Recently, I learned from Tim Berg that the 1602 Bishops’ Bible believed to have the handwritten edits of the KJV translators has been fully digitized and put online by the Bodleian Library. (It has also been recatalogued from BL Bib. Eng. 1602 b.1 to Arch. A b. 18.) I have added a link to it on my page of historic English Bibles online.
This is very good news as this may be one of, if not the, most important sources we have for understanding the translators’ work. This particular copy has consistent edits throughout the Old Testament, the Synoptics, and some chapters in John.
Besides marking where they wanted to change the Bishops’ text, there are also notations marking the source of some of those edits as the Geneva Bible among others. This copy also provides insight into the translators textual decisions.
But for that, and much else, you’ll have to read Tim Berg’s excellent article at the Text & Canon Institute: “A Newly Digitized Bible Reveals the Origins of the King James Version.”
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Tim is the man. Watch this guy. He's going to make some lasting contributions.
ReplyDeleteThe Bodleian has done Bible and historical researchers a great favor, moving this Bible to where it now may be seen freely by eyes all across the world. “Arch. A b. 18” needs a lot of work to know more about what it is and where (or whether) it fits in the translators’ work. In some online discussions, Christopher Yetzer, who is a missionary in Italy, mentioned something that might prove helpful in determining a terminus post quem. It has been suggested the letter “j/i” might stand for Jerome or Junius. Yetzer noticed that there are Italian words or phrases in the annotations, and the “j/i” mark corresponds with these places. Apparently, this has previously gone unnoticed. (If these match Diodati, for example, it pushes the date of the annotations in this Bible to 1607 or later.)
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