Sample page from the 1611 text of the King James Version: Song of Solomon chapter IV and the beginning of chapter V

Bible: The story of the king james version 1611-2011 By Gordon Campbell, Oxford, £16.99

This year marks the 400th anniversary of one of the most — many, including non-believers, would argue, the most — influential book in the English language. The book is none other than the King James Version of the Bible. Gordon Campbell’s book, simply written and deeply researched, tells the story of the making of the King James Version and its history in England and the United States of America right up to the 21st century.

Before the commissioning of the KJV, one of the most important English translations of the Bible was the one associated with John Wycliff. But this circulated in manuscript and the complete version (called the Wycliffite Bible) was printed as late as 1850. The man who is known as “the father of the English Bible’’ was William Tyndale who published his translation (from the Greek) of the New Testament. Tyndale was burnt on the stake and could not complete his translation of the Old Testament, but the language of his Bible lived on and influenced the KJV.

Tyndale’s most important successor was Miles Coverdale, who in October 1535, living in exile in Antwerp, published the first edition of the entire Bible in English. The Bible went through many other English translations, all noted and analysed by Campbell, till in January 1604 King James assembled a group of bishops and moderate puritans at Hampton Court Palace for a three-day conference. On the second day of the conference it was proposed by John Rainolds that a new translation of the Bible be prepared because the previous translations all had several defects and were thus “not answerable to the truth of the original’’.

Out of this was born the KJV. The writing was distributed among six companies based in Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge. About the translators, Campbell writes, “The learning embodied in the men of these six companies is daunting…it would be difficult now to bring together a group of more than fifty scholars with the range of languages and knowledge of other disciplines that characterized the KJV translators.’’

The first edition, over the years, has gone through many revisions and changes. Campbell takes his readers through these various emendations including the kinds of typefaces that were used.

This then is a history of a single book — its writing, production and reception. The KJV was written to be read aloud in church, but such is the majesty of its prose that even a modern silent reader cannot but be moved by it. What better evidence of this than the first verse of John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’’ The prose seems divinely inspired but it was the work of learned men.