The self-published book “Revised Cambridge KJV’s” by Rick Norris is rather telling by its appearance: a ragged Bible on the cover communicates exactly what Norris really thinks of our “grand old Bible”. The addition of a clip art butterfly invokes the idea that Norris does not see a standard, but something transient, morphing and whimsical.
However, the tradition of printing the King James Bible by Cambridge is quite the opposite. Norris needlessly omits much praiseworthy information of the Cambridge tradition of King James Bible printing.
Instead of promoting accurate history, mentions a scattershot of facts and some varying information in order to carry home his true point, which is not one of conveying history or of education, but of undermining the trust of King James Bible supporters in the authenticity and work done by Cambridge. Norris has one aim: to ensure his reader will question as he does the reliability of the King James Bible’s printed and editorial history.
Norris fires many pellets of information — you could call them little factoids — but little bits and pieces by themselves don’t communicate what the authors he was quoting meant, and Norris weaves together a whole patchwork of quotes with the hope of building some Frankenstein of a narrative where Norris must hunt down others who will say what he wishes to say. (No original ideas, just quote mining for someone who said something that Norris wants to say, or else, someone saying something that Norris thinks he can make out to be very wrong.)
In order to understand what this is all about, one simply should start with Norris’ conclusion at the end, which is that the Concord and the Pure Cambridge Edition are allegedly inconsistent and therefore do not match claims made about them.
Strangely, Norris barely can overtly identify anything about either the Concord or Pure Cambridge Editions, so he bewrays his real motives: his actual attack is aimed squarely on people who use the King James Bible, on people who rely upon it. He attacks these (and all normal) editions of the King James Bible because he does not want people to rely at all on it, and he wants to attack those people who teach to rely upon the King James Bible. It’s a strange hatred that motivates him, but Norris is playing the role of a Nutcracker Suite soldier from a soviet-era cartoon.
Norris knows that I think the use of “ye” and “you” in their respective places throughout the King James Bible (Pure Cambridge Edition) is right. Norris of course doesn’t agree. He runs to modernists like David Norton, he runs to “the Hebrew”, in fact, he will run to anything which will say otherwise. If some King James Bible supporter, who might say correct things 99.9% of the time questions something on this subject once, Norris will no doubt have collected that quote and put it into his repertoire.
Consider this. Norris quotes Bryan Ross, “According to Brother Verschuur, only the circa 1900 Cambridge Text is totally free from errors of any kind and constitutes the perfect Word of God.” Well, already Norris is eagerly perpetuating falsehoods, because if I really believed and said that statement, I would be saying that the Scripture was not perfect in Heaven, that the Scripture was not perfect as written by Paul, that the Scripture was not perfect as read by Timothy, that the Scripture was not perfect as believed by the Greek Church, that the Scripture was not perfect as translated by the Reformers and that the Scripture was not perfect in 1611 or in 1769! That is how ridiculous and wrong such a statement would be. Bryan Ross was either taken out of context or is mistaken, but Norris doubly the child of error for perpetuating such clear and blatant untruths.
What Bryan Ross should have said was, “Brother Verschuur has recognised that the Cambridge edition from the early 20th century is free from editorial errors and represents exactly the perfect Word of God.” There’s a huge difference between my belief in editorial correctness and a claim that one thing only is the very Scripture to the exclusion of all things. But Norris is not being kind to me, and is thrilled at Bryan Ross’ “suspicions”.
But then, Norris makes all kinds of mistakes, including when talking about the spelling of “rasor” and failing to identify D. A. Waite’s “Defined KJV” as a (badly typeset) Concord Edition.
Even more laughable are the litany of gaffes Norris makes in his willing blindness: “Like it had done before, Cambridge at some point left or abandoned its own new standard edition that it produced and printed in 1873.” In fact, the 1873 Scrivener Edition was not a standard, nor was it printed in normal editions issuing by the cart load year by year in the late 19th century.
Norris continues in his Bacchic stupor, “In the early 1900’s Cambridge developed, edited, and printed some new editions [its Concord edition, its Pitt Minion edition, its Cameo edition].” In fact, Cambridge was printing its normal Victorian editions continuously from the 1850s to the 20th century, besides Scrivener’s edition being made. But Norris here is even more wrong, the Concord Edition appeared in about 1956, the Pitt Minion (bold figure refs) appeared in about 1951 and the Cameo appeared in 1925. What’s bizarre is that Norris will not admit that the very same editing appears in the Cameo and the Pitt Minion (despite some minor variations, which I discussed already years ago in this work: http://bibleprotector.com/norris.pdf and the “house tops/housetops” variation I discussed in https://www.bibleprotector.com/blog/?p=1080 all of which easily pre-date Norris’ work).
Norris stumbles further, “These new revised Cambridge editions departed both from the standard 1873 Cambridge edition and from the other typical Cambridge editions printed in the late 1800’s that were based on the Oxford standard. Compared to a Cambridge edition printed in 1887, the new editions departed from Cambridge’s late 1800’s version of the Oxford standard in as many as 50 places. Since the source of the change at 1 Samuel 2:13 from “priest’s custom” to “priests’ custom” is the 1873 Cambridge, it would also be the more likely source for the other changes to Cambridge’s 1800’s previous version of the Oxford standard.” The fact is that Norris weirdly admits that there were indeed other normal KJVs, not Scrivener’s, in the late 1800s, and he claims these were following the 1769, and that changes made to these late 1800s editions (in the 20th century) were the result of the influence of Scrivener’s work. Absurdly, instead of identifying the actual editing that took place, Norris jumps straight to the Cameo, Pitt Minion and Concord, and mentions the year 1931 in regards to such changes having been made (as was stated by Norton). Norris clearly misses the fact that the editing of the Pure Cambridge Edition happened in the early 20th century and was evident in various editions printed by Cambridge years and decades before 1925, 1951 or 1956!
Norris sides with Norton hating on the very exactness of “an hole” (Ex. 28:32) and “a hole” (2 Kings 12:9), “an hammer” (Judges 4:21) and “a hammer” (Jer. 23:29) and “my hand” (Ezek. 20:15) and “mine hand” (Ezek. 20:22). Norris cannot abide that there are reasons why it should be one way in one place, and another in another. He cannot see it for he must apply his simplistic rigidity and sweep away exactness by making things in his mind uniform. But the grammar of the “hand” examples is very clearly a difference between a subject-object relationship which is observably different in the two verses from Ezekiel. The “hammer” examples seem to be the difference between what seems like a passive voice and the active. As for the “hole” verses, besides what has been mentioned, one might take further considerations as well of other factors, like meter, euphonics and rules of grammar which we not so aware of.
Norris also reads Norton hyperliterally, conflating the Pure Cambridge Edition of 1931 which Norton’s correspondent called “the current text” and the Concord Edition of the 1950s which is a specific edition only printed in some selective offerings. In Norris’ mind, the “current text” and the Concord are made to be the same thing, even thought they very noticeably are not. How can Norris find fiddling variations in hyphens and apostrophes and yet be so blind on the blatantly obvious common form of 20th century printing being by far the Pure Cambridge Edition?
Norris makes a passing comment about “unpaged documents” on my website as though urls or (especially) pdf page numbers don’t exist.
Norris ties himself in writhing knots trying to philosophically explain about my using twelve passages to identify the Pure Cambridge Edition. Thankfully his readers won’t understand what he is saying, because whatever he is saying is not reflective of reality.
I have consistently shown that there is a consistent Edition, printed many times, in many sizes, made by Cambridge in the early 20th century. Not only did Cambridge print it, but so has Collins, and other printers and publishers.
In order to identify an edition, you have to have some way of knowing it. Well, I am not going to give www.bibleprotector.com/editions as the list, because it is way too long. Instead, there are twelve passages to look up, and that’s sufficient. Remember, we are talking about an Edition, and that means that we do not expect that the Holy Ghost made the Cambridge printers do immaculate work so that there’s never a blemish of the press or something.
Norris is very wrong to make out as if I am arbitrarily dictating and pronouncing something when the Pure Cambridge Edition was being printed for many decades before I was born.
It is also strange that Norris seems to be unable to admit that there is a “Pure Cambridge Edition”, instead, speaking of the Cameo, Turquoise and Pitt Minion having an agreeing editorial text … it seems that Norris is very reluctant to admit the facts about this agreement, because it seems to curdle his blood to have to use the word “pure” in a positive sense.
Norris wrongly implies that people are being ruled by fear when they exclusively use the King James Bible. Norris has missed out on the proper and sound fear that believers should have, which would not lead them to attack Bible words like Norris does.
“Hear the word of the LORD, ye that tremble at his word; Your brethren that hated you, that cast you out for my name’s sake, said, Let the LORD be glorified: but he shall appear to your joy, and they shall be ashamed.” (Isaiah 66:5).
Norris’ primary research on peculiarities of different editions is useful, his secondary research on the history of editions is average, but it is his inflexible interpretation, turgid writing style and contemptuous disdain of the exclusive use of the King James Bible which are especially poor. One and an half stars.