Access to this new Bible allowed Protestants to worship wherever they were, eventually presenting them with the opportunity to become the original colonists of modern-day New England, whilst still being faithful, in their eyes. According to christianity.com, puritans believed “the Bible was their sole authority, and with these beliefs, they believed it applied to every area and level of life” (Curtis). Had they not had access to the holy text, it would be unlikely that many of them would have left. Religious devotion in the time period was far more intense than what is generally encountered today, so many of them would probably have chosen to stay where they could continue worshipping rather than living without it elsewhere. In addition to …show more content…
In a much more direct way, though, it affected English as a language and continues to do so to this day. A 2009 survey done by Durham University discovered that while only thirty-eight percent of people recognize the parable of the prodigal son, The book Begat by David Crystal counted 257 phrases from the King James Bible commonly used in conversation today. Phrases that originated from the book have been noticed in the writings and speech of Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, and Abraham Lincoln. Even to those who have no connection with the text, their everyday language is deeply affected by it. Due to the frequency that people read or heard passages from the Bible, it is no shock that certain strings of words were imprinted on people’s minds. Nowadays, it would be no surprise to hear someone refer to a person that they love as the “apple of their eye,” or money as “the root of all evil” without their having any idea that such phrases originated in the King James Bible. Translators of the text believed that to make the purest translation, the words needed to be translated literally. While at first it didn’t make much sense in English, readers became used to it, essentially changing the way they spoke to better understand the book. What was before foreign and strange to the English people of the early 1600s soon became the norm, altering the language forever. Because it was the only book most