A TEXTUAL HISTORY OF THE KING JAMES BIBLE AND THE NEW CAMBRIDGE PARAGRAPH BIBLE (HARDBACK SET)

Written by David Norton Reviewed By P. J. Williams

The King James Bible is an abiding religious icon and continues to arouse global interest. David Norton’s Textual History of the King James Bible is therefore most timely. Unlike those books that depict the age and circumstances in which the KJB arose this is the first major study since Scrivener (1884) of the history of the text itself. Just as Scrivener’s textual study accompanied his preparation of The Cambridge Paragraph Bible(1873), so Norton has produced his textual study together with The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible.

The first seven chapters of the Textual History deal with the development of the KJB text and the final two deal with the rationale behind The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible. In explaining the prehistory of the KJB text Norton draws particular attention to a 1602 printing of the Bishops’ Bible with annotations by the KJB translators. This plays an important role as Norton seeks to establish the ‘original intent’ of the translators, which sometimes was not realised in the first printing. On the pre-history of the text he concludes,

Until now, historians of the making of the KJB have interpreted the available evidence as showing an orderly, collective process such as went into the making of the Revised Version. Various hints and gaps in the evidence, it seems to me, tend towards a more muddled picture wherein the KJB stands partway between the orderly committee work of the Revised Version and the individualism of the Bishops’ Bible (27).

Some of the significant features in Norton’s outline of the history of the text are: (a) a somewhat haphazard first printing in 1611, (b) an initial three-year period in which the entire text seems to have been freshly typeset some thirteen times (63), with most editions not having a lasting influence on subsequent transmission, (c) the highly influential first Cambridge edition of 1629 ‘including a complete examination of the KJB against the original languages’ (82) and the similarly influential Cambridge second edition of 1638, which together resulted in ‘a still more consistent, more literal text’ (90), (d) a further complex and textually fluid period until 1760, (e) an almost complete standardisation of the text between 1762 and 1769 under F.S. Parris (Master of Sidney Sussex, Cambridge) and Benjamin Blayney (Regius Professor of Hebrew, Oxford), and (f) ‘neophobia’ beginning in the 1780s, which ensured that the text was not subsequently revised. Now the KJB’s of the presses of Oxford and Cambridge Universities are identical except in the Apocrypha.

Round this broad outline numerous interesting details are arranged. The original 1611 edition, printed at an unknown time that year, contained about one printing error per three and a half chapters (55), and was adorned by the printer with a few pagan illustrations, including figures such as Pan, Neptune, and Daphne. The translation was never officially ‘authorised’, though the phrase ‘the authorised bible’ was used by Ambrose Ussher in 1620 (46–47). Marginal dates for biblical events first appeared in 1679, when, following James Ussher, the Nativity was dated to the year 4000 following creation. In 1701 the system was changed by Bishop William Lloyd so that creation was dated to the familiar BC 4004 (100). The period between 1611 and 1769 saw some significant standardisation in use of italics and in some aspects of grammar. The 289 times when in the 1611 printing ‘you’ was used as a nominative and the 12 times when ‘ye’ was used as an accusative or dative were ‘corrected’, and four of the five occurrences of the modern third singular verb ending in ‘s’ were ‘corrected’ to the older form ending in ‘th’ (110–111). Despite revisions some surprising inconsistencies remain in modern editions: ‘One of the curiosities of the KJB is that there are no paragraph marks after Acts 20, only one in Psalms and six in the whole of the Apocrypha’ (49). Because apostrophes were usually not used in the first edition, and the rules for their use in English had not been completely settled by 1769—there was still random variation as to whether an apostrophe preceded or followed the possessive ‘s’—there remain in modern editions ‘nine singular possessives that should be plural … and another six plural that should be singular’ (109).

The vast amount of research that Norton has carried out is displayed in his copious use of textual statistics and by nine useful appendices, the most important of which is entitled ‘Variant readings in the KJB text’ (198–355) and lists all the most important variants that have occurred through different editions of the KJB, the 1611 reading, and the date when the new reading first occurred.

The second work in this set, The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible, is an edition of the JKB preserving original grammar, but with modern spelling, speech marks, and paragraphing. It has an exquisite layout and most will find it very pleasant to read. Norton has generally restored the 1611 readings and used his manuscript work to bring us even closer to the intention of the 1611 translators than did the original 1611 printing with its various errors. Norton’s search for the ‘original intent’ of the 1611 translators has led him to abolish italics, because they were not consistently used in the first edition. This reviewer fails to see that this new edition of the KJB serves any significant function. Most of those who want to promote the KJB nowadays are not particularly interested in the original intent of some group in the seventeenth century, and those who are interested in the translators’ original intent will generally be scholars, who will prefer a reprint with original spelling rather than the modern text that Norton has produced. As far as producing a translation for modern use is concerned, if Norton has given us a correct impression of the history of the text, editions of the KJB since 1769 have been significantly better than that of 1611. Few who want a modern edition of the Bible will grant any special significance to a translation from 1611 and those who care not for modernisation will be happy with eighteenth century spelling. Who then are the intended users of The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible? Norton notes of Scrivener’s revision of the KJB that ‘for all the virtues this critical work has, The Cambridge Paragraph Bible remained outside the mainstream of the text and has rarely been re-issued’ (Textual History, 123). What is to prevent The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible from suffering the same fate?

I am happy therefore to encourage readers to purchase Norton’s excellent Textual History without The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible, which, though learned, does not serve a purpose equal to its learning.


P. J. Williams

University of Aberdeen