King James Bible (Authorized Version)

The King James Bible of 1611 is the most influential English-language text ever produced. Commissioned by King James I and translated by forty-seven scholars drawing on the work of Tyndale, Coverdale, and the Bishops' Bible, its majestic prose style profoundly shaped English literature, supplying countless phrases still in everyday use — 'salt of the earth,' 'the powers that be,' 'the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.' Its cadences influenced Milton, Bunyan, Handel, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. The original 1611 edition included eighty books total — the thirty-nine Old Testament books, fourteen Apocrypha or deuterocanonical books in a separate section, and twenty-seven New Testament books — though from the 1820s onward most Protestant publishers began printing it without the Apocrypha, reducing it to the sixty-six-book Protestant canon.

The King James Bible emerged from England's dramatic separation from the Catholic world, set in motion when Pope Clement VII refused to annul Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon and Henry broke with Rome in 1534, establishing the Church of England with the monarch as Supreme Head. The defeat of Philip II's Spanish Armada in 1588 marked Spain's decline and England's ascent as a naval and colonial power. Under James I, the Authorized Version was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611, giving English-speaking Protestantism a unifying sacred text of extraordinary literary quality. The English Bible accompanied British colonists, missionaries, and traders across the globe, becoming the foundational text of Anglophone civilization, and Britain's rise to global dominance from the defeat of Napoleon through the vast Victorian empire was inseparable from the cultural and moral framework the King James Version helped establish.