Editions of the King James Bible

Below, is a short chronology of some of the known editions of the 1611 King James Bible.

1611 – First Edition

1629

1638

1762 – Cambridge Edition

1769 – Blayney’s Oxford Edition

1833 – Webster’s Common Version – Begun in 1831 and finished in 1833, Noah Webster’s The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, in the Common Version is a revision of the KJV into modern English. Because the Bible was widely used in classroom settings for reading practices, Webster edited the archaic and outdated English and updated the text with English that the modern reader would understand.

1873 – The Cambridge Paragraph Edition – The Cambridge Paragraph Bible, edited by F. H. A. Scrivener, is a comprehensive and carefully edited revision of the King James Version text. Originally published in 1873, this version presents the text in paragraph form, poetry formatted in poetic line-division, and also includes the Apocrypha.

1900 – Pure Cambridge Edition – This version is based upon the Pure Cambridge Edition first published around 1900 which is the product of the process of textual purification that has occurred since 1611 when the Authorized Version was completed.

2005 – New Cambridge Paragraph Bible –

Though it is the most important book in the religious life and the culture of the English-speaking world, the King James Bible or Authorised Version of 1611 has never been perfectly represented in print as the translators intended. David Norton’s edition, first published in 2005, aims to address two main concerns with the standard editions as currently printed.

First, what we now read as the King James Bible contains numerous deliberate and some accidental changes to the text, and these have been revised to make it more faithful to the King James translators’ own decisions as to how it should read. The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible gives the reader as closely as possible the exact text that the King James translators themselves decided on—but which was far from perfectly realised in the first edition.

Second, the presentation of the text—spelling, punctuation, and formatting—may interfere with the clarity with which it speaks to the minds and souls of present-day readers. An important aim of this edition is to give the reader consistent modern spelling and presentation in order to make it easier to read and study than the received text. The modernisation is kept within strict limits: spellings are modernised, but words and grammatical forms are unchanged. Like the spelling, the punctuation of the received text belongs to the eighteenth century and often appears heavy to modern taste. Since the original punctuation is often closer to modern practice, it is usually restored. Finally, the entire text is presented in paragraphs in order to contribute to the overall aim of making the King James Bible as readable and comprehensible as possible without falsifying the essentials of the translators’ work.

Thousands of specks of dust have been blown away from the received text in The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible, leaving the King James Bible presented with a fidelity to the translators’ own work never before achieved, and allowing the most read, heard, and loved book in the English language to speak with new vigour to modern readers.

This information is being reviewed and corrected or added to. Please let me know of any information that is incorrect or editions that are missing.