Catholic Critics of the King James Bible, 1611-1911

This book challenges the prevailing view that until fairly recently the King James Bible (KJB) dominated the field of English biblical translation virtually unopposed. Rather than focusing on its gradual acceptance and triumph as traditional Protestant narratives and even most recent scholarly monographs have done, this study takes into account the persistent currents of opposition-especially by Roman Catholic critics-during the version's first 300 years in print. While Anglo-American Protestants indeed came to cherish the KJB, narratives of its success which now dominate the fields of religious and literary history have ignored the persistent voices of dissent that were raised against the version in England, Ireland, and North America. Drawing on new archival research, this book tells the forgotten story of those who denounced the KJB as a "heretical" translation and the role they ironically played in immortalizing it.