Just as the KJV translators changed the Bishops’ Bible’s two other uses of “Easter” at John 11:55 to “Passover,” they may have also changed this third use at Acts 12:4. While Tyndale and Coverdale had used the rendering “Easter” several times for the Jewish Passover, the later English translators had increasingly changed this rendering to “Passover.”
In a 1671 book based on earlier manuscripts of Henry Jessey, Edward Whiston indicated that a great prelate, the chief supervisor of the KJV, inserted “Easter” back into the text of the KJV at this verse as one of the 14 changes he was said to have made (Life and Death of Mr. Henry Jessey, p. 49). In his 1648 sermon entitled “Truth and Love,” Thomas Hill also noted that Acts 12:4 “was another place that was altered (as you have heard) to keep up that holy time of Easter, as they would think it” (Six Sermons, p. 25).
In his 1727 book, John Currie maintained that at “Acts 12:4 in which place we have Easter, whereas it is the Passover according to the Original, this might be to favor their holy time of Easter, or an Easter communion” (Jus Populi Divinum, p. 38). In his volume on Acts in his An Interpretation of the English Bible, B. H. Carroll observed: “Pious Episcopalians and Romanists use this verse of the A. V. to confirm their custom of celebrating Easter” (p. 184). James Woolsey asserted: “To support, from the Scripture, the idea of Easter-Sunday and Easter-day, they suppress the original word which the Holy Ghost moved the inspired penman to use, and employed the Saxon word Easter” (Doctrine, p. 93).
Was the goal of inserting Easter back into the text at Acts 12:4 in order to present faithfully the meaning of the Greek word in English or was it intended to give the readers a different meaning?