From Papyri to King James: The Evolution of the English Bible

The English-language Bible came late in the long history of the preservation and transmission of the Biblical text. The Wycliffe English Bibles, the earliest complete Biblical manuscripts in English, appeared in the late 1380s and 1390s, or less than a century before the invention of the printing press. The roots of these texts are long and venerable, however, extending back some twelve centuries to the earliest New Testament documents and even further back to oral tradition and pre-history for the Old Testament.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120252/1/From_papyri_to_King_James_08-09.pd