What is the King James Bible?

What is the King James Bible?

The King James Bible, also called the King James Version (KJV) or the Authorized Version, is an English translation of the whole Bible made for the Church of England and first printed in London in 1611. Its title page says it was “Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues” and “with the former Translations diligently compared and revised.” That sums up the method: a careful revision of earlier English Bibles, worked through line by line against the Hebrew and Greek.

Four centuries later it is still printed, read and quoted. This page explains who made it, when and why; How many mistakes are in the King James Bible? covers its misprints and corrections, and Why is the KJV controversial? the debates.

Hampton Court, 1604: the king’s commission

When James VI of Scotland also became King James I of England in 1603, the Puritan wing of the Church of England hoped he would carry the Reformation further. On his journey south he was handed a petition said to bear the signatures of a thousand ministers, and in January 1604 he called bishops and Puritan leaders to a three-day conference at Hampton Court Palace.

Most Puritan requests were turned down. But midway through the conference John Rainolds (also spelled Reynolds), president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, asked the king to approve a new English translation of the whole Bible, and James agreed. Cambridge University Library notes that the idea met little warmth at first, yet it was the one proposal from Hampton Court that produced a lasting result.

Organizing the work fell to Richard Bancroft, then Bishop of London, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1604. He recruited the scholars, sent out the rules and found church posts to support the translators, since neither the king nor Parliament paid for the project. James clearly wanted the new Bible, but he took no part in the translating itself.

The translators, their rules and their sources

No complete list of everyone who worked on the translation survives. Fifty-four scholars were appointed, and researchers at the Folger Shakespeare Library use an approximate figure of 47 translators. They were organized in six companies, two each at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, and each company took its own portion of the Bible. Lancelot Andrewes led the first Westminster company, one Cambridge company translated the Old Testament from 1 Chronicles to Ecclesiastes, and another was assigned part of the Apocrypha.

The project ran under 15 rules. The Bishops’ Bible of 1568 was the base text, and each translator received an unbound copy of its 1602 edition; Tyndale’s, Matthew’s and Coverdale’s Bibles, the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible were to be used to correct it where needed. Marginal notes were allowed only to explain Hebrew or Greek words. Drafts went round the companies, a general meeting reviewed them in 1609 and 1610, and Thomas Bilson, bishop of Winchester, and Miles Smith, bishop of Gloucester, did the final editing.

Behind the English stood the original languages: the Hebrew of the Old Testament, including the chapters of Daniel and Ezra written in Aramaic, and the Greek of the New Testament. The translators also kept much of the English Bibles before them. Cambridge University Library cites a recent calculation that 83 percent of the King James text comes directly from William Tyndale’s New Testament of 1534 (that is, in the New Testament, the part his book covers), and the opening of John’s Gospel passed into the King James Bible almost unaltered from Tyndale. The Catholic Rheims New Testament of 1582 was not an official source, but the translators undoubtedly knew it.

In their preface, “The Translators to the Reader,” they described the aim in their own words: not to make a bad translation good, “but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one.”

How the rules shaped particular words, and the wider debate over royal influence, are covered in Why is the KJV controversial?

1611: the first printing

The finished Bible was printed in London in 1611 by Robert Barker, the King’s Printer. Because it was technically a revision rather than a new work, it was never entered in the Stationers’ Register, so its exact publication date is unknown; scholars estimate the first edition at roughly 500 to 1,000 copies. Barker received no payment from the king, Parliament or the church; Cambridge University Library estimates that he spent £3,000 on the job.

The book was printed in a large format so it could be read aloud in churches, and its title page carries the words “Appointed to be read in Churches.” Besides the Old and New Testaments it contained the Apocrypha, along with church calendars and other material for services. Our King James editions are the New Testament and the Torah; we do not print a complete Bible or the Apocrypha.

The first printing was full of misprints; a slip at Ruth 3:15 gave its two issues the nicknames “He Bible” and “She Bible” (see How many mistakes are in the King James Bible?).

From 1611 to the 1769 standard text

Printers and editors kept correcting the text for more than 150 years. Cambridge produced revised editions in 1629 and 1638, Thomas Paris edited another at Cambridge in 1762, and in 1769 Benjamin Blayney completed an Oxford edition that standardized the spelling. Blayney’s text is the one that has been reprinted ever since, which is why most King James Bibles today follow the 1769 text. It is also the text our King James editions print.

The name “Authorized Version” suggests an official decree, but Cambridge University Library notes that no record survives of the translation ever being authorized, and its 2011 exhibition states that the King James Bible was never formally authorized. What the title page claims is that it was made “by his Majesties Special Commandment” and “Appointed to be read in Churches.”

Backed by the King’s Printer’s monopoly, the new translation quickly replaced the Bishops’ Bible and, more slowly, the Geneva Bible, and it reigned unchallenged until the 1880s. Today it is in the public domain in the United States; the position in the United Kingdom is different, as Who owns the King James Bible rights? explains.

Protestant or Catholic? Who uses it today

The King James Bible is a Protestant Bible. It was made for the Church of England by Anglican and Puritan scholars, and according to Bible Gateway it quickly became the standard Bible for English-speaking Protestants.

English Catholics of the time had their own translation from the Latin Vulgate, made by exiles at the English College in Rheims and later Douai: the Rheims New Testament of 1582 and the Douai Old Testament of 1609, which came too late to be used for the King James Bible. Later revised by Bishop Richard Challoner, the Douay–Rheims remained the standard Catholic English translation until the twentieth century.

The KJV is still widely read. On the ECPA’s Bible translations bestseller list dated October 2026 it ranked third, after the New International Version and the English Standard Version (see the most popular Bible translations). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints uses the King James Version as its official English Bible, in a Church edition first issued in 1979 with its own chapter headings, footnotes and cross-references. For the view that the KJV is the only English Bible Christians should use, and its critics, see Is the KJV the only true Bible?

Why the King James Bible matters

Along with the works of Shakespeare, the King James Bible is often cited as one of the greatest influences on modern English, as Brigham Young University’s library puts it. Its rhythms run through writers and speakers as different as Herman Melville, John Steinbeck and Abraham Lincoln. Lines such as “Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3) and “Ye are the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13) are widely known in its wording.

Its gift to everyday speech is real but easy to overstate. The linguist David Crystal counted 257 English idioms that come from the King James Bible, such as “how are the mighty fallen,” yet found that most did not begin there: they were already in Tyndale, Wycliffe or the Bishops’ Bible. By his count only 18 are stylistically unique to the KJV. What it did, he argues, was popularize them, and no other literary source has matched it for the number of influential expressions it contains.

See the timeless KJV for why many readers still choose it, NIV vs KJV for a comparison with a modern translation, and What is the World English Bible? for the New Testament in present-day English.