Originally Posted by Diligent

One more comment on this, since your charge warrants it:


The translators' governing rules explained when a marginal note could be written:

6. No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words which cannot, without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the text.

The NKJV translators were not working under the same kind of guideline, otherwise their marginal notes would not routinely cast doubt on the veracity of the Scripture text.

The only marginal readings in the original AV that I am aware of that resemble anything like what the NKJV translators wrote appeared in the apocrypha -- the books they kept out of the Old Testament and plainly did not regard as inspired Scripture. One example is 1Esdras 5:5 where the translators wrote "this place is corrupt." I suppose the NKJV translators decided to apply the same attitude to the New and Old Testaments that the KJV translators had for the apocrypha!