Research by Dr Nicholas Hardy at the University of Birmingham found that French scholar Isaac Casaubon helped translate the Latin text into English.
Published in 1611, the King James Bible saw 40 translators work together but on different sections of the Holy book.
Dr Hardy discovered letters between English translator John Bois and the French scholar who was visiting London in 1610, which led to the “surprising” revelation.
Dr Hardy told The Sunday Telegraph: “People tend to talk about [the King James Bible] as a distinctively English cultural product, as something that was made in England, by Englishmen, for English readers.
“The English translators were using this guy’s work long before they met him, before he arrived in London.
“All of the books that they were using to help them had been printed on the Continent and most of them had been written outside the British Isles, because England was relatively speaking a bit of an intellectual backwater, especially in this field of Biblical scholarship and translation.”
The letters reveal Bois wrote to Casaubon with questions about specific passages, and Casaubon replied to each one with suggestions.
However, most of the passages Casaubon is known to have worked on were in the Apocrypha – books which are not included in the King James Bible translation.
The correspondence between the English and French scholar, found in…
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