Was there any anti-catholic bias written into the King James Bible?

by minoknow

James being a protestant, and the Church of England still being relatively new, did the writers of the King James version try to interpret the bible in an anti-catholic manner?

siecle

I think it would be a little question-begging to say that they "interpreted" the Bible in an "anti-Catholic" manner. Rather, they re-translated the book assiduously, in keeping with the insights of other recent translation projects and philological studies. Obviously, they did not feel bound to translate the book in a way that conformed to the special doctrines of the council of Trent.

At the time, the Douai-Rheims bible was the English translation officially sanctioned by the Roman church. You can compare and contrast. The major difference between KJV and D-R is that the priests at Rheims did not really like to translate words. This gave the English language some excellent new acquisitions like "verity", "adulterate", "character", "victim", and on and on, but also a lot of unreadable nonsense that had the explicit purpose of making the text hard for the laity to read.

The KJV was actually fairly friendly to the Catholic approach to translation - for example, I think they ultimately opted to translate "love" as "charity". This was, in part, because the Church of England had always been a compromise position, neither loyal to the bishop of Rome nor fully "reformed", and King James was hostile to the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland, and thus not quite so Protestant as you seem to believe. The Calvinists already had a bible in wide popular use in England (the Geneva Bible), and the KJV was in some ways meant to be a more conservative alternative.

Most of this information (including fun words that were fabriqués en Rheims) can be found in the book Wide as the Waters, a pop history of Early Modern English bible translation.