The Book Nobody Authorized

A history of the King James Version Bible

How a book made by a committee, printed by a monopolist, and built largely out of a burned man’s sentences became the most familiar English ever written.

A history in 13 parts · about 45 minutes · 1384 – today

1535–1536 · William Tyndale’s last year

A Letter Asking for a Warmer Cap

Six miles north of Brussels, in the castle at Vilvoorde, a prisoner sat down and wrote out a list of the things he needed. He had been taken at Antwerp on 21 May 1535, and he would be held about sixteen months. The list is domestic and exact. A warmer cap. A coat, his own being worn through. Leggings. A lamp, the evenings being long. And then, in the tone of a scholar asking a colleague for a favor rather than a condemned man asking for mercy, his Hebrew Bible, his Hebrew grammar and his Hebrew dictionary, so that he might spend the time in study.

The letter survives in the archives of the Council of Brabant, and it is the only document generally accepted as being in William Tyndale’s own hand — accepted rather than proved, since the case rests on where the paper sat and what it says. Everything else that comes down to us from him came off a press. It names no recipient; the man usually assumed to have received it, the Marquis of Bergen op Zoom, is an inference too. Whether the books ever reached the cell, no record tells us. The letter asks. That is the whole of it.

He was condemned in August 1536 and executed in early October. Nobody wrote down the day; 6 October is a commemorative convention settled on long afterward. The accounts we have, John Foxe’s chief among them, agree that he was strangled at the stake and then burned, because the version that stuck has him burned alive — and which rests, like everything else about that morning, on late and partisan reporting. The familiar detail that the strangling was botched is not even in that: it is a modern inference from Foxe’s report that he cried out at the stake. Foxe does not say it.

And here is the strange part, the part that makes the cap and the coat worth dwelling on. A great deal of the King James Bible — the book itself, sentence by sentence — was written by the man in that cell, seventy years before the committee that gets the credit sat down. In 1998 Jon Nielson and Royal Skousen published a sampled collation putting roughly 83.7 percent of the King James New Testament, and about 75.8 percent of the Old Testament books Tyndale lived to translate, in his words. It is a sampling estimate rather than a word count, and it speaks only of the ground he actually reached: he never translated the prophetic books entire, or Job, Psalms, Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, so about those it says nothing at all. And what it measures is the wording of one printed book, not what English speakers carry around in their heads, which is a different question, and gets a different answer before we are done.

Sixty-seven years after the fire at Vilvoorde, a committee assembled by a king would be instructed to build on a text descended, at one and two removes, from this man’s work; the finished book took another seven years after that. The bishops of that king’s church had helped hunt him down. To see how a man could be killed for making English sentences, and then have those sentences licensed by the Crown within a year of his death, you have to go back rather further than 1535.

1384–1519 · Wycliffe, the Lollards and the ban on English scripture

When Owning the Wrong Book Could Kill You

English scripture did not begin with John Wycliffe. Anglo-Saxon readers had the West Saxon Gospels; Aelfric put stretches of the Heptateuch into English before the Normans came; Richard Rolle’s Psalter was circulating in the fourteenth century and was perfectly respectable. What the Oxford circle around Wycliffe made was something nobody had made before: a complete Bible in English, assembled mostly after his death on the last day of 1384, and translated from the Latin Vulgate throughout rather than from Hebrew and Greek. There is no evidence Wycliffe translated a word of it himself. It traveled anyway, and it kept traveling. Mary Dove’s catalog lists 253 surviving Wycliffite manuscripts, and only about twenty of those are whole Bibles. The rest are gospels and epistles and portions: the parts a person could afford, and hide.

The law that answered them is usually described more luridly than it deserves. Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions, agreed at Oxford in 1407 and formally promulgated in January 1409 — dates here run modern-style throughout — did not ban the English Bible outright. They forbade translating any text of scripture into English on one’s own authority, and forbade reading any translation made in Wycliffe’s time or since without the approval of a bishop or a provincial council. Unlicensed translation and unlicensed reading were the offenses, which is a narrower thing than it sounds, and licenses were in fact granted; Thomas More later said he knew of them. Hold on to that, because it explains a scene a century later in which a young priest walks into a bishop’s palace and asks permission before he does anything else.

Wycliffe himself was long past punishing. The Council of Constance condemned forty-five of his articles by name in May 1415 and ordered his body dug up. Nothing happened for thirteen years, until Pope Martin V forced the matter, and in 1428 Bishop Fleming of Lincoln, who had been something of a Wycliffe sympathizer in his own youth, had the bones burned at Lutterworth and the ashes thrown into the River Swift.

The living were another matter. On 4 December 1514 a London merchant tailor named Richard Hunne was found hanged in the Lollards' Tower at St Paul’s, at the end of a long quarrel with his parish that had started over a mortuary fee claimed for his dead infant son. A coroner’s jury returned a verdict of willful murder against the bishop’s chancellor, William Horsey, the summoner Charles Joseph, and the bell-ringer John Spalding. The other reading of the night, that Hunne faced ruin and hanged himself, was argued at the time and is argued still; a jury’s verdict is not forensic proof. What nobody disputes is the sequel. Hunne was condemned as a heretic on 16 December, sixteen days dead, and burned on the 20th.

Five years later seven people were burned at Coventry, in the Little Park: six men and Mistress Joan Smith, traditionally on 4 April 1519. They died as relapsed heretics, several having abjured before, and the English Lord’s Prayer, Creed and Commandments found in their keeping served as the evidence against them rather than the charge itself. For nearly all of this, John Foxe is effectively the only source we have, a partisan writing decades afterward with a case to make. Some of what he reports is certainly true. None of it should be repeated without his name attached, which is a habit worth forming now, because he is about to open the next chapter.

1523–1536 · Tyndale’s New Testament and the smuggling trade

The Testament That Came in Under the Cloth

Foxe, as promised, is where it starts. The vow comes first, at Little Sodbury: Foxe has Tyndale telling a learned man that he would make a boy behind the plow know more of scripture than the priest did. Foxe set that down decades later, and the image was not Tyndale’s own in any case. Erasmus had the plowman singing scripture at the plow in the Paraclesis of 1516; Tyndale, if he said it, was quoting his own side’s manifesto. What is documented is what he did with the ambition. In 1523 he carried it to Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, with a specimen translation of Isocrates as proof that he could do the work. The request was not eccentric. Unlicensed translation was the crime, which meant a licensed English Bible was legally conceivable, and Tunstall was precisely the man who could license one. He said his house was full.

A cloth merchant, Humphrey Monmouth, took him in; in the spring of 1524 he sailed, and he never came back. The New Testament went onto a press at Cologne and got as far as Matthew 22 before the printing was stopped mid-run. One fragment survives, in the British Library. It is conventionally dated 1525, on some accounts the opening weeks of 1526, and the raid itself, the tavern talk, the tip-off, rests entirely on Cochlaeus’s own account, written more than twenty years afterward by the man claiming the credit.

The complete New Testament was printed at Worms in 1526 by Peter Schoeffer the Younger, and it was built to travel under other people’s goods: an octavo, genuinely pocket-sized, with no prologue and no marginal glosses at all, precisely so that it could not be attacked as Lutheran commentary dressed up as scripture. How many were made is unknown; the three thousand and the six thousand you see quoted are guesses with no document behind them. Three copies survive and not one of them is complete. St Paul’s Cathedral has one; the British Library bought another in 1994 from Bristol Baptist College for about a million pounds, lacking its title page; and Eberhard Zwink identified a third at Stuttgart in 1996.

Tunstall preached at Paul’s Cross in 1526 and burned the books, in what is usually called the first public burning of printed English scripture in England — a superlative resting on the records that happen to survive rather than on any complete account of what went on fires in the 1520s. His famous two thousand was a count of errors he said he had found in the translation, not a count of copies on the fire. Three years after the polite refusal he was burning them; six years after, in Antwerp in 1529, he was buying up the stock, though that last part comes to us on the authority of the Packington story, which reaches us through Hall’s Chronicle, printed in 1548, twenty years after the event. Tyndale answered in kind, and enjoyed himself doing it. His 1530 Pentateuch carries a colophon that lies: Marlborow in the lande of Hesse, by me Hans Luft, who was Luther’s printer in Wittenberg and had no press at Marburg at all. The book is now given to Johannes Hoochstraten, of Antwerp.

Then came the paper war with Thomas More, roughly two thousand pages of it, the Confutation alone running to half a million words, and what it was fought over was single words. Congregation, where the church wanted church. Senior, which Tyndale made elder in his 1534 revision, where the church wanted priest. Love, not charity. Repentance, not penance. More knew exactly what each one carried, which is why he gave a decade of his life to them, and why, eighty years later, a committee working under a king would be handed a rule putting every one of them back.

1535–1543 · Coverdale, the Matthew Bible and the Great Bible

Chained to the Lectern, Then Snatched Back

While Tyndale sat in the castle at Vilvoorde waiting for his books, a milder man finished the thing he had started. Miles Coverdale’s Bible was completed on 4 October 1535: the first complete printed Bible in English. That word, printed, is doing real work in the sentence. The Wycliffite Bible had been complete a century and a half earlier, but copied out by hand and taken from the Latin. What was new in 1535 was a whole English Bible you could buy rather than commission. Coverdale had no Hebrew, and rather than pretend otherwise he named his sources in the preface: five sundry interpreters, meaning the Vulgate, Pagninus’s Latin, Luther, the Zurich Bible, and Tyndale. A man who could not read the Psalms in the language they were written in produced the psalter English congregations have used ever since; his psalms, revised for the Great Bible, are the ones still printed in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

Two years later came the strangest book in the whole story. The Matthew Bible of 1537 was published under the name Thomas Matthew, who did not exist. Most of it is Tyndale: his revised New Testament, his Pentateuch, and his Joshua through 2 Chronicles, which had never been printed at all. John Rogers assembled it, filling the gaps from Coverdale. Cranmer forwarded a copy to Thomas Cromwell on 4 August 1537, the royal license followed within days, and on 13 August Cranmer wrote back that “you have shown me more pleasure herein than if you had given me a thousand pound.” Ten months after Tyndale burned at Vilvoorde, the King licensed Tyndale’s Bible under a false name. Whether England could have saved him is genuinely unsettled — Cromwell did write on his behalf, and nobody has ever established who was paying Henry Phillips, the young Englishman who betrayed him — but the timing needs no help from motive. Rogers left a signature about it, too: at the end of the Old Testament stand two large ornamental initials, W T. It is one of the very few flourishes in this story that is a physical object rather than somebody’s report of one.

The Great Bible was begun in Paris in 1538, where the paper and the presses were better. In December the Inquisitor General seized the sheets, which were sold off as waste; the presses, the type and the workmen were shipped across to London, and the book was finished there in April 1539. By then Cromwell’s injunctions of September 1538 had ordered every parish to buy an English Bible of the largest volume, with the cost split between the parson and his parishioners. That is most of the reason the parish chained it: the congregation had paid for the book, and the chain kept the parish’s property on the parish’s lectern. Chaining was in any case the ordinary way of keeping an expensive reference book where it belonged, in churches and libraries alike, long before an English Bible stood on any lectern. It would be too tidy to say nobody was nervous about readers — the same injunctions and the orders that came after them fussed a good deal about people expounding the text aloud to one another — but the chain itself was about the money. Seven editions appeared in under three years. How many copies is guesswork, the estimates running from about nine thousand to twenty thousand, and the deadlines for compliance slipped, and slipped again.

Then the weather turned. Cromwell was beheaded on 28 July 1540, and his arms were chiseled out of the woodblock for the Great Bible’s title page; from the fourth edition, in November 1540, the figure who had held his coat of arms holds a blank shield. On 12 May 1543 the Act for the Advancement of True Religion forbade English Bible reading to women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen, husbandmen and laborers, while noblemen and gentlemen might read aloud to their households, and noblewomen and gentlewomen might read to themselves alone. The line was drawn by rank and sex, not by literacy: what you were permitted to read depended on who your father was. The same act abolished Tyndale’s translation by name, six years after the King had licensed it under a pseudonym.

The whiplash had a human cost, and it came due under the next reign but one. John Rogers, who had assembled the Matthew Bible and set his dead friend’s initials into it, was the first person burned under Mary I, at Smithfield on 4 February 1555. The French ambassador Noailles wrote to Montmorency about him that same day, which is a detail worth having, because for once we are not relying on Foxe alone.

1557–1603 · The Geneva Bible and the Bishops’ Bible

The Bible That Argued Back

The fires that took Rogers sent a good many other people out of the country, and the book that would beat every official English Bible for the next eighty years was made by some of them. It was not printed in England at all. It was made in Geneva by refugees who had left when Mary came to the throne and who found themselves, unexpectedly, with time, scholarship and a good printer. The New Testament came in 1557 and the whole Bible in 1560, from the press of Rowland Hall, with William Whittingham leading the New Testament work.

Call it the first English Bible whose whole text was worked over against the Hebrew and Greek and you are on safe ground; call it a fresh translation from the originals and you are not. The Old Testament is a thorough revision of the Tyndale and Great Bible line, collated against the Hebrew; the New Testament is Whittingham’s revision of Tyndale, collated against Beza. What was new was not really the words. It was the page.

Open a Geneva and you are looking at something that still feels modern: roman type, verses numbered and set on their own lines, italics for the words the translators had to supply, maps, cross references. It invented almost none of that. The verse divisions are Robert Estienne’s, taken from his Greek New Testament of 1551, and roman type and italics were ordinary continental practice. Nor is every Geneva Bible roman; some of the English settings are black letter. What Geneva did was bring the whole apparatus into English at once, and put it in a book an ordinary household could own.

Including the notes. On a typical page they fill the outer margin and run along the foot, so that a reader is never more than a line away from a commentator’s elbow. The apparatus kept growing edition by edition; the Junius notes on Revelation arrived only in 1599.

Two of those notes are worth reading slowly, because a king is going to name them in a room at Hampton Court forty-odd years from now. At Exodus 1:19, where the midwives lie to Pharaoh, the Geneva margin says that their “disobedience herein was lawful, but their dissembling evil.” Read it at that speed and it is doing two things at once: licensing defiance of a king, and condemning the lie. Retellings of the Hampton Court story tend to flatten it the other way round, into a margin that blessed the midwives' deceit, and the correction here is simply what the note says when you go and look at it. At 2 Chronicles 15:16 the note faults Asa not for deposing his idolatrous mother but for stopping there: he should have executed her, and instead “gave place to foolish pity.”

Some 140 editions of the Geneva Bible and New Testament appeared between 1560 and 1644. English printing began in 1575 and 1576, under Christopher Barker. Scotland’s first printed Bible, the Bassandyne of 1579, was a Geneva, and a Scottish act required householders of substance to own one. Readers called it the Breeches Bible, after Genesis 3:7, where the Geneva has Adam and Eve sewing themselves breeches, though the Wycliffite Bible already had brechis in the same verse. The nickname stuck to Geneva; the trousers had been cut a hundred and seventy years earlier, by whichever member of that Oxford circle turned the verse — not, on the evidence, by Wycliffe.

The official answer was the Bishops‘ Bible of 1568. Archbishop Parker parceled the books out among his bishops and had each man initial his section, and it never caught on: roughly fifty editions in forty years, only about twenty of them the whole Bible. The 1572 revision printed the Psalms in parallel columns, Great Bible beside Bishops’, because congregations would not give up the psalter they already knew. It is a confession of failure bound into the book itself, and it was still the book on the lecterns when Elizabeth died.

January 1604 · The Hampton Court Conference, and why James wanted a new Bible

The Idea Nobody in the Room Had Come to Propose

It should have happened in November. Plague pushed it into the new year, and so the conference sat on three days, Saturday the fourteenth, Monday the sixteenth and Wednesday the eighteenth of January 1604, in the King’s Privy Chamber at Hampton Court. James was thirty-seven. He had been King of England for nine and a half months and a king somewhere for thirty-six years, having been crowned in Scotland at thirteen months old. He had held a throne longer than most of the men facing him had held a living.

The petition that brought everyone there had been put into his hands on the road south in April 1603, and it is worth being exact about what it asked for, because nearly every retelling gets this wrong. The Millenary Petition wanted relief from the surplice, from the cross in baptism, from the ring in marriage, from clergy drawing several livings at once, and from the ex officio oath. It did not ask for a new Bible. Not a line of it. Even the thousand of the name was a claim the petitioners made about themselves.

On the first day the Puritans were not in the room at all; the king spent it with his bishops. On Monday the sixteenth four moderate spokesmen were finally let in, and by then the bench had thinned: only two bishops sat with James, Bancroft of London and Bilson of Winchester, along with a handful of deans and members of the Council. It was there that John Rainolds, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, made the motion. What exactly he asked for is contested; Barlow has him moving for a new translation, while another surviving account reads more like a plea for one authorized text than for a fresh one. Bancroft objected first, and briskly: “if every mans humour should be followed, there would be no end of translating.”

James liked the idea, for reasons Rainolds had not offered him. He had never, Barlow writes, “see a Bible well translated in English; but the worst of all, his Majestie thought the Geneva to be” — note the third person; this is a witness reporting, not the king speaking. And what Barlow has him objecting to is the margins: “some notes very partiall, untrue, seditious, and savouring too much of daungerous, and trayterous conceites.” He named exactly two, the Exodus note and the Chronicles note you have already met, and both are about obeying kings. The Geneva was the Bible of his own boyhood and, by act of the Scottish Parliament, of his own kingdom’s law. So on the one account we have, what he complained of that morning was the elbow in the margin rather than the book it leaned on. What he privately thought of the book is not something this or any other page can tell you, since the only witness in the room is the one we are about to stop trusting.

Even the ban on interpretive notes arrived as an afterthought, “upon a word cast out by my Lord of London” — Bancroft again, adding a rider. Then James laid out on the spot how the thing would be approved: first the universities, then the bishops and chief learned, then the Privy Council, then his own ratification. No record of that Privy Council presentation has ever been produced, and no record of any other step in the chain either. Nothing was authorized that day, and no evidence of an authorization on any day afterward has ever come to light — which is a narrower statement than the one people usually make, for a reason a fire in a Whitehall room will supply later on, and which turns out to matter a great deal when the finished book finally appears.

And almost everything memorable from those three days comes from one book: William Barlow’s Summe and Substance, published later that same year by a conformist who went on to translate for the new Bible himself and to collect a bishopric the following year. Rival accounts do survive — a Puritan one, two letters, and Patrick Galloway’s report to Edinburgh, which the king corrected in his own hand. Every version we have of that room has been through somebody’s editing.

1604–1610 · Who translated the King James Bible

Fifty-Four Men, No Wages, Seven Years

The machinery was laid out on paper with a clerk’s confidence. In a letter to Richard Bancroft dated 22 July 1604, the king named “four and fifty” learned men for the work. No list of fifty-four has ever been found. The rosters that survive name about fifty, and roughly forty-seven is the traditional figure for those who actually did anything, a number reconstructed by later scholars rather than copied off a payroll. They were sorted into six companies, two each at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge.

The Bible was cut into six pieces. Westminster took Genesis to 2 Kings and, separately, the Epistles. Cambridge took 1 Chronicles through the Song of Solomon, and the Apocrypha. Oxford took Isaiah to Malachi, and the Gospels, Acts and Revelation. Note where the Apocrypha sits in that arrangement: not an appendix, not a courtesy, but a full and equal sixth of the commission, which is worth remembering when you open a modern King James and find it gone.

Then the rules. Rule 1 ordered that the Bishops' Bible “be followed, and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit,” and those three middle words, the truth of the original, are the license the companies actually used. Rule 3 froze Tyndale’s old quarrel with Thomas More into an instruction: keep the ecclesiastical words, “as the word church, not to be translated congregation.” Eighty years after the Confutation, More won that argument in a committee room. Rule 6 banned marginal notes except to explain a Hebrew or Greek word that could not be briefly and fitly expressed in the text, and then Rule 7 turned around and required cross-references, which is why the 1611 book carries thousands of marginal notes and is not, whatever you have heard, a noteless Bible. Rule 8 told each company to meet, “confer what they have done, and agree for their parts what shall stand”: peer review, in 1604, on paper. Rule 14 named the versions they might prefer where those read better — Tyndale’s, Matthew’s, Coverdale’s, Whitchurch’s (the Great Bible) and Geneva. Three of the five are Tyndale in different coats, and the fourth leans on him. The Rheims New Testament of 1582 is not on the list, yet Rheims readings demonstrably reached the King James text, most plausibly through William Fulke’s 1589 parallel edition, printed to refute it and thereby making it legal to own.

Nobody drew a salary. The king’s own letter admits that many of them had “either no ecclesiastical preferment at all, or else so very small,” and directs that livings be reserved for them. That promise was substantially kept; a striking number of these men ended as bishops and deans. But careers take years, and men do not.

Edward Lively, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, died in May 1605, only months into his first good living, leaving eleven children described as destitute of necessaries for their maintenance. John Rainolds, who had proposed the whole thing at Hampton Court in the first place, died on 21 May 1607, four years before publication; the Oxford company was remembered as meeting weekly in his lodgings through his last illness.

And the one place we hear these men talk to each other is thinner than anyone would like. John Bois’s notes are the only record of the translators in conversation, and they survive only in William Fulham’s later transcript, in Latin, found at Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1964 and published by Ward Allen in 1969. At 1 Peter 1:7 the note records a decision not to decide: they would leave the ambiguity standing. Men bent over a hard word for an afternoon, and chose restraint.

In 2015 Jeffrey Alan Miller identified something older still, a draft of part of the Apocrypha in Samuel Ward’s notebook at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, catalogued for centuries and simply unread. It is the earliest known draft, and the only one in a certainly identified translator’s hand. Ward’s notebook and the annotated Bishops' Bible in the Bodleian both show the same thing: a man alone, working through sheets, marking up a printed page. Which is not what Rule 8 describes at all.

1516–1970 · Erasmus, the Textus Receptus and the missing verses

The Greek With a Leaf Missing

Rule 1 let the companies depart from the Bishops' Bible wherever the truth of the original required it, which raises a question the rule does not answer: whose original? For the Old Testament the answer is a printed book out of Venice. Daniel Bomberg’s second rabbinic Bible, edited by Jacob ben Hayyim ibn Adonijah and finished in 1525, set the Hebrew consonants with the Masoretic vowel points, the accents, and the Masorah itself running around the margins, alongside the Targum and the medieval Jewish commentators. It became the standard printed Hebrew Bible in Europe and stayed the standard for something like four hundred years. That half of the story is quieter, though not as quiet as it is usually made out to be. The Masoretic manuscripts agree with one another to a degree that astonishes anyone who works on Greek copies for a living; but the older evidence recovered since — the scrolls from Qumran, and the Greek translations made centuries before the Masoretes were born — shows a Hebrew text with a good deal more variety in it before their work than after. Some of those Greek translations will matter again a little later, because the disputed books between the Testaments survive chiefly in Greek. The trouble the King James men could see, though, was all on the Greek side.

There the six companies were working from a text with an accident in its foundations. It goes back to Basel in 1516, where Erasmus produced a Greek New Testament at speed for the printer Johann Froben, who wanted to be first past a rival: the Complutensian Polyglot, directed by Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros at Alcala, whose New Testament had been printed in 1514 but would not be published until 1522. Both were Catholic projects: Erasmus was a priest in good standing, and dedicated the edition to Leo X. The Greek that every English Protestant Bible from Tyndale onward leans on came out of Rome’s own humanist scholarship. What Erasmus had on the table was perhaps half a dozen manuscripts, none of them earlier than the tenth century and most of them twelfth. Later editors tidied and extended that text rather than rebuilding it, Robert Estienne — whose verse numbers you have already met — and after him Theodore Beza; the King James men leaned on the two of them without following either slavishly, and when F. H. A. Scrivener reconstructed the Greek behind their English in 1881 he found it closer to Beza’s 1598 than to anything else and still not identical with it. The famous name for this family of texts is younger than the King James Bible. It comes from a publisher’s blurb in an Elzevir edition of 1633, boasting of the text now received by all: Textus Receptus, a phrase off the back of a book.

Erasmus’s haste left a mark that is still on the page. For Revelation he had one manuscript, lent by Reuchlin, and it wanted its final leaf. So he took the Latin Vulgate and turned the closing verses back into Greek himself. Some of it he invented outright: collations from Scrivener onward find readings in those verses that correspond to no surviving Greek manuscript anywhere, and they went into print, and out of print into English. Elsewhere he simply followed his Latin, which is the more interesting case, because it puts the Vulgate inside a Protestant Bible. At Revelation 22:19 the King James threatens the man who takes away from the prophecy with the loss of his part out of “the booke of life.” That is what the Latin in front of Erasmus said. The Greek copies say the tree of life, and congregations have been hearing the Latin ever since.

The most argued-over sentence in the whole English Bible arrived by a similar route. The Comma Johanneum, at 1 John 5:7-8, has three bearing record in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost. Erasmus left it out of his first edition in 1516 and his second in 1519, on the plain ground that his Greek manuscripts did not have it, and he was attacked for it. It appeared in his third edition of 1522, after a Greek manuscript containing the words was produced in England: Codex Montfortianus, now at Trinity College Dublin, and dated by its handwriting to about 1520, which is why most scholars take it to have been copied for the occasion — an inference from the paleography rather than anything the book says about itself. The story usually told alongside this, that Erasmus had rashly promised to include the passage if a single Greek manuscript could be shown him, should be handled with tongs. Henk Jan de Jonge went looking for that promise in Erasmus’s own writings in 1980 and could not find it.

What is certain is the consequence. The Comma stands in the King James and is gone, or dropped to a footnote, in the modern versions — and in the modern Catholic ones as well, since the Nova Vulgata, the Jerusalem Bible and the New American Bible all leave it out. nobody on any side argues the Trinity stands or falls with this verse. The doctrine is drawn from a great many other passages, and the churches that dropped the sentence did not drop the doctrine with it.

Why modern Bibles have fewer verses

Which is the question most readers actually walk in with. Why does a new Bible have fewer verses than the one on a grandmother’s shelf? Acts 8:37, the Ethiopian’s confession, is missing. So is 1 John 5:7. The long ending of Mark and the woman taken in adultery are usually still printed, but inside brackets or under a warning note. It looks like editing. Almost every modern editor says it is not — and what the people who disagree argue is not what they are usually reported to argue either, because it is not what they are usually reported to argue.

On one side stands the argument from age. Everything discovered since 1611 pushed the evidence older: Codex Vaticanus properly collated, Codex Alexandrinus arriving in England in 1627 as a gift to Charles I, Codex Sinaiticus, which Tischendorf took from St Catherine’s in 1844 and then in bulk in 1859, under circumstances the monastery disputes to this day, and after all of them the papyri. The oldest copies are frequently the shortest. A scribe with a devotional sentence already in his memory is likelier to write it in than a scribe with one in front of him is to strike it out, so on this reading the short text is the old text and the long one has grown.

On the other side stands the argument from number. The lines the modern versions drop are not eccentric curiosities: they sit in the large majority of surviving Greek copies, the Byzantine text that the Textus Receptus substantially reproduces, and the case for it is made in our own time by Maurice Robinson and William Pierpont, whose Byzantine Textform prints that majority as an edition rather than as a footnote. What they argue is that a reading carried in thousands of witnesses, copied and read and corrected in ordinary church use across a thousand years, has a better claim than a handful of early Egyptian books that survive because the climate was dry; that Erasmus’s genuine improvisations amount to a few dozen words at the end of Revelation and are the foundation of nothing; and that a shorter reading can be an abbreviation quite as easily as it can be the absence of an addition.

What separates the two camps is a rule of evidence — whether witnesses are weighed or counted — not a willingness to have verses in the Bible. This page follows the weighing rule, because it is the one the discipline settled on and the one nearly every modern edition is built from. That is a consensus, not a proof, and the specialists who hold it do not call it one.

The gap in the numbering, at least, is nobody’s argument. It is bookkeeping. Those verse numbers of Estienne’s were fixed for the New Testament in 1551, three centuries before the older manuscripts came to light, so when a sentence goes its number goes with it and leaves a visible hole in the page.

None of this is a charge against the fifty-odd men in the three towns. They used the best Greek and Hebrew that existed in 1604, and they told the reader where it was thin. The 1611 margins carry alternative renderings throughout, and at Luke 17:36 the note says outright that the verse is wanting in most of the Greek copies — which is a textual note, and Rule 6 had authorized nothing of the kind, having allowed only the explanation of a Hebrew or Greek word that could not be briefly put into the text. They went past their instructions in order to tell the reader that the copies disagreed.

Hold that beside the position, held now by a great many readers, that the King James is the only trustworthy English Bible. It is not a seventeenth-century English conviction but a twentieth-century American one, traceable in its modern form to Benjamin Wilkinson’s Our Authorized Bible Vindicated of 1930, carried much further by David Otis Fuller’s Which Bible? in 1970 and by Peter Ruckman after him. It arrived three centuries after the book it defends, and the men who made that book, having printed the disagreements in their own margins, are not among its witnesses. The argument a modern reader is having is not with them. It is with what had survived, and where, and how old it was, and how long it would take to find.

1611 · What the first King James Bible looked like — and who authorized it

The Object Itself: Black Letter, Copper Plate, No Warrant

Somebody had to pay for the printing, and it was not the Crown. Robert Barker, the King’s Printer, did. What the Crown withheld was coin: no translator drew wages for the work, and nothing came out of the exchequer to put it on a press. What it spent instead was other people’s hospitality and its own patronage — the colleges and Westminster housed and kept the companies while they sat, Bancroft went round the bishops asking them to support the men, and the king undertook that livings should be found for them, which is a real payment made slowly. The figure of 3,500 pounds you will see quoted for the copy rests on a single statement made in 1651, forty years after the fact, by an interested party inside a fight over printing rights; no receipt has ever surfaced. What Barker made was a lectern book: a folio over a foot tall, set in black letter, two columns to the page, fifty-nine lines to the column. If you are ever standing in front of an early folio and want to know whether it is a 1611, count the lines — the 1613 sets seventy-two, and that is the quickest tell there is. Words the translators had supplied, having nothing to answer them in the Hebrew or Greek, were set in a small roman inside the Gothic. The italics everyone associates with a King James Bible arrived later, with the roman-type editions, and were not regularized for a long time after that.

The general title page is engraved on copper entire — picture, lettering, imprint, all one plate — by Cornelis Boel, who signed it at Richmond. Moses and Aaron flank the frame; the four evangelists sit in the corners; the apostles gather around Peter and Paul, with one figure, conventionally identified as Judas, turned away from the rest; and the Tetragrammaton stands pointed at the top. The New Testament gets its own title page, and it is a woodcut, reused from stock. The reason is mechanical rather than theological: a copper plate has to go through a rolling press in a second pass, while a woodcut prints alongside the type in a single pull.

The title page also says “Appointed to be read in Churches,” a formula that had already appeared on Bishops‘ Bible title pages, and that line is the whole of the book’s authorization. Given what James had laid out at Hampton Court, you would expect a paper trail; there is none. No act, canon, proclamation or order in council has ever been found. The Privy Council registers for 1600 to 1613 burned at Whitehall in January 1619, which proves nothing in either direction: a missing record can mean a document that never existed or a document that went up with the room. Nor does anyone know what day in 1611 the book appeared, or how many were printed. The date of 2 May has no seventeenth-century source behind it, and the first edition was never entered in the Stationers’ Registers. It cost ten shillings in sheets and twelve bound. Put a London craftsman’s wage at about a shilling a working day, which is the figure usually reckoned for the building trades in those years, and the book comes to ten or twelve days of his labor — call it a fortnight, before he has eaten anything.

Two settings both carry the date 1611, and bibliographers tell them apart at Ruth 3:15, where one reads “he went into the citie” and the other “she” (KJV). The Hebrew consonantal text there is masculine, so the He reading is a translators' decision that a later setting overruled, not a compositor’s slip — and since sheets were stacked by gathering and made up to order, surviving copies often mix the two. The book contained the Apocrypha in its own section, headed “The bookes called Apocrypha,” as almost every English Bible of the day did, and the margins cross-refer to it. The paragraph marks run through the Old Testament and the Gospels and then stop at Acts 20:36 and never resume; the copy simply stopped being marked, and no explanation survives.

Bound in at the front is the thing modern readers never see: Miles Smith’s eleven-page preface, “The Translators to the Reader,” absent from almost every Bible sold for reading today. It says plainly that “we never thought from the beginning that we should neede to make a new Translation… but to make a good one better,” which is a modest sentence for a book that would eventually be treated as handed down whole. Not everyone agreed that this was the better one. Hugh Broughton, one of the finest Hebraists in England and by common consent the most difficult man in it, had been left off the list; within months he put out a censure saying he would rather be “rent in pieces with wilde horses” than see it urged upon poor churches.

1631–1769 · The Wicked Bible, and the 1769 text you actually own

Thou Shalt Commit Adultery

Broughton was wrong about the book, but he was right that nobody was guarding it very carefully. In 1631 Barker’s house printed an edition in which the seventh commandment, seventh in the Anglican numbering, reads, in that printing of the KJV, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The word not is simply gone from Exodus 20:14. A few leaves later, at Deuteronomy 5:24, the same book offers “his glory and his great-asse,” which is not a compositor’s joke but a word coming apart at a broken division. Archbishop George Abbot was angry about both. It was William Laud, then Bishop of London and not yet archbishop himself, who carried the matter to the king.

Star Chamber fined Robert Barker and Martin Lucas in 1632, the figure usually given being 300 pounds, and took away their license. Whether the money ever changed hands is another matter: accounts differ over whether the fine was quashed, quietly remitted or simply never levied, and nobody has produced the paper that would settle it. The tale that a rival printer sabotaged the forme is a lovely one with no evidence behind it. About twenty-five copies of the Wicked Bible are known to survive; one made 31,250 pounds at Bonhams in 2015, another 56,250 dollars at Sotheby’s in 2018. Barker’s own ruin was slower and a great deal duller than a misprint: the long, grinding litigation with Bonham Norton over the King’s Printer patent. He was imprisoned for debt from 1635 and died in prison, in 1645 by most accounts.

The blunder is the famous part. The interesting part is that the text would not hold still even when nobody blundered. The Cambridge editions of 1629 and 1638 were the first serious cleanups, and their editors included John Bois and Samuel Ward, two of the original translators, going back over their own work two decades on. Between them the two editions introduced more than two hundred revisions, often reaching up into the margin, taking the literal reading the translators had parked there, and setting it into the text.

Then came Francis Sawyer Parris, whose Cambridge edition of 1760 — an octavo, reprinted unchanged as a folio in 1762 — did most of the work usually credited to Benjamin Blayney. Blayney’s Oxford edition of 1769 modernized the spelling, regularized the punctuation, hugely extended the italics and overhauled the marginal references. Copies of that first printing are scarce, and the explanation always given is a fire at the Bible warehouse in Paternoster Row that took most of the sheets; it is repeated everywhere and rests, like the Packington story, on later telling rather than on a document anyone can point to. Later collation found Blayney’s checking against the 1611 folio patchy: readings he failed to restore are still sitting in the text today.

So the King James Bible in your hand is substantially Blayney’s, with the Cambridge corrections underneath: many thousands of differences from 1611, overwhelmingly spelling, punctuation, capitalization and italics, with a few hundred genuine changes of reading. Modern Cambridge and Oxford settings still disagree in small places, Ruth 3:15 among them. Anyone who says they prefer the 1611 almost certainly means 1769, and their copy almost certainly lacks the Apocrypha, the dedication to James, and the translators' preface.

1611–1660s · How the King James beat the Geneva Bible

It Took Fifty Years to Win

The text would not hold still, and neither would its rivals go away. The Geneva Bible did not die in 1611. No statute banned it and no proclamation was ever issued against it; English printing of it simply stopped around 1616, quietly, and editions went on appearing until 1644. Meanwhile the trade got creative. A shelf of Geneva Bibles dated 1599 is partly a shelf of Amsterdam books printed a generation later under a stolen London imprint. Dutch printers went further still and married the King James text to the Geneva notes, exactly the combination James had wanted separated, and one such hybrid was printed in London itself in 1649. The practice ran as late as 1715.

And this was not competition in the ordinary sense. The King’s Printer went on supplying Geneva Bibles after 1611 under the same monopoly that covered the new version: one patent covered all English Bibles, so the house that printed the King James also printed its rival, and took the money either way. The Bishops' Bible, meanwhile, had not been shouldered aside at all. Its last complete edition was printed in 1602, nine years before the King James existed, and no order ever replaced it on the lecterns. The new book filled a gap that was already there.

What followed was not a coronation but an attrition. The King James was attacked on arrival, outsold at first, and took roughly half a century to win the field. The usual mark is somewhere in the 1640s to 1660s, which is neither 1611 nor the eighteenth century. The universities muscled into the trade as it went. In 1629 Cambridge successfully claimed a privilege of its own to print Bibles, tracing the right back to letters patent of 1534; Oxford’s came with Laud’s charter of 1636, though Oxford printed no Bible until 1675.

Those old privileges are still alive, which may be the strangest fact in the whole story. The Crown’s right in the King James is not copyright, because copyright expires. It is a perpetual royal prerogative right exercised through letters patent, expressly preserved by section 171 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. That is why a four-hundred-year-old text still has a permissions desk in Cambridge, and why Scotland licenses separately. The standing permission allows up to five hundred verses, provided they are not a complete book of the Bible nor 25 percent or more of the work quoting them. In the United States the text was never in copyright at all, so nothing there ever had to expire.

The patent had bitten before, though, and hard. In colonial America no English Bible was legally printed: the patent forbade it, and cheap imported British Bibles made defiance pointless anyway. John Eliot’s Massachusett Bible of 1663 and Christopher Sauer’s German Bible of 1743 got through because they were in languages the patent had nothing to say about. The first complete English Bible printed in the United States was Robert Aitken’s, at Philadelphia in 1782. Congress resolved on September 12, 1782 to recommend it and funded nothing; then peace brought the cheap British Bibles back across the Atlantic and the edition lost him a great deal of money. He petitioned Congress about the losses, got sympathy rather than compensation, and went on printing for years afterward — a smaller ending than ruin, and the true one.

1546–1885 · The Apocrypha, and the name “Authorized Version”

The Name It Was Never Given, and the Books It Lost

Go back to the title page for a moment. The 1611 sheet says the text was newly translated out of the original tongues, that the former translations had been diligently compared and revised, that this was done by his Majesty’s special commandment, and that the result was appointed to be read in churches — and even that last phrase was borrowed, as you have seen, from the Bishops' Bible. Appointed by whom is not stated. The word authorized is nowhere on the page. So if nothing was ever authorized, where did the Authorized Version come from?

It arrives later, and gradually, the way nicknames do. You can find the phrase used loosely of the King James in the eighteenth century; by the early nineteenth it had become the ordinary way of naming the book, and it hardened into a proper title when the Revised Version of 1881 to 1885 needed something to call the thing it was revising and used Authorised Version throughout its preface and its apparatus. Who said it first is not documented and probably never will be. What the word meant is inference rather than record: most likely it was doing no more than restating that borrowed line about being read in churches, an old formula promoted to a name by people who assumed a paper trail existed behind it. Americans, having no crown to do any authorizing, settled on King James Version instead, and that is the name that traveled.

The other absence is heavier, and it is the one place in this story where the name of the thing is already an argument. The 1611 folio carried fourteen books between the Testaments, in a section of their own headed The bookes called Apocrypha, cross-referenced from the margins and set out by the lectionary to be read aloud in church through the year. Apocrypha is the Protestant word for them. For the Roman and the Orthodox churches they are not hidden books at all but deuterocanonical scripture, and they had stood as scripture in the Latin Bible for something like a thousand years before anyone in England argued about it; the Council of Trent defined them as canonical in 1546, in direct answer to the Reformers' doubts, sixty-five years before the folio was printed. The two sets are close without being the same. Eleven of the King James fourteen are the books Rome holds canonical; 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasses are not, and Rome prints those three, when it prints them at all, in an appendix of its own. And an English Bible carrying the disputed books as scripture already existed while the six companies were sitting: the Rheims New Testament of 1582 and the Douay Old Testament of 1609 and 1610, made by English Catholic exiles across the Channel.

The Church of England took a third position, and a middling one. Not that the books were scripture, but that they were worth reading: Article VI held that they were read for example of life and instruction of manners, and not to establish doctrine. That was precisely the compromise the Puritans would not accept. The Westminster Confession, finished in 1646 and adopted by the Church of Scotland the year after, put the harder line on paper — no part of the canon, of no authority in the church, to be regarded as no better than any other human writing.

Copies bound without them begin to appear within a generation. The Cambridge edition of 1629 is the one usually named, the same edition in which Bois and Ward went back over their own work, though what changed at first was how a book was made up and sold rather than what any press was willing to print. The thing that finished it came two centuries later, and it was fought on the canon. The British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804 to put cheap Bibles into as many hands as possible, spent the early 1820s in a bitter quarrel with its own Scottish auxiliaries over whether its funds should pay for those fourteen books. Robert Haldane and Andrew Thomson led it from Edinburgh, and what they made was a canon argument: that a society existing to circulate scripture had no business printing what its supporters did not hold to be scripture. In 1826 the Society resolved that its funds should not. The American society had already gone the same way. Fewer sheets also meant a cheaper book, which never hurts an argument. The book that was printed in 1611 has not been on sale, in the ordinary way, for two hundred years.

1611–today · King James phrases in everyday English

Words That Went On Ahead Without It

The English of 1611 was not the English of 1611. The translators took their pronouns from the Bishops' Bible, which had them from Tyndale: thou and thee for one person, ye for many, at a moment when Londoners were already saying you to everybody. Thou did not begin as reverence. It began as intimacy, what you said to a child, a servant, a wife, and to God — though the distinction was already wearing thin in ordinary speech by 1611, and readers who met thou mainly in church heard it as elevation almost at once, which is how it reaches us. The verb endings are stranger still, because they are absolute. Counted in the King James text this site serves — a modern setting of the Blayney line, since the 1611 folio’s spelling defeats a search — hath appears 2,263 times across the sixty-six books and has not once; saith 1,262 times and says never; cometh, doth, knoweth and giveth run the same way. And it came to pass turns up 396 times. Nobody sat down and chose an antique register. It was simply what the book was made out of, and the book was made out of older books.

David Crystal went through the book phrase by phrase and came out with 257 idioms that had entered everyday English from the King James Bible — more, on his own reckoning, than from any other single source, Shakespeare included. Both halves of that are his: the total depends on what he was willing to call an idiom, and the comparison with Shakespeare is his framing rather than some independent tally. Then he found the catch: only about eighteen of them are in a form unique to it. The rest arrived through Tyndale, or Geneva, or older English still. It was the vessel most of these phrases came in, not the workshop where they were made. And several of the most famous never passed through it at all. A fly in the ointment, the writing on the wall, money is the root of all evil, feet of clay: not there. Nor the good Samaritan; Luke 10:33 (KJV) says “a certain Samaritan.” Nor a house divided against itself cannot stand; Mark 3:25 (KJV) reads “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” Fire and brimstone is not at Genesis 19:24 either, which has “brimstone and fire” (KJV). The phrases we quote are what four centuries of speaking did to the sentences, not the sentences.

You can watch it happen, if you pick the right afternoon. At the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered Isaiah 40 from memory, and memory rearranged it: every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, against the KJV’s “every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.” Two pairs of clauses, quietly transposed, which is what happens to words that live in the mouth. For Amos 5:24 he did not improvise on the old book at all; he reached for a modern one. “Let justice roll down like waters” is the wording of the American Standard Version of 1901 and the Revised Standard Version of 1952. The KJV says “let judgment run down as waters.”

Five years later, on Christmas Eve 1968, William Anders, James Lovell and Frank Borman read Genesis 1:1-10 (KJV) from lunar orbit to the largest audience assembled to that date. The text was printed on fireproof paper in the flight plan, not out of ceremony but because after the Apollo 1 fire everything in the cabin had to be. The choice was not NASA’s either. Borman had asked for something to say; Si Bourgin carried the request to Joseph Laitin at the Bureau of the Budget, and it was Laitin’s wife, Christine, who suggested the beginning of Genesis. A book nobody ever authorized, read from the moon on the recommendation of a civil servant’s wife.

Which brings it back to the cold room at Vilvoorde, and the one sheet of paper in the man’s own hand. Most of the sentences that went on ahead without him were his, printed later under a king’s name, in a book he did not live to see, and gathered up by men who had been told in Rule 14 which older versions they might prefer without quite being told whose they were. Those men were not confused about what they had done. In the preface almost no modern edition bothers to print, Miles Smith wrote that “the very meanest translation… is the word of God” — their own answer, four hundred years early, to anyone who thinks one English Bible can be the last.

1384 – today

The whole thing, in order

1. 1384Wycliffe dies; the English Bible bearing his name is assembled after him.
2. 1407–1409Arundel’s Constitutions forbid unlicensed translation and unlicensed reading, not the English Bible.
3. 1428Wycliffe’s bones burned at Lutterworth, the ashes thrown into the River Swift.
4. 1514Richard Hunne found hanged in the Lollards' Tower, then condemned and burned.
5. 1516Erasmus prints a Greek New Testament at Basel in a race against a Spanish rival.
6. 1522The Comma Johanneum appears in Erasmus’s third edition, after a Greek copy is produced in England.
7. 1523Tyndale asks Bishop Tunstall to license a translation. The house is full.
8. 1525Bomberg’s second rabbinic Bible, edited by Jacob ben Hayyim, becomes the standard printed Hebrew text.
9. 1526The New Testament printed at Worms; Tunstall burns copies at Paul’s Cross.
10. 1530Tyndale’s Pentateuch appears under a colophon that lies about printer and place.
11. 1535Tyndale taken at Antwerp, 21 May; Coverdale’s Bible completed 4 October.
12. 1536Condemned in August, executed in early October; 6 October is a convention.
13. 1537The Matthew Bible, mostly Tyndale, licensed by the King under a false name.
14. 1539The Great Bible finished in London after Paris seized the sheets.
15. 1540Cromwell beheaded; his arms chiseled from the Great Bible’s title page.
16. 1543The Act for the Advancement of True Religion restricts reading by rank and sex.
17. 1546The Council of Trent defines the disputed books as canonical scripture.
18. 1555John Rogers, who assembled the Matthew Bible, burned first under Mary.
19. 1560The Geneva Bible: numbered verses, roman type, and an elbow in every margin.
20. 1568The Bishops' Bible answers Geneva officially and never catches on.
21. 1582–1610English Catholic exiles print the Rheims New Testament and the Douay Old Testament, the disputed books among them.
22. 1604Hampton Court in January; in July the king names four and fifty men.
23. 1611The folio appears: black letter, Apocrypha bound in, no warrant ever found.
24. 1631Barker’s press drops the not from Exodus 20:14: the Wicked Bible.
25. 1633An Elzevir blurb boasts of a text now received by all, and gives the Textus Receptus its name.
26. 1769Blayney’s Oxford edition sets the spelling and italics most modern copies still carry.
27. 1826The Bible Society resolves not to fund the Apocrypha; the King James loses fourteen books.
28. 1963Isaiah delivered from memory at the Lincoln Memorial, two clauses quietly transposed.
29. 1968Genesis read from lunar orbit, suggested by a civil servant’s wife.

Who says so

A note on sources

This is a secondhand history. Nothing in it comes out of an archive; it is assembled from the books named below, and where those books disagree the disagreement has been left standing in the prose rather than smoothed out of it.

Some of it rests on a single witness. John Foxe is effectively our only source for the seven burned at Coventry and for the plowboy vow at Little Sodbury; Cochlaeus alone tells the Cologne raid, Hall’s Chronicle alone the Packington story, and William Barlow nearly every word spoken at Hampton Court. Their names sit inside those sentences on purpose.

And some figures are estimates dressed as counts. The 83.7 and 75.8 percent are Jon Nielson and Royal Skousen’s sampled collation of 1998, not a word-by-word tally. The king’s four and fifty learned men match no surviving roster. Print runs before 1640 are guesswork. The word frequencies were counted in a modern edition, which, as section nine says at length, is not the 1611 book.

Further reading

• David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (1994) — The standard life of the man in the cell at Vilvoorde, and the place to go if you want the Cologne raid, the Worms octavo and the war with Thomas More at full length.
• David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (2003) — One long book covering the whole descent from Anglo-Saxon gospels to the twentieth century; the best single volume for seeing where any one version sits in the line.
• Gordon Campbell, Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011 (2010) — Sober and skeptical on exactly the points this page hedges: the missing authorization, the translators' rosters, the slow fifty-year victory over Geneva.
• David Norton, A Textual History of the King James Bible (2005) — The book behind section nine. Traces what the Cambridge editions of 1629 and 1638, Parris in 1760 and Blayney in 1769 actually did to the text you own.
• Adam Nicolson, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (2003) — The most enjoyable narrative of Hampton Court and the six companies, and the one to read for the men rather than the machinery; lighter on evidence than Campbell.
• David Crystal, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language (2010) — The 257 idioms, counted one at a time, with the far smaller number that are unique to the King James separated out honestly.
• Mary Dove, The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (2007) — Where the 253 surviving manuscripts are catalogued, and where Arundel’s Constitutions are read closely enough to show how much narrower they were than their reputation.
• John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1563) — The partisan witness himself, free online in a scholarly edition. Worth an hour simply to see what kind of writing this page has been quoting at arm’s length all the way through.
• Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (2005) — The standard introduction to the discipline the Greek section describes, in its fourth edition. Read it for what the weighing of witnesses actually involves, and for how much of the argument is about probability rather than certainty.
• Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform (2005) — The majority-text position in its own voice rather than in a summary of it: the Byzantine reading printed as an edition, with an introduction setting out why the count of witnesses should weigh against the age of a few.
• James R. White, The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations? (2009) — Argues against King James Onlyism, and describes it accurately enough that its own adherents quarrel with the conclusions rather than the account. The place to see what is genuinely at stake in a dropped verse.
• Gregory Martin, A Discoverie of the Manifold Corruptions of the Holie Scriptures by the Heretikes of Our Daies (1582) — The Catholic side of the English Bible quarrel, written by the chief translator of the Rheims New Testament — the book William Fulke printed his parallel edition to answer, which is how Rheims readings came to be legal to own in England.