A Translation Built on a Preserved Text
Translated from the Biblical Languages
The King James Version was translated from the languages in which the Scriptures were originally written. The Old Testament was translated primarily from Hebrew, with its smaller Aramaic portions translated directly from that language. The New Testament was translated from Greek.
This does not mean that the translators possessed the original pages written by Moses, David, the prophets, the apostles, or their scribes. Those original documents—sometimes called the autographs—are no longer known to exist. Instead, the translators worked from Hebrew and Greek texts representing the Scriptures that had been carefully copied, preserved, and passed down through many generations.
For the Old Testament, they relied primarily upon the traditional Hebrew Masoretic Text. For the New Testament, they used editions of the traditional Greek text that later became commonly known as the Textus Receptus, Latin for the “Received Text.” The name Textus Receptus was introduced after the KJV was published, but it now identifies the general line of printed Greek texts used by the translators.
This is an important part of why many Christians trust the KJV. Its underlying text represents the traditional Hebrew and Greek Scriptures received, copied, read, and preserved among God’s people across the centuries.
An Extraordinary Company of Translators
King James I commissioned the new English translation following the Hampton Court Conference of 1604. Fifty-four men were originally nominated for the work, and approximately forty-seven are known to have participated. They were organized into six companies that met at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge.
This was not a small project entrusted to one translator or controlled by a modern publishing company. It was a carefully organized undertaking involving some of the most accomplished biblical scholars and linguists of their generation.
Among them were professors of Hebrew and Greek, university leaders, theologians, churchmen, and authorities in ancient languages. Collectively, they possessed remarkable knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic—then commonly called Chaldee—Syriac, Arabic, and other languages relevant to biblical study.
For example, Edward Lively had served as Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge for approximately twenty-five years. Richard Kilby was Oxford’s Regius Professor of Hebrew. John Bois was an accomplished Greek scholar, while Miles Smith was known for his knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Chaldee, Syriac, and Arabic. William Bedwell was regarded as one of the leading Arabic scholars of his time.
It would be inaccurate to claim that every translator personally mastered dozens of languages. Nevertheless, their combined knowledge was extraordinary. It would be difficult to find another English Bible translation produced by a body of scholars with the same breadth of linguistic learning, theological knowledge, and familiarity with the history of the biblical text.
Their work also passed through multiple levels of examination. Individual translators studied assigned passages, each company reviewed the work together, completed books were circulated among the other companies, and difficult questions could be referred to other learned men. The translation was then subjected to a final general review. This process provided layers of comparison and accountability rather than leaving the wording to the judgment of one person. The surviving translation rules describe this extensive review process. The Rules to Be Observed in the Translation
Building Upon Tyndale and Earlier English Bibles
The KJV translators did not disregard the faithful English translation work that had already been completed. They were instructed to use the Bishops’ Bible as their starting point and to alter it wherever greater faithfulness to the Hebrew and Greek required a change.
They were also expressly permitted to consult several earlier English Bibles, including Tyndale’s translation, Matthew’s Bible, Coverdale’s Bible, the Great Bible, and the Geneva Bible whenever those translations agreed more closely with the original-language text.
William Tyndale’s influence was especially important. His pioneering work gave the English-speaking world a clear and direct translation based upon Hebrew and Greek, and much of his memorable language was preserved through later English Bibles and ultimately in the KJV.
The King James Version therefore did not appear in isolation. It brought together generations of English Bible translation, retained wording that had already proved faithful and understandable, and subjected that inheritance to a new and extensive examination by a large company of accomplished scholars.
The result was not an unnecessary rewriting of Scripture. It was a careful refinement of the English Bible, grounded in the traditional Hebrew and Greek texts and produced through an unusually thorough process of translation, comparison, and review.