How the Authorized Version Came to Be Translated

The English Bible before 1604

By the time James came to the English throne in 1603, England already had printed Bibles in English. Two were in common use, and they were not used by the same people.

The Bishops’ Bible of 1568 was the version appointed for reading in the churches. The Geneva Bible of 1560, produced by English exiles in Switzerland, was the one most families actually read at home. It was smaller, cheaper, printed in readable roman type, and it was the first English Bible divided into numbered verses.

The Geneva Bible also carried extensive marginal notes. Those notes, and not the translation itself, were the difficulty: a number of them commented pointedly on kings and on obedience to them. A Bible read in every household with a commentary of that kind attached was a live political question, not merely a scholarly one.

The Hampton Court Conference, January 1604

In January 1604 the King called a conference at Hampton Court Palace to hear grievances about the state of the Church. It was there, and almost in passing, that the translation was proposed.

Dr John Rainolds, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford and the leading Puritan spokesman at the conference, moved that a new translation be made, on the grounds that those in use were imperfect. The proposal was not warmly received by all present — but the King took it up, and the work was ordered.

The result is one of the quiet ironies of the story: the translation was suggested by a Puritan who wanted something better than the bishops’ book, and commanded by a King who had no wish to see the Geneva notes multiplied. Both got part of what they wanted. The new Bible would replace the Bishops’ Bible in the churches, and it would carry no interpretive marginal notes.

The rules the translators were given

The work was governed by a set of written rules, drawn up under Richard Bancroft, then Bishop of London and shortly afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. Several of them shape the book that resulted:

• The Bishops’ Bible was to be followed, and altered only as far as the original Hebrew and Greek required. The translators were revising, not starting afresh.
• The old ecclesiastical words were to be kept — church rather than congregation, and the like.
• No marginal notes at all, except what was strictly necessary to explain a Hebrew or Greek word that could not be briefly rendered in English.
• Where earlier English versions agreed better with the original text, they were to be used: Tyndale’s, Matthew’s, Coverdale’s, Whitchurch’s and the Geneva.
• Every man’s work was to be reviewed by his company, then by the other companies, so that no single hand settled anything.

That last rule matters more than it looks. The Authorized Version is not the work of one man or one party. It passed through company after company, each free to challenge the last.

The work itself

The translators were divided into companies working at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, with the books of the Bible parcelled out between them. They worked from the Hebrew and Greek, with the earlier English versions before them, and with the freedom — which they used — to keep a good English rendering wherever they found one already made.

They say so themselves, plainly, in their preface: their aim was not to make a new translation, “but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one.” The whole of that preface is reproduced on this site.

The finished work was printed in 1611. Its title page reads that it was “Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues… by his Majesties speciall Commandement”, and “Appointed to be read in Churches.”

What actually happened to the Apocrypha

This is the part most often got wrong, and it is worth setting out in order, because the common account — that King James removed the Apocrypha — is not what happened.

The 1611 Bible contained it

The Authorized Version as published in 1611 contained eighty books: the thirty-nine of the Old Testament, fourteen of the Apocrypha, and the twenty-seven of the New Testament. The Apocrypha stood between the Testaments, set apart from both. This is not in dispute; the 1611 volumes can be examined directly.

It was not removed by King James

He cannot have removed it. It is in the book he commanded. The pressure to drop the Apocrypha came from the Puritan side, and it came after 1611 — not from the Crown.

The pressure ran the other way at first. George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury and himself one of the translators, is reported to have forbidden in 1615 the binding or selling of Bibles that lacked the Apocrypha, on pain of a year’s imprisonment. Copies without it nevertheless began to appear within about a decade.

It was not removed by the 1769 revision either

The revision published at Oxford in 1769 under Benjamin Blayney is the text almost every King James Bible in print today descends from. What it did was orthographic: it standardised spelling and punctuation against Dr Johnson’s dictionary of 1755, extended the use of italics to mark words supplied by the translators, and revised the marginal cross-references. It did not alter the canon, and the full eighty-book Bible was printed in 1769.

It was dropped in the 1820s, by a Bible society

The decisive change came more than two centuries after 1611. The British and Foreign Bible Society, then the largest publisher and distributor of Scripture in the world, resolved that its funds would not support the printing or circulation of Bibles containing the Apocrypha. The regulations were adopted at its Annual General Meetings of 1826 and 1827. The dispute was severe enough to cost the Society its Edinburgh and Glasgow auxiliaries.

Because that Society supplied so much of the world’s Scripture, the practical effect was swift: the Apocrypha disappeared from ordinary English Bibles, and a later generation grew up assuming it had never been there.

Where the evidence comes from

• The 1611 Bible itself — facsimile editions, including the Apocrypha between the Testaments.
• The translators’ own preface of 1611, The Translators to the Reader, reproduced in full on this site.
• The rules given to the translators under Bishop Bancroft.
• The Reports of the British and Foreign Bible Society, containing the regulations adopted at the Annual General Meetings of 1826 and 1827.
• The 1615 prohibition attributed to Archbishop Abbot is reported in the historical literature; it is given here as it is reported, and the reader may weigh it accordingly.