18 Ways the Bible has Changed throughout History

18 Ways the Bible has Changed throughout History

Larry Holzwarth - April 19, 2019

18 Ways the Bible has Changed throughout History
Benjamin Brayney’s revisions in the Oxford Edition of 1769 included the tenets of the Confession of Faith of 1647. Wikimedia

7. The Oxford edition of the King James Version of 1769 is the basis of most printings today

By the time Benjamin Blayney edited the work which became the Oxford edition of the King James Version, the work of the original translators had been altered and amended by scholars and printers for more than a century and a half. Much of the work which appeared (and appears) in the Oxford edition is verbatim from the Cambridge edition, including the changes of punctuation which subtly changed the context of the text. The application of the Westminster Confession and subsequent church dogma was more readily evident and supported in the Bible, and supplied words (that is, words supplied by the original and subsequent translators and editors to make the text coherent in English, though not in the original documents) identified.

Blayney’s Oxford edition, like that of the original translators in 1611, included the Apocrypha, though many of the cross references to the Apocrypha, included in the original translation, were removed, signifying further that the books were not considered scriptural. More than 24,000 changes, many of them standardizing spelling or adjustments to punctuation, exist between Blayney’s 1769 Oxford edition and the 1611 edition produced by 47 scholars and clergymen. There still existed spelling and grammatical differences between the Cambridge and Oxford editions, but for the most part the Authorized Version had evolved to the same book which remains in print in the 21st century.

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