"They [the translators] had a noble version before them, which they have contrived to mar in every part. Its distinguished simplicity and essential faithfulness, its manly grace and its delightful rhythm, they have shown themselves alike incapable of imitating and unwilling to retain. Their uncouth phraseology and their jerky sentences: their pedantic obscurity and their stiff, constrained manner: their fidgetty affectation of accuracy, and their habitual achievement of English which fails to exhibit the spirit of the original Greek - are sorry substitutes for the living freshness, and elastic freedom, and habitual fidelity of the good old version which we inherited from our fathers, and which has sustained the spiritual life of the Church of England and of all English-speaking Christians for 350 years.
"Linked with all our holiest, happiest memories, and bound up with all our purest aspirations; part and parcel of whatever there is good about us: fraught with men's hopes of a blessed Eternity and many a bright vision of the never ending life; - the Authorised Version, wherever it was possible, should have been left alone. But on the contrary. Every familiar cadence has been dislocated: the congenial flow of almost every verse of Scripture has been hopelessly marred: so many of those little connecting words, which give life and continuity to a narrative have been vexatiously displaced, that a perpetual sense of annoyance is created. The countless minute alterations which have been needlessly introduced into every familiar page prove at last as tormenting as a swarm of flies to the weary traveller on a summer's day.
"To speak plainly, the book becomes unreadable. We lay the Revisers' volume down convinced that the case of their work is simply hopeless."
- Quarterly Review: Volume 153, Number 305 (January 1882)