THE NEW CAMBRIDGE PARAGRAPH BIBLE
WITH THE APOCRYPHA
King James Version
Edited by David Norton
Cambridge
university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha: King James Version, as edited by David Norton
© Cambridge University Press 2005, 2011
Rights in the Authorised (King James) Version of the Bible are vested in the Crown
This edition is printed and published by
Cambridge University Press,
The Queen’s Printer, under Royal Letters Patent
First published 2005
Revised edition 2011
ISBN 978-0-521-76284-7 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-19881-3 black calfskin leather
The Names and Order of all the Books of the Old and New Testament and the Books called Apocrypha
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 printed. This is not to say either that it is badly printed or that absolute perfection can be achieved, but that the text and its presentation can be improved. First, what we now read as the King James Bible contains numerous deliberate and some accidental changes to the text, and these can be revised to make it more faithful to the King James translators’ own decisions as to how it should read. Second, the presentation of the text—spelling, punctuation and formatting—interferes with the clarity with which it speaks to the minds and souls of present-day readers. Unnecessary background noise gets in the way. To use another image, there is dust and dirt on the old master, the paint is darkened and cracked: we can still see that the picture is a great one, but not how great it is.
Such improvements are needed because of the way the text developed and then stopped developing. The first edition was prepared under the supervision of some of the translators and is uniquely authoritative, but it has its unavoidable share of mistakes. Most of these are typographical, but some come from problems in the copy the printer used and some from mistakes the translators themselves made. Subsequent early printings corrected some of the mistakes and introduced others, so variant readings began to accumulate. Printing the King James Bible became both a large-scale commercial enterprise and a scholarly endeavour. The commercial enterprise produced innumerable editions without much care for the basis of the text they were reproducing. Meanwhile editors worked over the detail of the text, introducing small changes which usually made it a more literal translation of the originals, but sometimes, presumably for reasons of style, changed its English. ...
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About The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha: King James VersionThough 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. |
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