Friday, October 30, 2015

Handwritten Draft Of King James Bible Discovered



Let There Be Light: Handwritten Draft of King James Bible Reveals Secrets of Its Creation

sidneyjames

The King James Bible may well be the greatest work of literature ever written by committee—and now we know a bit more about the collaboration that produced it.

Jeffrey Allen Miller, an English professor at Montclair State University conducting research at Cambridge announced a remarkable discovery last week: “in the archives of Sidney Sussex College there survives now the earliest known draft of any part of the King James Bible, unmistakably in the hand of one of the King James translators.”

The manuscript was written by Samuel Ward, who was 32 when he became one of seven men at Cambridge charged with translating the biblical Apocrypha for inclusion in the edition, and who would eventually became master of Sidney Sussex College until his death in 1643. The material in the manuscript discovered by Miller covers apocryphal books known as Esdras and Wisdom, and it seems to indicate that the process of translation at Cambridge worked differently from what we thought we knew about it. It had long been assumed that the six separate teams, or companies, of translators who were based across Cambridge, Oxford, and London which had been assigned individual sections of the Bible to work on operated more collaboratively on certain sections than individually.

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