The chart below gives some history of the capitalization of Spirit/spirit, 1611-1769, in Acts 10:19, 11:12, and 11:28. It “proves” two things:
- There is enough variation for anyone who wants to do so, to base some theological or orthographical view on it.
- More seriously and more importantly, it illustrates the rules of capitalization in English were not fixed during this period of time.[i]
I hope the chart will be large enough to see; it appears to be kind of small. I think perhaps you can enlarge it on your computer. All of these Bibles are King James Bibles. The chart gives the Bible printing year and by whom it was printed (if known). A URL is provided for anyone who wants to check out the printings. I may have made some mistakes. After looking at one word that long, they can all start to look alike! Additionally, I discovered when I was using the tab in Excel, the program was “correcting” every entry to lower-case spirit. I believe I readjusted and corrected all those Excel “corrections.” If any readers find mistakes in the chart, please let me know.
When the entry has two years (e.g., 1640/39), that means the frontispiece of the Bible and the front of the NT had different dates.
[i] And I would add that they probably are still not as fixed as some people assume they are.
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