Gutenberg, Tyndale, and the King James Bible

Around 1455 in Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg finished printing a Latin Bible using movable metal type. For the first time, Bibles could be produced by the hundreds instead of one at a time over years. About 49 Gutenberg Bibles survive.

In 1516 the scholar Erasmus printed the New Testament in its original Greek, letting scholars read beyond the Latin. Martin Luther used it to translate the New Testament into German in 1522, and the complete Luther Bible appeared in 1534, shaping the German language itself.

In England, translating the Bible without permission was forbidden. William Tyndale did it anyway, working in exile. His New Testament, translated from Greek, was printed in 1526 and smuggled into England in bales of cloth. Copies were bought up and burned. Tyndale was betrayed, imprisoned, and in 1536 strangled and burned at the stake. His last words were reportedly a prayer: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes."

Within a few years, English Bibles were permitted, and most of them drew heavily on Tyndale. In 1611 the King James Version, produced by about fifty scholars, was published. It kept so much of Tyndale's wording that historians estimate more than three-quarters of its New Testament comes from him.

The English Bible family tree

What the 1611 King James Bible included

The original 1611 KJV included the Apocrypha (Tobit, Judith, the Maccabees, and others) in a separate section between the Testaments. Most printings dropped it in the 1800s. Today's KJV also has updated spelling: the 1611 read "In the beginning God created the Heauen, and the Earth."

Chapter and verse

The original authors did not number chapters or verses. Chapter divisions were added around 1205 by Stephen Langton; New Testament verse numbers by Robert Estienne in 1551. They are helpful tools, not part of the inspired text.