Reddit mentions of God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

There is a book called God's Secretaries which is how the King James Bible of 1611 came into being.

At the time, there were many religious factions and many Bibles floating around and these various groups were all bickering with one another. James the First thought that he could quell some of this infighting by having ONE bible. Then, he could get back to one of his favorite pastimes: pedophilia. Heh!

The best book on this is God's Secretaries by Nicolson. It is the history of how the 1611 King James edition of the Bible came into being. Understand that there were many bibles previous to this one: Geneva Bible, Bishops Bible, Catholic Bible, Tyndale Bible, etc. King James wanted only one - his.

it was falling out of fashion at the time of publication, from what i understand... with the exception of a few regional dialects, and as /u/CRCulver said, the quakers.

i wrote a paper that needed me to research the making of the kjv 1611 and what i found most interesting was that comparative studies show that a large majority of the kjv 1611 (upwards of 70%, in the new testament!) was taken from william tyndale’s 1526 translation... you know, when thou/thee/thine was really a thing. so that's one reason why those forms are still found in the 1611 translation, i guess? (if you're interested in this sort of thing, i highly recommend this book, though it definitely isn't a linguistic text, obviously.)

>Its quite absurd how they believe some 1500 years after Jesus God finally got around to giving mankind the TRUE word of God

Not only that, when the KJV first came out, it was almost universally rejected, due to its authoritarian tone- no one alive at the time actually spoke that way, with all the "Thou shalt" and such. It was only about a century later that it became widely adopted.

There's a book called God's Secretaries about the committee of 70-ish people who worked to make the KJV at the King's request; it's a pretty good read if you find that sort of thing interesting- it has a secular tone and isn't written with the intent of praising the divine word of gee-oh-dee. ;)

Though not an academic history I found this book enlightening on the early days of the COE. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060838736/ref=pd_sim_14_1?ie=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0060838736&pd_rd_r=JYZZ0GA7B9YR2T616PC4&pd_rd_w=SOm8I&pd_rd_wg=Zf2WD&psc=1&refRID=JYZZ0GA7B9YR2T616PC4
>The King James Bible remains the most influential Bible translation of all time. Its elegant style and the exalted cadences of its poetry and prose echo forcefully in Shakespeare, Milton, T.S. Eliot and Reynolds Price. As travel writer Nicolson points out, however, the path to the completion of the translation wasn't smooth. When James took the throne in England in early 1603, he inherited a country embroiled in theological controversy. Relishing a good theological debate, the king appointed himself as a mediator between the Anglicans and the reformist Puritans, siding in the end with the Anglican Church as the party that posed the least political threat to his authority. As a result of these debates, James agreed to commission a new translation of the Bible as an olive branch to the Puritans. Between 1604 and 1611, various committees engaged in making a new translation that attended more to the original Greek and Hebrew than had earlier versions. Nicolson deftly chronicles the personalities involved, and breezily narrates the political and religious struggles of the early 17th century. Yet, the circumstances surrounding this translation are already well known from two earlier books-Benson Bobrick's Wide as the Waters and Alister McGrath's In the Beginning-and this treatment adds little that is new. Although Nicolson succeeds at providing insight into the diverse personalities involved in making the King James Bible, Bobrick's remains the most elegant and comprehensive treatment of the process.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Here is a really interesting book about how the KJV came into being:
http://www.amazon.com/Gods-Secretaries-Making-James-Bible/dp/0060838736/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376153086&sr=1-1&keywords=god%27s+secretaries

That is it based on byzantine texts is foundational, and some even argue that the king imposed personal translation rules, I can recommend this book as a good but not extremely heavy reading on the subject. If one think the byzantine texts are corrupt, well, all serious scholars I've heard or read think so. Here wlc takes a clear stance on the matter.