King James 1611 origin

Statement taken from "God's Secretaries--The Making of the King James Bible" by Adam Nicolson.

Using fair copyright laws, I am quoting a small portion for debate and review purposes.

"....Tyndale's first 1526 translation, to its adaptation for Thomas Cromwell's official Great Bible in 1539, the 1557 New Testament produced in Calvinist Geneva, the 1560 complete Geneva Bible and finally the 1568 Bishops' Bible, on the basis of which the Translators had done their work:

""You are also helping [Bishop's Bible] together [Geneva 1557] by [Bishops[] prayer for vs [Tyndale] that [Tyndale] for the [Geneva 1560] gift [Great] bestpwed v[pm vs [Geneva 1557] by the meanes of many [Tyndale] persons [Great], thankes may bee giuen [Tyndale] bu [Gemeva 1557] many on our behalfe [Tyndale].""

This one tiny example of the minutely detailed nature of what the translators had done demonstrates their astonishing achievement. There is, on the whole, no telling that this text has been assembled like a mosaic floor, every tessera gauged and weighed, held up, examined, placed, and replaced, rejected, reabsorbed, a winnowing of exactness from a century of scholarship.

........The powerful government enterprise of the seventeenth century, taking almost everything from the earlier work, they say,k has done its best to obliterate the memory of the man [Tyndale] we should all revere as the king of English translators, the man who gave us so many of the most treasured passages in the Bible." (referring to the KJV)

I thought the KJV was a direct translation from Greek and Hebrew, with some fill in from the Latin Vulgate?

 

More quote:

"In the early summer of 1604, Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London and soon Archbishop of Canterbury, drew up his instructions to the Translators. They were to base thier revisions, he told them on the Bishops' Bible but they were to consult, he said, 'Tindall's Matthews, Coverdales, Whitchurch's, Geneva'."

The appendix lists most of the translators and discusses them. One or two were very lazy. Several were paid very well. (Didn't someone complain about the NIV translators being paid.)

The Apocrypha was translated by "The Second Cambridge Company" There is no indication that it was not considered as scripture in 1611. It is placed between the Old and New Testaments (unlike what some people say that it was placed like maps in the back or front.) It was not labeled any different than the other two Testaments, except it simply says Apocrypha and is chapter and verse just like the rest of the Bible.

The 1611 translators intended the Apocrypha to be part of the Bible because the Church of England did come from the Catholic Church, only later did protestant reformation cause translators who made modifications to decide to drop the Apocrypha.