The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today by David Norton

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 231

The King James Bible is a pillar in the history of Christianity and in the history of the English language. Norton has devoted much of his career to studying the history of the King James text, and this is a helpful and detailed introduction. Two things are clear when reading about the King James Bible: first, it has a long lineage stretching back to Tyndale's 1526 New Testament and proceeding through the Coverdale, Matthew, Great, and Bishop's Bibles; second, the King James itself continued to develop for quite some time from the first edition of 1611 until the "standard text" stabilized in the Blayney Oxford edition of 1769. I hope the diagrams I constructed from Norton's narrative, presented below, illustrate this point.

This text serves as background motivation for reading the King James from the New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with Apocrypha. Norton's edition of the KJB is the best of both worlds in that it restores as much as possible the intentions of the 1611 translators while also "dusting off" the text—spelling, punctuation, layout—to make it comprehensible to modern eyes and ears. Recently I have been reading the NCPB out loud to my two oldest sons (7 and 5), and they comprehend it just fine with the occasional explanation of an odd word or phrase.

A final point to make is that the Deuterocanonical Books, or Apocrypha, have always been a part of the King James tradition. Norton's textual history makes this abundantly clear despite the trend in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to print incomplete Bibles without these books. I hope that the NCPB may help open our eyes to the intentions of the 1611 translators, which include frequent reading of the deuterocanon. Indeed, English-speaking Catholics cannot ignore the immense history of the King James Bible, and "the time has come when all real Protestants should demand the whole Bible".²

Notes

Contents

Chapter 1: Predecessors
Chapter 2: Drafting the King James Bible
- Joseph and Mary
- The Fall
Chapter 3: 'I was a translator'
Chapter 4: Working on the King James Bible
Chapter 5: 1611: the first edition
Chapter 6: Printing, editing and the development of a standard text
Chapter 7: Reputation and future

Chapter 1: Predecessors

Summary: Gives an outline of the texts from Tyndale to the KJV, including the translation sources. This is helpful for expanding the Bible Translation Chart.

Originals and Texts

The KJV is "the most important book in English religion and culture." (1)
The story of the KJV starts with the writing of the Hebrew Bible: "Reverence for the text and the problems of understaning it are essential background to the story of books, scholarship and men that becomes the story of the King James Bible." (2)
The Old Testament is most of what survives of ancient Hebrew. It has a small vocabulary of 8,000 words: 1,000 occur only once, and 4/5 occur less than 20 times. (2)
Ancient translations of the Hebrew include: Aramaic (sixth century BC), Septuagint (third century BC), Vulgate (404)
There was little variation among Hebrew texts given their long tradition (3). But the Greek NT was later to be printed and slower to take a standard form, for example Erasmus "supplied his own Greek translation based on the Vulgate" in places: "Sometimes the results do not correspond to any Greek manuscripts, yet have remained in the Received Text." (4-5)
Erasmus' text became known as the 'Textus Receptus', Received Text, and "there was a strong sense that the Greek text had attained a similar authenticity to that of the Hebrew." It remained the standard text into the nineteenth century. (5)
The Textus Receptus has a special status and importance from majority attestation and traditional use, but modern textual criticism and knowledge of many more manuscripts now make it clear that this is not the closest we can get to the lost originals of the NT. (5)

The First Draft: William Tyndale

The KJV translators thought of themselves as revisers of the Bishops' Bible of 1568 and Tyndale's translation, not as creators of a new translation. (7)
"Without Tyndale, the English Bible would have been a different and, in all likelihood, lesser thing. Reading the KJB, we are for long stretches reading Tyndale, sometimes little revised, sometimes substantially worked over." (8)
Tyndale "was the one who came closest to working from teh original languages alone." (8)
Tyndale's first study was the original language text, and his primary effort was to be as true to it as possible, including keeping to its "phrase or manner of speech." (9)
"The Bible in English shaped Protestant English-speaking culture. It was not just that the Bible was read, heart, and known: the Bible in English made the individualistic act of reading and understanding primary, creating a culture wedded to the belief that understood words were of the highest importance. Besides this, the Bible, more than any other writing in English, shaped the English language." (11)
"The audience he had in mind did not know Latin. Latin was far less assimilated into English then than it is now. The common people would have heard much of what we take for granted as English as a foreign language only partly assimilated into their own, and they would have found Latin sentence structures very alien to their own way of talking. Any attempt to write with the eloquence of the classics would have sinned against both comprehensibility and the English languages just as much as literal translation would have." (12-13)

Revision, Completion of the First Draft, and More Revision: Myles Coverdale

1535 Coverdale Bible: Myles Coverdale completed and revised the work begun by Tyndale, producing the first complete English printed Bible (OT, Apocrypha, and NT) in 1535. He relied on the Vulgate, Pagninus, Luther's Bible, and the 1524-9 Zurich Bible to translate 2/3 of the Bible in about a year. (14-15)
Coverdale regarded translation as "no more than approximation to the meaning" and implies favor for a variety of translations, from his Prologue:
- "Sure I am that there cometh more knowledge and understanding of the Scripture by their sundry translations than by all the glosses of our sophistical doctors. For that one interpreteth something obscurely in one place, the same translateth another, or else he himself, more manifestly by a more plain vocable of the same meaning in another place. Be not thou offended therefore, good reader, though one call a scribe that another calleth a lawyer... For if thou be not deceived by men's traditions, thou shalt find no more diversity between these terms than between four pence and a groat. And this manner have I used in my translation, calling it in some place penance that in another place I call repentance, and that not only because the interpreters have done so before me, but that the adversaries of the truth may see how that we abhor not this word penance, as they untruly report of us." (15, against 2022-11-15-Liturgiam authenticam)
1537 Matthew Bible: John Rogers (pseudonym Thomas Matthew) revised Coverdale and reverted to Tyndale for the NT and Pentateuch.

The First 'Authorized' Version: The Great Bible
1539 Great Bible / Cranmer Bible: The first major revision under the English Church, done by Coverdale (Great Bible > Bishop's Bible > KJV).
"Light annotation was to be a characteristic of the official Bibles, perhaps because the Church leadres distrusted it. Annotation removed the task of interpreting the Bible from the Church, and, though one could argue that it was a way of creating orthodoxy, it might also be thought of as encouraging independent thought, and therefore dissent and even heresy." (18)
- Note that it is not the Catholic Church who suppresses independent thought. This is Thomas Cranmer: "I forbit not to read, but I forbid to reason." (18)
The Great Bible was a draft for the KJV, and its Psalms formed the basis of the Psalms of the Book of Common Prayer

Geneva, the People's Bible

1560 Geneva Bible: "Through his reliance on translations by others for his source texts, Coverdale took the drafting of the KJV in a false direction. One of the major contributions of the 1560 Geneva Bible was that it returned to Tyndale's principle of translating from the Hebrew and Greek texts, a move that was particularly important for the poetic and prophetic books which had not yet been translated from the Hebrew. The Geneva Bible was also immensely important for the quality of its scholarship, the extent of its annotations and its popularity...It was the immediate predecessor that had most influence on the KJB." (18-19)
The Geneva Bible was the work of a dozen Protestant scholars living in exile from Catholic England under Mary, led by William Whittingham.
The Geneva Bible was effectively a study Bible: "Never before in English had a Bible given in such equal measure text and understanding." (21)
It also introduced verse numbers and paragraph marks, making the natural structure of the text less apparent. (21)
It is a quite literal translation that used italic type to mark added words necessary in English but not present in the original. (22)
The Geneva-Tomson-Junius revision of 1599 included some sharply anti-Catholic notes that fueled a prejudice agains the Geneva notes in some quarters. (22)

The Second 'Authorised' Version, the Bishops' Bible

Bishop's Bible has been much vilified but it is "not as bad as sometimes suggested". It is of importance as a draft of the KJB and its final form was the KJB base text (using Great Bible Psalms). (23)
The Bishop's Bible was a revision of the Great Bible, intended to replace it as the official Bible in the Churches. (23)
The translation was done by a number of Bishops separately, and the translation quality varies by translator. (25-26)
Giles Lawrence assisted with the 1572 NT revision and left notes on readings that survive into the KJV. (26)

The Rheims New Testament

"For all their enmity, the two sides drew on each other's scholarship, so Rheims [1582 NT, not the 1609 and 1610 OT which was too late to influence the KJV], as a translation, is part of the tradition established by Tyndale; in their turn, the KJB translators drew on words or phrases from Rheims when it suited them: it too was a draft of sorts." (29)
Rheims is the most literal of the early translations (29) and had controversial footnotes (30-31).
"Through arguments, translations and annotations, the Rheims NT probably made sharper what was already sharp, the KJB translators' awareness of their inseparable linguistic and theological responsibilities." (32)
"Rheims's prime contribution to the KJB was an added sprinkle of latinate vocabulary in the NT": separated, impenitent, approvest, remission, glory, commendeth, concupiscence, revealed, expectation, conformed, emulation, concluded, conformed, contribution. "Since most of them are tranlsliterations of Jerome's Latin, they also make Jerome an author of the KJB." (32)

graph LR

heb(Hebrew Bible)
khc(Kimchi's Hebrew Commentary)
v(Vulgate)
pg(Pagninus)
sg(Septuagint)
egn(Erasmus Greek NT)
lb(Luther Bible 1522-1524)
zb(Zurich Bible 1524-9)
bln(Beza's Latin NT 1556)
sclb(Sebastian Castellio's Latin Bible 1551)

tnt(Tyndale<br>NT 1526, 1534<br>OT Partial 1530)
cb(Coverdale Bible 1535)
mun(Münster 1535)
mb(Matthew Bible 1537)
gb(Great Bible 1539)
genb(Geneva Bible 1560)
rnt(Rheims NT 1582)
bb(Bishop's Bible 1568, 1572, 1602)
kjv(King James Bible 1611)
%%kjv@{ shape: hex, label: "King James Bible 1611" }

classDef hb fill:Orange
classDef gk fill:lightGreen
classDef lt fill:lightBlue
classDef gm fill:pink

v --> rnt
v --> cb
lb --> cb

%% Tyndale (9)
v:::lt --> tnt
lb:::gm --> tnt
egn:::gk --> tnt
pg:::lt -.-> tnt
%% "and possibly Paginus (9)"

%% Coverdale (14)
tnt --> mb
tnt --> cb
pg --> cb 
zb:::gm --> cb
egn -.-> cb

%% Matthew (15)
cb --> mb

%% Great Bible 17-18
mb --> gb
egn --> gb
mun:::hb --> gb

%% Bishop's Bible 24
gb --> bb 
sclb:::lt --> bb

%% Geneva Bible 20
gb --> genb
mun --> genb
khc:::hb --> genb
zb --> genb
pg --> genb
bln:::lt --> genb


%% Rheims (29)
rnt --> kjv
genb --> kjv
bb --> kjv

sg:::gk --> tnt
heb:::hb --> tnt

subgraph Language
Hebrew>Hebrew]:::hb
Green>Greek]:::gk
Latin>Latin]:::lt
German>German]:::gm
English>English]
end

Click for larger version of this chart

Chapter 2: Drafting the King James Bible

Summary: Examines the development of two passages from Tyndale to the KJV to illustrate how the various English versions evolved.

Joseph and Mary

Examines the drafting of the KJV through Mt-01-21
Tyndale's "choices and changes show him as a deeply thoughtful translator whose priority, having once translated, was to bring his work closer to the literal meaning, and even to the word order of the Greek, while always maintaining a strong sense of normal English structures." (35)
Tyndale provided a solid base for the subsequent versions that led to the KJV (39). Two principles of Tyndale: judicious fidelity to the syntax and grammar of the original languages, and the choice of predominantly native English vocabulary (35).

The Fall

Gn-03-13
"There are a few omissions such as the definite article before 'Adam', a Hebrew word for man that came to be the name of the first man, and so was traditionally taken as a name in translations (the Hebrew gives the cue for this: once there are other men it drops the article, making Adam into a name Gn-04 onwards)." (42)
"Hebrew has few conjunctions, relying chiefly on 'vav', 'and'...The number of 'and's used by a translator—especially to begin sentences—is a useful indicator of the degree to which he is being literal...Tyndale follows the Hebrew nearly as closely as does the Septuagint...he shows that he is a servant to, rather than a slave of, the Hebrew." (42-43)
Older verb forms and pronouns: "Such forms were of course standard English for the time, and still have limited usage in some English dialects. What was familiar to Tyndale's ploughboy has, through nearly five hundred years, become strange but not impossible to us: that strangeness is part of what is now biblical or religious style. Tyndale's everyday language, coupled with his willingness to follow elements of the style of the original, forms the basis of our high religious English." (44)
"The Geneva translators relegate 'die the death' to the margin as a Hebraism, and substitute what was to them a more English form, 'ye shall not die at all' (we are now accustomed to Hebraisms such as 'die the death' or 'dream a dream' from their frequent use in the KJB)." (49)
"The overall drift of the KJB translators' work is clear: they gave most attention to the relationship between the English and the Hebrew, either selecting an earlier version that better reflected this relationship, or supplying their own version where none of the alternatives was as close as reasonably possible to the Hebrew. A marker of this increased literalness is that the KJB has more 'and's than any of the others, 31." (53)

Chapter 3: 'I was a translator'

Summary: Lists the KJV translators, and introduces John Bois whose diary is the only record we have of the KJV translation process.

Gives a roster of the translation committee
"What is needed is to see how they worked, not to make the KJB, but to polish the work already to intensely drafted." (61-62)
"The translators' mental lives were above all in their books. This was a time when a scholar could place limited reliance on college or university libraries...College libraries at Cambridge and Oxford typically held between 250 and 500 books in the late sixteenth century." (62)
They had few English Bibles: "It may be that the command to consult the earlier English translations took most of the translators into unfamiliar territory. Indeed, it is possible taht some groups of the translators did not have access to the work of all their predecessors." (64)
The translators thought and wrote in Latin, 'almost from our very cradle' (NCPB xxxi), the common language of scholarship. (65)
John Bois kept notes of the translators proceedings: he read the Bible through by age five, and his father was teaching him Greek and Hebrew before he went to school. He worked in the university library from 4 am - 8 pm, and would still study for 8 hours per day as an old man. (71)
- His library was "his darling" and "at least one other translator's wife felt she came second to books, saying to him once, 'I would I were a book too, and then you would a little more respect me'." (71)
- He kept a diary primarily in Latin, with some Greek and English and a little Hebrew. (73)
- "Bois's best remedy for lustful thoughts in old age is Luther on Isaiah 36." (73)
- A note on Augustine "highlights Bois's limitations: he gives nothing new. It is essentially the kind of note a student makes for himself: the extended time and daily labour, Christmas day included, that he devoted to Augustine do indeed show habitual, tenacious but essentially sterile study." (76)
- "An obscure, diligent, immensely knowledgeable scholar of languages and lover of theology, he was an ideal man to help examine the extant English Bibles agains the original Greek and Hebrew." (79)

Chapter 4: Working on the King James Bible

Summary: Discusses the origin and process of the KJV group of translators.

By 1604 there was need for a new Bible, advocated for strongly by Hugh Broughton. There was the official Bishop's Bible and the popular Geneva Bible, but both had errors. (81)
Anti-Catholic KJV motivations by Broughton: "...for avoiding of the multiplicity of errors that are rashly conceived by the inferior and vulgar sort by the variety of the translations of the Bible to the most dangerous increase of papistry and atheism." (82)
King James was proficient with the Scriptures: "he did mention sundry escapes in the common translation, and made it seen that he was no less conversant in the Scriptures than they whose profession it was; and hen he came to speak of the Psalms, did recite whole versus of the same, showing both the faults of the metre and the discrepance from the text. It was the joy of all that were present to hear it, and bred not little admiration in the whole [general] Assembly [of the Scottish Church]." (83)
The translators were chosen, and given 15 rules to follow in the making of the KJV (86)
The translators "thought primarily in Latin, sometimes in Greek and English...The argument that they worked primarily or even solely to polish the English of the Bible as English is absolutely untenable set against these notes." (101)
"That the KJB was printed from an annotated Bishop's Bible—possibly from BOD 1602—is almost certain from the presence of peculiarities and errors that come directly from the printed 1602 text." (106)

Chapter 5: 1611: the first edition

Summary: Discusses the first edition of the King James Bible.

The translators present the Bible and their work as purely religious, as from the preface: "happy is the man that delighteth in the Scripture, and thrice happy that meditateth on it day and night." (113)
"The translators examined the words of the originals with immense subtlety, they chose their words with fidelity, preciaion and sensitivity, but they caution against taking them too absolutely...In effect they say, we have done our best, but do not make too much of it." (116)
"The translators have avoided the jargon of both the Puritans and the Roman Catholics. Their aim is like Tyndale's, to be faithful to the language of the originals and comprehensible to everybody." (116)
"'~New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with Apocrypha' is both heavy and admirable, and much the most important part of the preliminary material that appeared in the original edition of 1611. It has been a casualty of its length, and is rarely reprinted. I have taken it first because of the importance of what it has to say about the nature of the Bible in general and o the translation in particular." (117)
The 1611 version, after 'The translators to the reader', has a calendar with the Psalm of the day and readings for morning and evening prayer and a calendar of feasts. (120)
"What had become the standard Protestant order of the books, with the Apocrypha given separately from the Testaments, is based on Jerome's views of the canon. Tyndale, followed by Coverdale and the Matthew Bible, placed Hebrews after 3 John. Coverdale placed Baruch (with the Epistle of Jeremy, though it is not separately identified) after Lamentations, and noted that it was not in the Hebrew canon; the Matthew Bible moved them to the Apocrypha. h Geneva Bible placed the Prayer of Manasses after 2 Chronicles." (121)
"The columns of text go back to early Greek manuscripts, marginal annotations to the Hebrew texts with the Masora, chapter numbers to Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury early in the thirteenth century, and headers and verse division to Robert Estienne in 1540 and 1551." (121)
"Visually, the first edition presented the KJB as a lightly polished revision of the latest version of the Bishop's Bible." (122)
Supplied words are inconsistently given as small roman type: visually they appear de-emphasized, which is the opposite effect of italicized words in modern roman type. (125)
The first edition, which appeared sometime between March 1611 and February 1612, had about 300-400 typographical errors, or about one every three and a half chapters. (128)

Chapter 6: Printing, editing and the development of a standard text

Summary: Traces the textual history from the first edition to the 1769 Blayney edition that became the standard text.

The KJV was without a name for several decades or more, often referred to as the "new translation" or the translation "without notes" (133-134). There was a demand for the notes, and a version was published of the KJV with the Geneva notes in 1645 (135).
"There were no other new translations until Daniel Mace's diglot NT of 1729 heralded the arrival of alternative versions, mostly of the NT. By this time the KJB was absolutely established as the Bible." (138)
==check between NCPB and other KJV==: Ex 38:11, Ruth 3:15, Hosea 6:5, Mt. 6:3, 2 Cor 3:3 (141)
The first Cambridge KJV printings of 1629 and 1638 were "after the first edition, the two most important folios in the development of the text" (and included the Apocrypha). (141-142)
- "The 1629 Cambridge edition was also a significant step forward in the spelling of the Bible. Superfluous 'e's begin to be omitted, and other modern—and nearly always shorter—spellings appear. Coupled with the use of roman type, including 'v' and 'j', this makes the text look much more modern." (143)
- The 1629 Cambridge edition cost 10S unbound (147). Gemini: 10S = £0.50 in pre-decimal currency , so "10 shillings in Britain in 1629 would be equivalent to approximately $120 - $150 USD (2025) in terms of purchasing power."
- The 1638 edition became the standard text for over 100 years. (144)
William Bentley, with the authority of Parliament, produced octavo editions without the Apocrypha in 1646, 1648, and 1651. (147)
"Non-conformists objected to the Apocrypha in the Bible (and no doubt printers had no objection to omitting it);¹ it was first omitted from editions of English Bibles (as opposed to omission from binding at the request of the purchaser) in a Dutch-printed Geneva Bible of 1640. Prefaced to this is a translation of the decision of the Synod of Dort which argues in detail the non-canonical and uninspired nature of the Apocrypha. Bentley omitted the Apocrypha in 1646, and by 1673 editions of the KJB were being issued that gave the Apocrypha in the list of contents but foliated the pages without reference to the Apocrypha and are not found including it."
In 1678 Thomas Guy contracted with Oxford to create Oxford Bible Press (distinct from the academic press at Oxford) to produce a large quantity of cheap Bibles. Folios fell to £1 10S (~$380 USD 2025) and the smallest formats fell to 1S 4D (~$17 USD 2025). (152-153)
Standard unbound prices in 1725: 2S for duodecimo ($19 USD in 2025), 6S for octavos ($55 USD in 2025), and 9S for quartos ($85 USD in 2025). (155)
"America depended on imported Bibles (Genevas and KJBs) until Robert Aitken's NT in 1777 and full Bible in 1782." (156)
After a hiatus, Cambridge resumed printing Bibles with major editions in 1743 (without Apocrypha) and 1762 (establishing a somewhat settled text). (161-162)
- These editions "were early manifestations of new standards of spelling and had a significant influence in establishing them." (169)
Benjamin Blayney's Oxford edition of 1769 collated the first edition, the Cambridge editions of 1743 and 1760, and Lloyd's 1701 to produce what became the standard text. (164)
- "Most printers at home and abroad took Blayned as standard, so that the text as now generally found is not that of the first edition but something that evolved unevenly over a century and a half before becoming nearly fixed by the standards of the 1760s imperfectly applied." (166)
- "One of the main reasons why Blayne's became the standard text is that it is a massive task to undertake such editing." (166)
"If respect and reverence for the KJB translators' work is to be one's principle, then the revised text represented by the 1769 Bible and most subsequent KJBs is not as good as it should be. That said, if any differences in the text are allowed to be small, then most of the differences between 1611, 1769 and most current KJBs are small, and, given the size of the text, few." (169)
Norton notes benefits and drawbacks of the of the standard Biblical layout (compare to recent trends for reader's Bibles):
- Benefits: "The basic format of the KJB remained essentially unchanged from 1611 through to most modern editions, something that we should be grateful for with reservations. Typographically, the KJB (and many other Bibles before and since) is different from other books: one has only to see a page without reading a single word to know that one is looking at a Bible. The layout declares it different from secular books, immediately evoking feelings appropriate to the sacred book. It is also highly efficient, allowing a great deal of text to be included on a page while keeping to a minimum the difficulties of keeping one's place. Finding a particular place could not be easier because of the numbered and visually separate verses. Moreover, the student is encouraged to take a holistic view of the inspired word, moving from one place in the text to related places sometimes at the other end of the Bible by way of the cross-references...In short, it feels right, suits the student of the text, encourages a sense of the Bible as united and inspired, and, in the larger editions, is easy to read aloud from." (171)
- Drawbacks are that "in traditional presentation, the Bible is a pile of precious bricks instead of a temple" by virtue of being "copped and minced" (Locke) into verses. Tyndale, translating before the invention of verses, "modelled how to present the text for plan, contextual reading." (172)
Oxford published an exact reprint of the 1611 edition in 1833, "a truly remarkable piece of work that reproduces all the quirks of the first edition, even inverted letters, with scarcely an error." (176)
The American Bible Society's text was the model for other American publishers by the 1830s, and it is aligned closely with the Blayney standard text, though un-scholarly in its approach of a "democratic" reading of several major British editions. Its regularization of names make the Apocrypha "strikingly different from the British editions", yet it was published without the Apocrypha in the edition of 1856. "Blayney's text had become the American text". (176-178)
Scrivener in 1873 published the Cambridge Paragraph Bible, its historical importance being the critical introduction later published as The Authorized Edition of the English Bible: its subsequent reprints and modern representatives. (178-179)
- "Scrivener's primary concern was to prepare a critical edition of the Authorized Version' that would represent it, 'as far as may be, in the precise shape that it would have assumed, if its venerable translators had shown themselves more exempt than they were from the failings incident to human infirmity; or if the same severe accuracy, which is now demanded in carrying so important a volume through the press, had been deemed requisite or was at all usual in their age' (pp. 1, 2). Implicit here and throughout is the idea that an editor's duty is to perfect the text in the light of the originals. By highlighting the translators' human infirmity, Scrivener opened the way to changing the text even where there is no printing error involved. This aligns him with most previous editors, feeling himself able to correct the text where he judges the translators to have erred as translators. So, aiming to give the text in the precise shape that it would have assumed', Scrivener is giving it in the shape he thinks it should have assumed. He tests the variants not by the evidence for the translators' judgements but by his view of how the original texts should have been translated. The result is more conservative than Blayney's text, for he restores about a third of the original readings (listed in his appendix C), but the reader of The Cambridge Paragraph Bible can never be certain that the text is that of the translators because Scrivener is at heart a reviser." (180)
The Revised Version (NT 1881, OT 1885, Apocrypha 1895) "marked the resumption of the kind of scholarly and creative effort that had produced the KJB out of the work of Tyndale and his successors". (180)
"Still continuing in fractured ways, this effort is usually characterised by a desire to keep something like the KJB's language, now absolutely established as religious English, while improving its scholarship in the light of modern discoveries and understanding. Versions such as the ASV (1901), NASB (1971), RSV (1952), NRSV (1989), NKJV (1982), and the 21st Century KJV (1994) appeal to the heritage of the KJB while being manifestly different. Together with the ever increasing number of translations and paraphrases into modern English, they are part of a large movement that has entirely destabilised the English text of the Bible [cf. 2022-11-15-Liturgiam authenticam]. Consequently the KJB has gone from being teh only Bible in England to being one of a multitude spread round the world. In this context, the stability of its text is like a hallmark. Whatever the qualities of the other versions—modern scholarship, simple, accessible English, political correctness, contemporary presentation—they are all pretenders to its throne, while it remains, apparently what it always was, the authentic, elderly, increasingly disregarded but still revered monarch among Bibles." (180)
"The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible is essentially a work of restoration. As far as possible, using the evidence of the translators' work found in Bod 1602, MS 98, and the first edition, it gives the text the translators themselves decided on. But perhaps its most obvious quality is restoration of the sort applied to an old master, making it newly vivid. The paragraphed presentation of the prose parts makes their structure clearer and poetic lines help the reader to a better sense of the poetry. The modern spelling is a particular help for the way it removes the dust and dirt of time." (182-184)
"The KJB's meaning is not always easy, but changing one word for a similar word, as happens in the standard texts, almost always misleads." (184)

This chart shows the approximate lineage from the first edition of the King James Bible in 1611 to the Oxford 1769 edition by Benjamin Blayney that became the standard text (see pg 138-166).

graph LR
%% Source Manuscripts / Earlier Editions
ms(Lambeth Palace MS 98)
bod(Bod 1602-Bodleian Library)
bb(Bishop's Bible 1602)

%% Core KJV and its direct descendants
kjv(King James Bible 1611)
%%kjv@{ shape: hex, label: "King James Bible 1611" }
c1(Cambridge 1629)
c2(Cambridge 1638)
cpb(Scrivener-Cambridge Paragraph Bible 1873)

%% Intermediate Cambridge editions and Blayney
c3(Parris-Cambridge 1743)
lf(Lloyd Folio 1701)
c4(Parris-Cambridge 1762)
bbo(Blayney-Oxford 1769 aka KJV Standard Text)
%%bbo@{shape: hex, label: "Blayney-Oxford 1769 aka KJV Standard Text"}

%% Modern descendants
abs(American Bible Society 1830s)
ncpb(Norton-New Cambridge Paragraph Bible 2005)
rv(Revised Version NT 1881, OT 1885, DC 1895)
mod(ASV 1901<br>RSV 1952<br>NRSV 1989<br>ESV 2001)

%% Connections / Edges
bb:::a --> ms
bb --> bod
bod --> kjv:::a
ms --> kjv

kjv --> c1:::a
kjv --> cpb:::a
kjv --> lf:::a
kjv --> bbo:::a

c1 --> c2:::a
c2 --> c3:::n 
c3 --> c4:::a
c3 --> bbo

c4 --> bbo
lf --> bbo
cpb --> ncpb

bbo --> abs:::a
bbo --> rv:::a

ms --> ncpb:::a
bod --> ncpb 

rv --> mod:::a

%% Class Definitions
classDef a fill:Orange
classDef n fill:Pink

%% Applying apocrypha classes
ap:::a
na:::n

subgraph Apocrypha Inclusion
ap>Includes Apocrypha]
na>Excludes Apocrypha]
end