This is a brief overview for charted lists of edition differences in the King James Bible.
When I began studying the area of edition differences of the KJB in 2000 there weren’t a lot of resources available. The internet was in its infancy, and letters rather than emails were still regularly sent.
My (Matthew Verschuur) website and materials provide lists of differences between editions, such as comparing 1611 to today, and differences between 20th century editions. It’s something I continue to discuss, study and interact with people about.
The earliest example of this, though I didn’t ever see it until later, was a list of spelling differences of words in contemporary editions in William Savage’s Dictionary of the Art of Printing (1839). This list mainly looked at spelling and whether words were hyphenated, joined or separate. You can find this on the main page of bibleprotector.com
The general foundations in edition studies (as we might term it), was the book by Scrivener, called The Authorized Edition. This book was quite obscure at the time, and has been an important source of information. Scrivener wrote this book in line with also making a highly edited edition of the KJB called the Cambridge Paragraph Bible. I obtained a physical copy of Scrivener’s guide from D. A. Waite, but the book is now easily available on archive.org
The next main source was D. A. Waite’s attempt at reading out a 1611 and comparing to a tape recording, and reading along with Cambridge Bible, and listening differences he heard. It wasn’t fully thorough, but it was enough to indicate that Scrivener’s information wasn’t wrong, and that there really were differences between 1611 and today. This document was being sold in the 1990s and early 2000s. My church bought a copy of his booklet.
In response to Waite’s work, was the far more pedantic and comprehensive investigations into editions by Rick Norris. Rick Norris has been a fairly prolific poster online, and has self-published a number of books, listing variations in many edition of the KJB. Norris published his materials after my website went up, and he first mentioned my website online in April 2007, which led me to get involved with the KJB bulletin boards/forums of those days.
When I was first examining the editions issue, one early website was from Touchet Baptist, which had a list of edition differences, including Joshua 19:2, Job 33:4, Jeremiah 34:16, Ezekiel 11:24, Nahum 3:16, Matthew 4:1, Matthew 26:39. It had a major section called “Capital ‘S’ left off the word Spirit affecting the deity of Christ”. I have a print off of this.
Another source document which was published on the Touchet Baptist 1611 website was Peter Ruckman’s Differences in King James Version editions, online in six parts, but originally written in perhaps the 1980s. I have a print off of this. He mentioned variant words in editions.
There was also a web page, which is still online, about being aware of counterfeit KJBs by Nic Kizzah, which listed differences been the Concord Cambridge and other editions.
Also, at that time, Sam Gipp’s Answer Book was around, which used a pamphlet by David Reagan which wrote about the changes in editions of the King James Bible.
Then Prof. David Norton’s book came out called A textual history of the King James Bible, which I bought. This book was designed to give information about Norton’s work to revise Scrivener’s Paragraph Bible, by making a New Cambridge Paragraph Bible. There are actually two editions of the Norton highly altered edition of the KJB.
Because of my website I’ve had interaction with different people looking at editions of the KJB over the years.
Gail Riplinger published a booklet in 2011 called Settings of the KJB, which goes through edition differences, and also mentions the Pure Cambridge Edition.
Laurence M. Vance has written a book in 2025 called The Text of the King James Bible, which has some very good tables of differences between editions. Bryan Ross and his circle of friends have been in interaction with Vance and been looking at editions over the years as well, including the Pure Cambridge Edition. So has Christopher Yetzer, a missionary and facebook user.
Brandon Peterson, author and youtuber, has made a chart comparing various editions and discussed the topic.
There are ongoing discussions of people looking at and listing differences in editions.
What is interesting is that many of the names listed above prefer Cambridge (in one form or another).
Further, in relation to comparing editions, a list was generated at MIT as recorded in an email exchange:
From: <mafetter@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
…
Date: Sat, 5 Aug 89 04:42:39 EDT
To: tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Subject: diffs
This email from 1989 (I have a copy) showed a machine output of differences between two online texts they were comparing, one of which was a PCE text from the old Oxford Text Archive from the 1980s (that text is still available on several websites, was worked on by Robert A. Kraft).