Who Authorized the Authorized Version? The King James Bible and the Failure of Revelation Authentication

The label Authorized Version on the King James Bible turns out, on inspection, to refer to no surviving document of authorization. The 1611 title page says Appointed to be read in Churches, not Authorized. The label settled into capitalized proper-name form only in the early nineteenth century. The text most modern readers hold is not the 1611 at all but a 1769 revision by an Oxford scholar named Benjamin Blayney. And the modern American conviction that the English KJB is uniquely divinely preserved above the Greek and Hebrew is a twentieth-century invention layered onto a seventeenth-century translation whose own preface disclaims it. This essay walks the historical record from the political commission at Hampton Court 1604 through Bancroft's editorial rules, the printed text's contested-lever use in three centuries of opposing English-speaking moral disputes, Blayney's revision, and the contemporary King James Only movement, applying a single diagnostic at each stage: authentication is prior to obedience — before asking whether any command is moral, ask whether the claimed source has been authenticated. The diagnostic generalizes beyond religion to any canonical text whose source-claim is taken on trust. The KJB is the worked case because the receipts are uniquely public. Companion to Morality, Power, and the Problem of a Self-Sufficient God (Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.20738940). Version history. v1.0 (June 2026) was the completed working master — written with Claude as drafting partner, independently verified against authoritative sources, and adversarially reviewed by four independent services (GPT, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity), with all review files retained; it was held unpublished pending a venue decision. Changes in version 1.1 (first published edition): the cover is brought into the house format used across the author's deposited papers (byline William Stafford, ADN, LI-AIast5, version line, preprint/DOI/license notice); the disclosure is conformed to the deposited Earned Trust standard v1.6.3 — the byline numeral now follows the count-of-services rule (five services: Claude, GPT, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity) rather than the earlier reviewer-count framing, with reviewer independence stated in the workflow prose. No changes to the body text or argument.