Repeating others' mistakes

Sometimes the KJB translators simply repeated the mistakes of previous translators. This happened in a few cases in their renderings of New Testament verses, as the translation team seems to have relied too heavily upon Beza's 1598 Greek New Testament.

There are mistakes in Beza, and they appear again in the KJB. Some of these mistakes do not appear in Erasmus, Wycliffe, Tyndale, and others, but then they pop up in the KJB. This is unfortunate.

Fortunately, none of them ever rise to the level of creating doctrinal uncertainties, or altering key verses; and, in fact, this is probably why these translation mistakes have rarely caused people to switch away from reading the KJB.

Here is a representative example:

Revelation 16:5 reads, "And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus."

The phrase translated here, "shalt be," should actually be "holy one." A pretty big difference, yes! That is because it is not a typo, but simply a repeated mistake from Beza.