The King James Version is considered one of the most accurate English translations in existence. A skilled committee of 54 translators worked for 7 years to carefully complete the King James translation project.
By whom?
The KJV was based on earlier translations, which the translators' preface called "the Word of God", and they expected it to be modified over time, which indeed it has.
The first two major revisions of the King James Bible came courtesy of Cambridge University, first in 1629 and then again in 1638. The aim of these revisions was to restore the proper text by eliminating misprints and correcting minor errors in translation. Cambridge scholars also made changes to the original text by incorporating a more literal interpretation of certain words. (These literal interpretations were not new. They had been included in the original
King James Version as margin notes.)
Printing errors didn’t end with the Cambridge revisions. For more than 120 years, new mistakes accrued. Eventually, misprinted editions became a problem of scandalous proportions. Two of the leading universities in England—Cambridge (again) and Oxford—began work on updated standard editions. Francis Sawyer Parris oversaw the Cambridge edition, and Benjamin Blayney oversaw the Oxford edition. The Cambridge edition was finished first, in 1760, but the Oxford version, which was finished nine years later, superseded it.
Blayney’s exacting work on the Oxford revision calls to mind
Psalm 12:6: “The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.”
His revisions fall into five categories. The first is the use of italics. Blayney used italics to identify words that are inserted into a passage to make the meaning clear but aren’t found in the original Hebrew or Greek text.
The original 1611 version used small “roman” type to identify such words. Because of printer’s errors and other factors, however, not all of those words were properly identified. The 1769 Oxford edition is much more heavily italicized than the original.
The second category of revisions involves very minor changes to the text itself. For example, in the 1611 version,
Matthew 13:6 contains the phrase “had not root.” In the 1769 version, the phrase is changed to “had no root.”
The third category involves spelling (“sinnes” is changed to “sins”), capitalization (“holy Ghost” is changed to “Holy Ghost”), and punctuation. In the century and a half since the original version was written, the rules of writing had changed. Spelling, capitalization, and punctuation had become more standardized. Blayney attempted to introduce this standardization into the Bible text.
The fourth category involves changes to the margin notes, including removing references to the Apocrypha.
The fifth category involves correcting a handful of printing errors, including changing “might” to “night” in Matthew 26:34
(Source: Thomas Nelson Bibles)
The King James Bible, a.k.a., the Authorized Version, is just that: a version. There has been tremendous progress in the last four centuries in Bible translation science and there are many more ancient texts, both Scripture and not, that professional translators from many backgrounds and faiths use to give us the great Bibles that we have today. It's time to make a change, my friend, into the same language by which you read, write (above), and think.
