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| Photo used under Creative Commons |
During its chequered 2000-year life, the Christian Bible has been translated into over 2,500 languages. Towering over all in its impact in the world is the monumental King James or ‘Authorised’ Version of the English Bible.
The KJV was the culmination of a revolution, two centuries of struggle by English-speaking people to replace the Latin Bible with the Bible in their own language. Church and State feared the consequences of a Bible in the hands of ordinary people. Translators, publishers and readers were relentlessly persecuted. From John Wycliffe’s handwritten manuscripts of the late 1300s to William Tyndale’s first printed Scriptures in the 1520s, English Bibles were banned. Not until the mid-1500s were people free to own and read the English Bible.
By the end of the century, Bibles such as the Geneva Bible had become vehicles for political comment. Into this heated situation in 1603 came James VI of Scotland. As James I of England, he explored ways to exert his new power over the English Church, convening a conference of church leaders at Hampton Court in 1604. When the idea of an entirely new Bible Translation was put forward, James jumped at it – a new, readable Bible, free from controversial comment.
James set up the world’s greatest translation project, with 54 scholars in 4 teams, reporting to an overall editorial committee. A mixed group, their combined strength was immense. They cared about accuracy, about readability and about the English language. In 1611 they produced the iconic King James Version, the most influential book in the history of the world, published in uncountable millions and still read 400 years later.
Within a generation the KJV supplanted all other English Bibles. As the translators had so passionately hoped, it became read and understood by the people; a Bible which ‘openeth the window to let in the light’. It changed the way people understood their relationship to God. It changed the way they lived their lives and the way they faced death.
Because it changed people, the KJV had the power to change society. Every literate person now had access to the Bible, leading to an entirely new spirit of inquiry through reading and reflection. This accelerated the growth of commercial printing and the ever-widening circulation of books.
Now free to interpret the Bible according to the light of their own understanding, people began to question the authority of both religious and secular institutions. Stimulating reformation within the Church, it led also to the reduction of the power of the monarchy and the rise of constitutional government. Carried far beyond the shores of England, oppressed peoples found in it the hope of freedom. The KJV Bible underpinned the great social reforms including the abolition of slavery. It was the KJV Bible which finally created liberty and democracy.
