Who Said It? The Bible or Shakespeare?

Two texts have shaped the English language more than any others. One is a collection of sacred writings assembled over centuries. The other is the work of a glove-maker's son from Stratford-upon-Avon. Between them, they gave English speakers a staggering share of the phrases still tossed around today.

Consider the scale of it. The King James Bible, published in 1611, was translated by roughly fifty scholars working in six committees. William Shakespeare, meanwhile, is credited with inventing or popularizing around 1,700 words entirely on his own — "eyeball," "lonely," "swagger," and "bedazzled" among them. When language needed a new word, he often just made one.

Here's what makes the two so easy to confuse. They were produced at almost exactly the same moment in history. Shakespeare died in 1616, only five years after the King James Version rolled off the press. Both drew on the same rhythms of early modern English, the same taste for balance and repetition, the same appetite for a line that lands like a hammer.

There's even a curious legend tied to the timing. Some point out that in the King James translation of Psalm 46, the forty-sixth word from the beginning is "shake" and the forty-sixth word from the end is "spear" — and note that Shakespeare would have been forty-six as the translation neared completion. Coincidence? Almost certainly. But it captures how tightly the two are braided in the popular imagination.

So which sayings came from the pulpit and which from the playhouse? The trouble is that both sources traded in the same currency: hard-won wisdom about money, pride, love, foolishness, and mortality. A line about human vanity could easily belong to either. A sharp observation about fools and their folly might come from a prophet or a jester.

Many people quote both every week without knowing it. A phrase learned in Sunday school might actually have first been spoken on a wooden stage beside the Thames — and vice versa.

Twenty-four famous lines await, each one either scripture or stagecraft. Some are obvious. Most are not. Time to find out how well the sacred and the theatrical can be told apart.