King James Only?

Blogging our way through the King James Only debate

The King James Only movement and the KJV's errata list

In the early seventeenth century, London printers produced copies of a translation that would become the King James Version. The translation came from a committee working between 1604 and 1611, but the physical book emerged from a printing house under time pressure, and mistakes slipped through. By 1629 an errata list was published identifying known printing slips across several early printings.

For most readers this is a minor curiosity about early printing. For the King James Only movement, however, the list presents a serious rhetorical problem. The movement holds that a particular printing of the 1611 translation is providentially preserved and stands in a class above all other English Bibles. A list of acknowledged printing errors issued within decades of completion sits awkwardly alongside that conviction.

This article examines the main ways in which King James Only advocates deal with that awkwardness. It also looks at what the translation committee recorded about variant readings, since their notes complicate any claim that the KJV was treated by its makers as flawless. For Australian Christians in family worship, church services in Brisbane or Melbourne, or Bible study groups in Adelaide, the historical record offers a more honest picture.

The story of the errata list is also a story about authority and the shifting meanings of the word preserved. Understanding how that shift occurred helps explain why a seemingly academic debate continues to surface in revival meetings, online forums, and church business meetings from Parramatta to Fremantle.

What the errata list actually was

The 1629 errata list emerged from a Stationers' Company meeting managing early printing privileges in England. Printers and correctors catalogued known printing slips across several early issues of the 1611 translation, including typos, transposed letters, dropped words, and occasional misreadings of manuscript sources.

Bibliographers like Scrivener and Norton have shown that the same errors recurred across early printings because typesetters reused formes. A word set incorrectly in one edition tended to reappear in subsequent printings unless a corrector caught it. An errata list, publicly posted in London bookshops, was the standard remedy. English-speaking Christians of the era understood that the translation was still being polished, and the translators themselves knew that print runs contained imperfections.

The standard King James Only response

When confronted with the errata list, King James Only advocates generally adopt one of three positions. The first is denial: the claim that the list was never officially issued or that it refers only to certain reprints. Some writers have denied its existence altogether.

The second strategy minimises the problem by dismissing the list as referring to trivial typos. The substance of the translation was never in doubt, and a misspelled word is simply a printer's accident. This argument is reasonable on the surface since most entries are small. The third approach implicitly concedes that the list is genuine by pinning authority to a specific early printing rather than to the translation as a whole. The 1769 Blayney revision, the Cambridge 1760s text, or a particular 1611 printing becomes the true KJV, and texts that disagree are reduced in status.

The vanishing 1611 edition strategy

The twentieth century saw a particular form of King James Only advocacy develop, especially in the United States but with growing reach in Australia through imported literature. Some advocates concluded that an early 1611 printing was uniquely preserved and that later printings drifted away. Under this view, the errata list becomes a record of how a perfect original was progressively lost.

This creates immediate problems. The 1611 edition itself contained printing errors that the list catalogues, so if the list is genuine even the earliest printing was imperfect by the printers' own admission. The advocacy position requires treating the 1629 list as a forgery, which is untenable given the manuscript record, or treating the 1611 edition as a snapshot of a translation always being corrected. Few early printings survive intact; most show signs of correction in ink by readers. The idea of a single, untouched authorised printing does not match the physical artefacts.

The translators' own notes on textual variants

The King James translators left behind a body of work explaining how they handled disagreements between Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. In their preface and marginal notes they acknowledged that different manuscripts often disagreed and discussed which reading they chose. They compared the Septuagint with the Masoretic text, consulted the Vulgate, and weighed variants rather than following a single manuscript.

The translators' treatment of variant readings, covered in their notes, shows that the men who produced the KJV treated textual criticism as part of the scholarly task. They did not pretend that the underlying Hebrew and Greek texts were free from variation, nor did they claim divine inspiration for particular manuscript copies. If the translators themselves accepted that variant readings exist and that the translator must choose between them, then the claim that a particular printing of the KJV is a perfect preservation sits oddly with the translators' working method.

Why the double standard fails

King James Only writers who insist that modern English translations are unreliable because they reconstruct a Greek or Hebrew text often insist, in the next breath, that no such reconstruction was needed for the English translation they prefer. Textual criticism is treated as legitimate when applied to the King James Version's printing history, but illegitimate when applied to the underlying sources for other English Bibles.

This double standard is usually defended on theological grounds. Some argue that God promised to preserve his words rather than preserve a particular manuscript tradition, with preservation found in the English text. Once this is taken it becomes hard to know what counts as the preserved text. Is it the 1611 first edition with acknowledged imperfections? The 1638 revision? The Blayney 1769 edition that most modern printings descend from? Or an ideal text behind the earliest printings that no printed copy contains? None of these matches the copy most readers in Australian homes actually own.

What this means for Australian Bible readers

For Australian readers the question is not academic, since the King James Version remains widely used in local congregations. It is the version many remember hearing from grandparents in suburbs like Penrith or Geelong, and the version used in many Pentecostal and independent Baptist churches in cities from Perth to Cairns. Knowing how the errata list came to exist does not undermine the value of the King James Version as a translation.

What it does is free Christian readers from arguments that demand the impossible. There is no need to defend a list of printer's errors as if it were part of the canonical text, and no need to rewrite the translators' working methods to fit a later doctrine of preservation. Readers can appreciate its literary beauty and historical influence while being honest about the textual processes that produced it. Australian bookshops such as Koorong still sell King James Bibles in large numbers, and the Australian Bible Society continues to distribute it alongside modern translations. The King James Version can keep its honoured place in Christian history and English literature without invoking a theology of perfection the translators themselves would not have recognised.

Practical takeaways from the errata debate

If you want to keep exploring how the historical record complicates King James Only arguments, consider subscribing to the blog or sharing this piece with someone you know who is still weighing the claims. The conversation benefits from evidence presented with patience and respect for the people on both sides of it.