King James Version Of The Bible
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org,
please feel free to visit the school website)
It was at the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), in England, that we find the draft for an act of Parliament to create a new version of the Bible: “An act for the reducing of diversities of Bibles now extant in the English tongue to one settled vulgar translated from the original.” The Bishop’s Bible of 1568 was not more popular than the Great Bible yet was still rivaled by the Geneva Bible of this period. We learn that nothing ever became of this draft during the reign of Elizabeth, who died in 1603, and was succeeded by James I, as the throne passed from the Tudors to the Stuarts. James was born during the period between the Geneva and the Bishop’s Bible.
James called the Hampton Court Conference in January of 1604 “for the hearing, and for the determining, things pretended to be amiss in the church.” He gathered clergymen and teachers to consider the complaints of the Puritans. Bible revisions were not on the agenda but the Puritan president of Corpus Christi College, John Reynolds, spoke up and “moved his Majesty, that there might be a new translation of the Bible, because those which were allowed in the reigns of Henry the eighth, and Edward the sixth, were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the Original.”
King James answered that he “could never yet see a Bible well translated in English; but I think that, of all, that of Geneva is the worst. I wish some special pains were taken for a uniform translation, which should be done by the best learned men in both Universities, then reviewed by the Bishops, presented to the Privy Council, lastly ratified by the Royal authority, to be read in the whole Church, and none other.” Accordingly, a resolution came forth, “That a translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek; and this to be set out and printed, without any marginal notes, and only to be used in all churches of England in time of divine service.”