Dr. Donald L. Brake, Sr. wrote "A Monarch's Majestic Translation: The Kings James Bible: The Remarkable Relevance of a Seventeenth-Century Book to the Twenty-First Century." Dr. Brake may not consider himself a King James advocate (see from 44:45 for a few minutes in this interview), but -- in various forms -- the idea that the King James Version is particularly majestic shows up in a variety of pro-KJV arguments.
Some examples:
"In 1906, Ira Maurice Price, writing in The Ancestry of Our English Bible wrote: 'For almost three centuries the Authorized, or King James, Version has been the Bible of the English-speaking world. Its simple, majestic Anglo-Saxon tongue, its clear, sparkling style, its directness and force of utterance have made it the model in language, style, and dignity of some of the choicest writers of the last two centuries.'" - Phil Stringer, "Majestic Legacy" (archived version)
"While the AV retains some of the prose of Elizabethan English which gives it the majestic feel that Ward claims to enjoy, it is not purely Elizabethan if Shakespeare is our guide – it’s closer to modern English actually." - Young, Textless, and Reformed (source)
It's hard to disagree with the idea that the King James has a majestic or even poetic in its sound. The question that is rarely asked, however, is why the text of the King James version has that sound to it.
The primary reasons are linguistic.
The King James has a vocabulary that has a different word usage frequency from our standard vocabulary today. This should be obvious to anyone who has read the King James. According to one King James focused website, "There are 788,258 words in the King James Bible." (source). The same source provides a ranked list of high-frequency words, in descending order of frequency. The top eight words ("and", "the", "of", "that", "to", "in", "he", and "for") are also similarly high frequency words in English today (based on this source, which cites the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus). Nevertheless, even within the top 50 most commonly used words in the KJV, we see some less familiar words:
unto (9th in the KJV, 6392nd in the list based on Google)
Lord (11th in the KJV, 1732nd in the list)
shall (13th in the KJV, 387th in the list)
thou (24th in the KJV, 5515th in the list)
God (28th in the KJV, 691st in the list)
thy (33rd in the KJV, 6168th in the list)
thee (39th in the KJV, 6945th in the list)
ye (40th in the KJV, 6195th in the list)
It's not surprising that words like "God" and "Lord" are much more frequent than usual, because of the subject matter of the book. However, the lower rank of "shall" and the much lower ranks of "unto", "thou", "thy", and "ye" most likely reflect the fact that the English language (in use) has changed.
And, of course, these are just the most frequently used.
This and one or two other difference are illustrated by the following verse:
Joshua 2:4 And the woman took the two men, and hid them, and said thus, There came men unto me, but I wist not whence they [were]:
The much lower frequency words here are "wist" (which is low enough frequency to trip a spell check) and "unto" (as noted above) but the words "whence" and "thus" are also less frequently used in contemporary English (particularly, "whence").
In addition, the phrase "said thus" is not a standard way of writing (or speaking) in English today. We would simply say, "the woman hid them and said "[whatever it is she said]." The "thus" is unnecessary for us, and sounds extraneous. Some people may see this extraneous word as providing a flourish of color or accent, but that's in the eye (or ear) of the beholder.
Likewise, saying "whence they were," is an unusual way of expressing the statement today. We more often use, "from where" instead of "whence". A more contemporary rendering might be "where they were from" (although ending in a preposition is somewhat informal).
Another violation of the way we write (and speak) English today is putting the "not" after "wist" rather than before it and after a helping verb. Today, we would not say "I knew not where they were from," we would say, "I did not know where they were from."
These violations of our expectations are (collectively) one of the things that make reading the King James a quasi-poetic experience. All the -eths and -ests and so on have a old-timey ring to them. The vocabulary often includes words we don't read or hear as much in everyday conversation. These make the King James interesting from a linguistic standpoint. They give it some of its poetic character.
Obviously, some poetry is identifiable by its rhyme and meter, but poetry is also associated (at least in the mind of many English speakers) with creative syntax and a varied vocabulary. Partly this is the result of attempting to meet rhyming and metrical constraints in traditional English poetry, but also partly because violations of expectations are interesting to the mind: that's one of the reason that the punchline is so enjoyable in a joke.
In the interview mentioned above, Dr. Brake argues that there is a "dignity and a majestic part" of the KJV that "motivates worship". My concerns about this are at least two-fold:
First, the King James Version was an update for fidelity to the originals of the Bishops' Bible, which was a revision ultimately of the Tyndale/Matthew Bible. When Tyndale translated, we have no good reason to suppose that the goal of the translation was to make the Bible sound "worship-y" or "high church" or the like. Similarly, the King James translators seemed to place an emphasis on avoiding fancy words in favor of use plain words. Moreover, the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament, while sometimes containing subjects that are hard subjects to understand (or words that are hard to understand now), seem to have been written in the common languages of the times.
Second, using language that sounds more like Shakespeare and less like the newspaper may give the Bible the audio equivalent of the smell of incense and the sound of church bells, but it is an easily imitated experience. Moreover, false religions take advantage of this to promote falsehood. For example, Marmaduke Pickthall's translation of the Koran (The Meaning of the Glorious Koran) and Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon both employ similar English. If people associate the King James sound with their Bibles, when they start reading Pickthall's or Smith's works, they may think it has the ring of truth, rather than just the ring of old syntax and vocabulary.
None of this is to suggest that the Bible ought to be translated into the least formal possible English or that it ought to be translated into the latest slang terms to grace the digital tongues of today's youth. Instead, the point is that the majesty argument is misleading (if people are confusing what is merely Anglic for what is Angelic) and has two edges.
Finally, some of the "majesty" has a trade-off against intelligibility. It's harder to understand something that's written in an unfamiliar way, and there is more potential for confusion when words are used differently in the Bible than in ordinary speech. Could someone jazz up a contemporary translation to make it sound more grandiose? Of course! Would that be a wise idea? That should, at least, be a question before prioritizing the perceived grandeur of old fashioned syntactical forms and yesteryear's vocabulary.
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