This year, the King James Version of the Holy Bible turns 400 years old. Reflecting on this quadricentennial reminds me of something literary critic Edmund Wilson once wrote:

Here it is, that old tongue, with its clang and its flavor, sometimes rank, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter; here it is in its concise solid stamp. Other cultures have felt its impact, and none—in the West, at least—seems quite to accommodate to it. Yet we find we have been living with it all our lives. (From A Piece of My Mind, p. 88.)

If it is true that we in the West have been living all these years with the KJV; it is especially true of Latter-day Saints, where the “concise solid stamp” of the KJV is not only accommodated by mainstream Mormon life but so thoroughly integrated that we often speak in Elizabethan English with little thought of this linguistic inheritance. Even so, some among our ranks resist the KJV, looking upon it more like an archaic corpse from a less-enlightened dispensation. Despite the KJV’s being the official translation of the Church, many members point out its numerous errors, idiosyncrasies, and outdated vocabulary, hoping that one day the Church might replace it with a “more accurate” translation. Heck, even Joseph Smith mucked around with it. But this view often obscures the KJV’s deep influence in Western culture and particularly the English language, of which several recent books offer rich perspectives.

We probably hear the KJV more often than we actually read it. This is due to the tremendous influence certain idioms exert on our vernacular. “At their wits’ end,” “skin of my teeth,” “fought the good fight,” “how the mighty have fallen,” or “thorn in the flesh,” are among the hundreds of KJV phrases linguist David Crystal traces in Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language. He recounts how the language of the Bible has become a part of our common culture, from the sober and serious to the bizarre and humorous.

Crystal reports that his search through the KJV turned up some 257 idioms widely used today. Unexpectedly, he found that many of them had existed in previous English translations, such as the Tyndale, Geneva, and Bishop’s Bibles. This situation is not surprising, as one of His Royal Majesty’s mandates to the KJV translators was to attempt a consensus among the various Bibles in use at the time, “with the former translations diligently compared and revised.” From there, Crystal follows how KJV phrases appear in many forms, such as in Lincoln’s presidential speeches and the episode of The Brady Bunch titled “My Brother’s Keeper.”

In his Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible, Berkeley Hebrew professor Robert Alter elaborates on the KJV’s aesthetic influence in fiction. Discussing works by Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy, he writes that these authors “were often impelled to argue with the canonical text, or to tease out dissident views within the biblical corpus, or sometimes to reaffirm its conception of things, or to place biblical terms in new contexts that could be surprising or even unsettling.” Alter demonstrates how writers were informed by the KJV where “style is not merely a constellation of aesthetic properties but is the vehicle of a particular vision of reality,” implemented by such forms as parataxis and parallelism. Alter clearly demonstrates that American fiction has been and continues to be in a challenging dialogue with the KJV’s “vision of reality,” a dialogue that ultimately enriches the country’s storytelling impulse to create new worlds.

While Crystal and Alter have drawn the outlines of influence, Renaissance historian Gordon Campbell recounts the origins of the KJV in a lavishly illustrated history that sheds light on the people who are rarely remembered: the translators. Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611–2011 reveals the complex history of how the translation was commissioned, who the translators were, and how it all come together in the end.

Of the translators, Gordon claims: “The learning embodied in the men . . . is daunting. It is sometimes assumed that people in the Twenty-first Century know more than the benighted people of the Seventeenth Century, but in many ways the opposite is true. The population from which scholars can now be drawn is much larger than that of the Seventeenth Century, but it would be difficult now to bring together a group of more than fifty scholars with the range of languages and knowledge of other disciplines that characterized the KJV translators.” Campbell’s admiration for the translators is evident, and he includes an appendix with a short biography of each.

Campbell also recounts the printing history of the KJV, providing plenty of amusing accidents. One infamous occasion is when a 1631 edition left out “not” from Exodus 20:14, thereby rendering God’s command to the children of Israel as “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The printer was fined. Even with the looming possibility of penalties, printing errors continued to occur. Two of my favorites among Campbell’s list are: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9, as printed in a 1653 edition) and “Let the children first be killed,” (Mark 7:27, as it reads in a 1795 edition,). “Killed” should be “filled.”

Despite the seemingly numerous translations available in our time; Gordon explains the KJV’s lasting impact this way: “For secular readers, it is a repository of cultural values, a great work of literature, and a realization of the power and beauty of the English language. For believers, it is much more, because it renders into English content that is inspired” (275).

And even though some of us have gone on to search for this inspired content in other translations, I like what Campbell says about why the KJV keeps us coming back: “[It] is the fountainhead of Bible translation into English, and, although the finest modern translations are models of good scholarly practice, they are admired rather than loved. It is the King James Version that has been loved by generations of those who have listened to it or read it to themselves or others; other translations my engage the mind, but the King James Version is the Bible of the heart” (275).

As a literary masterpiece, a cultural landmark, and a theological chorus, Campbell’s “Bible of the heart” reminds me (if I may plunder a verse) that the KJV is “written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond; it is graven upon the table of their hearts” (Jeremiah 17:1). To which I add my hope that the King James Version will last another 400 years in our hearts.

Dallas Robbins

Salt Lake City, Utah