Happy 400th, King James Bible

May 2, 2011 marks the 400th anniversary of the printing of the book commonly known in America as the King James Bible. How well do you know the history of what led to the making of the King James Bible? Only a few know the real history and goal. This history leading up to the publication of the King James Bible is worth knowing – lest history repeat itself! There was one single goal: Give everyone the opportunity to become a Bible student.

By the 1500s, the Renaissance had swept across Europe. The dark oppression of the Catholic clergy was broken by the light of education in art, literature, math and science. The invention of the printing press in 1450 made the production and distribution of educational materials readily available for a public eager to gather them up.
The first book published by printing press inventor Johann Guttenberg was a Latin-language Bible. The Bible was the hottest selling item in Europe at this time. The Catholic church having for centuries made it forbidden had made it even more popular.
Early in the 16th century, Disiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), a Dutch scholar, became an international celebrity. A founding father of the Renaissance, he is best known for his 1508 book In Praise of Folly, a satire on society. He did not spare the practices of the church and clergy. Having a rich knowledge of Greek, Erasmus grew to prominence lecturing at Cambridge. He studied the best early Greek texts he could find in order to make a Latin text that was more accurate than the Vulgate. Though his project was considered sacrilege to Catholic authorities – who would dare tamper with the Vulgate? – his goal was to direct scholars to the Bible in order to cleanse the Catholic church of error. Erasmus’s New Testament had its greatest impact at Cambridge, at that time considered the intellectual home of the English Reformation.
Then, in 1517, Martin Luther, a member of the theology faculty at Wittenberg University, began to speak out against papal indulgences. He invited scholars across Europe to join him in the study of what the Bible had to say about church doctrine. For Luther, the Bible was a rival to the authority of the pope. Rome called for him to recant. He refused and widely circulated numerous books explaining his beliefs throughout Europe and England. His writings found special residence at Cambridge. Martin Luther produced a German-language Bible in the years 1523 to 1529.
When Luther’s books were banned at Cambridge, revolutionary thinking students such as William Tyndale, a priest, theologian and gifted linguist, fled the university. Tyndale intended to translate the Bible into English from fresh sources following in the tradition of Erasmus. When denied approval by the English Catholic church authorities, he found financial support for his translation project through a wealthy cloth merchant who provided him with food and shelter.
Tyndale was a linguistic genius. He was proficient in eight languages. His intensive labor produced an English translation that was so astoundingly clear that common people could easily read and understand it. He had a true gift for transmitting the original meaning from one language to another. Much of his New Testament translation still appears as originally written in today’s King James Bible.
Authorities could not short-circuit the demand for Tyndale’s work. They resorted to buying copies simply to burn them. The battle over the Bible became very bloody. Many, including Tyndale, who was betrayed by a friend, lost their lives fighting for the right to have the Bible in their native tongue. The calculated ecclesiastical destruction of Tyndale’s Bible was so thorough that only three copies survive to this day.
Eventually the Bible was in England became tangled with Henry VIII’s battle to divorce his first wife. After winning his fight with Rome, the proud king soon realized that he faced an incredible dilemma. The nation was bitterly divided between Catholics and Protestants. He recognized that even the newly established English church was splintering into religious factions. Henry’s leading counselors urged him to produce a new official Bible to attempt to reunite the nation.
Henry laid the task at the feet of the English bishops. But because of deep disagreement nothing had been done by 1535. So began a new kind of war, not one of Bible translation but one of Bible interpretation.
By the time James I (James VI of Scotland) came to the throne, two bloodstained centuries of war over Bible translation had taken place. As James ascended the throne, essentially that war was over. People were free to own and read the Scriptures. Now came the need to strip the English Bible of all interpretation.
At the suggestion of church leaders, James personally convened the Hampton Court Conference on Jan. 1, 1604, to officially start the massive translation project. He set strict guidelines to ensure translator objectivity and that only the purest translation of the Scriptures was brought into English.
The Bible was divided among six teams of scholars; two each were set up at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge. Not only did they use the best Hebrew and Greek texts, they took advantage of every available version to compare the variant readings. The basic text was completed in four years. Then the translation was subjected to two additional years of further checking. Then, to ensure the very best translation, in 1610 another team, two men from each of the original six teams, completed a final check.
After all these years of grueling translation and proof, the authorized Bible was published in May 2, 1611. Its contribution to Western society is without question. It has molding and shaped our thinking.
Many have died to give us the right to own, read and study this incredible book. Do we highly value that right? If we don’t, we could easily lose it. In the apparent coming of religious war, the Bible is certain to figure prominently in that war.
Around the world today, many are losing their lives over owning or reading a Bible. It is said that there are more Christian martyrs in the last hundred years than there were in the twenty centuries since Christ. And much of this martyrdom was over the Bible.
Britain and America became great nations as this book grew to become the bestseller of all time.
If we forget this book, could history forget us? If, on the other hand, we see this remarkable book we call the Bible as God’s own words, then we will appreciate that printing of the Bible 400 years ago for the purpose of being understood by the common people. Then we will take it off our bookshelves, open it and search for the solutions to the problems that are about to overwhelm us.
God help us to come to the right answer.

[Back to Home]