It’s been an exciting month for fans and historians of the King James Bible: scholars have identified a set of original translator’s notes that give us our earliest known look at how the King James Bible took shape:

…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 draft appears in a manuscript notebook formerly belonging to Samuel Ward (1572–1643), who was part of the team of seven men in Cambridge charged with translating the Apocrypha.

This find is significant because all the other known material from the King James Bible creation project dates from much later in the translation process and was likely copied made by scribes. By contrast, Ward’s draft—written in his own distinctive handwriting!—gives us a remarkable firsthand look at a Bible translator’s work in progress. They show Ward wrestling with the translation of difficult passages, trying out different renderings and crossing out unsatisfactory attempts.

Ed Simon, writing at Salon.com, explains what this means for our understanding of the King James Bible:

The material in the manuscript… 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.

But Ward’s draft seems to indicate that individuals in each company were assigned smaller portions of the biblical sections that that company oversaw, making the whole Bible more of a patchwork of individual labor than a collaborative whole.

This news is a good reason to take a fresh look at the King James Bible this month, particularly if you normally read a different Bible version. Here are a few places to start:

• You can read the King James Bible online here at Bible Gateway. You might also see this brief overview of the King James Bible.
• Some of the parts of the Bible that Samuel Ward was translating are not considered by all Christians today to be part of the Bible canon. You can read the apocryphal books of 1 and 2 Esdras and Wisdom online in the NRSV translation if you’re curious about them.
• Here’s a biography of Samuel Ward if you want to know more about the translator in question.
• The 400th anniversary of the King James Bible was celebrated several years ago, and at that time we (and many others) wrote quite a lot about the KJV’s significance as a Bible translation and pinnacle of Western literature. Take a look here and here for some KJV-related links and articles.
• One of the most remarkable features of the King James Bible is just how popular it remains, despite its famously archaic language and the availability of more modern Bible translations. Here’s a Christianity Today piece on the KJV’s enduring dominance in the English-speaking world.