A New Testament that retains the grandeur and majesty of the 1611 Authorized Version’s English — without the archaisms. This is the selling point: updating the KJV with a 19th century high Victorian style that would have some strong sense of stylistic similarity to Elizabethan English. Not a new translation, but a verse-by-verse selection from six public-domain texts already revered by scholars.
Armstrong, a longtime Christian apologist and lover of 18th-and-19th-century English prose, draws every rendering from one of six sources: the KJV (1611), the Rheims New Testament (1582), Young’s Literal Translation (1887), Weymouth (1903), the Twentieth Century New Testament (1904), and the James Moffatt New Testament (1922). Passages still magnificent in the KJV stay. Verses too archaic to follow today are replaced from a “Victorian” alternative — all British or Scottish; no American translations.
Not for everyone. For readers who already love Newman, Wesley, Chesterton, Lewis, and Knox — and want the New Testament to sound like it belongs on the same shelf.
Inside this book
- The full New Testament — every verse drawn from one of six public-domain English translations
- KJV / Rheims passages preserved wherever they remain readable today
- Archaic verses replaced from Young’s Literal, Weymouth, Twentieth Century, or Moffatt — chosen for literalness and Victorian style
- Old Testament quotations italicized and cross-referenced (Moffatt method)
- No “thee” and “thou” or “Holy Ghost” — but the King James music intact
