King James Version(KJV)

The King James Version — also known as the Authorized Version — was commissioned by King James I of England and first published in 1611. It's the oldest translation on this site by far, and remains one of the most widely recognized and read English Bibles today, more than four hundred years after its release.

The work was carried out by 47 scholars organized into six translation companies working at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge, each assigned a different section of Scripture, with Archbishop Richard Bancroft overseeing the project. Their instructions were to revise the 1568 Bishops' Bible — the Church of England's official, if never very popular, translation — as the base text. In practice they leaned so heavily on earlier English Bibles instead, especially Tyndale's New Testament and the Geneva Bible, that most studies put 75-85% of the KJV New Testament in Tyndale's own words.

It's translated in a formal, word-for-word style from the Textus Receptus for the New Testament — a Greek text tradition compiled in the 16th century, a different textual lineage from the modern Critical Text that most newer translations, including its own successor the NKJV's marginal notes, now draw from — and from the Masoretic Text, the standard medieval Hebrew text, for the Old Testament.

Its gender language is traditional simply because it predates the modern conversation about it by centuries: it renders the generic masculine language of its source text — “brethren,” generic “he,” “man” — directly, in the same Early Modern English idiom as the rest of the translation.

The KJV remains the best-selling Bible translation of all time and continues to be widely used today, especially in traditional and liturgical congregations, and its phrasing is woven deeply into English literature, hymnody, and everyday idiom.

The King James Version most people read today isn't quite the original 1611 printing. In 1769, Oxford scholar Benjamin Blayney standardized its spelling and punctuation — correcting tens of thousands of small inconsistencies across earlier printings — without changing the wording itself. That 1769 edition is the text virtually all modern KJV Bibles use.

Several everyday English expressions trace back to the KJV's phrasing. “The powers that be” (Romans 13:1) and “a man after his own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14) are exact quotes, word for word. Two more are close paraphrases rather than direct quotes: Daniel 5's story of mysterious handwriting appearing during Belshazzar's feast gave English the idiom “the writing on the wall,” though that exact phrase isn't in the text, and Isaiah 40:15's “a drop of a bucket” became today's slightly reworded “a drop in the bucket.” Most people who use any of these don't realize they're quoting, or echoing, Scripture.