The quick and the dead
English phrase
The quick and the dead is an English phrase used in the paraphrase of the Creed in the Medieval Lay Folks Mass Book and is found in William Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament (1526), "I testifie therfore before god and before the lorde Iesu Christ which shall iudge quicke and deed at his aperynge in his kyngdom" (2 Timothy 4:1), and used by Thomas Cranmer in his translation of the Nicene Creed and Apostles' Creed for the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549. In the following century the idiom was used both by Shakespeare's Hamlet (1603) and the King James Bible (1611). More recently the final verse of The Book of Mormon (1830), mentions "...the Eternal Judge of both quick and dead".
The phrase has been used both in its original sense in the titles of books and films, and sometimes ambiguously with the modern sense of the word "quick" for tales of speed and deadly danger.
Etymology
The use of the word quick in this context is an archaic one, specifically meaning living or alive; therefore, this idiom concerns 'the living and the dead'. The meaning of "quick" in this way is still retained in various common phrases, such as the "quick" of the fingernails, and in the idiom quickening, as the moment in pregnancy when fetal movements are first felt.) Another common phrase, "cut to the quick", literally means cut through the dead, unfeeling layers of the skin to the living, sensitive tissues below. It is derived from the Proto-Germanic *kwikwaz, which in turn was from a variant of the Proto-Indo-European form *gwih3wos – "lively, alive", from the root *gweih3 – "(to) live" (from which also comes the Latin vivere and later the Italian and Spanish viva, and whose root is retained in the English words revive and survive). The English meaning of "quick" in later centuries shifted to "fast", "rapid", "moving, or able to move, with speed". The old sense of the word as "alive" survives in "quicksand" (which moves), "quicklime" (which seethes and bubbles), and "quicksilver", an old name for the liquid metal mercury, which runs around and quivers as if alive.
Primary religious origins
In the King James Bible
The phrase is found in three passages in the 1611 King James Bible: in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 10:42), Paul's letters to Timothy (2 Timothy 4:1), and the First Epistle of Peter.
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