The King James Bible

Translators commissioned by King James I of England (1611)

“The most influential English book ever printed — a 1611 translation whose cadences shaped Milton, Bunyan, Lincoln, Melville, Faulkner, King, and Morrison, and whose phrases (scapegoat, fly in the ointment, powers that be, labour of love, salt of the earth) remain the invisible scaffolding of English prose.”