The King James Bible represents a revision of Tyndale's translation. When his New Testament appeared in 1525, as far as denominational labels had any meaning in this early phase of the Reformation, Tyndale was a Lutheran, in other words, a supporter of Luther's movement to reform the whole Christian community.
When Mary I took the throne, she sought to re-establish Roman Catholicism as the Established Church. Some English Protestant leaders, fleeing the "fires of Smithfield" instituted by Queen Mary in co-operation with Roman Catholic policy, established an English-speaking Protestant colony at Geneva. With the help of Theodore Beza, successor to John Calvin as leader of the Reformed church there, they created the Geneva Bible. This translation, which first appeared in 1560, was a revision of Tyndale's and the Great Bible, which was furnished copiously with Protestant annotations and references. Many of these marginal notes were to be substantially expanded and revised towards more explicitly anti-papal exegisis in subsequent editions. The 1599 edition in particular controversially incorporated Franciscus Junius's notations and commentary on the Book of Revelation in English translation; whose bulk greatly exceeded that of the scriptural text.
In May 1601, King James VI of Scotland attended the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland at St. Columba's Church in Burntisland, Fife, and proposals were put forward for a new translation of the Bible into English. Two years later, he acceded to the throne of England as King James I of England. (He is therefore sometimes known as "James the Sixth and First".)
The King James Version (KJV) was first conceived at the Hampton Court Conference, which the new king convened in January 1604, in response to the problems posed by Puritans in the Millenary Petition. According to an eyewitness account, Dr John Rainolds "moved his majesty that there might be a new translation of the Bible, because those which were allowed in the reign of king Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original."
Rainolds offered three examples of problems with existing translations: "First, Galatians iv. 25. The Greek word susoichei is not well translated as now it is, bordereth neither expressing the force of the word, nor the apostles sense, nor the situation of the place. Secondly, psalm cv. 28, ‘They were not obedient;’ the original being, ‘They were not disobedient.’ Thirdly, psalm cvi. 30, ‘Then stood up Phinees and prayed,’ the Hebrew hath, ‘executed judgment.’"
King James proposed that a new translation be commissioned to settle the controversies; he hoped a new translation would replace the Geneva Bible and its offensive notes in the popular esteem. After the Bishop of London added a qualification that no marginal notes were to be added to Rainold’s new Bible, the king cited two passages in the Geneva translation where he found the notes offensive. King James gave the translators instructions, which were designed to discourage polemical notes, and to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology of the Church of England.
King James' instructions included requirements that:
The ordinary Bible, read in the church, commonly called the Bishops' Bible, to be followed, and as little altered as the original will permit....
The old ecclesiastical words to be kept; as the word church, not to be translated congregation.
When any word hath divers significations, that to be kept which has been most commonly used by the most eminent fathers, being agreeable to the propriety of the place, and the analogy of the faith....
No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words, which cannot, without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the text.
Such quotations of places to be marginally set down, as shall serve for the fit references of one scripture to another....
These translations to be used when they agree better with the text than the Bishops' Bible, viz. Tyndale Bible, Coverdale Bible, Matthew's Bible, Great Bible, Geneva Bible. (Influence from Taverner's Bible and the New Testament of the Douai-Rheims Bible can also be detected, but the Douai Old Testament was published too late to have any effect.)
King James's instructions made it clear that he wanted the resulting translation to contain a minimum of controversial notes and apparatus, and that he wanted the episcopal structure of the Established Church, and traditional beliefs about an ordained clergy to be reflected in the new translation. His order directed the translators to revise the Bishop's Bible, comparing other named English versions. It is for this reason that the flyleaves of most printings of the King James Bible observe that the text had been " translated out of the original tongues, and with the former translations diligently compared and revised (by His Majesty's special command.) "
The King James Version was translated by 47 scholars (although 54 were originally contracted) working in six committees, two based in each of the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and Westminster. They worked on certain parts separately; then the drafts produced by each committee were compared and revised for harmony with each other. The scholars were not paid for their translation work, but were required to support themselves as best they could. Many were supported by the various colleges at Oxford and Cambridge.
The King James Version was translated primarily from Greek and Hebrew texts, with only secondary reference to the Latin Vulgate. The King James Version is a formal translation of these base sources; words implied but not actually in the original source are specially marked in most printings (either by being inside square brackets, or as italicized text)
For their Old Testament, the translators worked from editions of the Hebrew Rabbinic Bible by Daniel Bromberg (1524/5); but adjusted the text in several places to conform to the Greek LXX or Latin Vulgate - in passages to which Christian tradition had tended to attach a Christological interpretation; as, for example, the reading "they pierced my hands and my feet" in Psalm 22:16. Otherwise, however, the King James Version is closer to the Hebrew tradition than any previous translation (Daiches 1941)- especially in making use of the rabbinic commentaries, such as Kimchi, in elucidating obscure passages in the Masoretic Text; where earlier versions were more likely to adopt LXX or Vulgate readings.
For their New Testament, the translators chiefly used the 1598 and 1588/89 Greek editions of Theodore Beza; which also presents Beza's Latin version of the Greek and Stephanus's edition of the Latin Vulgate; both of which versions were extensively referred to - as the translators conducted all discussions amongst themselves in Latin. F.H.A. Scrivener (1884) identifies 190 readings where the King James translators depart from Beza's Greek text, generally in maintaining the wording of the Bishop's Bible or another earlier English translation. In about half of these instances, the King James translators appear to follow the earlier 1550 Greek Textus Receptus of Stephanus. For the other half, Scrivener was usually able to find corresponding Greek readings in the editions of Erasmus, or the Complutensian Polyglot; but in several readings he notes that no printed Greek text corresponds closely to the English of the King James version - which in these readings derives rather from the Vulgate. For example, the name "Beelzebul" at Matthew 12:25 (and six further readings in the Gospels) is consistently rendered in the King James Version as "Beelzebub", following the Vulgate Latin, but no Greek text. The King James New Testament owes much more to the Vulgate than does the Old Testament; but still, at least 80% of the text is unaltered from Tyndale's translation.
The books of the Apocrypha were translated from the Septuagint - most likely, primarily, from the Greek Old Testament column in the Antwerp Polyglot - but with extensive reference to the counterpart Latin Vulgate text. It is also possible that the translators made use of the Sixtine Septuagint of 1587, which is substantially a printing of the Old Testament text from the Codex Vaticanus.
The translators appear to have made no first-hand study of ancient manuscript sources; even those which - like the Codex Bezae would have been readily available to them. However, they made wide and eclectic use of all printed editions in the original languages then available - and also to ancient and recent translations into other languages, in addition to English.
Modern critical biblical translations differ substantially from the King James Version in a number of passages, primarily because they rely on source manuscripts not then accessible to (or not then highly regarded by) early 17th Century Biblical Scholarship. Some conservative fundamentalist Protestants believe that these source manuscripts should be rejected as corrupt; and that the King James Version is truer to the original languages. This preference is partially because many modern versions often excise or marginalize certain verses deemed by modern scholarship as later additions to the original text and thus are seen by traditionalists as tampering with the sacred text.Those defending this view invariably also limit the scope of sacred scripture to Old and New Testaments alone -rejecting the King James Version in the books of the Apocrypha.
In the Old Testament, there are also many differences from modern translations that are based not on manuscript differences, but on a different translation of Ancient Hebrew vocabulary or grammar by the translators. Hebrew scholarship by non-Jews was not as developed in the early 17th century as it is now. The New Testament is largely unaffected by this as the grasp of Koine Greek was already quite firm in the West by the time the translation was made. The difference is partially caused by the fact that while there is a very large and diverse body of extra-biblical material extant in Ancient Greek, there is very little such material in Ancient Hebrew, and probably not even this little was known to the translators at the time. Additionally, Hebrew scholarship in modern times has been much improved by information gleaned from Aramaic (Syriac) and Arabic, two Semitic languages related to Ancient Hebrew, both of which have a continuous existence as living languages. Since these languages are still in use and have larger bodies of extant material than Ancient Hebrew (especially in the case of Arabic), many Hebrew words and Hebrew grammar phenomena can now be understood in a way not available at the time the King James Version was written.
The King James Version is notably more Latinate than previous English versions, especially the Geneva Bible. This results in part from the academic stylistic preferences of a number of the translators - several of whom admitted to being more comfortable in Latin than in English - but was also, in part, a consequence of the royal proscription against explanatory notes. Hence, where the Geneva Bible might use a common English word - and gloss its particular application in a marginal note; the King James version tends rather to prefer a technical term, frequently in Anglicised Latin. Consequently, although the King had instructed the translators to use the Bishop's Bible as a base text, the New Testament in particular, stylistically owes something to the Catholic Rheims New Testament, whose translators had also been concerned to find English equivalents for Latin terminology.
The original printing was made before English spelling was standardised. They wrote "v" invariably for lower-case initial "u" and "v", and "u" for "u" and "v" everywhere else. They used long "ſ" for non-final "s". The letter "j" occurs only after "i" or as the final letter in a Roman numeral. Punctuation was used differently. The printers sometimes used ye for the, (replacing the Middle English thorn with the continental y) and wrote ã for an or am (in the style of scribe's shorthand) and so forth when space needed to be saved. Current printings remove most, but not all, of the variant spellings; the punctuation has also been changed, but still varies from current usage norms.
The first printing used a black letter typeface instead of a Roman typeface, which itself made a political and a religious statement. Like the Great Bible and the Bishops' Bible, the King James Bible was "appointed to be read in churches". It was a large folio volume meant for public use, not private devotion; the weight of the type mirrored the weight of establishment authority behind it. However, smaller editions and Roman-type editions followed rapidly; e.g. quarto Roman-type editions of the Bible in 1612 (Herbert #313/314). This contrasted with the Geneva Bible, which was the first English Bible printed in a Roman typeface (although black-letter editions, particularly in folio format, were issued later).
The KJV also used Roman type instead of italics to indicate text that had been supplied by the translators, or thought needful for English grammar but which was not present in the Greek or Hebrew. In the first printing, the device of having different type faces to show supplied words was used sparsely and inconsistently. This is perhaps the most significant difference between the original text and the current text.
Current printings of the King James Bible are typically based on an edition published at the University of Oxford in 1769, edited by Benjamin Blayney, and contain substantially the same text; however, there are a number of differences between the 1769 and the 1611. But these are limited to punctuation, spelling and other minor etymological corrections. Based on comparison, the differences amount to 1/20th of 1%. The Oxford edition applied the device of supplying italics for absent words much more thoroughly, corrected a number of minor errors in punctuation, and made the spelling more consistent and updated (that is, to the standards of the 18th century). However, in 2005, Cambridge University Press released its New Cambridge Paragraph Bible, edited by David Norton, which modernized the spelling much more thoroughly (that is, to present-day standards) and introduced quotation marks.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
When Mary I took the throne, she sought to re-establish Roman Catholicism as the Established Church. Some English Protestant leaders, fleeing the "fires of Smithfield" instituted by Queen Mary in co-operation with Roman Catholic policy, established an English-speaking Protestant colony at Geneva. With the help of Theodore Beza, successor to John Calvin as leader of the Reformed church there, they created the Geneva Bible. This translation, which first appeared in 1560, was a revision of Tyndale's and the Great Bible, which was furnished copiously with Protestant annotations and references. Many of these marginal notes were to be substantially expanded and revised towards more explicitly anti-papal exegisis in subsequent editions. The 1599 edition in particular controversially incorporated Franciscus Junius's notations and commentary on the Book of Revelation in English translation; whose bulk greatly exceeded that of the scriptural text.
In May 1601, King James VI of Scotland attended the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland at St. Columba's Church in Burntisland, Fife, and proposals were put forward for a new translation of the Bible into English. Two years later, he acceded to the throne of England as King James I of England. (He is therefore sometimes known as "James the Sixth and First".)
The King James Version (KJV) was first conceived at the Hampton Court Conference, which the new king convened in January 1604, in response to the problems posed by Puritans in the Millenary Petition. According to an eyewitness account, Dr John Rainolds "moved his majesty that there might be a new translation of the Bible, because those which were allowed in the reign of king Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original."
Rainolds offered three examples of problems with existing translations: "First, Galatians iv. 25. The Greek word susoichei is not well translated as now it is, bordereth neither expressing the force of the word, nor the apostles sense, nor the situation of the place. Secondly, psalm cv. 28, ‘They were not obedient;’ the original being, ‘They were not disobedient.’ Thirdly, psalm cvi. 30, ‘Then stood up Phinees and prayed,’ the Hebrew hath, ‘executed judgment.’"
King James proposed that a new translation be commissioned to settle the controversies; he hoped a new translation would replace the Geneva Bible and its offensive notes in the popular esteem. After the Bishop of London added a qualification that no marginal notes were to be added to Rainold’s new Bible, the king cited two passages in the Geneva translation where he found the notes offensive. King James gave the translators instructions, which were designed to discourage polemical notes, and to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology of the Church of England.
King James' instructions included requirements that:
The ordinary Bible, read in the church, commonly called the Bishops' Bible, to be followed, and as little altered as the original will permit....
The old ecclesiastical words to be kept; as the word church, not to be translated congregation.
When any word hath divers significations, that to be kept which has been most commonly used by the most eminent fathers, being agreeable to the propriety of the place, and the analogy of the faith....
No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words, which cannot, without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the text.
Such quotations of places to be marginally set down, as shall serve for the fit references of one scripture to another....
These translations to be used when they agree better with the text than the Bishops' Bible, viz. Tyndale Bible, Coverdale Bible, Matthew's Bible, Great Bible, Geneva Bible. (Influence from Taverner's Bible and the New Testament of the Douai-Rheims Bible can also be detected, but the Douai Old Testament was published too late to have any effect.)
King James's instructions made it clear that he wanted the resulting translation to contain a minimum of controversial notes and apparatus, and that he wanted the episcopal structure of the Established Church, and traditional beliefs about an ordained clergy to be reflected in the new translation. His order directed the translators to revise the Bishop's Bible, comparing other named English versions. It is for this reason that the flyleaves of most printings of the King James Bible observe that the text had been " translated out of the original tongues, and with the former translations diligently compared and revised (by His Majesty's special command.) "
The King James Version was translated by 47 scholars (although 54 were originally contracted) working in six committees, two based in each of the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and Westminster. They worked on certain parts separately; then the drafts produced by each committee were compared and revised for harmony with each other. The scholars were not paid for their translation work, but were required to support themselves as best they could. Many were supported by the various colleges at Oxford and Cambridge.
The King James Version was translated primarily from Greek and Hebrew texts, with only secondary reference to the Latin Vulgate. The King James Version is a formal translation of these base sources; words implied but not actually in the original source are specially marked in most printings (either by being inside square brackets, or as italicized text)
For their Old Testament, the translators worked from editions of the Hebrew Rabbinic Bible by Daniel Bromberg (1524/5); but adjusted the text in several places to conform to the Greek LXX or Latin Vulgate - in passages to which Christian tradition had tended to attach a Christological interpretation; as, for example, the reading "they pierced my hands and my feet" in Psalm 22:16. Otherwise, however, the King James Version is closer to the Hebrew tradition than any previous translation (Daiches 1941)- especially in making use of the rabbinic commentaries, such as Kimchi, in elucidating obscure passages in the Masoretic Text; where earlier versions were more likely to adopt LXX or Vulgate readings.
For their New Testament, the translators chiefly used the 1598 and 1588/89 Greek editions of Theodore Beza; which also presents Beza's Latin version of the Greek and Stephanus's edition of the Latin Vulgate; both of which versions were extensively referred to - as the translators conducted all discussions amongst themselves in Latin. F.H.A. Scrivener (1884) identifies 190 readings where the King James translators depart from Beza's Greek text, generally in maintaining the wording of the Bishop's Bible or another earlier English translation. In about half of these instances, the King James translators appear to follow the earlier 1550 Greek Textus Receptus of Stephanus. For the other half, Scrivener was usually able to find corresponding Greek readings in the editions of Erasmus, or the Complutensian Polyglot; but in several readings he notes that no printed Greek text corresponds closely to the English of the King James version - which in these readings derives rather from the Vulgate. For example, the name "Beelzebul" at Matthew 12:25 (and six further readings in the Gospels) is consistently rendered in the King James Version as "Beelzebub", following the Vulgate Latin, but no Greek text. The King James New Testament owes much more to the Vulgate than does the Old Testament; but still, at least 80% of the text is unaltered from Tyndale's translation.
The books of the Apocrypha were translated from the Septuagint - most likely, primarily, from the Greek Old Testament column in the Antwerp Polyglot - but with extensive reference to the counterpart Latin Vulgate text. It is also possible that the translators made use of the Sixtine Septuagint of 1587, which is substantially a printing of the Old Testament text from the Codex Vaticanus.
The translators appear to have made no first-hand study of ancient manuscript sources; even those which - like the Codex Bezae would have been readily available to them. However, they made wide and eclectic use of all printed editions in the original languages then available - and also to ancient and recent translations into other languages, in addition to English.
Modern critical biblical translations differ substantially from the King James Version in a number of passages, primarily because they rely on source manuscripts not then accessible to (or not then highly regarded by) early 17th Century Biblical Scholarship. Some conservative fundamentalist Protestants believe that these source manuscripts should be rejected as corrupt; and that the King James Version is truer to the original languages. This preference is partially because many modern versions often excise or marginalize certain verses deemed by modern scholarship as later additions to the original text and thus are seen by traditionalists as tampering with the sacred text.Those defending this view invariably also limit the scope of sacred scripture to Old and New Testaments alone -rejecting the King James Version in the books of the Apocrypha.
In the Old Testament, there are also many differences from modern translations that are based not on manuscript differences, but on a different translation of Ancient Hebrew vocabulary or grammar by the translators. Hebrew scholarship by non-Jews was not as developed in the early 17th century as it is now. The New Testament is largely unaffected by this as the grasp of Koine Greek was already quite firm in the West by the time the translation was made. The difference is partially caused by the fact that while there is a very large and diverse body of extra-biblical material extant in Ancient Greek, there is very little such material in Ancient Hebrew, and probably not even this little was known to the translators at the time. Additionally, Hebrew scholarship in modern times has been much improved by information gleaned from Aramaic (Syriac) and Arabic, two Semitic languages related to Ancient Hebrew, both of which have a continuous existence as living languages. Since these languages are still in use and have larger bodies of extant material than Ancient Hebrew (especially in the case of Arabic), many Hebrew words and Hebrew grammar phenomena can now be understood in a way not available at the time the King James Version was written.
The King James Version is notably more Latinate than previous English versions, especially the Geneva Bible. This results in part from the academic stylistic preferences of a number of the translators - several of whom admitted to being more comfortable in Latin than in English - but was also, in part, a consequence of the royal proscription against explanatory notes. Hence, where the Geneva Bible might use a common English word - and gloss its particular application in a marginal note; the King James version tends rather to prefer a technical term, frequently in Anglicised Latin. Consequently, although the King had instructed the translators to use the Bishop's Bible as a base text, the New Testament in particular, stylistically owes something to the Catholic Rheims New Testament, whose translators had also been concerned to find English equivalents for Latin terminology.
The original printing was made before English spelling was standardised. They wrote "v" invariably for lower-case initial "u" and "v", and "u" for "u" and "v" everywhere else. They used long "ſ" for non-final "s". The letter "j" occurs only after "i" or as the final letter in a Roman numeral. Punctuation was used differently. The printers sometimes used ye for the, (replacing the Middle English thorn with the continental y) and wrote ã for an or am (in the style of scribe's shorthand) and so forth when space needed to be saved. Current printings remove most, but not all, of the variant spellings; the punctuation has also been changed, but still varies from current usage norms.
The first printing used a black letter typeface instead of a Roman typeface, which itself made a political and a religious statement. Like the Great Bible and the Bishops' Bible, the King James Bible was "appointed to be read in churches". It was a large folio volume meant for public use, not private devotion; the weight of the type mirrored the weight of establishment authority behind it. However, smaller editions and Roman-type editions followed rapidly; e.g. quarto Roman-type editions of the Bible in 1612 (Herbert #313/314). This contrasted with the Geneva Bible, which was the first English Bible printed in a Roman typeface (although black-letter editions, particularly in folio format, were issued later).
The KJV also used Roman type instead of italics to indicate text that had been supplied by the translators, or thought needful for English grammar but which was not present in the Greek or Hebrew. In the first printing, the device of having different type faces to show supplied words was used sparsely and inconsistently. This is perhaps the most significant difference between the original text and the current text.
Current printings of the King James Bible are typically based on an edition published at the University of Oxford in 1769, edited by Benjamin Blayney, and contain substantially the same text; however, there are a number of differences between the 1769 and the 1611. But these are limited to punctuation, spelling and other minor etymological corrections. Based on comparison, the differences amount to 1/20th of 1%. The Oxford edition applied the device of supplying italics for absent words much more thoroughly, corrected a number of minor errors in punctuation, and made the spelling more consistent and updated (that is, to the standards of the 18th century). However, in 2005, Cambridge University Press released its New Cambridge Paragraph Bible, edited by David Norton, which modernized the spelling much more thoroughly (that is, to present-day standards) and introduced quotation marks.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
