Authorized Version

The Authorized Version or King James Version is an English translation of the Bible commissioned by King James I of England (James VI of Scotland) and first published in 1611. For about three centuries it was the English Protestant Bible, and it is still popular. Its literary qualities have been widely praised, even by some unbelievers.

Names

The original 1611 title reads as follows:

"THE HOLY BIBLE, Conteyning the Old Testament, AND THE NEW: Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and reuised, by his Maiesties speciall Cõmandement."

As can be seen, there is no specific title for this particular translation. Over the centuries it was occasionally referred to by various names or descriptions, but its effective monopoly meant that such identifiers were not really needed and not often used. It was only with the issuing of the Revised Version starting in 1881 that it became common to give an identifying name on the title page. This was regularly Authorized Version in Britain, King James Version in America. Recently, the latter has been gaining ground in Britain, being adopted by Cambridge University Press, while the Oxford World's Classics edition compromises with Authorized King James Version.

Origins

The first printed English Bible appeared in 1535. It was translated from German and Latin by Miles Coverdale, making much use of published translations by William Tyndale of the New Testamant and some of the Old. A revision of this was produced in 1537 by Thomas Matthew (thought to be a pseudonym of John Rogers), making use of unpublished manuscript translations of more of the Old Testament by Tyndale. This in turn was the basis of a revision by Coverdale published in 1539. This "Great Bible" was authorized by Henry VIII as the source for Bible readings in church. It was replaced in 1568 by the "Bishops' Bible", revised by a group of bishops, for the first time in this sequence of revisions checking against the "original" languages. It was the Bishops' Bible that served as the main basis for the AV.

In 1604 King James held a conference at Hampton Court to discuss various issues facing the Church of England. One decision that came out of this was the commission for this translation. About 50 translators were recruited, grouped in six committees in Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster. The Bible was divided into six corresponding portions. Although the AV was a revision of the Bishhops' Bible, the translators made much use of the Gneva Bible, and even took some phrasing from the Douai Bible.

Contents

The 1st edition, published in 1611, comprised the following:

1. title page
2. dedication to King James
3. translators' foreword
4. calendar, including listings of the Bible passages to be read and sung in church each day (these cover the whole New Testament, most of the Old, and a good deal of the Apocrypha)
5. table of contents
6. genealogies
7. gazetteer and map
8. Old Testament
9. Apocrypha
10. New Testament

Most modern reprints include only 1, 5, 8 and 10, and perhaps 2, but a 400th-anniversary edition has been published by Oxford University Press including everything in the original, with only the typefaces changed from the original "black-letter" (or "gothic") to a more modern style.

The 16th-century Puritans had included the Apocrypha in their Geneva Bible, but their successors developed a more negative attitude, and removed the Apocrypha in the period of their dominance in the middle of the 17th century. After the Restoration in 1660 the Apocrypha were restored, and continued to be included in most editions published in England. However, this gradually changed around 1800 as a result of the missionary movement. The demand for cheap mass-market Bibles resulted in the frequent omission of the Apocrypha to reduce printing and distribution costs. This was reinforced by theological concerns, and in the 1820s the Scots bullied the Bible Society into adopting a rule excluding the Apocrypha from all their subsidized mass-market bibles, and most 19th- and 20th-century editions follow this practice; though complete editions were always available from the university presses, they were much more expensive, and the Apocrypha gradually sank beneath the awareness of most Anglicans. Availability changed with the appearance in 1997 of the Oxford World's Classics edition of the Bible, which was a complete AV including the Apocrypha at a fairly cheap price.

Bible Society rules also banned all notes and comments. The 1st edition included the following, which were thus also omitted from most later editions:

1. marginal notes referring to related passages elsewhere
2. another series of marginal notes giving
   1. alternative possibilities as to the meaning of the original
   2. literal translations where the translators felt it necessary to translate more freely
   3. explanations of puns in the original languages
3. summaries at the beginnings of chapters, and at tops of pages

Text

Strictly speaking it might be said that there is no such thing as "the" Authorized Version. Even copies of the original 1611 issue differ, owing to the way printing was organized at that period. A second printing in the same year changed "he" to "she" in one passage. By 1629, in a number of passages where the 1611 text had translated freely, giving a literal version in a note, the literal version had replaced the free one, and some other "corrections" were made. Substantial evolution of the text continued for well over a century. Spelling was standardized, for example, something that was happening in the English language generally over the same period. In 1611 it was arbitrary: Shakespeare didn't even spell his own name consistently, and compositors regularly adjusted spelling to justify lines. Furthermore, the 1611 Bible was written in a 24-letter alphabet, with i/j and u/v as positional variants only (note for example "reuised" and "Maiesties" in the title quoted above). Also made consistent was the use of 2nd-person plural pronouns, with "ye" for nominative and vocative, "you" for accusative. The language was partially updated, with some obsolete words ("sith", "sithen") removed, and "it" as genitive changed to "its". Eventually the text was largely standardized in the 1760s, with Parris's Cambridge edition of 1760, and Blayney's Oxford edition of 1769, which largely followed it. Most modern editions are based on the 1769 text, though not identical to it. The current Oxford text has a few dozen differences from it, and the Cambidge text has a few differences from the Oxford one, now confined to the Apocrypha after Cambridge removed its last remaining difference elsewhere in 1985. The traditional American text differs rather more, changing the spelling of some proper names and continuing the partial updating of the English rather more (e.g. "astonied" to "astonished").

A new edition appeared in 1873, the Cambridge Paragraph Bible, edited by F.H.A. Scrivener. This took its name from its abandonment of the original format in numbered prose "verses" in favour of a modern arrangement in paragraphs of prose and lines of poetry. It significantly changed the text as well as the format. It was recently adopted as the basis for Zondervan's KJV.

David Norton's New Cambridge Paragraph Bible of 2005 is not a revision of Scrivener, though it has similarities. Its objective is to undo all editorial changes from 1611 on, to reconstruct what the translators intended to be printed by comparing surviving copies and translators' notes, and then to carry out a partial update of the English. For example, the weak past tense "digged" is replaced by the strong form "dug". On the other hand, other archaisms, such as "thou", are retained. As "thou" went out of standard English usage in the 17th century and "dug" is not recorded before the 18th, the NCPB seems to be written in a form of the language that was never standard English at any point in history.

Religious status

There is in fact no surviving documentation to prove this translation was ever actually officially "authorized", that is to say, "appointed to be read in churches" as stated on the original title page. However, the Privy Council records for this period are lost, so the negative can also not be proved. Certainly the Church of England behaved as if it had been so authorized, using it for scripture readings in church services. The 1662 revision of the Book of Common Prayer used it for its scripture quotations. In practice it came to be regarded as the official Bible of the Church of England, and in theory still is. As an official document of the state religion it is crown copyright, though of course this has no force in other countries. The Sovereign is presented with a copy of it at the coronation (including the Apocrypha).

However, in 1974 Parliament repealed the Act of Uniformity, so that use of the BCP is no longer obligatory, and its use has declined to about 3%; use of the AV has declined along with it. In practice, then, its main public religious use is now outside the Church of England, among some churches of a more or less fundamentalist inclination, mainly in the USA, but also including the church founded by the late Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland. Some of these groups, in practice, sometimes even in theory, treat the KJV as itself infallible (though not of course the Apocrypha, of whose very existence they are often unaware).

Literary aspects

The AV displaced the Geneva Bible in popularity in a few decades, but took longer to win over literary critics. By the 1760s, however, the Bible and Shakespeare were "canonized" as the two Great Books in English. This is still true to some extent; see for example Desert Island Discs. Even the atheist writer Philip Pullman has supported the teaching of the AV in schools for its poetic language. On the other hand the Christian critic C.S. Lewis said there was nothing particularly special about this translation, that its literary qualities were largely derived from the originals, and that any good translation would be about as good.

The AV translates a good deal more literally than most modern versions (perhaps they had more faith in God's ability to make his meaning clear as and when he thought fit). The result is inevitably not idiomatic English a lot of the time, though some literal translations have become adopted into the language, e.g. "gave up the ghost".