5. The Cambridge revisions of 1629 and 1638
The original 1611 editions of the King James Version contained errors, as seen in the He and She Bibles, as well as many others. Some of the errors were due to the desire to maintain a consistent appearance of the text in columns, and led to inconsistent use of contractions, spellings, and other issues. Careless printing also led to errors, including the infamous omission of the word not in an edition which became known as the Wicked Bible, which exhorted its readers “Thou shalt commit adultery“. By the 1620s there were over 1,500 errors of printing in editions of the Authorized Version, and an attempt was made in two revisions at Cambridge to correct them in 1629 and again in 1638.
The Cambridge editions addressed the inaccuracies induced by poor quality control, attempted (in 1638) to standardize the spelling to match that of the English of the time, and made more than 200 changes to the text provided by the original translators. The Cambridge revisions were not new translations, but revisions to the existing 1611 translations, and mainly inserted marginal notes, many of which had come from the Geneva Bible, into the main text of the work. Thus the main text of the Authorized Version was changed without additional reference to the source data provided by the original manuscripts, in an attempt to render the work in the vernacular of the people who were not educated in the ancient languages of Latin and Greek.