“The Rheims-Douay and the King James Version were published less than thirty years apart. Since then the King James has steadily held its own. The Rheims-Douay has been repeatedly changed to approximate the King James. So that the Douay of 1600 and that of 1900 are not the same in many ways.”RABV 59.5

The plain inference intended to be drawn from this paragraph is that while the Roman Catholic Version needed to be changed from time to time, the King James Version was perfect from the first and needed no changes to be made. The evidence contained in the following quotations will show that this implied inference is entirely contrary to truth.RABV 59.6

Many early changes made in AV.—“The first edition of the ‘Authorized Version’ appeared in 1611. In 1614 another edition was printed which contained more than 400 variations from the first. But the sharp criticisms that were hurled at the new version, largely by Hugh Broughton, whose irascible disposition had deprived him of a place, as his scholarship deserved, on the translation committee, forced a revision in 1629. The so-called final revision of the Authorized Version was printed in 1638. Within less than fifty years after the appearance of King James Version, agitation was begun for a now revision of the Bible. In 1653 the Long Parliament submitted a bill calling for such revision. The reasons that lay back of the bill were in part errors, mainly printers’, and some in translation, and also the so-called prelatical language of the version. The matter went so far as to be put into the hands of a committee appointed especially to take charge of the scheme. Some preliminary work was begun, but the dissolution of Parliament put an end to the proposed concerted action.”—” The Ancestry of Our English Bible,” by Ira Maurice Price, Ph. D., p. 280.RABV 59.7

Many later changes made without authority.—“Most readers will be aware that numberless and not inconsiderable departures from the original or standard edition of the Authorized Translation as published in 1611, are to be found in the modern Bibles which issue from the press by thousands every year. Some of these differences must be imputed to oversight and negligence, from which no work of man can be entirely free; but much the greater part of them are deliberate changes, introduced silently and without authority by men whose very names are often unknown. Now, if such alterations had been made invariably for the worse, it would have been easy in future editions to recall the primitive readings, and utterly to reject the later corruptions. This, however, is far from being the case. Not a few of these variations, especially those first net with in Cambridge folio Bibles dated 1629 and 1638, which must have been superintended with much critical care, amend manifest faults of the original Translators or editors, so that it would be most injudicious to remove them from the place they have deservedly held in all our copies for the last 250 years.”—“The Authorized Edition of the English Bible,” 1884, F. H. A. Scrivener, p. 3.RABV 60.1

The Vaticanus Manuscript

MSS Available in 1611 and Now