The Holy Bible

The Story Behind This Film

How the King James Bible Came to Be

A Bible in Chains

For centuries, the Bible in England existed only in Latin, locked away from the ordinary people who could not read it. Translating Scripture into the language of the common man was treated as dangerous — even heretical.

William Tyndale and the First English New Testament

In the 1520s, William Tyndale defied the religious authorities of his day to translate the New Testament directly from Greek into English, smuggling printed copies into England at great personal risk. He was eventually betrayed, strangled, and burned at the stake in 1536 for this work. His dying words are reported to have been a prayer: “Lord, open the King of England's eyes.” A large majority of Tyndale's phrasing would later survive into the King James Version itself.

The Hampton Court Conference of 1604

When King James I ascended the English throne, tensions between competing factions of the English church — and competing English Bible translations — came to a head. At the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, a proposal was made for a single, authoritative new translation all sides could accept. King James approved it.

Forty-Seven Scholars, Six Companies

The translation was divided among roughly 47 scholars organized into six companies, working across Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge. Each group translated an assigned portion of Scripture, and each translation was cross-checked by the others — an extraordinary system of collaborative peer review for its time.

The 1611 Printing

After seven years of work, the King James Bible was first printed in 1611, drawing heavily on Tyndale's earlier translation, the Bishops' Bible, and the Geneva Bible, while returning to the original Hebrew and Greek texts for accuracy.

Persecution, Printing Wars, and Survival

The path to dominance wasn't smooth. Early editions faced printing errors, competition from the popular Geneva Bible, and decades of political and religious upheaval. Yet it endured — copied, printed, and carried across the world for over 400 years, shaping the English language itself in ways few other books ever have.

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