The quick and the dead

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 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.

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