WHY WE STILL USE  THE KING JAMES BIBLE

  

    At a time when many churches, church members, Christian leaders, and Bible colleges are exchanging the KJV for newer Bible versions, why don’t we? Here follows a brief explanation of our position on the Bible version issue.

NEW TRANSLATIONS HAVE NOT INCREASED OVERALL BIBLE LITERACY, IN FACT THE OPPOSITE IS TRUE. According to research by Barna Research Group, Thom Rainer, Gary Burge, George Lindbeck of Yale, and others, the Bible is read less, and less understood, than ever before among professing American Christians.

LACK OF UNIFORMITY HAS STIFLED RECOGNITION AND MEMORIZATION OF SCRIPTURE. The motivation for the King James Version was the need for one common English Bible to be used by all. It has been wisely noted that “repetition is the mother of learning”, but if the preacher uses one version, the Sunday school teacher uses another, the student another, etc., the advantage of widespread, easy recognition and memorization of Scripture is lost. It's also confusing. Without a uniform Bible, the Scriptures will continue to lose their influence on our country, our culture, and our churches. Instead of making the Bible more familiar, the multitude of versions have actually made it far less familiar to society, and the deleterious effects of this on our nation are sadly obvious.

GOD PROMISED TO KEEP EVERY WORD AVAILABLE TO EVERY GENERATION. “The words of the LORD are pure…. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever.” (Psalm 12:6-7; see also Psalms 33:11; 100:5; 119:160; Isaiah 40:8; Matthew 24:35; & I Peter 1:23-25). If He promised to do that, He is certainly able to keep that promise! It makes no sense for God to present His written Word to man without error, then to fail to preserve it for succeeding generations.

SOMEONE MAY ASK, “WHAT ABOUT THE WORDS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT? ONE WOULD EXPECT ANY ORDINARY BOOK THAT WAS HAND COPIED FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS TO CONTAIN SERIOUS ERRORS, RIGHT?” The answer to this is that both the Bible and its method of transcription were far from ordinary. There is essentially no debate about the preservation of the Old Testament in the Masoretic line of manuscripts.

Here Are Some Reasons Why -

Only trained professional scribes were allowed to reproduce the Hebrew Scriptures. Painstaking steps were followed to ensure that each copy was an exact duplicate of the original. The number of letters and words on each page was counted, and the middle word of each page was found to be sure they matched the original. No character could be smudged or touch another. If a single letter was found to be in error, the entire page was discarded and the work redone.

The ancient Dead Sea Scrolls contain all of the Jewish Scriptures except for the Book of Esther. They prove that the texts have remained unchanged through two millennia of copying by Jewish scholars.

Research of the Masoretic Texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as the methods and qualifications of the King James Bible translators, reveal that God has, indeed, preserved His written Word.

WHAT ABOUT THE NEW TESTAMENT?

While Bible translators uniformly base their OT versions on a particular “family tree” of manuscripts, there are two different families upon which translators can base the NT - the Byzantine (majority) or the Alexandrian (minority) texts. These two collections of manuscripts are like two pairs of identical twins born to the same parents. They are virtually identical within their set, but are significantly different from each other.

The Byzantine family contains about 2,000 complete hand-copied Greek New Testaments and 3,300 partials gathered from Europe, Asia, and Africa dating back as far as 350 A.D. This line of almost identical copies has been in continuous use since the early church period. All of the early New Testament translations, including the King James Version, were based on manuscripts from the Byzantine (majority) texts.

The other family of manuscripts, discovered in the 1800s, has come to be known as the Alexandrian texts. Also called the “Minority” or “Critical” texts, this family is comprised of only TWO near-complete Greek manuscripts and about thirty partials dating from 135-400 A.D., and have as their point of origin the area in and around Alexandria, Egypt. These manuscripts supposedly lay “lost” and unused from the fifth to the nineteenth century.

God has pronounced a curse on the works that come through Alexandria (see Isaiah 19:13-15).

An examination of the foundational scholars underlying the texts that all of the modern English versions are based upon will reveal that they were necromancers (ones who conjur up the spirits of the dead), which disqualifies them from handling the Word of God, especially as translators.

While there is not space to list them here, suffice to say that there are several major differences, doctrinally, between the Majority and Minority texts, and the translations made from them in English. If God did NOT preserve His written Word for us, even in English, then we are without His Holy Word in this generation, and, if this is the case, then it is practically impossible to discern what He DID say, and what He DIDN'T.  All of the modern English translations, except the New King James (and it is a hybrid of both) are based on the Alexandrian manuscripts, and, therefore, reflect various differences in several important doctrines, depending upon the translation being examined.

>>> THE TEST OF PURITY IS NOT AGE, BUT AVAILABILITY <<<

    Assuming “older is better”, many scholars believe that the Alexandrian/Minority manuscripts are more accurate than the Majority/Byzantine texts because they are closer in time to the original words of God. This is a logical assumption, until one thinks about the matter more fully. If the Minority texts truly ARE God’s preserved words, why did they lie unused and uncirculated for 1,400 years? Further, what if more “lost books” are brought forth, differing another five percent from what we now have? How are we to be certain that we have the pure Word of God? The answer is that God gave us a way to positively identify His preserved written Word: Every word being available to every generation. The Biblical test of purity is not “age,” but availability. God’s written Word can NEVER be lost any more than He can forget His name (Psalm 138:2). Because Almighty God has promised to safeguard and keep His written Word continuously available, there can be no such thing as a “lost book” of the Bible.

    God has preserved every word of the Old Testament for every generation in the Masoretic texts (our Old Testament), and every word of the New Testament for every generation in the continuously available Byzantine texts. As students of God’s Word, we should desire a “word-for-word” translation that is based on the Divinely preserved texts translated by world-class linguists. We believe the only translation that currently meets those criteria is the King James Bible.

THE ENGLISH USED IN THE KING JAMES BIBLE IS MORE ACCURATE THAN MODERN ENGLISH.

To support the position of the “need” for a “modern” English Bible, the argument is often made that no one speaks
today like they did back when the KJB was produced. The truth is that the version of English used by the King James translators was NOT the “common English” of that day - it is a high form of English that is very precise and designed to accurately convey the meaning of the text, independent of current slang, trends, and changes in nomenclature in any era. The truth is that, for over 400 years, our grandfathers, great grandfathers, and beyond have had no real problem understanding King James English, even though a vast majority of them were unschooled, untrained, and often illiterate! In fact, scores of our ancestors learned to read and write using the King James Bible! Yet, we are told that today's sophisticated, well educated, high-tech populace “can't understand” the King James Bible, or, at least, are “confused” by it, and, thus, need something “modern”.

NONSENSE! The people who push this idea must really think that modern Americans are too stupid to understand something that English-speaking people haven't been “confused” by for the last four centuries! Modern English has changed very little in the past 200 years or so, and those who speak it and read it “catch on” the English in the King James Bible quite easily, if they want to.    

CONCLUSION -

We categorically accept the King James Bible, and it's underlying texts, as the written Word of God, preserved by Him for us to this present hour, and unapologetically reject attempts to “modernize”, “correct”, or “update” the Bible using the corrupted Minority (Alexandrian) manuscripts used in the modern English versions of the Bible.

Furthermore - we also assert that the King James Bible is also, from a literary standpoint, the finest piece of literature that has been produced in Western civilization, a fact that has been made clear by numerous scholarly studies on the subject.