The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and LiteratureMcAfee, Cleland Boyd
History
The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and Literature
McAfee, Cleland Boyd
Bible -- History; Bible -- Influence; Bible and literature; Bible. English -- Versions -- Authorized
2. Then there have been new and important
discoveries of Biblical literature which date
earlier in Christian history than any our fathers
knew three hundred years ago. In some instances
those earlier discoveries have shown that
a phrase here or there has been wrongly
introduced into the text. There has been no marked
instance where a phrase was added by the revisers;
that is, a phrase dropped out of the
original and now replaced. One illustration of
the omission of a phrase will be enough. In
the fifth chapter of I John the seventh verse
reads: "For there are three that bear record
in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy
Ghost, and these three are one." In the revised
versions it is omitted, because it seems
quite certain that it was not in the original
writing. It does not at all alter the meaning
of Scripture. While it appears in most of the
best manuscripts which were available for the
King James translators, earlier manuscripts
found since that time have shown that it was
formerly written at the side as a gloss, and was
by some transcriber set over in the text itself.
The process of making the early manuscripts
shows how easily that could have occurred.
Let us suppose that two or three manuscripts
were being made at once by different copyists.
One was set to read the original; as he read, the
others wrote. It would be easy to suppose that
he might read this marginal reference as a suitable
commentary on the text, and that one or
more of the writers could have written it in the
text. It could easily happen also that a copyist,
even seeing where it stood, might suppose it had
been omitted by the earlier copyist, and that he
had completed his work by putting it on the
margin. So the next copyist would put it into
his own text. Once in a manuscript, it would
readily become part of the accepted form. Discoveries
that bring that sort of thing to light
are of value in giving us an accurate version of
the original Bible.
3. Then there are in our King James version
a few archaic and obsolete phrases. We
have already spoken of them. Most of them
have been avoided in the revised versions. The
neuter possessive pronoun, for example, has been
put in. Animal names have been clarified,
obsolete expressions have been replaced by more
familiar ones, and so on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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