Tuesday, November 3, 2026 · 天火 · tianmu.org

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The King James Version, or Authorized Version, was made at the command of King James I, who approved the proposal for a new translation at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604. Some fifty scholars, working in six companies at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, revised the Bishops' Bible of 1568 against the Hebrew and Greek and against the English of Tyndale, Coverdale, the Geneva Bible and others. Robert Barker printed their work in London in 1611. Over the next century and a half printers corrected and regularised its spelling, punctuation and italic type, work completed in the Cambridge edition of 1762 and in Benjamin Blayney's Oxford edition of 1769. That 1769 text is the King James Bible nearly every reader since has known, and it shaped the English language and the worship of English-speaking churches for four centuries.

This room gives that standard text whole: the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, the twenty-seven of the New, and the fourteen books of the Apocrypha, which the translators rendered and the 1611 edition printed between the Testaments. The Apocrypha follow the order of the digital source; the 1611 Bible itself begins them with 1 and 2 Esdras and sets the Prayer of Manasses before the Maccabees. This is the 1769 standard text, not the 1611 printing: the books keep the spelling, punctuation and italic type of 1769, and in places read differently from 1611. Ahead of the books stands the Epistle Dedicatorie to King James from the 1611 front matter, in its original spelling.

Each book is one page, verse by verse, with the translators' supplied words in italics as the KJV prints them. The Old Testament pages gather the marginal notes after each chapter. The digital source carries no marginal notes for the New Testament or the Apocrypha, nor the cross-references and chapter summaries of printed editions, so these are absent here. No word of the 1769 text is marked illegible or supplied by conjecture.

Front Matter (1611)

The Old Testament

The New Testament

The Apocrypha