Dear Pastor Bob,

I agree that no Bible is perfect.  And I read with interest your historical information concerning the people who wrote the Bibles, all of them imperfect people.

I would like to know why you assume and state that King James I/VI was conceived illegitimately,  that Lord Darnley, Mary Stuart's husband, is known to not be the father of James.  I have never read anything like this, even though I've read a great deal about the Stuarts.  I am a distant cousin of Mary Stuart and King James (we had a common foremother, Eschyna de Molle).  

What I have read is this:  Mary was indeed unhappy with her marriage to Lord Darnley, but no one has before this (in my reading) suggested that James was illegitimate.  Mary was a Catholic living in a largely Protestant country, Scotland.  She had been happier living in France, where she was raised, and where she was engaged and married to the French royal heir, who died very young.  She brought with her to Scotland the "Four Maries," her "ladies in waiting", and she also imported an Italian priest, Rizzio, as her advisor.  Her husband, Lord Darnley, was often absent, and was not a pleasant husband, but I have not read anywhere that the child James was conceived by an adulterous relationship with Rizzio.  I think that if this were the case (that Rizzio was the father) there would have been no move to annoint James as the new king of Scotland at the age of 13 months, after Mary was forced by the Protestant nobles to abdicate.  They would not have liked a new king who was a bastard, and a Catholic-bred bastard at that.   Politics in those days was as nasty as politics today, so maybe it is possible that James was a bastard.  Where did you find this to be alleged?

James was raised totally apart from his mother by Protestant clergy, from whom he got a good Biblical understanding, and he was involved in his translation of the Bible, alongside his appointed scholars.  He had Porphyria, a rare disease that he got from his mother Mary's genes, and probably

from his father's genes as well, since Lord Darnley was Mary's cousin on a "porphyria line" stemming from several sources, including the Tudor line

and the Stuart line.  Poor James.