The King James Bible

In January 1604, soon after he came to the English throne, James VI and I met the bishops and four spokesmen of the Puritan ministers at Hampton Court (Barlow, Sum and Substance of the Conference, first and second days (Cardwell, pp. 169–170, 177–178)). William Barlow, dean of Chester, who was present, reports that the Puritans’ foreman, Dr Rainolds, asked for a new translation of the Bible, saying that those allowed under Henry VIII and Edward VI were corrupt and did not answer to the original. The king, Barlow goes on, replied that he had never yet seen a Bible well translated in English and thought the Geneva version the worst; he wished for one uniform translation, made by the best scholars of both universities, reviewed by the bishops and the chief learned of the church, presented to the privy council and ratified by himself, and without marginal notes, for he found some of those in the Geneva Bible “very partial, untrue, seditious” (Barlow, Sum and Substance of the Conference, second day (Cardwell, pp. 187–188)). The translators’ own preface tells the story more briefly (King James Bible (1611), The Translators to the Reader, on the Hampton Court conference).

The rules given to the translators told them to follow the Bishops’ Bible, the version then read in church, and to alter it as little as the original allowed; to keep the old church words, “church” and not “congregation”; to add no notes except to explain Hebrew or Greek words; and to use the versions of Tyndale, Matthew, Coverdale, Whitchurch and Geneva where these agreed better with the text (Rules for the translators of 1611, rules 1, 3, 6, 14). English delegates told the Synod of Dort in 1618 that the Bible had been divided into six parts, each given to seven or eight scholars, two parts in London and four at the universities, that twelve men chosen from them all then revised the whole, and that two further revisers gave it a final review (British delegates’ report to the Synod of Dort, Pollard, pp. 336–339).

The Bible was printed in London in 1611; its title page calls it newly translated out of the original tongues, with the former translations diligently compared and revised, by the king’s special commandment, and “Appointed to be read in Churches” (King James Bible (1611), title page and table of books). Its table of books lists the Apocrypha as a separate group between the Old Testament and the New (King James Bible (1611), title page and table of books).

In the preface the translators say that they never meant to make a new translation, nor to turn a bad one into a good one, “but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones one principal good one”; they worked from the Hebrew and the Greek and consulted translations and commentaries in other languages (King James Bible (1611), The Translators to the Reader, on the translators’ purpose and method). They claim to have avoided both the “scrupulosity of the Puritanes”, who dropped the old church words, and the “obscurity of the Papists” (King James Bible (1611), The Translators to the Reader, last section).

The version was still being printed a century and a half later: an Oxford edition of 1769 describes itself on its title page in nearly the same words, down to “Appointed to be read in Churches” (King James Bible (1611), title page of the Oxford edition of 1769).