kjv-facsimiles-online

29 April 2023 ba-kjv

Occasionally, one might like to take a walk into the textual history of the KJV, and in those cases it is useful to be able to look at facsimiles online of various editions. I'm not aware of any online effort to catalogue all the various KJV facsimiles out there, so I'll get the ball rolling with this humble little list. Anyone who wants to should feel free to take the ball and run with it.

There are endless online versions of the KJV, with varying levels of authenticity,[1] but the focus of this page is to collect KJV's produced in print prior to the 21st century. Only copies of scanned images will be considered; electronic editions will not, even if they purport to follow one or another printed edition. For example, while Michael Verschuur's so-called Pure Cambridge Edition might just be the finest electronic edition available anywhere, you won't find it here.

A note of caution for the reader: in assembling this list, I have usually simply taken printed title pages and archive.org metadata at their word, except where I felt some special reason for doubt. I.e., if a title page claims to be an 1857 printing, for example, I simply file it as an 1857 printing. This will sometimes be misleading because title pages could be reused from printing to printing sometimes in ways that could mislead readers. Perhaps one day someone will sort that mess out. In a few cases, where I've gone beyond just copying from the title page and have some information bearing on the authenticity or otherwise of a printing, I'll footnote that information.

**** Still working from Archive search; "Holy Bible" up through 1831 and sorting.


  1. Just about any KJV will read almost the same, word for word, as just about any other KJV, provided it's a printing from after 1769. What I simply mean here is that the various online editions swirling around tend to be poorly documented as to which precise printing(s) they come from, and how they relate to other electronic editions. For this reason, a person interested in textual criticism of the KJV is going to have to turn to either physical copies or facsimiles; the work simply cannot be done working from electronic-first resources alone.↩︎