OT: The KJV Bible (was: Help with Greek was Re: Babel Text in

Raymond Brown scripsit:

> I am told that the KJV does not differ greatly from the Tyndale
> translations (New Testament 1525 -revised 1534 & 1535; Pentateuch 1530; the
> Book of Jonah, 1531; 'Epistles of the Old Testament', 1534), which
> essentially fixed the language of all subsequent English until the 20th
> cent.
Well, it's hard to say: the KJV is usually presented (including by me)
in a modernized orthography, whereas Tyndale's is not.

> But my thesis is that the KJV was not an attempt to give a translation of
> the Greek & Hebrew scriptures in contemporary English of the early 17th
> century, but was rather a revision of editions whose language & style had
> already been set in the early 16th century.
We violently agree, then.

> It was also deliberately
> literary in style, giving the impression that the scriptures as a whole
> were written in literary Hebrew and Greek - this is far from the case, at
> least in the matter of Greek (my knowledge of Hebrew is, alas, far too
> meager for me to make a similar judgment about the Hebrew scriptures).
        I am not a Biblical scholar, and anyone who was would say of
        my Hebrew and Greek what Samuel Johnson said (with far less
        justification) of Milton's "Tetrachordon" sonnets: that the
        first was execrable, and the second "not excellent".
                --Northrop Frye, _The Great Code_

--
John Cowan <jcowan@...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_

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