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
Frontispiece for the 1795 printing of the Oxford edition of the King James Version. Wikimedia

8. The Oxford Edition of the King James Version of the Bible became the standard in the English Protestant World

Over the next one hundred years, and for many up to and including the present day, the Oxford edition of 1769 is the definitive Protestant Bible, though it too changed over time. Gradually, editions were printed without including the Apocrypha, and references and notes concerning the Apocryphal books vanished with them. Still other Bibles appeared, and inconsistencies and contradictions which occurred within and between editions led to scholarly debate. In 1833 Oxford produced an exact, line by line reprint of the 1611 version, though in modern typeface, and the differences between it and subsequent editions were readily apparent. In 1873 the Cambridge Paragraph Bible presented another version which identified the sources in the 1611 edition, presented in modern language and spelling.

Both Blayney in 1769, and the editor of the Cambridge Paragraph Bible, Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, took the liberty of altering the texts where they felt the original translators may have been in error, though they used differing documents from some of those used in 1611. Scrivener used an ancient Greek document known as the Textus Receptus, which he compared with another ancient document, the Codex Sinaiticus (Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and about half of the Old Testament), to arrive at conclusions regarding the accuracy of the original translation. Though the King James Version is almost completely unchanged since 1769, developments in the world of archeology and language since have produced many questions regarding its accuracy.

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