I recently asked Pastor Bryan Ross (link to my question):
I noticed something in your notes that I myself have been puzzling about for about the last year or two. What is the actual first publication date for the PCE? Usually I hear "around 1900", which strikes me as odd. Surely someone who loves the PCE (perhaps Mr. Kinney?) should have been able to identify the first printing of that edition by now.
Pastor Ross responded by informing me that he would begin addressing that very question in an upcoming lesson. He has now responded with a video lesson (link to video). The accompanying notes (link to the notes) are a treasure trove of information, which directly and thoroughly answers my question.
The first “definitive” PCE was actually the 2006 electronic edition.
As the Guide describes the process, Verschuur and his associates spent several years comparing historical Cambridge/Collins printings, reconciling differences, and correcting perceived errors. This project culminated in 2006, when Verschuur completed what he calls the first truly authoritative PCE text. The Guide states plainly, “The electronic file was finalised… July 2006.” This finalized electronic edition is the first version that the Guide presents as complete, perfect, and definitive. In effect, the PCE—understood as a precise, unified, authoritative text—came into existence not in the early 1900s but in 2006, through deliberate editorial reconstruction.
The "Guide" refers to Matthew Verschuur's Guide to the Pure Cambridge Edition. Bible Protector, 2013 (link to source).
I suppose that this July will mark the 20th anniversary of the creation of the PCE, an edition that has obtained the support of many King James advocates in this century. I am unaware of any response as yet from Mr. Verschuur; at this time of this writing, Pastor Ross's comments are only a few days old, so it's not as though Mr. Verschuur has had a full opportunity to respond to them. His initial response seems to have been to accuse Pastor Ross of unspecified "misinterpretations and wrong implications" (link to source). As a minor aside, I would like to hear from Will Kinney regarding his claim that his standard (which I believe he says is "the Cambridge," by which I think he means the PCE, though perhaps he means a different Cambridge edition) was around before he was born.
I noticed that Mr. Verschuur also posted a video, "9 Decades of PCES," after he left his comment alleging misrepresentation. His video points to a printed 1911 KJV printed by the British and Foreign Bible Society on the Cambridge University Press. Mr. Verschuur asserts that this is an example of the PCE. His justification for this assertion is that the copy in question "matches a set of readings that are consistent across the 20th century." He also asserts that there is "a continuum of the same editorial set of readings in the 1911, the 1990s..." and argues that the question is not when the PCE was first printed but whether there is a "collective of editions with the same set of readings." Mr. Verschuur acknowledges that there may be errors in the editions, which he characterizes as "mistakes somewhere in the typesetting." He asks: "Does that make a Bible invalid?" and he answers it: "Of course not." So, even after pointing to the 1911 printing, Verschuur does not say that the 1911 cannot be further improved. Instead, Verschuur reserves that for what he refers to as a "text file," presumably the output of July 2006 (or perhaps even a later date, if Verschuur detected any perceived errors in the 2006 file).
From my standpoint, while it is interesting that Mr. Verschuur identifies a specific 1911 printed edition as an example of the PCE, since PCE is defined as merely any one of potentially numerous and at least multiple editions that share a collection of readings that were selected by Mr. Verschuur.
If the standard of perfection is complete perfection, then it's hard to see how a version that falls short of that perfection in something as seemingly trivial as a "full stop" ("."), which is one of Mr. Verschuur's examples, is perfect.
Mr. Verschuur is right to say that it is not reasonable to say that the Bible is not a "valid" Bible because of the absence of a period. However, that also applies to other minor errors, and there is no bright line between major and minor errors. I think we would all agree that the so-called "wicked Bible" (a printing of the KJV that had "thou shalt commit adultery") contains an error that is major in one sense and yet also minor in another sense.
Prior to his "9 Decades" video, Mr. Verschuur posted (within the last month or so) three other videos: a three minute video showing different printings of what he asserts are examples of the PCE (link to video) and two two-hour long videos, respectively parts 1 and 2, of "Assessing the assessor of the Pure Cambridge Edition position" (part 1)(part 2). There is also a three-minute video called "Noble Empire," which appears to be a Udio-generated song, but with no argumentative substance (link to video).
Interestingly, one of the allegedly PCE Bibles shown in the first video is printed on the occasion of the coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, but is only a New Testament. Given that 6 of the 12 markers identified by Verschuur are in the Old Testament, I suppose it's naturally easier for a New Testament to qualify if one doesn't have to have the markers for books that are not included. Of course, that logic leads to the absurd result that my Scottish metrical psalter is a PCE printing, since the 12 PCE criteria do not include any markers in Psalms.
In the "Assessing the assessor" videos, Verschuur names Bryan Ross and offers some responses to earlier videos in Ross's series (the video by Ross, which I've linked above, is not the first of the series). Interestingly (to me), Verschuur complains that he's being misrepresented, while simultaneously making comments suggesting that his own edition (which he says he brought out in 2007, "And so you can actually see that it was then in 2007 when I brought out my website that an electronic copy of the Pure Cambridge Edition was published.") is the standard and suggesting that others don't agree because they don't want there to be any standard.
Unfortunately, for Verschuur, he does not seem to be able to engage the same level of dialog or research as Pastor Ross. Instead of pointing to concrete errors in Ross's research or identifying flawed arguments offered by Ross, Verschuur resorts to what can best be described as hand-waving, such as by asserting that Ross is offering a "human rationalistic exercise" (around 13 minutes in in part 1). He shortly thereafter says he doesn't want to say that Ross is "a rank Modernist or heretic or something like that." His meandering thoughts, however, do not appear to provide any concrete rebuttal to anything that Ross offered. One could adequately, I think, summarize Verschuur's response as consisting of a reiteration of positions already mentioned by Ross coupled with statements suggesting that somehow the rhetorical flavor of his position has been misrepresented through accurate but selective quotation of his comments.
After listening to both parts of Verschuur's "Assessing the assessor" video, I think the biggest question that his position poses is this: how does Verschuur know that the PCE is perfect (as to spelling, capitalization, punctuation, italics, and so on)? Likewise, why hesitate to use the word "error" to describe a deviation from this standard (e.g., in part 2, around 1 hr, 36 minutes in, he states: "So that's why I say here that the we're talking about the pure Cambridge edition that not only is the edition correct, which is an editorial form, but then in a copy editing sense of even having no typographical error and resolving edition variation errors. I wouldn't really use the word error so much as they're not error errors like 'oh no that's an error.' I'm just using the word error as in like it's not the actual standard. And I think probably I've consciously tried to not use the word error to mean that because it would lead people like Brian Ross to say, 'Whoa, he said there's errors in PCE printings. Oh no.' Like he's would totally be misrepresenting things to say that. But no, that's not what I'm talking about.")?
Finally, Mr. Verschuur does protest the idea that his Pentecostalist views are the basis for his identification of the PCE. However, it's hard to come up with any better explanation for Verschuur's seemingly arbitrary identification of 12 marks of the PCE, half of which have to do with the capitalization of the word "Spirit" (or "spirit"). I'm certainly willing to acknowledge that Verschuur's background pre-commitment to Pentecostal/Continuationist views does not necessitate his seemingly arbitrary list of marks of the PCE, but mostly because of how arbitrarily the marks seem to be selected. For Bryan Ross's arguments how Mr. Verschuur's Pentecostal beliefs influence his determination of which readings are "pure," see Pastor Ross's Lesson 273, "PCE Pillars and Pentecostalism" and accompanying notes (link to notes).
For all his complaining about being cast as extreme, Mr. Verschuur does not hesitate to accuse Pastor Ross: "But Brian Ross is the other extreme of almost compromising with with sort of modernistic thought. Like he'll happily go to the Hebrew and Greek. he'll happily you know sort of try to say well additions don't matter. So he's on the other end. Now I'm talking in the spectrum of what we'll call believing the King James Bible but he's really on an extreme edge and there's plenty of stuff he says is great but he's still like on the edge as far as that." (around 1 hr, 55 minutes into part 2) Imagine the extreme of being happy to go to the Hebrew and Greek! Of course, a few seconds later, Verschuur seems to take it back with "it's not that extreme what he's saying ...."
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