Why we should celebrate the King James Bible

With another school season gearing up, debates about curriculum content arise. Should the Bible be included in any way?

Years ago, TIME magazine (April 2, 2007) covered why the Bible should be taught (with caution) in public schools.

TIME’s David Van Biema wrote: “Should the Holy Book be on the public menu? Yes. It’s the bedrock of Western culture. And it’s constitutional — as long as we teach but don’t preach it.” 

He also notes: “Simply put, the Bible is the most influential book ever written. Not only is the Bible the best-selling book of all time, it is the best-selling book of the year every year.”

One man who would agree was the late Reid Buckley, brother of the late William F. Buckley, Jr., who used to train professional speakers. Reid said this about the world’s most beloved book: “Any born English-speaking son or daughter of the Christian West, who has not savored, indeed, soaked him or herself in the King James Version of the Holy Bible is irreparably ignorant and culturally deprived.”

The Bible is the best-selling book in the history of the world. And the King James Version (1611), in particular, is the most widely published and distributed book of all time.

For our Coral Ridge Ministries television special, “What If the Bible Had Never Been Written?” (based on the eponymous book by Dr. D. James Kennedy and me), author Bill Federer observed, “If they were to [include it in] the New York Times bestseller list every month, all top ten would be the King James Bible. It is the world's bestselling book ever … It made a tremendous impact on Western civilization.”

Ironically, King James I set out to publish a new translation of the Bible — in order to dethrone the Geneva Bible which was popular with the Puritans and other dissidents.

But the king did an excellent job in producing this book. There were six different translation groups, two from Westminster Abbey, two from Oxford, and two groups from Cambridge. And they were assigned different parts of the Bible to translate into English.

They ended up producing the greatest masterpiece in the English language.

Indeed, to this day many common idioms and phrases in the English language get back to the King James Version of the Bible. Such as:  

• “Let there be light.”
• “The golden calf.”
•  “Chariots of fire.”
•  “Seek and ye shall find.”
•  “The straight and narrow.”
•  “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”
• “Love thy neighbor as yourself.”

And so on.

Several years ago, the leading book promoting atheism by a prominent skeptic was Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006). The retired Oxford professor doesn’t believe the Bible is the Word of God because he doesn’t believe there is a God. But he nevertheless says you are culturally illiterate if you don’t know the Bible.

Dawkins writes, “The King James Bible of 1611 — the Authorized Version — includes passages of outstanding literary merit in its own right, for example, the Song of Songs, and the sublime Ecclesiastes (which I am told is pretty good in the original Hebrew too). But the main reason the English Bible needs to be part of our education is that is a major source book for literary culture.”

Dawkins goes on to cite scores and scores of phrases from the Bible, similar to the examples I listed above, that are common everyday idioms that come from the KJV.

This does not mean he in any way respects the Bible as holy writ. He wrote: “We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.” Obviously, I don’t agree with him. But I mention it to say that even atheists can appreciate the Bible as literature and even view it as “a treasured heritage.”

In the aforementioned television special on the impact of the KJV, Tim Goeglein of Focus on the Family commented, “I think it's fair to say that without the King James Version of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, the cadence, the language, the beauty, we would never really understand the creation of America and the political rhetoric and oratory and life of our great nation.”

The Bible as literature and the Bible as history should have a renewed place in our schools. Back when it was the chief textbook in one way or another, literacy was widespread.

As author and former Yale professor William Lyons Phelps observed: “Our civilization is founded upon the Bible. More of our ideas, our wisdom, our philosophy, our literature, our art, our ideals come from the Bible than from all other books combined.”