[Ishmaeli]

Because the King James Version (KJV) was so dominant for so long among English speakers that archaic language came to be associated with Holy Writ. Generations have been conditioned to think that scripture is supposed to sound old.

Now, lots of Christian denominations do favor more modern translations, but the KJV refuses to go away.

Fun fact from the church I grew up in (Mormonism): aside from the Bible and the Book of Mormon, Mormons have a book of scripture called Doctrine and Covenants, which contains revelations from God directly to Joseph Smith. But what's funny is that this book is also written in faux-Jacobean English. Smith didn't think it through!

The KJV was so dominant in 19th Century America that Smith (like most people probably) just assumed that if God spoke directly to us, he would use language that sounded like the Bible. So when he purported to write down the words of God, that's exactly what he made them sound like. He didn't think about the fact that the the KJV is written in Jacobean English because it was written in the Jacobean era, and that scripture only sounds old to our ears now because that translation has persisted for so long.

So today, lots of Christian churches are adopting newer translations of the Bible. But the Mormon church is stuck with the KJV forever because Joseph Smith established the tradition that that's how God sounds when he talks to us. We can't just produce a modern translation of the D&C because it's supposedly the primary source!

[mjh2539]

I mean...Jesus was an orthodox Jew and prayed in (mostly) Hebrew (the sacral language), not Aramaic (the vernacular language of the Jews at the time). Having a "sacral language" or "sacral register" is not specific to the English or to the KJV. You will find the same phenomenon in other areas as well, some of which aren't even remotely religious. Think of the register of speech people use when writing a paper for publication in an academic journal, it's distinct from the register of speech you'd use when talking with your mother, or addressing graduates at a university commencement speech.

[CodeBeater]

I can 100% relate to that. For most of my 12 year long career I wrote, spoke and produced technical documentation exclusively in English.

Now that I work with a bunch of Portuguese speaking people, I find that I have a hard time communicating about anything related to work in an informal manner.

That leads to some awkward (albeit funny) situations in which sometimes I forget non-domain-specific words in Portuguese, and just Google Translate them (back into my own native language!).

In one instance I could not come up with a good enough translation for the word "henceforth", so I translated it and got "doravante", which I obliviously used it when establishing new deploy procedures. I got some laughs from my co-workers because apparently "doravante" is an absolutely archaic word.

[schoen]

> So today, lots of Christian churches are adopting newer translations of the Bible. But the Mormon church is stuck with the KJV forever because Joseph Smith established the tradition that that's how God sounds when he talks to us. We can't just produce a modern translation of the D&C because it's supposedly the primary source!

You could, though! It would probably be comparably controversial to translating the Hebrew Bible into Modern Hebrew:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanakh_Ram