The Coming of the King James Gospels: A Collection of the Translators? Work-in-Progress

The Coming of the King James Gospels is a primary publication exploring the handwritten annotations of the Oxford New Testament Company, made as members completed Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Their original edited pages, gathered into one binding as the Bodleian Bishops’ Bible ([1602] b.1), offer us the only known surviving record of their monumental work.

Ward Allen’s painstakingly produced collation of this Bishops’ Bible is available for the first time in acessible visual layout. It allows a reader to study simultaneously the three texts, that of the original Bishops’ Bible, the revisions suggested for the 1602 text, and the final King James version of the Gospels. Rejected readings reveal the reasoning which led to the wording of the final text. Beautifully produced, The Coming of the King James Gospels is now a prime resource for all students of the Bible and the English language.

An Elizabethan scholar, Ward S. Allen is Hargis Professor of English Emeritus at Auburn University in Alabama. A member of the Renaissance Society of America and a frequent contributor to learned journals, Professor Allen has previously edited Translating for King James and Translating the New Testament Epistles, 1604–1611.

Edward C. Jacobs is professor of renaissance literature and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Louisiana Tech University. He is author of significant essays on both the Olda nd New Testament annotations in the 1602 Bodleian Bishops’ Bible which have appeared in The Bodleian Library Record, Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America, and The Library.