This article is much longer than I would have originally liked, and goes into detail on various aspects of this monumental subject. I still have only scratched the surface, but the deeper I dig, the more I come to realize what a monumental waste of time this whole debate is. If you don't want to read the whole article, my bottom line is that there is nothing wrong with modern Bible translations. The King James Bible is extremely difficult for modern readers to understand. You do not need to struggle with it. Use the modern translation that communicates God's word to you in the clearest and most understandable way. For further study on this topic, I like Bible Research, particularly The English Versions of Scripture. The Bible Gateway is an essential resource for Bible students.

Note: I also have a review of a sermon I listened to while doing research on this topic. The review touches on King James Only issues from a different perspective, particularly the conspiracy theories in the sermon.

I found a local radio station which carries many Christian broadcasts, some of which are by people who believe no Bible translation other than the King James version (KJV, or Authorized Version) should be used. I was surprised to find that this debate was still going on. In no way should the rest of this article imply that people who know and understand the King James Bible need to give it up. Nor do I imply that the King James Bible has incorrect doctrine, or doctrinal errors, because it doesn't. But I feel strongly about addressing the issue of insisting modern English speakers use the KJV.

A distinction must be drawn between the people who are sincerely concerned with the correctness of the Bible, and those who have found a button to push. Some of this "debate" is shameless, coming from individuals who have discovered a way to sell books and tapes by using scare-ism devoid of facts or critical thought to push buttons and get the reaction they want. (When I began researching this topic, I was not prepared for the sociological element of it; the King James Bible is apparently the source of the livelihood of many people who perpetuate some of the more bizarre aspects of this debate.) Because most lay people probably know little about ancient texts and translations (I only know about it because I have always read ancient texts, before and after becoming a Christian), they can easily be alarmed by scare-ism concerning how the integrity of the English Bible is being undermined. A lot of lay people probably don't have the background to evaluate these scare tactics. They're sucked into buying these scare-ist resources to be protected from these imaginary dangers. I do not aim this article at the sort of people who are profiting from misinformation, but they are out there. Beware of these wolves hiding in sheep's clothing. They prey on ignorance. Most people do not know anything about how the English Bible (in any translation) was ever created. Even those who know koine Greek and can read the New Testament probably have little background in the tedious science of textual criticism. The wolves use this fact to their advantage, to paint a pseudo-intellectual case to scare people away from reliable and readable Bibles. Most of them don't (or don't want to) understand the textual issues, either.

The bottom line for me is communicating. I am someone who wants a Bible text I can understand in my native language. I am a writer and poet, who wants to communicate in clear, readable words. I don't always succeed (and sometimes deliberately create obscure works to highlight the distinction between meaningful communications and nonsense), but I try to study how to put English words in order so that they communicate meaning. I am not a theologian, or a translator, or an arbiter of doctrinal correctness.

To me, the King James Only advocates miss the most important aspect the debate: the King James text does not make any sense to modern readers. After all, J.B. Phillips said the King James text in 1941 was "not intelligible" to modern readers (in the preface to his paraphrase), and four generations or more have passed since then. What else is more important than a Bible text that speaks to those who read it in their own language? Christian history (and Jewish history) is filled with translations made expressly to speak to the people of their times. (Aramaic paraphrases and the Septuagint, the Latin Christian versions, the modern missions work translating the Bible into all living languages, etc.) To neglect today giving people their own translation, in their own language, is a violation of the Great Commission. Frankly, the King James text, which is closer to the Latin Vulgate than to modern English, is an insurmountable barrier keeping people from God's word. In an age when, according to Barna's polling, most Christians don't understand basic doctrinal concepts, why add any barriers to understanding the Bible? I can't get past this point, and it's the reason I completely reject the King James Only position. I don't understand why anyone would want to obscure the word of God in a translation that doesn't make clear sense anymore. Most KJV-Only people are Protestants, and don't seem aware that one of the issues the Protestants were protesting was the insistence of the Roman Catholic church in using a Bible translation no one understood, the Latin Vulgate. The landmark of the Reformation was a readable Bible for everyone in plain, everyday language so that God's word could be a living reality. It was the Geneva Bible which revolutionized the English-speaking world, not the King James.

King James Only advocates will say people need to have an unabridged dictionary and other tools to make sense of the KJV. This is begging the question. Why have a "translation" people don't understand, for which special tools are needed to approach, rather than one in the natural language being spoken? I have seen the King James Study Bible, and it is all but a re-translation itself. On average, I think there are two words glossed per verse, and the running notes often wholly retranslate opaque phrases to make sense of them. Why have all this apparatus encrusting a translation that can't be understood, when people can read a clear translation? (Plus, consider that a regular dictionary you'd buy at the local office supply store would not be helpful with the KJV. You would need a dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary which discussed the history of word meanings and how they have changed. That would not be cheap, and would represent a burden for many people.)

The words themselves are understandable. No one will argue that. In fact, when you read something from around the 16th century (like Milton, Bunyan, etc) notice that the glosses normally are on rare words, and not usually concerning the syntax. (I.e. rarely does the editor re-word a phrase to explain what it means.) The King James text is the opposite: most of the words make sense, but the syntax does not. King James Only people love to point out that the words in the King James text are at a low reading level, and are easy to understand. This is true but misleading. Understanding individual words isn't the point. The chief difficulty modern readers have with the KJV is not that the words are hard, but that the syntax is so garbled it makes little sense to the modern reader. Another way to put this is that all the individual words tend to make sense, but the text as a whole does not "parse" into something meaningful.

The King James text's syntax has two components: King James English and Greek literalness.

1. King James English lacks helping verbs, and has a very fluid word order which comes from English's roots as an inflected language. Inflections had just about died out by the time the Bible was translated into English, but the inflected roots of English and some of the vestiges helped the translators make a fairly literal rendering of the Greek. An inflected language, like English used to be, and like Greek and Latin are, does not use the position of words in a sentence to indicate a part of speech. Modern English does. (We use helping verbs to preserve word order when adding words to a sentence.) Modern English readers have to do mental gymnastics to parse King James sentences because we use the order of words to indicate their parts of speech. English fixed in word order read we today. Inflect not we the verbs or pronouns to indicate parts of speech. Reading more than a phrase at a time in the King James Bible is extremely tedious. In complex books, such as Romans, it is difficult to follow the overall argument Paul develops, because you can't see the forest for the trees. (We also punctuate differently, which makes the text harder to follow.)
2. The King James text is less readable than, say, Milton, because it isn't even written in the English of that time. It's in what I call "Biblese", a combination of English words and Greek syntax. The King James text is true to the Greek word order as much as it can be without being total gibberish in English. (In many places, the King James text translates figures of speech literally, creating a baffling English text.) When you combine fluid word order from King James English with Greek word order, the result is extremely difficulty for modern English speakers to unlock meaning from. These sorts of literal translations are useful for detailed study. But to fully express what the original text means in normal English, some sort of "paraphrasing", that is using a natural English word order even when it deviates from the Greek, is necessary.

Here is an example from Mark 10:18, "And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good?" In modern English, the second half of this phrase is gibberish. We don't put words in that order. The modern English reader has to know "thou" is a second-person-singular subject pronoun ("thee" is used for the second-person-singular object pronoun), and that it is the subject not by its position in the sentence, but because the word itself encodes the fact that it is a subject. Me is the (indirect) object. (This distinction is becoming lost in spoken English, where many people begin sentences with "me and ..." as a subject instead of "... and I".) So the sentence is verb-subject-indirect object-direct object. We say: "Why do you call me good?" (We would probably say "why are you calling me good?", but the translation needs to be faithful to the original Greek tense, depending on whether it is present-continuing action or present-one-time action.) Let's take a reality check: most English speakers don't know this much about their own language, let alone King James English. (And, why don't King James study Bibles have a chart of the different parts of speech? I've never understood this, since it's critical for understanding the text. To this day I have never seen a King James Bible explain the basics of King James English.) After some study, we can decode what the passage means, but doing this thousands of times becomes tedious and causes us to miss the point of the overall text.

Another example is Acts 23:21a, which says: "But do not thou yield unto them: for there lie in wait for him of them more than forty men". An example of Biblese: No English speaker at any time would write something like this, even in King James times. To read this tongue-twister aloud would take some practice. (NIV: "Don't give in to them, because more than forty of them are waiting in ambush for him." ESV: "But do not be persuaded by them, for more than forty of their men are lying in ambush for him".)

People who understand the King James text have all but learned a foreign language. Over the years they have used the KJV, these people have learned obsolete words, obsolete verb forms, obsolete syntax, etc. (Oddly enough, I have never seen a King James study Bible that explains how King James English works; wouldn't that be the first thing a King James Bible ought to have?) They've also learned all of the places with infelicities of translations, and how to work around them. People with intimate familiarity with the King James text must not be able to understand just how opaque it is to a normal person: Most people can't pick up a KJV and understand the text as-is. Maybe people with a lifetime of familiarity with the KJV don't honestly know how opaque it is to modern English speakers, especially those of us who didn't grow up learning King James English but who came to the Bible later in life.

King James Bible clip and save reference:

Pronoun	Subject	Object
First person singular	I	me
Second person singular	thou	thee
Second person plural	ye	you

Use of my / mine (first person) and thy / thine (second person) depends on whether it is a possessive adjective or a pronoun:

• As a possessive, the choice depends on the initial sound of the noun. If a noun starts with a consonant, my or thy are used. If the noun starts with a vowel (or silent "h"), mine or thine are used.
• As a pronoun, my and thy are subjects while mine and thine are objects.

Obsolete verb tense endings:

• -est indicates second person singular.
• -eth indicates third person singular.

The table above is based on notes I've put into my King James Bible, gleaned from various web sites. Example verses of the usages are not given, because I don't have time to find them. (1 Thess 4:10 is a good example of ye/you.)

Does the text of the King James Bible define the words that are used? One KJV-Only author claims this, but I find it hard to believe. Take the word "froward", which I genuinely thought was a typographical error the first time I saw it in print. (The modern reader will automatically transpose the two "wrong" letters, "ro" to "or", when seeing this word.) This word appears 24 times in the King James text. In no usage can I discern a definition. I defy anyone to take these occurrences to a person who does not already know what this word means, and see if the person can discern a precise definition. Obviously, from context, froward is something you don't want to be, but what it means can't be deduced with any certainty simply from its occurrences. Also, without knowing what a word means, it is very difficult to know if parallelism is comparing something else to it, or contrasting with it. A similar claim is that the KJV text can be memorized more easily than modern translations. This is probably true for short phrases, because the unusual wording is memorable (and many KJV phrases are English proverbs now). I am not sure that it is true for longer chunks of text. It is easy to take Romans 8:28 out of the context and quote it as a proverb, but it is not as easy to memorize the entire eighth chapter. Has anyone ever studied how easy the KJV is to memorize in chapter-sized chunks? Also, while phrases may be memorable (the KJV is likely easier to memorize because it requires long scrutiny to make sense of), do people understand what they memorize? That's the real test. How many times has Romans 8:28 been taken out of context as a universal statement, rather than used in its context of prayer?

Do you have a corrupt King James Bible? Don't answer too hastily. The letter "j" was the last letter adopted into the English alphabet as a consonant, after the King James Bible was first printed. Be sure to look at a reproduction of pages from an original 1611 printing. If your King James Bible has the letter "j", it has been modernized by someone who has made changes to the text. (And I'm sure it's no coincidence that "J" has been used by modernist scholars as an abbreviation of one source in their deconstructive theory of multiple-source redaction of Genesis! This would not be possible without the modernization of the alphabet.) If your King James Bible doesn't say "Ieremiah" and "Ioel", it's been tampered with and modernized. Make sure 2 Thess 1:5 says "iedgement". This may sound nonsensical, but is the sort of argument you'll find in the KJV-Only world. Some of these folk suggest checking 2 Timothy 3:17 in a King James Bible to make sure that, during the typesetting, the typographical error "throughly" was not corrected to "thoroughly". (Too bad access to the O.E.D. online costs a lot of money, because I'd like to read their entry on "throughly". If anyone has paid for the O.E.D., please send me a copy of their entry for this word. I'd love to know if there are any documented pre-KJV examples of it. Of course, spelling wasn't fixed at the time of the KJV, and "throughly" could actually have been the spelling intended. Even if this is true, the word "throughly" is still meaningless in modern English.)

KJV: Darth Vader's Bible

Besides the Star Wars movies, the KJV is the only place I know that mentions the "sith" (Vader was a Dark Lord of the Sith order). Here are some unusual passages I noticed in an article about a new, corrected edition of the KJV from Cambridge. I include these examples to show that the KJV is not a fixed text which will never need revision. Four hundred years later, the work of establishing the final text is in progress. (I am not being serious about Darth Vader, but many KJV-Only say things like that in all seriousness.)

Passage	Modernized	Original
Acts 3:7	ankle-bones	ancle bones
Exek 35:6	since	sith
Matt 4:2 (etc)	an hungred	a-hundgered

King James Only people frequently say the King James text is easy to understand because it uses short, familiar Anglo-Saxon words. They aren't telling the complete story. Most of the small, connecting words and common verbs of the King James text are English. But the important doctrinal words tend to be derived from Latin. For this reason, I say the King James is closer to the Latin Vulgate than to modern English. Righteousness is one of the few doctrinal words taken from Old English. Here are some samples of other King James words and where they come from: The Latin word "elect" is used in place of the Old English "choose". Latin words: propitiation, adoption, grace. Latin words brought into the English language through Old French and Middle English: justification, redemption, mystery, dispensation, earnest (i.e. down payment), condemnation. "Inheritance" is from Old French, but "heir" is from Latin. "Carnal" is from Latin, "flesh" is Anglo-Saxon. Predestinated is a Latin-ish construction from the Middle English word "destiny". (Note this word has changed its meaning since King James times.) The word "conversation" is derived from French and Latin, not Anglo-Saxon. (Another word that has changed its meaning.) The King James Only people, at best, grievously oversimplify the matter when they claim the words in the King James text are Anglo-Saxon, but this short list shows otherwise.

The argument that people can get an unabridged dictionary and look up obsolete words is a red herring. The words of the KJV often make perfect sense (and remember, while some words like "froward" obviously require a dictionary, when a word like "devote" or "let" has changed its meaning, there is no visual clue that the reader needs to look up its meaning), but the syntax does not render anything meaningful in modern English. An extreme example, which I found referenced on a web page, is the incomprehensible text of 2 Corinthians 6:11-13: "O ye Corinthians, our mouth is open unto you, our heart is enlarged. Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own bowels. Now for a recompence in the same, (I speak as unto my children,) be ye also enlarged." No modern reader could begin to make sense of this. It seems to be talking about a medical procedure to straighten the bowels. Even if a dictionary told us that bowel did not mean what we thought it meant, but "[Archaic] the inside of the body, regarded as the source of pity, tenderness, etc.; hence, tender emotions", this still doesn't help make sense of the passage: "O ye Corinthians, our mouth is open unto you, our heart is enlarged. Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own [tender emotions]. Now for a recompence in the same, (I speak as unto my children,) be ye also enlarged." To continue trying: "O ye Corinthians, our mouth is open unto you, our heart is enlarged. Ye are not [hampered] in us, but ye are [hampered] in your own [tender emotions]. Now for [repaying us for what we've done for you] in [your own tender emotions], (I speak as unto my children,) be ye also enlarged." The more I try to make sense of this passage, the less sense it makes. The reader of the KJV must mentally re-translate each phrase in most cases. This is not good, because it obscures the big picture. KJV readers drown in the details and miss the argument of the books, especially Paul's letters. Particularly right now, in an age when many of the wolves have a vested (often financial) interest in keeping people ignorant of what the Bible actually says and means, and ignorant of sound principles for Bible interpretation, missing the big picture of the Bible can be deadly. The King James text to modern English speakers simply obscures the message the Bible is trying to communicate, and there is absolutely no justifiable reason for using the text. (If we kept re-translating the passage above, and kept trying to bring out what it meant in English, we'd get something like: "We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians; our heart is wide open. You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your own affections. In return (I speak as to children) widen your hearts also." This is the English Standard Version's rendering. Instead of struggling for hours to make sense of a few sentences, why not use a modern translation?)

Most King James Only advocates believe modern Bible translations (anything after 1881) are made from a corrupt original text. Even if this is so, that point doesn't have anything to do with using an obsolete, 400-year-old translation no one understands anymore. The texts from which the King James Bible were originally translated are extant (as far as I know) and a readable, modern translation could be made from them. There's no excuse for fundamentalists who object to modern translations not to make their own if they don't like the ones in use now.

The odd part of the King James Only debate is there are modern translations faithful to the original texts. The English Standard Version was created so that evangelical fundamentalists would have a reliable modern translation. King James Only advocates reject it. The New King James is, quite frankly, a case of selling conservatives the Bible they want. (There's nothing wrong with doing that, since a good translation is the result: The NKJV is one of the best study tools ever created, because it carefully notes what material is in the King James' original texts versus the modern texts.) The vitriol poured on the NKJV from King James Only advocates is astounding (especially since I have used it for years to follow preachers using the KJV, and have never noticed any substantial differences, or even many minor ones). I do not like the King James Only position because it so often comes down to them simply not wanting people to have clear, easy-to-read Bibles. The truth is, if I could find any substance to the arguments of the King James Only position, and I believed modern versions were corrupt, I would throw away my modern Bibles use the King James Bible (until I could get a reliable, modern translation). While I am hardly an expert in the arcane world of Bible translations, when I look at arguments from both sides, I believe that modern translations are reliable. Given the choice between a KJV I could not understand and an NIV I could, I choose the NIV.

(For the record, before I ever knew that there was a King James Bible debate, I used the New King James and NIV for years when I became a Christian, and followed along with hundreds of hours of teaching tapes. I can't remember ever hearing any doctrinal statement that wasn't reflected in my translation. To this day I have never heard a speaker make any sort of doctrinal point I could not follow in a modern translation.)

The original text of the King James Version is the Textus Receptus (received text) which was received in Europe after the fall of Byzantium when the eastern half of the Roman Empire fell and people brought the text into Europe, which had been primarily Latin-speaking and was just experiencing a new revival of Greek. King James Only advocates say this text is reliable. The modern Critical Text harmonizes this text with other, older texts using established methods to determine what material is original and which was added later (i.e. textual criticism). All other modern Bibles (except the New King James) use this text. Are there problems with the Critical Text? I am not qualified to judge, but the one line of argument I think may be of interest is the fact that some early manuscripts are Alexandrian, that is from Egypt, where the Gnostic heresy had its roots, and some changes to the text could possibly be to make them more palatable to the Gnostics. (I do not know if this is true or not, but it is about the only rational argument supported by evidence that I have heard in the entire King James debate. After looking into it, I do not think there is much to this argument, for the reason that readings from the Egyptian codices are supported by even earlier versions. This is not a simple issue.) Overall, though, from what I have studied about this issue, the few changes made are not doctrinally significant. Their importance is greatly exaggerated by the King James Only advocates. I have followed teachers using the King James Bible for years with the New King James, and I have never encountered any development of a major Christian doctrine that relies on a disputed passage. Most of the hyperbolic missing verses and phrases of newer Bibles are simply places where later texts repeat phrases or verses that the earlier texts do not.

I have looked and looked at the textual issues. I am not a textual scholar, and there's the rub: it is easy and simplistic for the King James Only people to say, for example, that "modern translations delete verses". These sorts of straw-man arguments can't lose, because the only way to explain the other side is to go into mind-numbing discussions of textual criticism. The KJV-Only people have a quiver full of these "zingers" to shoot at people, and making the defense is quite difficult because it involves the kind of abstruse and detailed arguments from the science of textual criticism that put people to sleep. I recommend the book by Phillip Comfort about Bible translations, as an approachable and readable explanation of the issues modern translators face. Beyond books like his, the explanations of textual issues are embedded in commentaries and other works not particularly accessible to laypeople. I have picked a few favorite KJV-Only passages and looked at them under a microscope (a few paragraphs of which can be found in the middle of this review). When I do, the KJV-Only position is not particularly convincing. Usually there is a clear reason for modern translations to read the way they do. And these disputed passages don't amount to much. I have used the NKJV and NIV for years to follow along with KJV preachers, and I have never once encountered a missing verse that called any sort of doctrinal point into question. (I have encountered the opposite, where preachers will make some sort of point based on the exact wording KJV text which doesn't make much sense when reading in other translations. Most of the Word-of-Faith movement's doctrines are this way.)

Everyone concerned about the issue of the Bible's original New Testament text (remember, the Old Testament is almost wholly fixed in the Masoretic Text and this is not an issue for the OT) needs to realize that there are textual variants on almost every single verse in the New Testament. The King James Only position is grossly oversimplified when it comes to the Textus Receptus. As much as KJV-Only people rail about the modern, critical text, even the Textus Receptus was a critical text. Erasmus himself did what the Critical Text editors did, which is to take multiple manuscripts and assemble a single text with the best possible readings. Erasmus just didn't have the breadth of texts available, nor the time, to be as comprehensive as modern editions are. Today's Critical Text is the product of thousands, maybe even millions, of decisions which are made to reconcile variants among texts. The science of Textual Criticism has a set of fixed rules which are applied to variants to determine the best reading. When the King James Only people say words have been removed from a verse, what they do not tell you is this is one of the few ways in which textual criticism is visible in an English translation. Almost every single verse has gone through a process of reconciling different readings, only in most cases it isn't visible in English. (Most popular English commentaries do not discuss textual criticism of individual passages, unless they are controversial, so you won't see this process in a normal commentary. You can search Google for a textual commentary on a book of the NT, see the multiple readings, and get a feel for some of the decisions textual critics must make.) The point is, the Textus Receptus is not clearly superior and obviously correct, compared to the Critical Text which is clearly inferior and obviously corrupt. The King James text is not automatically correct when it includes spurious words, and modern Bibles are not automatically incorrect when they omit them. This is a gross oversimplification that does not do justice to the issues involved.

The mind-numbing nature of the arguments on both sides is difficult for a non-specialist to digest. These are the sorts of arguments that the English reader of the Bible wants scholars to settle before a translation is made. I suppose with web sites alone, both pro and con, the King James Only debate has produced more material than anyone could ever digest. There are also numerous books. (Even if you avoid the hardcore textual discussions, the sheer amount of material is overwhelming.) I think a normal person would go stark, raving mad trying to follow the King James Only arguments. Not only are the discussions technical, but they are also cloaked in a style of disingenuity that takes a clever mind to unravel.

The detail into which these arguments go is beyond even the motivated layperson's ability to follow, since often they are on the level of citing manuscript readings. The layperson is unable to even evaluate the reliability of an article or book, because the issues are so utterly abstruse it's hard to make sense of them. Here is an analogy: When your computer crashes, you don't really want me to walk you through the debugger and do a stack trace and tell you the register contents and stuff like that. As a user, you don't know what all this is. You want me to explain in everyday English what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. If I did go into a jargon-laced tirade about the technical aspects of the crash, you would not be equipped to decide if I am telling you something meaningful, and not dazzling you with a smokescreen of arcane technical jargon that doesn't mean anything. How much substance is there to these back-and-forth textual arguments? I don't know, but I do know that when I pick a translation of any work from a language I don't read, I have certain expectations. I want the translator to be someone who has studied the original text for some time, and who is familiar with the scholarship on the text. I want someone who is fair to all sides of disputed passages, and who will add footnotes if needed. I want someone who does not have an agenda behind the translation. For example, there are hundreds of translations of the Tao Te Ching by mystics, New Age people, etc. But are they correct and reliable? Do the translators know the ancient Chinese language? Do the translators have any qualifications to do the job? Have the translators read scholarship on the text? Is the agenda to produce a faithful English rendering of the original, or is it to produce something compatible with the translator's agenda? Is stuff I don't understand (like "straw dogs") explained in footnotes? If that much care is put into something like picking a translation the Tao Te Ching, or Herodotus, or any ancient work, how much more should it be put into the Bible!

While Critical Text editors Westcott and Hort are the super-villains of the King James Only debate, the KJV advocates do not mention that the Critical Text has been revised numerous times since then, and most modern Bible translations are based on textual editions far removed from the first edition of Westcott and Hort. The Critical Text has been studied by scholars of widely varying backgrounds. Modern Bibles are not directly based on the work of Westcott and Hort but on a work over twenty editions removed which incorporates much more scholarship than they had access to. Yes, indeed, the King James Only world frequently becomes a strange place. For example, Westcott and Hort would be considered by today's standards to be radical right-wing conservatives. Erasmus, whom the KJV-Only people venerate as the true preserver of God's word in the Greek text, was a Roman Catholic priest whose church did not want the English Bible to exist at all.

(There is an attempt by some KJV-Only people to link Westcott to occultism. The B. F. Westcott of the Critical Text is not the W. W. Westcott linked to 19th century occultism and whose texts can still be found with a Google search today. These men, for whatever true faults can be found with them, are targets of amazing libel.)

When it comes to the original text argument for using the King James text, note that the New Testament is the only part of the Bible called into question, because the Old Testament text was fixed long before the King James translation was made. The King James text and all subsequent translations use basically the same original Hebrew text as the basis of translation. If nothing else, by the textual argument, the King James Only people should insist on using the King James text for only the New Testament, since there is no argument that modern translations are based on the same original Old Testament text, but which are translated with a vastly improved understanding of Biblical Hebrew which wasn't available at the time of the King James text. Reasonably they could use a modern translation for the Old Testament without concern, if reason ever entered into this debate. (It does not, since they need the modern, liberal Bible translations' use of "young woman" instead of "virgin" in Isa, 7 to support their conspiracy theories. This has absolutely nothing to do with the underlying original text, but in how an ambiguous word is translated.)

One of the most significant errors King James Only advocates make is to lump all "scholars" together, and assume they are all part of a conspiracy to replace traditional Christianity with some sort of inferior modernist, humanist belief. This is easily refuted. Many of the scholars who have worked on modern Bible translations are well-known as Bible believers whose other works are decidedly conservative. As an example: F.F. Bruce (deceased), Leon Morris, Tremper Longman, Gordon Fee, Douglas Moo, and many others have worked on modern translations, and have also published extensive commentaries and writings in which they did not hide their conservative positions. Anyone could easily find out what these translators believe. There could, perhaps, be a worldwide conspiracy to undermine the Christian faith through modern Bible translations, but the conspirators have done a fantastic job of covering it up. How many people have ever read Gordon Fee's excellent conservative defense of the Pauline authorship of the Pastoral Epistles, in his commentary? A few hundred? Fewer? To cover up the vast conspiracy, we're expected to believe Fee researched and wrote this defense, which few people likely even know exists (and fewer heave read), just to throw us off the trail? Absurd. Look at the sheer number of scholars, reviewers, editors, and producers of the average modern translation: we're expected to believe hundreds of people are all engaged in a conspiracy? These conspiracy theories help no one, and make King James Only advocates look like a bunch of kooks.

I have looked at the conspiracy theories, and they are frankly absurd. I will not even waste time talking about them. But consider the nature of the good conspiracy theory: it can't be exhaustively proven to be false. Since no one can conclusively prove the conspiracy is not true, someone somewhere will believe it. God will preserve his word. There is no question about that. But how will he do it? Through the open exchange of ideas among scholars who leave a record of their writings which is readily available, or through the paranoid ravings of conspiracy theorists? Who will be entrusted with the preservation of the Bible?

Another error is to lump all modern Bible translations together, and argue that if one modern translation is not good, none of them are. Bibles like The Living Bible (a paraphrase) are clearly inferior, but one inferior Bible does not condemn all modern translations. Also, liberal Bible translations like the New Revised Standard are not the same as conservative Bibles like the New International Version and the two can't be lumped together. King James Only advocates like to lump the Jehovah's Witness translation, the New World Translation, together with modern, conservative translations. This is absurd. The JW translation intentionally mistranslates the original texts where they are perfectly clear and understandable, in order to promote JW doctrines.

The King James text is assumed to always be right, which leads to straw man arguments: Why do modern Bibles delete verses out of God's word? The assumption, of course, is that these verses belong in the Bible and that they are being deleted in modern translations rather than having been spuriously added in the first place. (The fundamentalists who oppose Catholicism in general are the ones fighting to retain verses introduced into the original manuscripts in the centuries before the Reformation.) King James Only advocates jump to unwarranted and hyperbolic conclusions, saying things like there is a conspiracy to undermine Christianity by making it compatible with world religions. (Surely they don't, themselves, believe these theories, and are being hyperbolic. If someone were to delete a verse from a gospel to harmonize the Bible with other religions, why wouldn't the parallel verses in other gospels also be deleted? They also can't believe their own one-world-religion conspiracy theories, since many of the King James Only positions were started by a Seventh-Day Adventist!) I do not see King James Only advocates asking the obvious question: Why were the "deleted" verses put into the King James text, and why would scholars who respect the Bible text consider removing them? The arguments behind most texts are fairly convincing. Even if they were not, the King James Only advocates don't discuss them. If King James Only advocates would take the "deleted" verses and discuss arguments for their inclusion, they might convince people more readily. But they can't, because there is nothing to discuss. The reason no modern translation follows the Textus Receptus rather than the modern critical text is that people who understand the issues know there is no basis for translating the Textus Receptus readings. King James Only advocates either don't understand the issues, or understand them and want to distort them.

The more I study different threads of the King James Only position, the more I return to a Seventh-Day Adventist named Benjamin G. Wilkinson. This was a surprising turn of events. Several different people have traced the origin of the modern King James Only movement to Benjamin G. Wilkinson, a Seventh-Day Adventist who wrote a 1930 book called Our Authorized Bible Vindicated. The SDA have an interest in perpetuating KJV use, since they are a pseudo-Christian offshoot which depends on the KJV working for some of its aberrant doctrines (not unlike the Word of Faith beliefs). Fundamentalists have latched onto this movement and spread it. It's important to question arguments made by an SDA, since there is an inherent conflict of interest.

I am surprised that the King James Only people are not a unified crowd, but a bunch of small factions working towards quite different purposes. Most modern KJV-Only people are Protestants. About half of them are Calvinists and the other half are Arminians.

Note: Conspiracy theories surrounding modern Bibles are easily refuted by showing that, among themselves, there is no agreement on what the conspiracy is trying to accomplish. Of the KJV-Only clusters I discuss next, they can't all be right, and among themselves they can't agree on which is correct. One conspiracy theory would be difficult to believe, but to believe there are multiple conspiracies working at cross-purposes is absurd. Because these conspiracy theories are so difficult to prove, proponents have to resort to strange explanations of why the conspiracy is ineffective and unnoticed among people who don't see conspiracies behind every word in modern translations. They speculate that conspiracies have been in operation over multiple generations, in total secrecy, to water down the Christian gospel by making small changes. This line of speculation is absurd, because in each generation there arises those who teach the core doctrines of the faith with renewed emphasis. A conspiracy which is so subtle that it unfolds over multiple generations with no discernable effects (other than those seen by conspiracy theorists) is the height of ineffectiveness and ought to be abandoned because it isn't working. The only truth behind any modern Bible conspiracy theory I have ever heard is that there is absolutely no shred of evidence to support it, other than evidence manufactured by the conspiracy theory proponent. I am disturbed by how readily Christians seem to be willing to support conspiracy theorists by buying their books and tapes.

King James Only people cluster in three main groups:

1. British and European Protestants who are hard-liners, and consider modern Bible translations as ecumenical attempts by other Protestants to reconcile with the Roman Catholic church. (I have not discovered why they insist on using the King James translation and not the Geneva Bible. The KJV is "Authorized" by the British Crown, that is, the Anglican Church.)
2. American Protestants who consider modern Bible translations a plot by "Modernists" to take over the church and corrupt Calvinistic doctrines. This centers mainly on the release of the Revised Standard Version in the 60s, which caused a huge backlash in American Christianity. The version was rejected by many Christians because it had a liberal slant to its translation. Christians also resented the way mainline denominations adopted the translation and rammed it down the throats of their members, many of whom did not get to read or critique the translation before it was officially adopted. (Many conspiracy theories resulted from this heavy-handed pushing of the RSV, including one about the "Modernists" taking over seminaries and poisoning Christianity from the inside.) The watershed adoption of the RSV by mainline churches caused a backlash in two directions. More moderate groups of conservatives had the NIV translation made as an alterative to the RSV. Traditionalists formed a KJV-Only movement. While they initially railed against the RSV, calling it the "Anti-Christ Bible", the RSV fizzled in America and was never widely used. The KJV-Only movement turned its guns on the NIV, and their scorn for the NIV (which is so similar to the KJV in places that it is easy to follow along) is almost unbelievable. (What is a "Modernist"? There is no exact definition, other than someone who is not a traditionalist. I found a fitting definition: Scruton defines a modernist as someone "believing that traditions must be overthrown or redefined in order to do justice to the new forms of experience" on p. 2 of Modern Philosophy, and says this person will "pour scorn on those who take refuge in the values and habits of a superseded age." Although a modern philosopher, Scruton is not a modernist in this sense.)
3. Arminians, who are generally the conspiracy theorists who see a New Age conspiracy behind every word in modern translations. They also attack Calvinists. These are the most surprising of any group for a number of reasons. The King James Bible was produced by Calvinists in a time when Calvinism was the predominant Christian belief, and is largely the Geneva Bible without the footnotes. If you don't like Calvinism, the King James Bible is the last thing you want to use! Modern Bibles are much more amenable to Arminianism than the KJV. The lengths to which the KJV-Only Arminians go in their quest to root out doctrinal impurities is amazing, since Arminianism itself waters down the classic Christian message. Arminianism waters down the doctrinal purity of Augustine and the Reformers. (On the other hand, it is not surprising that the KJV-Only Arminians venerate the Catholic priest Erasmus.) In our time, most Arminians tend to use modern, readable Bible translations because they feel a strong call to evangelize and make the message known. I can't really explain why the evangelistic Arminian branch of Christianity would produce KJV-Only supporters. Perhaps they don't have an appreciation of Christian history? (And please don't call them "ARE-MEE-NEE-UHNS", because the Armenians are a Christian group in modern Turkey and Iraq. Their beliefs are closest to Eastern Orthodox. The people who aren't Calvinists are "ARE-MIHN-EE-UHNS".)

By the way: This fact answers the question about why KJV-Only people insist on using the KJV, instead of the Geneva Bible. It would make more sense for KJV-Only people to insist upon using the Geneva Bible since the KJV was as controversial in its day as the modern Bibles are to KJV-Only people. The King James Bible is essentially a revision of the Geneva Bible, without the doctrinal footnotes added by the Reformers to help explain the Bible. The KJV was rejected much in the same way modern translations are today, because Reformed Protestants thought its purpose was to corrupt Protestant doctrine by removing the footnotes. The KJV only became widely used a generation later when Protestant theology returned to England, after the Reformers were suppressed. Most of the hard-line KJV-Only people are Arminian and do not hold to Reformed theology, so the last thing they would want to use is the Geneva Bible, which is a direct product of the Reformation. The Geneva Bible is the Bible of John Bunyan, the American puritans, and other Protestants of the 16th and 17th centuries.

You will frequently hear the argument that the King James Bible has been the standard Bible of the English speaking world for 400 years, and thus modern translations are not needed because the KJV text is sufficient. This is a disingenuous argument. The Geneva Bible was the main Bible of Protestant Christians for almost a century, and was so for at least half a century into the KJV era. For the past two hundred years, people have been trying to update and replace the KJV text. This means that during the KJV era, well over half the time people were either not using the KJV, or trying to replace it.

An incidental note: Sometimes people say Shakespeare was involved in the King James translation. Realize that Shakespeare was born in 1564, after the publication of the Geneva Bible. The King James text is based on the Geneva Bible. You may hear something about Psalm 46 having the words "shake" and "spear" in them. The word "shake" is also in Ps 46:3 in the Geneva Bible. Psalm 46 is close to word-for-word the same in both Bible texts. This is simply a coincidence.

Note on copyright: Supporters of the King James Bible say it is a text which doesn't have copyright, and therefore no one owns the rights to it, which makes the text free of the controlling influence of anyone. True, the King James text is not copyrighted in America. True, it predates American copyright law. At the same time, the British Crown as head of the Anglican Church owns the rights to the King James text. This is why it is the "Authorized Version". The British Crown gave exclusive printing rights to Cambridge and Oxford. This situation still obtains today as far as I can tell. (Unlike American copyright law established by our Constitution, which limits, or at least used to limit, the term of a copyright, there is no such limit on the King James text.) Saying the King James text is not copyrighted is practically a meaningless statement. Remember that America did not respect international copyright at all until recently. There is an "Authorized Version" of J.R.R. Tolkien's works in America, printed by Houghton-Mifflin, because a company called Ace made an unauthorized paperback release of his Lord of the Rings, which was copyrighted in England.

I've heard many strange statements concerning the King James Bible that I have started collecting them. Here are a few:

• The King James text is "correct English". I have actually heard someone on the radio make this amazing assertion more than once. And he uses modern helping verbs to create modern syntax (I do not think he realizes what he is doing; instead of: he realizes not what he is doing). He is curiously silent on correct spelling, likely knowing the King James Bibles we have today are the result of completely recreated spelling that has no resemblance to the original. Of course, the King James text was dated even in 1611, because it was a revision of texts from the previous century. If you read contemporary works (like John Bunyan, or even Shakespeare), they are much easier to read. (That is also because the King James text uses a Biblese English for its literal translation that was never a naturally spoken English at any time.) Also, this assertion plays into the myth that there is some standard, codified, "correct" English arbited by English teachers and William Saffire. Since before the English language was recognizable as such, English has been in flux. By 1611, the English language was already (and still is) a polyglot language composed of wave after wave. The original Germanic root language was assaulted by a wave of French, waves of Greek (medical and scientific terminology) and Latin (legal and government terminology), plus countless loan words from every language under the sun. And it continued to change, and still changes today. To say there is one correct English language is absurd. It is impossible to create a frozen, "correct" English language because the needs of mankind to communicate change, and the language changes with it.
• Modern translations remove the name of Jehovah. I have heard this, but do not fully understand it. Neither the King James text, nor the text of the Geneva Bible, translates the divine name YHWH as "Jehovah", they use the term LORD (in small capitals). (Cf. Psalm 23:1 and 110:1.) The only time "Jehovah" appears is in place-names, where the Hebrew is transliterated rather than translated. Modern Bibles do not do this, because to most people these strange names communicate absolutely nothing, while the meaning behind the names is highly significant. Instead, modern translations translate what the name means. (By analogy, if we translated information about Louisiana into Martian, we could transliterate the letters of Baton Rouge. Or, we could translate it into whatever the Martian language words were for "red stick". The difference is the name in this case doesn't have any real meaning to anyone.) The only Bible I recall ever seeing that translates YHWH is the New Jerusalem Bible, which uses Yahweh instead of LORD (in small capitals). (Of course, the King James Bible did not have the word "Jehovah" in it either, because the letter "j" was not part of English when it was printed in 1611.)
• Modern translations remove the word "hell" from the Bible, while the King James retains it. How can we tell people they're going to hell if the word "hell" isn't in the Bible? The word hell in the KJV is used for five (!) different Hebrew and Greek words: Sheol (Heb.), Abaddon (Heb.), Gehenna (the burning pit), Hades (Greek underworld), and Tartarus (below Hades). Modern translations are being responsible in accurately translating these very different terms. There is also the issue that "hell" retains little meaning in modern English, since its primary use today is slang. (The slang word was originally a curse word, but is little more than a verbal pause like "um" anymore.) Hell was an English word for the underworld, which comes from Norse and Germanic roots, deriving from Hel, the goddess of the dead. (This is important, because some KJV-Only people object to using the Greek mythological term "Hades"!) This is a typical kooky argument: the King James text is said to be a more accurate translation, but when modern translations are actually more accurate than the KJV, they are tampering with God's word. Similar is the criticism of replacing "princes" in the KJV with satraps in the NJKV (which KJV-Only people think is a distortion): The word "prince" conjures up a huge royal wedding us older people saw in their childhood in the 1980s on television, and fairy-tale characters in younger people. Satrap is a more accurate translation ("the governor of a province in ancient Persia") precisely because it does not have modern connotations of royalty. (Satrap is a Persian word filtered through Greek and Latin to English.)
• Even KJV-Only people are remarkably unable to use King James English consistently. I've listened to quite a few sermons and radio broadcasts, and these folks generally begin to address God in prayer as "thee", and switch to "you" after the first couple of sentences. At the end, they generally return to "thee". After I started noticing this, I hear it now without even listening for it. If they can't use King James English consistently, what hope is there for the rest of us?

These are just a few samples I've collected.

In the King James Only position, the use of the KJV is supposed to signal doctrinal correctness, against the errors of both the reactionary Roman Catholics (and those who would rejoin their fold through ecumenism) and the "modernists" (a general-purpose term roughly analogous to "Communists" as the Cold War root of all that is against true belief). What the King James Only advocates never tell you is who some of the staunchest King James Only believers are:

• Paramahansa Yogananda, syncretist who merged Hindu, mind-science, and Christian beliefs. (Not only that, but his SRF still sells King James Bibles.) One of the major pillars of the KJV-Only position is their claim that new Bible versions are part of a conspiracy to bring New Age beliefs into Christianity. Yoganada is one of the few people who have openly tried to harmonize Christianity and Hinduism (the philosophical basis of the New Age), and he used the King James Bible.
• Benny Hinn, accused of necromancy and with documented proof of bizarre doctrinal aberrations from any known form of Christianity. (He has his own KJV study Bible.)
• The Word-of-Faith movement. (Many of their doctrines are based on the exact wording of the King James text, so they can't easily switch.)
• The Seventh-Day Adventists. (Similar to the Word-of-Faith movement, doctrines don't make as much sense in a clear translation.) By the way, some of the early King James Only material came from a Seventh-Day Adventist. From what I have discovered, this material has been cited in Christian fundamentalist literature without adequate citation about the background of this person. Naturally, any material by an SDA would require the highest scrutiny, since the motive behind it would immediately be questioned. Why did the King James Only movement start with a doctrinally aberrant group with a vested interest in preserving the use of this translation?

With friends like these ........

The opposite is also true: many of the most fundamentally sound teachers, doctrinally, don't use the KJV. John MacArthur, R.C. Sproul, and others use modern translations, but advocate strict Reformed theology. And they derive this theology wholly from the contents of the modern translations they use. So it can't just be the Bible translation that determines doctrinal correctness.

I am coming to see that the issue is not so much about the King James text per se, but that the King James text has come to be a symbol of a much deeper issue. I can sympathize with this view, having seen so much of the world I grew up with faded and dead now. The truth is, old-line fundamentalism is in decline. The last generation to be reared on the KJV is fading out. After a point, the NIV overtook the KJV in sales. (This is not unlike the fading of the Classical education, learning for its own sake founded on the Classical works, which was replaced by the practical, modern vocational college education. Penguin Classics were once seen as cribs for people who could not handle Greek and Latin. Now, to most people, the Penguin Classics are the ancient works, because the Classics will be read only in English.) Further, I am amazed at radio, where many broadcasts feature speakers who are not only dead, but some for twenty years or more. Others feature speakers who are well over sixty. The world these people grew up in is being discarded. No one wants to become part of it. The world they spent their lives building and establishing and defending is irrelevant. And there's nothing they can do to stop it. These people are not going to say: "Come back to the past with us! Throw away the modern world you live in and retreat into our bubble. Take on the old ways like us." No. How they express their message is through seeing corruption in the modern world, and showing they have kept the truth. They say: "You must retreat into our bubble, because it's the only place you'll find the truth. It's the only safe place." By itself, the King James text does not represent textual superiority, and it does not represent doctrinal correctness. So what does it represent? A fading generation is trying to pass along the torch to a new generation, and their outstretched hand is met only by empty air. No one will take the torch. I'm deeply saddened by this, not because I think the King James Bible ought to still be used, but because the human race is losing a lot of important values that made human existence meaningful. The old Calvinist and Puritan world view is something the world desperately needs to go back to. Not much chance. The baton, the KJV, will fall to the ground, and those racing ahead into the modern world will never come back to pick it up.

There's no point in listing of the foibles of the King James text, something its advocates don't really ever mention. (Discussions of this topic can easily be found on the Internet.) The dragons and unicorns are well documented (an infelicitous translation in an age when the Bible is dismissed as fable). "My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him." (Song of Songs 5:4). A woman's adornment should not be external, but "let it be the hidden man of the heart" (1 Peter 3:4). Greek prepositional phrases: "coals of fire" (Romans 12:20), "obedience of faith" (Romans 16:26), etc. (These phrases are meaningless in English: what is the obedience of faith? Can faith be obedient? Is it the obedience that result from faith? Obedience that creates faith within the obedient?)

The mistranslation of "leprosy" in the King James Bible is a serious issue. KJV-Only advocates never mention it. The disease called "leprosy" in the Old Testament is some sort of communicable skin disease, and is nothing like what is called Hansen's Disease today. Most people could not contract Hansen's Disease if they wanted to, because it requires a susceptibility most people don't have. Because of this mistranslation, those with Hansen's Disease have been subjected to tremendous suffering, and this condition has not been given the same medical attention than it probably would have if Hansen's Disease had not been so radically misunderstood. This mistranslation alone is enough reason to banish the KJV to the scrap heap of history. I believe it is irresponsible for modern translations to continue to use "leprosy" when the disease is clearly not that at all.

I don't think the KJV translation has no place at all. It is an important document in the English language, and essential for studying English literature, which makes countless allusions to it. My point is the KJV should not be the main Bible people use to comprehend the word of God. I refuse to use it for serious Bible study.

Not all modern Bible translations are equal. Conservatives will want to avoid liberal translations like the NRSV. Protestants will want to avoid Roman Catholic Bibles. (Although, in fairness, quality of the New Jerusalem Bible translation is exceptional, even though I do not agree with Roman Catholicism. Why can't the Protestant world produce an equivalently readable, accurate, and literary translation?) Paraphrases like The Living Bible, The Message, Phillips, etc should be treated with caution. They are curiosities, but not for serious study. Eugene Peterson, for example, can create brilliantly insightful paraphrases of some passages which helps unlock the meaning buried into them, but other times the way he words things is so strange that it's hard to understand what he is trying to communicate. I would tend to stick to the NASB and NKJV for literal translations (and the new ESV is excellent), and the NIV for a more natural, readable version. The NLT is good for reading big chunks at a time, especially in the epistles, because it is highly readable, but I would not use it as a primary study Bible. It is not a paraphrase like the original Living Bible, but is an extremely dynamic translation.

In English, the attempts to replace the King James Bible have only multiplied it, since most major translations today are revisions of, or revisions of the revisions of, the KJV. This includes the RV (original Revised Version), ASB (original American Standard Bible), NASB, AMP, RSV, NRSV, NKJV (plus other KJV updates), ESV, etc. Only a few translations are totally made from scratch. These include the NIV (although its roots in the KJV tradition are not disguised), the NLT (which is a revision of the Living Bible, which makes it a much more accurate translation), and the two post-Second Vatican Council translations from the Roman Catholic church (the New American Bible and the New Jerusalem Bible). So it's not like the heritage of the KJV is going away any time soon. The text is simply getting closer and closer to an extremely accurate version of God's Word. The high standard set by the KJV's accuracy, inherited from the original Reformers and their first English translations, is simply being upheld. (Note that the Catholic "New American Bible" and the Protestant "New American Standard Bible" are two different translations with unfortunately similar names.)

Be aware that many of the other translations on the market are simplified translations first made for children and as a base text for foreign language translations, which have basically been repackaged as adult Bibles. I would be very careful about translations not on my short list. It's a sad commentary on the educational level of society that so many of these translations are meeting the needs of adults.

I've noticed people who use the King James Bible often supplement their study with The Amplified Bible, for some reason (perhaps because they don't realize it's based on the original ASV). While you can gain insights from this translation, care must be taken to avoid reading too much into the text. An error I see frequently is that someone will discover the Greek (or Hebrew) word behind a word in the KJV, and look it up in a Greek dictionary, and assume that they can pick any part of the definition that appeals to them, and plug that part of the definition back into the text without respect to word usage or context. This is not a valid way to approach a word, in any language. Since The Amplified Bible's amplifications are often dictionary definitions of words, this can help reinforce the "definition cherry-picking" error.

My recommendation is to have both a Biblese literal translation like the NKJV (or the new English Standard Version) and a readable English text like the NIV. Each serves a purpose. For long arguments, like the letters of Paul, it is much easier to understand the overall flow of what Paul is saying when the text is in a natural, readable English version. What these lack in precision, they make up for in comprehensibility. Once the overall message is understood, verse-by-verse study is better in a more literal translation. Each phrase can be unlocked for the full meaning in detail. Below that level are word studies on individual words. As individual words are studied for their full meaning, you will come to realize more and more that any English translation of the Greek text is wholly inadequate. And I strongly recommend getting a study Bible like the NIV Study Bible or the King James Study Bible (which I mention next) that will explain the historical context of passages that would otherwise be confusing. (John MacArthur's study Bible is also useful, because most of the study notes are about the meanings of words in the text to bring out a lot of information, even if you don't fully agree with all his doctrinal positions. Most other study Bibles tend to promote a specific doctrinal position.) In a nutshell, a dynamic equivalence translation like the NIV is good for reading large chunks of text and following the argument, while a literal translation like the ESV is good for detailed study of specific verses and passages.

If you need a King James text edition of the Bible, I have seen a lot of them over the years, and think Thomas Nelson's King James Study Bible is without much doubt the best. I have a copy of this edition for reference, since it's hard to avoid the KJV text with some of the studying I do (Milton, Spenser, etc.). (Except I gave my copy away.) It has Thomas Nelson's extensive marginal note system which glosses obsolete words and explains difficult phrases. The study notes are aimed at Protestant conservatives and should be totally uncontroversial (and are of interest even if you don't use the KJV exclusively). Many study notes re-translate extremely difficult passages to give the modern reader a sense of the meaning. There are some other KJV text editions, but they don't have the marginal glosses and are much harder to follow. The KJSB is worth every penny for its margin notes. I also recommend downloading a modern-spelling version of the Geneva Bible and comparing KJV verses to it. While the KJV is used by Puritan, Reformed, and fundamentalist groups today, the Geneva Bible was the Bible of the Reformation. (They thought the KJV was as bad then as the KJV-Only people think modern Bibles are today.) I also have the Breakthrough Miracle Bible which uses the King James text, but that is more because it's a miracle Bible. Plenty of people believe "the Bible" if it is gutted of what makes it unique such as miracles. But a miracle Bible makes a statement.

Note on the New Jerusalem Bible: Although I mention the NJB as a good English translation, please keep in mind that I am talking about its natural English usage and style, and not about the principles of translation that are used. I do not theologically agree with Catholicism, or liberal scholarship in general. The NJB tends to paraphrase to create readable, meaningful English sentences. (I wish someone would take the natural, readable style this Bible uses and make a conservative Protestant translation.) Also keep in mind that I happened to pick an edition without the notes and introductions, so I was spared much of the liberal scholarship which this extra-Biblical matter promotes. Like the so-called Catholic Study Bible, which has little to do with Roman Catholicism, and a lot to do with liberal scholarship, the complete NJB edition seems to have notes and introductions similar to the Catholic Study Bible. My NJB is the "Saint's Edition", which I picked (only) because it was the most readable typesetting of all the popular NJB editions you can get on bookstore shelves.

Note on the English Standard Version: With the publication of R. C. Sproul's Reformation Study Bible in the ESV, I have been impressed with the ESV text. It is a readable, accurate, modern text. I recommend the ESV highly. I have put my money where my mouth is, and bought a leather-bound version which will be my main study Bible, replacing my use of the NASB and NKJV. The ESV may well be the next standard Protestant Bible, replacing the NIV and the KJV as the main evangelical Bible text.

Case Study: Gal. 6:7-8

A passage that is interesting to compare in several translations because it is a great example of Greek which is translated into a sort of "Biblese" by the King James and most of the translations which follow it.

The King James text says:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

The word "deceived" refers to self-deception (do not deceive yourself), something the translation doesn't bring out. (The Amplified Bible does, at the expense of making the passage enormously verbose.) The words "sow" and "reap" are replaced in modern English by "plant" and "harvest", but these are not significant barriers to understanding. Most people know the proverbial phrase "reap what you sow", and know the meaning of these words.

The real impediment to understanding is that the sentence syntax is not natural English. No natural English speaker would string together all these prepositional phrases. We'd expect newer versions to revamp the strings of prepositional phrases, but they don't in general. This is what Bible purists call a "literal" or "essentially literal" translation, which sacrifices readable English to present the underlying Greek words and their order. There's nothing wrong with this at all; such a literal translation is extremely helpful for detailed study. But it is not always comfortable to read.

The New King James says:

Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life.

Although they added a modern helping verb, "Do", at the beginning, and rearranged the text a little, they did nothing to make this more readable. No native English speaker would write something like this. It is obviously an extremely literal rendering of the underlying Greek (a language which uses a lot of prepositional phrases), but the syntax doesn't make much sense in English. In its way, the New King James solves half the problem of the KJV.

The New International Version says:

Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature [mg: Or his flesh, from the flesh] will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.

The NIV is probably about as in-the-middle of a translation as is possible, combining enough literalness to make it a worthwhile study text, with enough readable English to make it comfortable for normal reading. The generically meaningless preposition "of" has been replaced by "from". The technical term "flesh" is replaced by its definition, with a marginal note showing the literal Greek. The classic King James sow/reap is retained. I've always liked the NIV because it manages to combine readable English with faithfulness to the original text.

The New Living Translation is interesting:

Don't be misled. Remember that you can't ignore God and get away with it. You will always reap what you sow! Those who live only to satisfy their own sinful desires will harvest the consequences of decay and death. But those who live to please the Spirit will harvest everlasting life from the Spirit.

This translation is fascinating, because the proverb "you reap what you sow" is used. This phrase is a chunk that is not mentally broken down into its constituent words. It retains the reap/sow pairing of the King James et al translations, but follows it up by using the more natural English word "harvest". Here, too, like the NIV, the technical word "flesh" is replaced by a definition.

The New Jerusalem Bible has:

Don't delude yourself. God is not to be fooled; whatever someone sows, that is what he will reap. If his sowing is in the field of self-indulgence, then his harvest from it will be corruption; if he sowing is in the Spirit, then his harvest from the Spirit will be eternal life.

At the expense of being wordy, this is probably the most natural and elegant natural, readable English translation I have found. The Hebrew parallelism, which was clearly intended by Paul, is bought out by using the phrase "sowing in the field" and "sowing in the Spirit". The Greek prepositional phrases are put into a natural English wording. (I am not advocating Protestants switch to a Catholic Bible, but why do they get such an elegant and readable English translation while we get "coals of fire"?)

The King James Study Bible (KJSB) offers us a good example of trying to make the King James text readable. Look at 1 Peter 1:13 in the King James text:

Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ

To a modern English reader, this makes little or no sense. There is no possible way that anyone can say "gird up the loins of your mind" parses into a meaningful phrase in modern English. Not only is it obsolete English, but it's also in the Biblese literal translation language that isn't quite English. We must assume that this is a literal rendering of an idiomatic expression. There is also a Biblese jumble of prepositional phrases near the end. This verse is identical in the Geneva Bible and the King James, and in this case the translation (in its own language) is quite literal and faithful to the original text. What it lacks is English readability, which would unlock its meaning to the reader.

Let's interpolate the KJSB's margin explanations:

Wherefore [prepare your mind for action], be sober, and [rest your hope fully upon the grace] that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ

Now the meaning is coming out, because the idiom is explained. This still doesn't quite parse as modern English, but much more meaning has been revealed. (The KJSB does not gloss "sober", which has narrowed its meaning over the centuries to specifically refer to not being drunk from alcohol.)

The New International Version renders this verse in natural English:

Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.

Notice the idiom has been translated into a meaningful phrase. (The English Standard Version solves the problem very nicely, by flipping the King James text and KJSB margin note. The literal Greek is preserved in a footnote.) The rendering of "sober" is replaced by a modern definition. The prepositional phrase jumble has been put into natural English word order.

Which is the better translation? The "literal" one which doesn't have meaning in English, or the "dynamic" one which renders the meaning of an idiom in natural English? Is the NIV wrong to interpret the text to make it understandable? My point is that modern translations like the NIV are said to be inferior, when to understand this passage a reader must go through a process of decoding and unlocking the meaning. So why not use a translation where this has already been done?

Additional note:

Leland Ryken has a small booklet with the title Bible Translation Differences: Criteria For Excellence in Reading and Choosing a Bible Translation. It's a one-sided look at the superiority of what he calls an "essentially literal" translation.

The question must be asked: What is the benefit of the translation "obedience of faith"? Ryken singles out the phrase "obedience of faith" (Rom 1:5) and compares (pp. 19-20) the REB, TNIV, NIV, NLT, and ESV. He says that the ESV is more literal and therefore more exact.

	King James Version	English Standard Version
Romans 1:5	obedience to the faith	the obedience of faith
Romans 12:20	coals of fire	burning coals

So why does the ESV render Romans 1:5 literally, when it renders the same basic construction in Romans 12:20 with a paraphrase? The latter communicates to us in English what the original text would have meant to the Greeks who heard it. Since these two examples are translated so differently, what criteria is used in a "essentially literal" translation to make these decisions?

What does "obedience of faith" actually mean in modern English? The phrase communicates little meaning (with the vague "of"). It could be read as the KJV (obedient to the doctrines of faith), or as the NIV (obedience that results from having faith). What is the "essentially literal" translation communicating with "of"?

I like the ESV translation a great deal, as a more readable alternative to the hoary Biblese KJV revisions (NRSV, NASB). But I wonder about how much different this "essentially literal" translation is from any other philosophy. I still think there is room for a translation that uses natural, modern English instead of Biblese to communicate the message of the original text.