Our King James Bible is a translation of ancient manuscripts. Six committees of brilliant scholars pored over these documents for six years and produced the Bible in 1611.
We cannot identify any single word or phrase in the Bible with any one of these scholars. This translation was a group enterprise. The only phrase that can be surely sourced does not appear in the final version. It is the phrase that concludes Jesus' prayer: " Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory."
These words were the creation of Lancelot Andrewes, , bishop of Westminster. Andrewes was indeed a gifted leader of his translating group, and his group made a mellow translation of the first five books of the Bible.
But authorship of any specific phrase in the Bible itself cannot be traced to him.
What, then, about these luminous words that have become so readily taken as part of Jesus' own prayer? When commissioning the translators for their task, King James asked them to produce a "magisterial" work. He wanted them to depict God with grandeur, to reflect His magnificence in His colleague James. He asked them to confirm the "divine right of the king."
Lancelot Andrewes took the liberty of concluding the Jesus prayer with these majestic words. And although they do not appear in the early versions, they have become universally accepted as clues to God's being as Jesus saw Him:
"Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory!"
No comments:
Post a Comment