Here is a quote from my book:
Meanwhile, in America there had been attempts to edit the Bible too. Noah Webster (1758–1843) wrote in his preface to his Revision of the Common Version, “I have attempted to remove, in a good degree, this objection to the version. It was my wish to make some further alterations in this particular; but difficulties occurred which I could not well remove.” This type of attempted alteration of the King James Bible was on a whole other level. Of course, through history, various new versions had come out supposedly rendering some words better, or paraphrased the Scripture. (Even John Wesley committed this error.) And there were also some (presumably on both sides of the Atlantic) who were so prudish (as opposed to chaste), that they thought that the language and content of the King James Bible too racy and vulgar for delicate ears, and so they attempted to sanitise the text. Such persons had much more success with Shakespeare than with the Bible. The Bible is, of course, a moral book, and there is nothing profane about it. The Bible uses “piss”, “bloody” and “bastards” in their proper contexts, and not as vulgarities. Some, like Webster, even disdained the use of “dung”, “womb”, “breasts”, “paps”, “whore”, etc.
But Webster’s notions were leading toward something far more sinister. Webster attempted to Americanise the Bible, and to introduce word changes under the misguided notion of “correcting the grammar” — he was actually changing things into error and such changes were never adopted in Britain. Webster’s version, in particular, was a bold attack on the King James Bible. In his 1833 preface to his revision of the Bible, he claimed that there were errors throughout the Bible, and admitted that his faith was shaken when he could not understand how the Euphrates and the Gihon of Ethiopia could come from a common source according to Genesis 2:10–14. But his solution was simple, he determined that the Bible contained a great mistake here, and accused the ancients of being ignorant of geography, and so took it upon himself to “correct” their error, thereby restoring his “faith”. Yet, he would only have had to read a little further in Genesis to see that there was a worldwide flood, and by this geographical features, such as rivers, could be drastically altered. It was obvious that he did not really believe the Word to begin with, or he would have sought to understand it, instead of change it.
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