The Legacy of the King James Bible honors the 400th anniversary of the KJB’s publication by telling its story—a drama that starts with the pioneering work of William Tyndale.

A good history of a Bible produced in 1611 which set the standards for translations for over 4 centuries. Attempting to maintain the balance between the zealotry of KJV supporters & zealotry of KJV haters, Mr. Leland manages to stay the course with the history & influence upon the English speaking world. ( )

A balanced review, or a balanced book, should tell both good and bad. So:

The Good: This book gives well-deserved praise to one of the noblest feats of English literature.
The Bad: It doesn't do its job of balancing things.

Let's say straight out that the King James Version is a great piece of prose, and well worth reading and knowing; it has deeply influenced our language and idiom. And this book gives a mostly accurate, if much too brief, overview of its history, and gives genuine reasons why, as a piece of writing, it is superior to all that came after or since.

The problem is, the King James Version isn't just some random piece of prose. It's a Bible translation. And that places certain requirements upon it: A proper translation needs to accurately reflect the nature of what it is translating.

Even here, there is good and bad. As author Leland Ryken notes, the King James Version is in many ways a better representation of its underlying Greek and Hebrew texts than the versions that have come since (Revised Version, Revised Standard Version, New English Bible, New International Version, New Revised Standard Version, Revised English Bible, and all the various idiosyncratic and personal translations). Of major modern translations, only the New American Standard Bible could be called more literal, and the NASB has other problems that make it unreliable (in addition to being frequently incomprehensible due to its very literalness).

But, as author Ryken does not note, the Greek New Testament in particular is in koine Greek -- the everyday Greek of New Testament times. It isn't even particularly grammatical, especially in the Gospel of Mark and the Apocalypse, both clearly written by people who were native Aramaic speakers and who struggled with Greek. Should a translation of this Greek text be brilliant, grammatical, and archaic? (And, yes, the KJV was archaic even when it was published, since it so often repeated the wording of previous Bibles such as Tyndale's, and English had evolved a lot in the century between Tyndale and James VI and I.) The KJV correctly translates the words of the Received Text of the Greek Bible -- but it doesn't at all translate the style.

And did you note those words "Received Text" in that last sentence? You should have -- because that's an even more important reason why the King James Bible fails as a Bible translation. The King James Bible is based on the printed Greek Bibles of Stephanus and Beza, both in turn based on the very first printed Greek Bible, Erasmus's. Which was based on a handful of late, bad manuscripts; it is simply not a good reflection of what the original authors wrote.

The Hebrew has a different set of textual problems, where the King James translators are less at fault -- but they make more errors in the Hebrew Bible, simply because knowledge of Hebrew and cognate languages in Europe was very limited in the seventeenth century.

Ryken mentions briefly that we now have better texts of the Bible -- but he doesn't stress it, and it seems as if he doesn't understand it. Case in point: On page 53, he quotes (nineteenth century Anglican) Bishop B. F. Westcott as saying, "From the middle of the seventeenth century, the King's Bible has been the acknowledged Bible of the English-speaking nations throughout the world simply because it is the best."

Ryken does not mention that Westcott was one of the editors of the Westcott and Hort Greek Testament that finally and firmly showed that the Received Text was not an acceptable basis for a translation (since Westcott and Hort, only the New King James version has been so benighted as to translate the Received Text; even the theologically very conservative New International Version frequently includes the readings of the older, better manuscripts). Nor does Ryken mention that Westcott was one of the translators of the Revised Version, the translation the English church intended to replace the King James Version -- by quoting Westcott out of context as he does, he functionally ignores Westcott's life's work. I don't know what other sources are so abused, but I know that there are at least some.

To top it all off, this is an irritating book to read, because it's full of fact-boxes and lists that interrupt the flow and misdirect the attention. I bought this book knowing that I don't approve of the King James Version -- but I do consider it important. The way this volume is presented makes the KJV feel like a cheap high school crib, even though the overall thread is to praise the KJV excessively.

The King James Bible deserves to be preserved and praised. It does not deserve to be used as a Bible translation. And that is a point that this book fails to make. By all means, read this book for its praise of the KJV. But only after you've read a book that tells you its "down side." ( )