More errors in KJV

1. Manuscript-based issues (not really "mistranslation," but translating from corrupted or late text)

1 John 5:7-8 — the "Comma Johanneum" ("For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one"). This trinitarian formula appears in almost no Greek manuscripts before the 14th–16th century and is absent from the earliest Latin and Greek witnesses. It was inserted into the Textus Receptus (Erasmus added it under pressure) and KJV translators rendered it as if original.

Acts 8:37 — Philip's confession of faith ("If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest... I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God") is missing from the oldest manuscripts and is widely regarded as a later scribal addition, absorbed into the Received Text.

Mark 16:9-20 (the "Longer Ending") and John 7:53–8:11 (the woman caught in adultery) — both are almost certainly not part of the original texts of Mark and John; they're absent from the earliest and best manuscripts (e.g., Codex Sinaiticus, Vaticanus). The KJV, working from later Byzantine manuscripts, includes them without any indication of doubt.

Luke 17:36 and a few other verses present in the Textus Receptus but absent from earlier manuscript families.

2. Straightforward word/phrase mistranslations

1 Corinthians 13 (throughout) — "charity" for Greek agape (ἀγάπη). In 1611 "charity" carried the broader sense of selfless love, but in modern English it has narrowed to mean almsgiving/donation, which badly distorts the famous "love chapter."

Genesis 1:28 — "be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth." The Hebrew male just means "fill." "Replenish" (implying refilling something previously full and then emptied) has been used by some to argue for a "gap theory" of a prior creation destroyed — a reading the Hebrew doesn't support. This is more an archaism problem than an intentional error (in 1611 "replenish" simply meant "fill"), but it has caused real theological confusion.

Exodus 25:31 etc. — "candlestick" for menorah (מְנוֹרָה). A menorah is a lampstand holding oil lamps, not a candle-holder; candles didn't exist as such in the ancient Near East context. Minor but a real mistranslation of the physical object.

3. Archaic English that now reads as wrong (not translation errors per se, but functional errors for modern readers)

2 Thessalonians 2:7 — "he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way." "Let" in 1611 meant hinder/restrain (the opposite of its modern sense). Modern readers routinely misread this as "permits," inverting the meaning.

Romans 1:13 — "I was let hitherto" — same issue, means "hindered."

Philippians 4:7 — "the peace of God... shall keep your hearts" — less confusing, but "keep" here has a garrison/guard sense (Greek phroureo) modern readers can miss.

4. Grammatical/syntactic choices with theological weight

Titus 2:13 — "looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ." The Greek construction (Granville Sharp's rule: one article governing two nouns joined by kai) more naturally reads "our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ" — identifying Jesus directly as "God" — a nuance the KJV's "and" phrasing obscures. Most modern translations (NIV, ESV, NASB) render it this way.

Romans 9:5 — similarly ambiguous punctuation/clause division affects whether Paul calls Christ "God blessed forever" or breaks it into a separate doxology about God the Father. The KJV's punctuation choice (favoring the former) reflects translator theology as much as grammar, since Greek had no punctuation to rely on.

Genesis 1:1 — "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" reads as an absolute statement of creation ex nihilo starting the verse. Many modern Hebrew scholars (following the Masoretic accents and comparative Semitic syntax) argue the more natural rendering is "When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form..." (as in the NJPS translation), making v.1 a dependent temporal clause rather than an independent statement. This is a live scholarly debate, not a settled "error," but it's a real point where the KJV's rendering commits to one reading among several grammatically viable ones.

5. Debated/contested renderings (scholars disagree, but worth flagging)

Isaiah 7:14 — "a virgin shall conceive." Hebrew almah (עַלְמָה) means "young woman of marriageable age," not specifically "virgin" (Hebrew has a more precise word, betulah, for that). The Septuagint's Greek parthenos does mean virgin, and Matthew 1:23 follows the Septuagint, but the Hebrew word itself is broader. This is one of the most contested translation questions in the whole Bible and matters a great deal theologically.

Psalm 22:16 — "they pierced my hands and my feet." The Masoretic Hebrew text as transmitted reads something closer to "like a lion, my hands and feet" (ka'ari, "like a lion," vs. karu, "they pierced/dug"), and this is genuinely disputed among Hebraists — the Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint support something closer to "pierced," but the vowel-pointed Masoretic text is ambiguous. The KJV follows the "pierced" tradition, which is defensible but not textually certain.

A general note: most serious errors cluster in two places — the KJV's dependence on the Textus Receptus (a late, thin manuscript base assembled by Erasmus) for the New Testament, and inevitable semantic drift in English since 1611. Modern translations (NRSV, NASB, ESV, NIV) benefit from a much larger and older manuscript base (Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, the Dead Sea Scrolls for the OT) and from lexical scholarship that didn't exist in the 17th century, which is why textual critics generally treat the KJV as a monumental literary achievement but not the best base text for close exegesis today.