1 April 2023 index-topical-hb

There exists at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/gopher/text/religion/biblical/kjv/, an edition of the KJV released on CD-ROM in 1987, and potentially revised in 1988. This seems to be the source -- often unacknowledged -- of many of the electronic "KJV" texts currently available online.

I am interested in knowing just what physical text of the KJV it comes from, but its own documentation seems spotty. Perhaps we can begin to pin down the a bit of information about the likely source with the help of the Norton Textual History of the King James Bible.

Because the spelling in the CCAT KJV is similar to that which I have been familiar with since childhood, I think it is safe to say that the text it uses is from no earlier than the 18th century. So I would like to begin with chapter 6 of the Norton history, "Setting the standard, 1762 and 1769", to see whether we can find traces of the editorial work of the 1760's in the CCAT KJV.

I have gathered from chapter 6 of Norton's work that Blayney's revisions to the text before him include the following. These are just some of the changes Norton mentions.

All in all, CCAT seems to agree with Blayney in all but one of our text-cases. It would seem to be a post-Blayney text, but not identical with Blayney. Norton's History (p. 113) notes this as a case where Blayney's update of the KJV "looks like a clear mistake", so this is consistent with a post-Blayney editor using what was essentially Blayney's text, but correcting an error.

Let us look now to the beginning of chapter 7, where Norton has:

The three official guardians of the text, the two University presses and the King or Queen’s Printer, became two when Cambridge took over Eyre and Spottiswoode. So the standard English editions of the text are those currently issued by Cambridge in its own right and as Queen’s Printer, and Oxford. They are identical in the Testaments but not the Apocrypha.

Only six new changes to the text have been introduced into them since 1769. In the OT ‘LORD’^[1] is changed to ‘Lord’ at Neh. 1:11, and in the NT ‘Zaccheus’ becomes ‘Zacchæus’. In the Apocrypha ‘Ioribas’ becomes ‘Joribus’ (1 Esdras 8:44), the verbs following ‘alms’ are changed to plural at Tobit 4:10, ‘generation’ is made plural at Ecclus. 4:16, and the apostrophe is moved in ‘king’s sons’ (Baruch 1:4), making ‘kings’ plural (only the last of these is in the Oxford text). Besides these, at least thirty old readings, of which twenty-two are spellings of names, were reintroduced.

So we can now easily check whether the CCAT text seems to follow what Norton calls the "standard English editions" or Blayney. Of the six new changes, the new changes are found in the CCAT text at Nehemiah 1:11, Luke 19:2, but CCAT sides with Blayney in Ecclesiasticus 4:16 and Baruch 1:4. In Tobit 4:10, it would seem that CCAT is between Blayney and the standard editions: it reads plural "do deliver", but singular "suffereth not". Likewise, 1 Esdras 8:44 reads "Joribas", neither in precise agreement with Blayney nor the standard English editions.

Here search engines can once again come to our aid. The name "Joribas" seems fairly distinctive, appearing only in the Apocrypha, and not in Blayney or the "standard" editions. Adding the word "Zacchaeus" to our search help us find web pages containing the entire Bible -- it's by no means guaranteed that Joribas and Zacchaeus will appear together only in a complete Bible, but if somewhere online the entire Bible in the edition we are looking for has been converted to a searcheable form and uploaded as a single chunk, the search "Joribas Zacchaeus" will give it to us.

Upon Googling "Joribas Zacchaeus", I've Google returns just four hits. One is for a database of words on GitHub that someone created for a dictionary, while the other three are for copies of Scrivener's 1873 edition of the KJV. This seemed promising.

In order to check whether this is indeed Scrivener that we are dealing with, a quick check could involve using the seven passages mentioned above where we found the most interesting results from CCAT: Nehemiah 1:11, 1 Esdras 8:44, Tobit 4:10, Ecclesiasticus 4:16, Baruch 1:4, Luke 19:2, and 2 Cor 12:13. I now turned to Scrivener's 1873 Cambridge Paragraph Bible. Here, we find "Lord" in Nehemiah 1:11, but "Joribus" in 1 Esdras 8:44 and "doth deliver" in Tobit 4:10.

So we're not looking at Scrivener either.

Among the most enthusiastic KJV students out there are a number of people who have religious convictions that the KJV is God's own preferred version, and that therefore it is extremely important to nail down it's exact wording. The most extreme example of this that I know of comes with the folks in Australia whose online copy they call the Pure Cambridge Edition. Supposedly it matches exactly to what Cambridge University was publishing just after 1900. Unfortunately it lacks Apocrypha.

However, when it comes to just the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, a look at Nehemiah 1:11, Luke 19:2 and 2 Corinthians 12:13 show agreement between the CCAT KJV and the "Pure Cambridge" one. Matthew Verschuur, who is apparently the keeper of the "Pure Cambridge" electronic text, lists the following as "true" readings:

1. “or Sheba” not “and Sheba” in Joshua 19:2
2. “sin” not “sins” in 2 Chronicles 33:19
3. “Spirit of God” not “spirit of God” in Job 33:4
4. “whom ye” not “whom he” in Jeremiah 34:16
5. “Spirit of God” not “spirit of God” in Ezekiel 11:24
6. “flieth” not “fleeth” in Nahum 3:16
7. “Spirit” not “spirit” in Matthew 4:1
8. “further” not “farther” in Matthew 26:39
9. “bewrayeth” not “betrayeth” in Matthew 26:73
10. “Spirit” not “spirit” in Mark 1:12**
11. “spirit” not “Spirit” in Acts 11:28**
12. “spirit” not “Spirit” in 1 John 5:8**

Checking these against CCAT shows that the CCAT text agrees with the "Pure Cambridge" text in all twelve places. And so it would seem that the CCAT version has some very noticeable affinities for the KJV as Cambridge was publishing it just after the year 1900, to the extent that the "Pure Cambridge" edition can be trusted.

A further chart of differences, produced on the same "Pure Cambridge" website, shows variations from the "Pure Cambridge" form found in various editions, including one's denoted as

The following list shows variations in common editions of the King James Bible, namely, the Early 1800s London (B), Victorian London (L), Victorian Oxford (O), Victorian Cambridge (C), the 1950s London Edition (LE), the 1950s Oxford (OE) and the Concord Cambridge (CC).

Working down through the list, checking the first three disagreements between "Pure Cambridge" and "LE" shows that CCAT agrees in all three with "Pure Cambridge". By the same criteria of checking the first three disagreements, we find that CCAT universally supports the "Pure Cambridge" reading versus L, O, C, B, CC, and OE.