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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

The Vatican probably?

so, uh, I thought the kjv was... not recognized as valid by the catholic church? Like, the KJV was authorized by the church of England, a, uh, rather different body from the Vatican. I thought a lot of what made the KJV important was that it was early in that split.

I mean, i suppose that the Vatican would probably still have a pretty interesting opinion on it.

Another commenter elsewhere in this thread just mentioned the Preface to the KJV, which includes some specific criticism of the Catholic Church (referred to as "our chief adversaries") for (at the time) disapproving of vernacular language editions of the Bible.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Preface#%C....

I misunderstood a detail here: this section admits that the Catholic Church sponsored an English translation (the Douay-Rheims Bible) but complains that this translation was itself made in response to pressure from Protestants, and that Catholics were expected to seek permission from church authorities in order to read it. So I probably shouldn't have said "disapproving of" but rather something like "grudgingly permitting" or "restricting access to".

I actually had no idea that the catholic church permitted an english translation so early.

It's not that that the KJV is not "valid". It's that it's not recommended over the Catholic version.

The Catholic version contains the "deuterocanonical" books of the Old Testament.

https://bustedhalo.com/ministry-resources/why-doesnt-the-cat...

PS. [mentioned in the article] Apparently the original KJV did include the deuterocanonical books, but they were not considered canon. The Puritans and non-English protestants were the first to omit them entirely.

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