Forty-seven scholars and one Bible
The KJV translation committee
The process by which the King James Bible is produced is as interesting as the product.
Fifty-four scholars are appointed, though probably forty-seven actually participate. They are divided into six companies, each responsible for a section of the Bible. Each company produces a draft. The draft is sent to the other companies for review. A general committee of representatives from all companies meets to reconcile differences.
The scholars include bishops and country clergy, Hebraists and Hellenists, men who disagree sharply on church governance and theology but agree to subordinate those disagreements to the work of accurate translation.
The rules they work under are revealing. They are to follow the Bishops' Bible as the base text where possible, but to consult the earlier translations — Tyndale, Coverdale, Geneva — and use the better rendering. They are to use traditional ecclesiastical terms rather than the more literal translations that Tyndale had pioneered. They are to read the finished text in churches before final approval.
That last rule is the key: the text must be readable aloud. It must sound like what it is — the word of God delivered to human ears in a language those ears can receive.
The scholars who argue over a word and test it by reading it aloud in the company of colleagues are doing something the whole history of Bible translation has been building toward: producing a text worthy of being heard by the plowboy Tyndale died for.
“We never thought from the beginning that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, but to make a good one better.”
— Preface to the King James Bible, 1611 AD
“Assemble the people, the men and the women and the little ones, and your sojourner who is within your gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn, and fear the LORD your God, and observe to do all the words of this law;”
The preface to the King James Bible is honest about what it is: not a new translation but an improvement of existing good translations. Not a work of individual genius but a collaborative achievement.
The humility of that framing is worth noting. The translators do not claim to have produced the definitive word of God. They claim to have made a good thing better, in service of people who need it.
This is the right posture for every generation that works with the text: we are not the first, we are not the last, we are doing our best with what we have received to pass on what we have received, as well as we can, to the next person who needs it.
The chain again. The same chain.
Forty-seven scholars argued over every word for seven years to put it in your hands.
Be as careful with it as they were. Not in their methods — in their reverence. Every word mattered to them. Let every word matter to you.