ris3n's Apologetics Codex

Translation

KJV

The Authorized Version of 1611, commissioned by King James I of England and produced by ~47 scholars across six committees at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge. The English Bible for ~300 years of Protestant Christendom; in the public domain (US; UK Crown copyright unenforced); foundational to English literary heritage. The modern KJV text descends from the Blayney revision of 1769, which standardized spelling, punctuation, and italics; the 1611 first edition differs in many surface details from what is sold today as "the KJV."

History

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Pre-KJV English Bibles

The KJV's English-Bible ancestry runs through:

  • Wycliffe Bible (1380s), first complete English Bible; translated from the Vulgate
  • Tyndale's NT (1526), first English NT translated directly from Greek; Tyndale executed 1536
  • Coverdale Bible (1535), first complete printed English Bible
  • Matthew's Bible (1537), Tyndale + Coverdale assembled
  • Great Bible (1539), first authorized English Bible
  • Geneva Bible (1560), Calvinist annotations; popular among Puritans
  • Bishops' Bible (1568), Church of England's response to the Geneva Bible
  • Douay-Rheims Bible (1582 NT / 1609 OT), English Catholic translation from the Vulgate

The KJV was commissioned to replace the Bishops' Bible while sidelining the politically inconvenient Geneva annotations.

The Hampton Court Conference (1604)

King James I convened the Hampton Court Conference in January 1604 to address Puritan grievances. John Reynolds (Puritan, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford) proposed a new English translation. The King embraced the proposal, it gave him a unified English Bible across the church and a way to displace the Geneva Bible's marginal notes (which James considered "very partial, untrue, seditious").

Translation process (1604-1611)

~47 scholars in six committees:

  • First Westminster Company, Genesis through 2 Kings (chaired by Lancelot Andrewes)
  • Second Westminster Company, Romans through Jude
  • First Cambridge Company, 1 Chronicles through Song of Solomon
  • Second Cambridge Company, Apocrypha
  • First Oxford Company, Isaiah through Malachi (chaired by John Harding, then John Reynolds)
  • Second Oxford Company, Gospels, Acts, Revelation (chaired by Thomas Ravis, then George Abbot)

Each company translated its portion; drafts were reviewed across companies; final harmonization was done by a 12-member general committee. Translation rules (15 in number) prescribed continuity with the Bishops' Bible where possible, retention of ecclesiastical terms (church not congregation; baptism not washing), and italicization of supplied words.

The translators consulted Hebrew (Bomberg's 2nd Rabbinic Bible, 1524-25), Greek (Erasmus's editions of the Textus Receptus, refined by Stephanus and Beza), the Vulgate, and earlier English translations (especially Tyndale, who supplies roughly 80% of the NT wording).

Completed and published 1611.

Later editions

  • 1611 first edition, included the Apocrypha; many printing errors (the "He Bible" / "She Bible" variants in Ruth 3:15)
  • 1629, first major revision (Cambridge)
  • 1638, Cambridge revision
  • 1762 (Paris of Cambridge) and 1769 (Blayney of Oxford), modernized spelling, punctuation, italics. The Blayney 1769 text is what circulates today as "the KJV."
  • 20th century, many publishers further updated spelling silently; the "standard" KJV is now an editorial composite

KJV-Only movement

In the 20th century a position arose (Peter Ruckman, David Otis Fuller, Gail Riplinger, etc.) holding the KJV alone as the inspired English Bible. Variants range from "KJV is the best translation" (defensible) to "the KJV is divinely re-inspired and corrects the Greek" (untenable). The standard scholarly engagement is James White, The King James Only Controversy (2nd ed. 2009).

Translators

Notable individuals:

  • Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Bishop of Winchester; chaired the First Westminster Company; widely regarded as the most accomplished linguist of the project
  • John Reynolds (1549-1607), President of Corpus Christi, Oxford; initiated the proposal; chaired the First Oxford Company until his death
  • Edward Lively (c. 1545-1605), Cambridge Regius Professor of Hebrew; died early in the project
  • Miles Smith (d. 1624), wrote the Translators to the Reader preface; later Bishop of Gloucester
  • Thomas Ravis (c. 1560-1609), chaired the Second Oxford Company; later Bishop of London

The translators included Anglican, Puritan-leaning, and broadly Reformed scholars; the project was deliberately cross-party within English Protestantism.

Textual basis

  • OT: Bomberg's 2nd Rabbinic Bible (1524-25), a printed Masoretic Text edition by Daniel Bomberg of Venice (with the Massorah and rabbinic commentaries). Substantively close to BHS/BHQ used by modern translations.
  • NT: Textus Receptus, the Greek text of Erasmus's 1516 editions (esp. as refined by Robert Estienne / Stephanus 1550 and Theodore Beza 1598). Note Erasmus had access to only a handful of late medieval manuscripts.
  • Apocrypha (in the 1611 first edition): translated from the Septuagint and Vulgate
  • Vulgate: consulted throughout; many KJV renderings retain Vulgate-influenced English ecclesiastical vocabulary

The KJV's textual base predates the discovery of older NT manuscripts (Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, papyri). Most modern translations use a critical-eclectic Greek text (Nestle-Aland / UBS) that draws on these earlier witnesses. The TR/CT divergence accounts for the ~30 NT passages where KJV reads materially differently from ESV/NIV/NASB.

Translation philosophy

Formal equivalence (essentially word-for-word) within early-modern English idiom. The translators retained Hebrew/Greek word order where English allowed, italicized supplied words, and preserved ecclesiastical terminology. Their stated aim (preface): "to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one."

The English is early-modern, not Middle English. By 1611 standards it was a contemporary translation; the now-archaic feel comes from English's drift since.

Strengths

  • Literary excellence, widely regarded as the most influential English literary work outside Shakespeare; foundational to English prose rhythm and biblical idiom
  • Public domain in the US (and effectively in the UK); freely usable in any context
  • Familiarity, most-memorized Bible across the English-speaking Christian world; foundational to hymnody, liturgy, and Christian rhetoric
  • Cross-denominational use, accepted across Anglican, Reformed, Baptist, Pentecostal, and many other Protestant traditions; the only English Bible with that breadth across 400 years
  • Italicized supplied words, typographic honesty about translator additions, a feature most modern translations have dropped
  • Foundation for 400 years of English-language commentary, sermons, hymnody, and reference works, KJV-keyed concordances (Strong's, Young's, Cruden's) remain in print and use

Weaknesses

  • Early-modern English, vocabulary and syntax now archaic; "prevent" once meant "go before"; "let" once meant "hinder"; "conversation" once meant "manner of life"; readers consistently misread these
  • Textual base predates discovery of earlier manuscripts, TR includes readings (1 John 5:7 Comma; Acts 8:37; longer Mark ending; Acts 9:5b-6a; Revelation 22:14) that almost certainly are later additions
  • Hebrew scholarship in 1611 was limited compared to today, some OT renderings reflect medieval Jewish exegesis (Rashi via Bomberg) rather than original sense
  • Apocrypha was originally included but most Protestant printings now omit it, readers don't realize the 1611 KJV was a different physical book
  • "Authorized Version" overclaim, the KJV was authorized for use in Church of England services; it was never officially "authorized" by anyone else; the name has misled some
  • KJV-Only movement has at times damaged its reputation by overclaiming inspiration for the translation itself

Notable / problematic verses

  • 1 John 5:7, the Johannine Comma ("there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one"); included by KJV from the Textus Receptus; almost certainly not original; absent from all Greek manuscripts before the 14th century; included by Erasmus only under duress for his 3rd edition
  • Acts 8:37, the Ethiopian eunuch's confession ("I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God"); included in KJV; absent from earliest Greek manuscripts
  • Mark 16:9-20, the longer ending; in KJV main text without brackets; modern translations bracket or footnote
  • John 7:53-8:11, the woman caught in adultery (pericope adulterae); in KJV main text; modern translations bracket
  • Acts 9:5-6, Damascus road longer reading ("it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks"); KJV/TR
  • 1 Timothy 3:16, "God was manifest in the flesh" (KJV/TR); modern critical-text translations read "He who" / "who" (referring to Christ but not making the divine identification explicit)
  • Revelation 22:14, "blessed are they that do his commandments" (KJV/TR); modern critical text "blessed are those who wash their robes"
  • Isaiah 7:14, "virgin" (preserved); matches Matthew 1:23's quotation from the Septuagint
  • 2 Kings 2:23-24, "little children"; the Hebrew neʿarim qeṭannim arguably means young men / youths (cohort of dozens, capable of mob threat), see Bears Mauling Youth Objection for the apologetic treatment
  • Romans 8:1, longer reading ("who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit") from TR
  • John 3:16, "his only begotten Son", Greek monogenes (only / unique / one-of-a-kind); modern translations often render "one and only"; "begotten" reading reflects Nicene-Constantinopolitan creedal language
  • Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth", the canonical English translation; modern translations debate the relative-clause possibility
  • Exodus 20:13, "Thou shalt not kill" (later corrected in NKJV/most moderns to "murder"; the Hebrew ratsach is specifically murder, not all killing)

Notable users / influence

Beyond its centuries as the default Protestant English Bible:

  • The KJV's English shapes the prose of John Milton, John Bunyan, William Blake, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless preachers and writers
  • The Book of Common Prayer (1662 and later editions) uses KJV as its scripture base
  • Most pre-1980 English-language Christian hymnody is KJV-influenced
  • Negro spirituals and the African-American preaching tradition draw on KJV cadence
  • The KJV's idioms ("salt of the earth"; "feet of clay"; "fly in the ointment"; "scapegoat"; "by the skin of my teeth"; "no man is an island"; "the writing on the wall") have entered standard English
  • John Wesley, George Whitefield, Charles Spurgeon, Jonathan Edwards all used KJV
  • Modern KJV-using traditions: Independent Baptist (most strongly), Pentecostal churches in some regions, KJV-Only movement, traditionalist Anglicans

See also

  • NKJV, modern English update preserving the Textus Receptus base
  • ESV, modern formal-equivalence translation using critical text
  • NASB95, most-literal modern critical-text alternative
  • NIV, modern dynamic-equivalence alternative
  • NRSVue, academic / mainline alternative
  • WEB, public-domain modern alternative (Majority Text basis)
  • Vulgate, Latin ancestor that influenced KJV's English ecclesiastical vocabulary
  • Septuagint, Greek OT not used by KJV translators; explains some KJV/Septuagint differences in OT prophecy

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