1871:
“With many persons there is no medium between perfection and worthlessness; what is not infallible cannot be trustworthy. The general excellence of the English Version being admitted, its perfection is assumed, and therefore all preceding and subsequent versions must be unworthy of notice; nay, even the original text need not be consulted. The steps by which the present excellence of our version was attained are wholly forgotten.” (Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, The English Bible, and Our Duty with Regard to It: a Plea for Revision, 2nd edition, Dublin: Hodges, Foster, & Co., 1871, p. 2; 1st ed., 1857).1890:
A Wisconsin Supreme Court decision includes, “…the practice of reading the King James Version of the Bible, commonly and only received as inspired and true by the Protestant religious sects, is…” (Decision of the Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin Relating to the Reading of the Bible in Public Schools, Madison, WI: Democrat Printing Company, 1890)
1897:
“A hundred years ago the Authorized Version, which had been in our fathers’ hands for nearly two hundred years, was no longer a version. It had come to have all the significance of an original book. Outside the pulpit and the university no one dreamed that it was translated from another language. The rugged simplicity and meatiness of its thought had smitten themselves into our thought-forms as a prime elemental literary power. The Hebrew idioms and turns of phrase, nay, even the awkward straits of translation, which once must have had a strange alien sound, had become English idiom; or rather, we may say, the English-thinking mind, in all its religious phrase and syntax, had become Hebrew. To a profounder extent than any were aware the language of Canaan was a western people’s mother-tongue; and this largely because the Authorized Version had naturalized it into a mould for men’s every-day thinking. When our fathers, as they did, stoutly maintained the doctrine of verbal inspiration, the inspired words they really had in mind were not Hebrew or Greek, but English words; the words of that version which Selden called ‘the best translation in the world,’ and of which the late Master of Balliol once remarked, ‘In a certain sense, the Authorized Version is more inspired than the original.’ Their English Bible had wrought itself into the inmost texture of their minds and speech.” (“A Century With Versions and Editions,” John Franklin Genung, Minutes of the Ninety-Fifth Annual Meeting of the General Association of the Congregational Churches of Massachusetts, Boston, MA: Congregational Sunday School and Publishing Society, 1897, pp. 90-91.)
2011:
1897:
“A hundred years ago the Authorized Version, which had been in our fathers’ hands for nearly two hundred years, was no longer a version. It had come to have all the significance of an original book. Outside the pulpit and the university no one dreamed that it was translated from another language. The rugged simplicity and meatiness of its thought had smitten themselves into our thought-forms as a prime elemental literary power. The Hebrew idioms and turns of phrase, nay, even the awkward straits of translation, which once must have had a strange alien sound, had become English idiom; or rather, we may say, the English-thinking mind, in all its religious phrase and syntax, had become Hebrew. To a profounder extent than any were aware the language of Canaan was a western people’s mother-tongue; and this largely because the Authorized Version had naturalized it into a mould for men’s every-day thinking. When our fathers, as they did, stoutly maintained the doctrine of verbal inspiration, the inspired words they really had in mind were not Hebrew or Greek, but English words; the words of that version which Selden called ‘the best translation in the world,’ and of which the late Master of Balliol once remarked, ‘In a certain sense, the Authorized Version is more inspired than the original.’ Their English Bible had wrought itself into the inmost texture of their minds and speech.” (“A Century With Versions and Editions,” John Franklin Genung, Minutes of the Ninety-Fifth Annual Meeting of the General Association of the Congregational Churches of Massachusetts, Boston, MA: Congregational Sunday School and Publishing Society, 1897, pp. 90-91.)
2011:
“the KJV...was not the only Bible version in print, but for the vast majority of Evangelical Christians in Britain, for all practical purposes, it was viewed as the Bible.” (The King James Bible and Baptists over 400 Years, Brian R. Talbot, Paper delivered at Baptist World Alliance Heritage and Identity Commission, Thursday, July 7, 2011, p. 11.)
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