Surpassing masterpieces by Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain as the most widely read work in English literature, the King James Bible is a feat of translation—with more than a billion copies published over the last 400 years. Recently, a notebook containing translation notes by Samuel Ward, one of the translators of the King James Bible, surfaced. Dated between 1604 and 1608 C.E., it is the earliest known draft of the King James Bible.
Commissioned by King James I of England in 1604, the King James Bible is both beautiful and scholarly. A team of about four dozen scholars, all members of the Church of England, worked on the King James Bible—translating it from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts—and completed it in 1611. These scholars were divided into six teams, or “companies.”
In fall 2014, Jeffrey Alan Miller of Montclair State University in New Jersey was looking through documents in the archives at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge. It was there that he saw Samuel Ward’s notebook and realized that it contains translation notes for part of the Apocrypha: First Esdras and part of the Wisdom of Solomon.
This manuscript is especially significant because it shows the process of translation. Even though the translation teams were supposed to translate their sections of the King James Bible collectively, Ward’s notes show that some of the translation work—at least at the initial stages—was done individually.
Surpassing masterpieces by Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain as the most widely read work in English literature, the King James Bible is a feat of translation—with more than a billion copies published over the last 400 years. Recently, a notebook containing translation notes by Samuel Ward, one of the translators of the King James Bible, surfaced. Dated between 1604 and 1608 C.E., it is the earliest known draft of the King James Bible. Commissioned by King James I of England in 1604, the King James Bible is both beautiful and scholarly. A team of about four […]
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