The text was now effectively settled, and, rather than dismissing Curtis as the crank he has generally been taken to be, we must recognise him as a serious worker who played an important role in achieving this result.
The necessity of standardisation having been brought home to the Universities, the Oxford standard, essentially Blayney's text, now ruled.
The result is, it is hoped, more scholarly and trustworthy than any of its predecessors because of its first principle and because the manuscript evidence of the translators' work has been consulted.
After Parris's work it seems to have lost its way, or, perhaps more accurately, as Curtis's narrative reveals, it lost all knowledge of the way it had taken.
Again the likely reason is the public's resistance to changes in the KJB whenever changes are advertised.
Scrivener's book except in this case where there is a significant difference between the original introduction and the later revision given in the book.
By highlighting the translators' human infirmity, Scrivener opens the way to changing the text even where there is no printing error involved.
First Edition of the Authorized Version presented in roman letters for easy reading and comparison with subsequent editions' (title page); save for some of the introductory material, this appears to be a photographic reproduction of the Oxford edition.
British editions, an asterisk indicating those found in the 1856 text but not noted in the Report: astonished (astonied) assuaged (asswaged) aught (ought) awl (aul) basin (bason) borne (born) braided (broided) 10.
At some point around the beginning of the nineteenth century it departed from Parris's work in ways that must have been the result of substantial effort.
Such attitudes and practice, hardly to be excused by remembering that the Oxford English Dictionary was then an unborn child, make his work on spelling valueless.
This is not to change the text but to continue to allow it to speak as clearly as possible in its own authentic voice to the contemporary reader.
What we do have to have is a respectable, defensible and (reasonably) consistent text we can use for all our AV editions.
Following all the concerns raised by Curtis, Cambridge silently abandoned this text: it could hardly do otherwise since it knew so little about its own work and could not make any credible claims to having a standard.
Reader may learn how far it was thought necessary to correct the Authorized Text in the time of the original Translators'.
Having collated its six texts (and without considering that its four modern texts might be Blayney's and three close representations of his work), the Committee treated this unscholarly sample in a still more unscholarly way, that is, it treated them democratically.
The collation was not only far more substantial than any previously attempted, even extending to minute work on the KJB's sources, but it was responsible in the way that it provided a thorough account of the work.
Whether or not this was to mark the Universities' joint care to ensure that their texts agreed, they do agree, and what they agree on has the inestimable merit of over two centuries of near uniformity.
Cambridge Paragraph Bible of the Authorized English Version, with the text revised by a collation of its early and other principal editions, the use of the italic type made uniform, the marginal references remodelled, and a critical introduction prefixed (1873; H1995).
As with the spelling, so the punctuation was neither right by current standards nor that of the translators.
Eventually it was agreed that the spelling needed attending to, and that the current Cambridge Concord text should be collated with Scrivener's text (something that was done).
From the variety and inconsistency of the 1611 text it is clear that, for the most part, neither of these involve deliberate intentions of the translators and so do not demand respect and reverence in the way that the readings do.
Enough examples have come to light in the course of the present work (to say nothing of textual criticism in general) to prove the existence of this danger, and to prove that Scrivener himself succumbed to it.
The result was a fine quarto Bible, large enough to be a folio, published, without the Apocrypha, in 1856 (H1904), and intended to be the standard American Bible Society text.
