The Queen has attended a special service at Westminster Abbey marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.
During the service the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams described the King James Bible as an “extraordinary text” which remains of “abiding importance”.
The Queen was accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales and around 2,000 other worshippers.
Bible
At the start of the service historic copies of the famous Bible translation were carried through the Abbey.
A copy of the People’s Bible, which was handwritten by more than 22,000 people from towns across the nation, was also carried through.
Wednesday’s service was the culmination of a year’s worth of events, organized principally by the King James Bible Trust, to mark the 400th anniversary of the text.
Professor Pauline Croft, a trustee of the King James Bible Trust, said: “People are always surprised how much of the language they use without thinking.
Scholars
“It’s just the genius of the language, they were contemporaries of Shakespeare, they could have walked over to the globe and asked him what he thought.”
Work on the King James translation began in 1604, at the request of James I of England, and carried on until 1611.
A team of the best Bible scholars of the day worked on translating the text into English, and the King James translation became the version read by many English speaking nations.