What's up with all the words ending with "-eth" in the Bible? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate:
What happened to the “-est” and “-eth” verb suffixes in English? How were they once used?

With all this rapture thing going on now, I noticed that through the Internet, the English version of the Bible has sentences like:

Howbeit we know this man whence he is: but when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is.

So what's up with all these words ending in -eth? Are they correct grammatically and what's the difference between this and their usual use like "knows", "comes" etc.?

Solution 1:

Someone may correct me and come up with a non-facetious current usage, but in general the -eth ending is archaic.

Some people think old equates to established equates to authoritative, so they feel more comfortable with things like Bibles using archaic language.

New Bibles tend to use more modern language, but there's always a rump of die-hards. Plus lots of people still have very old Bibles - either because they're likely to be more robustly bound, or because they don't actually use them much anyway.

Solution 2:

They are the archaic form of those words.

The suffix -eth (also -th) is classified like this in my NOAD:

suffix - archaic
Forming the third person singular of the present tense of verbs : doeth | saith.

ORIGIN Old English -eth, -ath, -th.

I remember there was a similar question treating the same topic (although from a slightly different perspective) but I haven't found it yet.

EDIT - Found it: What happened to the “‑est” and “‑eth” verb suffixes in English?

Solution 3:

It appears you're quoting from the King James Bible, which is just one English translation. Granted, it's a very famous translation and was the best translation of its day, but the English is archaic. For a long time, it was the only option, and even today some circles consider it to be the English translation.

There are a variety of English translations of the Bible today, varying from strictly literal to paraphrases. If you want to read a fairly simple English translation that's easy to read, I'd recommend the GNB (Good News Bible), also known as the TEV (Today's English Version). A less-simple version would be the NIV (New International Version).

You might get considerable debate on those recommendations, as people can be very passionate on the subject. You can search and view many different translations at Bible Gateway.

Solution 4:

There is not a single English version, there are many English versions (to illustrate, here is an example which shows a comparison, NIV is from 1974-78 and KJV is from 1604-1611).

The history of English translations of the Bible is quite rich and very interesting linguistically.

If people quote an older version you will have various examples of archaic language constructs from different eras.

Quoting particular translation might be significant in cultural context of the quote (and of course in linguistic and religious context), as there are changes in translations which are more or less significant.

Just for illustration: in the comparison from the first paragraph one translation uses word charity and one uses love - this is quite significant, especially since the text proclaims it more important than both hope and faith. In this case, one can argue that even the essence of certain texts is changed between versions and quoting particular version might have more substance to it than superficial attempt to imply credibility or value through use of archaic language.