1 April 2023 index-topical-hb
There exist two very fine textual histories of the KJV that I'm aware of. The first, published in 1884, if Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener's The Authorized Edition of the English Bible (1611), Its Subsequent Reprints and Modern Representatives, based on the work that went into producing his 1873 Cambridge Paragraph Bible. The other is David Norton's A Textual History of the King James Bible, published in 2005.
Both books agree that the 1769 Oxford edition of the KJV, edited by Benjamin Blayney, was the last major revision of the KJV, and that it strongly influenced the editions of the KJV that appeared afterward. By the twentieth century, just about any KJV an ordinary reader might find would be something very close to Blayney's edition.
So far, however, no one -- as far as I know -- has written a history of the electronic editions of the KJV which float about the web, mostly without any obvious textual history and lacking any explicit relationship to any particular printed edition.
Someone -- or some group of people -- at some point in or before 1987, produced the first electronic edition of the KJV. Given that the KJV contains approximately 900,000 words, the production of that first electronic edition must have taken more than 200 hours, probably quite a bit more. In terms of labor, producing an electronic edition is quite expensive. On the other hand, copying one is free.
So while the first electronic KJV would take quite a bit of effort to produce, subsequent online KJV's could be produced easily. We should expect then, that once the first electronic KJV arrived on the scene, there should rapidly appear many other copies. And anyone who wanted to produce a better KJV would face a relatively easy choice: one could re-do all that tedious labor, or simply copy the inferior version, improve it, and then publish the improved version. We would imagine, then, that people wanting to produce a better-proofread KJV, or a KJV with notes, or a KJV improved in any other way would likely simply taken an existing KJV and alter it.
Some time in or around 1987, electronic editions of the KJV began to appear. I do not know who first produced the KJV in electronic form -- the earliest text I have found so far is one which was circulated on a CD produced by Robert Kraft and other academics at the University of Pennsylvania.
This text can be found here:
And here:
That second URL is to this text of the KJV as it appears at the website of the Oxford Text Archive, from which it appears to have been copied out to many other websites.
I do not know whether it was Robert Kraft himself or someone else who first produced this text. I also do not know how many of the online KJV texts that currently exist trace back to this form.
A website known as "Bible Software Review", at the somewhat unfortunate URL bsreview.org, records an interview with Larry Pierce, the producer of the Online Bible, and of an influential electronic edition of the KJV, which we will get to in a bit:
The bit that is interesting for our purposes right now is this:
We started doing this (Online Bible) in Oct/1987 when we got the KJV text from Public Brand Software.
Another mention of this software, from April 30th, 1992, in the Los Angelos Times, reveals that the software package containing the complete KJV text was known as "Seedmaster".
I am not aware of whether this text is any different from Kraft's, nor do I know of any surviving copies -- except for highly altered copies such as those of Pierce.
Project Gutenberg released an eBook of the King James Bible in 1989, which can be found here:
In January 1992, Derek Andrews released an electronic KJV text, which survives here:
This text was copied, initially without credit, and used as the original basis for the books of Exodus through Malachi in the Wikisource KJV.
In or before 1997, the University of Michigan began hosting a copy of the KJV, which can be found here:
It is derived from the 1987 Robert Kraft Text.
Wikisource began a project for a KJV text, which has progressed in fits and starts from 2004 to the present. It began as a chimera: its Genesis from a Debian software package known as bible-kjv, the rest of its canonical (in the translators' eyes) books from the 1992 Project Gutenberg text, and since then partially conformed to Blayney's 1769 edition.
On the theory that the Bibles printed by Cambridge University during several decades of the 20th century are the final and perfect KJV, Matthew Verschuur of Australia has published a KJV which he holds to be completely perfect. It's not, but it is a very well-done electronic edition, perhaps tied with that of Brandon Staggs for the title of "best KJV online".
It can be found here:
For more on the Pure Cambridge Edition, see
Pretty Good Cambridge Edition, which introduces Verschuur's inflated claims about his electronic edition, and at least two errata.
A website that -- for no particular reason I can tell -- bills itself as the "Official King James Bible", has existed since November 2007:
As far as I can tell, it does not credit the University of Michigan, but contains a text with distinct similarities to the 1997 University of Michigan Text, and therefore also to the 1987 Robert Kraft Text.
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.