Translation authority in the history of English Bible publishing

The 1611 preface to the King James Bible—known as "The Translators to the Reader," written primarily by Miles Smith—contains one of the most theologically significant statements about translation authority in the history of English Bible publishing. It's worth explaining carefully, since this passage is often summarized loosely.

The core argument

The translators were responding to two groups of critics: Roman Catholic polemicists who argued that only the Latin Vulgate (or the original languages, mediated through the Church) carried authority, and some within English Protestantism who thought a "final" translation should displace all others. Against both, the translators argued that translation itself does not strip a text of its status as God's word. Their famous line was that even "the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession" contains the word of God, and is the word of God—just as a king's speech translated into another tongue remains the king's speech, even if some clauses are rendered imperfectly.

Which translations they had in mind

They were explicitly defending the whole lineage of prior English Protestant Bibles, not just their immediate predecessor. This included:

• William Tyndale's New Testament and Pentateuch (1520s–30s) — the foundational translation from Greek and Hebrew that shaped the language of every version after it, including the KJV itself.
• Miles Coverdale's Bible (1535) — the first complete printed English Bible, leaning on Tyndale plus Latin and German sources.
• Matthew's Bible (1537) — compiled by John Rogers under the pseudonym "Thomas Matthew," combining Tyndale and Coverdale.
• The Great Bible (1539) — the officially authorized Bible of Henry VIII's Church of England, revised by Coverdale.
• The Geneva Bible (1560) — produced by English Protestant exiles in Geneva, hugely popular among the laity and the Bible Shakespeare and the Puritans knew best.
• The Bishops' Bible (1568) — the Church of England's official pulpit Bible, and the base text the KJV translators were instructed to revise rather than retranslate from scratch.

The preface treats this entire succession as legitimate vehicles of God's word, despite their acknowledged flaws, varying quality, and theological differences in marginal notes (the Geneva Bible's Calvinist annotations being a particular sore point with King James, though the translators still didn't deny the text itself was Scripture).

The theological principle underneath it

Their point wasn't naive pluralism—they clearly believed some translations were better than others and that their own work was an improvement. Rather, they were making a distinction between the inspired original texts (which they held to be without error) and translations of those texts (which, being the work of "poor instruments," could be flawed yet still faithfully convey the word of God to those who read them). This let them affirm ongoing revision as a virtue rather than an admission of failure—their preface explicitly welcomes future correction, reasoning that if jealousy over minor imperfections silenced translation work, "there should be nothing done to please God."