KING JAMES VERSIONS?

It was Sunday morning in church and for the first time, a little first-grade girl got to sit in the adult service with her  parents.  And when the mom opened the Bible and set it on her lap, the daughter noticed the page.  She whispered to her mother, “Did God really write all of that?”  The mom replied affirmatively and the child said in wonder, “Wow, He really has neat handwriting!”

Recently, a very respected Greek scholar who is also a seminary professor said that we shouldn’t talk about the King James Version but King James Versions; since today’s KJV has over 100,000 changes in it compared to the original KJV first published in 1611.  (All this as an attack on the authorized version and in defense of the plethora of new translations.)  So the question  becomes: Is the professor right or wrong?  And the answer is:  He’s both!  The professor is right in that if you take your current KJV in one hand and a 1611 KJV in the other, there are over 100,000 changes.  But the professor is also wrong because he’s using smoke-and-mirrors to come up with the 100,000 figure.  Let me explain.  There have been two modifications (one minor, one major) made to the King James Version since it first came off the press  over four hundred years ago.

Minor Modification – The minor modification involved the correction of printing errors.  Johannes Gutenberg may have invented the printing press in 1440, but 171 years later the process was still the same – setting type one letter at a time.  And when you have 3,566,480 letters to do, there are going to be some mistakes and there were.   The total was 421, including the infamous Wicked Version, Thou shalt commit adultery.  However, in the years following, the minute number of errors (really a miraculously small amount) was corrected and has long been ever since.