William Shakespeare was still alive when the King James Bible was underway in 1610 – he would’ve been 46 years old. It’s possible you’ve heard that Shakespeare was the one who translated the original KJB or, at least, that he was one of the translators who worked on the religious text. This rumor has grown so pervasive that many believe it without knowing where they’d learned it. In fact, some truly believe they’ve found “proof” of the master wordsmith’s work hidden in the pages of the document.

As Eden explains, Shakespeare had written for King James (the monarch) more than once, and this, to them, counts as evidence that the author may have also written part of the KJB. They also claim that the stylings in the Old Testament Book of Psalms are too poetic to be the work of the dry scholars known to have translated this particular work, but one final clue locks it in for many conspiracy theorists out there. Apparently, in Psalm 46, the 46th word from the beginning is “shake” while the 46th word from the end is “spear,” and since Shakespeare would’ve been 46 when the translation work was underway in 1610, there’s no possible conclusion other than he wrote it. Of course, cryptic coincidences that take this much of a stretch to connect rarely count as evidence to credible scholars. This isn’t “The Da Vinci Code.”