KJV was never authorised

The notion of the KJV as “authorized” rests on a historical fiction. Although King James proposed at Hampton Court that the translation be approved by bishops, church leaders, the Privy Council, and finally ratified by royal authority, history preserves no record of its ever receiving official approval by Parliament, King, Privy Council, or Convocation.[1] Some have conjectured that authorization records were destroyed in the Whitehall fire of 1616, but scholars remain unconvinced that any authorization ever existed.[1] From its first edition, the KJV carried the print “Appointed to be read in Churches,” language borrowed directly from the Bishops’ Bible that preceded it[1]—a claim of liturgical status rather than formal authorization. Official church recognition in England came only in 1666 when the fifth edition of the Prayer Book adopted the KJV for its scripture.[1]

The irony you identify emerges strikingly in the translators’ own preface. The address from “The Translators to the Reader,” which prefaced the King James Version of 1611, drew its Scripture quotations from the Geneva Bible.[2] This is particularly pointed given that King James disliked the Geneva Bible because its marginal notes suggested that in some circumstances it was lawful to disobey kings[3]—a threat to the divine right doctrine he championed. Yet the translators introducing their work to displace the Geneva Bible ironically borrowed its very words to do so. Even in the KJV’s own preface, it quotes not from itself but from the Geneva Bible.[4] The translators thus embedded their predecessor—the version they were commissioned to supplant—within the foundational text meant to establish the new translation’s authority, creating an unintended textual irony that undercuts the project’s political purpose.

[1] Jack P. Lewis, “Versions, English: Authorized Versions,” in The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 6:832.
[2] Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1986), 554.
[3] Tania Fenwick, “The King James Bible and the Importance of Textual Criticism,” Bible and Spade, ed. Bryant G. Wood (2011). [See here.]
[4] A. Kenneth Curtis, “No Overnight Success,” Christian History Magazine: Celebrating the 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible (Worcester, PA: Christian History Institute, 2011), 23.