What is the strengths and weaknesses of King James' Bible?

Answer 1

King James really did manage to assemble some of the best scholars of his era to create what we now know as the King James Bible. They took their job very seriously, and produced a translation that really is brilliant, at its best. Their decision to use the Tyndale Bible as a framework, along with the original Hebrew and Greek texts, as opposed to the Latin Vulgate, was very wise.

The principal problem with the King James Bible is one that was imposed on the committee by the King: No footnotes. If you compare it with the somewhat earlier Geneva Bible, which has many footnotes, you find the poverty of this approach. The translators of the Geneva Bible admit, in their footnotes, places where they were uncertain of the correct translation. This is food for scholars who want to argue about the text, but King James wanted certainty and did not want ambiguity. A populace arguing about the text might question it, and that was dangerous to the government and the state church. The result was that the King James translation committee wrote into their translation their preferred interpretation of the text in places where the original admitted to multiple interpretations. I fear that this interpretation was sometimes politically expedient and not necessarily hones to the original meaning(s) of the text. This set a precedent for many later translations, to this day.

Also, of course, the English language has evolved a bit from that day to this. The English of the King James Bible is old fashioned. At times, this gives it a wonderful ponderous air of authority. "Thou shalt" sounds so much more official than "you should," but at other times, we stumble on these archaic words or we think, quite incorrectly, that this archaic English is highly formal in a way appropriate for addressing God on high when the members of the translation committee thought they were writing in informal colloquial English, bringing God closer with those forms of address.