King James Bible 400th anniversary marked by Queen, Archbishop of Canterbury (Video)

King James Bible 400th Anniversary Celebration | Video courtesy of Telegraph

Queen Elizabeth II and Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, led the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible in a special service held at England’s famed Westminster Abbey.

During the service, Dr. Williams hailed the King James Bible as an “extraordinary text” of “abiding importance.” He told the congregation that the seventeenth century translators would have been "baffled and embarrassed" by the idea of a perfect translation of the Bible.

He said they had sought instead to convey the "almost unbearable weight of divine intelligence and love" into the English language.

"The temptation is always there for the modern translator to look for strategies that make the text more accessible; and when that temptation comes, it doesn't hurt to turn for a moment – for some long moments indeed – to this extraordinary text, with its continuing capacity to surprise us into seriousness, to acquaint us again with the weight of glory – and, we hope and pray, to send us back to the unending work of letting ourselves be changed so that we can bear just a little more of the light of the new world, full of grace and truth," he said.

The anniversary service was also attended by the members of the royal family, including Prince Charles and Prince Philip, and around 2,000 other guests.

Here's a Wikipedia of the King James Bible.

King James Bible is an English translation of the Christian Bible by the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611. First printed by the King's Printer Robert Barker, this was the third official translation into English; the first having been the Great Bible commissioned by the Church of England in the reign of King Henry VIII, and the second was the Bishop's Bible of 1568.[6] In January 1604, King James I of England convened the Hampton Court Conference where a new English version was conceived in response to the perceived problems of the earlier translations as detected by the Puritans, a faction within the Church of England.

James gave the translators instructions intended to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its beliefs about an ordained clergy. The translation was done by 47 scholars, all of whom were members of the Church of England. In common with most other translations of the period, the New Testament was translated from Greek, the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew text, while the Apocrypha were translated from the Greek and Latin. In the Book of Common Prayer (1662), the text of the Authorized Version replaced the text of the Great Bible – for Epistle and Gospel readings – and as such was authorized by Act of Parliament. By the first half of the 18th century, the Authorized Version was effectively unchallenged as the English translation used in Anglican and Protestant churches. Over the course of the 18th century, the Authorized Version supplanted the Latin Vulgate as the standard version of scripture for English speaking scholars.