The English story: from Wycliffe and Tyndale to the King James and beyond

The English Bible has a long and, in places, bloody history. In the 1380s John Wycliffe and his circle produced the first complete English Bible, hand-copied and translated from the Latin Vulgate rather than the original languages; the church authorities condemned it. The decisive figure is William Tyndale, who around 1526 printed the first English New Testament translated directly from the Greek (and, from the Hebrew, the first five books of the Old Testament in 1530 and Jonah in 1531; his Joshua through 2 Chronicles was still unprinted when he died and reached readers in Matthew's Bible of 1537), determined, in his famous hope, that a boy who drove a plough would know Scripture better than a learned priest. It was illegal; Tyndale was hunted down, strangled, and burned in 1536, praying, tradition says, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." Within a few years the king's eyes did open, and much of Tyndale's own wording flowed on into every English Bible after him, the Coverdale Bible (1535), the Great Bible (1539), the Geneva Bible (1560, the Bible of the Pilgrims and of Shakespeare's England, and the first complete English Bible with numbered verses and study notes; the verse divisions themselves were Robert Estienne's, from his Greek New Testament of 1551, and had already appeared in an English New Testament of 1557), and the Bishops' Bible (1568). Then came the King James Version of 1611, commissioned by James I and produced by a large committee that revised the earlier English Bibles against the Hebrew Masoretic text and a printed Greek New Testament of the "Textus Receptus" type (assembled from a handful of late-medieval manuscripts). For its dignity and rhythm the King James became the dominant English Bible for roughly three centuries. As the English language changed and, crucially, as older and better manuscripts came to light, revisions followed: the (English) Revised Version of 1881–1885 and its American counterpart the American Standard Version of 1901. The twentieth century then brought an explosion of new translations, each with its own aim, the Revised Standard Version (New Testament 1946, complete Bible 1952) and its New Revised Standard Version (1989, updated 2021); the very literal New American Standard Bible (1971, updated 1995 and 2020); the readable, mainstream New International Version (New Testament 1973, complete Bible 1978, revised 1984 and again, more substantially, in 2011); the New King James Version (1982), modernizing the KJV's English while keeping its Textus Receptus base; the thought-for-thought New Living Translation (1996, second edition 2004, with further updates since); the literal-leaning English Standard Version (2001, revised 2007, 2011 and 2016); and the Christian Standard Bible (2017, updated 2020). Some are the work of a single tradition, others deliberately interconfessional; the story is not finished, and new revisions keep appearing. A date to watch for (it trips up almost every list of Bible versions, including ones you will find online): the year a translation is famous for is usually the year it FIRST appeared, not the text you would buy today. A living translation is revised, quietly and repeatedly, by a standing committee. The NIV on a shelf now is the 2011 revision, not the 1978 first edition; the ESV is the 2016 text; the CSB is the 2020 one. When a version's wording matters to you, check which edition you are reading. The throughline is worth remembering: people gave their lives so that ordinary readers could hold the Bible in their own tongue, as Paul had urged, "in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that I might instruct others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue" (1 Corinthians 14:19, American Standard Version), and Timothy had known "the sacred writings" from childhood (2 Timothy 3:15, American Standard Version).