From time to time, I run across factual errors in the realm of theology or church history on the World Wide Web. If I think it is egregious and possibly influential, I try to contact the web site owner or owners to suggest a correction. Sometimes the suggestions are met with appreciation, sometimes with ambivalence, sometimes with anger, and sometimes with silence. I intend (Lord willing) to start a series “Correcting the Internet” for the times I meet with these issues.
The following correction is to an article section titled “Addendum I: The King James Version” on the textual criticism site of Robert B. Waltz. In this case the “silence” is because I could not contact the owner. The site no longer has a valid contact e-mail and my message was returned undeliverable. There are several things on the site to which I object, but some are matters of opinion which I will overlook for the time being. I note two things.
The Greek Text of the King James Bible
The 2nd paragraph of the article states, “Scrivener reconstructed the text of the KJV in 1894, finding some 250 differences from Stephanus.”
This seems to be a common misconception. The original publication is 1881 rather than 1894. It seems that the 1894 publication of F. H. A. Scrivener’s The New Testament in the Original Greek is the best known, and perhaps the edition that was reprinted. Nevertheless, it was first published in 1881. F. H. A. Scrivener was commissioned to compile this work as part of the English Bible revision project. He served on the revision committee with B. F. Westcott, F. J. A. Hort, Charles J. Ellicott, and others. It came out the same year as the New Testament translation The scan of this book available at Google Books verifies the 1881 date.
The New Testament in the Original Greek, According to the Text Followed by the Authorised Version (1881)
This is a simple correction, easily verified in numerous sources.
The Reception of the King James Bible
The next to last paragraph in the article has this statement: “…at the time of its publication, the KJV was greeted with something less than enthusiasm, and for the first few decades of its life, the Geneva Bible remained the more popular work…”
Regarding the reception of the new King James Bible, this is a common misconception. It is not that this has no ring of truth. Rather, the Geneva vs. KJV embellishment is often simply passed on without scrutiny. (I have dealt with this is a few places, e.g., HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.) In this manner the overstatement exerts a wide and powerful influence on what people think about the reception of the KJV without inspecting the details. The King James Bible was a dud. People would not have used it if King James had not made them. There is a Geneva Bible partisanship running through the WWW, in both scholarly and popular circles, that rushes to judgment.[i] If we take a breath and do some research, we find that this idea encompasses some confirmation bias.
- As might be expected, the new translation faced early and weighty competition with the Geneva Bible.
- The popular use of the Geneva Bible continued, though in decline, through the first half of the 17th century.
- For many it was the commentary, the “study notes,” that kept their continued loyalty more than a dislike of the new translation.[ii]
- In the Puritan Commonwealth Oliver Cromwell favored the King James Bible, which was printed by John Field, first Printer to Parliament and “one of His Hignes [i.e. Cromwell’s] Printers.”
- The last known printing of the Geneva Bible occurred in Amsterdam in 1644.
In “Ten Fallacies about the King James Version” (Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, Vol. 15, No. 4, Winter 2011, p. 9), Leland Ryken calls this “Fallacy #5: The KJV Fell Flat And Was Ignored When It Was First Published,” writing:
“It is true that the release of the KJV was surrounded by misfortunes that could easily have subverted the entire publishing venture. The first printer of the KJV found himself in almost immediate financial difficulty, and the early years of printing were bound up in litigation…the new translation was in immediate competition with the entrenched best-selling Bible of the day, the Geneva Bible…Despite this, the KJ V did very well. In its first five years of existence, readers called for seventeen editions, compared with six editions of the Geneva Bible during those same years. Expanding the time frame, in the first 35 years of its existence the KJV went through a whopping 182 editions. The KJV supplanted the Geneva Bible within fifty years of its publication, very good indeed.”[iii]
[ii] This may be seen in the fact that King James’s Bibles were printed with Geneva notes in 1649, 1679, 1708, and 1715.
[iii] Ryken served as a literary consultant for the English Standard Version, so he is obviously no KJVO partisan. See also The Bible in the Making, Geddes MacGregor, London: Murray, 1961; and “Introduction: the King James Bible and its reception history,” Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones, in The King James Bible After Four Hundred Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, edited by Hamlin and Jones, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. See especially “Birth and Early Reception of a Masterpiece: Some Lose Ends and Common Misconceptions,” Mordechai Feingold, Chapter 1 in Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord: Erudition and the Making of the King James Version of the Bible (Brill, 2018). For example, “As in the case of any new contribution to knowledge, a phase of acculturation was required before the KJV could establish itself as the paramount vernacular version of the Bible—assisted by commercial incentives of interest published. However, scholars and the reading public more widely began engaging seriously and approvingly with the KJV from the start” (p. 27).
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