Bible 2.1

When speaking about the Bible, especially in English speaking countries, there is no version that remains in the spotlight of controversy more than the King James Authorized Version (KJV). There are people who will defend the KJV as the only “real” Bible to their graves. There are others who will oppose the KJV to their own graves as well. What about this simple translation makes it so controversial? I will say up front that I don’t belong to either “camp” surrounding this particular translation of the Bible. I truly do straddle the fence on this issue, and honestly everyone else should as well.

I have overheard someone say that the reason that more modern translations don’t use red lettering is because they aren’t the actual words of Jesus, the KJV was. I wanted so bad to say that the publishers of those versions didn’t choose to put red ink on the pages of the Bibles in question, but I kept my mouth shut. Let’s face it, though, that is the reason the Gospels didn’t have red lettering. I said it last time and I’ll say it again. The Bible was not written in ANY form of English. It was written in Hebrew and Greek. The New Testament wasn’t even written to be a Bible, it was written as a series of letters to explain why Jesus was the Old Testament Messiah, what He did, what He expects His followers to do, and how they should go about doing it. The Old Testament wasn’t even canonized as the Old Testament till 70 years after Jesus’ death. It took another 200 years before the New Testament was recognized.

Back on topic, my main problem with the KJV is mostly practical. The version dates back to 1611, hence the name “1611 King James Authorized Version of the Holy Scriptures.” That is not the problem. The problem is in the intervening 400 years (minus 2) the English language has changed and evolved into something else entirely. When was the last time you greeted a buddy on the phone with, “Verily I saith unto thee, good sir, how hast thine day faired?” Case in point, Microsoft Word is trying to auto-correct words in the previous sentence. If you have EVER done that, congratulations, you are a nerd. (I say this knowing full well I have said something similar to my compatriots on the blog here.) The language doesn’t hold water today. Hence, I study the New King James Version. It keeps the original structure and translation, and only changes the grammar to fit in better with today’s English language.

Some try to argue that the KJV is a horrible translation of the Scriptures, as a Greek scholar I can say that is a bunch of bull. The KJV is all in all, the best translation of its Greek subtext I have seen to date. The original translation committee states in the introduction that they did the best they could with the resources on hand. They also encouraged future laborers to continue their work when better resources presented themselves. My problem with the Greek to English aspect is not the translation, it’s the Greek itself.

This is an area that Theophonic Polycarp and I disagree on, but I really dislike the Textus Receptus. I won’t get into all of the details, but it was compiled by a single person using only a handful of manuscripts because he was trying to beat a team of people who had been working for some time already to print. It’s kind of like the Playstation and the X-Box 360. They won a lot of support from fans because they were the first of their generation to reach the market. The TR was the first officially published Greek New Testament, and so it had already caught on when the other work was published. I’m not saying it’s a bad work, and for its day it was surprisingly accurate. But whereas Erasmus had only a hundred or so manuscripts, modern compilers have access to hundreds of thousands of manuscripts to find the most accurate version of the original letters that they can.

The bad mostly comes from the age of the text. There are better copies of the original Greek language out there today than there where 400 years ago. The TR is based mostly on texts that dated to within the last millennium, over 1000 years from the writing of the New Testament. There where no Hebrew texts that dated before 400 AD, also 1000 years after their writing. Archeology has turned up pieces of text that date to within 150-200 years of Jesus’ life. The English language itself has changed over the last 400 years. There are translations that use more modern English to convey the words of the Scripture writers to us.

The good about the King James Version comes from it being the first legitimate copy of the Bible in English. People like William Tyndale gave their lives to see the Bible made available in the language of the people. Up to that point you had to learn Latin or Greek to read Scriptures, and the general public could barely read their own native tongue. People where given the right and ability to study God’s Word on their own; they didn’t have to rely on preachers or scholars to tell them not only what the Word meant, but what it said in the first place. Regardless of how well it has conveyed itself into the modern era, the KJV is still a copy of God’s Word. As Holy Scripture, it contains power and authority, the power to change lives for eternity. It has its place in history, and it has its place today. It is not the best, nor is it the worst. If it impacts lives, then it still deserves the right to speak for itself.