In January, 1604, King James I brought together church dignitaries, scholars, and Puritans; all loyal Protestants. On the last day of the conference between James and the churchmen, January 18, 1604, the first formal step was taken toward the making of the so-called Authorized Version of the English Bible.
Some of the High Church party objected that there were translations enough already; but it struck James’s fancy to set them all aside by another version, which he at once said he would order. It was to be made by the most learned of both universities, then to be revised by the bishops and other Church dignitaries, then presented to the Privy Council, and finally to be passed upon by himself. The King was true to his word in this line also, and before the year was out had appointed the fifty-four best Bible scholars of the realm to make the new version. They were to sit in six companies of nine each, two at Oxford, two at Cambridge, and two at Westminster. It must be said for the King that the only principle of selection was scholarship, and when those six groups of men met, they were men of the very first rank, with no peers outside their own numbers—with one exception, and that exception is of some passing interest. Hugh Broughton (1549 –1612) was probably the foremost Hebrew scholar of England, perhaps of the world, at the time, and apparently, he was not appointed on the committee. Chiefly, it seems to have been because he was a man of ungovernable temper and utterly unfitted to work with others. Failure to appoint him, however, bit and rankled, and the only keen and sharp criticism that was passed on the version in its own day was by Hugh Broughton. He sent word to the King, after it was completed, that as for himself he would rather be rent to pieces by wild horses than have had any part in the urging of such a wretched version of the Bible on the poor people. That was so manifestly pique, however, that it is only to be regretted that the translation did not have the benefit of his great Hebrew knowledge.
It was the original plan that when one company had finished its part, the result should go to each of the other companies, coming back with their suggestions to the original workers to be recast by them. The whole was then to be reviewed by a smaller committee of scholars to give it uniformity and to see it through the press. The records are not extant that tell whether this was done in full detail, though we may presume that each section of the Scripture had the benefit of the scholarship of the entire company.
We know a good deal of the method of their work. We shall understand it better by recalling what material they had at hand. They were enabled to use the result of all the work that had been done before them. They were instructed to follow the Bishops’ Bible wherever they could do so fairly; but they were given power to use the versions already named from Wycliffe down, as well as those fragmentary versions which were numerous, and of which no mention has been made. In addition, they had all other versions made in the tongues of the time. Chiefly there was Luther’s German Bible, already become for the German tongue what their version was destined to be for the English tongue. There were parts of the Bible available in Spanish, French, and Dutch. They were kept at hand constantly for any light they might cast on difficult passages.
For the Old Testament there were very few Hebrew texts. There had been little critical work yet done on them, and for the most part there were only different editions running back over the centuries. There was, of course, the Septuagint, the Greek translation from the Hebrew made before Christ, with the guidance it could give in doubtful places on the probable original. And finally, there was the Vulgate, made into Latin out of the Greek and Hebrew. This was all the Old Testament material they had, or that anyone could have in view of the antiquated original sources.
The New Testament material was more abundant, though not nearly so abundant as today. There were few manuscripts of the early days to which they could refer; but there were the two great critical versions of the New Testament in Greek, that by Erasmus[i] and the Complutensian Polyglot Bible,[ii] which had made use of the best manuscripts known. Then, finally again, there was the Vulgate.
We must stop a moment to see what was the value of the Vulgate in this work. The Vulgate may be wrong because it is only a translation; but it may be right because it is a translation of earlier manuscripts.
With all this material the scholars of the early seventeenth century set to work. Each man in the group made the translation that seemed best to him, and together they analyzed the results and finally agreed on the best. They hunted the other versions to see if it had been better done elsewhere. The shade of Tyndale was over it all. The Geneva version was most influential. The Douai had its share, and the Bishops’ was the general standard, altered only when accuracy required it. On all hard passages they called to their aid the appropriate departments of both universities. All scholars everywhere were asked to send in any contributions, to correct or criticize as they would. Public announcement of the work was made, and all possible help was besought and gladly accepted.
Very faithfully these greatest scholars of their time wrought. No one worked for money, and no one worked for pay, but each for the joy of the working. Three years they spent on the original work, three years on careful revision and on the marginal references by which Scripture was made to throw light on Scripture. Then in six months a committee reviewed it all, put it through the press, and at last, in 1611, with the imprint of Robert Barker, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, the King James version appeared. The name Authorized Version is not necessarily correct, for so far as the records go it was never authorized either by the King or the bishop; and, even if it were, the authority does not extend beyond the English Church, which is a very small fraction of those who use it. On the title-page of the original version, as on so many since, is the familiar line, “Appointed to be Read in Churches,” but who made the appointment history does not say.
Even a scholar is human, and there must have been times when some of them would be inclined to salt the mine a little, to see that it would yield what they would want it to yield later. So far as these men were able to do it, they made it say in English just what it said in Hebrew and Greek. They showed no inclination to use it as a weapon in their personal warfare.
For many English-speaking Christians, the King James Version became a national treasure, a monument of literary excellence, of theological and textual accuracy, sometimes all these. For others, it stood for a very different, oppressive reality of Anglo-Protestant hegemony. It became for some the Vulgate of Protestantism, a text that could not be challenged without calling into question one’s authentic Christianity.
Cleland Boyd McAfee, A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and its Influence on Life and Literature, (New York: Harper Brothers) 1912.
[i] Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466 –1536), known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, or simply Erasmus, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, and theologian. Erasmus was a classical scholar and wrote in a pure Latin style.
[ii] The Complutensian Polyglot Bible is the name given to the first printed polyglot of the entire Bible, initiated and financed by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517) and published by Complutense University of Madrid. It includes the first printed editions of the Greek New Testament, the complete Septuagint, and the Targum Onkelos. Of the 600 printed six-volume sets, only 123 are known to have survived to date.