PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

They tell me that the translators of the King James Version of the Bible, all of them being Anglican prelates or scholars, were likely far more familiar with Latin than with Koine Greek and Hebrew, the languages in which the original documents of the Holy Bible were written.  The study of Greek was still relatively new in Europe at that time.  I have heard that one of the Baptist Churches' greatest scholars, A. T. Robertson, a professor raised, and resident, in Kentucky probably knew more about Biblical Greek than any of the translator of the KJV.

However, due to their situation, the translators kept, close at hand, the Vulgate translation than the official version of the BIble used by the Roman Cathiolic CHurch.  This translation was made by Jerome, an early scholar who had studied both Hebrew and Koine Greek and rendered the Bible's books into Latin.   When the Anglican scholars encountered---as they did often---problems in the Hebrew and Greek that they considered unsolveable, they turned to Jerome's Vulgate and assumed his solution to those problems was sufficiently authoritative to translate directly.

And here is the aspect that pleases me so much:

they tell me that Jerome's Latin was heavily dependent upon his admiration for two Roman writers and their styles:  Vergil, for his Poetry; and Cicero, for his prose.  To some extent, then, Jerome's Latin rendering of the Holy Scriptures (one thinks especially of the Poetry of Job, the Psalms, Solomon's Song, Isaiah; the canticles in Luke's Gospel, and the words and structure of John's Gospel, his First Epistle, and his Apocalpyse; all of which are heavily Poetic) must have been highly influenced by Vergil's poetic technique, diction, grammar, and tone.  And that then rendered itself into the English used by the Anglican translators.  Through their translation, by way of Jerome's Vulgate, the great Vergil's Poetic voice speaks, however quietly, in the Scriptures of the King James Version.

Starward