David Norton

Revised and condensed from David Norton's acclaimed A History of the Bible as Literature, this book, first published in 2000, tells the story of English literary attitudes to the Bible. Meer

The King James Bible was the result of an extraordinary effort over nearly a century to make many good English translations and turn them into what the translators called 'one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against'. Meer

David Norton re-edited the King James Bible for Cambridge, and this 2005 book arose from his intensive work on that project. Here he shows how the text of the most important Bible in the English language was made, and how, for better and for worse, it changed in the hands of printers and editors until, in 1769, it became the text we know today. Meer

Early-eighteenth-century literary critics thought the King James Bible had 'all the disadvantages of an old prose translation'. But from the 1760s on criticism became increasingly favourable. Meer