Thanks for looking that up Marshall. I’d love to do another round of the One Year Bible plan with the King James (I’m assuming no one’s assembled it out of Geneva). I don’t regret the New Living, as it’s helped my access, but I know there’s a lot of places where important nuances about 17th century interpretations will be lost.

As regards the passage you quote from Colossians (verse 2:8), George Fox would of course have read it in the Authorised (“King James”) translation, and had access to the older Geneva translation, and in those versions, which are more literal, it comes across rather differently.

What your version renders “human thinking” is in the AV/KJV “the tradition of men” — which Fox, in common with most religious scholars, would have seen as a fairly clear reference to religious tradition. So in Fox’s understanding, this part of the verse would have been a rebuke to those who accept post-apostolic add-ons to Christianity, things like the doctrine of purgatory and the idea of Christian war.

What your version renders “from the spiritual powers of this world” is in the AV/KJV “after the rudiments of the world”, and in the older Geneva Bible “according to the rudiments of the world”. The marginal notes to the Geneva Bible explain the word “rudiments” as a reference to “the ceremonies of the Law” as distinct from the Gospel, making this part of the verse a repetition of the same idea expressed in the phrase “the tradition of men”. And many early Friends, Fox included, would have been familiar from childhood with the Geneva Bible’s interpretation.

But in seventeenth-century English, the standard meaning of “rudiments” was “elements” or “basic components”, and the phrase “the world” did not necessarily mean “Jewish religion”. And thus the phrase “the rudiments of the world” could easily have been understood by an intelligent seventeenth-century reader as meaning “the basic premises of secular thinking” — ideas like “God helps those who help themselves” and “the best defense is a good offense”. It is at least possible that Fox, who was always a deep thinker and didn’t feel bound by standard interpretations, took the words in that more basic sense.