In the Beginning

Last night I finished reading In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture by Alister McGrath.

The three most interesting things I learned:

• The creation and popularity of the KJV was primarily politically motivated. King James I didn't like the most popular Bible of the day (it had lots of commentary that argued against the divine right of kings) and that led to him authorizing a new translation. Once it was finished, it wasn't very popular until after the Puritan Commonwealth (Cromwell et al.) had fallen and the people returned the monarchy (Charles II) to the throne. People turned to the KJV and rejected the Geneva Bible because the KJV was associated with the monarchy and stability and the Geneva Bible was associated with the Puritans and the instability of the Commonwealth.
• (Going along with the first item) The KJV was not immediately popular. Although it eventually came to be considered "a great work of religious literature," this view did not become generally accepted until about 1750.
  
• The KJV was written in old-fashioned language even for the time. The instructions to the translators told them to use the language in the Bishop's Bible unless they had a compelling reason to translate it differently. The translators of the Bishop's Bible, likewise, had used the language of Tyndale's translation of 1525 whenever possible. So, the language of the KJV (1611) is largely the language of Tyndale (1525) and includes several ways of speaking that were already dying out in English at the start of the 1600s, among them: thou and the "eth" and "est" verb endings.