June 10, 2026

Dear Saints,

Recently, I had reason to study through significant sections of two books in our church library about the 47 eminent scholars and clergymen who, over six years—with unmatched academic tenacity and rigorous accountability along with a remarkably deep and wide Christian faith and spiritual enthusiasm, produced our beloved King James Version (KJV) of the English Bible.  They are, Gustavus S. Paine’s, The Men Behind the King James Version, and Alexander McClure’s Translators Revived: Biographical Notes on the KJV Bible Translators.  I was so blessed by what I learned; and, because we can often take a licking for best liking the KJV as our own cherished Bible, I’m eager to share some of their astounding accounts with you.

What follows from these volumes is reminiscent of what I taught in my membership class supplement to chapter one of the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF), “Of the Holy Scriptures,” which explained why we use the KJV.¹ Charles Jefferson wrote: “The purest, noblest English ever written is that of our King James Bible.  Its unfading glory is no mystery to those who have come to know the beautiful and saintly soul of William Tyndale.”²

Also from the class, in The Story of English, the KJV is prized as

probably the single most influential book ever published in the English language … Out of their deliberations [between the bishops and Puritan divines with King James at Hampton Court in 1604] emerged a plan which would provide the English language with one of its great Renaissance masterpieces, a work whose impact on the history of English prose has been as fundamental as Shakespeare’s: the Authorized Version of the Bible.³

McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil, The Story of English.

Now, when some object to the KJV and their ability “to be or not to be” reading Shakespeare, it is appropriate to respond, “Well, I wonder how much you’ve actually read Shakespeare or the KJV, because they’re entirely different.”  Consider this comparison:

The King James Bible was published in the year Shakespeare began work on his last play, The Tempest. Both the play and the Bible are masterpieces of English, but there is one crucial difference between them.  Whereas Shakespeare ransacked the lexicon, the King James Bible employs a bare 8000 words – God’s teaching in homely English for everyman.  From that day to this, the Shakesperian cornucopia and the biblical iron rations represent, as it were, the North and South Poles of the language, reference points for writers and speakers throughout the world, from the Shakespearian splendor of a Joyce or a Dickens to the biblical rigour of a Bunyan, or a Hemingway.⁴

Shakespeare’s voluminously aesthetic vocabulary makes the KJV’s 8,000 common English words seem elementary. It reminds me of stories about how one of the reasons Augustine stalled on becoming a Christian was how he felt the simple Biblical Hebrew and Greek paled in comparison to the sophisticated Latin of pagan writers and rhetoricians. It’s not hard to grasp and use the KJV which is not foreign to our English. In fact, Gustavus Paine qualifies that “Shakespeare seldom quoted or mentioned the Scriptures … Shakespeare did not take the Puritans seriously.”⁵  Your and my children have happily used this superb translation without prejudice or difficulty and, instead, with appreciation and devotion.

Further, Philip Hopkins explains:

There is not one supreme authority in the English language which could dictate grammar, spelling or usage right across the English-speaking world. In some of the languages in which the Society is working (or has been working), such as Chinese, Spanish, Maltese, Persian, Polish, Romanian, and Bulgarian, the pace and extent of change far exceeds what we have seen in English. Some of these languages have changed far more in one hundred years—often at the behest of governments and language academies—than English has changed in four hundred years … Furthermore in English the AV and its Biblical terminology has permeated to a far greater extent in wider society than in almost any other language, meaning again that the need for linguistic revision of the AV is far less than for equivalent seventeenth-century Bibles in most other languages.”⁶

Rather than dismissing the KJV as archaic and foreign to our dialect, the devoted, continual use of the KJV may even be what preserves the English language let alone a faithful Christian witness.

TREMENDOUS INFLUENCE ON THE ENGLISH SPEAKING WORLD

Paine avers, “ … the 1611 rhythms have been potent to affect writing, speaking, and thinking ever since the learned men produced them.”⁷  Further, “Today even the godless admire the splendors of the King James words, retaining them in their thoughts and on their lips as if they expressed truisms or slogans … Thus they persist in our common language.”⁸

Alexander McClure agrees:

The [KJV] Bible has ever since been the grand English classic.  It is still the noblest monument of the power of the English speech.  It is the pattern and standard of excellence therein … It has given a fixed character … as intelligible now as when it was first imprinted ; and will be easily understood by readers of coming centuries as by those of the past and the present.⁹

Alexander McClure, Translators Revived: Biographical Notes on the KJV Bible Translators

He also says the KJV “has become a permanent necessity, through its immense influence on the language, literature, manners, opinions, character, institutions, history, religion, and entire life and development of the Anglo-Saxon race in either hemisphere.”¹⁰  Put in our cheeky American vernacular, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”  Indeed, as the American Bible Society admiringly reviews, the “KJV has immeasurably shaped the rhetoric and literary expression of generations of English speakers”¹¹—how much more then the devotional and church life of English speaking worshippers?

ENORMOUS IMPACT ON THE GLOBAL ENGLISH SPEAKING CHURCH

Paine asserts, “When all is said and done, we have lived too long with the land, air, and water of 1611, with its people, their concepts and actions, to change with ease.  When a true masterpiece is done, it stays done, it lives alone.”¹²

McClure reasons:

… No book is so abundantly sold, or so freely given away … the language of the current version is throughly blended with the whole religious literature of the English tongue.  It also pervades the religious experience, and expresses the devotional feelings, of all the Christians who speak that tongue. … The present translation has been, and is, the text-book for millions of Sabbath-School pupils, and religious inquirers ; and is hallowed by associations so tender and sacred, that the attempt to discard it will seem to multitudes of devout men and women but little better than sacrilege.  It was sufficient, they will say, for the salvation of our godly parents and others of our sainted friends,—and, with the blessing of their God and our God, it shall suffice for ours.¹³

The Trinitarian Bible Society (TBS) concurs:

The Authorised Version has served as a standard English translation recognised throughout the English-speaking world as the source and foundation of effective Gospel preaching, and as the highest authority in all matters of controversy. No other version has taken its place in this respect. The greatest evangelists and expositors of the last 350 years have used this version for their ministries, and by means of it God has blessed millions of people with the light and truth of the Gospel of Christ.¹⁴

Trinitarian Bible Society, “Plain Reasons for Keeping to the Authorised Version”

My present article does not directly address the important issue of the original language source texts—such is covered in detail in the membership class through the WCF as well as in many articles on our website.  But I would remind you of something I have shared in that class: during my seminary days, about the time I determined I needed to upgrade from the Bible version I had cut my teeth on, I observed that whenever my Greek professor went around the classroom surveying various translations from students on important theological texts in the New Testament, the King James Version always conveyed the best sense of the original language (the issues were never the Greek sources but the most accurate wording and doctrine from the same words in Greek).  And my Greek professor was not trying to make a case for the KJV as superior; in fact, he used the NIV (though he read and preached directly from the Greek NT and he used the Greek critical text and apparatus).  It was merely a matter of exegeting selected texts together and his off-the-cuff curiosity with how they were rendered in various translations that were had by students in the class.

While I don’t remember what those various passages were (I double-checked my Greek class notes and regret I didn’t think to collect a written list), I had determined then for the sheer cumulative effect in my own devotions that I would choose the KJV as my new personal Bible.  Eager to study the Scriptures to show myself approved, grow most intimately in gracious knowledge and fellowship with God, and always be ready to give a witness, why would I want anything other than the most consistently accurate translation in my own language—especially on important doctrinal concerns?  Besides the vital discussion regarding the Critical and Received Text sources along with the confessional testimony of providential preservation in WCF 1:8, since my seminary days I have become convinced that modern English translation resources are simply unlikely to ever match that distinctive historical moment and its men of academic prowess, spiritual depth and fervor, literary and linguistic artistry, adequate time and protected focus, and thorough ecclesiastical and civil accountability to produce the same caliber of work.  And my recent readings from our library rekindled a passion about it.

THE UNIQUE AND MARVELOUS TIME OF THE TRANSLATORS

In his book, The Men Behind the King James Version, Gustavus Paine highlights how the Puritan John Rainolds—who requested a new English Bible of King James and was one of its translators, “was among the foremost scholars in Elizabethan and early Stuart England.  Those who knew him held him to be the most learned man in England, pious, courteous, modest, kind, and wholly honest, with a vast memory that made him ‘a living library, a third university.’ … he ‘wholly addicted himself’ to the study of the Holy Scriptures.”¹⁵

Paine quotes Lytton Strachey: “Isaiah and Jeremiah had the extraordinary good fortune to be translated into English by a committee of Elizabethan bishops.”¹⁶

Alexander McClure marvels in his, Translators Revived: Biographical Notes on the KJV Bible Translators, that

the first half of the seventeenth century, when the Translation was completed, was the GOLDEN AGE of biblical and oriental learning in England.  Never before, nor since, have these studies been pursued by scholars whose vernacular tongue is the English, with such zeal, and industry, and success.  This remarkable fact is such a token of God’s providential care of his word, as deserves most devout acknowledgement …

… their work was undertaken in a fortunate time … the study of Greek, and of the oriental tongues, and of a rabbinical lore, had then been carried to a greater extent in England than ever before or since … all the colleges of Great Britain and America … could not bring together the same number of divines equally qualified by learning and piety for the great undertaking.¹⁷

Alexander McClure, Translators Revived: Biographical Notes on the KJV Bible Translators

His prominent example is Lancelot Andrews—director of the first Westminster company assigned to translate Genesis through 2 Kings. Andrews had “acquired most of the modern languages of Europe” and was “conversant with fifteen languages,” whose “manual for his private devotions, prepared by himself, is wholly in the Greek language” and who inspired a chronicler to opine, “had he been present at the confusion of tongues at Babel, he might have served as Interpreter-General!”¹⁸

With the result of such expertise, minimal issues presented for KJV revision are thus amply handled by introductory guides and marginal notes, glossaries, or appendices.

Using the KJV also experientially connects us with the old paths and faith of our fathers in unity with contemporary brethren around the world, just as does remaining confessional (and in our case, without exceptions to the original 1647 Westminster Confession published just 36 years after the KJV was first printed) as well as singing the Psalms (such as the “Old 100th” originally in Calvin’s 1551 Genevan Psalter whose tune is now more often used with the modern “Doxology” that closes many Christian gatherings unaware of its original composition for Psalm 100 worship).  Further, the revived interest in publishing Puritan works warrants a similar use of the Bible they produced and preserved with their massive writings and preaching manuscripts—not only because of its accuracy, but its majesty.

THE GRANDEUR OF ITS SPIRIT AS WELL AS ITS LETTER

Paine extols that “… they were poets who fashioned prose without knowing how expert they were.  Their meters were beyond our common attempts at scansion.”¹⁹  The style of the KJV best expresses the feel of the original autographs: “their writing flows with a sense of must.”²⁰  It especially conveys the one Author’s force capturing the Scriptures’ intent to captivate.  The TBS offers a similarly compelling literary appeal:

A translation should therefore be in language and style appropriate to the subject matter … in a form of English suitable for public and private reading – and easy to learn by heart. The rhythm of the Authorised Version, its reverent and dignified style, and the very high proportion of simple short words of Anglo-Saxon origin … all combine to make this version the most suitable in all these respects.²¹

Paine continues:

The King James men … had an aptness of manner with beauty as they ordered the words, and the sounds within the words, in a wondrous divine progress.  They knew how to make the Bible scare the wits out of you and then calm you, all in English as superb as the Hebrew and the Greek. …Soul and body, the work of the learned men still moves the world because they wrought inside each sentence a certain balance of letter and spirit … somehow more immediate and lively, even literally lively …²²

Gustavus Paine, The Men Behind the King James Version

Yet he qualifies:

Miles Smith made it clear that, although he and his fellow translators for the king approached their work with fresh energy and a resolve to make new all that should be new, they were nevertheless carrying out an ancient task. …The Hebrew words mean just what the King James men made them mean … A masterpiece may use what words it pleases, and the work of the 1611 translators lasts partly because they were fearless and called a spade a spade.²³

Another of my articles elsewhere more related to gender issues yet demonstrates how the KJV’s literal translation better reflects the “earthy” Hebrew vernacular to us with God’s intended emphasis: reformation21.org/god-said-men-pee-standing-up.

As McClure quotes Dr. Adam Clarke, “ … the translators have seized the very spirit and soul of the original, and expressed this almost every where with pathos and energy,”²⁴ and adds, “The best fruits of Christianity have sprung from the seeds our translation has scattered.”

CONCLUSION

Keeping the KJV raised high as a standard bearer avoids ecclesiastical disunity and upholds Christian confidence reflecting the sacred devotional sentiments of Psalm 119:89-90, 97: For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven. Thy faithfulness is unto all generations … O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day.

Foot Notes:

1. See Why We Use the KJV Pt. 1 and Why We Use the KJV Pt. 2.  See also this Ted Letis lecture at our church many years ago on the Textus Receptus which was digitized from analogue tape and uploaded just a few years ago in MP3 format: sermonaudio.com/series/178342.  It is obvious by Dr. Letis’ comments that attendance for his lecture for this mid-week presentation was an impressively “packed house.” Thanks to Christian McSchaffrey of Text and Translation and Five Solas OPC in Wisconsin for remastering the lecture and making it available here: textandtranslation.org/letis-lecture-remastered/. ↩︎
2. Charles Jefferson, Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company Publishers, 1901), 182. ↩︎
3. Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil, Editors, The Story of English (New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books – Viking, 1986) , 109, 110. ↩︎
4. Ibid, 113. ↩︎
5. Gustavus S. Paine, The Men Behind the King James Version (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1977), 108. ↩︎
6. Philip Hopkins, “Five Questions about the Authorised (King James) Version – Projects”: tbsbibles.org/page/FiveQuestionsAbouttheAV ↩︎
7. Paine, 171. ↩︎
8. Ibid, 183. ↩︎
9. Alexander McClure, Translators Revived: Biographical Notes on the KJV Bible Translators (Worthington, PA: Marantha Publications, ?), 61. ↩︎
10. Ibid, 247-248. ↩︎
11. americanbible.org/news/articles/the-elegant-king-james-bible. ↩︎
12. Paine, 181. ↩︎
13. McClure, 241-242. ↩︎
14. Source: tbsbibles.org/resource/collection/D1B0BDBE-CD9E-4D12-BBDD-138677F98835/Plain-Reasons-for-Keeping-to-the-Authorised-Version.pdf? ↩︎
15. Paine, 22, 26. ↩︎
16. Ibid, 169. ↩︎
17. McClure, iv, 63-64, 77. ↩︎
18. Ibid, 78, 86, 87. ↩︎
19. Paine, 169. ↩︎
20. Ibid, 170. ↩︎
21. The TBS, “Plain Reasons.” ↩︎
22. Paine, 172. ↩︎
23. Ibid, 176, 179. ↩︎
24. McClure, 239, 250. He offers this final counsel: “If ever the time shall come for a new revision of the Translation, let it be done with the care and solemnity which marked the labors of King James’s commissioners ; and above all, let it be done by men who shall know what they are about, and how it ought to be done.  It will be a vast undertaking, affecting the dearest interests of ages of time, and millions upon millions … Whoever attempts to shake the confidence of the common people in the common version, puts their faith in imminent peril of shipwreck.”  Ibid, 235-236, 249-250. ↩︎