Bible King James Version

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Bible King James Version

The King James Bible, published in 1611, was produced by six teams of translators, known as ìcompanies,î in London, Oxford and Cambridge, who were charged with creating an authorized version that would support the Church of England against the Puritan influence seen in some earlier translations. Along with Shakespeareís First Folio of 1623, it is one of the most influential books in the history of English and the wellspring of common phrases like ìsalt of the earth,î ìdrop in the bucketî and ìfight the good fight,î to name only a few.

While some records of the committee that supervised the overall translation survive, only three manuscripts of the text itself have been known to exist until now. The Bodleian Library at Oxford owns nearly complete drafts of the Old Testament and the Gospels, in the form of corrected pages of the Bishopsí Bible, a 16th-century translation that the King James teams used as a base text. Lambeth Palace Library in London has a partial draft of the New Testament epistles.

Professor Miller discovered the manuscript last fall, when he was in the archives at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, researching an essay about Samuel Ward, one of the King James translators and, later, the collegeís master. He was hoping to find an unknown letter, which he did.

ìI thought that would be my great discovery,î he recalled.

But he also came across an unassuming notebook about the size of a modern paperback, wrapped in a stained piece of waste vellum and filled with some 70 pages of Wardís nearly indecipherable handwriting.

The notebook had been cataloged in the 1980s as a ìverse-by-verse biblical commentaryî with ìGreek word studies, and some Hebrew notes.î But as Professor Miller tried to puzzle out which passages of the Bible it concerned, he realized what it was: a draft of parts of the King James Version of the Apocrypha, a disputed section of the Bible that is left out of many editions, particularly in the United States.

ìThere was a kind of thunderstruck, leap-out-of-bathtub moment,î Professor Miller said. ìBut then comes the more laborious process of making sure you are 100 percent correct.î

The draft, Professor Miller argues, dates from between 1604, when the King James Bible was commissioned, and 1608, when the six teams were asked to send their work to the general committee for review. Unlike the other surviving drafts, which scholars date to later parts of the process, it shows an individual translatorís initial puzzling over aspects of the Greek text of the Apocrypha, indicating the reasoning behind his translation choices, with reference to Hebrew and Latin as well.

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The title page of the King James Bible in 1611.

ìYou can actually see the way Greek, Latin and Hebrew are all feeding into what will become the most widely read work of English literature of all time,î Professor Miller said. ìIt gets you so close to the thought process, itís incredible.î

The draft, he argues, also complicates one long-cherished aspect of the ìmythos,î as he put it, surrounding the King James: that it was a collaborative project through and through.

The companies were charged with doing their work as a group, rather than subdividing it by assigning individual books to individual translators, as was the case with the Bishopsí Bible. But the Ward notebook, Professor Miller said, suggests ìbeyond a reasonable doubtî that at least some of the companies ignored the instructions and divided up the work among individuals, at least initially.