When, in 1604, King James I commissioned a new Bible translation to replace the 1568 Bishops’ Bible, he selected forty-seven or more men of diverse personality and shades of religious belief, including several of the best scholars and churchmen in England, for the task. This body of translators hammered out, after layers of revisions, what appeared in 1611 as the Authorized Version (AV), or the King James Bible, believed by many to be the most divine rendering ever of the written word in English.
The Coming of the King James Gospels is a primary publication exploring the handwritten annotations of the Oxford New Testament Company, made as members completed Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Their original edited pages, gathered into one binding as the Bodleian Bishops’ Bible ([1602] b.1), offer us the only known surviving record of their monumental work.
Ward Allen’s painstakingly produced collation of this Bishops’ Bible is available for the first time in accessible visual layout. It allows a reader to study simultaneously the three texts, that of the original Bishops’ Bible, the revisions suggested for the 1602 text, and the final King James version of the Gospels.
The Coming of the King James Gospels, with Ed Jacobs’s analysis of the revisions in the Bishops’ Bible, makes it possible to trace the progress through the three distinct stages of the translators’ work. Rejected readings reveal the reasoning which led to the wording of the final text. Beautifully produced, The Coming of the King James Gospels is now a prime resource for all students of the Bible and the English language.
An Elizabethan scholar, Ward S. Allen is Hargis Professor of English Emeritus at Auburn University in Alabama. A member of the Renaissance Society of America and a frequent contributor to learned journals, Professor Allen has previously edited Translating for King James and Translating the New Testament Epistles, 1604–1611 .
Edward C. Jacobs is professor of renaissance literature and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Louisiana Tech University. He is author of significant essays on both the Old and New Testament annotations in the 1602 Bodleian Bishops’ Bible which have appeared in The Bodleian Library Record, Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America, and The Library.
“Ward Allen and Edward Jacobs have achieved a remarkable scholarly coup with this edition. Not only do they demonstrate convincingly that they have given us what we have long searched for, actual detailed examples of the work of revision undertaken by the translators of the 1611 Authorized Version, but, in a meticulously argued preface, they show how the various stages of this revision can be traced through their text. They are specially to be praised for the way in which the complexities of the marginal annotations to the Bodleian Bishops’ Bible have been presented so that, with little effort, readers can follow for themselves the many revisions which resulted in the splendours of the Authorized Version. On every page there are treasures to be found. Sometimes one word is altered, transforming the ordinary into the sublime. In other places whole verses are recast and redesigned, often with fascinating doctrinal implications. As a guide to interpretation the editor’s preface includes a splendid series of analyses of such revisions. What they offer here is literary criticism of a high order, a fitting tribute to the stylistic sensibilities of the translators whose work is represented in the body of this text. I have no doubt that this book will stand as a key work in English Bible studies. Any one who wishes to study the Authorized Version and achieve an understanding of how it was translated and of how this translation can be given proper estimation will find it indispensable.”
—Gerald Hammond, Department of English Language and Literature University of Manchester, England author of The Making of the English Bible.
“Not Biblists alone will be interested, but all historians of the English language, and stylists. ‘Words, words, words,’ true enough, and lexicography dominate the scene, but you watch extremely cultured men weighing those words on precision scales, checking on the nuances of the original words and phrases so as to retain their iridescence and even ambiguity in a concern for total fidelity, reshaping their own English. . . .”
—Germain Marc’Hadour author of The Bible in the Works of St. Thomas More
“The Coming of the King James Gospels is a source of unparalleled importance for understanding how the makers of the King James Bible worked. Professor Allen’s collation of the translators’ own record of their decisions shows us with remarkable clarity how they revised the scholarship and English of the Bishops’ Bible. In his introduction, Professor Allen reveals how much religious artistry there can be in the revisions as the translators teased out the nuances of Greek in the light of their strong sense of English meaning and rhythm. Students of English language and literature, equally with students of Bible translation, will revel in this chance to follow his example as they trace the final steps that turned William Tyndale’s mighty pioneering work into the Bible of the English-speaking peoples.”
—David Norton, Department of English Language and Literature Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, author of A History of the Bible as Literature, Volumes I and II
“Allen and Jacobs have provided us with a fascinating glimpse into the process by which the Bishops’ Bible was revised into what we know as the King James version. By examining the translators’ work in progress, the authors show us how the final translation of the Gospels took shape, a shape which it had retained until the revisions of the late nineteenth century. For almost three hundred years the work of the King James translators endured as the official version of the Bible in English. The book by Allen and Jacobs is therefore an indispensable tool for anyone who is interested in the history of the English Bible and its impact on English-speaking
literature and culture.”
—David C. Steinmetz, Amos Ragans Kearns Professor, Duke University Divinity School, author of Memory and Mission and The Bible in the Sixteenth Century
