[Esip-preserve] A Few More Comments on "Chapter and Verse" as well as Text Versioning

[Bruce Barkstrom]

After our previous discussion of "chapter and verse" citations, as well as
Al's note on the King James, my wife found our copy of "God's Secretaries:
the Making of the King James Bible" by Adam Nicolson (2003, Harper
Collins).  Back in chapter twelve (pp. 216-243), there are some interesting
items that are worth pondering in our context.

On p. 221, Nicolson comments that "There is, on the whole, no telling
that this text [the KJV] has been assembled like a mosaic floor, every
tessera guaged and weighed, held up, examined, placed, replaced,
rejected, reabsorbed, a winnowing of exactness from a century of
scholarship."

On p. 224, he notes that the text "they delivered to Rober Barker was not
entirely good.  The Hebrew and particularly the Greek texts they were
working from were not the most accurate, even by the standards of their
own time."

However, the really interesting part of the story comes when the manuscript
is supposed to be printed.  "Some form of text was handed over to Robert
Barker, 'Printer to the King's Most Excellent Maiestie', perhaps an
annotated
version of the Bishop's Bible, perhaps a manuscript.  What was said to be
the 'manuscript copy of the Bible' was sold twice in the seventeenth
century, once to Cambridge University Press, once to a firm of London
printers,
but has now disappeared.  According to one romantic theory, it was burnt in
the Great Fire of London.

Barker's printshop began to apply its own level of chaos to the production
process.  It seems to have been a sort of anarchy.  Either two editions were
produced one after another; or both at the same time and sheets from each
edition were bound together in single volumes.  As a result, no copy of the
1611 Bible is like any other.  And they were riddled with mistakes.  The
Translators had intended that any word inserted to improve the sense should
be printed in a different face.  In fact, that principle became confused
early
on and if a word is in italics in the printed Bible, there is often no
telling if
it is in the original Greek or Hebrew or not." [pp. 225-226 - and, we might
note,
tends to make the provenance issue a bit complicated]

Finally, near the bottom of p. 226, Nicolson notes that "When, finally, in
the nineteenth century, Dr. F. Scrivener, a scholar workiing to modern
standards, attempted to collate all the editions of the King James Bible
then in circulation, he found more than 24,000 variations between them.
The curious fact is that no one such thing as 'The King James Bible' -
agreed,
consistent and whole - has ever existed." [This is a clear corrective to my
sense that some of the production paradigms and versioning I've been
responsible for are complicated.]

So much for getting back to the "single authoritative version" of the text
on what I had assumed would be the prime example of this kind of paradigm.

Then, of course, there's the publishing process.  Nicolson notes [p. 227]
that
"The book crept out into the public arena.  Being only a revision of earlier
translations, and not a new work, there was no need for it to be entered in
the Stationers' Register, which recorded only new publications and so, in
addition
to this most famous book having no agreed text, it also has no publication
date."
[I suppose one might begin to suspect that the KJV of the Bible is not
referencable,
at least according to Dublin Core and other modern standards.]

As is often the case, some real stories are more complicated and interesting
than what we imagine them to be.

Bruce B.
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