Bryan C. Ross wrote his investigation to answer a pressing worry among King James Bible believers: are modern printings that change spellings—things like throughly → thoroughly, alway → always, ensample → example, stablish → establish—“corruptions”? Ross opens his work by describing the headlines and fears that prompted the study and then states plainly his purpose: to determine whether these are truly different words with different meanings or simply orthographic variants (Ross, Introduction).
Ross makes his own theological posture plain. He is unequivocally a King James Bible Believer who affirms that the KJB is God’s Word for English speakers and that it is a formal‑equivalent (literal) translation of a preserved text; as such the KJB is inerrant in what it reports (Ross, Introduction). From that KJV‑only, right‑division Mid‑Acts vantage we can insist on faithful preservation of doctrine while still facing the historical and textual facts Ross lays out.
On those historical facts Ross shows the reader how unstable English orthography was from 1611 to 1769 and that many changes between early and later King James printings were the correction of printer errors, updates in spelling, or punctuation shifts as English usage settled (Ross, A Brief Orthographic History). He cites David Norton’s cataloguing of many textual variants across editions—Norton documents hundreds of verse‑level differences—so the demand that every printing be verbatim identical overreaches the textual record (Ross, Framing the Discussion; Norton cited in Ross).
That overreach is central to Ross’s critique. He frames the problem as one of verbatim identicality: if every minor difference in wording or spelling is treated as corruption, then defenders of the KJB are forced to pick a single printing as the unique inerrant edition—an untenable position given the textual history Ross summarizes (Ross, Framing the Discussion). Ross illustrates the principle that what matters is the nature of the difference—whether it is simply another way of saying the same thing or a substantive doctrinal change—not mere variance of letters or word order (Ross, Framing the Discussion).
Ross then turns to dictionaries and English reference works to test alleged discriminations of meaning (Ross, What Saith the Dictionary?). He lists and consults historical sources—Cawdrey, Bullokar, Cockeram, Blount, Bailey, Johnson, Webster, Skeat, the OED, and others—and shows that the available lexicography does not support a hidden, robust difference between pairs like throughly/thoroughly or alway/always. Ross uses those findings to challenge selective readings by some KJV advocates (he cites Matthew Verschuur/Bible Protector and Keith Blades as examples) who claim such spellings carry distinct meanings; Ross concludes the dictionaries and the textual record do not bear out those sharp distinctions (Ross, What Saith the Dictionary?).
The pastoral implications Ross urges are practical and charitable: orthographic modernization in many King James printings does not automatically equal doctrinal corruption, and historical American printings exhibited such spelling updates long before the late nineteenth century—facts Ross reserves for Part II but flags as important to honest defense (Ross, Introduction; Part II referenced). His aim is unity under a clear, consistent, evidence‑based stance: love for the KJV and firm defense of preservation, without making claims the textual and lexicographical evidence cannot sustain (Ross, Introduction). For Mid‑Acts, KJV‑only believers this is a call to steady, careful witness—defend the inerrant KJB, but do so with the historical and linguistic facts in hand as Ross has modeled.