Recently, I learned from Tim Berg that the 1602 Bishops’ Bible believed to have the handwritten edits of the KJV translators has been fully digitized and put online by the Bodleian Library. (It has also been recatalogued from BL Bib. Eng. 1602 b.1 to Arch. A b. 18.) I have added a link to it on my page of historic English Bibles online.
This is very good news as this may be one of, if not the, most important sources we have for understanding the translators’ work. This particular copy has consistent edits throughout the Old Testament, the Synoptics, and some chapters in John.
Besides marking where they wanted to change the Bishops’ text, there are also notations marking the source of some of those edits as the Geneva Bible among others. This copy also provides insight into the translators textual decisions.
But for that, and much else, you’ll have to read Tim Berg’s excellent article at the Text & Canon Institute: “A Newly Digitized Bible Reveals the Origins of the King James Version.”
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