Authorship, Transcribers and added Subscriptions

Ross Purdy suggested that two other “examples of the [KJV] translators’ bias will be seen in the postscripts to two of Paul’s epistles” (I Will Have One Doctrine, p. 63). At the end of 2 Timothy in the 1611 edition of the KJV, the postscript referred to Timothy as “ordained the first Bishop of the Church of the Ephesians.” At the end of Titus in the 1611 KJV, the postscript referred to Titus as “ordained the first Bishop of the Church of the Cretians.” Bishop Thomas Bilson in his book defending Episcopal church government and apostolic succession maintained that Timothy and Titus were bishops (Perpetual Government, pp. 302-303, 341, 388). Bilson wrote: “If succession of Episcopal power came from the apostles to them [Timothy and Titus], and so to their successors, we shall soon conclude that bishops came from the apostles” (p. 302). Bilson asserted: “We infer this power must be perpetual in bishops, for they succeed Timothy in the church” (p. 391). Bilson contended: “St. Paul committed that power and care to Timothy and his successors” (p. 406). Bishop Overall’s Convocation Book claimed that “it is very apparent and cannot be denied, that in many Greek copies of the New Testament, Timothy and Titus are termed bishops in the directions or subscriptions of two epistles which St. Paul did write unto them (pp. 145-146). In this same book, KJV translator John Overall referred to Timothy and Titus as “two apostolical bishops newly designed unto their Episcopal functions” (p. 140).

James Lillie maintained that the Church of England uses these postscripts “to prove her order of bishops” (Bishops, p. 3). Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstowe maintained that “our Episcopal men of late in newer impressions enlarged their phylacteries, in putting those postscripts in the same full character with that of the text, that the simple might believe they are canonical Scripture” (Smectymnuus, p. 45).

Concerning these postscripts, Ross Purdy asserted: “The bias of the King James Version ’translators’ towards prelates (i.e., a hierarchy of ruling prelates/bishops is quite obvious” (I Will Have, p. 64). John Davenport asserted that the postscript to 2 Timothy and to Titus “are apocryphal” (Power, p. 80). William Perkins (1558-1602) noted that “most of the postscripts are uncertain, if not false, as of that after the second epistle to Timothy, in which Timothy is called an ‘elect bishop of Ephesus’” (Works of William Perkins, Vol. 4, p. 21). John Brown maintained: “These postscripts are of no weight; are of no divine authority; but were added, at least in their present form, ages after their [referring to Timothy and Titus] death, by some imposter” (Letters, p. 42). Thomas Powell observed: “The subscriptions at the end of the Epistles are of no authority; but only mere human tradition” (Essay on Apostolical Succession, p. 54).

While the 1560 Geneva Bible also included a postscript to 2 Timothy, its rendering does not assert the same degree of Episcopal bias. The Geneva Bible postscript referred to “Timotheus the first bishop elected, of the Church of Ephesus.” Haak’s 1657 English translation of the 1637 Dutch Annotations had this note after the postscript at the end of 2 Timothy: “These subscriptions even as it is uncertain who set them down, so their truth is also uncertain.” At the end of 2 Timothy, Theodore Haak noted or translated: “(The Epistle) to Titus, the first elected overseer [Gr. EPISCOPON; that Titus was an evangelist, sent to and fro by the apostles to spread abroad the gospel, is indeed collected out of the Scriptures; but not that he was anywhere a Bishop, as they are at this day called amongst the Papists].”

These misleading postscripts used to advocate Episcopal church government remain in some [perhaps all] KJV editions printed at Cambridge and Oxford in Great Britain, but they are not found in a number of KJV editions printed in America. Do KJV-only advocates believe those words of the postscripts as the KJV translators did and do they assert that these postscripts should be printed in the KJV editions that they recommend? Some KJV-only advocates recommend as the perfect standard Cambridge KJV editions that include these Episcopal postscripts.