The year 2011 marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible in 1611.

Commissioned by James I of England in 1604, this translation was the work of 47–54 scholars divided into six committees. Some historians believe that the king himself formulated the rules and a procedure for the translators, so keen was his interest in the project.

For many readers, the KJV is unmatched in its spiritual uplift, poetry, and majestic language. It remains eminently readable when its basic terminology is decoded, and is perhaps unmatched when read aloud. The initially intimidating archaisms—“thee,” “thy,” and “thou,” among many others—can become part of the acquired devotional vocabulary of readers young and old. As the product of an age that was both meditative and declamatory, the KJV is versatile.

The devotional life of prayer and service once centered around monasteries was being pushed outward in Puritanism’s revival of intense religiosity; the preaching of the Church had received a new impetus from the reformers’ emphasis on God’s Word. The Bible was becoming understood as a dual text—to be read at home by an increasingly literate public, and also to be read in church to congregations that expected to hear the Word in the English language.

Another feature that keeps readers returning to the KJV is the way its poetic language facilitates memorization. Bible readers down through the centuries have committed passages of the KJV to memory. It has been the ladder to literacy and religious consciousness for generations.

In his book God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (HarperCollins 2003), author Adam Nicolson calls the KJV “an irenicon,” a project designed to harmonize conflicting viewpoints and bring peace. The king’s vision of a universally accepted, widely employed translation remains a practical, as well as a spiritual, aim for many Christians.

He had written, “His Highnesse wished, that some especiall pains should be taken in that behalf for one uniform translation . . . and this to be done by the best learned of both the Universities [Oxford and Cambridge], after them to be reviewed by the Bishops, and the chiefe learned of the Church; from them to be presented to the Privy Councell; and lastly to bee ratified by his Royall authority; to be read in the whole Church, and no other” (Nicolson, p. 59).

What were the conflicts that the king hoped that the new Bible translation would heal? For one, the Puritan party in the English Church believed passionately that the Protestant Reformation of their church was not complete. Seventy years had passed since Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) had broken with the Roman Catholic Church, and this party argued that the Church needed to be further “purified”—hence their name.

A smaller contingent, the Separatists, believed that the established Church was too corrupt to be reformed, and that self-governing congregations represented authentic Christianity. Some of these Separatists emigrated to North America after a period of exile in Holland. We know them as the Pilgrims. Later emigrants to New England included both Puritans and Separatists.

It is not surprising that the Separatists were excluded from translating the KJV. They preferred the Geneva Bible, translated in the 1550s by a group of English Puritan refugees in the city of Geneva. The location of its translation associated this Bible with the reformer John Calvin and with Scottish reformer John Knox. It contained numerous marginal notes promoting Calvinist theology, including predestination and suspicion of royal authority. It was no wonder that King James directed that the new Bible translation would have no notes!

Although Separatists were not part of the translation team, the more moderate Puritans who remained within the Church of England were fairly well represented. They worked in association with other scholars who did not share their views. This accommodation of a variety of viewpoints aimed to bridge the divide in the English Church; the KJV was to be a product of unity, not division.

Popular discord over the English Bibles that were currently in use helped forge the KJV. Bible translation already had a long, controversial, and dramatic history before the reign of King James. In one sense, the KJV was the culmination not only of the translations that preceded it, but of prolonged public dispute over their reliability and lineage.

The earliest attempt to translate the whole Bible into English was the project of John Wycliffe (c. 1328–1384) and his associates in the 14th century, before the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. While some members of the English nobility possessed French translations, and portions of the Bible in English were available, there was no complete Bible in English. Wycliffe and his associates translated the Latin Vulgate, the Bible used by the Roman Catholic Church, into English.

The Vulgate, which gradually became the standard Bible of the Roman Catholic Church and held that rank until the 20th century, was primarily the work of Jerome, the redoubtable scholar of the fourth century AD, who completed his work in Bethlehem. The Vulgate, translated from Greek and Hebrew texts, became the base text for other early translators into European languages; that is, they translated from the Vulgate, not from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.

William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) was the first to translate the Bible into English from Hebrew and Greek texts. He was influenced by the intrepid reformer Martin Luther, whose translation of the Bible into German in 1534 had an impact on German religion and society comparable to the influence of the KJV on the English-speaking world. Tyndale’s work was particularly important to the later scholars who translated the KJV. His translation inspired several other translations in the interim: Matthew’s Bible and Taverner’s Bible.

Tyndale’s martyrdom is a sobering reminder of the danger involved in producing an English Bible. His last words, “Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes!”—a reference to his controversy with Henry VIII—also point to the prophetic role of the early translators, who worked in opposition to state power.

However, the state, too, played an expanding role in pushing forward the English Bible. The English Reformation, which made the monarch head of Church and State, and “Defender of the Faith,” placed responsibility for the continuity, cohesion, and promotion of Protestant Christianity in his or her hands, through the Church of England. This nationalization of the Church, no longer under the Pope’s control, affected, and was affected by, the evolving political power of the English parliament, where a quarter of the members of the upper house were bishops.

Henry VIII, condemned by Tyndale for his plan to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, commissioned The Great Bible (named for its great size, and to be read in churches), published in 1539. There is irony in the king’s commission of a new Bible and his warrant for Tyndale’s arrest. The Great Bible, also called the Coverdale Bible for its chief translator, drew on the Tyndale Bible, which was incomplete, filling the gaps with new translations from the Vulgate. Henry built on the foundation of his nemesis in an attempt to create a sacred document that would unite the English people.

The Great Bible, in addition to its role in worship, was a public resource, made available in each church for people to read individually, as well. This heightened accessibility of the Scriptures in the local language was one of the main goals of Protestantism, fulfilling the mandate and motto “Sola Scriptura”—“By Scripture alone.”

The Geneva Bible, published in 1560, was one of the most important early translations. Although it drew heavily on Tyndale, it was the first English Bible in which the Old Testament was translated directly from Hebrew. The text was divided into verses—another innovation—and marginal notes were heavily used.

No royal decree created this version. It points to the religious and political sensitivities of its Puritan translators. The word tyrant appears 400 times in the Geneva Bible, but not once in the KJV. The Geneva Bible, issued during an interval of tremendous national turmoil, bears the marks of the struggle: the failed attempt of Queen Mary (r. 1553–1558) to return England to Roman Catholicism, and the larger conflict between Puritans and the established, state church.

Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558–1603) authorized the translation of the Bishops’ Bible, an attempt to remedy the deficiencies of the Great Bible. The process was poorly supervised, and the quality of the completed work inconsistent and subsequently unpopular. A more successful attempt waited on King James I. The 1602 revision of the Bishops’ Bible played a central role in that enterprise.

Interestingly enough, the last major English version issued before the KJV was the work of English Roman Catholic translators of the Vulgate, the Douay-Rheims Bible, published in France. It was the major English language Bible for Catholics until the 1940s.

King James inherited this complex history of Bible translation, and, in many ways, the work of the committees of scholars transformed that heritage. Translation on such a grand, cooperative, and careful scale had not been previously attempted. The translators worked both with existing English Bibles and with Hebrew and Greek texts; they were selected for their mastery of those ancient languages. All but one were clergymen. We have incomplete biographical information about most of them—many are known to us only by their names.

The KJV translation process was orderly and systematic. Forty unbound copies of the revised Bishop’s Bible were distributed to the committees as a base text, and the translators recorded their numerous changes in the margins. Each committee was responsible for a separate section of the Bible. For example, the “First Oxford Company” (or committee) translated from Isaiah through Malachi. The committees completed their work in 1608, and submitted their translations to a General Committee of Review in 1609.

The King James Version was first printed in 1611, and gradually won its way among the people; by the 18th century, it was the primary Bible used among English-speaking Protestants. However, the KJV that we read today is the 1769 version, in which spelling and grammar were standardized and modernized, and the accumulated misprints of successive editions were eliminated.

The KJV remains the preeminent work of literature in the English language, which is remarkable, given its origins in collective effort and collaboration. It is worth noting that the successive translations which began to appear in the 20th century—such as the Revised Standard Version and New International Version—are based on the KJV.

They take into account advances in language scholarship and the discovery of early Bible manuscripts unavailable to the KJV translators, but none of these advances has fundamentally undercut the form and structure of the KJV. Without it, these more recent translations would not exist.