For many believers, the story of the English Bible seems to begin in 1611 with the King James Version. It’s familiar, trusted, and for good reason deeply loved. But history tells us something important right up front:
God did not drop an English Bible from the sky.
What we hold today came through a long and costly process—through faithful men, dangerous choices, and a conviction that ordinary people should be able to read the words of God for themselves.
This isn’t a story about tearing down the KJV.
It’s a story about how God preserved His word long before it had royal approval.
When Scripture Was Locked Away
For centuries, the Bible in Western Europe existed primarily in Latin. That wasn’t a problem for scholars and clergy—but it was a wall for everyone else. Farmers, craftsmen, mothers, children—the very people Scripture was written to instruct—were largely dependent on secondhand explanations.
And that dependence mattered.
Once Scripture is mediated only through authority, it becomes easy for tradition to quietly replace the text. The issue was never that Latin was sinful. The issue was control.
So when men began asking whether the Bible could—and should—be read in the common tongue, it wasn’t seen as a harmless project. It was seen as a threat.
Translation as an Act of Faith
Translating Scripture wasn’t merely academic work. It was a confession:
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That God’s word is clear enough to be read
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That truth does not require a gatekeeper
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That faith grows best when rooted in the text itself
Those convictions came at a cost.
Long before printing presses filled England, handwritten English Scriptures were copied in secret. Later, when the press made distribution possible, it also made persecution faster and more public.
Some translators were imprisoned.
Some were burned.
Some labored in exile, knowing they might never return home.
Not because they hated the church—but because they loved the Word.
A Stream, Not a Moment
The King James Version did not appear in isolation. It stands at the end of a stream already flowing—fed by earlier English efforts, continental reformers, and believers who believed Scripture should speak plainly.
English translators were not alone. Across Europe, the same conviction was taking root: God’s word belongs to God’s people.
This matters because it reframes how we think about preservation. God did not preserve His word by freezing it in one moment of history. He preserved it through faithful transmission, careful translation, and an unbroken concern for accuracy and clarity.
The miracle is not that one translation exists.
The miracle is that the Word survived opposition at every step.
Why This Series Exists
This series is not an exhaustive history. It’s not a defense of one camp or an attack on another. It’s a brief look at the men and moments that shaped the English Bible before 1611—so that when we open our Bibles today, we do so with gratitude instead of assumption.
If God was faithful to preserve His word through persecution, exile, and human weakness, then the real question isn’t which translation we defend—but whether we’re willing to read, study, and believe the Scriptures those men risked everything to give us.
In the next post, we’ll meet one of them—a man whose English still echoes every time we open our Bibles, even if we don’t know his name.
