Page 42 - Yahwehs Book

We find that a similar experience befell the King James Bible. The 1611 edition of the KJV Bible,
the very first one to be published, is very different than the KJV Bible sold today. There have been
numerous revisions to the KJV Bible. The version sold today is widely identified as the 1769
Baskerville Birmingham revision. This Bible, was originally printed in Birmingham, England by
renowned printer John Baskerville. The Baskerville revision of the KJV Bible modernized the
language. The 1611 Bible used spellings such as "Hierusalem,"' "Marie," "assone," "foorth,"
"shalbe," "fet," "creeple," "fift," "sixt," "ioy," "middes," and "charet," which you will no longer find
in a KJV Bible, though they still are advertised as “1611 King James Bibles.” Baskerville followed
the revisions of F.S. Paris and H. Therold who produced an updated language version of the KJV
in 1762. The Baskerville Birmingham Bible also introduced other changes of wording.

Font Developed By, and Named After, John Baskerville

It is well to comment somewhat on John Baskerville, the printer. Although a near genius at
originating innovations in printing that led to vastly improved print quality, the man was all his life
a professed atheist. In his later years he lived openly with the wife of another man (her husband had
reportedly abandoned her), though Baskerville never married the woman. Baskerville was a member
of the Lunar Society, a philosophical society attended by other “enlightenment” thinkers such as
Erasmus Darwin, and Benjamin Franklin. He was very outspoken against those he considered to be
religious bigots. That he would print a very successful revision of the King James Bible that has
become the standard text for KJV Bibles today is not inexplicable, for the Bible has always been a
best seller. Baskerville was, after all, a merchant seeking to turn a profit.

Although Baskerville was an atheist, and no friend of Christians, this does not necessarily mean that
the KJV Bible is a wretched work (though it certainly contains errors and shortcomings). It does,
however, destroy the argument that would suggest that the KJV Bible we have today was produced
by a divine act of God as he moved upon Christian men resulting in an inerrant text of the Scriptures
in the English language.

More will be shared on the subject of errors in the Biblical text in the next chapter. My point in this
post is to reveal that claims of inerrant Bible translations are not a new phenomenon. Manuscript and
translation bias has existed at least as far back as the time of the early church when Jewish myths
about the translators of the Septuagint were passed around to bolster the reputation of this Greek
Bible. The same type of bias was demonstrated by the Roman Catholic Church who favored
th
Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, and by Protestants in Europe from the 16 century forward
who placed an inordinate veneration upon Erasmus’ Textus Receptus. Today we find that there are