Campbell - Bible: the story of the King James Version ; 1611-2011

BIBLE

Oxford University Press Publications by Gordon Campbell

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The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance
Renaissance Art and Architecture
John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (co-author)
Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana (co-author)
Very Interesting People: John Milton

AS EDITOR

The Holy Bible: Quatercentenary Edition
The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts (2 vols)
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Renaissance Studies (10 vols)
The Review of English Studies (13 vols)
The Complete Works of John Milton (11 vols, in progress)
W. R. Parker, Milton: A Biography (2 vols)
Ben Jonson, The Alchemist and Other Plays

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Grove Art Online
John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus. Tercentenary Essays
The Journal of Theological Studies
The Oxford Chronology of English Literature
The Oxford Companion to English Literature
The Oxford Companion to the Garden
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The Oxford Handbook of Milton

THE STORY OF THE KING JAMES VERSION 16112011

GORDON CAMPBELL

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Gordon Campbell 2010

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The four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the King James Version of the Bible falls in 2011, and Oxford University Press, which has published King James Bibles since the seventeenth century and has sold uncounted millions of copies over the centuries, has decided to mark the quatercentenary with this account of the fortunes of this translation from 1611 to the present. This project was conceived not as an academic exercise in book history, but rather as an affectionate biography of a book that has had a long life and has, in another sense, given life to Christian readers.

There are more books devoted to the Bible than to any other book in human history, so the addition of another requires some justification beyond the fact that few translations live long enough to have four-hundredth birthdays. The first two centenaries seem to have passed with little note, but, on the occasion of the tercentenary in 1911, Oxford University Press celebrated the anniversary on both sides of the Atlantic. In England the Press commissioned the bibliographer and book historian Alfred Pollard to write a book-length introduction to two editions of the 1611 Bible, one a facsimile of the original, and the other a version of the 1611 Bible set in roman type. In America the Press published The 1911 Tercentenary Commemoration Bible, which contained a new system of references prepared by C. I. Scofield, who had already published the first edition of his annotated Bible. The text of this edition was corrected and amended by a committee of 34 eminent Hebrew and Greek scholars in the USA and Canada, representing all the great evangelical bodies. The changes that they wrought on this edition are indicative of the issues that will be discussed in this book: Isaiah 9:3, for example, was changed from Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy to Thou hast multiplied the nation, and increased the joy.

This book has been prepared in tandem with another project, which is an edition of the 1611 Bible that is as close as possible to the text of 1611; it is entitled The Holy Bible: Quatercentenary Edition. In both commissions I have aspired to make the material accessible to modern readers and to take into account the sensibilities of readers of all denominations and none. In the edition of the Bible the typeface is roman (and therefore easier to read than the black-letter type of the original edition), but the initial letters of the first edition have been preserved, because their pictorial images were part of the 1611 Bible. And, just as the roman typeface of the Quatercentenary Edition is intended to make the book more accessible, so in this book I have refrained from quoting Hebrew and Greek texts; I have nonetheless felt free to discuss textual issues with reference to these and other languages, because readers of the Bible often have a passionate interest in the subject.

This is not the first account of the history of the KJV, and a reader might reasonably wonder how this book differs from its predecessors, especially as I often draw on their insights. The principal difference is that I have had a large body of recent scholarly material at my disposal, in the form of the American National ) who famously deplored Wyclif, who had foolishly made the Bible available to anyone who could read Englisheven women! It is oddly satisfying to know that I have written this celebratory chronicle of the KJV in the small parish that more than 600 years ago produced the grumpy chronicler who complained about the first complete translation of the Bible into English; on one level this book is a riposte to my erstwhile neighbour.

I have followed the spelling of names in the ANB and ODNB, so I refer to George Whitefield (not Whitfield) and John Wyclif (not Wycliffe); in the Further Reading I list individuals who are the subject of ANB and ODNB entries. In citations from the KJV I have not been consistent, because there are thousands of differences between the text published in 1611 and the text published in the twenty-first century. Sometimes it suits my purpose to quote the original text, but when I do so I usually modernize the letter forms; on other occasions, when textual issues are not at stake, I cite the current Oxford text of the KJV.