Earlier English translations There were
several translations into
Middle English of large portions of Scriptures in the 14th Century, with the first
complete bibles probably being made by the followers of
John Wycliffe. These translations were effectively but not formally
banned in 1409 due to their association with the
Lollards. The Wycliffite Bibles pre-dated the
printing press but were circulated very widely in manuscript form. translated the New Testament into English in 1525. In 1525,
William Tyndale, an English contemporary of
Martin Luther, undertook
a translation of the New Testament into
Early Modern English. Tyndale's translation was the first printed Bible in English. Over the next ten years, Tyndale revised his New Testament in the light of rapidly advancing biblical scholarship, and embarked on a translation of the Old Testament. Despite some controversial translation choices, and in spite of Tyndale's execution on charges of heresy for being a Lutheran, the merits of Tyndale's work and prose style made his translation the ultimate basis for all subsequent renditions into Early Modern English. With these translations lightly edited and adapted by
Myles Coverdale to remove offensive notes, in 1539, Tyndale's New Testament and his incomplete work on the Old Testament became the basis for the
Great Bible. This was the first "authorised version" issued by the
Church of England during the reign of King
Henry VIII. When
Mary I succeeded to the throne in 1553, she returned the Church of England to the communion of the Catholic faith and many English religious reformers
fled the country, some establishing an English-speaking community in the Protestant city of
Geneva. Under the leadership of
John Calvin,
Geneva became the chief international centre of
Reformed Protestantism and Latin biblical scholarship. These English
expatriates undertook a translation that became known as the
Geneva Bible. This translation, dated to 1560, was a revision of Tyndale's Bible and the Great Bible on the basis of the original languages. Soon after
Elizabeth I took the throne in 1558, problems with both the Great and Geneva Bibles (namely, that the latter did not "conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its beliefs about an ordained clergy") became apparent to church authorities. In 1568, the Church of England responded with the
Bishops' Bible, a revision of the Great Bible in the light of the Geneva version. While officially approved, this new version failed to displace the Geneva translation as the most popular English Bible of the age, in part because the full Bible was printed only in
lectern editions of prodigious size and at a cost of several pounds. Accordingly, Elizabethan lay people overwhelmingly read the Bible in the Geneva Version, as small editions were available at a relatively low cost. At the same time, there was a substantial clandestine importation of the rival
Douay–Rheims New Testament of 1582, undertaken by exiled Catholics. This translation, though still derived from Tyndale, claimed to represent the text of the Latin Vulgate. In May 1601,
King James VI of Scotland attended the
General Assembly of the Church of Scotland at Saint Columba's Church in
Burntisland,
Fife, at which proposals were put forward for a new translation of the Bible into English. Two years later, he ascended to the throne of England as James I.
Considerations for a new version The newly crowned King James convened the
Hampton Court Conference in 1604. That gathering proposed a new English version in response to the perceived problems of earlier translations as detected by the
Puritan faction of the Church of England. Here are three examples of problems the Puritans perceived with the
Bishops and
Great Bibles: Instructions were given to the translators that were intended to use
formal equivalence and limit the Puritan influence on this new translation. The
Bishop of London added a qualification that the translators would add no marginal notes (which had been an issue in the
Geneva Bible). King James cited two passages in the Geneva translation where he found the marginal notes offensive to the principles of
divinely ordained royal supremacy: Exodus 1:19, where the
Geneva Bible notes had commended the example of civil disobedience to the Egyptian
Pharaoh showed by the
Hebrew midwives, and also II Chronicles 15:16, where the
Geneva Bible had criticised King Asa for not having executed his idolatrous 'mother', Queen Maachah (Maachah had actually been Asa's grandmother, but James considered the Geneva Bible reference as sanctioning the execution of his own mother
Mary, Queen of Scots). Further, the King gave the translators instructions designed to guarantee that the new version would conform to the
ecclesiology of the Church of England. Certain Greek and Hebrew words were to be translated in a manner that reflected the traditional usage of the church. For example, old ecclesiastical words such as the word "church" were to be retained and not to be translated as "congregation". The new translation would reflect the
episcopal structure of the Church of England and traditional beliefs about
ordained clergy. The source material for the translation of the New Testament was the
Textus Receptus version of the Greek compiled by
Erasmus; for the Old Testament, the
Masoretic text of the Hebrew was used; for some of the
apocrypha, the
Septuagint Greek text was used, or for apocrypha for which the Greek was unavailable, the
Vulgate Latin. James' instructions included several requirements that kept the new translation familiar to its listeners and readers. The text of the
Bishops' Bible would serve as the primary guide for the translators, and the familiar proper names of the biblical characters would all be retained. If the Bishops' Bible was deemed problematic in any situation, the translators were permitted to consult other translations from a pre-approved list: the
Tyndale Bible, the
Coverdale Bible,
Matthew's Bible, the
Great Bible, and the
Geneva Bible. In addition, later scholars have detected an influence on the Authorized Version from the translations of
Taverner's Bible and the New Testament of the
Douay–Rheims Bible. A recent estimate is that 84% of the New Testament in the KJV is word-for-word identical to the Tyndale Bible, and about 76% of Tyndale's incomplete Old Testament is in the KJV. It is for this reason that the flyleaf of most printings of the Authorized Version observes that the text had been "translated out of the original tongues, and with the former translations diligently compared and revised, by His Majesty's special commandment." As the work proceeded, more detailed rules were adopted as to how variant and uncertain readings in the Hebrew and Greek source texts should be indicated, including the requirement that words supplied in English to 'complete the meaning' of the originals should be printed in a different type face.
Translation committees The task of translation was undertaken by 47 scholars, although 54 were originally approved. All were members of the Church of England and all except
Sir Henry Savile were clergy. The scholars worked in six committees, two based in each of the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and
Westminster. The committees included scholars with Puritan sympathies, as well as
high churchmen. Forty unbound copies of the 1602 edition of the ''Bishops' Bible'' were specially printed so that the agreed changes of each committee could be recorded in the margins. The committees worked on certain parts separately and the drafts produced by each committee were then compared and revised for harmony with each other. The scholars were not paid directly for their translation work. Instead, a circular letter was sent to bishops encouraging them to consider the translators for appointment to well-paid
livings as these fell vacant. Several were supported by the various colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, while others were promoted to
bishoprics,
deaneries and
prebends through
royal patronage. On 22 July 1604 King
James VI and I sent a letter to
Archbishop Bancroft asking him to contact all English churchmen requesting that they make donations to his project. The six committees started work towards the end of 1604. The Apocrypha committee finished first, and all six completed their sections by 1608. From January 1609, a General Committee of Review met at
Stationers' Hall, London to review the completed marked texts from each of the committees, and were paid for their attendance by the Stationers' Company. The General Committee included
John Bois,
Andrew Downes,
John Harmar, and others known only by their initials, including "AL" (who may be
Arthur Lake). John Bois prepared a note of their deliberations (in Latin) – which has partly survived in two later transcripts. Also surviving of the translators' working papers are a bound set of marked-up corrections to one of the forty ''Bishops' Bibles
—covering the Old Testament and Gospels; and also a manuscript translation of the text of the Epistles, excepting those verses where no change was being recommended to the readings in the Bishops' Bible''. Archbishop
Bancroft insisted on having a final say making fourteen further changes, of which one was the term "bishopricke" at Acts 1:20.
Printing Richard Bancroft was the "chief overseer" of the production of the Authorized Version. The original printing of the Authorised Version was published by
Robert Barker, the King's Printer, in 1611 as a complete folio Bible. It was sold
looseleaf for ten
shillings, or bound for twelve. Robert Barker's father, Christopher, had, in 1589, been granted by Elizabeth I the title of royal Printer, with the perpetual Royal Privilege to print Bibles in England. Robert Barker invested very large sums in printing the new edition, and consequently ran into serious debt, such that he was compelled to sub-lease the privilege to two rival London printers,
Bonham Norton and John Bill. It appears that it was initially intended that each printer would print a portion of the text, share printed sheets with the others, and split the proceeds. Bitter financial disputes broke out, as Barker accused Norton and Bill of concealing their profits, while Norton and Bill accused Barker of selling sheets properly due to them as partial Bibles for ready money. There followed decades of continual litigation, and consequent imprisonment for debt for members of the Barker and Norton printing dynasties, while each issued rival editions of the whole Bible. In 1629 the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge successfully managed to assert separate and prior royal licences for Bible printing, for their own university presses—and Cambridge University took the opportunity to print revised editions of the Authorised Version in 1629, and 1638. The editors of these editions included John Bois and Samuel Ward from the original translators. This did not, however, impede the commercial rivalries of the London printers, especially as the Barker family refused to allow any other printers access to the authoritative manuscript of the Authorised Version. Two editions of the whole Bible are recognised as having been produced in 1611, which may be distinguished by their rendering of Ruth 3:15; the first edition reading "he went into the city", where the second reads "she went into the city"; these are known colloquially as the "He" and "She" Bibles. of the 1611 edition of the Authorized Version shows the original
typeface. The text of the Bible (only) is in black text. Marginal notes reference variant translations and cross references to other Bible passages. Each chapter is headed by a précis of contents. There are decorative initial letters for each chapter, and a decorated headpiece to each book, but no illustrations in the text. The original printing was made before
English spelling was standardised, and when printers, as a matter of course, expanded and contracted the spelling of the same words in different places, so as to achieve an even column of text. They set
v for initial
u and
v, and
u for
u and
v everywhere else. They used the long
s (
ſ) for non-final
s. As can be seen in the example page on the left, the first printing used a
blackletter typeface instead of a roman typeface, which itself made a political and a religious statement. Like the
Great Bible and the
Bishops' Bible, the Authorised Version was "appointed to be read in churches". It was a large
folio volume meant for public use, not private devotion; the weight of the type—blackletter type was heavy physically as well as visually—mirrored the weight of establishment authority behind it. However, smaller editions and roman-type editions followed rapidly, e.g. quarto roman-type editions of the Bible in 1612. In the Great Bible, readings derived from the Vulgate but not found in published Hebrew and Greek texts had been distinguished by being printed in smaller
roman type. In the Geneva Bible, a distinct typeface had instead been applied to distinguish text supplied by translators, or thought needful for English
grammar but not present in the Greek or Hebrew; and the original printing of the Authorised Version used roman type for this purpose, albeit sparsely and inconsistently. This results in perhaps the most significant difference between the original printed text of the King James Bible and the current text. When, from the later 17th century onwards, the Authorised Version began to be printed in roman type, the typeface for supplied words was changed to
italics, this application being regularised and greatly expanded. This was intended to de-emphasize the words. So as to make it easier to know a particular passage, each chapter was headed by a brief précis of its contents with verse numbers. Later editors freely substituted their own chapter summaries, or omitted such material entirely.
Pilcrow marks are used to indicate the beginnings of paragraphs except after the book of Acts.
Authorised Version The Authorised Version was meant to replace the Bishops' Bible as the official version for readings in the
Church of England. No record of its authorisation exists; it was probably effected by an order of the
Privy Council, but the records for the years 1600 to 1613 were destroyed by fire in January 1618/19, and it is commonly known as the Authorised Version in the United Kingdom. The King's Printer issued no further editions of the Bishops' Bible, so necessarily the Authorised Version replaced it as the standard lectern Bible in parish church use in England. In the 1662
Book of Common Prayer, the text of the Authorised Version finally supplanted that of the Great Bible in the Epistle and Gospel readings—though the Prayer Book
Psalter nevertheless continues in the Great Bible version. The case was different in Scotland, where the Geneva Bible had long been the standard church Bible. It was not until 1633 that a Scottish edition of the Authorised Version was printed—in conjunction with the Scots coronation in that year of
Charles I. The inclusion of illustrations in the edition raised accusations of
Popery from opponents of the religious policies of Charles and
William Laud,
Archbishop of Canterbury. However, official policy favoured the Authorised Version, and this favour returned during the
Commonwealth—as London printers succeeded in re-asserting their monopoly on Bible printing with support from
Oliver Cromwell—and the "New Translation" was the only edition on the market. F. F. Bruce reports that the last recorded instance of a Scots parish continuing to use the "Old Translation" (i.e. Geneva) as being in 1674. The Authorised Version's acceptance by the general public took longer. The Geneva Bible continued to be popular, and large numbers were imported from Amsterdam, where printing continued up to 1644 in editions carrying a false London imprint. However, few if any genuine Geneva editions appear to have been printed in London after 1616, and in 1637
Archbishop Laud prohibited their printing or importation. In the period of the
English Civil War, soldiers of the
New Model Army were issued a book of Geneva selections called "The Soldiers' Bible". In the first half of the 17th century the Authorised Version is most commonly referred to as "The Bible without notes", thereby distinguishing it from the Geneva "Bible with notes". There were several printings of the Authorised Version in Amsterdam—one as late as 1715 which combined the Authorised Version translation text with the Geneva marginal notes; one such edition was printed in London in 1649. During the Commonwealth a commission was established by
Parliament to recommend a revision of the Authorised Version with acceptably Protestant explanatory notes. A small minority of critical scholars were slow to accept the latest translation.
Hugh Broughton, who was the most highly regarded English
Hebraist of his time but had been excluded from the panel of translators because of his utterly uncongenial temperament, issued in 1611 a total condemnation of the new version. He especially criticised the translators' rejection of word-for-word equivalence and stated that "he would rather be torn in pieces by wild horses than that this abominable translation (KJV) should ever be foisted upon the English people".
Walton's London Polyglot of 1657 disregards the Authorised Version (and indeed the English language) entirely. Walton's reference text throughout is the Vulgate. The Vulgate Latin is also found as the standard text of scripture in
Thomas Hobbes's
Leviathan of 1651. Hobbes gives Vulgate chapter and verse numbers (e.g., Job 41:24, not Job 41:33) for his head text. In Chapter 35: "The Signification in Scripture of Kingdom of God", Hobbes discusses Exodus 19:5, first in his own translation of the Vulgar Latin, and then subsequently as found in the versions he terms "... the English translation made in the beginning of the reign of King James", and "The Geneva French" (i.e.
Olivétan). Hobbes advances detailed critical arguments why the Vulgate rendering is to be preferred. For most of the 17th century the assumption remained that, while it had been of vital importance to provide the scriptures in the vernacular for ordinary people, nevertheless for those with sufficient education to do so, Biblical study was best undertaken within the international common medium of Latin. It was only in 1700 that modern bilingual Bibles appeared in which the Authorised Version was compared with counterpart Dutch and French Protestant vernacular Bibles. In consequence of the continual disputes over printing privileges, successive printings of the Authorised Version were notably less careful than the 1611 edition had been—compositors freely varying spelling, capitalisation and punctuation—and also, over the years, introducing about 1,500 misprints (some of which, like the omission of "not" from the commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery" in the "
Wicked Bible", became notorious). The two Cambridge editions of 1629 and 1638 attempted to restore the proper text—while introducing over 200 revisions of the original translators' work, chiefly by incorporating into the main text a more literal reading originally presented as a marginal note. By the first half of the 18th century, the Authorised Version was effectively unchallenged as the sole English translation in then current use in Protestant churches, and was so dominant that the Catholic Church in England issued in 1750 a revision of the 1610
Douay–Rheims Bible by
Richard Challoner that was much closer to the Authorised Version than to the original. However, general standards of spelling, punctuation, typesetting, capitalisation and grammar had changed radically in the 100 years since the first edition of the Authorised Version, and all printers in the market were introducing continual piecemeal changes to their Bible texts to bring them into line with then current practice—and with public expectations of standardised spelling and grammatical construction. Over the course of the 18th century, the Authorised Version supplanted the Hebrew, Greek and the Latin Vulgate as the standard version of scripture for English speaking scholars and divines, and indeed came to be regarded by some as an inspired text in itself—so much so that any challenge to its readings or textual base came to be regarded by many as an assault on Holy Scripture. In the 18th century there was a serious shortage of Bibles in the American colonies. To meet the demand
various printers, beginning with
Samuel Kneeland in 1752, printed the King James Bible without authorisation from the Crown. To avert prosecution and detection of an unauthorised printing they would include the royal insignia on the title page, using the same materials in its printing as the Authorised Version was produced from, which were imported from England.
Standard text of 1769 By the mid-18th century, the wide variation in the various modernized printed texts of the Authorized Version, combined with the notorious accumulation of misprints, had reached the proportion of a scandal; and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge both sought to produce an updated standard text. First of the two was the Cambridge edition of 1760, the culmination of 20 years' work by
Francis Sawyer Parris, who died in May of that year. This 1760 edition was reprinted without change in 1762 and in
John Baskerville's folio edition of 1763. This was effectively superseded by the 1769 Oxford edition, edited by
Benjamin Blayney, though with comparatively few changes from Parris's edition; but which became the Oxford standard text, and is reproduced almost unchanged in most current printings. Parris and Blayney sought consistently to remove those elements of the 1611 and subsequent editions that they believed were due to the vagaries of printers, while incorporating most of the revised readings of the Cambridge editions of 1629 and 1638, and each also introducing a few improved readings of their own. They undertook the mammoth task of standardizing the wide variation in punctuation and spelling of the original, making many thousands of minor changes to the text. In addition, Blayney and Parris thoroughly revised and greatly extended the italicization of "supplied" words not found in the original languages by cross-checking against the presumed source texts. Blayney seems to have worked from the 1550
Stephanus edition of the
Textus Receptus, rather than the later editions of
Theodore Beza that the translators of the 1611 New Testament had favoured; accordingly the current Oxford standard text alters around a dozen italicizations where Beza and Stephanus differ. Like the 1611 edition, the 1769 Oxford edition included the Apocrypha, although Blayney tended to remove cross-references to the Books of the Apocrypha from the margins of their Old and New Testaments wherever these had been provided by the original translators. It also includes both prefaces from the 1611 edition. Altogether, the standardization of spelling and punctuation caused Blayney's 1769 text to differ from the 1611 text in around 24,000 places. This is a side-by-side comparison of three verses from the 1611 and 1769 texts of . Note that the 1769 Cambridge Edition used
the long s [ ſ ], as was common then, and for several decades after, this revision. There are a number of superficial edits in these three verses: 11 changes of spelling, 16 changes of typesetting (including the changed conventions for the use of u and v), three changes of punctuation, and one variant text—where "not charity" is substituted for "no charity" in verse two, in the belief that the original reading was a misprint. A particular verse for which Blayney's 1769 text differs from Parris's 1760 version is Matthew 5:13, where Parris (1760) has Blayney (1769) changes 'lost
his savour' to 'lost
its savour', and '
to trodden'.
Standardization in the 19th century For a period, Cambridge continued to issue Bibles using the Parris text, but the market demand for absolute standardization was now such that they eventually adapted Blayney's work but omitted some of the idiosyncratic Oxford spellings. By the mid-19th century, almost all printings of the Authorized Version were derived from the 1769 Oxford text—increasingly without Blayney's variant notes and cross references, and often excluding the Apocrypha. One exception to this was a scrupulous original-spelling, page-for-page, and word-for-word reprint of the 1611 edition (including chapter headings, marginalia, and original italicization) with the substitution of Roman type for the
blackletter of the original, published by Oxford in 1833. A table of "Various Readings" or differences between the 1611 and 1613 editions shows what passages were "necessary to correct [...] in the time of the original Translators." Another important exception was the 1873
Cambridge Paragraph Bible, a modernized and re-edited edition by
F. H. A. Scrivener, who for the first time consistently identified the source texts underlying the 1611 translation and its marginal notes. Scrivener, like Blayney, opted to revise the translation where he considered the judgement of the 1611 translators had been faulty. Scrivener's lengthy "Critical Introduction" to the 1873 edition noted that the Authorized Version had largely been standardized by the 17th century's Cambridge editions of 1629 and 1638 and that the 18th century versions of Parris and Blayney had markedly fewer revisions of significance. Scrivener also remarked that Blayney had made strides in adding apostrophes and publishing new italicized words, but complained that they were wrong in several instances. "sin", "clifts", "vapour", "flieth", "further" and a number of other references. In effect the Cambridge was considered the current text in comparison to the Oxford. These are instances where both Oxford and Cambridge have now diverged from Blayney's 1769 Edition. The distinctions between the Oxford and Cambridge editions have been a major point in the
Bible version debate, and a potential theological issue, particularly in regard to the identification of the Pure Cambridge Edition. Cambridge University Press introduced a change at 1 John 5:8 in 1985, reversing its longstanding tradition of printing the word "spirit" in lower case by using a capital letter "S". A Rev. Hardin of Bedford, Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to Cambridge inquiring about this verse, and received a reply on 3 June 1985 from the Bible Director, Jerry L. Hooper, claiming that it was a "matter of some embarrassment regarding the lower case 's' in Spirit". ==Revised versions==