The Holy Bible 1769, Containing the Old and New Testaments: Translated Out of the Original Tongues: And With the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised, By His Majesty's Special Command

Leather Bound. Condition: Very Good. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1769. The Holy Bible of King James 1769, revised by Dr. Benjamin Blayney, is now the only King James Bible standard text. The Bible is a very valuable one, having been only about 20 preserved of the whole Edition, the rest having been burnt by fire in Paternoster Row, London. First Edition. 1st Printing. Professionally rebound in full dark brown calfskin with gold titling, tooling and dentelles, with gauffered page ends, and marbled flyleaves. Romans III has piece taken out of page, see photos. 'The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments : Translated Out of the Original Tongues : And With the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised, By His Majesty's Special Command. Appointed to be Read in Churches.' Includes the 'Apocrypha', 'The New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Translated out of the Original Greek : And With the Former Translations Dligently Compared and Revised, By His Majesty's Special Command. Appointed to be Read in Churches.' Includes 'The Translators to the Reader' 1769, 'An Index to the Holy Bible', 'Tables of Time, Offices, Measures, Weights, Coins, Kindred and Affinity Forbidden to Marry', waterstained. 'A Brief Concordance or Table to the Bible of the Last Translation : Serving for the More Easy Finding out of the Most Useful Places Therein Contained. Carefully Perused and Enlarged by John Downame, B.A. Allowed by His Majesty's Special Privilege to be Printed and Bound With the Bible in All Volumes. 1767, waterstained.' Size: 11 x 8.9 x 3.3. By the mid-18th century the wide variation in the various modernized printed texts of the Authorized Version, combined with the notorious accumulation of misprints, had reached the proportion of a scandal, and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge both sought to produce an updated standard text. First of the two was the Cambridge edition of 1760, the culmination of 20 years' work by Francis Sawyer Parris, who died in May of that year. This 1760 edition was reprinted without change in 1762 and in John Baskerville's fine folio edition of 1763. This was effectively superseded by the 1769 Oxford edition, edited by Benjamin Blayney, which became the Oxford standard text, and is reproduced almost unchanged in most current printings. Parris and Blayney sought consistently to remove those elements of the 1611 and subsequent editions that they believed were due to the vagaries of printers, while incorporating most of the revised readings of the Cambridge editions of 1629 and 1638, and each also introducing a few improved readings of their own. They undertook the mammoth task of standardizing the wide variation in punctuation and spelling of the original, making many thousands of minor changes to the text. In addition, Blayney and Parris thoroughly revised and greatly extended the italicization of 'supplied' words not found in the original languages by cross-checking against the presumed source texts. Blayney seems to have worked from the 1550 Stephanus edition of the Textus Receptus, rather than the later editions of Theodore Beza that the translators of the 1611 New Testament had favoured; accordingly the current Oxford standard text alters around a dozen italicizations where Beza and Stephanus differ. Like the 1611 edition, the 1769 Oxford edition included the Apocrypha, although Blayney tended to remove cross-references to the Books of the Apocrypha from the margins of their Old and New Testaments wherever these had been provided by the original translators. Altogether, the standardization of spelling and punctuation caused Blayney's 1769 text to differ from the 1611 text in around 24,000 places. The Bible also includes the prefatory section 'The Translators to the Reader'. office