Still, Flake said, "There was a period where members brought their scriptures to church but didn't know how to use them. It took Mormons at least 20 years to begin to really talk about scriptures."

The new edition of the Bible solved a major problem for church members, said James Mortimer, a member of the scriptures committee and former publisher of the Deseret Morning News. Until 1979, members juggled three Bibles published by different churches.

LDS children used the World Bible, LDS seminary students used a Church of England Bible and LDS missionaries used a third Bible printed by Cambridge University, Mortimer said.

The footnotes in the Bibles and the Church of England's Bible Dictionary were fine — for the Church of England, BYU religion professor Robert J. Matthews said. Much of the doctrine was problematic for Latter-day Saints.

Matthews said the Church of England generously allowed the scripture committee to remake its Bible Dictionary, adding and subtracting to create a separate version consistent with LDS doctrine and now included with every LDS edition of the King James Version.

The project also gave Matthews and Elder Bruce R. McConkie of the church's Quorum of the Twelve the opportunity to champion the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, which McConkie's son Joseph, a BYU religion professor, said had been "something of a hiss and byword" in the church.

Smith's translation — what he said were inspired corrections to errors made over centuries of translation and transcription — is the property of what was then known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and LDS church members were suspicious of what it contained.

Now more than 1,000 passages from the JST, or about one-third of the alterations Smith made, are found in the LDS edition of the Bible, either in footnotes or in a small section after the Topical Guide and Bible Dictionary, and a generation of Latter-day Saints has grown up with it as part of the mainstream church canon.

Flake, who is LDS, said the church's continued reliance on the King James Version appears to have benefited it in two ways.

"As a scholar I'm interested in the way the church continues to maintain its commitment to the King James Version while integrating the Joseph Smith Translation," she said. "The LDS edition of the King James Bible is both useful for the church's proselytizing program while integrating a part of its scriptural history that had heretofore been lost."