Quote:
Originally Posted by lagtight
I think that might be a slight overstatement.
It's not a revision like the New King James Version was of the King James Version.
I don't think it's an overstatement at all. The translators were instructed to use the Bishop's Bible as their base text, it's as simple as that.
40 scholars were divided into six teams: two companies from Oxford, two from Cambridge, and two from Westminster. According to the King James translators’ own published comments in the 1611 preface, and by the charter of the King and the instructions of the 14 rules for the translation process, the “translators” were not to develop a new translation but rather, they were to develop a revision of the Bishops’ Bible. The first rule was: “the Bishops’ Bible [was] to be followed, and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit.”
At the beginning of the process, the Kings’ Printer, Robert Barker of London, delivered 40 unbound copies of the 1602 Bishops’ Bible to the translators. If the King James was to be a new translation, the six teams (and more than 50 scholars who eventually worked on the project) would not be expected to write their work in the narrow margins and squeeze tiny handwriting in the space between the lines of an already printed Bible. The origin of the KJV is the opposite of what is envisioned by thousands of King James Only advocates.
God did not bring about a brand new divinely inspired English Bible. Rather, men labored to revise an existing translation, yet they often retained some of its weaker passages (that were corrected in most later KJ versions) and sometimes wrongly altered the Bishops’ Bible’s correct translation (with these translators errors also corrected in most later KJ versions).
