The King James Bible was first printed 400 years ago this year. It took seven committees to make the book—six to translate (two at each of Westminister, Oxford, and Cambridge….ed) and a seventh to revise. The King wanted to bring unity among Christians. The translation steered middle way between the Puritans and the ‘Papists’. Today 250,000 copies are printed annually by Oxford University Press and it is the widely used translation in U.S.A. and U.K.
(The popular version for reading at home(?) was the Geneva Bible which is an excellent translation but full of anti-establishment margin notes while the Bishop’s Bible was a very poor effort but popular with the establishment so the King James version was to use the Bishops Bible as a base and to have no notes. Fortunately the committees appear to have snuck in large chunks of Tyndale’s Bible, large chunks of the Geneva Bible, as well as most parts of the Bishop’s Bible that were a direct translation from St Jerome’s Latin Bible….but don’t quote me on this as I like a peaceful life……..ed)
Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish Sunbury 