King James Bible
The King James Version (KJV), also known as the King James Bible (KJB) or simply the Authorized Version (AV), is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611.[a] The books of the King James Version include the 39 books of the Old Testament, an intertestamental section containing 14 books of the Apocrypha (most of which correspond to books in the Vulgate Deuterocanon adhered to by Roman Catholics), and the 27 books of the New Testament.
It was first printed by the King's Printer Robert Barker and was the third translation into English approved by the English Church authorities. The first had been the Great Bible, commissioned in the reign of King Henry VIII (1535), and the second had been the Bishops' Bible of 1568.[3] In January 1604, James VI and I convened the Hampton Court Conference, where a new English version was conceived in response to the problems of the earlier translations perceived by the Puritans,[4] a faction of the Church of England.[5] The translation is noted for its "majesty of style", and has been described as one of the most important books in English culture[6] and a driving force in the shaping of the English-speaking world.
James gave the translators instructions intended to ensure that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy.[8] The translation was done by 47 scholars, all of whom were members of the Church of England.[9] In common with most other translations of the period, the New Testament was translated from Greek, the Old Testament from Hebrew and Aramaic, and the Apocrypha from Greek and Latin. In the Book of Common Prayer (1662), the text of the Authorized Version replaced the text of the Great Bible for Epistle and Gospel readings (but not for the Psalter, which substantially retained Coverdale's Great Bible version) and as such was authorised by Act of Parliament.
By the first half of the 18th century, the Authorized Version had become effectively unchallenged as the English translation used in Anglican and English Protestant churches, except for the Psalms and some short passages in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. Over the course of the 18th century, the Authorized Version supplanted the Latin Vulgate as the standard version of scripture for English-speaking scholars. With the development of stereotype printing at the beginning of the 19th century, this version of the Bible became the most widely printed book in history, almost all such printings presenting the standard text of 1769 extensively re-edited by Benjamin Blayney at Oxford, and nearly always omitting the books of the Apocrypha. Today the unqualified title "King James Version" usually indicates that this Oxford standard text is meant.
Gutenberg Bible
Johann Gutenberg was born in Mainz, Germany, around 1400, the son of an aristocratic family with ties to the local metalworking industry. He lived in Strasbourg (in present-day France) for a time, where he carried out experiments with moveable metallic type made from a mold. By the mid-1450s, he had perfected a system of printing with moveable type that he used to create what became the world’s most famous book, the Latin translation of the Bible (Vulgate), generally known as the Gutenberg Bible. Scholars have thoroughly researched all aspects of Gutenberg’s work: the elaborate typeface with its 290 different characters derived from a Gothic missal script, the way he divided the text in the typesetting process, and the paper he used in the printing. Yet certain fundamental matters about the Gutenberg Bible are unknown or remain matters of dispute. The date on which the printing was completed is based solely on the notation “1455” on the binding of the Paris paper copy. It is believed that 180 copies of the Bible were printed, but this information is based on a single letter of Enea Silvio Piccolomini (the future Pope Pius II), who viewed samples of Gutenberg’s work in Frankfurt in 1455. Gutenberg originally intended to print in red the headings of the books of the Bible, but he abandoned this approach, using instead a separately printed table as a pattern for entering these lines by hand. Of the 49 extant, more-or-less complete copies of the Gutenberg Bible (12 on vellum, 37 on paper), this copy from the Bavarian State Library is one of only two (along with one copy in the Austrian National Library) in which this table is found as a vestige of the production process.