Some fundamentalists believe the King James Version of the Bible is the only accurate version and the only one inspired by God.
Imagine you arrive late to church one morning and quickly slipping into a pew next to a friend in the back. You notice fairly quickly that something is strange. You can’t understand a word the preacher is saying and it isn’t because you’re in the back of the church. He is speaking passionately, and hammering a point home, but he’s speaking in another language – and he isn’t stopping.
After about 10 minutes you lean over to your friend and whisper, “What is this all about?” Your friend whispers back, “Before the sermon started, he announced that from now on he would be delivering all of his sermons in Aramaic, because that’s the language Jesus spoke.”
That’s well and good, but last you checked, nobody in the congregation spoke Aramaic. You bear with it for a while because you want to be obedient to your pastor and be a good Christian, but after about three weeks of going to church and not understanding a single word, you give up and sleep in on Sundays. Afterall, if the point of the sermon is to communicate God’s truths, your pastor certainly isn’t meeting anybody’s needs by speaking a nearly dead language.
Far-fetched? Perhaps. But there are a considerable handful of churches that do this week in and week out. I say considerable handful because this is a relatively small group, but not an insignificant group, particularly in the South. These are the folks who believe the King James version is the only valid English translation. In fact, some members of this group even go as far as to say the King James version is divinely inspired, even above the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.
If ever there was a sacred cow in need of becoming a hamburger, this one is premium quality. This is a subject that has much debate surrounding it and both sides of the issue have a wide array of arguments. Being that this is a blog post about sacred cows and not a dissertation on translation techniques, I’ll spare the details relating to how the King James was translated, printed, and the textual arguments for and against. I want to focus on the obvious, or at least what seems obvious to me and why I am calling the King James version a sacred cow.
Do you know anyone who speaks 15th century English? When you are at work conducting business, has a client or colleague ever uttered these words: “This selfsame day, we shall hasten to make ready our covenant with one another.” Probably not. It isn’t completely unrecognizable, but it is archaic. It is not effective communication.
What makes the King James only view problematic is that people are putting an old translation on a pedestal that is, in my opinion, higher than God. The New Testament, for example, was written mostly in common Greek – the vernacular used by the average Roman citizen. If God didn’t desire to deliver His message in an archaic form, it is incredibly doubtful that He would choose to preserve His message in an archaic form. Also, if God wanted it in 15th century English, why not just send Jesus during the 15th century and have Him speak English?
Instead, the timing of Christ’s coming was perfect. He came when the Romans had colonized and established a common language for commerce. He came at a time when the Romans had built roads connecting the entire empire. He came at a time that would be perfect to reach the maximum number of people in a world- changing manner. It would appear from what we see in the Bible that God’s primary concern was healing a broken world and communicating His message to all people.
Yet despite that, we have a group of Christians today who would like to obscure a message Christ and His disciples died to deliver. As I said in a previous blog post, the intent of the Bible was to communicate God’s message. When that communication begins to fall on deaf ears because the audience doesn’t understand the language, it is time to deliver the message in an intelligible form. Paul said to the Jews he became a Jew and to the Greeks he became a Greek. Being able to relate to the surrounding culture was paramount at the time of Christ. To uphold a middle-English translation as the only one that can be used flies in the face of what the Scripture inside the leather binding actually says. They probably don’t realize that because they can’t understand what they are reading.
Some of you might be asking, “What’s the big deal? It’s only a few thee’s and thy’s.” Is it? Let’s take a look at some obscurity you might find a bit amusing. This is from 1 Corinthians 6 in the King James.
“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.”
What is this saying? If we read it using our modern understanding of the words, the above passage might seem a bit perverse. Now let’s look at this same passage, in a more modern translation.
“We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians, and opened wide our hearts to you. We are not withholding our affection from you, but you are withholding yours from us. As a fair exchange — I speak as to my children — open wide your hearts also.“
The Bible deals with some very complex issues. At stake to the reader, is all that matters in life and death. When a reader either can’t understand the text at all or could easily misinterpret something because they can’t get around the language, it can be tragic, particularly when there are other translations out there, yet we have some Christians who would put a guilt trip on people for reading a different translation. For what?
Come off it. Seriously. There is no language of God. The text we have is written in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. One would think that if God were concerned about the language, He would have had the original authors write in the same language. God’s concern wasn’t language though, it was content. It was communicating the message in the clearest form possible to the intended audience. If God can do it that way, we should as well.
A few thoughts for the KJV only crowd: When we send missionaries out into other countries, do they need to take a dictionary with them as well and teach the people 15th century English so that they will be able to understand the superior text of the King James Version? Also, you say that the KJV edition from 1611 is the true inspired version. How many have actually read it? Let me quote for you a familiar passage from that version. Read it and judge for yourself if it is an effective form of English to communicate God’s message to people in a modern setting.
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among vs (& we beheld his glory, the glory as of the onely begotten of the Father) full of grace and trueth. Iohn bare witnesse of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that commeth after me, is preferred before me, for he was before me. And of his fulnesse haue all wee receiued, and grace for grace. For the Law was giuen by Moses, but grace and trueth came by Iesus Christ. No man hath seene God at any time: the onely begotten Sonne, which is in the bosome of the Father, he hath declared him.”
Let me close by telling you a couple of things I like about the King James. It’s free. That’s part of why we see so much of it. The copyright on this version expired a long time ago, so it is the one most likely to be freely distributed. It is also fairly close to being a word for word translation, which can be extremely helpful sometimes when studying the Bible. As translations go, it isn’t bad. But it also isn’t a god unto itself.
photo credit: ahhyeah
photo credit: funkypancake
