Which Bible Should You Use?

The KJV Bible is a flawed translation that is more than 400 years old. It was created to establish King James as God’s chosen leader of the Church of England. In the process he had all negative comments from earlier translations removed so the Bible would glorify him.

I know this isn’t the point of this discussion, and it’s just a tangent. But while I regard KJV-onlyism as obviously false (and patently silly), I think your assessment of the KJV isn’t historically accurate nor particularly fair.

The purpose of what we call the KJV was to create a standardized translation for the Church of England, there were several competing English translations at the time, Puritans preferred their Geneva Bible, while the Bishop’s Bible was used officially in the Church of England. King James wanted to reconcile the factions within the English Church and so called scholars from diverse backgrounds to produce a new translation for liturgical use. The committee had the goal of not so much as producing a brand new translation, but rather to improve upon older translations using the best scholarship available to them at the time.

Did they succeed? While of course it is debateable, but for their time and the limits of what they had access to, they did a fantastic job of pulling from the best and most recent insights of biblical scholarship. They did not ignore previous biblical translations, but relied on the work of Tyndale, they looked to the Vulgate and the Septuagint as well as primarily working from the Masoretic Text. As a result the KJV was a masterpiece of translation for its time, sure we could nitpick–after all there some odd choices they made, they chose to simply borrow (for example) the Vulgate’s Latin translation of Hebrew in Isaiah’s condemnation of the king of Babylon, as such generations of English-speaking Christians still often think “Lucifer” is the devil’s name, where “lucifer” is just the Latin translation of the Hebrew word for the morning star which Isaiah uses as a mocking epithet against the king of Babylon.

The KJV is still a legacy of 17th century biblical scholarship, which has been a deeply and abiding literary influence on the whole English language, and for its time very good. Definitely not perfect, far from perfect, and we have a host of translations today which are far superior to the KJV. But we needn’t insult the the historic importance of the KJV in order to properly recognize that it is in many ways a flawed translation when we compare it to the best of modern scholarship has to offer. The explosion of biblical manuscripts which we have discovered in the centuries since the KJV was first translated would, of course, mean we have a far deeper pool to wade through; we have access to information nobody who worked on the KJV did; but given the restraints of time and place, the limited resources available to them, and even if we can nitpick certain choices they made or methods they used, they still produced a massive achievement in biblical translation.

KJV-onlyism is an obviously wrong and silly idea; but the KJV itself is still a beautiful translation.

2 Likes