[bibleprotector]

The first step was the Gothic Bible, which we associate with Ulfilas (310-383). The Goths may have received the New Testament first-hand: many of them served in the Roman army in Thessalonica and Cappadocia. Ulfilas' Gothic Bible, according to liberal and conservative scholars alike, contained no contamination (or influence, if you prefer) from Jerome's wretched Vulgate. The Cambridge History of the Bible says that Ulfilas' Byzantine text "differs very little from the fully developed Textus Receptus of the later period." So, the Goths had a Bible, long before 1611.

The Goths were not the only one to have a good Bible in that period. And there is no connection between the Gothic Bible and the English. They are separate branches on the Bible tree.

I know that the Gothic language is the eastern form of the Germanic family tree, but that is as close as it gets to "English". English is a branch on the far end of the German family tree. To find a common ancestor language, you have to go back toward the time of Ashzenaz ("proto-German")... or Woden.

The "pure stream" of the NT was being preserved most specifically in Byzantium. However, it is true that Bibles already existed in Latin of the proper type before the Vulgate, and these continued for many years in "insular" use, such as in Britain. The Vulgate was not entirely bad, though it did overtake Europe to become a standard Latin Version.

We already have quotes of the Scripture from Gildas from the 6th century, whose Latin Scriptures do not match the Vulgate, but shows similarity to the Byzantine.

Next came the Anglo-Saxon Bible(s), which started cropping up around 450 AD. The "father of English history," the Venerable Bede, bears witness to these vernacular Bibles, which were of the Byzantine text type. There was not a single edition of the Bible in these days before the printing press, but the Anglo-Saxon Bibles were faithful to the Receptus and to one another. So the ancient Britons had God's word, too.

The Anglo-Saxon Versions did not begin until about 658 A.D. or so, and were not wholly conformed to the Vulgate, because they were based on the pre-Vulgate line of Latin Bibles which had gone from France into Ireland, to Scotland and to the North. Therefore Bede's Bible would be similar to the Byzantine Text. However, in time, there was an increasing "Romanization".

Then, like dawn breaking after a stormy night, came John Wycliffe's Bible in 1389.

Wycliffe used the Vulgate to render into English, just as others around that time had done so, like the R.C. translator Richard Rolle (1290–1349).

Then Tyndale's printed edition.

Tyndale's version, which underwent revision, appeared in Matthew's Bible, also Coverdale's further edited and expanded, and then the Great Bible too.

Then the Geneva Bible in 1560.

There are at least 40 differences between the 1557 NT and the 1560 NT.

Then the Bishops' Bible, in 1568 (although the Geneva was still in use until around 1599).

The seven purifications leading to the KJB cannot be the Gothic, and is not the Wycliffe (it had no real influence on the KJB).