A Newly Digitized Bible Reveals the Origins of the King James Version

Though often thought to be a fresh translation, the King James Bible is, at heart, a revision of the 1602 Bishops’ Bible that was produced in three stages (translation companies, General Meeting, and final revisions). It was a monumental feat and one that has influenced English Bibles ever since. Fortunately, we know more about the process that produced the King James Bible (KJB) than just about any other translation of its time.

One key source involves the actual Bibles used by the revisers. According to an extant bill dated 10 May 1605, King James I purchased “40 large church bibles for the translators” from Royal Printer Robert Barker for the translators to use.¹“MS. Don. c. 88” (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, n.d.); Paul Morgan, “A King’s Printer At Work: Two Documents of Robert Barker,” The Bodleian Library Record 13, no. 5 (1990): 370; A massive cache of documents relating to the King’s printing house, the largest collection of manuscript materials relating to any single printing house in the Jacobean period, have recently been studied by Graham Rees and Maria Wakely, Publishing, Politics, and Culture: The King’s Printers in the Reign of James I and VI (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The translators worked directly on these unbound pages in the first stage of work. As far as we know, only a single copy remains.

This remaining copy, a 1602 Bishops’ Bible in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, collects handwritten notes reflecting alterations made while crafting the KJB. Thankfully, it has recently been digitized and made completely accessible online for the first time ever.²Previously catalogued as BL Bib. Eng. 1602 b.1, it was given a new pressmark in Sep. 2013: Arch. A b. 18. My thanks to Chris Yetzer for informing me about its digitization. The document’s importance to scholars studying the history of the English Bible is hard to overestimate. This article introduces the history of its study and gives a small sample of its value for understanding the work of the KJB translators.

Previous scholarship

The Bodleian Library acquired the volume in 1646 when it was described as “a large Bible wherein is written downe all the Alterations of the last translacōn.”³William Dunn Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford: With a Notice of the Earlier Library of the University, 2nd ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1890), 102. The first critical notice was in 1868 by B. F. Westcott. When preparing his history of the English Bible, he requested a summary of its notes from John Wordsworth, Bishop of Salisbury, and Bodleian Librarian Henry Coxe. Unfortunately, Westcott mistakenly thought it represented “a scholar’s collation of the [KJB] and Bishops’ texts” rather than the source for the KJB itself.

In 1888, Nicolas Pocock pronounced Westcott’s judgment “very doubtful,” and Edwin Willoughby later took the document more seriously as a genuine draft and brought it to public attention.⁴Nicholas Pocock, “The Bishops’ Bible of 1568, 1572, and 1602.,” The Athenaeum, no. No. 3148 (February 25, 1888): 243–45; Edwin Eliott Willoughby, The Making of the King James Bible: A Monograph with Comparisons from the Bishops Bible and the Manuscript Annotations of 1602, with an Original Leaf from the Great “She” Bible of 1611 (Los Angeles: Printed for Dawson’s Book Shop at The Plantin Press, 1956); Adam Nicolson, Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible (London: Harpercollins, 2003), 151–52. In the 20th century, Edward Jacobs examined the Old Testament annotations in detail in his 1972 dissertation but, sadly, had to rely on microfilms; he extended this study in later articles to its New Testament annotations.⁵Edward Craney Jacobs, “A Bodleian Bishops’ Bible, 1602 (Bib. Eng. 1602 b. 1): A Preliminary Study of the Old Testament Annotations and Their Relationship to the Authorized Version, 1611.” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Alabama, Auburn University, 1972), 14; Edward Craney Jacobs, “Two Stages of Old Testament Translation for the King James Bible,” The Library S6-II, no. 1 (March 1, 1980): 16, fn. 2; Jacobs, “A Bodleian Bishops’ Bible, 1602 (Bib. Eng. 1601 B. 1)”; Edward Craney Jacobs, “An Old Testament Copytext for the 1611 Bible,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 69, no. 1 (1975): 1–15; Jacobs, “Two Stages of Old Testament Translation for the King James Bible”; Edward Craney Jacobs, “King James’s Translators: The Bishops’ Bible New Testament Revised,” The Library s6–14, no. 2 (June 1, 1992): 100–126. As Jacobs finished his dissertation, Irena Backus started a thesis studying Theodore Beza’s impact on the KJB New Testament which also employed the document, their different conclusions interacting only in a footnote.⁶Irena Dorota Backus, “Influence of Theodore Beza on the English New Testament” (DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, 1976); Irena Backus, The Reformed Roots of the English New Testament: The Influence of Theodore Beza on the English New Testament, ed. Dikran Y. Hadidian (Pittsburgh: Wipf & Stock, 1980), 28, fn. 63. A decade later Jacobs published, with Ward Allen, a transcription of the Gospels with an introduction and, more recently, David Norton has used the document to sift translators’ intentions from printers’ errors while editing the New Cambridge Paragraph Bible for Cambridge University Press.

What’s in this Bible?

What’s in the document and what makes it so important to scholars? The answer is the handwritten notes themselves. In the Old Testament, these annotations cover almost every book, though in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, they end after chapter four. (Lamentations and the Apocrypha are unannotated.)

The notes also reveal other translations used by the revisers besides the Bishops’ Bible itself. Back in 1868, Westcott described a set of miniscule letters (g, t, and j) which identify these other sources. He correctly identified “g” as the Geneva Bible, the KJB’s famous predecessor. Other scholars have suggested that “t” is for Tremellius and “j” is for Junius or Jerome’s Vulgate.⁷See Jacobs, “A Bodleian Bishops’ Bible, 1602 (Bib. Eng. 1601 B. 1),” 30–31, fn. 44; Jeffrey Alan Miller, “‘Better, as in the Geneva’: The Role of the Geneva Bible in Drafting the King James Version,” Journal of Medieval & Early Modern Studies 47, no. 3 (September 2017): 517–43.

Dating the translators’ notes

Dating the Old Testament annotations is complicated as they stretch across text assigned to all three translation companies and are written in what Jacobs believed is the same hand. This means, as Miller points out, that “the Old Testament annotations, in the aggregate, must postdate the company stage of the translation process, since one person could not have been part of three different translation companies in three different locations.”⁸Jeffrey Alan Miller, “The Earliest Known Draft of the King James Bible: Samuel Ward’s Draft of 1 Esdras and Wisdom 3–4,” in Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord, 2018, 216.

Several dates have been proposed, including ones that suggest the notes are an actual printers’ master copy, a copy of the printers’ master copy, notes made at the General Meeting, or a revision sent to the General Meeting. Miller argues that, most likely, “the annotations were made in preparation for the general, revisory meeting in London, assimilating into a single working manuscript the changes that had been separately proposed by the three Old Testament translation companies.” This would mean the handwriting is likely that of a scribe, though it is also possible they “could have been made at the general meeting itself.”⁹Miller, 216.

The New Testament annotations are less extensive. The text of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is heavily revised, but in John, only chapters 17–21 are annotated. Elsewhere, only brief notes are found in a handful of places (Eph. 4:8; 2 Thess. 2:15; 1 Cor. 9:5; Gal. 3:13; and 2 Pet. 1:10).

Dating the New Testament annotations is simplified by the fact that they occur across text assigned to only one company. Even here, however, the dating is complicated by the fact that the annotations are in three separate hands.¹⁰Allen and Jacobs, The Coming of the King James Gospels, 5–7. Miller gives this as a reason why “the draft of the Gospels seems to be assignable to the company stage of the translation process, distinct from the draft of the Old Testament now bound together in the same Bodleian volume.”¹¹Miller, “The Earliest Known Draft of the King James Bible,” 216. The different hands would then represent either the company internally critiquing its own draft or the input of one or more of the other companies upon it. The process of producing the most famous English Bible in history was obviously not a simple one!

Insights into the translators’ decisions

One of the most interesting and unexplored areas of the translators’ work that this document illuminates is how they wrestled with textual issues. Here are four examples.

1. Mary’s purification (Luke 2:22)

I have noted before that, in the Christmas story, the translators’ base text for Luke 2:22 explains that Mary brought Jesus to the temple because it was the time of “her purification,” without any notes. Virtually all the textual data read “their purification” (including either Joseph or Jesus in the purification). Greek editions at the time differed, particularly those of Erasmus and Beza.

What did the KJB translators do? This document shows a complex back-and-forth. First, “Or, theyr” was added to the main text (which read “her”) to indicate a textual variant. Then they changed their minds on the base text but still wanted a note. “Her” was crossed out in the text, “theyr” written above it, and in the margin “theyr” was replaced by “her.” Now the main text would read “theyr” with a marginal note giving the alternative: “Or, her.” This revision too was apparently overturned, presumably at the General Meeting. In the end, the KJB ended where it began: “her” in the text and nothing in the margin.

2. Jesus’ rebuke of Satan (Matt. 4:10)

Another example appears in Matthew 4:10 in the case of Jesus’ rebuke of the Devil, a rebuke later echoed after Peter’s confession (Matt. 16:23). The translators’ base text has “get thee hence behind me” (opisō mou). But they crossed out this last phrase. Why? Because the editions of the Greek New Testament they had available from Erasmus (1535), Stephanus (1550), and Beza (1598) all have the shorter reading in the text (though each mentions the longer reading).

3. Greeting our friends (Matt. 5:47)

Matthew 5:47 provides an example of how the translators wanted their readers to see more textual variation than what ultimately made it into the final version. The Bishops’ text has Jesus asking if his followers only greet “your brethren”—with no note. The KJB revisers added a marginal note that read “Or, frendes,” indicating the variant in Greek (philous vs. adelphous). As before, the two readings were known to them because of the Greek New Testaments of Erasmus and Beza. But, this note was not to survive. It was struck down by later revisers and didn’t make it to the published 1611 KJB.

4. Two longer marginal notes (Luke 17:36; Matt. 26:26)

Other marginal changes did make the cut. In Luke 17:36, the Bishops’ Bible has no marginal note, but the revisers wanted to alert their readers to a variant by adding a note saying: “The 36 verse is wanting here in the most of the Greeke copyes.” The revisers at Stationers’ Hall made a few minor changes in wording to the note but included it in the published text.

Likewise, in Matthew 26:26 the text of the Last Supper says that he broke the bread when he had taken it and “given thankes,” without a note. The revisers crossed this out, added “blessed and” beside it, and added the marginal note, “Many Greeke copies have, given thankes.” This switched the base text from “given thankes” (eucharistēsas) to “blessed” (eulogēsas) and alerted the reader to the variant. The note was tweaked slightly but still published.

This is just a sample of what this Bible reveals about the translators’ textual work. All the KJB’s notes that reflect textual variants were collected by F. H. A. Scrivener and his list remains the best treatment of the translators as textual critics. Scrivener, however, never examined this document.

Conclusion

For the translators, textual variants like these were part of a larger category they called “differences of readings.” This category included not only textual uncertainties but also lexical uncertainties, where words could have several different meanings. Today, we tend to think of these as separate categories. But applying our distinction to the KJB translators would be an anachronism.¹²As seen in the comments of Miles Smith defending the KJB’s marginal notes, which discuss both textual and lexical differences in the same section, and in the report of translator Samuel Ward to the Synod of Dordt, suggests. Samuel Ward, “SSC MS Ward L1” (Sidney Sussex College, n.d.), fol. 5r; Anthony Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619), vol. 13, Church of England Record Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2005), 138–40; Christian Moser, Donald Sinnema, and Herman J. Selderhuis, eds., Acta of the Synod of Dordt, vol. I, Acta et Documenta Synodi Nationalis Dordrechtanae (1618-1610) (KG, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 17, 203; Samuel Ward, “British Statement on the Method of Bible Translation,” in Early Sessions of the Synod of Dordt, ed. Anthony Milton, vol. II/2, Acta et Documenta Synodi Nationalis Dordrechtanae (1618–1610) (KG, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 69, 70. Perhaps detailed examination of the document in the future from a text-critical perspective can catalogue all annotations reflecting textual decisions, painting a clearer picture of the KJB translators as textual critics.

This is just a small sample of the kind of insight that can be gained from studying this source of the most important English Bible in history. Viewing the images online provides an immediate, visual reminder of how many decisions Bible translators have to make. Further study will undoubtedly bring to light further insights into how the translators made their decisions. May we all be grateful for the push towards open access upon which human knowledge thrives!

An earlier version of this article could have given the impression that F. H. A. Scrivener’s list of the KJB’s notes was collected by him in 1910. What was meant is that his list was last published, posthumously, in 1910.

Notes

• 1
  “MS. Don. c. 88” (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, n.d.); Paul Morgan, “A King’s Printer At Work: Two Documents of Robert Barker,” The Bodleian Library Record 13, no. 5 (1990): 370; A massive cache of documents relating to the King’s printing house, the largest collection of manuscript materials relating to any single printing house in the Jacobean period, have recently been studied by Graham Rees and Maria Wakely, Publishing, Politics, and Culture: The King’s Printers in the Reign of James I and VI (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
• 2
  Previously catalogued as BL Bib. Eng. 1602 b.1, it was given a new pressmark in Sep. 2013: Arch. A b. 18. My thanks to Chris Yetzer for informing me about its digitization.
• 3
  William Dunn Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford: With a Notice of the Earlier Library of the University, 2nd ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1890), 102.
• 4
  Nicholas Pocock, “The Bishops’ Bible of 1568, 1572, and 1602.,” The Athenaeum, no. No. 3148 (February 25, 1888): 243–45; Edwin Eliott Willoughby, The Making of the King James Bible: A Monograph with Comparisons from the Bishops Bible and the Manuscript Annotations of 1602, with an Original Leaf from the Great “She” Bible of 1611 (Los Angeles: Printed for Dawson’s Book Shop at The Plantin Press, 1956); Adam Nicolson, Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible (London: Harpercollins, 2003), 151–52.
• 5
  Edward Craney Jacobs, “A Bodleian Bishops’ Bible, 1602 (Bib. Eng. 1602 b. 1): A Preliminary Study of the Old Testament Annotations and Their Relationship to the Authorized Version, 1611.” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Alabama, Auburn University, 1972), 14; Edward Craney Jacobs, “Two Stages of Old Testament Translation for the King James Bible,” The Library S6-II, no. 1 (March 1, 1980): 16, fn. 2; Jacobs, “A Bodleian Bishops’ Bible, 1602 (Bib. Eng. 1601 B. 1)”; Edward Craney Jacobs, “An Old Testament Copytext for the 1611 Bible,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 69, no. 1 (1975): 1–15; Jacobs, “Two Stages of Old Testament Translation for the King James Bible”; Edward Craney Jacobs, “King James’s Translators: The Bishops’ Bible New Testament Revised,” The Library s6–14, no. 2 (June 1, 1992): 100–126.
• 6
  Irena Dorota Backus, “Influence of Theodore Beza on the English New Testament” (DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, 1976); Irena Backus, The Reformed Roots of the English New Testament: The Influence of Theodore Beza on the English New Testament, ed. Dikran Y. Hadidian (Pittsburgh: Wipf & Stock, 1980), 28, fn. 63.
• 7
  See Jacobs, “A Bodleian Bishops’ Bible, 1602 (Bib. Eng. 1601 B. 1),” 30–31, fn. 44; Jeffrey Alan Miller, “‘Better, as in the Geneva’: The Role of the Geneva Bible in Drafting the King James Version,” Journal of Medieval & Early Modern Studies 47, no. 3 (September 2017): 517–43.
• 8
  Jeffrey Alan Miller, “The Earliest Known Draft of the King James Bible: Samuel Ward’s Draft of 1 Esdras and Wisdom 3–4,” in Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord, 2018, 216.
• 9
  Miller, 216.
• 10
  Allen and Jacobs, The Coming of the King James Gospels, 5–7.
• 11
  Miller, “The Earliest Known Draft of the King James Bible,” 216.
• 12
  As seen in the comments of Miles Smith defending the KJB’s marginal notes, which discuss both textual and lexical differences in the same section, and in the report of translator Samuel Ward to the Synod of Dordt, suggests. Samuel Ward, “SSC MS Ward L1” (Sidney Sussex College, n.d.), fol. 5r; Anthony Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619), vol. 13, Church of England Record Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2005), 138–40; Christian Moser, Donald Sinnema, and Herman J. Selderhuis, eds., Acta of the Synod of Dordt, vol. I, Acta et Documenta Synodi Nationalis Dordrechtanae (1618-1610) (KG, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 17, 203; Samuel Ward, “British Statement on the Method of Bible Translation,” in Early Sessions of the Synod of Dordt, ed. Anthony Milton, vol. II/2, Acta et Documenta Synodi Nationalis Dordrechtanae (1618–1610) (KG, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 69, 70.

Timothy Berg

Timothy Berg (MDiv, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) was reared on the King James Bible and now runs kjbhistory.com, which is an outlet for his passion for studying the history of the King James Bible. He is currently pursuing his PhD degree at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.