The King James Version · Open Word Bible

For about three hundred years, the English Bible for most English speakers was the King James Version, published in 1611. In Britain it is usually called the Authorized Version. Its phrases are woven into the English language, and many churches and readers still use it today.

It is easy to imagine it as a single inspired act of genius. The real story is more ordinary and more interesting: a committee of about fifty scholars, a set of rules, a long line of earlier translations, and a printer who made mistakes.

The Hampton Court Conference

When James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, the English church was divided. Puritans wanted further reform; the bishops wanted to keep the settlement made under Elizabeth I. In January 1604 James called a conference at Hampton Court Palace to hear both sides.

On the second day, John Rainolds (or Reynolds), President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and a leading Puritan scholar, proposed a new translation of the Bible, saying that the existing ones did not answer to the original. Most of his other requests were refused, but James seized on this one. He disliked the Geneva Bible’s marginal notes, some of which he thought dangerous to royal authority (see From Coverdale to Geneva: the English Bibles before 1611), and a new Bible for the whole church, without such notes, suited him well.

Six companies

The work was organised by Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London and soon Archbishop of Canterbury. The translators were divided into six “companies,” two each meeting at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge:

First Westminster: Genesis to 2 Kings, led by Lancelot Andrewes.
First Cambridge: 1 Chronicles to the Song of Songs.
First Oxford: Isaiah to Malachi.
Second Oxford: the Gospels, Acts and Revelation.
Second Westminster: the New Testament letters.
Second Cambridge: the Apocrypha.

A list of fifty-four names survives from 1604, but some died or were replaced, and lists of the translators who actually served usually give about forty-seven. The exact number and membership are not certain. They were among the best scholars of Hebrew and Greek in England, and they included both Puritans like Rainolds and conservative churchmen like Andrewes.

The rules

Bancroft issued a set of fifteen rules. Among them:

The Bishops’ Bible was to be followed, and “as little altered as the truth of the original will permit.”
The old ecclesiastical words were to be kept, such as “church” rather than “congregation,” a deliberate turn away from Tyndale and the Geneva Bible.
There were to be no marginal notes, except to explain Hebrew or Greek words that could not be expressed briefly in the text.
Each translator in a company was to work on the same chapters, the company was to agree on a text, and each company’s work was to be sent to the others for review.
Where they agreed better with the text, the translations of Tyndale, Matthew, Coverdale, Whitchurch (the Great Bible) and Geneva were to be used.

In practice the translators went well beyond the Bishops’ Bible, drawing on all the earlier English versions and on the Rheims New Testament. They worked from the Hebrew of the Rabbinic Bible printed in Venice and from printed Greek New Testaments in the tradition of Erasmus, Estienne and Beza (see From manuscripts to printed Bibles), and consulted Latin, Aramaic, Syriac and modern European versions. A final review committee met in London around 1610. Notes taken by one of its members, John Bois, were discovered in the twentieth century and give a rare glimpse of the discussion: arguments over single words, rhythm and sense.

1611: the first printing

The new Bible was printed in London by Robert Barker, the King’s Printer, in 1611. It was a large folio for reading in church. The title page says it was “appointed to be read in Churches”; despite the name “Authorized Version,” no record survives of a formal act authorising it.

The first edition shows how the translators wanted the text to look. Words supplied in English that had no direct equivalent in the original were set in roman type to stand out from the black-letter text; later editions, printed in roman, marked them with italics instead. The margins gave alternative renderings and literal meanings, more than 8,000 notes in all by one count. Chapter summaries were printed at the head of each chapter.

It also included the Apocrypha, the books found in the Greek and Latin Old Testament but not in the Hebrew, printed between the Testaments as the Church of England expected. Editions without the Apocrypha appeared later in the century, and from the nineteenth century most printings, especially those of the Bible societies, left them out.

Printers’ errors

Printing a book of this size by hand was difficult, and errors crept in. Two printings in 1611 differ at Ruth 3:15: one says that “he went into the city,” the other that “she went.” Collectors call them the “He” Bible and the “She” Bible. The World English Bible reads “he,” which agrees with the standard Hebrew text, though some manuscripts and versions read “she.”

The most notorious error came in 1631, when an edition printed by Barker and Martin Lucas left out the word “not” from the seventh commandment, so that it read “Thou shalt commit adultery.” This Wicked Bible was suppressed, the printers were fined heavily, and only a handful of copies survive.

The translators speak

The translators prefaced the Bible with a long essay, ”The Translators to the Reader,” written by Miles Smith. Modern editions usually leave it out, which is a pity, because it shows the translators’ own view of their work. They defended translation itself:

Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light.

They insisted that they had not set out to replace the earlier English Bibles but “to make a good one better.” They defended the marginal alternatives, arguing that where a word is uncertain it is more honest to show the reader the doubt than to hide it. And they explained that they had not tied themselves to rendering each Hebrew or Greek word by the same English word every time, preferring variety where the sense allowed.

Slow acceptance and later revision

The King James Version did not win immediately. The scholar Hugh Broughton, who had been left off the committee, attacked it bitterly. The Geneva Bible remained popular for decades; it continued to be printed until about 1644, and editions of it sometimes had King James text with Geneva notes. Only after the Restoration of 1660 did the King James Version become unquestionably the English Bible.

Meanwhile its text was quietly corrected. Cambridge editions of 1629 and 1638 corrected many misprints and made the use of italics more consistent. In 1769 Benjamin Blayney of Oxford produced a thoroughly revised edition, standardising spelling, punctuation and italics. Most King James Bibles printed today follow Blayney’s text, not that of 1611. The differences are mostly in spelling and small details, but they are many. Later scholars, including F. H. A. Scrivener in 1873 and David Norton in 2005, have produced critical editions that try to recover what the translators intended.

Its influence

Few books have shaped English as much. The linguist David Crystal counted 257 idioms in modern English that come from or were popularised by the King James Version, while noting that most of them were already in earlier translations, especially Tyndale’s. Phrases such as “the powers that be,” “a law unto themselves” and “the skin of my teeth” passed into everyday speech.

For a long time the King James Version was also the text against which all newer translations were measured. Its Greek and Hebrew base, however, was the best available in 1611, not the best available today. Later discoveries of older manuscripts led to revisions such as the Revised Version of 1881–85, and to the modern critical editions that most translations now use.

A good one better

The King James translators would have recognised some of Open Word Bible’s aims. They worked from the Hebrew and Greek, built on earlier translations, and showed alternatives in the margin rather than pretending to certainty. Open Word Bible takes that last practice further: every sentence has a reasoning record listing the decisions behind it, with the options considered. Its New Testament is translated from the SBL Greek New Testament and its Old Testament from the Westminster Leningrad Codex, editions based on older and better evidence than the translators of 1611 could use. Unlike them, it is a young, AI-assisted draft, still waiting for named human reviewers. And like the King James Version in most of the world today, it is free of copyright, though by deliberate choice rather than by age.

Sources

Allen, Ward, ed. Translating for King James: Notes Made by a Translator of King James’s Bible. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969.
Campbell, Gordon. Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611–2011. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Crystal, David. Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
McGrath, Alister. In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2001.
Nicolson, Adam. God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Norton, David. A Textual History of the King James Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Norton, David. The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Pollard, Alfred W., ed. Records of the English Bible. London: Oxford University Press, 1911.
Smith, Miles. “The Translators to the Reader.” Preface to The Holy Bible. London: Robert Barker, 1611.
Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes a historic translation.