9 August 2023 - 16 September 2023 index-topical-hb

There are plenty of websites that contain the KJV, but despite the near-uniformity of the various KJV's, the text has been in a state of flux throughout its history, and editions vary here and there. These variations have crept straight from print onto the internet, as unfortunately the KJVs found online tend not to cite their original print sources, and the state of the print sources is not much better.

I have a particular interest in two of the editions that have found their way online: the one produced by Robert Kraft or other members of the CCAT/CATSS team of the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 and 1988, which I will from here on call the CCAT KJV, and the one produced by Matthew Verschuur, a Pentecostal preacher, around 2007.

The CCAT text, in one form or another, found its way from the original CCAT collection (see here), to the University of Michigan (here), and out from there to a variety of websites, such as the popular kingjamesbibleonline.org, which appears to be hosting an uncredited and partially proofread version of the CCAT text.

As the KJV gets copied from place to place, it gets altered, sometimes for the better. Consider the following, which is CCAT's text of 2 Maccabees 9:4 --

2Mac 9:4
Then swelling with anger. he thought to avenge upon the Jews
the disgrace done unto him by those that made him flee.
Therefore commanded he his chariotman to drive without ceasing,
and to dispatch the journey, the judgment of GOd now following
him. For he had spoken proudly in this sort, That he would come
to Jerusalem and make it a common burying place of the Jew

s.

There's quite a collection of typographical errors. First, a period after the word "anger." Next, the strange capitalization of "GOd". And finally, two line-breaks somehow inserted right into the word "Jews".

Turning to the text as it appears at the University of Michigan website, we find the following:

[4] Then swelling with anger. he thought to avenge upon the Jews the disgrace done unto him by those that made him flee. Therefore commanded he his chariotman to drive without ceasing, and to dispatch the journey, the judgment of GOd now following him. For he had spoken proudly in this sort, That he would come to Jerusalem and make it a common burying place of the Jews.

The first two typographical errors are intact, but the third has somewhere along the line been improved. Finally, consider the text as it is at kingjamesbibleonline.org:

Then swelling with anger. he thought to avenge upon the Jews the disgrace done unto him by those that made him flee. Therefore commanded he his chariotman to drive without ceasing, and to dispatch the journey, the judgment of God now following him. For he had spoken proudly in this sort, That he would come to Jerusalem and make it a common burying place of the Jews.

Now only the first typo remains.

Will the KJV just continue evolving as it passes from website to website?

Matthew Verschuur assures us that the KJV has already reached its final and perfect form, some time around 1900 at Cambridge University, which finally published the perfect KJV about that time. For Verschuur, this is a vital theological point, but for those of us who do not share Verschuur's particular convictions, his strong interest in the text of the KJV has produced another fruit.

Verschuur claims to have produced an electronic edition of the KJV entirely free of errors, even typographical errors, and which represents his preferred edition of the KJV, that which was produced by the University of Cambridge starting around the year 1900.

Verschuur explains how to recognize an example of the "Pure" Cambridge Edition:

It is important to have the correct, perfect and final text of the King James Bible, since there are correctors (e.g. publishers) who have changed some aspects of King James Bible texts. The final form of the King James Bible is the Pure Cambridge Edition (circa 1900), which conforms to the following:

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

After some unseccessful fiddling around, it occurred to me that I could find such a "pure" Bible, if it existed on archive.org, by searching simultaneously for phrases which, according to Verschuur, it must contain.

So I wound up running an internet search on the following:

"Ramah and Geba" "or Sheba" "all his sin, and" "whom ye had" "flieth away" "went a little further" bewrayeth

This yielded 80 results. Looking for something that visually looked like a book from about 1900, I fairly quickly found the following link:

https://archive.org/details/holybiblecontain0000unse_z7h7/page/402/mode/2up

This is, according to its catalogue record, a 1900 printing, by Cambridge University Press, of the Authorised Version, better known in the US as the KJV. And, to my delight, I found that it met all twelve of Verschuur's criteria for being a "Pure" Edition.

With this in hand, I can now use the electronic resources provided by Verschuur to flag possible errors in the CCAT Text. My plan is to use an electronic comparison program, known as "wdiff", to yield all differences between the CCAT KJV and the electronic "Pure Cambridge" edition. In each case where a difference is found, I can then check the Cambridge 1900 facsimile, and search for mentions of the verse in the Scripture index of Norton's Textual History and in the Appendices A, B, and C of Scrivener's work.

Though this may not automatically tell me in every case whether a variant reading in CCAT constitutes an "error", a careful checking should in many cases allow a pretty conclusive decision as to where the CCAT version or the "Pure" Cambridge Edition might be going astray. Ideally, this will both (1) yield a list of places where the CCAT text could be improved, and (2) test whether the "Pure" Cambridge Edition is quite as pure as it claims.

Wherever there is a differences between the CCAT reading and the Cambridge 1900 reading, the following sources will be consulted: the Project Gutenberg KJV, the Cambridge Paragraph Bible, Norton's index, and the Appendices A, B, C of Scrivener. Unless otherwise noted, the contents of the "Cambridge 1900" column contain the agreed text of both Verschuur's electronic text and the 1900 Cambridge facsimile.

When the CCAT reading finds support in any of the three sources being consulted -- the Cambridge 1900, Cambridge Paragraph Bible, or Gutenberg -- I will assume that it may in fact be a correct rendering of whatever edition it follows. However, if all three are arrayed against the CCAT reading, and nothing to support the CCAT reading appears in Scrivener or Norton, and if there is no obvious logical reason to support the CCAT reading, then I will assume CCAT is in error. Where support is mixed, I will discuss these in a separate list.

https://archive.org/details/cambridgeparagra00scri/page/n133/mode/1up

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10/pg10.txt

The table below will catch differences of spelling, capitalization, verse numbering, and ordinary punctuation; but not of paragraph divisions or pilcrows or italics.

This is one of the incomplete-posts.