What God permits, let not man forbid, lest he make an idol.
If God permits men to freely make copies of His inspired Word, and to translate His Word (as we will show that He does), so that thousands, millions, even billions of men, women, and children can read about Him for themselves and in their own language, then those who forbid this continued dissemination of Scripture establish themselves as an authority above God Himself.
We want to thank our host, TheologyOnline.com’s webmaster Knight, and our opponent, Will Kinney, for bringing about this important debate on such a deeply dividing widespread controversy. In organizing this event, Knight received from Will Kinney an affirmation that he holds to and will defend the affirmative, that yes, the King James Bible is the only inspired scripture on earth today.
If we can show, however, that God desires men to use translations of his Word into other languages, even when more accurate originals are readily available, we will demonstrate that the King James Only (KJO) movement is in opposition to the authority of God. We also will show that the KJO movement opposes central claims of the King James translators themselves regarding their work, and that it opposes much of the actual translation of those KJ translators, the very ones to whom they attribute divine infallibility. In this way the KJO camp makes an idol out of a text and out of their own self-asserted authority.
Though Christians disagree on much, evangelicals virtually all agree, except for the KJO camp, that God’s Word has filled the world in a thousand tongues.
Following the question numbering convention in the TOL rules for Battle Royale XIV, here is Bob Enyart & Will Duffy’s first question for Will Kinney.
BWQ1: Is God able to produce a robust message that could remain effective even as reproduced by mere men (i.e., without the need for divine intervention)?
God has the ability to create in such a robust way that even though the whole cosmos groans under the Fall (Rom. 8:20-22), regardless, the creation still declares the glory of God (Ps. 19:1). Though in bondage, the creation reveals not a stained glory, but the true glory of God, yet creation is under the dominion (Gen. 1:26) of fallen man. Similarly, regarding God’s written communication, we will also demonstrate, using genetics (our human DNA) and the Scriptures, that God has been able to create a robust written message that effectively survives imperfect human copying and translation. Thus we will show that the KJO camp has a very different opinion than God does of what it means to fill the earth with His Writings.
To prepare for this King James Only debate, we have corresponded and spoken repeatedly and at length with some of the world’s leading experts on the translation of the King James Bible, including Ward Allen and New Zealand’s David Norton. Regarding these men, consider that many KJO advocates themselves use a Cambridge edition of the KJB. Early this century, when that university desired to publish a new edition of the King James Bible that would be even more faithful to the original text of the 1611 than are many current editions, they turned to Dr. Norton to produce Cambridge’s newest King James Version text. When we asked Norton to list the world’s leading experts regarding the KJ translation (though he is at the top of that list, as we knew), he put at the top of his list Dr. Ward Allen professor emeritus from Alabama’s Auburn University.
Also in preparation, we traveled to Oxford University in the United Kingdom to gain access to the most extensive of the primary three documents still in existence that were produced by the translators themselves between 1604 and 1611, of the actual work of the translation process. For a few wonderful days we poured over one of Britain’s national treasures, the 1602 Bishops’ Bible, housed in the rare books collection of the Bodleian Library.
We paid special attention to dozens of its thousands of handwritten notes which document the multiple stages of the KJB’s impressive revision process, for the King James was not actually a new translation, as we have learned, but a revision of the Anglican Catholic Bishops’ Bible. We returned to America with high-resolution photos of all annotations should we need to consult them for this debate. For example, these contemporaneous writings should be able to settle the kind of question, often raised by the KJO camp, of whether a particular reading is the result of the printers changing the work of the translators, or a result of the translators work themselves.
Also regarding background, on one of Bob’s research trips he made a stop to see an original 1611 King James and this summer Will Duffy spent two weeks in Scotland to research the family history of this first British monarch, King James.
Finally, in preparation, we've read scholarly books on the KJ and various popular books on the controversy while reviewing a dozen more titles that we have obtained for this debate and of course we’ve been reading Will Kinney’s extensive online writings and various online discussions between the opposing sides; and we’ve acquired and read scholarly journal papers on the King James translation project.
Work to translate the Bible into what we refer to as Old English goes back to at least 730 A.D. Yet the history of the spread of the Scriptures in our language that we can document from manuscripts still in existence begins in about 990 A.D. with the four Gospels. So that translation effectively became the first of eleven English Bibles prior to the King James.
~1000 Wessex (Anglo-Saxon) Gospels (with reproductions from work at Oxford and Cambridge available)
~1200 Anglo-Saxon Gospels (Hatton ms 38, at Oxford’s Bodleian Library)
1395 Wycliffe Bible (Gen-Rev; Separately, the Gutenberg Bible printed the Latin text of the Vulgate in ~1454)
1534 Tyndale Bible (Gen-Deut; Jonah; Mat-Rev 1526; first English Bible from originals; See Foxe’s Book of Martyrs)
1535 Coverdale Bible (first complete English Bible printed)
1537 Matthew’s Bible (martyred after extending Tyndale’s work from Joshua to Chronicles; Ezra-Mal from Coverdale)
1540 Great Bible (Cranmer/Coverdale; first Bible authorized by the Anglican Catholic Church)
1568/1572 Bishops’ Bible (authorized by the Anglican Church)
1582 Douay-Rheims (translated from the Latin, N.T. in 1582, O.T in 1609)
1587 Geneva Bible (main Protestant Bible of the 1500s; disliked by King James, used by John Bunyan, Shakespeare, etc.)
1602 Bishops’ Bible (Anglican Bible, revised to become the 1611 KJB)
1611 King James (the 12th English Bible; 3rd Anglican; both of its first two and differing editions published in 1611)
Six hundred years after the first known English translation appeared, about forty scholars were divided into six teams: two companies from Oxford, two from Cambridge, and two from Westminster, putting great effort into consulting the original Hebrew and Greek languages of the Old and New Testaments. Yet according to the King James translators’ own published comments in the 1611 preface, and by the charter of the King and the instructions of the 14 rules for the translation process (which we will show you), the “translators” were not to develop a new translation but rather, they were to develop a revision of the Bishops’ Bible. As they were chartered to do, they stayed as true to the wording of that eleventh English version as they believed the original Hebrew and Greek text would permit. For example, the first sentence of the preface, “The Translators to the Reader” speaks of “revising that which hath bene laboured by others”. Also, the first rule was that: “the Bishops’ Bible [was] to be followed, and as little altered as the truth of the original [Hebrew and Greek text] will permit.”
In the following scan from a 400-year old manuscript, notice that we see the last part of the original list of translators with their assignments. The Apocalypse (Revelation) was assigned to the second Oxford company. Then, of the books not previously assigned, the second Cambridge company was to translate the rest of the Apocrypha (which should not be included in the Bible).
In this manuscript, following those work assignments, we read “The Rules to be observed in Translation”.
These rules aid greatly in evaluating the unique claims of the KJO movement and so happily they are preserved in three existing manuscripts with this scan being of a document held by the British Library, MS. Harley 750.
The first instruction, Rule #1, makes explicitly clear that the King James is not a new translation. This is confirmed by the translators themselves in their own preface to the 1611, and by extensive published scholarship, and by our own hands-on research. The KJV is a revision of the 1602 Anglican Catholic Bishops' Bible, which itself was a revision of its original 1568 edition, which version itself undoubtedly drew on a half-a-millennium of earlier translations, all of which is consistent with the words on the ornate 1611 title page “with the former translations diligently compared and revised”.
At the beginning of the process, the Kings’ Printer, Robert Barker of London, delivered forty unbound copies of the 1602 Bishops’ Bible to the translators. If the King James was to be a new translation, the six teams (and more than 50 scholars who eventually worked on the project) would not be expected to write their work in the narrow margins and squeeze tiny handwriting in the space between the lines of an already printed Bible. The origin of the KJV is the opposite of what is envisioned by thousands of King James Only advocates. God did not bring about a brand new divinely inspired English Bible. Rather, men (whom the Lord undoubtedly smiled upon) labored to revise an existing (great) translation, yet they often retained some of its weaker passages (that were corrected in most later KJ versions) and, as we shall see, they sometimes wrongly altered the Bishops’ Bible’s correct translation (with these translators errors also corrected in most later KJ versions).
Now again, because this historical fact deeply affects this debate, we repeat that first rule as you can see for yourself in the above manuscript:
1 The ordinary Bible read in the church commonly called the Bishops Bible to be followed, and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit.
The translators adhered so strongly to this rule that many tens of thousands of words in the King James match word-for-word unchanged from the Bishops’ Bible. The following example from Luke 2:13 shows the process. The translators struck “heavenly soldiers”; changed it to “heavenly army” (note the handwriting in the margin directly to the left of the word “multitude”); and then in a later stage of their well-ordered work decided, appropriately for the underlying Greek, to go with host. So they finally crossed out “army” in the margin note and wrote ‘hoste’ directly above it, so that the 1611 KJV reads identical to the 1602 Bishops’ Bible except for the annotations in the margin that replace the crossed out words:
“And suddenly there was with the Angel a multitude of heavenly host, praising God and saying,” Yes, praise God!
Therefore the 1611 King James Bible reads:
We will make two observations from this example passage out of the 1602 Bishops' Bible. First, as this verse visually illustrates, we can see why the exact same accusations leveled by the KJO camp against modern translators were leveled against the KJB translators themselves. For the 1611 translators were accused of:
- crossing out God’s Word
- being critics of God’s Word
- denying God’s Word
- changing God’s Word
- etc.
Much of the argument by the KJO camp against newer translations was leveled almost verbatim against the King James translators themselves. So in the preface of the 1611 the translators defended themselves against such baseless accusations from those anti-King James defenders of Scripture who were essentially indistinguishable from today’s KJO camp. These claims are logical fallacies in that they are circular arguments when offered in defense of the King James Only position. That is, in defending the claim that the King James is the only true Bible, you can’t prove that point by showing that other versions differ in their translations, for that is merely a circular argument offered as proof of itself. We have noticed that many KJO believers do not realize that they are making this logical fallacy (and one leading advocate, made aware of this, simply claims that his circular argument is justified). However, when Jesus said that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, because God is truth, and truth is non-contradictory, therefore, no Christian should use an invalid argument that violates the laws of logic and reason that exist because of God’s rationale nature. For as the Lord says in Scripture, “Come now, and let us reason together.”
Thus ironically, the direct predecessors of the Bible-defender KJO authors Peter Ruckman, Gail Riplinger, D.A. Waite, Will Kinney, etc. leveled the same claims of sinfulness but against the production of the King James Bible itself. Yet as the KJO camp has evolved over the decades, it has reached a point where it is comfortable acknowledging various errors in the 1611 KJV but it blames those undeniable errors on the printers. (Those 1611 errors are irrefragably undeniable as errors because the KJO camp acknowledges that these erroneous readings have since been corrected in the later versions of the King James Bible which include the versions that almost all KJO believers use today.)
That brings us to our second observation from this passage as regards the inestimable value of having access to thousands of such annotations from the translators themselves toward evaluating a central KJO claim. Where the KJO camp recognizes errors in the 1611 King James, specifically, the errors that have been corrected in dozens of subsequent editions published over the following months, years, decades, and even centuries, the KJO leaders blame the printers, and not the translators, for any errors in the original King James Bible.
Thankfully, for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, the translators themselves, by leaving behind historical treasures that document their work, enable us to evaluate this central KJO claim that any and all 1611 errors were not the fault of the translators (whose work was allegedly kept inerrant by supernatural intervention) but were the fault of the printers. But what happens to Will Kinney’s arguments, and the KJO camp, if we find in the translators’ own handwriting some of the very 1611 errors that the KJO camp has acknowledged?
BWQ2: Of any actual error that appeared in the 1611 KJB (like ones corrected in later versions), if that error was made not by the printers but by the translators themselves, would that falsify the KJO position?
BWQ3: Does God’s perfect Word exist anywhere on Earth today?
BWQ4: Will Kinney, please provide a list of King James Bibles, listing publisher and year published, for which you and, to the best of your knowledge, the KJO camp generally, claim them to be free of error (i.e., God’s perfect Word). Please also specifically indicate, by presenting the year published, which edition was the very first that was free of error.
We will answer our own third question here. Yes, God’s perfect Word exists on Earth today, and it is in the same place that it was in 1610. For as we wrote in our introduction, God’s Word has filled the world in a thousand tongues.
Will Kinney, our answer is not unlike the answer that you yourself have provided when responding to the question, “Where was the Word of God before 1611?” For you’ve written, “God's words from the Old Testament were most likely preserved in the Hebrew texts. A good educated guess for the New Testament words would be that God preserved them in the Old Latin Bibles.”
For, unlike the Muslims, who early in their history recalled all copies of the Koran and destroyed them and then issued an authorized version, the Christian scriptures were distributed geographically to the north, east, south, and west, and were never recalled, with manuscripts copied by the thousands, memorized, taught, sung, translated, quoted in ten thousand books, so that truly, God’s Word fills the world in a thousand tongues, and in a thousand ways, as it is also hidden in the hearts of millions upon millions of believers (whether or not they memorized a 400-year old translation).
BWQ5: Did God’s perfect Word exist in English in 1610, and if so, in which version?
Bob Enyart and Will Duffy assert that the KJO claim of perfect translation is not one of theological insight nor of spiritual maturity but that it is a claim of superstition and superficiality. The translators themselves manifestly rejected such a claim, and they rejected this in their writings and even directly in the very translation work that they had printed in the 1611 King James Bible itself. We will establish their rejection of their own inerrancy as we proceed.
A Roman Catholic’s defense of their claim of inerrancy for the Pope, when he speaks officially regarding the faith, is similar to the KJO camp’s claim for the 1611 translators. For conservative catholics blame the media’s “translation” whenever the Pope is quoted in English saying something morally questionable. Likewise, wherever newer KJ Bibles correct the original and older versions, the KJO camp blames the printers. (The Catholics haven’t yet tried that tactic.)
The large, annotated 1602 Bishops’ Bible that we have photographed and studied is far more than a reference work. It contains a contemporaneous record of the various stages and of much of the seven years of the translators work with about 80% of its handwritten notes becoming the text of the KJV. Further, a high percentage of the skipped verses that had no annotations resulted in the 1611 text exactly reproducing the text of the Bishops’ Bible. (See above Lev. 9:23 and 10:3.) Along with two other contemporaneous works, Manuscript 98 and the notes of John Bois, these provide great insight and significantly document the translation process itself. In hopes of making this debate worthwhile for the reader and as authoritative as possible, we also acquired a facsimile copy of Bois’s Notes, and we have read at Oxford a hard-to-obtain complete transcription of MS 98, and as stated above, we have corresponded and spoken with the world’s leading expert on these manuscripts.
By the testimony of the translators themselves, including in their own preface to the 1611, and like many previous versions, the 1611 King James Bible itself was a revision. This brings us to our next question, with the BR XIV Rules requiring that numbered questions are repeated by the opponent, and then answered forthrightly.
BWQ6: Will Kinney, please explain how God revealed to mankind that the KJ is the only inspired version of the Bible, and please indicate when, i.e., what year, this was first known?
BWQ7: Will Kinney, because neither the Bible nor the Gospel is only for English-speaking persons, from the insights gained by the KJO movement, please explain how Chinese Christians, or those who speak Spanish or Hindi, for example, could evaluate whether God’s Word was available for them and their children in their own language?
Not ever wanting to lose sight of the most important truths, we would like to take a moment here, with Will Kinney in agreement we are certain, to express our gratitude to the Father for the life that He has given to each of us three and to everyone throughout the world. And we especially thank Him for sending His Son Jesus Christ to die for Adam, and for us, to pay for the sin of the world, so that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.
We know that this Gospel is true because the Lord authored the Scriptures, for the Bible is God breathed, thus it is His Word. In that Book, God mentions other books including the Book of Life. And beyond those two, He wrote other books of life. For example, we have the exact date of the publication of one of God’s books of biological life. This book is still being printed and it appears in our human DNA which the Lord first published about 5,000 years prior to the appearance of the King James, specifically, on the sixth day of the year 1 A.M. (Anno Mundi, or year of the world). This book of biological life, vital to all people on Earth and robust and effective enough to bring billions of eternal creatures into existence, has a parallel with our King James Only debate. Lord willing, we will present this, including by quoting Scripture, in Round Two but for now, suffice it to say that the information that God wrote in the human genome is robust, not unlike His Word, and has been able to remain effective while being literally copied, transcribed, and translated throughout the generations of fallen men. We hope the reader will see that as God literally wrote on our hearts His book of our biological life, and that it remains effective through the millennia, that this parallels both the Scriptures and His work of creation, though both transmitted to our understanding through a fallen world, both still effectively reveal not the marred but the true glory of God.
In the Scriptures, God did not provide us with a mere list of didactic statements (e.g., life is good; death is bad; heaven is good; hell is bad). Rather, God revealed Himself through a record of His actual historical interactions. Therefore like any good history book, the Bible has a plot. And like viewing a foreign language movie without subtitles, the Bible can communicate its message effectively even where a Gospel has been translated by a devout missionary who has only imperfectly learned the language of his new neighbors.
For example, of the more than 100 versions that have appeared of the King James Bible, two different editions were published in its very first year, in 1611. There were so many errors in the first 1611 that it required a second version which was published just a few months later in that same year, with hundreds of intentional changes and corrections, but which also included, not surprisingly, a number of new errors that would have to be corrected. Many KJ versions quickly followed the first two 1611s. Today, perhaps most of the various KJ texts printed are based on the 1769 Cambridge Edition, though even with its spelling modernized, matches neither the original nor the way that we speak today.
BWQ8: Will Kinney, from your past statements, we believe that you will agree with us, and here help to dispel the myth believed by many KJO adherents, that there was only a single 1611 King James. So will you affirm that in fact there were two 1611 King James Bibles, and that these two differ in hundreds of instances?
Let’s consider now some of the changes in the early editions of the King James, starting with one of the changes between the two 1611 KJBs.
He/She: In Ruth 3:15, the first 1611 edition read, “he went into the city” which was corrected (along with many other changes) in the second 1611 to read “she went”. (The Hebrew text underlying the KJB, by the way, has “he”, whereas the Septuagint, the early Greek translation of the Old Testament often used by Jesus and the Apostles, has “she”.) This is why these first two editions of the King James are called the He/She editions. (There are similar changes at Gen. 39:16 and Song of Songs 2:7, and there’s a gender issue with an eagle at Job 39:30, thus making multiple He/She editions over various years.)
Judas: The 1613 King James Version in Matthew 26:36 said “Judas came with them to a place called Gethsemane” whereas the originals, and that includes every Greek manuscript, the codecs, the Celtic, the Aramaic, and every Latin and English translation ever produced said, “Jesus came with them…” This error was not in the 1611 and it is not in the translators annotations in the Bishops’ Bible. Thus, even though some of the original translators continued to work with the printer through the printings of the initial editions of the King James, this was most certainly an error by the printers. (The cost of printing the King James was enormous and of course Robert Barker did not have enough individual movable type letters, in both upper and lowercase, to set the entire Bible. So they would have to repeatedly use their composing sticks to set portions of the Bible, say for illustration sake, Genesis to Deuteronomy, and then break down those pages to reuse the same letters to compose the text of Joshua, etc. It was tedious, gruelling, and hard work.)
Thou Shalt: While at Oxford’s new Weston Library, we asked the rare books conservator for permission to also see one of the very few remaining 1631 King James Bibles. One of its errors appears, of all places, in the Ten Commandments, at Exodus 20:14, which omitted the “not” and shockingly declared: “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Because all that has been publicly available is the smallest portion of the passage, we photographed the cover of the 1631, the whole chapter of Exodus 20, and all of the other five places in the Bible that repeat this command.
As expected we saw in Deuteronomy 5, Matthew 5 and 19, Romans 13, and James 2, that this command in each of those passages was worded correctly. This is a textbook case of God’s robust style of communication being able to effectively survive less-than-perfect human transmission. This case regards Scripture, but again, in Round Two, we will see this same kind of robustness powerfully evident in God’s other written text, in the language that He developed and used to write mankind’s biological genome. For geneticists, whether they realize it or not, study God’s writing just as certainly as theologians study God’s scriptural text. And if those molecular biologists were to look at the 1631 KJV, they may recognize the same kind of fault tolerance that God designed into our DNA. For His Word can remain robust and effective, overcoming challenges put to it by mutations regarding our DNA, and by copyists, translators, and even unskilled teachers, regarding the Scriptures.
The Exodus 20 error was a printer error and it was immediately recognized (by all, including by believers and unbelievers), and thus was effectively self-correcting through the Scripture’s redundancy and various levels of built-in error correcting mechanisms. So by the nature of God’s revelation to us, this particular error in the text, like so many others through the centuries, was immediately recognized.
God’s ways are higher than our ways, but they are not lower. We get confused; He does not. We can be unsound; He is wise. So this next question is presented because the King James Only leaders including Will Kinney blame admitted errors in the various KJ texts on the printers and never on the translators.
BWQ9: It is your camp, and not the Scriptures, that claims that in the production of the King James Bible, God inspired the translators, but not the printers. (Thus you blame the errors on the printers.) So Will Kinney, can you explain why that is a reasonable claim for you all to attribute to God, considering that the printers’ work would be read by millions, whereas the translators’ work was only read by the printers?
In light of our own position that God’s Word fills the earth in a thousand tongues, we can provide a strong answer to this question. But the reason that the KJO camp will not have a good answer for this question is because they hold to an unbiblical standard of what it means to have a valid translation of God’s inspired Word. Related to this, in Round Two we will use the Septuagint Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament to demonstrate that God permits the use even of imperfect translations of His Word, and even when the more accurate scripture in the original tongue is readily available. Further, we will demonstrate from sacred history in Scripture that all known copies of the Bible itself had completely disappeared such that God’s covenant people had not a single written copy of the Bible to read from. This biblical material will demonstrate that the KJO camp misinterprets God’s promise to “preserve” His Word and turns the Lord’s promise into a superstitious and superficial claim.
BWQ10: In 1611, any particular minister may not have been convinced that King James was even in a position to authorize a new translation of God’s Word. Such a minister could count and find literally thousands of differences in the new text as compared to the 1537 Matthew Bible that his great-grandfather had preached from. If a minister back then had the kind of spiritual insights of today’s KJO leaders, how would he have been able to refute the one who declared: “King James’ corrupt 1611 translation has hundreds of changes as compared to the Word of God”?
BWQ11: If the King James translators have taken a position on a matter regarding their work that differs from your position Will Kinney and that of the KJO camp, who would have more authority as to the truth of that particular matter, you and the KJO camp, or the translators themselves?
When the King James Only camp has claimed that any errors were printers’ errors and not translators’ errors, they’ve also thereby implied that there was no way of knowing what the 1611 translators actually asked the printers to print. Thus the movement at large was either unaware of the decades of scholarship that addressed this exact matter, or they were aware of it and decided to share with their readers the tens of thousands of handwritten notes, markings, and annotations from the translators themselves regarding their decisions of how to translate thousands of passages.
We think the few examples that follow provide to the God-fearing KJO person the kind of information from the 1611 translators themselves that he has never been aware of, and that this is evidence that forcefully refutes the arguments of his trusted KJO leaders.
But first consider our Luke 2:13 passage from above which shows that the translators rejected and changed the work of the translators! So, at a later stage, 1611 translators rejected the translation of other 1611 translators. In Luke 2 for example, the translator’s word “army” was overruled and changed to “hoste”. Thus, while the effort to produce the 1611 KJB took seven years of work from more than 50 scholars, the KJO advocate now has to argue that it was not all of those translators and all their years of effort (which they’ve long and rightly praised) that was inspired. Rather, with the information provided to us by the translators themselves, the KJO movement must now be reduced to claiming that it was only the very few translators, and that very last stage of the process, that were inspired, since literally thousands of specific translation decisions made by the translators as individuals and by the companies corporately were later rejected by other translators. So, which translators were inspired?
Now consider Deuteronomy 26:1, and note the error made, not by the printer, but by the translators, when they removed “thy God” (which thankfully was correctly restored in future editions):
Notice that the translators annotations and strikethroughs recorded in the 1602 Bishops’ Bible were followed exactly and became the text of Deuteronomy 26:1 in the 1611 King James Bible:
That error from the translators remained in the text until 1629, and as with the 1769 King James, has been corrected in most later editions:
Most of the criticisms leveled by the KJO camp could be leveled equally at the translators of the KJ Bible. However, being guilty of the logical fallacy of special pleading, applying a criticism to others but refusing to admit when the same exact criticism applies to themselves, the King James Only camp shows itself to lack credibility. If a New King James translator had made the above edit, Peter Ruckman, Gail Riplinger, D.A. White, and Will Kinney would all have railed against that person. Ruckman would have accused him of intentionally denying (as here in this verse by the 1611 translators) that “the Lord” is “God”. We pray that our God is not offended at our presumption here, but we presume that when this King James translator struck out “thy God”, and that this omission was preserved through the remaining final stages of the translation work by the companies, that he was not sinning, that he had no nefarious motive; and that God was not angry with Him. It was just another instance of a teacher, scribe, translator, believer, who was teaching, copying, translating, memorizing, a passage but yet rendered it incorrectly.
To the reader, feel free to look up 2 Kings 11:10 in your King James Bible and you will see that it say, “the temple of the Lord”. Yet as the 1602 Bishops’ Bible incorrectly omitted “the Lord”, the 1611 translators went with that error:
And so not surprisingly the 1611 followed the translators' failure to correct the Bishops’ Bible here:
This error by the translators was not corrected until a 1638 King James Version was produced, and most new versions contain the correction. However the 1817 (octavo) edition reverted to the error, which is typical of a common yet unfortunate and expected phenomenon, that translators’ errors fixed in early versions of the King James reappear later.
See also from the 1602 Bishops’ Bible that at 2 Chronicles 32:5 the translators changed the correct word “repaired” to the incorrect word “prepared” by crossing out the “i” and using a caret (upside down v) to prepend a “p”:
Because the translators made this error, the 1611 followed it with the incorrect “prepared”, yet this was corrected in the 1616 KJ edition and has remained corrected in virtually all future revisions:
BWQ12: Will Kinney, do you agree that these actual handwritten notes from the 1611 translators themselves demonstrate that various errors previously admitted by the KJO camp were not the fault of the printers, but that these errors were generated by the translators themselves?
However Will Kinney answers our question 12, Round Two should be absolutely stunning!
