Bunyan's Bible

In the book “The Legacy of the King James Bible” Dr.  Leland Ryken shows how the King James Bible has been a blessing and still is a blessing for all of us English speakers. Though he doesn’t use the KJB, and from what I understand in listening to an interview he gave, hasn’t used it in decades. In fact, he is involved with Crossway and the publication of the ESV. Here is his bio from Wheaton College:

Dr. Ryken has served on Wheaton's faculty since 1968. He has published over thirty books and more than one hundred articles and essays, devoting much of his scholarship to Bible translations and the study of the Bible as literature. He served as Literary Chairman for the English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible and in 2003 received the distinguished Gutenberg Award for his contributions to education, writing, and the understanding of the Bible.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is actually quite refreshing to read a book from someone that actually appreciates the King James Bible, and isn't ashamed of his appreciation. Even if you don't use or read the KJV, you should at the very least, acknowledge its beauty, longevity, and the impact this version has had upon the English speaking world.

One of the ways Ryken shows the KJV has impacted society is from the realm of literature. The language of the Bible was the language of the people.

This is an excerpt from chapter 13 Early Literary Influence of the King James Bible showing how John Bunyan's writing was influenced by his reading of the Bible.

"Beginning at the end of the seventeenth century and lasting for two centuries, the King James Bible and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress were the two “best sellers” in evangelical Protestant households. In the popular imagination, these two books were regarded as being cut from the same religious and imaginative cloth. The fact that readers have found these two books a natural pair is more telling than occasional scholarly attempts, grounded in technical stylistic analysis, to show that Bunyan’s style often differs from the KJV. The Victorian literary giant Thomas Babington Macaulay offered the opinion that Bunyan “knew no language but the English, as it was spoken by the common people. He had studied no great model of composition, with the exception…of our noble [KJV] translation of the Bible.” 

It might be expected that as a Puritan Bunyan (1628-1688) would have used the Geneva Bible, but the evidence points to the King James Bible instead. This is easy to establish from the occasional direct Bible quotations in The Pilgrims’ Progress. For example, as Christian is engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Apollyon, he reached for his sword and says, “Rejoice not against me, o mine enemy; when I fall I shall arise.” This is verbatim from Micah 7:8 as found in the KJV, but not the Geneva Bible. In this same paragraph that narrates the battle between Christian and Apollyon, we hear Christian asserting, “Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors though him that loved us.” This, too, is verbatim from the King James Bible.

“Read anything of [Bunyan], and you will see that it is almost like reading the Bible itself. He had studied our Authorized Version, which will never be bettered, as I judge, till Christ shall come; he had read it till his whole being was saturated with Scripture….Prick him anywhere; and …the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his soul is full of the Word of God.” Charles Spurgeon, Autobiography.

Once we know what translation Bunyan used, we can quickly asses how much he owed to the King James Bible. Through the centuries and continuing through modern scholarly editions, it has been customary to print The Pilgrim’s Progress with the marginal notes that identify the biblical source or allusion for a given passage. A glance at such an edition confirms historian Greens’ famous verdict that “so completely has the Bible become Bunyan’s life that one feels its phrases as the natural expression of his thoughts. He has lived in the Bible till its words become his own.”

What all did Bunyan owe to his King James Bible when he came to compose his masterpiece, which he stared to write while imprisoned for nonconformist preaching? Bunyan owes his master image and superstructure – a pilgrimage form this world to the heavenly city—to Hebrews 11:13 and 16: “these all died in faith,…and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth…they desire a better country, that is a heavenly…city.”….And as already noted, Bunyan wrote in a biblical idiom as if it were his native language. He himself called this idiom “the language of Canaan.”
The final verdict on Bunyan’s indebtedness to the King James Bible can be give to David Norton, who writes:

“The Pilgrim’s Progress, more commonly read by generations that any book but the KJB, helped to form a love for the language of the KJB itself…It is difficult to believe that Bunyan did not contribute to a literary as well as a religious sense of the KJB, and that he did not help show later writers ways they might use it.”