THE GUARDIAN
March 1, 2011
LONDON--Everyone from Richard Dawkins to Sarah Palin seems agreed that the King James Bible is Basically A Good Thing and wishes it many happy returns. It's more majestic than modern translations, easier to follow than Shakespeare, has enlivened English by translating Hebrew idiom literally, and is the genesis of 257 phrases that you use every day. (Don't say you don't. You do.) But the King James Bible has also had a terrible effect on religious language, from which English-speaking churches are only now fully recovering. For centuries, it persuaded Christians, when talking to or about God, to drop normal English in favour of cod Jacobean. What better way could there be to show that Christianity is an outdated cultish fringe with nothing of use to say to contemporary society? Ruffs and morris dancing, possibly, but it would be a close-run thing.
The obvious example is the grammar of "thee", "thou hast" etc. English must be the only language to have developed a different grammar for the second person deity. The petrifaction of religious language has happened over and over – Catholic Latin, Orthodox Slavonic. In each case it started with people wanting to communicate in today's language, who did it so well that churches still held on to the language long after it failed to communicate anything any more. [link]
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