Rick Norris was a well known online commenter in bulletin boards and facebook groups on the subject of editions of the KJB.
Norris comes across as a neurodivergent who gathers many quotes from others and presents variations in King James Bible editions to pedantic degrees.
While his interpretations are faulty, and methods are in the direction of a modernistic view, his data collection skill is quite good. As the Scripture teaches, what Norris thinks for ill, God uses for good.
And Norris thinks quite ill of the King James Bible.
His May 2025 book “Revised Cambridge KJV’s” is a setpiece example his neurodivergent-like approach.
His primary aim is to argue that those who uphold the King James Bible don’t align to “verified facts” and that the King James Bible is inconsistent (with his own sense of propriety). Apparently facts are only verifiable by Norris and he selectively chooses sources that present his modernist-leaning views, like David Norton, Webster’s Dictionary, David Daniell and Mark Ward.
It is also telling that he deliberately quotes King James Bible supporters who say something he likes against others, thus, he favourably quotes Laurence Vance and Bryan Ross, while he goes out of his way to quite unnecessarily quote mine for a few favourable statements I have made about Pentecostalism. (Norris is clearly trying to make propaganda.)
Norris begins by laying out his doctrine of inspiration. In the main this is not extraordinary, but Norris keeps trying to imply that those who support the King James Bible believe in inspiration of version, translation or maybe even edition. Weirdly, Norris goes out of his way to try to deny that the Old Testament Scripture Timothy or Paul had access to was inspired, as if inspiration was only in the originals autographs and not in the words themselves that were faithfully copied.
Norris then discusses the King James Bible supporting view that changing the Bible is a bad thing. Norris seems willingly ignorant that talking about changes between versions or translations is very different to talking about changes between editions. Yet he conflates these areas, takes what people have said about version changes and then tries to apply that to edition changes. The fact is that a change in correcting a typo, spelling or an editorial regularisation is very different from changing the text and translation.
Norris then goes through some of the Cambridge editions, but his information is inexact, because had he been more thorough, he might have identified more editions from Cambridge along the years, e.g. talked about the work of Anthony Scattergood. While Scattergood’s work was known (mentioned by Scrivener), it is good that some work into looking into this edition has been done by Bryan Ross’ circle in February 2025, but evidently poor old Norris missed those exciting discussions.
One of Norris’ favourite subjects, and I agree with the facts about this, is that we are not using the Oxford Edition of 1769 today. Norris wants to make out as King James Bible supporters are ignorant for saying they do, but the problem is this ignorance is on Wikipedia, in ai and in modernists’ materials, like James R. White’s, who ignorantly has a chart comparing the “1769 Oxford” with the “1769 Cambridge”. And this is where we see just how horribly biased Norris is: he wants to make out as if supporting the KJB is akin to foolishness, but he completely ignores the foolishness of a leader of his own side.
Years ago, Norris had this kind of obsessive fight with D. A. Waite. It’s about D. A. Waite’s clumsy but well-meaning scholarship as opposed by Norris’ slightly more pedantic but stained belligerence. The big issue was that Waite used to talk about the “1769 Cambridge” and Norris would smugly show that Waite’s own Defined KJV was no John Archdeacon printing from 1769. Norris really went on about it, and that same indignation manifests in this latest book, written many months after Waite’s death. The weird thing is that Norris cannot (refuses to) identify that Waite was using the Concord edition.
In fact, for a work that is supposed to be about KJB editions printed by Cambridge, Norris seems strangely obscure about Cambridge editions between 1817 and 2005. It’s not like my books and information like “Vintage Bibles” were unavailable to him. I put that online for free at the start of 2025, and my previous book, “A Century of the Pure Cambridge Edition” was also available for months before that. (Norris charges people for his books, which happily keeps his boring and misleading information out of many people’s hands!)
Unsurprisingly, Norris does make much of one particular edition: a perverted one, which is Scrivener’s 1873 Paragraph Bible. There’s something attractive to Norris in Scrivener, and in David Norton’s work in 2005 and 2011, which of course is their wild changes to the King James Bible. That spirit of modernism loves anything radical, it loves to question and to doubt and to put down and to disparage.
Once Norris discusses the 20th century, he happily quotes Vance and Norton and then moves to editions being printed by Cambridge after the year 2000. He dedicates one page and a half to describing the Pure Cambridge Edition without even mentioning the Pure Cambridge Edition. There is something wrong here, clearly, for Norris’ approach is clearly not to educate nor to be fair. He tries to imply that changes happened essentially by Cambridge taking some of Scrivener’s editing choices, and then he’s off talking about post-2000 editions.
I wrote two books which are freely available to download which contains probably 100 pages worth of information that Norris basically pans, and yet Vance’s book, which was published after both of mine, is favourably quoted by Norris. (Norris of course is trying to be a propagandist here in his selection of material.) The problem for Norris is he presents a really hazy view of Cambridge editing from Scrivener’s time to Norton’s time because he wilfully ignores the facts because of the person (i.e. me) rather than the information itself. But I will let him be ignorant, it undermines his position all the more that I will quite happily be looking at differences between 1769 and the PCE while he almost can’t bear to regard anything I say.
When Norris then comes to mentioning the Pure Cambridge Edition by name, he does so in such a way as to present it in the worst possible light he can, which is laughable. He obsesses over a few minor quotes I made about Pentecostalism while ignoring the wealth of other information.
But it is evident that the real purpose of Norris’ book is to attack the Pure Cambridge Edition, and he then spends his time trying to argue that to have a corrected edition is a fallacy, which is a very bizarre line of reasoning, since the whole purpose of an editing is to have a corrected edition. Logically, Norris must reject Scrivener and Norton if he is to reject corrected or standard editions (and in truth those editions are not very correct nor standards).
Norris vaguely discusses the Concord Edition, knowing next to nothing about it, and even ascribing quite a wrong date to it.
Norris then turns to all the reasons he thinks there couldn’t possibly be a corrected or standard edition. He talks about spelling, italics and so on. But what is the measure for his judgment, and what is the rule for his consistency? Nothing other than his own mind, and the words of modernists, who claim that nothing can ever be perfect.
It is telling that in Norris’ neurodivergent-like thinking he cannot abide reference to the “holy spirit”, for example, because he must have capital letters … and if any edition differs, as some do in wayward ways, this is all the more something he cannot abide. It is like he goes into a kind of overload someone on the spectrum experiences, and because editions differ, and he cannot have irregularity, and because he thinks that “holy spirit” must mean “Holy Spirit” he has already spiralled far off into error.
Superficial judgment and personal opinion are Norris’ light. He fails to recognise that the King James Bible could have words in lower case and that those instances are right and really mean something.
It’s actually the height of hubris to take one’s own standards and claim that something must be wrong in the King James Bible as based on nothing but opinion.
Absurdly, Norris tries to claim (with suitable quotes from Bryan Ross who is equally insensible on this specific topic) that “always” and “alway”, or “ensample” and “example”, etc., have no difference at all. I’ve written a book and taken information from the Oxford English Dictionary showing the various distinctions between these words.
Norris quotes Ross talking about two passages, 2 Peter 2:6 and Jude verse 7. They try to argue that these two passages must be identical (or substantively the same) so that there is no difference between the words used. But this is wrong.
An ENSAMPLE is an internalisation of a sample, whereas an EXAMPLE is something observable externally. These are clearly two different words with two different meanings.
So, when we read 2 Peter 2:6 we find that the sinners are to take Sodom as an ENSAMPLE, because it is a warning to them in their own selves (conscience) even in their sin. Whereas Jude verse 7 shows that Sodom is an EXAMPLE, because it is a warning to all, it is an open shew (show), so to speak.
There’s a real blindness that someone like Bryan Ross (on this issue) and modernist Rick Norris cannot recognise that different words have different meanings.
Norris shows he is not interested in being factual in that he accuses me of speaking “ex cathedra” about the Pure Cambridge Edition (which he editorialises to cast doubt on by referring to it as the “Pure” Cambridge Edition).
But Norris cannot question that this edition was printed for about 100 years before my website appeared. He cannot question its content, except by his own unjust weights and measures.