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Regarding this discovery, I would argue that debates about the quality of the KJV translation are beside the point. This is a tremendous historical discovery, especially for historians of the early English Reformation. The KJV formed the mind of British Christianity for centuries, which in turn formed the mind of the British Empire. In other words, the KJV translation is important not merely for early Reformation studies, but for world history more generally. Anything that could give historians greater insight into the process of the KJV translation, as well as the theology (theologies?) of its translators, is a great discovery.

(A side-note regarding the Empire and Christianization: in the early centuries of the Empire, the British were primarily interested in trade and conquest, but not so much in evangelization and conversion of native peoples. The East India Company (EIC) was a good example of this: as long as profits and goods flowed in from India, the leaders of the EIC were content not only to leave native religions alone, but even to intermarry with native Muslims and Hindus and allow each wife to raise her children in her own particular faith tradition. Hence the creation of a new ethnicity: the Anglo-Indian. However, in the 19th century, an evangelical revival effected a sea-change in British Christianity, and thus the Empire became a vast instrument of evangelization and conversion. At this point, I think, the KJV became important for world history, rather than British history in particular.)

Former Seminary Student here. Not really that significant for religious reasons. This is purely a Historical and Literacy in the Middle Ages finding. King James version is not very important at all in academia for theology besides historical understandings (My main focus and where I was going to do my PhD). We have the original documents that the King James used and we also have MUCH better originals than the KJ.
It's such a poor translation, it's unfortunate so many people still hold it as the one. My feeling is that being exposed to the KJV turns away a lot of people who might otherwise be interested in reading the Bible. There are so many others that are more accurate, use modern modern language, and are more accessible at the same time.
Well, yes and no. We definitely have better manuscripts now, much better textual apparatus to organize and assess their variations, and much better research into what the Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic words would likely have meant to their original hearers. It also suffers from some horrible printing decisions: why folks continue to print the KJV with proper names in italics, and each verse as a separate paragraph is beyond me. But the KJV was a ground-breaking translation at the time: kind of like ALGOL or something like that. Nobody uses it anymore, but its ideas were what everybody has built on. And unlike nearly any modern translation, its English style means that it has rightly become a literary classic on its own rights. Yeah, it's not the Bible I read. But for certain uses (memorization, for instance, where rhythm and style is more important than every word coming across as familiar), it can hardly be beat.
I agree with everything you say here, especially about the manuscripts, except that it isn't true that "nobody uses it anymore." AFAICT, it's still the most popular English Bible by a wide margin.

The KJV isn't perfect, and we do have better manuscripts now, but it's still a very popular Bible translation worldwide.

Except that they (non-KJV) are all copyrighted and thus you better not get caught reading them out loud in public or cutting and pasting quotes online.

I agree, the KJV is not the easiest to read and a new Christian might want to start on something a little easier. But it is my advice that one hopefully outgrow the easier version as quick as possible.

The KJV authors were genuine people as well. They were not bent on making a name for themselves which is what the basis for every modern translation is (other than money).

I disagree that new translations are somehow "more accurate". From a handful of older manuscripts, that disagree not only with the originals used in the KJV but they also disagree amongst themselves, we get a hodgepodge of missing sentence fragments, and re-wordings that for what ever reason where backported into the Nestle greek from which most modern translations are derived. There are plenty of books written on the topic, the most recent being: http://amzn.com/B00KTV5GM2 (note I am not advocating any particular one,nor have I read any. What I speak of is from my own personal study).

And the worst thing of all is none of the "modern bible" movements were ever lead by Christians. It was the complete opposite; lead by secularists and skeptics alike who's only goal seemed to be how many verses they could get away with removing. Verses were never added, only removed.

In the end, there was no reason for the Christian community to be involved in this. The Christians already had a bible that had proved itself to be trustworthy and well liked.

  "Yea, hath God said?"
  --Satan, Genesis 3:1
The American Standard Version is a slightly more modern revision of the KJ and is out of copyright and widely distributed online. The Standard Version and ESV build on it with successively more modern language and are in copyright.

Comparison between the three:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+1&version=...

Personally, I don't think that any edition written in English (or latin for that matter) can be close to a canonical version of the Bible... nor do I think it is necessary that one is.

There is a project, called the World Edition Bible (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_English_Bible), that is attempting to rectify this with an open-source, scholarly translated Bible. I have generally been impressed by what they're trying to do, and I think they're mostly an unequivocal step up from the ASV, but they've got a ways to go yet. If you speak Biblical Greek or Hebrew, you might take a look at volunteering; I believe they've largely updated the Gospels, but the translations for a lot of the Hebrew Bible were still a bit wanting last I looked.
Peers have mentioned updates to the ASV, and the Bibliotheca project is also updating the ASV. Interestingly, the rationale for editing the ASV given in the Kickstarter campaign [0] does not mention copyright as a factor, instead it focuses on literary factors. However, in the comments on the last update [1], amidst general grousing about the translation choice (and mainly how long the editing effort is taking) someone speculated about copyright, so maybe we'll hear more about that angle in a future update.

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/530877925/bibliotheca/d...

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/530877925/bibliotheca/p...

There is no such a thing as ideal translation of the bible, simply because there is no single bible. Each tradition has a different set of sources for the biblical text. Just for the old testament you can choose between Septuagint and Massoretic texts, and we know these two traditions existed for centuries already at the time of Jesus. For the new testament, you will learn that all existing copies differ from each other, sometimes with entire chapters or even books being added or removed. Modern translations use the so-called Text Receptus, which is an invention of Erasmus. So, a translation of the bible is just like the picture of a unicorn. Most people will agree on the general shapes, but when it comes to the details there is no way to determine if it is true or not, because there is no original to compare.
As I understand it, there are sects for whom the supremacy of the KJV is actually a matter of doctrine. If so, then it becomes the truth relative to that particular sect.
Yes, you're talking about the "KJV-Only" movement adopted by some primitive Baptists and other fundamentalist sects.

There's a big difference between KJV-onlyism and preferring the KJV over other translations. The former insists something that the KJV translators themselves never did: that the KJV is the only legitimate Bible translation, and specially favoured and preserved by God over other translations.

The KJV has plenty of archaic usage that reduces its usability. One of my favourite KJV oddities:

"Suffer little children"

Singing "Suffer little children" in church always struck me as odd. As a kid, I'd puzzle over why Jesus would say "suffer".

The only modern usage of "suffer" in this sense is the phrase "to suffer fools gladly", as in "he doesn't suffer fools gladly", which means "he won't put up with fools."
Can you recommend an accurate translation? I've always wanted to read the bible
I don't pretend to know or especially care about accuracy, but the semi-archaic language of the King James Version gives it a certain authoritative-sounding zing that others may lack.

"Thou shalt not kill" sounds a whole lot better than "Don't kill" even though the former has two words missing from modern English.

But significant for literary reasons, at least. The KJV is deeply interwoven into much of English literature.
Actually, the King James Bible was produced in the Early Modern period (c. 1611), not the Middle Ages.
Sorry you are 100% correct. My defense it was late at night :(
Slightly off topic, do you have a favorite translation?
OP Here:

I have studied 2 years of Greek and Hebrew and some Aramaic. The more I learned of these languages the more I realized how good our own translations are. All the modern translations are good but I do have two recommendations. New Living Translation is the best reading bible. It just is well written in sentence structure and word choices. New Revised Standard is the best "study" translation. To me it has the best "word for word" though I must say my old Hebrew teacher HATES this version's Old Testament version's word choices. (For example NIV translate the Greek word SOMA (flesh) sinful nature, I have an issue with that. In the Old Testament there are similar things that are merely differences in opinion) As a Linux and Open Source (Free Software) person I hate these copyrights so there are a few open license projects that I haven' dug into yet.

(Also) Not the OP, but the Holman [http://www.hcsb.org/] has become my translation of choice.

As mentioned by other, the NASB and the ESV are also both good choices. I really like the NASB for study, but find the language choices make it a little jarring (compared the ESV or HCSB), so I tend not to use it for regular personal reading.

Not OP either but:

If you want to read the Bible smoothly there's the NLT (New Living Translation) reads very nicely for today's day and age. There's different translations for different purposes, I enjoy reading many of them. If you want to read the New Testament from a different source (most translations use Greek) there is Aramaic New Testament in Plain English (from the Peshitta Script written in Aramaic) which clears up some confusing verses in the New Testament. Such as the famous camel through the eye of a needle becomes a rope passing through the eye of a needle which reads clearer.

Not OP, but if you want faithfulness to the original languages, English Standard Version is really good. New American Standard Bible is also good.
The NIV gets a lot of flack for not being terribly accurate, but for a translation that tries to strike a balance between reasonable accuracy and good readability, I like it. It definitely does smooth over a lot of difficulties in the original languages (see, e.g., its indefensible confusing of what exactly the Midianites and Ishmaelites are getting up to in Gen. 37:25-28), but just know that going in.
First paragraph of the article.

"The King James Bible is the most widely read work in English literature, a masterpiece of translation whose stately cadences and transcendent phrases have long been seen, even by secular readers, as having emerged from a kind of collective divine inspiration"

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale "In 1611 the 54 scholars who produced the King James Bible drew significantly from Tyndale, as well as from translations that descended from his. One estimate suggests the New Testament in the King James Version is 83% Tyndale's and the Old Testament 76%."

Could someone explain how it is that someone discovers something that is already in a University archive? It seems people are discovering these kinds of things every few years.
In this case, the notebook was long known to be there, but the relevant section had been cataloged as a "verse-by-verse bible commentary". What was discovered was that the verses are part of a draft for a new bible, instead of just being verses copied from an existing bible.
I love skipping straight to comments.
Fun fact about archives: a lot of the time, people have no idea what's actually stored in them. Obviously the University didn't know they had the bible or didn't know what it was because of a lack of bookkeeping. Now they know.
I feel compelled to mention here that archives and libraries aren't the same thing.

Libraries do (or should do) collections management, whereby the librarians go through the records and find out which resources aren't being used and weed them. Ideally, if it isn't used, it's taking up space, and it's gone. This is balanced by acquisition, such that the net effect is a constant churn of what's there, so there shouldn't be much chance for anything to sit and molder where nobody knows where, let alone what, it is.

Archives don't do collections management of that sort. They do preservation, and ideally they never get rid of anything. Moldering (in a metaphorical, but hopefully not physical!) sense is very possible in an archive.

well, the University of Cambridge was founded in 1209 and presumably their libraries have been collecting moldy old books ever since (it is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world, after Oxford).

It's not exactly surprising that they might have forgotten or misplaced a few things.

slightly off-topic - do you know if the catalogue in any of the Oxbridge's libraries are online searchable?
Good example: End of the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Amazing! Although the draft is actually of 1 Esdras and Wisdom of Solomon, part of the intertestamental Apochrypha and not found in many editions that have only the New and Old Testaments. What happened to the translation drafts of the other 66 books? Does this mean we have more information on J. R. R. Tolkien's work (12 volumes) than we do of the original translators of the KJV bible (a fact that probably would have astonished and annoyed Tolkien)?
Why would that have annoyed Tolkien? He was Roman Catholic, and KJV is a protestant translation.
I meant he would be dismayed more because of his love of language and ancient translation, and contrasted to the distaste of his fans' excesses. But I looked it up, and I was surprised to find that he did read the KJV. "The exact Bibles in Tolkien's library are not publicly known, but he probably used the Catholic Douay Version, as well as the Authorized (King James) Version" [1]. "Tolkien knew well the King James Bible of 1611" [2]. [1] (https://books.google.com/books?id=B0loOBA3ejIC&pg=PA63&lpg=P... [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=O5WvohegkLcC&pg=PA76&lpg=P...
To add, the Vatican has the posted the text of the bible for Catholics http://www.vatican.va/archive/bible/index.htm
There was much less time for losing Tolkien's work
The KJV originally had the deuterocanonicals, the canonical text for most of non Protestant Christendom.
Whilst happily an atheist, this is still fascinating.

Now does the draft contain the famous "Thou shalt commit adultery"? I bet they just blamed the typesetter but really ... :-)

Whilst I'm happily a Christian, I've always believed the same about that KJV mishap, somebody somewhere did something wrong. They are mere men after all.
I was always under the impressionist was a publishers mistake. It would be fun to find out the translators slipped it in ...

I would of course be very surprised anyone meant to put it in maliciously.

"The King James Bible is the most widely read work in English literature"

I've read this many times, but is it true? Are there real sources to support this claim?

Here's the article mentioned that contains the details of what was found in the draft.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1619318.ece

It's certainly interesting to get a view into a the processes behind a a four hundred year old, geographically distributed, 50 scholar collaboration.

Cool. So what are the notes around John 10:36 say? That's always been a pretty contentious adding of a, "the" in there.
Url changed from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/origins-of-the-king..., which points to this.
I feel compelled to add the link to the hilarious King James Programming site: http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/