The war against the English language. One of the great signs of disintegration of the language has been the devolution of the Bible. In the early 1960’s the New testament section of the New English Bible appeared, which was the latest in a long line of revisions of the King James Version. Since the King James Version and the works of Shakespeare have generally been ranked together as the noblest monuments of the English language, many lay people wondered why the majestic seventeenth-century translation could not have been left alone. For in all Christendom it is only the English Bible that is regarded as a great work of literature.
—This is the opposite, of course, of the procedure followed by most new translations, starting with Good News for Modern Man, a paperback Bible published by the American Bible Society in 1966, whose goal was to reflect not the language of the Bible but its ideas, rendering them into current terms, so that Ezekiel 23:20, for example (“For she doted vpon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses”) becomes “She was filled with lust for oversexed men who had all the lustfulness of donkeys or stallions.”—click image for source…
The intent of the translators of the new version were twofold: to correct textual errors in the King James Version revealed by then recent discoveries of new manuscripts and, by rendering it in “frankly contemporary English,” such as changing thou and thee to you for example. to make it as “readable” as any other book. Though the objectives of scholarship may have been fulfilled, the new version was seen as stripping away the beauty and splendor of the old without any notable addition to understanding.
T.S. Eliot (see link at end):We are, however, entitled to expect from a panel chosen from among the most distinguished scholars of our day at least a work of dignified mediocrity. When we find that we are offered something far below that modest level, something which astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial, and the pedantic, we ask in alarm: “What is happening to the English language?” … And the unlearned, on being told that “a man who divorces his wife must give her a note of dismissal,” will marvel at the apparent facility with which the Hebrews could get rid of their wives. “Bill of divorcement,” even though it gives no clear notion of the process required by Jewish law, at least sounds ceremonious….
—There are, however, several popular, mistaken notions about this book. First of all, it was not the first English translation of the Bible. Several came before it, including a famous one by a guy named Wycliffe and another by a man who was burnt at the stake for translating the Bible into the vernacular, Tyndale.
Second, King James did none of the work. He appointed someone who then assembled a series of translation committees made up of scholars and poets who did the work.
Third, there is no record of King James ever actually authorizing the KJV for use in the churches of England once it was completed, making it all the more odd that the KJV is also often referred to as the “Authorized Version.” —click image for source…
…The foregoing examples are all taken from “the Gospel according to Matthew,” an Evangelist who seems to have been especially unlucky in his translator. The other Gospels, however, conform to the same style (or absence of style) in their monotonous inferiority of phrasing.
I wish nevertheless to quote one brief passage in order to give the translator of “Luke” his due (Luke 3:14-15). To the soldiers who ask what they should do John the Baptist replies: “No bullying; no blackmail; make do with your pay!” …So long as the New English Bible was used only for private reading, it would be merely a symptom of the decay of the English language in the middle of the twentieth century. But the more it is adopted for religious services the more it will become an active agent of decadence.Read More:http://www.bible-researcher.com/neb-eliot.html
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…From the start, the King James Bible was intended to be not a literary creation but rather a political and theological compromise between the established church and the growing Puritan movement. What the king cared about was clarity, simplicity, doctrinal orthodoxy. The translators worked hard on that, going back to the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, and yet they also spent a lot of time tweaking the English text in the interest of euphony and musicality. Time and again the language seems to slip almost unconsciously into iambic pentameter — this was the age of Shakespeare, commentators are always reminding us — and right from the beginning the translators embraced the principles of repetition and the dramatic pause: “In the beginning God created the Heauen, and the Earth. And the earth was without forme, and voyd, and darkenesse was vpon the face of the deepe: and the Spirit of God mooued vpon the face of the waters.”
The influence of the King James Bible is so great that the list of idioms from it that have slipped into everyday speech, taking such deep root that we use them all the time without any awareness of their biblical origin, is practically endless: sour grapes; fatted calf; salt of the earth; drop in a bucket; skin of one’s teeth; apple of one’s eye; girded loins; feet of clay; whited sepulchers; filthy luc
pearls before swine; fly in the ointment; fight the good fight; eat, drink and be merry.But what we also love about this Bible is its strangeness — its weird punctuation, odd pronouns (as in “Our Father, which art in heaven”), all those verbs that end in “eth”: “In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth vp; in the euening it is cut downe, and withereth.” As Robert Alter has demonstrated in his startling and revealing translations of the Psalms and the Pentateuch, the Hebrew Bible is even stranger, and in ways that the King James translators may not have entirely comprehended, and yet their text performs the great trick of being at once recognizably English and also a little bit foreign. You can hear its distinctive cadences in the speeches of Lincoln, the poetry of Whitman, the novels of Cormac McCarthy.
Even in its time, the King James Bible was deliberately archaic in grammar and phraseology: an expression like “yea, verily,” for example, had gone out of fashion some 50 years before. The translators didn’t want their Bible to sound contemporary, because they knew that contemporaneity quickly goes out of fashion.Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/weekinreview/24mcgrath.html?_r=0
COMMENTS
New Age Versions of the Bible, book by Gail Riplinger, goes into extensive detail on how modern translations of the Bible have changed it’s fundamental underlying meaning to be in harmony with “new age” philosophies, and traces the motivation for these translations back to individual 19th century philosophers and scholars,as well as further back into history.