The bible is in deed a book worth reading.
So is Grimm's fairy tales and Harry Potter.
It only gets dangerous when you start to believe its contents.

I seem to be in a strangely agreeable mood today.
I quite agree with Graham -and also with Ponde.
Not at 'Ambit Gambit' though.

"How do you describe someone who pushes the Bible at you, but not necessarily Christianity?"

Someone who, as the CEO of the Bible Society Australia and aware of its (and its antecedents) goals, isn't doing his job properly...

but that seems irrelevant to Graham Young's affirmation of The Great Bible Swindle's supporting the importance, to any informed appreciation of 'western civilisation', of the influential history of The Bible.

Which seems obvious without having to read Greg Clarke's book. Though I may need to to clarify "The Bible's bequest is 257 "brand new words" making Shakespeare ["who... bequeathed 100 new words to us"] what Clarke calls "the silver medallist".

If only because I thought Shakespeare's legacy was over 1700 and The Bible isn't a person.

An interesting claim.

>>"Argument", "excellent", "puberty" and "novel" are amongst these Biblical bequests.<<

Words are also a fascination of mine, so sentences like this will always see me lunging for the OED.

It would appear that the first three get the guernsey from their inclusion in Wycliffe's first translation of the Bible. The OED dates them 1382, and the only other Wycliffe version, John Purvey's revision, was made after Wycliffe's death. (On December 31st 1384. He missed the New Year's Eve fireworks. How galling)

And - as any fule kno - Wycliffe adhered to the Latin Vulgate for his baseline text, so it is hardly surprising that he slipped in the odd Latinism where he couldn't think of an existing English word. So "argumentum" became "argumentis", "excellentem" became "excellent" and "pubertas" became "pubertee".

"Novel" has me and the OED (and the internet, of course) quite puzzled, though. The earliest published use that I could find was 1460. Can anyone help unravel this one? Someone who has read the book in question, perhaps?

Not in KJ version.

You do not have to be a Christian to acknowledge and appreciate the importance of the Bible to Western culture. Unfortunately, those hoping to reduce the influence of Christianity on modern society often wish also to downplay its historical importance. Not all, though. Two prominent atheists – Melvin Bragg and Christopher Hitchens – wrote approvingly on the bible’s contribution to our language and culture on the 400th anniversary of the King James Version in 2011.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Book-Books-Radical-1611-2011/dp/1444705156

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/05/hitchens-201105?currentPage=all

I particularly like Hitchens:
‘ The Tyndale/King James translation, even if all its copies were to be burned, would still live on in our language through its transmission by way of Shakespeare and Milton and Bunyan and Coleridge, and also by way of beloved popular idioms such as “fatted calf” and “pearls before swine.” ‘