King James Version

The project began as a concession in a church quarrel. At Hampton Court in January 1604, the Puritan spokesman John Rainolds proposed a new translation to the new king, and James, who disliked the popular Geneva Bible for the anti-monarchical tone of its marginal notes, seized the idea. The rules drawn up for the work fixed its character: the Bishops' Bible was to be the base, altered only as the original required; old ecclesiastical words such as church were to be kept; and marginal notes were confined to matters of language and cross-reference, banishing the Geneva annotations that had irritated the king.

Some forty seven to fifty translators, the exact roll varies, were organised into six companies, two each at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, dividing the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Apocrypha among them. They worked from the Hebrew Masoretic text and the printed Greek of the Erasmian tradition, with the ancient versions and the whole line of sixteenth-century English Bibles open on the table, and their procedure was corporate throughout: drafts circulated between companies, and a final revising committee of twelve met daily at Stationers' Hall, where, contemporaries record, the text was read aloud and judged by ear. That ear is audible in the result. Roughly four fifths of the New Testament's wording descends from Tyndale, refined; the rest was composed to match him.

The folio of 1611, printed by Robert Barker, the king's printer, carried a dedication to James and a translators' preface, The Translators to the Reader, that remains the best account of the work's aims, disclaiming novelty and asking only to make a good translation better. Early printings were littered with variants and misprints, most notoriously the 1631 Wicked Bible, whose compositors dropped the word not from the seventh commandment; the text was progressively corrected until Benjamin Blayney's Oxford edition of 1769 fixed the standard spelling and wording read today.

Adoption was gradual rather than triumphant, the Geneva Bible holding popular loyalty for decades, but by the Restoration the King James text stood alone in English church use, and the centuries that followed made it something no translation had been before: the common literary possession of an entire language. Its phrases, the powers that be, a law unto themselves, the skin of my teeth, salt of the earth, passed into ordinary speech; Milton, Bunyan, Lincoln and King built on its rhythms.

The Apocrypha, part of the 1611 volume between the Testaments, fell away from most printings in the nineteenth century under Bible society policy. Revision produced descendants from the Revised Version of 1881 through the Revised Standard and New King James, yet the 1769 text remains in print, in liturgical use, and for some communities the preferred English Bible outright.