Ten things you need to know about the King James Bible
[Nick Page]
Amidst all the literary luvvies gushing over the quality of the prose and the RADA trained voices reading it in Radio 4 speak a few salient facts aren’t getting much attention. So here are ten things you ought to know about the KJV. They are taken from God’s Dangerous Book – a book on the history of the Bible…. But here’s the shorter version:
Ten things you need to know about the King James Bible
1. It was widely ignored on publication. Far from being an instant classic, The King James, or Authorised Version, was widely ignored on first publication for one very good reason: hardly anyone wanted it in the first place.
2. It was never intended as a means of giving the Bible to the people: it was intended as a way of stopping them using the Bible they already had. The people already had a great English translation – the Geneva version. James I hated that because he thought its footnotes were seditious. So he specifically commanded that the new version should be done without footnotes.
3. It was a revision not a new translation. James ordered that it be based on the text of the Bishops’ Bible of 1568. James instructed that the new version was to be ‘as little altered as the truth of the original [i.e. the Bishop’s Bible] will permit’.
4. It was a politically motivated translation. James also instructed that ‘the old ecclesiastical words to be kept, viz. the word Church not to be translated Congregation.’ James insisted that ekklesia be translated as church and that the word ‘bishop’ be used instead of ‘elder’. So you get verses like Acts 1.20, where the Geneva Bible has