Dimensions
129 x 197 x 25mm
The King James Bible, the most famous English-language Bible, was the culmination of centuries of work by various translators, most notably John Wycliffe in the fifteenth century and William Tyndale in the sixteenth. In this enthralling account of the tumultuous politics surrounding the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages, Benson Bobrick, a professor from Columbia University, shows that the achievement of Tyndale and other translators had a permanent influence on the English-speaking world.
As the historian Macaulay wrote of the King James version: 'If everything else in our language should perish, it alone would suffice to show the extent of its beauty and power.' But the King James scholars relied on Wycliffe and particularly Tyndale, polishing their translation and giving us more phrases that are still part of the English language: 'fight the good fight', 'a thorn in the flesh', 'labour of love', 'the fat of the land', 'the sweat of the brow', 'to cast pearls before swine' and 'am I my brother's keeper?' among them.
As Benson Bobrick shows, translating the Bible had been a chancy business. Caught in the political dispute between Henry VIII and the Pope, Tyndale was imprisoned and executed as a heretic. Henry and later Elizabeth embraced the English Bible and commissioned translations.
Free to interpret God's word according to their own understanding, rather than listen to priests read from the Latin, Bobrick argues that this is how revolutionary concepts of liberty and free will arose leading to the English Civil War and the overthrow of Charles I.
