A Bible Fit for a King

The English version of the Bible has been called “God’s Bestseller.”¹ According to Joseph Fielding Smith, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it “has had a greater influence on the world for good than any other book ever published.”² It served as the foundation for the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ in Joseph Smith’s day, preparing the way for the dispensation of the fulness of times of which it prophesied (Eph. 1:10).

The publication of the King James Version in 1611 was the culmination of the process of translating the Bible into English, which began around the seventh century AD, when Christianity established itself in the British Isles with the arrival of missionaries in AD 597 sent by Pope Gregory I the Great (c. 540–604).³ Generally speaking, the translation process started with interlinear English glosses of the Latin text of the Vulgate, the Bible the missionaries knew. Soon there were separate translations of specific passages in the biblical text, followed by translations of entire biblical books into the English of the period.

Best-known examples of early attempts to translate the Bible include English metrical renditions of parts of the Old and New Testaments done by a seventh-century monk named Caedmon (died c. 678). He turned certain biblical passages into Old English poems for people to memorize and sing. The venerable monk Bede (died c. 735), the “father of English history,” is said to have translated portions of scripture into Old English. According to tradition, he was dictating an English version of John’s Gospel as he lay dying, though “no trace of this translation exists.”⁴ Other names involved in efforts to translate the Bible into English include Alcuin (735–804) and Alfred the Great (849–901).

John Wycliffe

Credit for producing the first whole Bible in English is usually given to Oxford don John Wycliffe (died 1384), though it is not clear how much of the translation Wycliffe did himself. The completed translation of both the Old and New Testaments was the work of various scholars, including Nicholas of Hereford and John Purvey. Different iterations appeared between 1382 and 1395.

However, there is little doubt that John Wycliffe initiated the project. He first began work on the New Testament and oversaw the production of the first draft of the whole because of its importance to him personally. By 1372, Wycliffe had become England’s leading theologian and reformer. He believed the only true foundation for Christians was the Bible. The pope was not the voice of God on earth; the Bible was. Furthermore, “England belongs to no pope. The pope is but a man, subject to sin; but Christ is the Lord of lords, and this kingdom is held directly and solely of Christ alone.”⁵ A revival of biblical Christianity was desperately needed; a reformation of the church was required. The only way for that to happen was for the English people to possess the word of God in their own language. As Wycliffe said, “It helpeth Christian men to study the Gospel in that tongue in which they know best Christ’s sentence.”⁶

For Wycliffe, scriptural infallibility replaced papal infallibility; scripture alone was the sole basis for deciding doctrine and morals for every Christian. This conviction affected both Christianity and the history of the English Bible in monumental ways. It was the genesis for one of Protestantism’s three fundamental tenets: sola scriptura, “by scripture alone.” However, efforts by like-minded scholars to translate the Bible into English in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries met with bitter opposition from Roman Catholic Church leaders. They inveighed against not just the notion of an English Bible but also the idea of common people having the word of God in their own hands. Henry Knighton, a Catholic writer of the time and a constant opponent of Wycliffe, summed up the church’s view in telling fashion and provided an interesting window into the status of the laity in the minds of the church hierarchy.

Christ gave his Gospel to the clergy and learned of the Church that they might give it to the laity and more infirm persons. . . . But this Master John Wyclif translated the Gospel from the Latin into the Anglican language not the angelican. And Wyclif, by thus translating the Bible made it the property of the masses and common to all and more open to the laity and even to women who were able to read. . . . And so the Gospel pearl is thrown before swine and trodden underfoot, . . . and this precious gem of the clergy has been turned into the sport of the laity, so that what used to be the highest gift of the clergy and the learned members of the Church has become common to the laity.⁷

Wycliffe remained undeterred in his pursuits and issued a clarion declaration for successors engaged in the work of translating the Bible into English.

Christ and his Apostles taught the people in the language best known to them. It is certain that the truth of the Christian faith becomes more evident the more the faith itself is known. Therefore, the doctrine should not only be in Latin but in the common tongue, and as the faith of the Church is contained in the Scriptures, the more these are known in a true sense the better. The laity ought to understand the faith, and as the doctrines of our faith are in the Scriptures, believers should have the Scriptures in a language familiar to the people, and to this end indeed did the Holy Spirit endue them with the knowledge of all tongues. If it is heresy to read the Bible, then the Holy Ghost himself is condemned who gave in tongues to the Apostles of Christ to speak the Word of God in all languages that were ordained of God under heaven. If Christ was so merciful as to send the Holy Ghost to the heathen men to make them partakers of his blessed word, why should it be taken from us in this land that be Christian men?⁸

William Tyndale

A little more than a century passed between the death of John Wycliffe (died 1384) and the coming of the man the world would recognize as the “Father of the English Bible”—William Tyndale (c. 1490–1536). Judging by any measure, Tyndale brought to English speakers the noblest of gifts—a new and improved version of the Bible in their own language—first the New Testament and then the Old. By the time Tyndale turned his considerable intellectual prowess to this endeavor, Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus were already working to reform of Roman Catholicism and would prepare new Bible translations of their own in German and Greek, respectively. Gutenberg had printed his now-famous forty-two-line Bible, inaugurated a new information age, and passed off the world’s stage. Not least, individuals living in and out of England had become well acquainted with Wycliffe’s first English Bible and had taken up the cause to make the scriptures the center of Christian theology.

Even the threat of church punishment—languishing in a dank prison cell or being consumed by agonizing fires at the stake—could not intimidate or dissuade these determined souls from studying the word of God directly in their own language. A set of laws called the Constitutions of Oxford of 1407–9 forbade the owning or making of English translations of the Bible, and yet “men and women were still being burned alive for the possession of such ‘Lollard’ material well over a hundred years later.”⁹ However, an increasingly greater challenge for English Bible readers was navigating the difficult and stilted translation left by Wycliffe and his collaborators.

Enter Master Tyndale. His resolve and sacrifice were exceeded only by his linguistic abilities. His work rendered the biblical text into beautiful contemporary English that was later taken by translators and made the direct expression of the King James Version published a little more than one hundred years (1611) after Tyndale’s birth. “Through that King James Bible, which dominated the English-speaking world for 350 years, Tyndale has reached more people than Shakespeare.”¹⁰ It seems no exaggeration to say that the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ is, in part, a product of William Tyndale and that God raised him up at the exact moment in history when he was needed.

Early Preparation

William Tyndale was born sometime between 1490 and 1495 to an affluent farming family in Gloucestershire, England. He went off to Oxford University at age twelve, and by 1515 (also the year of his ordination), he completed a master of arts degree. He became fluent in eight languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.¹¹ The sixteenth-century historian John Foxe described him as a thoroughgoing product of Oxford and one who was addicted to the scriptures! “[Tyndale was] brought up from a child in the University of Oxford, where he, by long continuance, increased as well in the knowledge of tongues, and other liberal arts, as especially in the knowledge of the Scriptures, whereunto his mind was singularly addicted; insomuch that he, lying then in Magdalen hall, read privily to certain students and fellows of Magdalen college some parcel of divinity; instructing them in the knowledge and truth of the Scriptures.”¹²

After teaching at Oxford for a time, he moved to Cambridge, where he became “further ripened in the knowledge of God’s Word.”¹³ There he also came in contact with new theological ideas promoted by scholars who supported church reform, including Miles Coverdale, John Frith, and Thomas Bilney. Luther’s writings were, as we might say, served up as sumptuous fare for their theological feasts.¹⁴ Moreover, not only was Cambridge at that time “a centre of aggressive Lutheranism,” but it seems just before Tyndale was there, “the Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity had been Erasmus himself, teaching Greek to, as he admitted, bored undergraduates.”¹⁵ During this time, Tyndale must have had access to the Ovum Instrumentum of 1516, the New Testament in the original Greek translated by Erasmus. In Gloucestershire, he began tutoring the children of a notable nobleman named Sir John Walsh. Fearlessly, Tyndale entered into spirited discussions on theology with various clergy and visitors to Little Sodbury Manor, which often took place around the Walshes’ dinner table.

It is at this juncture we see Tyndale’s views on the importance of an English Bible come into clearer focus. And we also see opponents attempt to thwart Tyndale. On one occasion, Tyndale had his now-famous encounter with the “learned man” who stated the church-supported view that people were better off without God’s law found in scripture than without the pope’s. “Master Tyndall hearing that, answered him, I defy the Pope and all his laws, and said, if God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know more of scripture than thou dost.”¹⁶

The die was cast. Tyndale possessed a conviction that he must provide for the plowboy’s education by producing a reliable, readable edition of the Bible in English. For him, individuals in England must have access to the scriptures in order to withstand errors promulgated by church leaders. The laity deserved better than always having to be at the mercy of priests who tried to discredit teachings that Tyndale was convinced were true. He said, “I had perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth, except that the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the process, order and the meaning of the text.”¹⁷ Furthermore, Tyndale argued, “If [English] Christians possessed the Holy Scriptures in their own tongue, they could of themselves withstand these attacks. Without the Bible it is impossible to establish the people in truth. . . . Christians must read the New Testament [for themselves] in their own tongue.”¹⁸

In 1524, with the help of Humphrey Monmouth, a wealthy cloth merchant, Tyndale left England—never to see it again—and moved to Hamburg, Germany. He believed he was on God’s errand. He made his way to Wittenberg, where Luther had posted his Ninety-Five Theses, and got caught up in the discussion of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. He met fellow Englishman William Roye, a linguist who assisted Tyndale in finishing his translation of the Greek New Testament into English in August 1525. They went to Cologne and found a printer, Peter Quentell. Why they chose to print in Cologne remains unclear. It was a very conservative center of Catholicism. Unfortunately, Roye was an indiscrete braggart, especially after he had imbibed a few beers. Perhaps he was the one responsible for tipping off Johannes Cochlaeus about Tyndale’s secret project. Cochlaeus was an enemy of reformation and alerted authorities, who shut down the printing operation. But Tyndale gathered up what had been done, fled to Worms in Germany, and finally got the complete New Testament printed by Peter Schoeffer.¹⁹

Once printed, several thousand copies of the new Bible were smuggled into England in barrels of flour and bolts of cloth. Humphrey Monmouth used his cloth operation to secretly distribute the copies. Tyndale’s New Testament became an immediate bestseller. People were hungry for the word of God. Between 1525 and 1528, eighteen thousand copies were sold, which was no small feat. Sponsoring merchants priced each copy at half a crown, or two-and-one-half shillings. To provide perspective, it would have cost a brick mason five days’ wages to purchase a Tyndale New Testament—the equivalent of at least $500 in today’s economy!²⁰ This may help modern readers appreciate what it cost our predecessors to possess the word of God, a treasure we may sometimes take for granted.

Tyndale’s Bibles fomented national unrest. The bishop of London was enraged. King Henry VIII, though not yet a Protestant, was also angry. It should be remembered that this was eight years before Henry broke away from the Catholic Church over the issue of divorcing his first wife, Katherine. Johannes Cochlaeus, who had prevented the printing of Tyndale’s New Testament in Cologne, expressed his intense opposition to and utter disdain for the whole notion of scripture being translated into the vernacular: “The New Testament translated into the vulgar tongue is in truth, the food of death, the fuel of sin, the veil of malice, the pretext of false liberty, the protection of disobedience, the corruption of discipline, the depravity of morals, the termination of Concord, the death of honesty, the well-spring of vices, the disease of virtues, the instigation of rebellion, the milk of pride, the nourishment of contempt, the death of peace, the destruction of charity, the enemy of unity, the murderer of truth.”²¹ Here was a man who knew how to hurl an insult!

King Henry condemned Tyndale’s New Testament and ordered copies to be burned publicly. He also began a policy of persecuting those found guilty of distributing or possessing copies. For his part, Bishop Tunstall authorized a certain merchant who was trading in Antwerp to act as a secret agent of the crown by using royal funds to buy up every copy he could of the new scripture and send them back to London for burning. What Tunstall didn’t know is that the merchant was a sincere friend of Tyndale and thus happily began paying four times the amount it had cost to produce each Tyndale New Testament. “So, for every Bible Tunstall burned, the king paid for three more to be added to Tyndale’s arsenal.”²²

A price was now put on Tyndale’s head. Agents of the crown (bounty hunters really) traveled all over the Continent, sometimes in clever disguise, to track down their criminal. Some of them were bumbling and inept but still treacherous. They could be found bumping into each other but never quite managed to bump into Tyndale; he was spared. Tyndale next went to Marburg, Germany (1527–1531), and began working on the Old Testament—translating each word from the original Hebrew text. The Pentateuch (the first five books of Moses) appeared in 1530.²³

In 1531, Tyndale moved to Antwerp. Controversies over his New Testament translation and subsequent revisions of it, as well as worries over being caught by authorities before his work was completed, distracted him from finishing the translation of the whole Old Testament. However, he was able to add Joshua through 2 Chronicles to the tally of completed books.²⁴ The rest of the Old Testament would be finished by John Rogers—friend, colleague, and confidante of Tyndale. But Tyndale never lived to see the whole of it printed.

By now, Tyndale was a fugitive, and he knew it. This kind of pressure and its attendant difficulties are known by many men and women. Unjust, unfair treatment in the face of attempting to follow God’s promptings is often the worst kind of contradiction. It can make or break individuals. But Tyndale did not flinch; he did not become embittered or retreat from his own stated conviction that “scripture derives its authority from him who sent it.”²⁵

It was in Antwerp that Tyndale was betrayed and caught by authorities. A secret agent of the English crown Henry Phillips offered to take Tyndale to dinner one night and lured him into taking a walk through town. As they entered an alley, upon a prearranged signal, two captors grabbed Tyndale and quietly whisked him off to a cold, damp dungeon in Vilvoorde fortress near Brussels. There he was imprisoned for almost a year and a half. Though friends and supporters petitioned authorities for his release (even King Henry was asked), Tyndale was given no reprieve. One of these petitioners Thomas Poyntz was himself arrested—guilty by association.²⁶

Conditions in the Vilvoorde dungeon were miserable, as the only surviving letter from Tyndale during this period attests:

I beg your Lordship and that by the Lord Jesus, that if I am to remain here through the winter, you will request the commissary to have the kindness to send me from the goods of mine which he has, a warmer cap: for I suffer greatly from cold in the head, and am afflicted by a perpetual catarrh [a cold] which is much increased in this cell. . . . But most of all I beg you clemency to be urgent with the commissary that he will kindly permit me to have the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary that I may pass the time in study. . . . I will be patient abiding the will of God, to the glory of the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ, whose spirit (pray) may ever direct your heart. Amen.²⁷

It has been noted that this correspondence sounds very much like one of Paul’s letters to Timothy²⁸ as the former awaited his fate and requested a visit from the latter, saying, “The cloke that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments” (2 Tim. 4:13). Tyndale’s letter hints that he was probably still working on his unfinished translation of the Old Testament.

In August 1536, William Tyndale was found guilty of heresy by an ecclesiastical court and delivered over to secular officials, not church leaders, for public execution. Again, the principle invoked by the church, as with the case involving Wycliffe’s exhumed body, was Ecclesia non novit sanguinem—“The Church does not shed blood.”²⁹ Two months later, on October 6, 1536, Tyndale was taken from his cell, paraded into town, chained to a stake, strangled openly by an executioner with a rope, and then burned. His last coherent words were “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”³⁰ One of the great minds and spiritual giants of an already impressive age was dead. He gave his life for a cause that he believed was God-inspired—a cause that would result in a Bible, in a restoration of scriptural accuracy, and in a changed language that would affect the whole world.

As it turned out, within a year of Tyndale’s death, his dying wish was granted. Tyndale Bibles or versions that drew heavily upon his work were circulating in England—with King Henry’s approval. Within two years, all parishes were encouraged to have a copy, and within five years, they were ordered to do so or face a fine levied by the government.

Tyndale’s influence in other ways is hard to overstate. His translation changed the English language. He replaced certain terms with others that became widely accepted: “church” (Greek ecclesia) became “congregation,” “priest” (Greek presbyter) became “elder,” “do penance” (Greek metanoia) became “repent,” “charity” (Greek agape) became “love.”³¹ More than that, literally dozens of words and phrases were coined by Tyndale to make his translation richer and more understandable. These include (but are not limited to) the following:

• alpha and omega
• apple of his eye
• beautiful
• brother’s keeper
• busybody
• cast the first stone
• coat of many colors
• eat, drink, and be merry
• infidel
• Jehovah
• judge not
• no man can serve two masters
• Passover
• stiff-necked
• suffer fools gladly
• two-edged sword
• undergird
• ungodly
• uproar

In fact, even the very word at the center of Christian theology, “atonement” (derived from the phrase “at-one-ment”), was appropriated by William Tyndale to describe the reconciliation that occurs between people and God through the redemptive suffering of Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:11). Though Tyndale has been credited with inventing the word “atonement,” it was used in English texts as early as the fourteenth century. A form of the term appears in the oldest surviving Middle English romance, King Horn (“At one he was with the king”).³² And the 1395 edition of the Wycliffe Bible uses “onement” in Ezekiel 37:17 to describe the prophesied sticks of Judah and Ephraim that would “become one in thine hand” (King James Version) or “be in to onement in thin hond [sic]” (Wycliffe Bible).³³ “Atonement” appears in Sir Thomas More’s manuscript history of Richard III in 1513.³⁴

But William Tyndale was astute enough to see that “atonement” was the best equivalent of the Hebrew and Greek words used in the Old and New Testaments to refer to the act of bringing estranged beings into a state of union with God. Tyndale used the word only once in his 1526 edition of the New Testament, but he must be credited with giving “atonement” its powerful theological meaning, using it to translate the Greek katallagan, often rendered “reconciliation.”

Only someone who understood the infinite and eternal power of Christ’s sacrifice to put all humankind back into a right relationship with God the Father, after the wrenching estrangement brought about by sin, could have translated the Greek into the word “atonement.” Only someone whose very soul was attuned to the nature of God and to the effects of sin, suffering, repentance, and reconciliation would have chosen “atonement.” William Tyndale was such a man. Modern readers are the beneficiaries of his consecrated intellect and spiritual compass. Those of us who share the English-language culture speak what we speak and are who we are because of William Tyndale.

All that William Tyndale endured was for the sake of bringing the word of God to an English-speaking population. Ultimately, he gave everything he possessed—even his own life—for God’s work and word. He was a spiritual giant. His work profoundly, even monumentally, influenced future versions of the English Bible. They, in turn, all contributed to the crowning achievement in the chain of English Bibles—the King James Version. But none of these future versions equaled the significance of the work accomplished by William Tyndale. “Previous estimates of William Tyndale’s contribution to the 1611 King James Version (or Authorized Version) of the Bible have run from a high of up to 90 percent . . . to a low of 18 percent.” However, the most recent analysis by researchers at Brigham Young University concludes that for the New Testament, Tyndale’s contribution is about 84 percent of the text, while in the Old Testament about 76 percent of his words have been retained.³⁵ Tyndale’s influence continues to this day.

Persecution

William Tyndale’s martyrdom caused his like-minded associates to steel their resolve and redouble their efforts to bring the best English Bible they could to the world. Tyndale’s friend John Rogers was such a man. Rogers was responsible for completing the translation of the Old Testament into English, getting it to press, and ultimately becoming a martyr for the cause of truth.

John Rogers’s brief friendship with Tyndale began in Antwerp. Rogers believed Tyndale’s work and vision to be so important that he guarded with his life all the unpublished Old Testament translations and handwritten notes Tyndale had left with him for safekeeping. He initially published the completed Bible under the pseudonym of Thomas Matthew in 1537, just one year after Tyndale’s death. At the insistence of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the “Matthews Bible” was granted the “Kings most gracious license” and officially recognized, as was Tyndale’s work. Tyndale’s heavenward plea at the time of his execution, to open the English king’s eyes, was now answered in full!

Eventually, Rogers forsook the priesthood and the Roman Catholic Church, married a woman from Antwerp, and became pastor of a Protestant congregation in Wittenberg, Germany (hometown of Martin Luther and, for a brief time, Tyndale himself). He then returned to England during the reign of King Edward VI (1547–1553), who was sympathetic to reform. In time, Rogers was recognized for his abilities at preaching and pastoring and was appointed lecturer in divinity at St. Paul’s in London.³⁶

When Queen Mary I (1553–1558), a staunch Catholic, ascended the English throne upon the death of Edward VI, there was a violent purge in England. The reform-friendly atmosphere evaporated, and many Reformation leaders fled to the continent. John Rogers, however, was defiant. In July 1553, he preached a sermon at St. Paul’s on “the true doctrine taught in King Edward’s days” and warned everyone to beware of returning to “pestilent Popery.”³⁷ Ten days later, he was put under house arrest. In January 1554, he was sent to Newgate Prison in London for a year and then dispatched to the residence of a notorious persecutor of reformers to answer questions. Finally, in late January 1555, he was convicted by a papal commission of denying the Christian character of the Roman Catholic Church and rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation by saying that the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper did not turn into the actual body and blood of Christ. For Rogers, such a denial was in perfect harmony with scriptural warrant. Transubstantiation was not a biblical doctrine. But biblical or not, Rogers was sentenced to death.³⁸

Queen Mary I was the daughter of King Henry VIII and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. She is described as being filled with resentment over the way Henry treated her mother.³⁹ Henry had tried to have their twenty-four-year marriage annulled because Katherine couldn’t provide a surviving male heir to the English throne, and Henry didn’t want Mary to become monarch. All of this set in motion events that resulted in the English Reformation. The quest for a new version of the Bible was an inextricable part of this reform. This was also a major factor contributing to the intensity of the Catholic restoration that Mary pursued and the bloodbath over which she presided. Between 1555 and 1558, Mary ordered 287 persons executed for religious convictions; most of these were by burning.⁴⁰ Mary was followed by Queen Elizabeth I and then King James.

Bible Versions after Tyndale

When Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) ascended the throne of the English realm, Protestants everywhere breathed a sigh of relief. Many people had gone to prison or been put to death across Europe for supporting the spread of Bibles in the vernacular. But European religious reform in general, and the English Reformation in particular, could not now be stopped. In the British Isles, the Bible in English had become the heart and core of earthshaking change, as historian G. M. Trevelyan noted: “The English Reformation, which had begun as a Parliamentary attack on Church fees, and proceeded as a royal raid on Abbey lands, was at last to find its religious basis in the popular knowledge of the Scriptures which had been the dream of Wycliffe.”⁴¹

By the time King James (r. 1603–1625) succeeded Queen Elizabeth to the throne of England, reactions to the language of Tyndale’s Bible were not uniformly positive, as exemplified in the several versions of the English Bible that had appeared since Tyndale’s New Testament was first published in 1526. The main ones were the Coverdale Bible of 1535 (named after its editor), the Great Bible of 1539 (named for its size), the Geneva Bible of 1560 (named for its place of printing), the Bishop’s Bible of 1568 (authorized by the Church of England clergy), and the Catholic Douai-Rheims Bible of 1582 (so named for the place of translation—Douai Rheims College).⁴²

Each of these Bibles favored a different doctrinal slant. The Geneva Bible contained a running commentary that was intensely antagonistic toward the pope as well as the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the Church of England, and the universities. However, the Geneva Bible was immensely popular with the people. It is the version Shakespeare likely used. It is the Bible that came to America on the Mayflower and certainly the version read by our Pilgrim forefathers. Yet, the Geneva Bible was understandably annoying to the bishops of the Church of England because it was too Protestant. Not least, it made King James unhappy because of notes in the margins that criticized kings.⁴³ The English clergy’s response to the Geneva Bible was the Bishop’s Bible, proposed by Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, and translated by a goodly number of church bishops.⁴⁴ Whereas the Geneva Bible was filled with anti-Catholic annotations, Parker ordered that the Bishop’s Bible “avoid notes of a doctrinal or controversial nature.”⁴⁵ Still, the Puritans were not happy with it because it was not accurate, which was true for some portions.

The Puritans argued that the church and society needed to be “purified” of all remnants of Catholic influence. This meant getting rid of anything that resembled the Roman Catholic Church or distorted Christianity (from their point of view), which included such things as the office of bishop, clerical robes, emphasis on “high church” rituals, and the popular recent versions of the Bible currently in use. Therefore, before King James of Scotland even got to London to take up his new additional duties as king of England, he was presented with the Millenary Petition, so called because it was signed by one thousand Puritans who requested changes in the Church of England, including a new Bible.⁴⁶

King James’s Bible

James VI of Scotland had ruled over the Scottish realm for many years (since 1567) before he became king of England in 1603. He liked the episcopal structure of the Church of England, which was bishop centered. He especially liked the church’s title for the king, “Defender of the Faith.” He was not anxious to change things. Yet on one matter he agreed with the Puritans—the need for a new translation of the Bible.

In January 1604, during his first royal year in England, James called a conference at Hampton Court to evaluate the condition of the Church of England. The conference did not favor the Puritans’ requests. But the king did agree to proceed with plans for a new Bible, with the provision that it omit controversial notes, like those in the Geneva Bible.⁴⁷

Work began in July. The king claimed to have appointed fifty-four men to the translation team, although only fifty names can be found on various surviving lists. They were divided into six translation companies, two companies each working from three different cities in England (Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster in London).⁴⁸ These teams included the finest biblical scholars of that era. Dr. Lancelot Andrewes, for example, was a brilliant linguist, a master of fifteen languages, the dean of Westminster, and a famous preacher and devotional writer. William Bedwell of Cambridge University was the father of Arabic studies in England and the most distinguished Islamicist of his day. Dr. Miles Smith was a fine Semitist, energetic Puritan, and writer of the King James Version preface. Sir Henry Savile was eminent among Greek scholars.⁴⁹ Surely, these were men raised up for the very purpose to which they applied their considerable abilities.

These men sought not their own aggrandizement but the will of God. It was Miles Smith who said they didn’t start out to make a new translation of the Bible because others were bad. Rather, they desired “to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one . . . ; that hath been our endeavour, that our mark. To that purpose there were many [scholars] chosen, that were greater in other men’s eyes than in their own, and that sought the truth rather than their own praise.”⁵⁰

It is no exaggeration to say these translators worked exceptionally long and hard to produce a new version of the word of God. In fact, some of them turned every waking moment to the task. One example is John Bois. Born in 1560, he could read Hebrew at age six and “write the Hebrew alphabet with elegance.” As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, “he studied from 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.” and turned down a career in medicine to pursue theology and humanities. He was assigned to the sixth company of translators working on the Apocrypha. He worked all week at St. John’s College only to return to his country parish on weekends to prepare and deliver his Sunday sermons. Some objected to the appointment of this “country preacher” to a translation team filled with the ranks of such notable scholars from all over England. However, John Bois loved God and the common man. His work ethic was such that he did not waste a spare moment. And he believed in the importance of the work, though he did not believe himself to be important. Dr. Bois was ultimately chosen to do the final editing work on the entire biblical manuscript and prepare it for press.⁵¹ The King James Version was printed in 1611.

One scholar who was not chosen for the original translation team became a vicious opponent of the new Bible, even though he had first argued for it. This was Hugh Broughton, a renowned professor who apparently became so incensed at being slighted by not receiving an invitation to participate that he would write in a letter, “Tell His Majesty, I had rather be rent in pieces with wild horses, than any such translation by my consent should be urged upon poor churches. . . . The new edition crosseth me. I require it to be burnt.”⁵² Though Broughton was admittedly a very bright man, he was also cantankerous and not missed owing to his eccentricity and bad temper. Neither did his absence on the translation team impoverish the work. However, the results of some work he did on a planned independent translation of the Bible did find its way into the hands of the King James translation team.⁵³

The King James Version has also been called the “Authorized Version,” though, oddly enough, no proof survives that the king formally approved the final product. The title page to the 1611 version read that it was “appointed to be read in churches,”⁵⁴ but there was no official law that said it had to be used, and it was a long time before the King James Version displaced the Geneva Bible as the Bible read by individuals.⁵⁵ Once established, however, the King James Version became entrenched. It was more than two hundred fifty years before a serious attempt was made to replace the King James Version with an updated translation. The English Revised Version appeared in 1885. From this revision sprang an American variation called the American Standard Version in 1901. This was followed by the Revised Standard Version in 1952 and the New Revised Standard Version in 1989.⁵⁶ In 1978 the New International Version appeared, with revisions in subsequent years.

Many of these versions undertook to correct mistakes found in the King James Version. Early editions of the King James Version were plagued with misprints, which were corrected in later printings. But one example of a misprint that never got corrected is found in Matthew 23:24: “strain at a gnat.” It originally read “strain out a gnat.” It has been corrected in other versions of the Bible.

Because of these so-called problems and the archaic nature of seventeenth-century English, some people say the King James Version is too outdated and will soon become obsolete (or should become obsolete). Even if readers eventually no longer use the King James Version, we have the King James translators to thank for many phrases still used today:⁵⁷

• “the skin of my teeth” (Job 19:20)
• “Woe is me!” (Ps. 120:5)
• “a drop in a bucket” (Isa. 40:15)
• “my brother’s keeper” (Gen. 4:9)
• “holier than thou” (Isa. 65:5)
• “at their wits’ end” (Ps. 107:27)
• “hair stood on end” (Job 4:15)
• “apple of his eye” (Ps. 17:8)
• “lily of the valley” (Song 2:1)
• “line upon line” (Isa. 28:10)
• “set house in order” (Isa. 38:1)
• “Can a leopard change its spots?” (Jer. 13:23)
• “hollow of his hand” (Isa. 40:12)

Today, most people who can quote from the Bible quote the King James Version published in 1611. As one source notes, modern-day translators of new Bible revisions may “rightly feel humble, knowing they can never produce a work that will so mold a language and shape an entire culture” as did the King James Version.⁵⁸

New translations of the Bible continue to be made for a variety of reasons: to keep apace with changes in the language, to facilitate ease of understanding, and to harmonize language with doctrinal understandings in the modern world. (It must be recognized that any translation is automatically an interpretation.) These new translations are valuable tools in helping students understand more deeply the meaning and intent of God’s word. But perhaps it is not wrong to say as well that nothing has yet quite hit the high watermark left by the King James Version.

The King James Version was the culmination of a long process and many participants. We owe a great debt to all those who created the English Bible and made the King James Version possible. Their sacrifices were monumental, and their faith is inspiring.