The King James Bible – 400 Year Aniversary

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Listen to a short story on the commission and legacy of the Bible commissioned at the Hampton Court Conference (1604) – and a bit of review on James IV and I.

Words Tyndale Created for the English Bible

  • Atonement (from Wycliffe’s ‘at one-ment’)
  • Beautiful
  • Fisherman
  • Industrious
  • Landlady
  • Mediocrity
  • Modesty
  • Passover
  • Peacemaker
  • Scapegoat
  • Seashore

Phrase Coined by Tyndale

  • a law unto themselves
  • am I my brother’s keeper
  • fight the good fight
  • filthy lucre
  • gave up the ghost
  • God said let there be light, and there was light
  • salt of the earth

The choice of words can also be theologically loaded. Since Tyndale was a Protestant, his translation was carefully phrased in order to state the viewpoints of the reformers. In several notable cases, Tyndale deliberately chose to render words that had a long legacy in Catholicism with new terms that Catholics found offensive. For example, he used congregation instead of church, elder instead of priest, repent instead of do penance, and love instead of charity. Tyndale’s English translations of these words were in many cases probably more accurate translations of the Greek terms, but they differed from the familiar Vulgate upon which much Christian theology had been based. These terms are loaded: do penance had sacramental implications rejected by many reformers—whereas repent more closely reflected an act that could be done by an individual before God, without the need of the church. And Tyndale preferred the term love as being more allusive to the Protestant understanding of grace and the term charity to be more in tune with the Catholic emphasis on works. These changes were offensive to Catholics and were heavily criticized by many, including Tyndale’s countryman Thomas More. Interestingly enough, the King James translators chose to retain the traditional terms church, priest, and charity, but nowhere does one find the word penance in the King James Version. (David Rolph Seely, “William Tyndale and the Language of At-one-ment,” in The King James Bible and the Restoration, 2011)

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