4 ms·
Firstly, this notebook contains the translation for 1 book, and the partial translation of another, neither of which are considered "scripture" by most protesta
by timv 11y ago
Firstly, this notebook contains the translation for 1 book, and the partial translation of another, neither of which are considered "scripture" by most protestant Christians.
The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches have never had any particular connection to the King James bible, so there are very few churches that use (or previously used) these particular books from the King James version. Hence, it is hard to imagine that anything that would found in this notebook would be of particular theological relevance to almost anyone.
That said, if someone were to find a similar notebook for a "mainstream" book, it would still be of only minor consequence.
Even within strongly evangelical protestant churches, there is not a lot of specific theological reverence for the King James Bible. It was a remarkable achievement and did a lot to aid in the accessibility and spread of the bible in Western Europe and the colonies, but it is - in most churches - viewed as simply another translation. It was done by good people with the best of intentions, using the best manuscripts and technique available to them at the time, but that does not make it perfect, nor does it make it "scripture" in a way that another translation isn't.
We know what source material they used, and we know what they produced as output. These notebooks help understand the process by which they did that, but that's more of historical interest than anything else.
Plenty of people have undertaken the process of comparing the source material with the KJV output, so that the christian church is well aware of the relative strengths and weaknesses of that translation.
It is discovery of early source material that has the potential to cause ripples in modern christian theology - the discovery of the dead sea scrolls had a far bigger impact on modern bible translations than any KJV notebooks ever could.
There are a small number of Christian churches who believe that the KJV is "the true bible". If we found that the draft versions of the bible were greatly different than the final version, that might cause some angst for them, but generally their views are based on a form of the idea that "God protected his church by providing this bible translation" so they would simply accept that God was at working directing the translators to reject the draft version and accept the final version.