The project began as a concession in a church quarrel. At Hampton Court in January 1604, the Puritan spokesman John Rainolds proposed a new translation to the new king, and James, who disliked the popular Geneva Bible for the anti-monarchical tone of its marginal notes, seized the idea. The rules drawn up for the work fixed its character: the Bishops' Bible was to be the base, altered only as the original required; old ecclesiastical words such as church were to be kept; and marginal notes were confined to matters of language and cross-reference, banishing the Geneva annotations that had irritated the king.
Some forty seven to fifty translators, the exact roll varies, were organised into six companies, two each at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, dividing the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Apocrypha among them. They worked from the Hebrew Masoretic text and the printed Greek of the Erasmian tradition, with the ancient versions and the whole line of sixteenth-century English Bibles open on the table, and their procedure was corporate throughout: drafts circulated between companies, and a final revising committee of twelve met daily at Stationers' Hall, where, contemporaries record, the text was read aloud and judged by ear. That ear is audible in the result. Roughly four fifths of the New Testament's wording descends from Tyndale, refined; the rest was composed to match him.