The most influential English Bible in history — formal, rhythmic, public-domain prose used by Christians for over four hundred years.
The King James Version was commissioned in 1604 at the Hampton Court Conference, where King James I of England authorized a fresh English translation to unify the Church of England around a single Bible. Six committees of forty-seven scholars worked at Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster, drawing on the Bishops' Bible (1568) as their working base while consulting Tyndale, Coverdale, the Geneva Bible, and earlier English translations alongside the Hebrew and Greek originals.
First printed in 1611 by Robert Barker, the translation went through several minor revisions before the 1769 Oxford edition standardised the spelling and punctuation we still read today. That 1769 text, prepared by Benjamin Blayney, is what most digital editions (including this one) actually present when they say "KJV".
For three centuries the KJV was the de facto English Bible, shaping the English language itself — phrases like "the powers that be," "salt of the earth," and "a thorn in the flesh" entered everyday speech through its prose. It remained the dominant pew Bible until the American Standard Version (1901) and the wave of mid-20th-century translations.
The KJV is a formal-equivalence translation: words are rendered as close to one-for-one as English grammar allows, preserving the structure of the underlying Hebrew and Greek. Compared to modern dynamic-equivalence translations, it sounds more elevated and less conversational — closer to Shakespeare than to a contemporary newsfeed.
It works from the Textus Receptus, a 16th-century Byzantine-tradition Greek New Testament edited by Erasmus, Stephanus, and the Elzevirs. This is a slightly different textual basis than modern critical editions (Nestle-Aland, UBS), which means a handful of verses — Mark 16:9–20, John 7:53–8:11, 1 John 5:7 — appear in the KJV but are bracketed or footnoted in most modern Bibles.
The 1611 dedication, prefatory letters, marginal notes, and Apocrypha were dropped from most American printings in the 19th century, leaving the lean 66-book Protestant canon most readers know today.
Hand-picked verses that demonstrate how the KJV renders well-known passages.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.”
Bibles that share lineage, philosophy, or canonical structure with the KJV — open any to read its history.
The complete 1611 King James Bible — the same authoritative translation as the standard KJV, with the fourteen apocryphal books restored between the Old and New Testaments.
The most literal mainstream English Bible of its era — a scholarly revision of the KJV that informed nearly every modern formal-equivalence translation.
The first complete English Bible authorised for Catholic use — a careful translation from Jerome's Latin Vulgate that remained the standard English Catholic Bible for nearly four centuries.
A meticulous Victorian-era translation produced by a leading dispensationalist scholar — formal, precise, and footnote-rich.
A famously rigid word-for-word English Bible — preserves Hebrew and Greek verb tenses so closely it reads more like an interlinear gloss than a literary text.
Open the full Bible reader in King James Version, or jump straight to a search.