>>828
Indeed. If the Bible was the only heritage that our ancestors could keep pure and complete without error, then I am sure they would be glad to see it in use today. Here is an interesting bit of history from one of the scholars in the 16th century who worked on the Greek manuscripts behind the received text.
>Thus in the year 1536 the Faithful of the Valleys of Piedmont, who were always beseiged and horrified by the Romans, and who had never in successive times declined in their piety, or in their doctrine, sent unto Guillaume Faren at Geneva, who was renowned for his doctrine and piety, two characters, one named Jean Girard, who has since been a printer in said city, and the other, called Martin Gonin, who having been imprisoned on his return to Grenoble, was secretly drowned there on 26 of April, to the chagrin of the Inquisitor, after having so resisted the adversaries of truth that they dared not execute it by day.
-Theodore Beza,
Histoire ecclesiastique des Eglises reformes au Royaume de France (tl. into English), Vol. 1, pp. 38-39.
>Now, to return to our history, after the above-mentioned heard the grace that God did in some cities of Germany and Switzerland, they sent there for their part Georges Morel de Freissiniere of Dauphine, a minister whom they themselves had supported at the schools, and one Pierre Masson de Bourgongne, who conferred diligently of all the points of doctrine, both in Basel with John Œcolampade, in Strasbourg with Capito and Martin Bucer, and in Bern with Berthold Haller, prime minister of that Church... and since the year 1535 they have printed at their expense, at Neuchatel in Switzerland, the first printed French Bible of our time, translated from the Hebrew by Pierre Robert Olivétan, with the help of Jean Calvin...
-ibid. page 53.
This was written in 1580 by the way. Somehow you are not likely to find it in your modern textbooks. I wonder why.
Also interesting is that an English translation, the Geneva Bible of 1560 was also made here from these manuscripts. This version was printed in England itself in 1575 and Scotland in 1579.
Previous English Bibles has partially relied on translating from Latin or German Bibles as an intermediate for part of the Old Testament, due to Tyndale (the Hebrew scholar) being martyred in 1536 (he finished translating Genesis to 2 Chronicles + Jonah, in addition to the whole New Testament). The 1560 English Bible is very similar to, uses the same sources as and has influenced the Authorized version of 1611. Tyndale's work additionally became the base for another very similar version called the 1568 Bishops' Bible, the second complete translation to use only original language sources. These two competing versions were used by the households and the church of England respectively, receiving updates until 1592 (Bishops') and 1599 (Geneva). In 1604, James VI & I authorized a commission to make a translation that each faction could agree on, and it took influence in its word choice from both of these versions. As a result, the 1611 translation is very similar to both the 1592 and 1599 Bibles, which mainly differed in certain word choices (such as 'presbytery' over 'eldership', or 'church' instead of 'assembly'). The textual variants between these three (1592, 1599, 1611) are very few. After 1611, it is possible to trace the line of editions to the 1900 format, which is for every practical purpose the same translation made readable by formatting, orthography and spelling improvements. If you read the words aloud it would sound the same. Much of this later work was made possible by the early Dictionaries, especially Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755, a very comprehensive Dictionary which also used the only Bible in use then, which is the 1611 KJV, as its authority for definitions of words and their proper usage. So we see that the language itself has been influenced by the translation, and for this reason it would be backwards to say that the 1611 translation is incorrect in a word choice. It would only signify that you do not understand how the word is properly used in English, and/or that you are trying to change the meaning of language for some unusual purpose.