History of the New King James Version
For more than three centuries the King James Version of 1611 was the Bible of the English-speaking church. Its language shaped hymns, prayers and everyday speech, but by the twentieth century many of its words had changed meaning or dropped out of use. The New King James Version set out to keep what readers loved about the King James while making it clear to modern readers.
- 1975Thomas Nelson begins a seven-year project, led by executive editor Arthur L. Farstad, to update the King James Version.
- 1979The New King James New Testament is published.
- 1980The Psalms follow.
- 1982The complete New King James Bible is published.
- TodayThe NKJV remains one of America’s best-selling Bibles. It was the fifth best-selling Bible in 2024, according to the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.
How it was translated
The NKJV is a word-for-word (formal equivalence) translation. The Old Testament follows the Hebrew text of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. The New Testament follows the Textus Receptus, the same Greek text tradition behind the King James, and its footnotes show where other Greek manuscripts (the critical and Majority texts) read differently, without choosing one as “best.”
Sources: Wikipedia, “New King James Version”