You are very gracious, but I have no great contributions to make. However, God has been very generous in giving me teachers and mentors who understood such things.

It is a sheer canard to imply that there was no written word of God prior to 1611 - - - in fact, it's worse than a canard; it's an insult to the memory of some of God's most faithful saints. William Tyndale was not burned at the stake in 1536 for the sake of an "inadequate translation;" his version, at that point in time, was the word of God, just as the AV is in our own time. And there were others: because, as has been mentioned once or twice in this thread, God's word was purified over a period of time.

We talk about Ps. 12:6, 7, and we speculate as to the nature of the seven purifications; but we don't always realize that, apart from the Old Latin and the Koine Greek and all that stuff, there have also been seven purifications in English - - - and only seven. The AV was the last.

The first step was the Gothic Bible, which we associate with Ulfilas (310-383). The Goths may have received the New Testament first-hand: many of them served in the Roman army in Thessalonica and Cappadocia. Ulfilas' Gothic Bible, according to liberal and conservative scholars alike, contained no contamination (or influence, if you prefer) from Jerome's wretched Vulgate. The Cambridge History of the Bible says that Ulfilas' Byzantine text "differs very little from the fully developed Textus Receptus of the later period." So, the Goths had a Bible, long before 1611.

Next came the Anglo-Saxon Bible(s), which started cropping up around 450 AD. The "father of English history," the Venerable Bede, bears witness to these vernacular Bibles, which were of the Byzantine text type. There was not a single edition of the Bible in these days before the printing press, but the Anglo-Saxon Bibles were faithful to the Receptus and to one another. So the ancient Britons had God's word, too.

Then, like dawn breaking after a stormy night, came John Wycliffe's Bible in 1389.

Then Tyndale's printed edition.

Then the Geneva Bible in 1560.

Then the Bishops' Bible, in 1568 (although the Geneva was still in use until around 1599).

And, of course, the seventh and final purification came in 1611, although subsequent editions (not revisions) made orthographical changes, in keeping with typesetting practices.

As the English language itself developed from its Gothic roots, the Bible developed, under God's guidance, right along with it. And now we have the King James Bible: which, contrary to popular misconception, is written in Modern English, not Old English or Middle English.

Please understand: I'm not limiting Ps. 12:6, 7 to the development of the English language! I think the verses go much deeper than that, and refer to much more. But isn't it interesting that the development of the English Bible came in seven stages?

Which is nothing that hasn't already been said in another thread, but you asked! You rascal!