I’m not sure we can trust general critical consensus in this case, if there is such a thing as objective literary quality that we can attribute to a work. There’s a massive halo effect with its finger on the scale here, no pun intended. Not even just for Christians; the Bible and particularly the King James Version is so basal to English-speaking culture that the two are hard to disentangle. Note also that literary quality and significance are often confounded in e.g. reading lists, and the KJV’s unquestionably a hugely significant part of the English canon.
That said, there are parts of the King James Bible that I find fascinating and beautiful and generally of high literary quality. I’m just not sure we can say the same for the work as a whole, which I find frequently turgid or repetitive or painfully clunky—particularly in the Mosaic books past Exodus, and in the Pauline epistles of the New Testament.
I’m not sure we can trust general critical consensus in this case, if there is such a thing as objective literary quality that we can attribute to a work. There’s a massive halo effect with its finger on the scale here, no pun intended. Not even just for Christians; the Bible and particularly the King James Version is so basal to English-speaking culture that the two are hard to disentangle. Note also that literary quality and significance are often confounded in e.g. reading lists, and the KJV’s unquestionably a hugely significant part of the English canon.
That said, there are parts of the King James Bible that I find fascinating and beautiful and generally of high literary quality. I’m just not sure we can say the same for the work as a whole, which I find frequently turgid or repetitive or painfully clunky—particularly in the Mosaic books past Exodus, and in the Pauline epistles of the New Testament.