Though it is the most important book in the religious life and the culture of the English-speaking world, the King James Bible or Authorised Version of 1611 has never been perfectly represented in print as the translators intended. David Norton's edition, first published in 2005, aims to address two main concerns with the standard editions as currently printed.
First, what we now read as the King James Bible contains numerous deliberate and some accidental changes to the text, and these have been revised to make it more faithful to the King James translators' own decisions as to how it should read. The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible gives the reader as closely as possible the exact text that the King James translators themselves decided on—but which was far from perfectly realised in the first edition.
Second, the presentation of the text—spelling, punctuation, and formatting—may interfere with the clarity with which it speaks to the minds and souls of present-day readers. An important aim of this edition is to give the reader consistent modern spelling and presentation in order to make it easier to read and study than the received text. The modernisation is kept within strict limits: spellings are modernised, but words and grammatical forms are unchanged. Like the spelling, the punctuation of the received text belongs to the eighteenth century and often appears heavy to modern taste. Since the original punctuation is often closer to modern practice, it is usually restored. Finally, the entire text is presented in paragraphs in order to contribute to the overall aim of making the King James Bible as readable and comprehensible as possible without falsifying the essentials of the translators' work.
Thousands of specks of dust have been blown away from the received text in The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible, leaving the King James Bible presented with a fidelity to the translators' own work never before achieved, and allowing the most read, heard, and loved book in the English language to speak with new vigour to modern readers.
