King James forced the scholars who labored for years in Geneva, Switzerland (neutral territory so they were protected from arrest) to make the Geneva Bible available for the commoners, to rewrite the Bible in a way that he would approve of.

Had any of them refused, they would be executed.

The final product was completed and published in 1611 and King James authorized it.

That is why it was known as the “Authorized Version” and the “King James Authorized Version” for hundreds of years. Notice that the official name didn’t have the word “Bible” in it.

If you look up the definition of the word “version” it will explain a lot.

KING JAMES VERSION

An English translation of the Bible sponsored by James I of England (IV of Scotland; 1603–1625).

Published in two separate editions in 1611. Contains the Old Testament, New Testament, and the 14 books of the Apocrypha.

The King James Version in Historical Perspective

The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, with some portions in Aramaic, while the New Testament was written in Greek.

The Old Testament had already been translated into Greek before the time of Jesus and the apostles, so the early church had their entire Bible in Greek.

The Bible was also translated into Latin, the language of the Roman Empire.

The Roman church’s official Latin translation, the Vulgate, was completed early in the fifth century ad, and remains the official translation of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Bible was translated in part or in whole into many European and African languages over the ensuing centuries, either from Latin or from Greek.

The whole Bible didn’t appear in English until the 1380s, when John Wycliffe, Nicolas of Hereford and other Oxford scholars produced two translations from the Vulgate.

The first of these translations was very literal, and the latter was much more idiomatic. However, neither Wycliffe’s translations nor his teachings were well received by the authorities, and both were outlawed.

Johannes Gutenberg refined movable type around 1449 and began printing the Latin Vulgate in 1452.

By the end of the century, the Bible had been printed in 11 different languages.

Moved by his desire to see every Christian with a Bible in hand, William Tyndale produced the first English New Testament, translated from the Greek, in 1526.

Because he did this without the permission of the Roman Church, his testaments were destroyed (only two first editions survive).

Tyndale was eventually strangled and burned at the stake in 1536. Before his martyrdom, however, he published the Pentateuch (Genesis—Deuteronomy), Jonah, and two revised New Testaments, but left Joshua through 2 Chronicles in manuscript form.

Because England was too dangerous, Tyndale worked in Germany. His associate, Myles Coverdale, managed to publish the first complete English Bible in England in 1535.

He combined Tyndale’s Pentateuch and New Testament with his own translation of the Latin and Luther’s famous German Bible.

Coverdale’s Bible was officially licensed. Revisions of Tyndale and Coverdale appeared in editions by John Rogers (Matthew’s Bible, 1537) and Richard Taverner (1539).

Coverdale’s own revision of Matthew’s, known as the Great Bible, was also published in 1539 and became the first authorized English Bible.

The first English Bible translated from the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament and Greek New Testament was published in 1560 by English expatriates working in John Calvin’s Geneva.

The Geneva Bible became the most popular translation of its time, and went through at least 140 different printings over the next 80 years.

A revision of the Great Bible done by bishops of the Church of England, called the Bishops’ Bible, appeared in 1568. Roman Catholic scholars produced an English translation of the Latin New Testament, published in Rheims, France, in 1582.

The Old Testament soon followed in Douay in 1609–1610, and the resulting translation was called the Douay-Rheims Version.

The 1611 Version

Following the pattern of Luther’s German Bibles of 1522–1534, English translations had many explanatory notes, often condemning teachings of the Roman Church and sometimes challenging the English monarchy.

When James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, one of his first tasks was to satisfy the English churches’ demands to have a single English Bible without notes, except to explain alternative translations or similar texts.

In 1604, at a conference in Hampton Court, James gave permission for this new translation to be produced by six panels of “learned men” working at Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster.

The 48 to 54 translators were actually revisers, as they based their work on the Bishops’ Bible in light of the original languages and the other major translations of the 16th century.

The translation sponsored by (not written by) King James was published in two separate editions in 1611. As had all the English Bibles before it, the new version contained the Old and New Testaments with the 14 books of the Apocrypha between the testaments.

Though not recognized by the Church of England (or Lutherans and other Protestants) as authoritative for doctrine or teaching, the books of the Apocrypha were part of the Greek and Latin Bibles and continued to appear in most English Bibles well into the 19th century.

Development

It took nearly a generation for the new translation to replace the popular Geneva Bible, which was last printed in 1644 (aside from facsimile editions).

Although there are no documents officially authorizing the KJV, it became known as the Authorized Version—the title page states, “Appointed to be read in Churches.”

Because of its association with James I, it is now known as the King James Version.

There were many translations by individuals over the next centuries, but it was not until 1881 (New Testament), 1885 (Old Testament), and 1895 (Apocrypha) that an official church translation was published in England, the Revised Version.

The American Standard Version of 1901 was its American edition. Both versions were self-conscious revisions of the KJV, as was the more-popular Revised Standard Version of 1946 (New Testament), 1952 (Old Testament), and 1957/77 (Apocrypha).

The second half of the 20th century saw an explosion of English Bible translations, but it took until the mid-1980s for the KJV to be surpassed in new Bible sales by the New International Version (NIV).

The KJV of 1611 remains the most widely circulated and influential English translation of all time. It is available in more editions and bindings than any other translation.

Bibliography

Bobrick, Benson.
Wide As the Waters:

The Story of the English Bible
and the Revolution It Inspired.
New York: Penguin, 2002.

The Holy Bible:
1611 Edition King James Version.
Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 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, 2005.

Norton, David.
A Textual History of the King James Bible.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.