Bible Translations before KJV 1611

 Bible Translations

•  Septuagint (second century bc): a Greek version of the Hebrew Old Testament that was used for many Bible translations.

•  Vulgate (Jerome, 383–405): Latin translation of the Bible; became the official text of the Roman Catholic Church.

•  Harclean Version (Thomas Harkel, 616): Syriac translation of the New Testament; included in the Syriac Bible.

•  Wycliffe’s Version  (John Wycliffe, 1380–1384): English vernacular translation based on the Latin Vulgate; used by English Catholics in the sixteenth century; it is unclear what Wycliffe’s exact role in this translation was, whether he was responsible for translating, provided supervision, or merely inspired the translation.

•  Gutenberg Bible (Johann Gutenberg, 1453–1456): first printed Bible using the Latin Vulgate.

•  Mentelin Bible (Johann Mentelin, 1466): first printed German Bible and first printed Bible in any language other than Latin.

•  Malermi Bible (Niccolò Malermi, 1471): first Italian printed Bible.

•  Luther Bible (Martin Luther, 1522–1534): German translation of the Bible based on Textus Receptus and Masoretic Text.

•  Tyndale Bible (William Tyndale, 1525–1530): English translation of the Pentateuch and New Testament based on Textus Receptus.

•  Gustav Vasa Bible (Laurentius Andreae, Laurentius Petri, and Olaus Petri, 1541): commissioned by Gustav I of Sweden; the first Swedish Bible printed.

•  Christian III Bible (1550): commissioned by Christian III of Denmark and Norway; the first Danish Bible printed.

•  Geneva Bible (1560): English translation of the Bible with Calvinist influences; translated by a team of English Protestant scholars who were in exile during the reign of Mary I; it was the primary English Protestant Bible during the Reformation; the English rendering was dependent on the Tyndale Bible; the New Testament was dependent on the Textus Receptus; first English Bible to use verse numbers.

•  King James Version (1611): English version authorized by King James I based on Textus Receptus.

Bible Translators

 Bible Translators

    •      Jerome (347–September 30, 420): Latin church father; translator of the Vulgate, which became the official text of the Roman Catholic Church.

    •      Bede the Venerable (672–May 26, 735): English monk and scholar; he translated the Gospel of John into Old English.

    •      John Wycliffe (1330–1384): English scholar and theologian; he advocated for, and possibly played some role in the translation of, an English vernacular version of the Bible which resulted in the Wycliffe Bible (English); he was declared a heretic after his death.

    •      Niccolò Malermi (c. 1422–1481): Italian biblical scholar; translator of the Malermi Bible, which was the first printed Italian translation.

    •      Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1455–1536): French humanist; he was the first to translate the Bible into French.

    •      Desiderius Erasmus (October 27, 1466–July 12, 1536): Dutch Roman Catholic theologian, scholar, and humanist; he translated the New Testament into Latin based off the Vulgate and included a collation of Greek texts which became known as the Textus Receptus.

    •      Martin Luther (November 10, 1483–February 18, 1546): German Protestant Reformer; translator of the Luther Bible (German).

    •      William Tyndale (1494–October 6, 1536): English Protestant Reformer; translator of the Tyndale Bible, which was the first Bible printed in English; he was burned at the stake after being charged with heresy.

    •      Antonio Brucioli (c. 1498–December 6, 1566): Italian writer, publisher, and humanist; first to translate the Bible into Italian.

    •      Casiodoro de Reina (c. 1520–March 15, 1594): Spanish theologian; he translated the first complete Spanish Bible.

    •      Giovanni Diodati (June 6, 1576–October 3, 1649): Italian theologian; adhered to Calvinism; translator of Diodati Bible, which was used by Italian Protestants.

Parks, Jessica. 2022. “The Christian Bible Is Translated Into Many Languages.” In Church History Themes, edited by Zachariah Carter. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife.

English Bibles by Publication Date

 English Bibles by Publication Date

•  Tyndale Bible (Published: 1522 – 1536) — The Tyndale Bible generally refers to the body of biblical translations by William Tyndale into Early Modern English made from 1522 to 1536.

•  King James Version Apocrypha (Published: 1611) — The King James Version (KJV), also the Authorized Version, is an English Bible translation, which was commissioned for the Church of England in 1604 and published in 1611 by sponsorship of King James VI and I.

•  Young’s Literal Translation (Published: 1862) — Young’s Literal Translation (YLT) is an English Bible translation published in 1862 by Robert Young, compiler of Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Bible and Concise Critical Comments on the New Testament.

•  Darby Bible (Published: 1867 – 1890) — The Darby Bible refers to the Bible as translated from Hebrew and Greek by John Nelson Darby and first published in 1867.

•  Cambridge Paragraph Bible of the Authorized English Version (Published: 1873) — The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible was an edition of the King James Version published in 1873 and was edited by F.H.A. Scrivener, a noted scholar of the text of the Bible.

•  King James Version, 1900 (Published: 1900) — The King James Version 1900 (KJV 1900), also the Pure Cambridge Edition, is the stable edition of the King James Version used in most modern print editions. The original King James text of 1611 has had numerous variants giving rise to the need for a stable text.

•  American Standard Version (Published: 1900 – 1901) — The American Standard Version (ASV), officially Revised Version, Standard American Edition, is an English Bible translation that was completed between 1900 and 1901.

•  Tanakh, 1917 (Published: 1917) — The Jewish Publication Society of America Version of the Tanakh (JPS) was the first Bible translation published by the Jewish Publication Society of America and the first translation of the Tanakh into English by a committee.

•  New American Standard Bible, 1995 (Published: 1960 – 1971) — The New American Standard Bible (NASB) is a translation of the Bible published by the Lockman Foundation between 1960 and 1971. The NASB is a revision of the American Standard Version (ASV).

•  New Testament: An Expanded Translation (Published: 1961) — The Wuest Expanded Translation (1961) is a literal New Testament translation by Professor Kenneth S. Wuest that strictly follows Greek word order.

•  Amplified Bible (Published: 1965) — The Amplified Bible (AMP) is an English Bible translation produced by Zondervan and The Lockman Foundation in 1965. It revises the American Standard Version of 1901 and is designed to amplify, or clarify, the biblical text by using additional features, such as multiple translation values.

•  Revised Standard Version, 2d Catholic Ed. (Published: 1966) — The Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVCE) is an English Bible translation first published in 1966, which includes the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament in the traditional Vulgate order.

•  Good News Translation (Published: 1966 – 1976) — The Good News Bible (GNB), also called the Good News Translation (GNT), is an English Bible translation by the American Bible Society. It was first published as the New Testament under the name Good News for Modern Man in 1966 and was completed in 1976.

•  New American Bible (Published: 1970) — The New American Bible (NAB) is an English Bible translation for Roman Catholics first published in 1970. It is the Catholic translation approved for use at mass.

•  Living Bible (Published: 1971) — The Living Bible (TLB) is a personal paraphrase of the Bible in English by Kenneth N. Taylor first published in 1971. It is not considered a translation.

•  New International Version, 1984 (Published: 1973) — The New International Version (NIV) is an English Bible translation published in 1978 by Biblica (formerly the International Bible Society). It was translated into broadly understood modern English using the earliest and highest quality source manuscripts.

•  New American Standard Bible, 1977 (Published: 1977) — The New American Standard Bible 1977 (NASB 1977) is an update of the New American Standard Bible (NASB) originally published by the Lockman Foundation between 1960 and 1971.

•  New King James Version (Published: 1982) — The New King James Version (NKJV) is a translation of the Bible published in 1982 by Thomas Nelson. It attempts to remain true to the text of the King James Bible while providing better readability.

•  New Century Version (Published: 1983 – 1987) — The New Century Version (NCV) is a revision of the International Children’s Bible (ICB), an English translation aimed at young readers and those with low reading skills or limited vocabulary.

•  New Jerusalem Bible (Published: 1985) — The New Jerusalem Bible (NJB) is an English Bible translation published in 1985 by Darton, Longman and Todd and Les Editions du Cerf. It is approved for use for study and devotion by Roman Catholics.

•  New Revised Standard Version (Published: 1989) — The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) is an English Bible translation published in 1989 by the National Council of Churches to serve the needs of a broad range of Christians.

•  New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Ed. (Published: 1989) — The New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (NRSV-CE) is a Bible translation closely based on the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) but including the deuterocanonical books and adapted for Catholic usage.

•  Contemporary English Version (Published: 1991 – 1995) — The Contemporary English Version (CEV), also known as the Bible for Today’s Family, is an English Bible translation published by the American Bible Society between 1991 and 1995.

•  The Message (Published: 1993 – 2002) — The Message is a translation of the Bible by Eugene H. Peterson published in segments from 1993 to 2002. It falls on the dynamic end of the dynamic and formal equivalence spectrum.

•  GOD’S WORD Translation (Published: 1995) — The God’s Word Translation (GW) is an English Bible translation published by the God’s Word to the Nations Society in 1995.

•  NET Bible (Published: 1996) — The New English Translation (NET Bible) is a free online English Bible translation sponsored by the Biblical Studies Foundation and published in 1996 by Biblical Studies Press. It includes thousands of translator notes as an aid to study.

•  New International Reader’s Version (Published: 1996) — The New International Reader’s Version (NIrV) is an easy reader version of The New International Version (NIV) published in 1996.

•  New Living Translation (Published: 1996) — The New Living Translation (NLT) is an English Bible translation published in 1996. The NLT originally aimed to revise The Living Bible (TLB), but became a translation in its own right by relying on original language texts of the Bible where The Living Bible did not.

•  Complete Jewish Bible (Published: 1998) — The Complete Jewish Bible (CJB) is an English Bible translation by David H. Stern published in 1998 by Jewish New Testament Publications, Inc. It consists of Stern’s revised translation of the Old Testament and his original Jewish New Testament translation.

•  International Standard Version (Published: 1998 – 2011) — The International Standard Version (ISV) is an English Bible translation completed in 2011.The texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls provide a textual apparatus for understanding the Old Testament.

•  Holman Christian Standard Bible (Published: 1999 – 2004) — The Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) is an English Bible translation from Holman Bible Publishers. The New Testament was published in 1999, followed by the full Bible in March 2004.

•  English Standard Version (Published: 2001) — The English Standard Version (ESV) is a Bible translation published in 2001 by Crossway based on the work of more than 100 evangelical scholars and pastors.

•  Lexham English Bible (Published: 2010 – 2011) — The Lexham English Bible (LEB) is a Bible released by Logos Bible Software in 2011 and intended to be used alongside original language texts of the Bible.

•  New American Bible, Rev. Ed. (Published: 2011) — The New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE) is a Catholic translation of the Bible published in 2011. It was the first major update to the New American Bible (NAB) of 1970.

•  New International Version, 2011 (Published: 2011) — The New International Version 2011 (NIV 2011) is an update of the New International Version (NIV) published in 1978 by Biblica (formerly the International Bible Society).

•  Lexham English Septuagint (Published: 2012 – 2013) — The Lexham English Septuagint (LES) is a translation of the Greek version of the Old Testament writings used from around the 2nd century BCE onwards. The translation was published by Lexham Press between 2012 and 2013.^[1]

 

---

^[1] Thompson, Jeremy. 2022. Lists from Church History. Faithlife Biblical and Theological Lists. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife.

Of The Making Of Translations There Is No End

 Of The Making Of Translations There Is No End

As difficult as translation is, however, godly scholars through the ages have labored diligently to bring the Word of God to His people in languages they can read and understand. Even before the time of Jesus, devout Jews in Alexandria had translated the Old Testament into Greek for the growing number of people who no longer spoke, or read, Hebrew. The Roman scholar Jerome rendered the Greek and Hebrew into the Latin of the common people in the fourth century a.d. Wycliffe and Tyndale performed the same service for the English-speaking world. The German translation of Martin Luther has held the same place of honor among German speakers as the Authorized, or King James Version has among English speakers.

Through the work of translators on the committees that gave us the New American Standard Bible, the New King James Version, Today’s English Version (Good News Bible), and the New International Version, believers today have access to God’s revelation in language they can understand and trust. Beyond our English-speaking world, numerous Bible Societies, teams of Bible translators, and men and women from a multitude of mission boards strive to reduce non-written languages to written forms so that residents of the Third World can also read the words of God.

In many ways, the process of Bible translation testifies to one of God’s great, on-going miracles. He not only inspired Scripture, but He continues to oversee the faithful transmission of His Word. An infallible original would be of little value if the copy we read is riddled with error. Our Bibles are so faithfully preserved that we can read our English translations with nearly the same confidence and reverence as the first century church read its personal letters from the apostles. No important doctrine or teaching of Scripture is subject to question because of the problems with translation that I’ve mentioned earlier. The ideas that God taught His prophets and apostles are accessible to us today, even though we are sometimes unable to fine-tune our interpretation the way we’d like.

Problems in interpretation usually arise out of isolated passages dealing with obscure issues. When it comes to knowing how to be saved, how to live the Christian life, or what God requires of us, we need have no doubts about the reliability of our Bibles.

Think of it! God’s self-revelation took place over thousands of years, to people who spoke at least three different languages, and lived lives as foreign to us as the lives of an Afghan nomad or a Vietnamese rice farmer. Yet we and others from all over the world can read that revelation, learn from it, grow by it, and meet the God whose book it is!^[1]

 

---

^[1] O’Brien, David E. 1990. Today’s Handbook for Solving Bible Difficulties. Minneapolis, MN: David E. O’Brien.

The Best Bible Translated From 5800 Manuscripts ?!!

 

TWO ATTITUDES, THREE QUESTIONS

 TWO ATTITUDES, THREE QUESTIONS^[1]

To begin with, there are two attitudes that we should try to avoid: absolute certainty and total despair. On the one side are King James Only advocates; they are absolutely certain that the KJV, in every place, exactly represents the original text. To be frank, the quest for certainty often overshadows the quest for truth in conservative theological circles and is a temptation that we need to resist. It is fundamentally the temptation of modernism. To our shame, evangelicals have too often been more concerned to protect our presuppositions than to pursue truth at all costs.

On the other side are a few radical scholars who are so skeptical that no piece of data, no hard fact, is safe in their hands. It all turns to putty because all views are created equal. If everything is equally possible, then no view is more probable than any other view. In Starbucks and on the street, in college classrooms and on the airwaves, you can hear the line “We really don’t know what the NT originally said since we no longer possess the originals and since there could have been tremendous tampering with the text before our existing copies were produced.”

But are any biblical scholars this skeptical? Robert Funk, the head of the Jesus Seminar, seemed to be. In The Five Gospels he said,

Even careful copyists make mistakes, as every proofreader knows. So we will never be able to claim certain knowledge of exactly what the original text of any biblical writing was.⁷

The temporal gap that separates Jesus from the first surviving copies of the gospels—about one hundred and seventy-five years—corresponds to the lapse in time from 1776—the writing of the Declaration of Independence—to 1950. What if the oldest copies of the founding document dated only from 1950?⁸

Funk’s attitude is easy to see: rampant skepticism over recovering the original wording of any part of the NT. This is the temptation of postmodernism.⁹ The only certainty is uncertainty itself. It is the one absolute that denies all the others. Concomitant with this is an intellectual pride—pride that one “knows” enough to be skeptical about all positions.

Where does Ehrman stand on this spectrum? I do not know. On the one hand, he has said such things as the following:

If the primary purpose of this discipline is to get back to the original text, we may as well admit either defeat or victory, depending on how one chooses to look at it, because we’re not going to get much closer to the original text than we already are.

… [A]t this stage, our work on the original amounts to little more than tinkering. There’s something about historical scholarship that refuses to concede that a major task has been accomplished, but there it is.¹⁰

In spite of these remarkable [textual] differences, scholars are convinced that we can reconstruct the original words of the New Testament with reasonable (although probably not 100 percent) accuracy.¹¹

The first statements were made at the Society of Biblical Literature in an address to text-critical scholars. The last is in a college textbook. All of this sounds as if Ehrman would align himself more with those who are fairly sure about what the wording of the autographic text is.

But here is what Ehrman wrote in his immensely popular book Misquoting Jesus:

Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later.… And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places.… [T]hese copies differ from one another in so many places that we don’t even known how many differences there are.¹²

We could go on nearly forever talking about specific places in which the texts of the New Testament came to be changed, either accidentally or intentionally.… [T]he examples are not just in the hundreds but in the thousands.¹³

And here is what he wrote in another popular book, Lost Christianities:

The fact that we have thousands of New Testament manuscripts does not in itself mean that we can rest assured that we know what the original text said. If we have very few early copies—in fact, scarcely any—how can we know that the text was not changed significantly before the New Testament began to be reproduced in such large quantities?¹⁴

The cumulative effect of these latter statements seems to be not only that we have no certainty about the wording of the original but that, even where we are sure of the wording, the core theology is not nearly as “orthodox” as we had thought. According to this line of thinking, the message of whole books has been corrupted in the hands of the scribes; and the church, in later centuries, adopted the doctrine of the winners—those who corrupted the text and conformed it to their own notion of orthodoxy.

So you can see my dilemma. I am not sure what Ehrman believes. Is the task done? Have we essentially recovered the wording of the original text? Or should we be hyperskeptical about the whole enterprise? It seems that Ehrman puts a far more skeptical spin on things when speaking in the public square than he does when speaking to professional colleagues.¹⁵

These two attitudes—total despair and absolute certainty—are the Scylla and Charybdis that we must steer between. There are also three questions that we need to answer:

1.   What is the number of variants—how many scribal changes are there?

 

2.   What is the nature of variants—what kinds of textual variations are there?

 

3.   What theological issues are at stake?

 

---

^[1] Wallace, Daniel B. 2011. “Lost in Transmission: How Badly Did the Scribes Corrupt the New Testament Text?” In Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence, edited by Daniel B. Wallace, 22–26. Text and Canon of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic & Professional.

KJV King James Version

NT New Testament

⁷ Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 6 (italics added).

⁸ Ibid.

NT New Testament

⁹ Those whose writings are very influential in the marketplace of ideas but who are not biblical scholars make even more unguarded statements. For example, Earl Doherty declared in Challenging the Verdict (Ottawa: Age of Reason, 2001), “Even if we had more extensive copies of the Gospels from within a couple of generations of their writing, this would not establish the state of the originals, nor how much evolution they had undergone within those first two or three generations. It is precisely at the earliest phase of a sect’s development that the greatest mutation of ideas takes place, and with it the state of the writings which reflect the mutation” (39).

¹⁰ Bart D. Ehrman, “Novum Testamentum Graecum Editio Critica Maior: An Evaluation,” TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism (1998), revision of a paper presented at the Textual Criticism Section of the 1997 Society of Biblical Literature conference in San Francisco. He goes on to argue (in point 20 of his review), “We can still make small adjustments in the text in place—change the position of an adverb here, add an article there—we can still dispute the well known textual problems on which we’re never going to be agreed, piling up the evidence as we will. But the reality is that we are unlikely to discover radically new problems or devise radically new solutions; at this stage, our work on the original amounts to little more than tinkering. There’s something about historical scholarship that refuses to concede that a major task has been accomplished, but there it is.” This sounds, for the most part, as though he thinks the primary task of textual criticism—that of recovering the wording of the autographic text—has been accomplished.

¹¹ Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 481. All quotations are from this edition.

¹² Misquoting Jesus, 10.

¹³ Ibid., 98. Elsewhere Ehrman says, “Given the problems, how can we hope to get back to anything like the original text, the text that an author actually wrote? It is an enormous problem. In fact, it is such an enormous problem that a number of textual critics have started to claim that we may as well suspend any discussion of the ‘original’ text, because it is inaccessible to us. That may be going too far” (58); “In short, it is a very complicated business talking about the ‘original’ text of Galatians. We don’t have it. The best we can do is get back to an early stage of its transmission, and simply hope that what we reconstruct about the copies made at that stage—based on the copies that happen to survive (in increasing numbers as we move into the Middle Ages)—reasonably reflects what Paul himself actually wrote, or at least what he intended to write when he dictated the letter” (58; italics added).

¹⁴ Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 219.

¹⁵ Part of the evidence for this is what he says in interviews. In one posted on September 25, 2006, on the Evangelical Textual Criticism website (http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/), he was asked by host P. J. Williams, “Do you think that anyone might ever come away from reading Misquoting Jesus with the impression that the state of the New Testament text is worse than it really is?” Ehrman responded, “Yes I think this is a real danger, and it is the aspect of the book that has apparently upset our modern day apologists who are concerned to make sure that no one thinks anything negative about the holy Bible. On the other hand, if people misread my book—I can’t really control that very well.” The cynicism and implicit condemnation of apologists, coupled with a denial of his own radical skepticism about the original text, clearly suggests that Ehrman feels that he has not contributed to this false impression. Further, in his final chapter of Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman declares, “The reality, I came to see, is that meaning is not inherent and texts do not speak for themselves” (216). But if he really believed this, would he have the right to complain about how people are reading his books?

The reality seems to be that Ehrman has had the opportunity to alter such a false impression in his many radio, TV, and newspaper interviews. But instead of tempering the misimpression, he usually feeds it. For example, in an interview in the Charlotte Observer (Dec. 17, 2005)—nine months before his interview by P. J. Williams—he said, “When I talk about the hundreds and thousands of differences, it’s true that a lot are insignificant. But it’s also true that a lot are highly significant for interpreting the Bible. Depending on which manuscript you read, the meaning is changed significantly.” No quantitative distinction is made between insignificant variants and significant variants; both are said to be “a lot.” But a qualitative distinction is made: “a lot are insignificant,” while “a lot are highly significant.” Further, in many of his interviews, he leads off with what appears to have a calculated shock value, viz., denial of the authenticity of the pericope adulterae.

One other comparison can be made: Both Ehrman and KJVers have a major point in agreement. They both view the early scribes as having almost a conspiratorial motive behind them. (Webster’s defines the word conspire in three ways: “1 a: to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement <accused of conspiring to overthrow the government>[;] 1 b: scheme[;] 2 to act in harmony toward a common end.” Ehrman does not necessarily see what the proto-orthodox scribes did as a “secret agreement,” but he certainly sees them as doing more than acting in harmony toward a common end. And if what became the orthodox view started out in a minority camp struggling for survival, then the fact of the changes the scribes made could certainly not be made public.) The basic difference is that KJVers think that heretics corrupted the text, while Ehrman thinks that orthodox scribes did. (Of course, Ehrman is not adamantly against the early Alexandrian manuscripts. But it does seem that his overriding criterion for determining the wording of the original [as seen in Orthodox Corruption] is that if a reading even gives off a faint scent of perhaps being an orthodox corruption, that trumps all other considerations, both external and internal. In addition to my discussion later in this chapter, see Philip Miller’s “The Least Orthodox Reading Is to be Preferred: A New Canon for New Testament Textual Criticism,” also in this book.)

The KJV translators were not KJV-Only

 On Foundations of the KJV^[1]

“The KJV translators were not KJV-Only. They would most definitely support the work of later translators building on their foundation and being helped by their labors. They themselves used multiple Bible translations as a basis for their work. They used the Bishops’ Bible as their formal basis, marking up large, unbound copies of it made just for this purpose… Far from seeing other Bible translations as threatening or suspect or even simply needless, they saw them as valuable assets. They built on the good work of those that had gone before.”

From Authorized: The Use & Misuse of the King James Bible

On Priority of the KJV (1900)

“There has been a great ignorance of the fact that a final purification took place in the history of the King James Bible. Those who have studied the history of the King James Bible in depth would have been aware of the major purifications that took place, such as the editions of 1629, 1638 and 1769. There was also a proper purification that took place circa 1900, which has resulted in the final text of the King James Bible, which is in all ways the definitive presentation of the King James Bible, and should not be altered.”

From Pure Cambridge Edition (bibleprotector.com, retrieved on 10/13/2020)

”… there are weighty reasons for rejecting the claims of the proponents of the so-called Pure Cambridge Edition: they are contrary to Scripture, contrary to plain reason and contrary to historical testimony. In addition, an examination of the text itself of the so-called Pure Cambridge Edition reveals that, even by their own standards, it cannot be the ‘correct, perfect and final’ text as alleged by its proponents.”

From “The Doctrine of Holy Scripture and the Pure Cambridge Edition,” TBS Quarterly Record, Issue 603 (2013): 17.

 

Conclusion:

The "King James Only" movement, which asserts that the KJV is the only legitimate English translation of the Bible, developed much later. The original translators did not share this view; they were focused on creating a reliable translation based on the best available manuscripts and their collective expertise.

---

^[1] Jessica Parks. 2022. “King James Version, 1900.” In Major English Bible Translations. Faithlife Biblical and Theological Lists. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife.

King James Version - Revision History

The KJV is a respected and beloved translation, it should not be considered a "perfect" Bible. See the revisions below:

Revision History^[1]

•    1611: KJV is published for the first time

•    1629 and 1638: major revisions made to KJV

•    “Because of the printing technology available at the time, various misprints, variations in spelling, and other inconsistencies were common in early editions. Therefore, subsequent updates were necessary in 1613, 1629, and 1638.”²

•    1762 and 1769: KJV is revised to standardize the text

•    “the revisions made at Cambridge in 1762 and at Oxford in 1769 standardized the text, ensuring that the King James Version would remain immensely readable for generations to come.”³

•    1873: Scrivener’s Cambridge Paragraph Bible is published.

•    Revisions include, “the text revised by a collation of its early and other principal editions, the use of the italic type made uniform, the marginal references remodelled, and a critical introduction prefixed.”⁴

•    1881 and 1894: KJV undergoes revision in England and is published as the English Revised Version.

•    Two committees were formed to revise the Old and New Testaments of the Authorized Version to account for recent biblical scholarship and text criticism.

•    “The character of the Revision was determined for us from the outset by the first rule, ‘to introduce as few alterations as possible, consistently with faithfulness.’ Our task was revision, not re-translation.”⁵

•    ca. 1900: The Pure Cambridge Edition is published and proponents claim it “should not be altered.”⁶

---

^[1] Jessica Parks. 2022. “King James Version, 1900.” In Major English Bible Translations. Faithlife Biblical and Theological Lists. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife.

² About the King James Version (KJV)  ThomasNelsonBibles.com

³ About the King James Version (KJV)  ThomasNelsonBibles.com

⁴ The Cambridge Paragraph Bible

⁵ Preface to the New Testament (ERV)

⁶ “The Doctrine of Holy Scripture and the Pure Cambridge Edition,” TBS Quarterly Record, Issue 603 (2013): 17.