English Bibles, Esoteric Coinage and the King James Legacy

English carries an extraordinarily large body of religious literature, most significantly the King James Bible of 1611, commissioned by King James I and translated by a committee of scholars working from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek source texts, whose rhythmic prose shaped English literary and religious style so profoundly that its phrasing remains embedded in everyday English idiom four centuries later, alongside numerous subsequent English translations reflecting evolving textual scholarship and denominational preference, including the Douay-Rheims Catholic translation, the Revised Standard Version and, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Book of Mormon, composed in deliberately archaic King James-style English by Joseph Smith in 1830.

English has also become the primary language of coinage for modern Western esotericism, since terms including theosophy, channeling, chakra balancing as popularly understood, and much of the New Age movement's specific vocabulary were formulated or substantially popularized in English by nineteenth and twentieth century English-speaking writers and translators rather than inherited directly from the older traditions they draw upon, making English, alongside older sacred languages, itself a significant vehicle of modern religious and esoteric expression rather than merely a neutral medium translating older material.