In typical ghost stories, the first convincing sign that an actual ghost might be present creates a transformation: it takes an otherwise familiar world and makes it unnervingly and catalytically strange. Sigmund Freud described this sense of familiarity-turned-strange as the uncanny – the unheimlich that confronts us with something disturbingly unfamiliar hidden in what seems familiar, the heimlich. Thus the ghost of Jacob Marley appears and unsettles Ebenezer Scrooge, thereby preparing him to revise what he thinks he knows about his world and what he values most: before he takes a fantastical journey through Christmases past, present, and future, Ebenezer must first come to terms with the very existence of the ghost, which does not accord with his beliefs about the world. Likewise, the ghost of Hamlet’s father sets the play in motion not by revealing a “murther most foul” but, as the opening scene emphasizes, by first challenging Horatio’s general system of beliefs with his mere presence: in Hamlet’s words, the existence of a ghost suggests “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Arguably, the most successful ghost stories don’t merely depict a character’s experience of the uncanny; they actually create such an experience for many of their readers or audience members.

Two of the most widely acclaimed novels of the twentieth century tell this kind of profoundly uncanny ghost story. Often considered their Nobel-prize-winning authors’ respective masterpieces, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Toni Morrison’s Beloved are ghost stories of a hauntingly unconventional kind. At the center of each novel’s strange-making representational strategies is the King James Bible (KJB) – so much so that, as I elaborate below, the KJB itself haunts these novels as much as any other ghost. Yet the KJB does not merely haunt them. More than that, it defines what it means to be haunted in these novels. Specifically, the KJB helps define the implicit sense conveyed by these novels that the present is inescapably haunted by the past, which is to say that the word history names a ghost, as it were, a ghost that constantly threatens to render the present unsettlingly and perhaps catalytically strange to itself.

The story of the King James Bible (KJB) – or the Authorized Version (AV) – is, as its multiple names suggest, not one but many stories. To begin with, its creation entailed many different stories. It was the work not of one translator but of several groups or “companies” of translators whose charge was not to produce their own original translation but rather to cull from and revise the work of earlier English translations of the Bible. The end result was the product of a collective effort not only of the various individuals who made up each company of translators, and the different companies (each assigned to particular sections of the Bible), but also the amalgamated efforts of prior English translators dating back over roughly a hundred years before the 1611 KJB was first published. In addition, this transhistorical translation story itself originated in the court of James I, which involved a still more complex tale about the intimate relationship between politics and religion in Jacobean England.

Yet these are just the beginning of a vastly more complicated and multifaceted story – indeed, a collection of interrelated stories – of how, over the course of the past four centuries, the KJB became the most popular and influential translation of the Bible among English-speaking peoples. Indeed, it became the single most influential book in the English language and arguably the greatest work ever produced by a committee. This larger story – the reception history of the KJB – is a story that comprises not only different individuals but also different peoples, countries, and historical eras. It is a story so complex that it is best told not by one voice but by many. That is why we created The King James Bible after 400 Years. Bringing together leading scholars from a wide range of different fields of study relating to the KJB and its influence, this book offers new insights intended to spark new kinds of conversations about the many different roles the KJB has played since 1611.