King James Version

• 1. Introduction

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  The King James Version of the Bible, published in 1611, has no surviving record of its own authorisation. The Privy Council registers for 1600-1613 were destroyed by fire in January 1618/19. The biblical scholar F. F. Bruce can say only that an order in council probably approved it.

  Eighty books sit between its covers: 39 of the Old Testament, 14 of the Apocrypha and 27 of the New Testament. It was made for the Church of England under the sponsorship of King James VI and I. The book that resulted, also called the Authorised Version, has stayed in continuous use for over four centuries.

  Why would a king care so much about what a Bible left out? Who were the scholars behind it, and how much of the text was truly theirs? And why did printers argue over its words for a century and a half?

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• 2. A Quarrel Over Margins

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  In January 1604, King James convened the Hampton Court Conference to answer Puritan complaints gathered in the Millenary Petition. At that meeting, a proposal for a new English translation of the Bible was presented. The idea was not new to him. In May 1601, while still King James VI of Scotland, he had attended the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland at Saint Columba's Church in Burntisland, Fife, where similar proposals were put forward. Two years later he took the English throne as James I.

  The Puritans had specific grievances about the older Bibles. In one psalm, the Great Bible read 'They were not obedient' where the original said 'They were not disobedient.' In Galatians, the Bishops' Bible rendered a Greek word as 'bordereth,' which the Puritans felt captured neither the apostle's sense nor the situation of the place.

  The deeper trouble lay with the Geneva Bible of 1560. English exiles who fled when Mary I restored Catholicism had produced it in Geneva, and ordinary readers preferred it. Its footnotes carried a Calvinistic Puritanism. James named two notes that offended his belief in divinely ordained royal supremacy. At Exodus 1:19, the notes commended the Hebrew midwives for defying Pharaoh. At II Chronicles 15:16, they faulted King Asa for failing to execute his idolatrous 'mother,' Queen Maachah.

  Maachah had actually been Asa's grandmother. James, however, read the note as approving the execution of his own mother, Mary, Queen of Scots.

  The Bishop of London added a condition that the translators would add no marginal notes. Further orders tied the text to the Church of England's structure of bishops and ordained clergy. Old church words such as 'church' were to stay, rather than becoming 'congregation.' The familiar proper names of biblical figures would all be kept.

  Even so, in some 8,500 places the finished Bible's margin offers an alternative English wording. These notes never interpret the text. Many give a more literal rendering, introduced by abbreviations such as Heb, Chal, Gr or Lat. A few longer notes explain biblical names, units of measurement and currency.

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• 3. Forty-Seven Scholars

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  Fifty-four men were first approved for the work, but 47 scholars carried it out. All belonged to the Church of England, and every one except Sir Henry Savile was a clergyman. They split into six committees, two each at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge and Westminster. Scholars with Puritan sympathies sat alongside high churchmen.

  Forty unbound copies of the 1602 Bishops' Bible were specially printed so that each committee's agreed changes could be written in the margins. The First Westminster Company took Genesis to 2 Kings, and Lancelot Andrewes was among its members. The Second Oxford Company took the Gospels, Acts and Revelation. The Second Cambridge Company handled the Apocrypha.

  Nobody paid the translators directly. A circular letter encouraged bishops to consider them for well-paid livings as these fell vacant. Several were supported by Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and others rose to bishoprics, deaneries and prebends through royal patronage.

  On the 22nd of July 1604, James wrote to Archbishop Bancroft about the problem. He described having appointed 'certain learned men, to the number of 4 and 50, for the translating of the Bible.' Some of them had little or no church income. He asked Bancroft to write to the bishops, urging them to recommend these men whenever a post fell vacant.

  The six committees began towards the end of 1604. The Apocrypha committee finished first, and all six had completed their sections by 1608. From January 1609, a General Committee of Review met at Stationers' Hall in London, and the Stationers' Company paid for their attendance. John Bois, Andrew Downes and John Harmar sat on it. Others are known only by initials, such as 'AL,' who may be Arthur Lake.

  John Bois kept a note of the deliberations in Latin, and part of it survives in two later transcripts. The working papers that remain include a bound set of corrections marked in one of the forty Bishops' Bibles, covering the Old Testament and Gospels. A manuscript translation of the Epistles also survives, apart from verses where no change was recommended.

  Archbishop Bancroft insisted on a final say, and he made fourteen further changes. One of them was the word 'bishopricke' at Acts 1:20.

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• 4. Borrowed Words

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  One recent estimate says 84% of the King James New Testament matches the Tyndale Bible word for word. About 76% of Tyndale's unfinished Old Testament survives in it too. William Tyndale began his New Testament translation in 1525, and he was later executed on a charge of heresy for being a Lutheran. The merits of his prose made his work the ultimate basis for every later rendering into Early Modern English. That debt explains why most printings say the text was 'translated out of the original tongues, and with the former translations diligently compared and revised, by His Majesty's special commandment.'

  The translators were told to treat the Bishops' Bible as their primary guide. Where it proved problematic, they could consult a pre-approved list: the Tyndale Bible, the Coverdale Bible, Matthew's Bible, the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible. Later scholars also detect the influence of Taverner's Bible and the Douay-Rheims New Testament. When the translators left the Bishops' Bible, they most often turned to the Geneva Bible. They also used the Rheims New Testament, which their own preface criticised.

  For the Old Testament, the translators used a Hebrew text from the Rabbinic Bible editions of Daniel Bomberg, dated 1524/5. In passages that Christian tradition read as pointing to Christ, they adjusted it to match the Septuagint or the Vulgate. At Psalm 22:16 they chose the Septuagint reading 'They pierced my hands and my feet.' The Masoretic Hebrew instead reads 'like lions my hands and feet.' Elsewhere the version sits closer to the Hebrew tradition than any earlier English translation, drawing on rabbinic commentators such as David Kimhi to clear up obscure passages.

  Theodore Beza's Greek editions of 1598 and 1588/89 were the main basis for the New Testament. The translators held all their discussions in Latin. F. H. A. Scrivener counted 190 places where they departed from Beza's Greek, usually to keep the wording of the Bishops' Bible or another earlier English version. In several dozen readings, he found no printed Greek text matching the English at all, because the wording came straight from the Latin Vulgate. At John 10:16 the King James reads 'one fold,' following the Vulgate 'unum ovile,' while Tyndale had 'one flocke,' closer to the Greek.

  The Apocrypha is the one part where the translators named their sources in the margins. Those notes show the books came from the Septuagint, mostly the Greek Old Testament column of the Antwerp Polyglot. The translators also looked often at the Vulgate and at Junius's Latin translation. For 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasses they had no Greek text, and Scrivener found that an unidentified Latin manuscript was used instead.

  The translators apparently made no first-hand study of ancient manuscripts, even readily available ones such as the Codex Bezae. Their preface lists translations and commentaries consulted in Chaldee, Hebrew, Syrian, Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian and German.

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• 5. A Deliberately Old Voice

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  Research has found only one verse, Hebrews 13:8, where the translators debated how the wording sounded. Their stated priority was a Bible dignified and resonant in public reading. The preface says they varied English words where the originals repeated, yet in practice they also did the opposite. Fourteen different Hebrew words became the single English word 'prince.'

  In a period of rapid linguistic change, the translators avoided contemporary idioms. They leaned instead on forms already slightly archaic, such as 'verily' and 'it came to pass.' Thou and thee are always singular, and ye and you always plural, even though ordinary English of the time often used 'you' for one person, as Shakespeare did. They avoided 'its,' first recorded in 1598, and wrote 'his' instead, as in Matthew 5:13: 'if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?'

  Verbs take the ending -eth, as at Matthew 2:13: 'the Angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dreame.' The plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe already favoured the modern -s ending. The translators also preferred 'which' to 'who' for people, as in Genesis 13:5.

  Several translators admitted they felt more at home writing Latin than English. The ban on notes pushed the same way. Where the Geneva Bible might use a common English word and explain it in the margin, this version often chose an anglicised Latin term. For that reason the New Testament owes much of its style to the Catholic Rheims New Testament. New Testament translators also gave Old Testament names in Greek forms, such as 'Elias' and 'Noe' for Elijah and Noah.

  Some 9,000 cross-references originally ran through the margins. Most were copied unchanged from the Latin Bible tradition, so early editions kept many Vulgate verse references, such as the numbering of the Psalms. In the Old Testament, the divine name YHWH appears as 'the LORD,' with 'IEHOVAH' in just four places.

  Modern translations make clear that Job 28:1-11 describes mining, which the Authorised Version's wording does not reveal. Critics cite alleged mistranslations, especially where Hebrew knowledge was uncertain. In Job and Deuteronomy, a Hebrew word that probably means wild ox or aurochs became 'unicorn.' The Vulgate and several medieval rabbinic commentators did the same, and Martin Luther's German used Einhorn. The margin at Isaiah 34:7 offers 'rhinocerots' as an alternative.

  At 2 Samuel 1:18, critics say the translators took a descriptive phrase for a proper name in 'the Book of Jasher.' It may mean 'the Book of the Upright,' which a marginal note proposed. Defenders reply that the phrase seems to work as a title, also at Joshua 10:13. Several later works bear the name Sefer ha-Yashar, but mainstream scholarship treats them as distinct from the lost book that scripture mentions.

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• 6. Printers and Editors

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  Robert Barker, the King's Printer, published the first edition in 1611 as a complete folio. It sold looseleaf for ten shillings, or bound for twelve. His father, Christopher, had received the title of royal Printer from Elizabeth I in 1589, with a perpetual privilege to print Bibles in England.

  The investment left Robert Barker deep in debt. He sub-leased the privilege to two rival London printers, Bonham Norton and John Bill. Each was meant to print a portion, swap sheets and share the proceeds. Instead, Barker accused them of hiding profits, and they accused him of selling sheets that belonged to them. Decades of litigation followed, with members of the Barker and Norton families jailed for debt.

  In 1629 the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge asserted separate and prior royal licences for their own presses. Cambridge printed revised editions in 1629 and 1638, edited in part by two original translators, John Bois and Samuel Ward. The Barker family still refused other printers access to the authoritative manuscript. Two whole-Bible editions are recognised from 1611. At Ruth 3:15 the first reads 'he went into the city' and the second 'she went into the city,' so they are called the He and She Bibles.

  The 1611 page looked unlike a modern Bible. Printers set v for initial u and v, used u elsewhere, and used the long s. The blackletter typeface was heavy physically as well as visually, and the folio was meant for public reading rather than private devotion. Smaller roman-type editions, including quartos in 1612, followed quickly. Words the translators supplied for English grammar were shown in roman type, sparsely and inconsistently.

  Quarrels over privileges left later printings less careful than the first. Compositors freely varied spelling, capitalisation and punctuation, and about 1,500 misprints crept in. The most notorious, the 'Wicked Bible,' omitted 'not' from 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.' The Cambridge editions of 1629 and 1638 tried to restore the text. They also introduced over 200 revisions, mostly by moving a more literal marginal reading into the main text.

  By the middle of the 18th century, the variant texts and misprints had become a scandal. Cambridge answered first with an edition of 1760, the fruit of 20 years' work by Francis Sawyer Parris, who died in May of that year. Oxford followed in 1769 with an edition by Benjamin Blayney that changed comparatively little from Parris's. Blayney's text is reproduced almost unchanged in most current printings.

  Standardising spelling and punctuation made the 1769 text differ from the 1611 text in around 24,000 places. A comparison of three verses about charity shows 11 changes of spelling, 16 of typesetting and three of punctuation. It also shows one variant reading, where 'not charity' replaced 'no charity' because the editors thought the original a misprint. Parris had written 'lost his savour' at Matthew 5:13. Blayney changed it to 'lost its savour.'

  Parris and Blayney also greatly extended the italicising of supplied words, a change meant to de-emphasise them. Blayney seems to have worked from the 1550 Stephanus edition of the Textus Receptus rather than Beza's later editions. Because of that, the current Oxford text alters about a dozen italicisations where the two differ.

  In 1873, F. H. A. Scrivener produced the Cambridge Paragraph Bible. He called Parris and Blayney 'the great modernizers of the diction of the version,' yet he deplored their 'tasteless and inconsistent meddling with archaic words and grammatical forms.' Oxford had already published a page-for-page reprint of the 1611 edition in 1833, in roman type. In 2005, David Norton's New Cambridge Paragraph Bible added quotation marks while returning to the translators' own wording.

  In 1985, Cambridge University Press changed 'spirit' at 1 John 5:8 to a capital 'S.' Its Bible Director, Jerry L. Hooper, answered a clergyman's inquiry on the 3rd of June 1985. He called the old lower-case letter a matter of some embarrassment.

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• 7. Slow Acceptance

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  Scotland, where the Geneva Bible had long been the standard church Bible, saw no Scottish edition of the new translation until 1633. It appeared alongside the Scottish coronation of Charles I. Its illustrations drew accusations of Popery from opponents of the religious policies of Charles and of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. F. F. Bruce reports the last recorded Scottish parish still using the Geneva text in 1674.

  Even in England, the Geneva Bible kept its readers. Large numbers arrived from Amsterdam, where printing continued up to 1644 in editions with a false London imprint. Few genuine Geneva editions seem to have been printed in London after 1616, and in 1637 Laud prohibited their printing and importation. During the English Civil War, soldiers of the New Model Army were issued 'The Soldiers' Bible,' a book of Geneva selections.

  Through the first half of the 17th century, the new translation was commonly called 'The Bible without notes,' in contrast to the Geneva 'Bible with notes.' Amsterdam printers combined its text with the Geneva notes, one edition as late as 1715, and a London edition appeared in 1649. During the Commonwealth, Parliament set up a commission to recommend a revision with acceptably Protestant explanatory notes.

  Hugh Broughton, the most highly regarded English Hebraist of his day, had been excluded from the translators because of his temperament. In 1611 he issued a total condemnation of the new version. He attacked the rejection of word-for-word equivalence, and he said he would rather be torn apart by wild horses than see it forced on the English people.

  Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan of 1651 used the Vulgate as its head text, giving Vulgate numbering such as Job 41:24 rather than Job 41:33. Walton's London Polyglot of 1657 ignored the Authorised Version and the English language altogether. Educated readers still assumed that serious Bible study belonged in Latin. Only in 1700 did bilingual Bibles appear that set the Authorised Version beside Dutch and French Protestant Bibles.

  In the early 1660s, the Authorised Version replaced the Great Bible in the Epistle and Gospel readings of the Book of Common Prayer. The Prayer Book Psalter, however, still uses the Great Bible version. By the first half of the 18th century, the new translation was so dominant that the Catholic Church in England issued a revision of the Douay-Rheims Bible by Richard Challoner in 1750. It sat much closer to the Authorised Version than to the original. Over that century the Authorised Version replaced the Hebrew, Greek and Latin as the standard scripture for English-speaking scholars. Some came to regard it as inspired in itself.

  In 1752, Samuel Kneeland began printing the King James Bible in the American colonies without Crown authorisation. The colonies faced a serious shortage of Bibles. To avoid prosecution, printers included the royal insignia on the title page and used materials imported from England.

  At the start of the 19th century, stereotype printing made the Bible the most widely printed book in history. Almost all printings used the 1769 text and nearly always omitted the Apocrypha. Scholars raised three concerns: study of oriental languages suggested the Hebrew needed revising, the same Greek phrases were rendered differently in parallel gospel passages, and newly discovered ancient manuscripts undermined the Textus Receptus. Most modern textual scholars now value the Alexandrian family of manuscripts over the late Byzantine ones behind it.

  The Convocation of Canterbury resolved in 1870 to revise the text. The Revised Version appeared in 1881 for the New Testament, 1885 for the Old Testament and 1894 for the Apocrypha. It sold widely but never won popular favour, and Convocation approved it for reading in churches only reluctantly, in 1899.

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• 8. Names and Legacy

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  In his Leviathan of 1651, Thomas Hobbes called the translation only 'the English Translation made in the beginning of the Reign of King James.' For many years it had no settled name, and writers used phrases such as 'our English translation.' Charles Butler's Horae Biblicae, first published in 1797, used 'King James's Bible' as a name. 'Authorized Version,' capitalised as a name, appears as early as 1814. 'The King James Version' is found unequivocally as a name in a letter from 1855. Today Britain usually says Authorised Version, and the United States says King James Version.

  The Critical Review complained in 1763 of false interpretations, ambiguous phrases and obsolete words. Blayney's 1769 text, with its revised spelling and punctuation, helped turn the public view of the translation into admiration for a masterpiece. By the 19th century, F. W. Faber could say that it 'lives on the ear, like music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forego.' Geddes MacGregor called it 'the most influential version of the most influential book in the world, in what is now its most influential language.'

  David Crystal estimates that the translation is responsible for 257 English idioms, including 'feet of clay' and 'reap the whirlwind.' The atheists Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins both praised it. Hitchens called it 'a giant step in the maturing of English literature,' and Dawkins called it 'a great work of literature.' Dawkins added, 'A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.'

  The Bible was presented to King Charles III at his coronation service. The Episcopal Church and other parts of the Anglican Communion authorise its use as their historical Bible. It is also used by English-speaking Conservative Anabaptists, by Methodists of the conservative holiness movement and by certain Baptists. The Orthodox Church in America made it the official translation for a whole generation. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints uses its own edition as its official English Bible.

  The Church of England now recommends six other versions alongside it. It remains the most used translation in the United States, but over the past forty years the New International Version of 1973, the New Revised Standard Version of 1989 and the English Standard Version of 2001 have gradually overtaken it. The last is seen as its successor.

  The King James Only movement holds that this version is superior to every other English translation. Most adherents believe the Textus Receptus is very close, if not identical, to the original autographs. They argue that Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, the basis of most modern translations, are corrupted. One of them, Perry Demopoulos, was a director of the Russian translation of the King James Bible. Its New Testament was released in Kyiv, Ukraine in 2010, and the first complete Russian edition followed in 2017. A Faroese translation also appeared in 2017.

  In most of the world, the Authorised Version is in the public domain. In the United Kingdom, the right to print it is a royal prerogative that the Crown licenses by letters patent. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the King's Printer holds them, and since 1990 that has been Cambridge University Press. It inherited the right when it took over the firm of Eyre & Spottiswoode. In Scotland, Collins publishes it under licence from the Scottish Bible Board. Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press also hold older charters letting them print it independently.

  The earliest known reference to the office of King's Printer dates from 1577. In the 18th century, John Baskett bought out all surviving interests in the monopoly. Section 171(b) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 exempted any unwritten right or privilege of the Crown. That exemption preserved the last remnant of the Crown's old monopoly over printing and publishing.

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