In trying to sum up the unique genius of the King James Bible, you need go no further than its opening words. As Adam Nicolson points out in his book on the translation, Power and Glory (now republished as When God Spoke English), the 1611 version rings subtle but marvellous changes on the most popular preceding version, which goes like this: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the waters."

The King James translators noticed an extra word in the original Hebrew – literally translated as "surface" – and inserted it twice. So the second sentence becomes: "And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." As Nicolson argues, "face" is a simple, plain English monosyllable, but it also has a resonant double meaning. Simon Schama noted at the beginning of Radio 4's all-day programme of readings from the Bible that the word "face" implies "mirror", God's face reflected in his creation, which reflects itself back on him. It is a wonderful example of the brilliance of a translation that has never been bettered, before or since.

Except that it isn't. The double use of "face" also appears in two earlier translations of Genesis 1:1. You could say "the face of the deep" was found or chosen or selected by the 1611 translators, but you can't say it was theirs. And, in that respect, the coinage joins "let there be light", "am I my brother's keeper?", "be fruitful and multiply", "pillar of salt", "let my people go", "by the skin of my teeth", "tender mercies", "the spirit is willing", "a man after his own heart", "vanity of vanities", "sign of the times", "wages of sin", "all things to all men", "eat, drink and be merry", "fight the good fight", "through a glass darkly", "grave, where is thy victory?" and "the powers that be" among phrases that appear in English versions of the Bible published long before the King James translators took up their pens.

Celebrants of this year's anniversary have enjoyed pointing out the ironies of the translation: that it was commissioned to mollify the losing faction at a religious conference; that far from "inventing the language", it was written in archaic prose; and – most surprising of all – that it was made not by an individual genius but by six largely anonymous committees. But its authorship is much broader than the 53 clerics and one lay scholar who were selected to do James I's bidding in 1604. Most of the memorable Biblical phrases listed above were coined not in the hallowed cloisters of Oxford colleges or in the sepulchral calm of the Jerusalem Chamber but on the run. Five of the seven major English Bibles of the 16th century were produced in exile; two of their makers died at the stake. Each new Bible was the manifesto of a faction in the religious wars that revolutionised Tudor England, each subsequent Bible a revision and many a riposte. The full, 80-year-plus history of the English Bible is the story of the English reformation; it is spattered with blood and scorched with fire.

Nearly 60 years before the introduction of moveable type to Europe, and 130 years before Martin Luther, England's John Wycliffe oversaw the translation of two manuscript English Bibles from the Latin Vulgate, a project that landed him in court, and led to laws making translating or even reading the Bible in the vernacular a capital offence (laws under which Wycliffe's own body was dug up and burnt). His underground Lollard followers kept alive the idea of a direct relationship between God and the individual Christian, through his word.

Like Wycliffe, the first Bible translator of the printing age saw the production of an English Bible as a matter of theology. It is generally understood that the 1611 Bible owes its greatest debt to William Tyndale. Born around 1495 in the Lollard country of the west Cotswolds, educated at Oxford and inspired by Luther, Tyndale became a translator because he believed that if "a boy that driveth the plough" had access to the word of God in his own language, he would discover how little of Catholic ritual and indeed doctrine was in there (no sacraments or relics, no bishops, popes or purgatory). Aware that his work was still a burning offence, Tyndale fled England for northern Europe and spent the rest of his life trying to keep one step ahead of the imperial authorities, betrayed by spies and corrupt collaborators, fleeing up the Rhine with the first printed sheets of an English gospel in his satchel, but nonetheless producing the first printed translations of the New Testament and the first five books of the old (the Pentateuch), which were then smuggled into England and – when found – burnt in solemn rituals by Cardinal Wolsey.

Produced under these desperate circumstances, Tyndale's New Testament nonetheless provides well over 80% of the King James version. People note the sonorous musicality of the Beatitudes, but not their provenance. From "Blessed are the poor in spirit" all the way through to "Blessed are ye, when men revile you", every word but one is Tyndale's (the King James adds "exceeding" before "glad"). His Old Testament coinages range from "let there be light" and "let my people go" to "am I my brother's keeper?", "a man after his own heart" and "the fat of the land".

At the same time, Tyndale was buttressing his practice with theory, in writings that promoted the anti-papal Lutheran cause and provoked the ire of Catholic apologists such as the heretic-burner Thomas More, who unjustly accused Tyndale of being a political as well as religious revolutionary. In fact, Tyndale followed his mentor Luther (who'd been appalled by the peasant uprisings of the mid-1520s in Munster and elsewhere) in seeing kingly power as the only realistic alternative to papal infallibility. In The Obedience of a Christian Man, Tyndale argues forcibly for unconditional loyalty to kings ("He that judgeth the King judgeth God and damneth God's law and ordinance").

In his play Anne Boleyn, Howard Brenton dramatises the way Henry's second queen alerted him to Tyndale's congenial opinions on the royal supremacy, and overtures were made for Tyndale's return to England. Sensibly (in view of Anne's fate), he refused them. However, a year after More's arrest for opposing the king's defiance of the pope, Tyndale was lured from his Antwerp safe house by an English adventurer (possibly in More's pay) and tried by the imperial authorities for heresy. Despite a half-hearted attempt by Thomas Cromwell to secure his release, Tyndale was strangled and burnt at Vilvoorde in October 1536. His last words are reputed to have been "Lord, open the king of England's eyes".

The irony is that Henry's eyes were opened already. Cromwell, his chief courtier, had persuaded the king to allow a complete English Bible, made by Tyndale's saintly collaborator, the former monk Miles Coverdale, to be sold openly and legally in England. Coverdale's 1535 version consisted of a revision of Tyndale's New Testament and Pentateuch, supplemented by Coverdale's own translation of the rest. Coverdale had no Greek or Hebrew, and his translations from Latin and German are arguably the more elegantly effective as a result, changing Tyndale's "go in into thy master's joy", for instance, to "enter thou into the joy of thy Lord". He was the first printed translator to give us the psalms (and thus "the valley of the shadow of death", "thy tender mercies and thy loving-kindnesses" and "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills"), which are retained in the Book of Common Prayer. It's in Coverdale's revision of his own work, Henry VIII's officially authorised, regally bound and aptly titled Great Bible, that the "face of the deep"/"face of the waters" formulation first appears.

Between Coverdale's first Bible (1535) and the Great Bible (1539) comes the so-called Matthew Bible of 1537, published – like so many early Bibles – by a member of the emergent merchant class, Richard Grafton of the Grocers' Company, who is commemorated in the name of one of the houses of my sternly Protestant public school (Oundle in Northamptonshire). Its editor was John Rogers, chaplain to the Antwerp English community, and the Bible is significant for the inclusion of a new version of the history books of the Old Testament (Joshua to Chronicles), which is convincingly attributed to Tyndale by his biographer, editor and redoubtable champion David Daniell. More than doubling the length of the Tyndale Old Testament, these nine books may have been translated in (and thus smuggled out from) Tyndale's prison cell. What is certain is that – in an act of some generosity – Coverdale dropped his own versions of these books, incorporating Tyndale's into the subsequent versions he edited, including the Great.

By the time of his death, Henry VIII and his bishops had backtracked on the reformation and the English Bible, forbidding its reading by men and women below the class of merchant and gentlewoman, and banning entirely any Bible bearing Tyndale's name (his work could not be banned without banning every English Bible in print). But under the fervently Protestant Edward VI the Bible became central to both private and public worship. As the Catholic church's missals and processionals and primers were removed, the English Bible became the only source of doctrine and ceremony. As the altars were stripped, statues smashed and sacred hangings torn down, its texts were nailed up in their stead, becoming the sole form of church decoration. No wonder that a biblical editor – John Rogers, of the Matthew Bible – was the first of the 300 Protestants who were burnt alive at the stake by the restored Catholic hierarchy under Edward's successor, Mary.

The remaining major Tudor translations were specifically doctrinal. The 1560 Geneva Bible – which gave us "the skin of my teeth", "from strength to strength", "vanity of vanities", "unto us a child is born" and "my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased" – was made in the Calvinist capital by Protestant exiles from Mary's reign of terror (including Coverdale) and is notable for its extensive and highly partial marginal notes. Twenty years later, with the Protestant Elizabeth firmly on the throne, English Catholic exiles working from Douai and Rheims in France began producing a new Catholic English Bible, on the principle that if English translations were now unstoppable (and "in the hands of every husbandman, artificer, prentice, boys, girls, mistress, maid") then they should at least get it right. The language is heavily latinate: durable usages include "adulterate", "verity" and "prescience", while "potestates", "longanimity" and "conculcation" failed to stick. Even so, Douai-Rheims gave us "through a glass darkly", "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof", "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" and "whited sepulchres".

Between Douai-Rheims and Geneva sits the 1568 Bishops' Bible, an attempt by Archbishop Matthew Parker to outflank Geneva by producing a Bible without "bitter notes" or accidental "lightness or obscenity" (no "pissing she-mule", for instance), a Bible appropriate to the Elizabethan settlement, which sought to combine Catholic ceremonial with Protestant doctrine. Notably failing to supplant Geneva (the Bible of Spenser, Shakespeare and the Mayflower puritans), Bishops' is best known for its unfortunate rendering of "cast thy bread upon the waters" as "lay thy bread upon wet faces". Nonetheless, it gave us "be fruitful and multiply", "spare the rod", "the voice of one crying in the wilderness", "kick against the pricks" and "thou good and faithful servant", and passed on "the face of the deep" from Coverdale to the King James translators.

It was this Bible – printed unbound, for ease of distribution – which was given to the 54 scholars appointed by Archbishop Richard Bancroft to make yet another new translation in 1604. The project was a sop thrown to the Puritan faction at a conference held by the newly acceded James I, at which – on all matters of substance – it had been defeated. In contrast to Tyndale, James did not believe in the monarchy as an alternative source of power to an overweening church; his slogan was "No bishops, no king". Less defensively – and despite the undoubted fillip given to the Protestant cause by the Gunpowder Plot the following year – James saw his mission as keeping religious (and literal) peace in Europe, by bringing the warring factions of the Christian confession together.

Thus, and despite Puritan support, the impetus of the translation was and remained deeply conservative, its aim to declare the English reformation complete. The Bishops' Bible was the default text, there were to be no marginal notes, and the translators were instructed to defer to "the ancient fathers", "the analogy of the faith" and the "old ecclesiastical words". Thus, as Thomas More had insisted in the 1520s, Tyndale's "elder", "congregation" and "love" were to be rendered as "priest", "church" and "charity". The Bible's divine authority was implied by an imposed uniformity of format and literary style (so poems such as the psalms and Mary's Magnificat in Luke are rendered in prose). For the 1611 reader, the Bible was overlaid with an antique patina: the increasingly outmoded "thou" as the singular of "you", the "-eth" ending to verbs as opposed to the current move to "s" ("hath" for "has", "doeth" for "does"), "thereof" for the contemporary "its". The consistent – you could say persistent – use of conjunctive phrases such as "And it came to pass" (on which Tyndale rings the changes) gives the work a ritualised, almost plainsong feel. Following Bishops', colloquialisms were frowned on: Tyndale's serpent tells Eve "Tush, ye shall not die"; King James's insists "Ye shall not surely die". As contemporary critics pointed out, the Bible is surprisingly indebted to the Catholic Douai-Rheims version, both stylistically and doctrinally: so, the Protestant "acknowledge" becomes the Catholic "confess", "ordinance" is rendered as "tradition", and, in John's gospel, Tyndale's "flock" (a congregation of sheep) becomes Douai-Rheims's "fold" (a means of containing them). And, while the word "penance" does not appear in the 1611 Bible, in deference to the Puritans, neither does the word "tyrant", in deference to the king.

All of this said, the length and ease of the translation process, the advancement in Hebrew scholarship and the diligence and distinction of the translators enabled them, time and again, to stand on their predecessors' shoulders. At a conference on the King James Bible in Stratford three years ago (out of which grew my play about its making, Written on the Heart), it was tacitly forbidden to comment on the obvious upside of the translation's conservatism: its literary beauty. In that, we would have been at one with the writer of the King James version's preface, Miles Smith, who insisted that "niceness in words was always counted the next step to trifling". Nonetheless, the many memorable coinages which the translators selected (and often improved) from earlier versions are joined by many more that are original, from "the root of the matter", "a still small voice" and "a thorn in the flesh", to "lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven", "get thee behind me, Satan", "suffer little children" and "let us now praise famous men". The method of reading the translation out loud contributed to the creation of brilliant set-pieces. The death of Jonathan in 2 Samuel ("how are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished") is one of a number of passages in which scholarship combined with literary skill to turn clunky and even tortured phraseology into paragraphs of clarity, memorability and – yes – majesty.

So, in the second chapter of Isaiah, the scholars assembled in the Puritan John Rainolds's rooms in Corpus Christi, Oxford, faced the following in the Bishops' Bible: "They shall break their swords also into mattocks, and their spears to make scythes: and one people shall not lift up a weapon against another, neither shall they learn to fight from henceforth". At first the translators would have noted that to turn one kind of metal object to another, you beat it rather than break it. Some might have advocated the Matthew Bible's double alliteration "So they shall break their swords and spears to make scythes and saws thereof" (Coverdale adds "sickles"), but the crowding of sibilants wouldn't have survived reading aloud. Luckily, Isaiah 2 is one of the few passages from the prophets which Tyndale translated; his "one nation shall not lift up a sword against another" is a lot better than Bishops' "one people shall not lift up a weapon against another", but Geneva's "nation shall not lift up a sword against nation" is better still (particularly without the "a"). Coverdale, Matthew and the Bishops' all end with the slightly bathetic "henceforth", but Tyndale has the simpler "any more" (albeit following the musclebound "neither shall they teach to war", a phrase turned around by everybody else into variants of "neither shall they learn to fight"). The result, with its magnificent ABAB alliteration, hardly needs quoting: "And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

There are two ironies in this. The first is that – by accident or design – the translators chose to evoke the very ploughboys for whom Tyndale made his vernacular Bible, a very different audience from the metropolitan Anglicans to whom their version was directed. The second concerns the aim of the translation, to bring religious peace. When Gordon Brown praised the King James Bible for bringing different denominations "together in committee to create a symbol of unity for the whole nation" (in a 2004 speech on Britishness), he didn't mention that it failed. In under 10 years, Europe was aflame with what was to become the 30 years war; within 30, the English civil war had broken out, consigning Archbishop Bancroft's successor William Laud and James's second son Charles to the executioner's block, an outcome chillingly predicted by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, head of the committee that translated Genesis, to Laud's face. The universal success of the King James version in England had to wait for the restoration of the monarchy, and its spread across the world for Britain's great imperial advance.

By then a work written in and for a specific time, elbowing out previous versions on which it substantially relied, with many wonderful coinages as well as some pedestrian and repetitive formulations, had turned into something universal and apparently divinely provenanced, a book of which the proverbial American Baptist could insist: "If it's good enough for St Paul, it's good enough for me."

• This article was amended on 2 and 10 March 2011. The original had the serpent telling Mary, "Tush, ye shall not die". This has been corrected. "Bald as a coot" was also included in a list of phrases that appeared in translations of the Bible before 1611. This has been removed as incorrect.

• David Edgar's play about the making of the King James Bible, Written on the Heart, will premiere in the RSC's Swan Theatre at Stratford in the autumn. Join him and guests for a panel discussion entitled The Word for All Time: Is the King James Bible Really So Special? on Wednesday 9 March (Ash Wednesday), at Stationers' Hall, London. Tickets for Guardian Extra members are £10 (normal price £12). Admission includes a complimentary glass of wine. Find out more at theguardian.com/extra