The English Bible translation authorized by King James I of England and published in 1611. Produced by 47 scholars working in six translation committees across three locations (Westminster, Cambridge, Oxford), the KJV drew heavily on William Tyndale's New Testament (1526) and on the Bishops' Bible (1568) while consulting Greek, Hebrew, and earlier English translations. Its textual base was the Greek Textus Receptus (Erasmus-derived) for the NT and the Masoretic Text for the OT. The 1769 revision by Benjamin Blayney updated spelling and punctuation and remains the version most readers today know as "the KJV."
The KJV is the most influential English translation in history. Four observations. (1) Literary landmark. Along with Shakespeare, the KJV shaped the modern English language more than any other source. Its cadences, phrases ("the powers that be," "a thorn in the flesh," "the fat of the land," "by the skin of my teeth"), and rhythms have saturated English literature for 400 years. (2) Reliable translation for its era. The KJV was a work of serious scholarship. Its translators — some of the finest Hebrew and Greek scholars of their age — aimed at faithful rendering, not paraphrase. Its principles live on in the ESV and NASB. (3) Outdated in vocabulary, not orthodoxy. Some KJV vocabulary (charity for love, let for hinder, prevent for precede, conversation for conduct) has shifted meaning; some archaic forms (thee, thou, -eth verbs) make comprehension harder for modern readers. These are translation-era limits, not doctrinal problems. (4) KJV-only movement (see separate entry) — a minority stream that treats the KJV itself as uniquely inspired and rejects all modern translations — is historically and textually indefensible. The KJV translators themselves affirmed the value of re-translation over time; their preface is explicit about this. Read the KJV for its majesty, memorize from it for its cadence, study from more recent reliable translations when precision matters.