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Were there any phrases or words that were particularly surprising that they were coined in the Bible?

Sure, words like sprinkler or stargazer. We came away from this realizing that there's really nothing new under the sun—which actually is another phrase from the Bible.

It's really a lot of fun to have these realizations that the language is a living thing. There's this wonderful vibrancy to it that keeps it going. Somebody once said that the Bible interprets itself. I think that's probably right in a number of ways.

What were some surprising things you found in the research?

We were surprised at how many phrases considered "biblical" are really elusive phrases—they're not in the Bible but they're of the Bible. Promised land, Good Samaritan, prodigal son, and Doubting Thomas don't exist in the Bible.

We also found that Wycliffe had about half of the total number of coinages [we included in the book]. Tyndale was second with about half of that. King James by contrast had two entries. We thought it was going to be the other way around—that the King James would be top heavy and the others wouldn't have as many.

I was a little bit surprised about the way the numbers fell as far as the books of the Bible. There's kind of an interesting symmetry. In the Old Testament, Genesis and Exodus both had 10 or 11 coinages. Matthew then had the highest number of entries from the New Testament at 14. The first books of each have the most coinages. I didn't know what to make of it, except that [the translators] were more energetic at the beginning than at the end.

As far as the numbers go in terms of the New Testament and Old Testament, it is about even. There were about 70 coinages from the New Testament and 64 in the Old Testament, including the Apocrypha. So there's an even distribution.

What effect have English Bible translations had on the language?

In an educative sense, they've provided tools and methodologies to think about translation, which have become very valuable for us in today's world. There are many things to learn about translation from the Bible translators.

This time period was a century of translation, not only of the Bible, but of many Greek and Roman classics. Translation methodology was established during that time.

And also, of course, [these translations affected] the nuances of ideology and religion. When you have something like the Geneva Bible that included interpretations in the margins, you see that translators were taking it upon themselves to explain hard-to-understand passages. This, in effect, was establishing doctrine in and of itself.

The King James Bible offered so much to the writing of prose and poetry. I think of Walt Whitman right away, for instance. It is a product of a series of translations. It wasn't just something that happened in and of itself—but it was the heir to that process that started with Wycliffe. So through a couple hundred years, you get something as beautiful as the King James Bible. Somebody was learning something about translation.

Todd Hertz is assistant online editor for Christianity Today.

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Recently, Christian History Corner looked at Coined by God in the article, "Sex, Politics, and the Bible | Some words just don't mean what they used to … "

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February (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47