(BA) KJV

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23 July 2022 - 29 April 2023
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The King James Version or KJV, known in its home country of England as the Authorised Version or AV, was from shortly after its creation in 1611 until about two generations ago the de facto standard Bible of the English-speaking world. It was a magnificent achievement in its time, although it did build on the efforts of earlier translations of the Bible into English.

The previous works on which it was based were the Bibles of Tyndale and Coverdale, along with the Geneva Bible and Bishop's Bible. It quickly became the standard Protestant Bible, although its Catholic rival, the Douai-Rheims Bible, retained some use among English-speaking Catholics into the 1900's.^[1]

Interestingly, the KJV and Douai-Rheims Bible each influenced the other. Originally, the Douai-Rheims New Testament was produced in 1582, and its wording influenced the KJV in many places. Later, in the 1700's, the Douai-Rheims Bible was extensively revised by Richard Challoner, producing a new Bible which was still called Douai-Rheims, but in fact looked more like the KJV than it did the old Douai-Rheims.

It was also in the 1700's, more precisely in 1769, that the KJV reached -- more or less -- its present form, almost entirely through the replacement of the old spellings of 1611 with newer English spellings. The translation itself, beyond spellings, was virtually unchanged over the period, and just about any KJV you find today, online or off, will be exactly or almost exactly the 1769 version.

After 1769, the KJV remains virtually frozen and had the nearly unanimous usage of English-speaking Protestants. Though it would not be knocked out of its leading position until the second half of the twentieth-century, portions of the English-speaking world, and especially academia, saw the need for its replacement a bit sooner. Perhaps the first major step in the direction of replacing it came with the production of the Revised Version (RV) in England, which appeared in 1885.

The RV was revised again, to produce the American Standard Version (ASV) of 1901. It, in turn, was succeeded by the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of 1946, 1952, 1957, and 1971; after which came the New Revised Standard Version of 1989. I think, if there was a "main line" of widely used English translation, it would best be described as the KJV-RV-ASV-RSV-NRSV lineage, although a variety of other translations of varying merits exist, including the NJPS, NASB, NIV, NKJV, ESV, and CSB.

One flaw, from my standpoint, in this "main line" of translations is that, after the ASV, all are under copyright still, meaning that their publication and re-use are limited. In the age of the internet, this, ironically, has resulted in the persistance of the KJV, which can be used online by anybody without any restrictions, except perhaps in England, where it remains under some kind of copyright, though I do not know how well it is enforced.

To the extent that there is a public domain continuation of that "main line", at present I believe it exists mainly in the World English Bible and New Heart English Bible, both largely one-man projects of a conservative evangelical flavor. However, as a public domain translation can always be revised by anybody, there remains hope that perhaps a widely used, scholarly revision in that tradition will one day exist.

I certainly don't have the time, skill, or resources to do justice to that task, but on this website I am doing a tiny bit here and there to encourage work in that direction. Where I post revisions of chapters from the ASV, I am now working to diligently compare them to the World English Bible, and to see whether I can take from it anything useful, while trying to leave useful comments in my translation notes on ways that the World English Bible might be improved. This will likely be an on-again, off-again effort for some time -- I do not know whether I will complete it in any real sense of the word.

Electronic Editions

Some time in or before 1987, electronic copies of the KJV began to circulate. I still have not adequately untangled that story.

Online Facsimiles

For a selected list I've compiled of electronic facsimiles of printed KJV's, see here.

Further Reading

Scrivener's introductory matter to his Paragraph Bible. Norton's Textual History. Perhaps: Robert Haldane, Review of the conduct of the directors of the British and Foreign Bible Society relative to the Apocrypha and to their administration on the continent.

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