This month sees the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. It is the greatest book in the English language. It made English, and remade England.
It has been printed in millions of copies and hundreds of editions. It gives us our most memorable phrases and arresting images – from ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ to a ‘sting in the tail’.
Called into being by a king, it has carried ideas of truth and freedom and justice and human dignity to the furthest corners of the globe. Its cadences can be heard in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and President Obama. It is the spice in the new English of the Indian Subcontinent. And yet, extraordinarily, this supreme achievement was the work of a committee – or so we have always been told.
Closer examination reveals a very different story, which overturns our notions of the chronology of this great book and reintroduces an unjustly neglected name to our pantheon of great writers, William Tyndale.
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