What does the lamb lie with?

[robvalue]

That seems like the default hypothesis, and the simplest explanation. I’d have to go for this if forced to pick. It would be easier to accept if there weren’t quite so many oddities "occurring" though. Some of them look just like what I’d expect if someone was actively fucking with the text.

Well...people are.  This sort of thing is part of how the stories came to us in the form we have them now to begin with.  Nobody needs to go house to house with whiteout changing personal copies of magic book, and no one ever needed to do that.  

Thanks very much for everyone’s input! I’ll be investigating this further, if I can figure out how it’s even possible to do so.

The conclusion it would be tentative to draw is that people don’t read their bibles as much as they claim, or at least they don’t concentrate properly when they do. But this is rather patronising and assuming.

It has the benefit of being true, though.  The whole "I know every jot and tittle of the word of the Lawd!" thing is pious theater.  Always has been, anytime people set out to study it they find the same thing.  

IDK what other occurrences and oddities you have in mind...but people mis-remembering things isn't all that surprising, and in this case a bunch of people may have never known the verse to begin with.  Then you've got culture using the imagery, and the mistaken belief amounts to an alliterative phrase.  Then, lions are mentioned in the passage anyway, which I actually didn't remember even though I remembered wolves and sheep.  Probably because there aren't any lions where I'm from and I'm not in the subculture that emphasizes the imagery, lol.

Even if there actually were people going door to door with whiteout, they wouldn't have to touch this one, and even if they were touching things..they're obviously not touching this one...because there it is in black and white all the same.  We can repeat the same comments with memories instead of magic book.  Nobody needs any help to get this sort of thing wrong.

I suppose that taken at face value, it goes to show something I used to say quite a bit: it doesn’t matter what the bible says, it matters what people think it says. It’s just amazing to me that such innaccuracies could get out of control, even in heavily religious areas.

I find some of the things fascinating though, such as the word "stuff" appearing in the KJV. What the fuck is that doing there, that word can’t have existed at the time it was inserted can it? Even if it did, what scholar would put it into the Bible?

We'll have to see what other changes occur / have occurred

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PS: The thing is, the hypothesis, "It happened by chance and people have misremembered" has to be falsifiable at some point, or else it’s simply an ad-hoc explanation. Deciding exactly what point it stops being adequate isn’t something that can be easily statistically qualified of course.