Below will be the text of the Hooper Letter for those who have trouble reading the above copy.
I don’t know how to say this to you other than to be perfectly honest. We are very grateful to you even though you have put your finger on a matter of some embarrassment regarding the lower case ‘s’ in Spirit, reference 1Jn. , 5:8.
There is no way of knowing how many years this particular edition has carried the misprint. Our Bible department in England was astounded that this has never been noticed before. I assumed some mysterious theological question was involved and overlooked the obvious in my search of the commentaries.
This error of course, will be corrected in subsequent printings thanks to your sharp eyes. Again, we are very grateful.
In Appreciation, I am sending you a copy of our Concord KJV Bible which does use the upper case ‘S’ correctly.
It is the above letter that overthrew the faith of many. The first observation to be made is that Jerry Hooper says, "There is no way of knowing how many years this particular edition has carried this misprint". In other words, he has no historical evidence of where the bible he is printing came from or where Cambridge got it. If he had sent a researcher to the Cambridge University Library he could have found out that that particular "misprint" as he called it dates back to the first time a living translator was allowed to oversee the printing of the Bible. It went back to at least 1638. From the time that Ward and Bois (actual translators) first got their hands on a printing press to do their own printing until 1985, there has never been a time when the Cambridge University Press did not use a lower case "s" in printing I John 5:8 when they printed a standard, verse form King James Bible.
Why didn't he send someone over to the Cambridge University Library? Because The Cambridge University Press is its own entity and has no links to the past and no links to the library. If you will notice, the heading on the letter is New York, not Cambridge, England. To this day, if my reader will email the Cambridge University Press about historical questions they will respond that they have no clue as to their past and will suggest contacting Professor David Norton who they hired a few years after this letter to research their past.
Professor Norton's book gives us further insight into their ignorance. Their letter to him states categorically that when it comes to what is the "real KJV" no documentation can be found. They were still confused over the "S"s. (A Textual History of The King James Bible by David Norton page 132.) Professor Norton didn't come in and straighten them out. He used their confusion and ignorance to foist upon them the Modern Cambridge Paragraph Bible which they expend most of their energy in now printing.
Their letter to Professor Norton also makes it clear what I had long surmised, they were trusting Scrivener's Text to make corrections. The only historical evidence that Cambridge Press has on file that purports to be historical evidence is a 1929 pamphlet prepared by their PR department to celebrate their 300th year of printing the KJV. That pamphlet is wrong. It states that Cambridge was using the Scrivener Text in its printing. There are hundreds of deviations from the Cambridge text that they were printing in 1929, 1985 (when the Hooper Letter was written), and today. It is not the same text. Both the Scrivener 1873 Paragraph Bible and the 300th Anniversary Pamphlet can be easily retrieved on the internet for anyone who wants to verify this.
So, on the basis of a letter from a bureaucrat with a New York letter head, in which he confesses not to know why or how long something was done, Local Church Bible Publishers began to amend their text. 350 years of non-stop usage which was begun under the tutelage of living translators was not enough to stay their hand. On the basis of one letter from a man with no knowledge, the proper text was thrown out.