“But in the colonies, the Anglicans no longer had supremacy, because the Puritans, Presbyterians, Methodists came,” all of whom made use of the King James Bible. The Puritans and other reformers “didn’t overtake the Anglican Church in England,” Meyers explains.
WATCH NOW Why was the King James Bible so Important?īy giving more people direct access to the Bible, the King James Version also had a democratizing influence on Protestantism itself, especially in the English colonies being settled in the New World. With its poetic cadences and vivid imagery, the KJV sounded to many like the voice of God himself. Not only that, but the language they read in the King James Bible was English, unlike anything they had read before. Whereas before, the Bible had been the sole property of the Church, now more and more people could read it themselves.
“The translation into English, the language of the land, made it accessible to all those people who could read English, and who could afford a printed Bible.” “Printing had already been invented, and made copies relatively cheap compared to hand-done copies,” says Carol Meyers, a professor of religious studies at Duke University. Because of the wealth of resources devoted to the project, it was the most faithful and scholarly translation to date-not to mention the most accessible. Published in 1611, the King James Bible spread quickly throughout Europe. While one version of Christianity’s holy texts-the so-called Bishops’ Bible-was read in churches, the most popular version among Protestant reformers in England at the time was the Geneva Bible, which had been created in that city by a group of Calvinist exiles during the bloody reign of Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary I.Ī 1616 printed King James bible translated by James I on display at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. And even though Elizabeth had established the supremacy of the Anglican Church (founded by her father, King Henry VIII), its bishops now had to contend with rebellious Protestant groups like the Puritans and Calvinists, who questioned their absolute power.īy the time James took the throne, many people in England at the time were hearing one version of the Bible when they went to church, but were reading from another when they were at home. When King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England in 1603, he was well aware that he was entering a sticky situation.įor one thing, his immediate predecessor on the throne, Queen Elizabeth I, had ordered the execution of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, who had represented a Catholic threat to Elizabeth’s Protestant reign.
0 kommentar(er)
