What Bible Was Used Before The Kjv
There is so much information regarding the history of the Bible down through the ages which can literally take up volumes. To keep it simple, here is a very brief outline of the Bible used before the King James Version. .
1382 The Wycliffe Bible translated by John Wycliffe from the Latin Vulgate into English.
1455 The Gutenberg Bible. This was not an English translation but was done in Latin.
1526 The Tyndale Bible. We mentioned this one earlier.
1535 The Coverdale Bible. Completed by Myles Coverdale, it was considered to be the first Modern English translation .
1560 The Geneva Bible. The first mass-produced Bible available to the general public and the primary Bible of 16th Century English Protestants.
1568 The Bishops Bible. An English Bible written under the authority of the Church of England.
1611 The King James Bible.
Why Is The King James Bible So Popular
16 May 2021
Shakespeare was still alive when this Bible was published.
Shortly after he ascended the English throne in 1603, King James I commissioned a new Holy Bible translation that, more than 400 years later, is still widely read around the world.
This Bible, known as the King James Version , helped King James leave behind a lasting cultural footprint one of his goals as a leader. “James saw himself as a great Renaissance figure who wanted to impart on the world culture, music, literature and even new ways of learning,” Bruce Gordon, a professor of ecclesiastical history at Yale Divinity School, told Live Science.
But given the KJV’s age, why is it still so popular across different Christian denominations?
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In short, the KJV’s influence has waxed over the centuries because, Gordon said, it was the version that was most widely read and distributed in countries where English was the dominant language and that its translation was “never really challenged until the 20th century.” In that time, the KJV became so embedded in the Anglo-American world that “many people in Africa and Asia were taught English from the KJV” when Christian missionaries brought it to them, Gordon said. “Many people weren’t even aware that it was one of many available translations,” he added, “they believed the King James Version was the Bible in English.”
But there’s more to the story that goes back to the translation’s inception.
What King James Hath Wrought
Many Oxbridge colleges have alumni or other connections to the King James Authorized Version of the Bible. Include the following on your go-see.
Cambridge, Emmanuel College, St. Andrews Street www.emma.cam.ac.uk
Emma was founded in 1584 by the Puritan Sir Walter Mildmay, a chief aim being to educate Protestant ministers, and he insisted that Laurence Chaderton become first Master to set the tone. KJV Translator Chaderton lived to a rare old age of almost 103, and his remains lie beneath an inscribed slab in the chapel. There is also a 19th-century stained-glass window to him, as well as to other alumni who have played a part in the history of the Church: including John Harvard, who emigrated to New England in 1637 and bequeathed funds for the university that bears his name. Emmanuel is normally open to the public 8 a.m.6 p.m. daily.
Oxford, Corpus Christi College, Merton Street www.ccc.ox.ac.uk
Founded in 1517, Corpus played an important role in the religious disputes of the 16th17th centuries. John Rainolds, seventh president , led the Puritans who met the bishops at the Hampton Court Palace conference 1604. A key organizer and Translator of the KJV, he was a member of The First Oxford Company and held weekly meetings in his college lodgings. Theres a wall monument to Rainolds in the chapel adjoining the beautiful main quad. Corpus is open to the public most afternoons .
Merton College, Merton Street, www.merton.ox.ac.uk
Further Afield:
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King James Only Movement
The King James Only movement advocates the belief that the King James Version is superior to all other English translations of the Bible. Most adherents of the movement believe that the Textus Receptus is very close, if not identical, to the original autographs, thereby making it the ideal Greek source for the translation. They argue that manuscripts such as the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, on which most modern English translations are based, are corrupted New Testament texts. One of them, Perry Demopoulos, was a director of the translation of the King James Bible into Russian. In 2010 the Russian translation of the KJV of the New Testament was released in Kyiv, Ukraine. In 2017, the first complete edition of a Russian King James Bible was released. In 2017, a Faroese translation of the King James Bible was released as well.
The Translators Of The Kjv 1611 Were Relatively Unfamiliar With Koine Greek
Koine Greek is the original language of the New Testament, but the KJV translators of the New Testament, who were accomplished scholars of Classical Greek, were relatively unfamiliar with Koine Greek. Koine Greek was not well-understood. Some people suggested it was a Judaic or Hebraic Greek. Some even believed it was a unique, Spirit-inspired dialect. It was not until the 1800s and early 1900s, when tens of thousands of papyrus documents were discovered, many written in Koine, that we began to understand the language more fully. Unlike the translators of the KJV, modern translators of the New Testament are scholars of Koine Greek. There are also some issues with the KJV translation of the Hebrew into English in the Old Testament.
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Who Was King James And Why The King James Bible
While modern Bible translations have grown in use, the King James Version remains the most popular and most familiar of Bible translations. After all, the King James Bible was used for centuries it wasnt until the late 20th century that any other translation gained credible traction. Published in 1611, the poetic weight and beauty has had quite an impact on people and language, a standard of religious life in church and at home. Yet, what has become such a familiar and influential piece of English literature was not always that way.
In fact, while the text of the KJV is familiar, the man and the story behind its birth are less well known. This is a brief story about a king who determined to create a new Bible, not so much because he wanted common folk to have access to Gods Word in their mother tongue, but because he sought political peace in his kingdom. In so doing, his legacy became the greatest gift the world could know.
How Was It Translated
As few English language Bibles existed at the time, the King James Bible did not have a wealth of contemporary sources from which to draw. Not at all like today, where the number of available translations could fill a small library. Amongst those available in the 17th century were the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the Bishops Bible. The latter of the three served as the primary influence for the KJV as it was produced under the Church of England a little over 50 years prior. All passages in the Bishops Bible deemed problematic at the time were changed, but names of places and people remained unaltered.
The translation also heavily drew from original Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew texts. These included the Hebrew Masoretic Text and Beza’s Greek New Testament.
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How Accurate Is The Kjv Bible
For many, the King James Bible is the most authoritative and accurate text of the Bible. That doesnt mean, however, that it adheres word-to-word to original manuscripts. Whilst the KJV sits on the more accurate side of the biblical translation scale, it was still commissioned with a purpose and audience in mind. The written style remains a significant factor in the King James Bible.
But how accurate is it, really?
But where does the KJV Bible sit on this spectrum?
The King James Bible sits firmly on the Word-for-Word side of things. It doesnt feature the up-to-date scholarship of the ESV Bible, but does it hold closer to the text’s original language and archaic terms. Unlike, for example, the Message Bible, whose paraphrase style works to present you with a Bible in today’s language.
The Origins Of The King James Bible
A handwritten draft of the worlds most famous bible has been discovered in England
When an archive yields an unexpected discovery, it’s usually cause for celebration. But when that discovery involves the world’s most famous bible, scholarly excitement mounts to ecstastic levels. The earliest known draft of the King James Bible has been unearthed at the University of Cambridge, writes Jennifer Schuessler for The New York Times, and its being lauded as a critical find for historians.
The draft was discovered by Jeffrey Alan Miller, an American scholar conducting research in the Cambridge archives. It contains the handwriting of dozens of authors, dating from 1604 to 1608. That handwriting is a crucial find, Schuessler writes, because it reveals how they translated and assembled the text.
“There’s a strong desire to see the King James Bible as a uniform object, and a belief that it’s great because of its collaborative nature,” Miller tells Schuessler. “It was incredibly collaborative, but it was done in a much more complicated, nuanced, and at times individualistic way than we’ve ever really had good evidence to believe.”
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Catholic Bible Vs King James Bible
The difference between the Catholic Bible and King James Bible is, Catholic Bible imbibes the original version of the Holy book that contains 46 books of Old Testament and 27 Books of the New Testament. Whereas, the King James Bible contains translation of old and new testaments, however it is devoid of the 7 Apocryphas making it 39 Old Testament books.
The Catholic Bible as we say, it is the actual Christian Bible. Further, it contains both the old and new Testaments. Additionally, it has Vulgate too. The King James Version of the Bible is a translated English Version of the Bible. It was ordered by the King James I and the task was carried out in the 17th Century.
| Catholic Bible is the very first translation of the canon scriptures to Latin first. | King James Bible is the English translation of the canon scriptures. | |
| Completeness | Catholic Bible is considered to be complete as it contains all the scriptures that were in Hebrew and Greek. | King James Bible is made in English, however, does not have the deuterocanonical books and also misses out on Apocrypha. |
How The King James Bible Came To Be
When King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England in 1603, he was well aware that he was entering a sticky situation.
For one thing, his immediate predecessor on the throne, Queen Elizabeth I, had ordered the execution of his mother, , who had represented a Catholic threat to Elizabeths Protestant reign. And even though Elizabeth had established the supremacy of the Anglican Church , its bishops now had to contend with rebellious Protestant groups like the Puritans and Calvinists, who questioned their absolute power.
For the new king, the Geneva Bible posed a political problem, since it contained certain annotations questioning not only the bishops power, but his own. So in 1604, when a Puritan scholar proposed the creation of a new translation of the Bible at a meeting at a religious conference at Hampton Court, James surprised him by agreeing.
Over the next seven years, 47 scholars and theologians worked to translate the different books of the Bible: the Old Testament from Hebrew, the New Testament from Greek and the Apocrypha from Greek and Latin. Much of the resulting translation drew on the work of the Protestant reformer William Tyndale, who had produced the first New Testament translation from Greek into English in 1525, but was executed for heresy less than a decade later.
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The Real Reason The King James Bible Was Created
The King James Bible, sometimes called the King James Version , is one of the most revered religious texts in the world, and it’s certainly one of the most popularly used by different branches of the Christian religion. According to the Christian Post, the KJV is used by Mormons, Episcopalians, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, and Baptists, among others. The Catholic Church, the most old school of all the Christian denominations, most frequently uses the New American Bible’s English translation, as noted by Difference Between, though English other translations are also used. Then of course, there’s the Anglican Church, who among other translations, still uses the KJV, and they have a special relationship with this particular version.
Did King James Write The King James Bible
Now lets get to the story of who wrote the King James Bible and why. With the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century, peoples appetite for translation of ancient texts grew. This included ancient classical pieces as well as the Biblical texts which were written in Classical Greek and Hebrew. This desire led to the creation of the Tyndale Bible – translated in 1526 – and is credited as being the first English Bible translated from the original Greek and Hebrew texts.
In 1604 King James sought to address many of the religious differences by creating one universally accepted translation of the scriptures. This undertaking was begun by a committee of scholars led by John Rainolds. This was no small undertaking as the process literally took seven years it was a very meticulous undertaking. Rainolds never saw his work completed because he died four years before the King James Version of the Bible was published, which happened in 1611.
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Considerations For A New Version
The newly crowned King James convened the Hampton Court Conference in 1604. That gathering proposed a new English version in response to the perceived problems of earlier translations as detected by the Puritan faction of the Church of England. Here are three examples of problems the Puritans perceived with the Bishops and Great Bibles:
First, Galatians iv. 25 . The Greek word susoichei is not well translated as now it is, bordereth neither expressing the force of the word, nor the apostle’s sense, nor the situation of the place. Secondly, psalm cv. 28 , ‘They were not obedient ‘ the original being, ‘They were not disobedient.’ Thirdly, psalm cvi. 30 , ‘Then stood up Phinees and prayed,’ the Hebrew hath, ‘executed judgment.’
The committees started work towards the end of 1604. King James VI and I, on 22 July 1604, sent a letter to Archbishop Bancroft asking him to contact all English churchmen requesting that they make donations to his project.
Holy Bible Vs King James Version
The difference between the Holy Bible and the King James Version is that the Holy Bible was initially written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek. Whereas the King James Version Bible is in the English language. The King James Version is the English translation of the Christian Bible of the Church of England.
The Holy Bible is a Holy Library that holds a collection of different religious scriptures written by other people. It is believed that the Bible is a collection of Gods teachings to his people. It mainly consists of Christianity and Jesus Christ. It mostly consisted of Christianity and Jesus Christ.
The King James Version, commonly known as the King James Bible, is an English translation of the Bible. It is considered to be the authorized version of the Christian Bible of the Church of England. The translation process took place under the rule of King James I.
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The Kjv Translation Of The Nt Is Based On Relatively Recent Greek Manuscripts
As well as relying on previous English translations, the 1611 edition of the KJV relied on critically edited Greek texts that were for the most part based on about half a dozen very late manuscripts . These Greek texts included five printed editions of the Greek New Testament by Erasmus, as well as Robert Estiennes edition and Theodore Bezas edition . Michael Holmes writes more about the Greek texts behind English Bibles here.
Unfortunately, one of the manuscripts Estienne and Beza used for their Greek editions contained a few corrections that downplayed the importance of women in the church.
Hallelujah At Age 400 King James Bible Still Reigns
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The King James Bible, published in 1611, celebrates its 400th birthday this year. Above, a 1754 illustration depicts a group of robed translators presenting a bible to King James I. The king commissioned the new translation in 1604, and for the next seven years, 47 scholars and theologians worked through the Bible line by line.hide caption
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The King James Bible, published in 1611, celebrates its 400th birthday this year. Above, a 1754 illustration depicts a group of robed translators presenting a bible to King James I. The king commissioned the new translation in 1604, and for the next seven years, 47 scholars and theologians worked through the Bible line by line.
This year, the most influential book you may never have read is celebrating a major birthday. The King James Version of the Bible was published 400 years ago. It’s no longer the top-selling Bible, but in those four centuries, it has woven itself deeply into our speech and culture.
The title page of the first edition of the King James Bible from 1611 reads: “Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and revised, by his Majesties speciall Comandement. Appointed to be read in Churches.” The Green Collectionhide caption
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Let’s travel back to 1603: King James I, who had ruled Scotland, ascended to the throne of England. What he found was a country suspicious of the new king.
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