12 February 2023
*index-topical-hb
One thing that annoys me slightly is that the text of the KJV is almost, but not quite, standardized. Just about all versions of the text currently circulating -- except for those specially advertized as sticking to the 1611 spelling -- are much closer to an edition printed in 1769 than to the 1611 edition.
But beyond that, KJV texts are generally unlabelled as to their exact origins. One website serving the KJV text, which I imagine many people have seen because it comes up well-ranked in search engine results, is kingjamesbibleonline.org.
On the positive side, it appears to do a very good job of displaying both a "standard" (i.e. post-1769) and a "1611" (original spelling) text of the KJV, and it also includes apocrypha, which is an important part of fully disclosing what the 1611 KJV was.
However, it's About page does not have much to say about its authorship or how it got its current KJV texts. It does refer to its "standard" KJV as "Cambridge edition" (though that is unfortunately a bit vague). It does not tell us -- did the producers of this site take a particular KJV Bible and type its contents into a computer? Did they copy their text from some other website? The "About" page does not tell us, although it does tell us that the site has been online since November 2007.
However, it is possible to do a little detective work and find a probable source. A specific typographical error can be found at the page for 2 Maccabees chapter 9. There, in verse 4, we read, "Then swelling with anger. he thought". That is, there is a simple typo here, where a period has been put in a place where a comma should be.
Google can tell us which other websites share this typographical error. Unfortunately, a Google search for "Then swelling with anger. he thought" (including the quotation marks in the Google search) yields approximately 1020 results (as of 12 February 2023). That's a lot of websites to search through. Though the spread of the typo would clearly seem to indicate that somebody has been copying text from somebody, it gives us too many options to sort through.
However, Google also allows us to narrow down time searches by a web page's date of publication. Since kingjamesbibleonline.org tells us that it has been online since 2007, I ran a search for the same typo, but restricted it to web pages published between 1990 and 2006. This turned up just two results. One was at beautyforashesboutique.com, "where shopping supports ministry!", and the other was at quod.lib.umich.edu/k/kjv.
That second, at the University of Michigan, strikes me as a more likely source for the text,1 and the Wayback Machine indicates that the U of M has been displaying KJV text there since at least 2007. The page itself called a note at the bottom "Last updated Feb. 18, 1997". An About page reads:
The original electronic text for this version of the Bible was provided by the Oxford Text Archive. Original tagging was performed by the New Centre for the Oxford English Dictionary (Waterloo). Subsequent conversion to SGML was performed by the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative. The HTI is grateful for the permission of the Oxford Text Archive to provide access to the text.
A little searching turns up a likely candidate for where exactly the Oxford Text Archive copy now lives: here. Comparing that text with the U of M text makes it especially clear that the two texts must be related. The U of M text and the Oxford text share another typo in the same verse: "judgment of GOd".
That text in turn, we are informed by Oxford, came from Robert Kraft, of the University of Virginia, in 1987. A little more Googling shows an address made by Prof. Kraft at an SBL meeting, entitled, "How I Met the Computer, and How it Changed my Life". This reveals that Robert Kraft was instrumental in the development of a CD-ROM of Bible-related materials produced by CATSS/CCAT in 1987.
The CCAT website itself appears to contain this same text or an extremely similar revised in 1988, which can be found here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/gopher/text/religion/biblical/kjv/. Its text of 2 Maccabees 9:4 contains the same two typos.
1 Among other reasons, the boutique website does not give a source for its copy of 2 Maccabees, which gives every appearance of having been copy-pasted from the output of a Bible software suite such as -- perhaps -- e-Sword or something similar. The University of Michigan, however, does provide source information.