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Revised and condensed from David Norton's acclaimed A History of the Bible as Literature, this book, first published in 2000, tells the story of English literary attitudes to the Bible. At first jeered at and mocked as English writing, then denigrated as having 'all the disadvantages of an old prose translation', the King James Bible somehow became 'unsurpassed in the entire range of literature'. How so startling a change happened and how it affected the making of modern translations such as the Revised Version and the New English Bible is at the heart of this exploration of a vast range of religious, literary and cultural ideas. Translators, writers such as Donne, Milton, Bunyan and the Romantics, reactionary Bishops and radical students all help to show the changes in religious ideas and in standards of language and literature that created our sense of the most important book in English.

This 1993 volume traces how opinions of the King James Bible changed from the eighteenth-century view that it had 'all the disadvantages of an old prose translation' to nineteenth-century praise for 'the noblest monument of English prose'. It also shows how literary criticism has shaped understanding of the Bible and how the Bible has shaped literary criticism.

The first volume of this magisterial two-volume work provides the only full account of how people have thought of the Bible and Bible translations from biblical times to the end of the seventeenth century.