The Rules to be Observed in the Translation of the Bible
The fifteen rules laid down for the scholars who made the English Bible of 1611. They name the Bishops’ Bible as the base text, require the old church words to be kept, forbid doctrinal notes and set out how the companies were to check one another’s work.
The rules survive in copies; Pollard prints them from Burnet’s History of the Reformation, together with the list of the translators headed “An Order set down for the Translating of the Bible, by King James”. They carry no date of their own. The date given here is that of the Hampton Court conference of January 1604, after which the work was set in hand.
Rule 1 makes the Bishops’ Bible the text to be followed and “as little altered as the Truth of the original will permit”. Rule 3 keeps the old ecclesiastical words. Rule 6 allows marginal notes only to explain Hebrew or Greek words. Rules 8 to 10 require each man in a company to translate the same chapters, the company to agree a text, and each finished book to be sent to the other companies. Rule 14 names the earlier versions to be used where they agree better with the original: Tyndale’s, Matthew’s, Coverdale’s, Whitchurch’s and the Geneva. They are cited in the King James Bible.
Cited in
- 1611, firm date