Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Fine for college-bound kids.

Not only was the KJV a product of a committee...
ER — (archived)

...the Bible itself was the product of a committee, the great Councils of the early Christians where church factions negotiated (and brawled in the streets) to determine which books would and would not be admitted into the canon. The Old Testatament was likewise subjected to editing and selection by Jewish religious authorities, not to mention editorial enhancements over centuries of manual transcription. Many of the Apocrypha and the Lost Gospels survive to this day, and scholars pore over them for clues as to what really happened back in then; but many others have been lost to history forever.

Even today, there is a movement among some evangelicals to ban all versions except the KJV because they find some of the changes of meaning revealed by more accurate modern translations doctrinally threatening. They favor keeping the KJV because it's the Bible "just like God wrote it." The Lord could have done worse than Elizabethan English.

And I bet that KJV committee had unauthorized its fun, too. Note the 46th Psalm. The 46th word is "Shake". The 46th word from the end (if you ignore the final "Selah") is "spear". Coincidence? Could the Bard, or maybe one of his literary apostles, have been on that committee, polishing off the text, and couldn't resist leaving a little souvenir for posterity?

There is no doubt the KJV is a glorious peace of English prose, but it maintains a stylistic uniformity and coherence which obscures the great heterogeneity, and even different languages, of the original documents.

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