The 400th anniversary of the King James or Authorized version of the Bible (KJB) has produced a magnificent harvest of exhibitions, conferences, and scholarship. A comparison with what happened in 1911 at the 300th anniversary is instructive. One hundred years ago, the most visible public figures in the English-speaking world led the celebration, including formal messages from President William Howard Taft and the newly crowned King George V, and, within a matter of weeks in the spring of that year, major speeches on the significance of the Bible from ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, presidential aspirant Woodrow Wilson, and three-time Democratic nominee for president William Jennings Bryan. The Royal Albert Hall in London (March 29) and Carnegie Hall in New York (April 25) supplied the venues for grand celebrations featuring the British prime minister, the American secretary of state, and the ambassadors from Britain to the U.S. and the U.S. to Britain.
Much of the content of those 1911 commemorations was, however, neither historically informative nor religiously insightful. Rather, speakers and writers leaned on stereotypes and truisms. They rang the changes in praising the KJB as "the noblest monument of the English language in the time of its greatest perfection and vigor." They also stressed how this translation provided "the foundation of our civilisation and our religion"; and how it had functioned (in phrases from Thomas Huxley that were quoted repeatedly in 1911) as "the Magna Charta of the poor and the oppressed … the most democratic book in the world."
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