02A.03. Reception of the KJV

III. The Reception of the KJV The new version began to be used immediately in all the churches through the people continued to hold on to the older versions in their private reading. Kenyon says, "From the first, however, the version of 1611 seems to have been received into popular favor." (Kenyon, p. 232). Some believe it was forty years before the KJV won out over the popularity of the Geneva Bible. The publishers added their contribution to the success of the KJV by ceasing the publication of the Bishops’ Bible in 1606 and by issuing the KJV with the same format as the Geneva Bible. But the Roman Catholics accused it of being false to the scriptures in favor of protestantism; Armenians thought it favored Calvinism; the Puritans would have preferred to use "washing" instead of "baptism", and "congregation" or "assembly" instead of "church." They also disliked the words "bishops," "ordain," and "Easter." The reasons for the gradual but overwhelming success of the KJV have been well stated by several writers and may be briefly summarized as follows:

1. The personal qualifications of the revisers, who were the choice scholars and linguists of their day as well as men of profound and unaffected piety.

2. The almost universal sense of the work as a national effort, supported wholehearted by the king, and with the full concurrence and approval of both church and state.

3. It was the work of no single man and of no single school. It was the deliberate work of a large body of trained scholars who had before them nearly a century of revision. The translation of the Bible had passed out of the sphere of controversy. It was a national undertaking in which no one had any interest at heart save that of producing the best possible version of the scriptures.

4. The congeniality of the religious climate of the day with the sympathies and enthusiasm of the translators, as the predominate interest of their age was theology and religion.

5. The organized system of cooperative work which followed the precedent of the Geneva translators, while it may have been improved, resulted in a unity of tone in the Authorized Version which surpassed all its predecessors.

6. The literary atmosphere of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries paralleled the lofty sense of style and artistic tough of the translators. (Geisler, p. 420)