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 A revision of this was produced in 1537 by Thomas Matthew (thought to be a pseudonym of John Rogers), making use of unpublished manuscript translations of more of the Old Testament by Tyndale.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 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.

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 Apocrypha were omitted in the period of Puritan dominance in the middle of the 17th century, they by that time having developed a more negative attitude than their 16th-century predecessors, who had included the Apocrypha in their Geneva Bible. After the Restoration in 1660 the Apocrypha were restored, and continued to be included in most editions. 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. 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. 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").