Language of King James Bible: English, but special

These scholars were not pulling the language of the scriptures into the English they knew and used at home. The words of the King James Bible are just as much English pushed towards the condition of a foreign language as a foreign language translated into English. It was, in other words, more important to make English godly than to make the words of God into the sort of prose that any Englishmen would have written, and that secretarial relationship to the original languages of the scriptures shaped the translation.

Adam Nicolson, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (New York: Perennial, 2004), p. 211