I love the King James Version of the Bible. I love it because it's beautiful, because it has been a translation of the Bible that has edified millions of Christians around the world for literally hundreds of years. Most of the Bible verses I memorized as a child come out in KJV English.
In fact, when I recite Psalm 23, the Lord's Prayer, or Hebrews 12, they come out of my mouth in the King James. Now, that might not be what you'd have expected. If you saw the title of this video, why if I grew up on and love the King James Version, would I then make a video with a title that says that I don't recommend it? Let me help explain a few things.
My academic study has a number of crossover disciplines, one of which is called textual criticism. Textual criticism is not criticizing the text. but rather the study of the original text of an ancient document, in this case the Bible, and comparing the manuscripts, those handwritten documents that have survived until today, to find the mistakes that were made by copyists, scribes, in the text as they copied, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
The goal of biblical textual criticism, then, is to examine these ancient handwritten copies for the purpose of determining the exact wording of what the original looked like. When I started to get serious about my study and I learned about the Greek and Hebrew text that sat behind the text of the Bible, I started to realize that there were some issues, minor issues granted, but issues nonetheless with the text that sat behind the KJV. Now, these issues wouldn't lead you to come to any different conclusions, theologically or doctrinally, about the content of or the teaching of the Bible, but there were some places that looked slightly different in modern translations done in 2022 than they do in the King James done in 1611. Nonetheless, the primary reason why I don't recommend the KJV to the average person isn't necessarily because of the issues regarding textual criticism and the text that lies behind the translation. That is important, don't get me wrong, but textual criticism is one of the most complex and demanding academic fields there is. And so I can't really fault lay Christians for not understanding its sometimes convoluted complexities.
Unless someone can read the Greek or the Hebrew, and has the comprehension and time to sit down with me and examine some of these things, I'm only going to truly get so far. There very well might be a time and a place for those kinds of details. But if I don't have that time or that place, I think there's another just as valid reason why I shouldn't recommend the KJV to people. So, what is it?
Well, in 1 Corinthians 14, it says that if you do not speak intelligibly, how will anyone know what is being said? For you will be speaking into the air. In other words, edification, instruction, and maturity all require intelligibility.
The fact is that the English of the King James Bible, 500 years later, is no longer fully intelligible. William Tyndale, an English Bible scholar who taught at the University of Cambridge in the late 15th and early 16th century, lived during a time when it was controversial to read the Bible in anything other than Latin. Seeking to develop a translation of the scriptures in his native tongue, Tyndale famously said that if God would spare his life, and that he would be gifted years of long living, his desire would be that the boy who pushes the plow in the field would know more about the Bible than he, a biblical scholar, did. This has always been the goal of Bible translation, to make the Word of God intelligible, understandable, and clear to the average person that they may learn, study, and grow spiritually and intellectually in it. My point is this, despite whole lists of definitions and explanations that are produced and published, There are still hundreds of dead and obsolete words in the King James.
Four centuries does a lot to a language. You don't have words like besom, chambering, and emerald. You say broom, immorality, and tumor.
This isn't an objection to hard concepts within the Bible. There are, of course, hard terms, ideas, and notions throughout the Old and the New Testaments, after all. I'm not objecting to difficulties that God clearly meant to put in the Bible. Peter clearly says that there are some things in the scriptures that are hard to understand. My grievances with the recommendation of the KJV are with difficulties God didn't put in the Bible.
Difficulties due to the evolution of language itself. And there aren't just dead words, that is, words that we don't use any longer in the English language, but what biblical scholar Mark Ward describes as false friends. Words you don't know, you don't know.
And this is one of my main reasons for not recommending the King James Version, because there are words we use today that changed meaning. that meant something completely different to Elizabethans 500 years ago than they do today. And so by reading them, we might be completely misled in our understanding and comprehension of a particular text. We might not even know that we're misunderstanding the King James translators because our lexicon has changed its definitions.
Let me give you a simple and hopefully straightforward example of this. In 1 Kings, we get the famous story of Elijah sparring with the kings of Baal. The Israelites are watching on to this competition, and Elijah at 1 Kings 18.21 in the KJV says, How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, follow him. But if Baal, then follow him.
And the people answered him not a word. What does halt me? And What I mean by that is what did the original translators in 1611 mean when they chose this particular phrase for it to be understood intelligibly by their initial readers? Now, no one would fault you if you read this and thought it meant stop.
After all, we talk about traffic being ground to a halt. You might be thinking of the more old timey halt who goes there. It wouldn't be crazy to think that. What Elijah is asking the Israelites is, how long will you stop between this opinion or that opinion? However, if you turn to a modern translation, say an ESV, for example, what you'll see is this.
How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If you go to the Hebrew word, it means limp or hop. In fact, if you go to other places where the KJV uses the word halt, You kind of get this indication.
The Gospels say that Jesus healed the halt and the blind. Genesis 32-31 says that when Jacob wrestled with the Lord, he emerged halting upon his thigh. Back in 1611, in a King James context, halt meant to limp.
Today, in the context like that, we don't expect that meaning. It's not that the King James translators... were somehow wrong or misguided in their word choices when it comes to words like halt. They couldn't predict the future of the English language, even if their translation choices may have shaped the future of English to a large degree.
Your Bible has changed. It's simply a reality. It hasn't changed in terms of corruption, like many skeptics may assert, but it has changed in terms of clarity. Take, for example, this graphic I made of the 23rd Psalm, an English-origin... versions throughout their history.
Words evolve. Some phrases die out entirely and others, like halt, change their meaning over time. This is the natural course of linguistics and language development. The danger is that there might be words in the KJV that you don't know you don't know.
And the King James translators themselves say as much in their preface to the original 1611 printing. In the preface titled, The Translators to the Reader, they state that language changes and, as it does, the English Bible will need to be updated as such. When you read the Bible, you should be able to understand what it means.
This is what Bible translators strive for today, and this is what the KJV translators wanted at the beginning of the 17th century. I've said it before and I will say it again. I care less what translation of the Bible you read as much as I care that you're reading it.
Now, the caveat to that is that not all Bible translations are created equally. There are good translations, there are bad translations, and there are, of course, heretical Bible translations. And the King James Version of the Bible is neither the most accurate nor the best translation in our day and age.
By all means, read it. But there are very good trans-reasons why if you ask me to recommend a Bible translation, I will probably not recommend the King James to you. And it has everything to do with the fact that I want you to understand what you're reading in the most accurate and legible English you can access. The King James version of the Bible is not written in the 21st century English we speak. It's not entirely unintelligible, that's very true.
but it is sufficiently unintelligible in places where the question, should this or that be updated, changed, or made more legible, is a genuine and legitimate question. The KJV translators were not wrong to use these words, and we are not dumb for misunderstanding them. It is not your job to try to keep pace with all the changes in the English language over the last 500 years in order to simply read your Bible, understand it, and apply it to your life effectively. Once again, it is more important that you read your Bible than what translation you are necessarily reading.
And if you're interested in the complexities of this particular topic, two books I would recommend on this subject are Mark Ward's Authorized, The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible, and James White's The King James Only Controversy. Likewise, if you want to learn more about these types of things, theology, biblical and church history, and all other things Christian worldview, then why don't you hit that subscribe button, check out some of the other videos and content on my channel while you're at it.