DID YOU KNOW

KING JAMES BIBLE

Although it is referred to as the King James Version, the only active part King James took in the translation was limiting the criminal (death) penalty attached to its translation and setting very reasonable guidelines for the translation process.

By the time the King James Version was written, there was already a tradition going back almost two hundred years of Bible translation into English. Many of the vernacular (the mode of expression of a group or class) translations of the time were said to be filled with "heretical" (of, relating to, or characterized by departure from accepted beliefs or standards) translations and notes and were thus banned by the Church. The English translation of the Bible authorized by the Roman Catholic Church was the contemporary Douay-Rheims version which was a strict translation of the Latin Vulgate.

The King James Bible represents a revision of Tyndale's translation. Tyndale's New Testament appeared in 1525. Despite controversial renderings, the merits of Tyndale's work and prose style made his translation the basis for most of the subsequent renditions into Early Modern English, although Tyndale's own life ended with being strangled and having his body burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic authorities for his alleged heresy.

The King James Version 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 Eight and Edward the Sixth were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original."

King James 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, 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:

1...The ordinary Bible, read in the church, commonly called the Bishop's Bible, to be followed, and as little altered as the original will permit...
2...The old ecclesiastical words to be kept, as the word church, not to e translate congregation...
3...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...
4...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 text...
5...such quotations of places to be marginally set down, as shall serve for the fit references of one scripture to another...
6...These translations to be used when they agree better with the text than the Bishops' Bible, Tyndale's, Coverdale's, Matthew Bible, Whitchurch, Geneva.

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.)"

At least 80% of the King James New Testament is unaltered from Tyndale's translation.

SOURCE: Wikipedia