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King James Bible

The Bestselling Reference Bible That Remade American Evangelicalism

By combining familiar and original material, the Scofield Reference Bible ushered in a theological sea change.

Daniel G. Hummel

It is a useful fact for trivia night that Oxford University Press, one of the world’s most prestigious academic publishers, has a bestselling book of all time that it doesn’t often celebrate. That bestseller is the Scofield Reference Bible, edited by C. I. Scofield, first published in 1909, updated in 1917, and revised in 1967. In its first few decades, the SRB sold more than two million copies and, by one estimate, has sold more than ten million copies in its lifetime. It still sells in various formats in dozens of languages.

These sales have influenced an entire religious subculture in the English-speaking world. Journalist Amy Frykholm’s recollection is shared by millions of Americans: “In my mind’s eye I see my grandmother’s Scofield Reference Bible, a text from which she read every day of her life, a text that told her of the coming of the rapture” (4). Indeed, the SRB’s widespread adoption by lay evangelicals since 1909 has made it something of a driver of U.S. evangelical and fundamentalist culture writ large.

The SRB popularized the teaching of an any-moment “rapture” event (even as Scofield’s notes only employed the term once without defining it) and unobtrusively introduced readers to key teachings of dispensationalism, the theological tradition known for advancing biblical literalism, a strong Church-Israel distinction, and a sequence of distinct dispensations of God’s relationship with humanity that will end with a pretribulational rapture and a premillennial return of Jesus.

How original was Scofield?

Recent accounts of the SRB acknowledge the Bible’s importance in the history of evangelicalism. To reference the most recent, historian Donald Akenson concludes that it “became deeply embedded in American culture” (435). Other scholars agree, which is why the SRB has such a prominent place in the history of annotated Bibles.1Other recent accounts that agree with Akenson: R. Todd Mangum and Mark Sweetnam declare that the SRB “permeates evangelical culture and thought” (The Scofield Bible: Its History and Impact on the Evangelical Church (Colorado Springs, CO: Paternoster, 2012), 3–4), while Brendan Pietsch’s study of early twentieth century dispensationalism hazards the judgment that the SRB is “perhaps the most influential annotated Bible in the twentieth century” (Dispensational Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 174). A recent biography of John Nelson Darby by Crawford Gribben states that it “circulated in the tens of millions to define the movement of ‘fundamentalism’” (J. N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), 6).

But a deeper question allows us to explore afresh some fundamental aspects of the SRB, including its origin, importance, and legacy: exactly how original (or not) was it? Historians, not to mention theologians and other informed observers inside and outside of the dispensationalist tradition, do not agree. Within religious circles, where historic creeds are important reference points, “originality” is a loaded term. And in non-religious scholarly circles, continuity is hotly debated. Assessing the SRB’s originality and continuity can supply a new appreciation for how it changed the world and why it has remained relevant more than a century after its publication.

The story of the SRB’s originality (or not) should be assessed at three levels:

  1. How much did it reflect American Protestant assumptions in the early twentieth century?
  2. How much did it reflect the teachings of what I call the Moody Movement, or the proto-dispensationalist movement, of which Scofield was a leader?
  3. How much of it was idiosyncratic to Scofield himself?
A photo of C. I. Scofield
C. I. Scofield (1843–1921)

Most studies of the SRB begin with the man who produced it, Cyrus Scofield. Much has been made of Scofield, whose biographical details have been debated. Especially for his opponents, they have also been used as fodder to dismiss his writings.

My contention is that the figure of Scofield matters less than asking how much of what ultimately made its way into the SRB was original (and in what way) and how much was continuous with previous teachings in the American Protestant circles Scofield inhabited. The explanation for the SRB’s stunning sales and cultural success lies, in part, in the fact that answers to all of three of these questions are multifaceted and complex.

The early twentieth-century context

Historian Brendan Pietsch is correct when he writes that one key aspect to the success of the SRB was that “in its basic theology it reflected the beliefs and impulses of nonspecific American Protestantism, particularly among the laity” (178). In other words, it succeeded because it fit right in. On everything from the importance of conversion and evangelization to the Christian life to the essential reliability of the Biblical text, Scofield sounded like a “nonspecific” early-twentieth century Protestant. Moreover, he did so while presenting his findings as modern, “based on ‘a new and vast exegetical and expository literature,’” as he wrote in his Bible’s preface.

In other words, the SRB was successful precisely because on many topics it did not question received views and presented those received views as justifiable in a modern intellectual climate. This includes views that are rejected today but were commonplace in the early twentieth century, including the “gap theory” interpretation of Genesis 1 and the racist assumption of a “curse of Ham” (see Scofield’s note for Gen. 9:1).

Scofield divided Genesis 1:1–3 into three sections, allowing for a presentation of the “gap” theory of an undisclosed but vast amount of time between each verse. As note two explains, “The first creative act refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geologic ages.” Google Books

Neither of these views fell outside the American Protestant mainstream of the time and Scofield was merely one proponent of both. Had they been more fringe, or had Scofield presented novel views on historic teachings in too particular a manner, the SRB’s appeal would have shrunk and its status would have become isolated as a “Scofieldian” production rather than a broadly evangelical one.

We can see this in action by comparing Scofield’s work to a contemporaneous Bible which represented some of the same unique theological teachings that influenced him. Scofield’s work was indebted, in part, to the teachings of John Nelson Darby, the influential leader of the Exclusive Brethren movement and the prodigious writer and articulator of such doctrines as the any-moment rapture. While the two men never met, we know that Scofield was familiar with Darby’s writing and the Exclusive Brethren movement. Scofield cites Brethren in the SRB acknowledgements and Brethren helped to fund and bring it to publication. Yet, as historian Crawford Gribben has recently argued, Scofield did not regard himself as beholden to Darby’s ideas. The notes presented Darby’s teachings in a “radically revised, simplified, and contracted form”2Gribben, J. N. Darby, 116. intended to apply to American evangelical rather than British Exclusive Brethren concerns.

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    The title to the “Jefferson Bible.” Illustration by Josh Koch.
    The Jefferson Bible and the Faith of an American Founder

    Thomas Jefferson’s cut-and-paste version of the Gospels reveals important facets of the famous founder’s faith and the Bible’s role in American history.

    Thomas S. Kidd

But Scofield was not the only biblical annotator working to adapt Darby’s teachings. Another person influenced by Darby was Fredrick W. Grant, perhaps the most prominent U.S.-based Exclusive Brethren at the turn of the century. Grant had produced his own seven-volume Numerical Bible from 1888–1905 that we can see as a similar project to Scofield’s. Grant’s work included expository notes, but the nature of these notes was different from Scofield’s. Grant combined intricate numerology and typology, a novel way to number verses, and Exclusive Brethren teachings about ecclesiology and pneumatology more aligned with Darby that made his Numerical Bible a robust offering, but one destined for a niche market. Grant’s work is notable today mostly because, according to one of the first chroniclers of the SRB, Scofield kept Grant’s work by his side constantly as a reference.

The role of the ‘Moody Movement’

Unlike Grant’s Bible, the SRB was not so novel as to become niche. What it did do was offer a distinctively conservative presentation of Biblical teachings that aligned with Exclusive Brethren emphases and the growing premillennial convictions of conservative evangelicalism in the United States. And it did all this in an emerging fundamentalist-modernist polarization of American Protestantism. This conservative evangelicalism was, as historian Michael Hamilton has defined it, essentially the outgrowth of Dwight Moody’s era-defining revivals, missions work, and institution-building.

The “Moody Movement” incubated the first Bible institutes, the first wave of nondenominational global missions agencies, and was powered by the robust Bible and prophecy conference circuits such as the famed Niagara Bible Conference (1875–1897). Scofield himself was at one time the pastor of Moody’s own church in Massachusetts, helped found the Central American Mission, and founded the Philadelphia School of the Bible (now Cairn University).

D. L. Moody speaking to a group at Northfield Camp in Massachusetts. Wikimedia Commons

The Moody Movement was more distinctive than “nonspecific American Protestantism” on a number of fronts, each of which made it into Scofield’s notes. The Moody Movement was generally premillennialist in eschatology (breaking with the dominant postmillennial Protestant consensus a generation before), was committed to Keswick or “Higher Life” teachings (breaking with both confessionally Reformed sanctification and Wesleyan perfectionism), rejected Darwinian evolution (Scofield’s note for Gen. 1:26 declared, “Man was created, not evolved”) and young earth creationism (Scofield preferred to interpret the “days” of Gen. 1 as “a [longer] period of time marked off by a beginning and an ending”).

Moody and Scofield represented a thoroughly interdenominational movement, focused on parachurch activity.

Moreover, Moody and Scofield represented a thoroughly interdenominational movement, focused on parachurch activity, with a default to congregationalism in church polity and structure allowing for the mixing of such disparate denominational members in the movement as Exclusive Brethren, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Stone-Campbellites, and some early Pentecostals.

These movement-level distinctives are what helped demarcate the SRB reading public and friendly churches from American Protestantism as a whole. Landing when it did in 1909 and, especially, with the revised 1917 edition, this meant that the SRB’s legacy would both be limited (to the more conservative wing of the emerging fundamentalist-modernist polarization), but would also permeate that fundamentalist wing and disproportionately shape the baseline interpretations of verses and passages for those within the fundamentalist fold.

Scofield’s committee of “consulting editors” was another testament to this specific strand of Protestantism to which he belonged. It was made up of Moody Movement leaders representing key institutions (Moody Bible Institute, Toronto Bible Training School—now Tyndale University) and luminaries (Arthur T. Pierson, Arno C. Gaebelein—the latter of which assisted Scofield on writing most of the prophecy-related notes), among others.

The front plate of the Scofield Reference Bible’s 1917 edition provides a detailed description of the resources Scofield is adding to the Biblical text as well as a list of the consulting editors, significant as much for what the list signals as for exactly how instrumental these individuals were to the substance of the SRB. Google Books

The extent to which these consulting editors—excepting Gaebelein—directly aided Scofield in the substantial creation of the SRB is limited. More important to Scofield was establishing that he was indebted to, as his preface made clear, “the valuable suggestions and co-operation” of such an esteemed group of Moody Movement leaders whose names essentially vouched for the high quality of the final product.

Alongside the SRB’s interpretive commitments, the book helped to popularize new Bible reading techniques and technologies that had been gaining legitimacy in the preceding decades. Beyond extensive help notes at the bottom of the page intended for lay readers, Scofield introduced newly titled section headings that could play a significant interpretive role, as in the aforementioned case of the “gap” theory of Genesis 1:1–3 or the various headings declaring a new dispensation (see, for example, headings preceding Gen. 8:20–22 or Exod. 19:8).

Moreover, he offered an elaborate chain system of verses that ran down a central column of each page that created thousands of analog “hyperlinks” across the entire Biblical text, producing new associations, systematizations, and meanings for key terms including Israel, salvation, and antichrist. Scofield’s chain system, as Donald Akenson documents, emerged alongside similar systems such as that developed by Frank C. Thompson (in his Thompson Chain Reference Bible, first published in 1908).

Alongside the hundreds of notes, Scofield developed an extensive system of subject references. These created a vast internal architecture of biblical meaning and resemble something like an analog “hyperlink” system for establishing systematic meanings of words and passages. This instruction page was inserted more than a dozen times in the Bible, preceding each grouping of books (Pentateuch, Historical Books, Poetical Books, etc.). Google Books

Both Scofield and Thompson were indebted to the Biblical indexes and concordances developed in the previous thirty years by Augustus Strong and Robert Young which gained immediate widespread adoption by lay Christians. Scofield embedded each of these technologies in his own reference Bible to create, as he wrote in the 1917 introduction, a one-stop Biblical interpretive resource for “the plain people of God in their homes.”

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  • Timothy Berg

Scofield’s unique contribution

Finally, there is Scofield himself. Born in 1843 in Michigan, he was living with relatives in Tennessee when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Scofield enlisted for a one-year term in the Confederate Army where he served at Antietam in September 1862. But, when he was conscripted, he prosecuted his own discharge on terms of bad health and being underage when he had enlisted. He spent the rest of the war in St. Louis and married into a wealthy Catholic family in 1866. His story is a rough one from this point: he was appointed a U.S. attorney, dismissed for corruption, became an alcoholic, and fled his home, separating permanently from his wife and two daughters.

In the midst he converted to Christianity and became a disciple of one of St. Louis’s most prominent pastors, James Brookes, who also happened to be one of the most significant adopters and promoters of Exclusive Brethren teachings in the U.S. Scofield was a quick learner and became a successful popularizer and co-organizer with Brooks, Moody, and many other prominent evangelicals of the era. Scofield had a gifted mind, learned and synthesized vast amounts of information, and worked tirelessly, amid significant health challenges, to complete his work.

He was also a socially conservative Christian who regarded theological and social truth as intertwined. Scofield spent much of his pastoring career in Dallas, Texas and by all accounts accepted the Jim Crow system of racial segregation then in force. Scofield preferred clear, distinct, and hierarchal categories and relations between concepts—between law and grace, periods of time, between goodness and sin, and between groups of people.

He was skeptical of social reform movements of all kinds and pessimistic about the prospect of international peace, socialism, ecumenism, or capitalism as solutions to sin and injustice. We might see socialism and capitalism on separate ends of an economic spectrum, but for Scofield both pointed toward a concerning consolidation of power and authority in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

We might see socialism and capitalism on separate ends of an economic spectrum, but for Scofield both pointed toward a concerning consolidation of power.

Consolidation was both politically and prophetically significant—it presaged more difficulty for Christians and the fulfillment of worsening conditions on earth before the return of Jesus. Scofield’s views permeated his notes in ways obvious and implicit, whether it was an imposition of law-grace distinctions across all parts of the Bible, or his endorsement of the curse of Ham mentioned above.

Scofield came into funding and opportunity for the SRB through his involvement with Exclusive Brethren businessmen and prophecy conference circuits in the 1890s and early 1900s. By 1902 he had secured some support from benefactors to quit his pastoral duties and dedicate all of his time to the production of his Bible. He spent the years 1905–1908 largely in Europe where he met Henry Frowde, the famous publisher of Oxford University Press who was also at work developing a new North American branch for the press. Scofield and Frowde came to an agreement in April of 1909 that landed the SRB in hands of readers on both sides of the Atlantic (though with a much larger built-in audience in the United States).

Taking all three dimensions together, the SRB could not be what it became without a mix of continuity and originality relative to American Protestantism in 1909: the Moody movement as the dominant buying market for the Bible and the specific efforts of Scofield himself (and those he surrounded himself with).

Akenson declares that the SRB was “a successful rewriting of the scriptures… a new Bible,” (427) which seems too strong a claim given the significant lines of continuity Scofield advanced from both Exclusive Brethren and American Protestant circles. Historians R. Todd Mangum and Marc Sweetnam, on the other hand, conclude that Scofield’s theology “is characterized by (1) social conservatism; (2) irenic evangelicalism, and (3) distinctive dispensationalism” (133). This gets closer to the analysis presented here, though it was not just the theological but social, cultural, and publishing context that shaped these commitments.

Perhaps the most iconic product of early dispensationalism was its detailed charts, many of which illustrated prophetic timelines. The most recognizable were those by American Baptist pastor Clarence Larkin (1850–1924). Image source

Assessing the legacy

We can assess the legacy of the SRB in the subsequent century using the same levels of analysis as we have used so far. For Scofield himself, the SRB made him a singular name in the Moody Movement and, though he died in 1921 before the fundamentalist movement had fully cohered, he was a household name there, as well. In the circles of fundamentalism where it took hold, the book had a unique shaping power on lay and pulpit Biblical interpretations—theologically, culturally, and devotionally. As the historian Paul Boyer observed, Scofield was “a towering figure” and his Bible “more than any other single work solidified the premillennial movement” (97).

Yet on the flip side, Scofield himself became a lightning rod in other sectors of fundamentalism. Perhaps most significantly, the coiner of the term “dispensationalism” was a disaffected fan of Scofield named Philip Mauro, who came to reject proto-dispensationalist theology in part because of reading the SRB. While Scofield’s notes on eschatology did not align with Mauro’s views, other facets of the SRB were even more alarming to him. Picking up the Bible for the first time, Mauro could not make it past the notes for Genesis 1 which allowed for a nonliteral reading of “days” of creation. In an out-of-print book from 1919 titled A Kingdom Which Cannot Be Shaken he wrote, “I found to my surprise and disappointment that these notes made room for, and indeed rather favored, the absurd notion that the ‘days’ of Genesis 1 were long periods—ages—of time” (10–11).

A passionate advocate of a six-day reading of the creation account, Mauro could not brook difference on this issue. His depiction of Scofield and his notes as “modern” and “clever” were not meant as compliments. As later twentieth century doggerel from dispensationalist opponents attests, Scofield remained polarizing. A satire based on the famous hymn “On Christ the Solid Rock” runs like this: “My hope is built on nothing less / Than Scofield’s notes and Moody Press / I dare not trust this Thompson’s chain / But wholly lean on Scofield’s fame.”

“My hope is built on nothing less
Than Scofield’s notes and Moody Press.”

The fundamentalist reaction to Scofield bleeds into movement-level analysis of the SRB’s legacy. In theological terms, the SRB cemented the ascendance, for most of the century after its publication, of futurist, pre-tribulational premillennialism as the dominant eschatological position among a large swath of fundamentalism and post-World War II evangelicalism (and relevant still today). Scofield had been part of a resurgent premillennial movement in the late 19th century that then splintered over debates on the nature and timing of end-times events, leading, among other things, to the ending of the famous Niagara Bible Conference in 1897.

The New Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1967, was the culmination of more than a decade of scholarly collaboration. The editorial committee made thousands of changes to the 1917 edition, including revisions away from key Scofieldian emphases such as typologies. The committee also added notes that included tacitly endorsing Zionism (see note for Gen. 12:3) that reflected changing world events since 1917.

The SRB appeared at an opportune time to assure that Scofield’s views prevailed and became more permanently embedded in the Moody Movement and, later, in large parts of the Billy Graham-oriented evangelicalism. For his part, Scofield articulated his own end-times position into his notes and did not acknowledge other views. The scholarship of later evangelical premillennialists such as George Ladd, Carl Henry, and James Montgomery Boice—among many others later in the 20th century—had to contend with the SRB’s massive reach and success in shaping the premillennial movement.

Finally, how significant was the SRB’s broader national reach in the United States and beyond? We can say without a doubt it has contributed to dispensationalism being, as one historian described it, “perhaps the most resilient popular theological movement in American history” (246). The SRB’s continuing popularity is a testament to its impermeability to being dismissed, especially in communities where it has already gained authority.

Yet a truly national and international legacy is harder to discern. Its influence on global missions and successive generations of Christianity in the Global South is evident, but not yet assessed systematically by scholars. In terms of the United States, Akenson concludes his study of the SRB by describing it as “the ur-text, the script and scripture, of twentieth-century American white Christian nationalism” (436). This would be remarkable if true.

Scofield and today’s ‘Christian Nationalism’

Yet as alluring as it might be to draw a straight line from Scofield to Trump, such claims to the SRB’s significance should be resisted. We can too easily commit the violation that anthropologist Susan Harding warned about the “internally ‘orientalized’” (390) othering of American fundamentalism, assuming static and largely unchanging influences in the twentieth century that do not account for, in the case of the SRB and Christian nationalism, an intervening century of dynamic development, reforms, splits, and reassessments of theology including the SRB.

The SRB resides theologically and ideologically distant from much of what is commonly referred to as “Christian nationalism” today. It would certainly have been news to Scofield, as well as to contributing editors James Gray (president of Moody Bible Institute) and Arno C. Gaebelein, all of whom received critiques from other Protestants for not being nationalistic enough during World War I (1914–1918). Those charges, lobbed by modernist critics of premillennialism such as Shirley Jackson Case, who equated premillennialism with political quietism, the Moody Movement’s relationship to American power and war was complex in the 1910s.

It was not until the 1940s—World War II and the start of the Cold War—that evangelicalism developed a more thorough nationalism, and still decades later that the more familiar politicized dispensationalism of Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye shaped evangelical activism at the grassroots. By the 1980s we are a long way from the SRB’s original context and, indeed, a long way from its direct (though certainly there was indirect) influence on these developments.

Today’s leading advocates of Christian nationalism tend to represent the theological tradition, not of Scofield and the SRB, but of his critics (confessionally Reformed and Pentecostal postmillennialists).

Today’s leading advocates of Christian nationalism represent the theological tradition, not of Scofield and the SRB, but of his critics.

Conclusion

In the end, the Scofield Reference Bible remains significant as ushering in a theological sea change among lay evangelicals in the early twentieth century—and not because everything Scofield introduced was new. The layering of familiar and original, the addition of distinctive teachings alongside lines of continuity, created a text that indeed has shaped far more of American Protestantism than Scofield could have imagined.

An earlier version of this article said Scofield’s notes did not use the term “rapture,” but it was used once at Rev. 19:9 (without definition).

Notes

  • 1
    Other recent accounts that agree with Akenson: R. Todd Mangum and Mark Sweetnam declare that the SRB “permeates evangelical culture and thought” (The Scofield Bible: Its History and Impact on the Evangelical Church (Colorado Springs, CO: Paternoster, 2012), 3–4), while Brendan Pietsch’s study of early twentieth century dispensationalism hazards the judgment that the SRB is “perhaps the most influential annotated Bible in the twentieth century” (Dispensational Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 174). A recent biography of John Nelson Darby by Crawford Gribben states that it “circulated in the tens of millions to define the movement of ‘fundamentalism’” (J. N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), 6).
  • 2
    Gribben, J. N. Darby, 116.

Filed Under: History, Theology Tagged With: King James Bible

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

A one-of-a-kind Bible used by the King James translators offers a rare glimpse of their textual decisions.

Timothy Berg

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.

The document’s importance to scholars studying the history of the English Bible is hard to overestimate.

The 1602 Bishops’ Bible with the translators’ notes (left) and the final product in the 1611 KJB (right). Images from Bodleian Library and UPenn

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.)

Letters were used to identify other translations as the sources for suggested changes. Source

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).

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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.

The text at Luke 2:22, showing a series of changes from “her” to “their” and back to “her.” Source

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).

The words “behinde mee” are crossed out in Matt 4:10. Source

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.

The words “or friends” were added to the margin but never made it into the final King James. Source

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.

A note added in the left margin about manuscripts missing Luke 17:36. Source

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.

The note added in the left margin for Matthew 26:26. Source

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.

Viewing the images online is a visual reminder of how many decisions Bible translators have to make.

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.

Filed Under: Text, Translation Tagged With: English Bible, King James Bible

Seven Common Misconceptions about the King James Bible

The most widely read English Bible translation has sprouted a series of fictions about it. It’s time to prune them.

Timothy Berg

Finding praise for the 1611 King James Bible (KJB) is not hard. It is “the single most influential book in the English language and arguably the greatest work ever completed by a committee” according to Hannibal Hamlin and Norman Jones in their edited book marking the 400th anniversary of the KJB. Showing just how influential it has been on our language, renowned linguist David Crystal traces hundreds of expressions it cemented into the English mind while Angelica Duran, English professor at Purdue, has edited a book arguing that the KJB transcends English, rising to the level of a key text in world literature and achieving a global impact.

All this praise is warranted. But when a book blossoms into such a literary lotus, myths also begin to sprout. Grains of truth rendering them plausible grow into weeds of fiction. Blocking the light of contrary facts and pilfering life-giving nuance, truth eventually withers. The following are seven myths about the KJB that now need pruning.

Myth 1: The KJB isn’t copyrighted

Many claim the KJB is not copyrighted and can be reproduced freely. Through American eyes the KJB is “public domain” (see, for example, the work of Roger Syn and Jason Cohn), but it was printed under patent to the royal printer or “crown copyright,” with permissions later extended to the university presses at Cambridge and Oxford. Since the copyright has never lapsed in the UK, its unenforceability in the US reflects not an absence of copyright but rather a disregard of the KJB’s creators. Roger Syn explains that after the Revolutionary War, “English patents were disregarded. This caused the Authorised Version – still protected by royal patents – to enter the public domain outside the United Kingdom.”1Roger Syn, “Enforcement of Copyright in the Bible and Religious Works,” Regent University Law Review 14.1 (2001–2002): 12. The copyright at Cambridge University Press requires the abbreviation “KJV” following all citations, which cannot exceed 500 verses or 25 percent of a document. You can learn more on the enduring KJB copyright here. 

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Myth 2: The KJB was a new translation

Some deem the KJB a new translation—an original language text, freshly translated on blank pages from the original languages. In fact, the translators actually worked on unbound pages of the Bishops’ Bible. The first rule of their procedures commanded that this text “be followed, and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit.”

Miles Smith’s preface to the KJB was clear on this point too: “Truly, good Christian reader, we never thought from the beginning that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one … but to make a good one better.” Samuel Ward, one of the revisers, reported that “caution was given that an entirely new version was not to be furnished, but an old version, long received by the Church, to be purged from all blemishes and faults.”

Existing quarries were mined for lexical gold. Rule 14 required using five prior Bibles “where they agree better with the text than the Bishops’ Bible.” The KJB preface records digging “out of many good” Bibles to make “one principal good one,” thereby rendering “better” what prior translators had “left so good.” They were now “building on their foundation that went before us,” being helped by their labors, which could now be “rubbed and polished.” The “former translations” were “diligently compared and revised” as the very title page boasts of its “newly translated” work. The KJB is thus best understood as a thorough revision of the 1602 edition of the Bishops’ Bible, carefully rendering the original languages and mining prior Bibles for verbal ore.

The King James Bible is best understood as a thorough revision, carefully rendering the original languages and mining prior Bibles for verbal ore.

Myth 3: The text of the KJB has never changed

It’s not uncommon for King James readers to assume their KJB is textually identical to the 1611, except for spelling. This isn’t true. Frederick Scrivener, a major scholar of the KJB, concluded from his study that “numberless and not inconsiderable departures” from the 1611 abound in modern editions, mostly “deliberate changes, introduced silently and without authority” by unnamed men. He listed over fifty pages of variations from the 1611 edition that had been adopted by later editions and that he retained. He also gives more than twenty pages of variations from the 1611 that he rejected in his own edition of the KJB. David Norton’s more recent study of the textual history of the KJB scrupulously lists over 150 pages of variant readings supporting his updated edition.

Most changes to the original text were made in 1629, 1638, 1762, and 1769 editions, others in hundreds of humbler editions. These alterations are extremely minor compared to differences between distinct translations (say, KJB vs. NKJV) and so, they shouldn’t be exaggerated.

At the same time, they shouldn’t be minimized either. D. A. Waite, for example, did this when he compared an audio version of the Old Scofield Reference Bible and a 1611 facsimile, and said he heard only 421 changes. Setting aside changes of form, he claimed there were only 136 changes of “substance” from 1611 to today.2D. A. Waite, Defending the King James Bible, 3rd ed. (Old Paths, 2006), 4–5. A pastor in North Carolina called for a recount; using the same two editions in print, he enumerated over 2,000. Waite’s count was reportedly updated some but still gets repeated. 

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Myth 4: The translators spoke in unison

Some treat the KJB as its architects’ united opinion. If one suggests that alterations are needed to the KJB the response today is sometimes, “Why contradict so many brilliant scholars?” But we should not imagine that all the translators reached some sort of consensus in a large meeting room. Instead, the KJB is the result of three broad stages of work. 

  1. The Bible was divided, in 1604, among six companies, one at Westminster, one at Cambridge, and one at Oxford (a Greek and Hebrew team at each). Some of these subdivided. Individuals were to bring personal drafts to meetings where a company’s eight or nine men worked over selections. Review was then to take place through other companies and appointed overseers, with input from outside consultants. 
  2. Twelve men made veto revisions in a “general meeting” at Stationers’ Hall in 1610. 
  3. Several final editors added para-textual material and finishing touches.

An elaborate process of cross-checking was envisioned, but scholars still debate the amount completed. Most agree that some was skipped. The translators met in small groups in tiny rooms; they never met all together. Further, the KJB ultimately reflects, not unanimous votes, but veto decisions. Rules 9–10 explained that, where differences remained, they would be settled “at the general meeting” (step two of the process). 

The translators’ handwritten revisions in a 1602 Bishops’ Bible. Bodleian Library Arch. A b.18

For example, in Luke 2:22, the translators’ base text read “her purification,” explaining why Mary brought Jesus to the temple, without any notes. Virtually all the textual data read “their” purification (including either Joseph or Jesus in the purification). Greek texts at the time differed. A manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford shows a back-and-forth between reviewers.

At Luke 2:22, this manuscript shows that “her” is first crossed out in the text, “their” written above, and then “her” is again added to the margin. This proposed revision and note got crossed out. Then “her” stood in the text and “their” in the margin. This revision too was overturned. The KJB ended where it began: “her” in the text and nothing in the margin. Documentary evidence vividly challenges any assumption that the translators always agreed.

Myth 5: Little is known about the KJB’s formation

Some today think that loss of records has obscured the KJB’s formation. It’s true that data has been lost, but what remains is impressive. Bod. 1602, the manuscript just mentioned, records revisions to various texts assigned to four different companies. Another manuscript at Lambeth Palace (Ms. 98) records revisions to another company. More recently, Jeffery Miller has added Samuel Ward’s Apocrypha notes to this list of documentary evidence. This leaves us extant manuscript work from every company’s assigned text.

And this isn’t all. We also have sixteen contemporary accounts of the Hampton Court Conference where the idea for the KJB was first hatched; the receipt for the pages translators worked on; numerous correspondence about the translation, including letters from King James and Richard Bancroft, the bishop of London; copies of the translators’ rules; lists of translators; library records of the translators’ borrowing helps; John Bois’s notes from stage two and his annotated Septuagint; and Samuel Ward’s summary report to the Synod of Dort (a draft of which remains in his own hand).

The garden at Hampton Court Palace, where the idea for the King James Bible was born. Stu Smith

And documents continue to multiply, as Nicholas Hardy of the University of Birmingham explains. As one of the premier KJB scholars today puts it, Shakespeare scholars only dream of having this kind of data about his plays. Likewise, Hamlin and Jones are right to say that, “Despite the peculiar popular legend that the translation of the KJB is shrouded in mystery, it isn’t. We know a great deal about it.”3Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones, “Introduction: The King James Bible and Its Reception History,” in The King James Bible After Four Hundred Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, ed. Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6. 

Myth 6: The KJB is a perfectly literal translation

Some assume the KJB is the most “literal” translation possible, rendering every word with exact precision. Generally speaking, the KJB is more literal than many more recent translations (although even here, Young’s certainly overtakes it). Further, the translators shunned one aspect of exactness which is known as “concordance.” Concordance is the consistent rendering of the same word from the original languages with the same English word whenever feasible. The KJB preface records that the translators instead celebrated verbal variety, untethered by “uniformity of phrasing,” or “ identity of words,” to make “verbal and unnecessary changings.” Alister McGrath illustrates this point using Romans 5:1–11, a text that exemplifies their linguistic liberties. In the KJB, Christians “rejoice” in hope, “glory” in tribulations, and “joy” in God: three distinct words all rendering the same Greek word. More on this myth here. 

Myth 7: The KJB is written in Old English

Finally, many Bible readers today think that the 1611 KJB is unreadable Old English. But, the Oxford English Dictionary traces the following historical stages in the English language: Old English until 1150, Middle English until 1500, Early Modern English until 1700. As a work of Early Modern English, the KJB is certainly still readable. That said, some grammatical forms are foreign. The obvious examples are pronouns like “thee/thou/thy” or “ye”; the possessives “thine/mine”; and verbs ending in -est (2nd person) and -eth (3rd person).

Further, Mark Ward rightly cautions readers to be on the lookout for dead words which have fallen out of the language now. He also laments that everyone trips over false friends, words that have dramatically changed their meaning since 1611. That said, if someone can read at a college level and is willing to learn unfamiliar grammar, most of the KJB is not impossible; it merely requires work. 

Conclusion

The KJB is read daily all over the world and is still, by one poll, the most read English Bible in America. Rightly so. It blooms to its greatest beauty when we regularly trim the myths that threaten to crowd it out. When not choked by myths, it provides a visual banquet on which our souls may feast.

Notes

  • 1
    Roger Syn, “Enforcement of Copyright in the Bible and Religious Works,” Regent University Law Review 14.1 (2001–2002): 12.
  • 2
    D. A. Waite, Defending the King James Bible, 3rd ed. (Old Paths, 2006), 4–5.
  • 3
    Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones, “Introduction: The King James Bible and Its Reception History,” in The King James Bible After Four Hundred Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, ed. Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6.

Filed Under: Translation Tagged With: King James Bible

Borrowing from the KJV Bank and Trust

Why we must steward and protect the trust people have in prominent Bible translations.

Mark Ward

I want all good evangelical English Bible translations to be trusted and used by all good English-speaking evangelicals. And I think you should want this, too. It makes sense, then, to look to the most popular English Bible of all time for lessons in how a translation might win and keep Bible readers’ trust. That is, of course, the King James Version.

The KJV is the one ring to rule them all. There is no escaping its influence—on church history, on Bible translation, on the English language itself. But Rings of Power often get shrouded in hagiographic mist over time. According to a recent poll, 103% of English-speaking Christians believe that the KJV was created on the sixth day and brought over to America on the Mayflower on the seventh.

A huge number of English-speaking Christians still use and trust the King James.

Okay, that isn’t true. But this is: the most recent reliable poll found that 55% of American Bible readers are still reading the KJV. A huge number of English-speaking Christians still use and trust the King James.

And yet, there was when the King James was not. It had to be made by humans, just like today’s translations. There were no angel choirs singing in the sky at its birth (and the Pilgrims carried the Geneva Bible, not the KJV). The KJV had to achieve its status.

There are therefore a number of useful lessons we can learn about public trust in Bible translations from the human history of the excellent King James Version.

1. Plan for cavils and parles.

First, those who love good English Bible translations today—the ESV, CSB, NIV, NET, NLT, LEB, NKJV, and others—should take heart: even the venerable KJV once faced vituperative opposition.

It’s odd, actually, to read the KJV preface, “The Translators to the Reader,” because it opens in what might seem to us to be an unnecessarily defensive crouch. Its author, Myles Smith, is certain people will attack his and his fellow translators’ work. There isn’t much space to read between Smith’s rather dense lines, but I see there a resigned, elite-academic sigh. Smith has no idea he has helped forge the one ring. By sentence two, he is offering this biting prediction:

Cavil, if it do not find a hole, will make one.1David Norton, ed., The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha: King James Version, Revised edition, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), xxvii–xxviii. Page numbers for future quotations of the preface will be given in parentheses.

The KJV translators foresaw the inane criticisms (“cavils”) they were about to face, and yet I can’t exactly point to them as examples of how to respond with grace—I don’t hear in Smith much noblesse oblige. He calls out his critics’ “absurdity,” “wickedness,” “envy,” and “malignity.” And listen to this cynical complaint:

He that meddleth with men’s religion in any part meddleth with their custom, nay, with their freehold [money-producing land]; and though they find no content in that which they have, yet they cannot abide to hear of altering [it]. (xix)

But I actually take some consolation from the mere fact that Smith felt he had to defend the KJV. The malicious treatment that current English Bible translators often get today is not an invention of the social media era. Apparently, it can be overcome.

The KJV translators do offer this constructive tip:

Being brought together to a parle [conference] face to face, we sooner compose our differences than by writings, which are endless. (xvii)

New Bible translations, if they are to be trusted, have to be ready to suffer slings and arrows from outraged Bible readers. And they have to win some of those people over with parles.

2. The KJV is the Septuagint of today.

A second lesson we can learn from the KJV translators comes from the insightful comments they make about one of the only Bible translations in history that is more famous than the KJV. This is the Septuagint, the pre-Christian Greek translation of the (Hebrew) Old Testament.

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The lesson might go something like this: the trust people have in a prominent Bible translation must be carefully stewarded and protected.

The KJV translators were not overly enamored with the accuracy and quality of the Septuagint:

It is certain that that translation was not so sound and so perfect but that it needed in many places correction. (xxii)

They noted that the coming of the New Testament was a perfect time for God to fix the Septuagint’s problems. Whenever Jesus and the apostles quoted it, they could have adjusted it. But they often didn’t.

It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to them to take that which they found (the same being for the greatest part true and sufficient), rather than by making a new, in that new world and green age of the Church, to expose themselves to many exceptions and cavillations, as though they made a translation to serve their own turn. (xxii)

The KJV is the Septuagint of today. In general, the safest path to widespread trust is through it. The KJV established a tradition (begun by William Tyndale) of basically literal and beautifully literary translation choices, a tradition that has proven its utility over time.

In general, the safest path to widespread trust is through it.

While I happen to think that the New International Version is a fine work by fine scholars, and while I use the NIV frequently, it hasn’t hewed as closely to the KJV tradition as a few of the other major modern evangelical English Bible translations. I don’t think there is any kind of biblical requirement that we stick with precedent here; if Christians in your context trust the New International Version, then you have a new and useful tradition worth holding on to. But when it came time for a choice in my own congregation, I found that I was a member of the if-it-ain’t-broke school of Bible translation selection. We now use an English translation that is a more direct heir of the KJV—it was simply an easier sell in my circumstances to borrow from the KJV Bank & Trust.

3. Make the KJV translators thank you.

That, in fact, is very like what the KJV translators did in their day. Hence a third lesson: the KJV translators successfully replaced the work of their forebears without disdaining it.

I said earlier that Myles Smith wasn’t exactly gentle with his imagined critics. But he was nothing but gracious toward those who went before him in the work of English Bible translation.

As nothing is begun and perfected at the same time, and the latter thoughts are thought to be the wiser: so, if we building upon their foundation that went before us, and being helped by their labours, do endeavour to make that better which they left so good, no man, we are sure, hath cause to mislike us; they, we persuade ourselves, if they were alive, would thank us. (xxvii)

There are defenders of exclusive use of the King James Version who take even the gentlest question (Hasn’t English changed enough by now to make portions of the KJV unnecessarily difficult for today’s readers to understand?) as an affront. But it seems to me that if indeed it is time for the English-speaking church to replace the KJV in pulpits and other institutional contexts, pastors and others who must make this change would do well to speak well of the KJV—to refuse to let those defenders lay sole claim to its legacy.

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The KJV translators were not KJV-Only. It is actually those who wish to see the venerable King James revised who are most honoring the KJV tradition. The KJV itself wasn’t a fresh translation; it was a revision of the Bishop’s Bible, first released in 1568. The edition of the KJV that is now in the most common use was produced in 1769 (not 1611).

The KJV translators were revisers, and they were sensitive to the charge that revising a translation meant rejecting or even disrespecting that earlier work. They loaded up the metaphors to explain their revision work to non-specialists:

  • It took the work of both Gideon and of the men Ephraim to destroy Midian in Judges 8: both were called for. Likewise, translation and revision are both necessary. (xxvii)
  • Joash struck the ground three times in 2 Kings 13; he should have struck it more. (xxvii)
  • “Books of profane learning” such as Aristotle’s Ethics get translated and then revised—even multiple times. (xxvii)
  • Gold doesn’t stop being gold because it needs at times to be “rubbed and polished.” (xxvii)

They did not disdain the work of their forebears. We should not disdain theirs even as we the church begin to use KJV revisions and replacements.

Conclusion

Some aspects of the KJV’s rise to prominence are unrepeatable, especially 1) the tiny size of the English-speaking world at the time and 2) the fact that pretty well all of it was subject to the king who commissioned the translation. That will never happen again. I am convinced that there will never again be one ring to rule them all.

Instead we’ve got something not quite so stirring, though you can still try using a movie-trailer announcer voice to say it: multiple rings with complementary and overlapping powers.

It’s a bad idea, then, to take a Bible translation that people trust such as the KJV and cast it into Mount Doom. There is room for many rings. And we can have and use them if we learn some lessons about trust from the wise KJV translators.

Notes

  • 1
    David Norton, ed., The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha: King James Version, Revised edition, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), xxvii–xxviii. Page numbers for future quotations of the preface will be given in parentheses.

Filed Under: New Testament, Old Testament, Translation Tagged With: King James Bible

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