The King James Version (KJV), also the King James Bible (KJB) and the Authorized Version (AV), is an Early Modern English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611, by sponsorship of King James VI and I. The 80 books of the King James Version include 39 books of the Old Testament, 14 books of Apocrypha, and the 27 books of the New Testament.
Myles Coverdale, first name also spelt Miles, was an English ecclesiastical reformer chiefly known as a Bible translator, preacher and, briefly, Bishop of Exeter (1551–1553). In 1535, Coverdale produced the first complete printed translation of the Bible into English. His theological development is a paradigm of the progress of the English Reformation from 1530 to 1552. By the time of his death, he had transitioned into an early Puritan, affiliated to Calvin, yet still advocating the teachings of Augustine.
The Matthew Bible, also known as Matthew's Version, was first published in 1537 by John Rogers, under the pseudonym "Thomas Matthew". It combined the New Testament of William Tyndale, and as much of the Old Testament as he had been able to translate before being captured and put to death. Myles Coverdale translated chiefly from German and Latin sources and completed the Old Testament and Biblical apocrypha, except for the Prayer of Manasseh, which was Rogers', into the Coverdale Bible. It is thus a vital link in the main sequence of English Bible translations.
The Geneva Bible is one of the most historically significant translations of the Bible into English, preceding the Douay Rheims Bible by 22 years, and the King James Version by 51 years. It was the primary Bible of 16th-century English Protestantism and was used by William Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, John Knox, John Donne and others. It was one of the Bibles taken to America on the Mayflower, and its frontispiece inspired Benjamin Franklin's design for the first Great Seal of the United States.
The Great Bible of 1539 was the first authorised edition of the Bible in English, authorised by King Henry VIII of England to be read aloud in the church services of the Church of England. The Great Bible was prepared by Myles Coverdale, working under commission of Thomas Cromwell, Secretary to Henry VIII and Vicar General. In 1538, Cromwell directed the clergy to provide "one book of the Bible of the largest volume in English, and the same set up in some convenient place within the said church that ye have care of, whereas your parishioners may most commodiously resort to the same and read it."
The Revised Version (RV) or English Revised Version (ERV) of the Bible is a late-19th-century British revision of the King James Version. It was the first officially authorised and recognised revision of the King James Version in Great Britain. The work was entrusted to over 50 scholars from various denominations in Great Britain. American scholars were invited to co-operate, by correspondence. Its New Testament was published in 1881, its Old Testament in 1885, and its Apocrypha in 1894. The best known of the translation committee members were Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort; their fiercest critics of that period were John William Burgon, George Washington Moon, and George Saintsbury.
Partial Bible translations into languages of the English people can be traced back to the late 7th century, including translations into Old and Middle English. More than 100 complete translations into English have been produced. A number of translations have been prepared of parts of the Bible, some deliberately limited to certain books and some projects that have been abandoned before the planned completion.
The Douay–Rheims Bible, also known as the Douay–Rheims Version, Rheims–Douai Bible or Douai Bible, and abbreviated as D–R, DRB, and DRV, is a translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English made by members of the English College, Douai, in the service of the Catholic Church. The New Testament portion was published in Reims, France, in 1582, in one volume with extensive commentary and notes. The Old Testament portion was published in two volumes twenty-seven years later in 1609 and 1610 by the University of Douai. The first volume, covering Genesis to Job, was published in 1609; the second, covering the Book of Psalms to 2 Maccabees plus the three apocryphal books of the Vulgate appendix following the Old Testament, was published in 1610. Marginal notes took up the bulk of the volumes and offered insights on issues of translation, and on the Hebrew and Greek source texts of the Vulgate.
The American Standard Version (ASV), officially Revised Version, Standard American Edition, is a Bible translation into English that was completed in 1901 with the publication of the revision of the Old Testament. The revised New Testament had been published in 1900.
Early Modern English Bible translations are those translations of the Bible which were made between about 1500 and 1800, the period of Early Modern English. This was the first major period of Bible translation into the English language including the King James Version and Douai Bibles. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation led to the need for Bibles in the vernacular with competing groups each producing their own versions.
Taverner's Bible, more correctly called The Most Sacred Bible whiche is the holy scripture, conteyning the old and new testament, translated into English, and newly recognized with great diligence after most faythful exemplars by Rychard Taverner, is a minor revision of Matthew's Bible edited by Richard Taverner and published in 1539. First editions of Taverner's Bible are extremely rare.
The Life with God Bible is a study Bible published by Harper in 2005, and utilizes the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). It was formerly published under the name Renovaré Spiritual Formation Bible, but has been republished under the Life with God title.
The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha is a newly edited edition of the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. This 2005 edition was printed as The Bible in 2006. The editor is David Norton, Reader in English at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Norton is author of A History of the Bible as Literature (1993) revised and condensed as A History of the English Bible as Literature (2000). He wrote A Textual History of the King James Bible as a companion volume to the New Cambridge Paragraph Bible.
There have been various debates concerning the proper family of biblical manuscripts and translation techniques that should be used to translate the Bible into other languages. Biblical translation has been employed since the first translations were made from the Hebrew Bible into Greek and Aramaic. Until the Late Middle Ages, the Western Church used the Latin Vulgate almost entirely while the Eastern Church, centered in Constantinople, mostly used the Greek Byzantine text. Beginning in the 14th century, there have been increasing numbers of vernacular translations into various languages. With the development of modern printing techniques, these increased enormously.
The Coverdale Bible, compiled by Myles Coverdale and published in 1535, was the first complete Modern English translation of the Bible, and the first complete printed translation into English. The later editions published in 1537 were the first complete Bibles printed in England. The 1537 folio edition carried the royal licence and was therefore the first officially approved Bible translation in English. The Psalter from the Coverdale Bible was included in the Great Bible of 1540 and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer beginning in 1662, and in all editions of the U.S. Episcopal Church Book of Common Prayer until 1979.
The biblical apocrypha denotes the collection of apocryphal ancient books thought to have been written some time between 200 BC and 100 AD.
The Tyndale Bible (TYN) generally refers to the body of biblical translations by William Tyndale into Early Modern English, made c. 1522–1535. Tyndale's biblical text is credited with being the first Anglophone Biblical translation to work directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, although it relied heavily upon the Latin Vulgate and Luther's German New Testament. Furthermore, it was the first English biblical translation that was mass-produced as a result of new advances in the art of printing.
The English Hexapla is an edition of the New Testament in Greek, along with what were considered the six most important English language translations in parallel columns underneath, preceded by a detailed history of English translations and translators by S. P. Tregelles; it was first published in 1841. The six English language translations provided are Wycliffe's (1380), William Tyndale's (1534), Cranmer's, the Geneva Bible (1557), Rheims (1582), and the Authorised version, or King James Bible (1611), arranged in columns underneath.
A Protestant Bible is a Christian Bible whose translation or revision was produced by Protestant Christians. Typically translated into a vernacular language, such Bibles comprise 39 books of the Old Testament and 27 books of the New Testament, for a total of 66 books. Some Protestants use Bibles which also include 14 additional books in a section known as the Apocrypha bringing the total to 80 books. This is in contrast with the 73 books of the Catholic Bible, which includes seven deuterocanonical books as a part of the Old Testament. The division between protocanonical and deuterocanonical books is not accepted by all Protestants who simply view books as being canonical or not and therefore classify books found in the Deuterocanon, along with other books, as part of the Apocrypha. Sometimes the term "Protestant Bible" is simply used as a shorthand for a bible which contains only the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments.
The Apocrypha controversy of the 1820s was a debate around the British and Foreign Bible Society and the issue of the inclusion of the Apocrypha in Bibles it printed for Christian missionary work.
