King James English
Taken from The
Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, page 59.
(Both quotes
from Hugh Nibley)
"The
only alternative to Joseph Smith's explanation (of how the Book of Mormon came
to be) is to assume . . . the existence of a forger who at one moment is so
clever and (skillful) as to imitate the archaic poetry of the desert to
perfection and supply us with genuine Egyptian names, and yet so incredibly stupid as to
think that the best way to fool people and get money out of them is to write an
exceedingly difficult historical epic of six hundred pages. Endowed
with the brains, perseverance, and superhuman cunning necessary to produce this
monumental forgery, the incredibly sly genius did not have the wit to know,
after years of experience in the arts of deception, that there are ten
thousand safer and easier ways of fooling people than by
undertaking a work of infinite toil and danger which, as he could see from the
first, only made him immensely unpopular.
This
is the forger who never existed."
(Next taken
from, the Prophetic Book of Mormon, pages 216-218)
The Church
News recently received (1957) a letter from an interested non-member of the
Church making an inquiry. Dr. Nibley's reply,
published herewith, is worth the reading of every Latter-day Saint.
Why did Joseph Smith,
a nineteenth century American farm boy, translate the Book of Mormon into
seventeenth century King James English instead of into contemporary language?
"The
first thing to note is that the "contemporary language" of the
country-people of New England 130 years ago was not so far from King James
English.
Even the New
England writers of later generations, like Webster, Melville, and Emerson,
lapse into its stately periods and "thees and thous" in their loftier
passages.
For that
matter, we still pray in that language and teach our small children to do the
same; that is, we still recognize the validity of a special speech set apart for
special occasions. My old Hebrew and Arabic teacher, Professor
Popper, would throw a student out of the class who did not use 'thee' and 'thou'
in constructing.
'This
is the word of God! he would cry
indignantly. 'This is the Bible! Let us
show a little respect; let us have a little formal English here!'
Furthermore,
the Book of Mormon is full of scripture, and for the world of Joseph Smith's
day, the King James Version was the Scripture. Large sections of the Book of Mormon,
therefore, had to be in the language of the King James Version…
We must not
forget that ancient scribes were consciously archaic in their writing, so that
most of the scriptures were probably in old-fashioned language the day they
were written down. To efface that solemn antique style by the latest up-to-date usage
is to translate falsely…
The Book of Mormon
avoids the necessity of having to be redone into "modern English"
every thirty or forty years. If the
plates were being translated for the first time today, it would still be King
James English!"