King James Version Bible

In May 1601, King James VI of Scotland attended the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland at St. Columba’s Church in Burntisland, Fife, and proposals were put forward for a new translation of the Bible into English. Two years later he acceded to the throne of England.

The King James Version was first conceived at the Hampton Court conference, which the new king called in 1604 to settle various religious grievances. According to an eyewitness account, Dr John Rainolds “moved his majesty that there might be a new translation of the Bible, because those which were allowed in the reign of king Henry the Eight and Edward the Sixth were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original.”

Rainolds offered three examples of problems with existing translations: “First, Galatians iv. 25. The Greek word susoichei is not well translated as now it is, bordereth neither expressing the force of the word, nor the apostles sense, nor the situation of the place. Secondly, psalm cv. 28, ‘They were not obedient;’ the original being, ‘They were not disobedient.’ Thirdly, psalm cvi. 30, ‘Then stood up Phinees and prayed,’ the Hebrew hath, ‘executed judgment’.”

King James proposed that a new translation be commissioned to settle the controversies; he hoped a new translation would replace the Geneva Bible and its offensive notes in the popular esteem. After the Bishop of London added a qualification that no marginal notes were to be added to Rainold’s new Bible, the king cited two passages in the Geneva translation where he found the notes offensive. King James gave the translators instructions, which were designed to discourage polemical notes, and to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology of the Church of England. Eventually four different editions of the King James Version were produced in 1629, 1638, 1762, and 1769. It is the 1769 edition which is most commonly cited as the King James Version (KJV).

The King James Version was translated by 54 scholars (although only 51 are known) working in six committees, two based in each of Oxford University, Cambridge University, and Westminster. They worked on certain parts separately; then the drafts produced by each committee were compared and revised for harmony with each other.

The translation

Like the earlier English translations such as Tyndale’s and the Geneva Bible, the King James Version was translated from Greek and Hebrew texts, bypassing the Latin Vulgate. The King James Version’s Old Testament is based on the Masoretic Text, while the New Testament is based on the Textus Receptus as published by Erasmus. The King James Version is a fairly literal translation of these base sources; words implied but not actually in the original source are specially marked in most printings (either by being inside square brackets or as italicised text).

Compared to modern translations, there are some differences which are based in part on more recently discovered manuscripts, for example, the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. Some conservative fundamentalist Protestants believe that the newer versions of the Bible are based on corrupt manuscripts and that the King James Version is truer to the original languages. This preference is partially due to the fact that many modern versions often excise or marginalise certain verses that modern scholarship deems as later additions to the original text, and thus traditionalists see as tampering with the text.

In the Old Testament, there are also a large number of differences from modern translations that are based not on manuscript differences, but on a different translation of Ancient Hebrew vocabulary or grammar by the translators. Hebrew scholarship by non-Jews was not as developed in the early 17th century as it is now, and it is unclear how well the translators grasped the language. (For example, the Greek word “Pascha,” a transliteration of the Hebrew word “Passover,” was translated as “Easter” instead of “Passover” in Acts 12:4, although the accuracy or inaccuracy of this translation is disputed.) The New Testament is largely unaffected by this as the grasp of Ancient Greek was already quite firm in the West by the time the translation was made. The difference is partially caused by the fact that while there is a very large and diverse body of extra-biblical material extant in Ancient Greek, there is very little such material in Ancient Hebrew, and probably not even this little was known to the translators at the time. Additionally, Hebrew scholarship in modern times has been much improved by information gleaned from Aramaic (Syrian) and Arabic, two Semitic languages related to Ancient Hebrew, both of which have a continuous existence as living languages. Since these languages are still in use and have larger bodies of extant material than Ancient Hebrew (especially in the case of Arabic), many Hebrew words and Hebrew grammar phenomena can now be understood in a way not available at the time the King James Version was written.

References

• Bobrick, Benson (2001). The Making of The English Bible. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0297607723.
• McGrath, Alister (2002). In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How it Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture. Anchor/Doubleday. ISBN 0385722168.
• Daniel, David (2003). The Bible in English: Its History and Influence. Yale. ISBN 0300099304.
• Nicolson, Adam (2003) God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible ISBN 0060185163.
• Farstad, Arthur (2003). The New King James Version: In The Great Tradition. Nelson Reference. ISBN 0785251758.
• The Geneva Bible 1599 (L. L. Brown, 1991) ISBN 0962988804.
• The Holy Bible: 1611 Edition (Thos. Nelson, 1993) ISBN 0840700288.
  • While the Nelson facsimile edition is out of print, the same facsimile is currently published by Hendrickson Publishers, ISBN 1565631609. Both of these Bibles reprint a Roman-type facsimile originally published by Oxford University in 1833.
• McAfee, Cleland Boyd (1912). The Influence of the King James Version on English Literature. Retrieved Nov. 22, 2004.
• Spurgeon, Charles (1899). The Last Words of Christ on the Cross.

This article is licensed under the Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “King James Version of the Bible.”