WHY I USE THE KING JAMES BIBLE

Bible translations have been a hot topic of debate for a while. Many years ago, I could care less about what Bible translation I used or anyone else used. Not so anymore.  We do indeed live in a time where truth and authority is not held in high esteem.  Authority is diminished at every turn, we have an authority crisis for sure.  Authority within the Church, the family, government, society and our personal submission to authority can only come from Scripture.  When the Bible is supplanted by something else as a source of authority, there comes an absent of authority.  This is because the fall back is mans words and devices, which are erroneous and inconsistent.  Ultimately God is the only authority and the authority that He has delegated to governments, fathers and husbands, teachers, pastors, mothers, all goes away without being supplied by Him.  When people out right reject the Bible, there is nothing left to establish any basis for authority except a mob rule anarchy.  But what about when people hold to the Bible but the Bible translation they use is missing quite a bit?  You get the same thing essentially but its more covert.  The majority of modern Bible versions have removed, completely cut out enough scripture to equal all of the epistles of 1 and 2nd Peter, this came about due to two Greek scholars by the name of Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Hort who were commissioned by Anglican churchmen to come up with a revised edition to the universally accepted King James Version.  Westcott and Hort were only supposed to make minor revisions and were instructed to retain the vast majority of the original translation.  But. they didn’t do that, you see Westcott and Hort were not Christians, they were just scholars and they have been linked to consorting with the Roman Catholic Church, which has a long reputation of snuffing out Bibles and those that translate them.  Instead what Westcott and Hort did was produce an entirely new edition of the New Testament using entirely different Greek manuscripts than that of which the KJV and Geneva Bibles were based on.  That new version that Westcott and Hort produced in 1881 was called the Westcott-Hort edition and it is the grand daddy of all modern bible translations.  John Burgon who was the Dean of Chichester Cathedral and an Anglican divine published an extensive retort of the work of Westcott and Hort entitled “The Revision Revised” in it he goes through all the problems of Westcott and Horts new edition and exposes the liberty they used in producing it. 

When the King James Bible was in the works (commissioned in 1607) we already had several Bibles translated into English, but most of these were translated from the Latin Vulgate not from the original Greek and Hebrew manuscripts with the exception of the Geneva Bible and the Tyndale Bible.  Without getting into much of the history of the Bible in English, its important to understand that all the translations done leading up to the King James Bible were produced under penalty of death and many of these past saints who became martyrs for working to get the Word of God into the hands of common people, we are indebted to.  The real advantage of the King James Bible is the fact that the men who worked to produce it were very committed Christians.  They were believers first and scholars second.  It was 47 scholars who were given the task to translate the scriptures from the original Hebrew and Greek.  They met often in committees and devoted themselves to hours of prayer.  Some of these scholars knew upwards of 20 languages.  This was during a time of rest with the church, without distractions of political correctness, social media, and the onslaught of divisions within the church we see today.  Those 47 scholars had at their disposal 5556 manuscripts with majority reliance on the Textus Receptus or “received text”, also known as the majority text,  the modern myth that they did not have available to them many manuscripts or that modern translations have vastly more manuscripts available is a total falsehood.  The KJV translators had plenty of ammunition.  What they produced in 1611 came to be known as the greatest literary work of all time.  It has been heralded even by the secular world as “the noblest monument of English prose”.  So what are modern translations missing? Well just a few examples: Acts 8:37 – omitted, John 7:8-10 – makes Jesus out to be a liar, 1 Corinthians 1:18 – changed to say your not really saved, but your being saved, Mark 16:9-10 – either omitted or footnoted to make the false claim that is was added later and not found in older manuscripts, 1 John 5:7 - omitted or footnoted to claim it was added later.  Some of the scriptures that are omitted are a direct attack on one of the cornerstones of orthodox Christian doctrine, which is the Trinity and diety of Christ, such is the case with 1 John 5.  These are only a few examples there are many others.  These “older manuscripts” that Westcott and Hort relied on were unreliable at best; Codex Siniaticus was supposedly found in a trash pile in an old monastery and Codex Vaticanus just popped up in the Vatican library with no record of where it came from, not to mention these manuscripts make up a tremendous minority of all the manuscript evidence we have.  The manuscripts that were used by Westcott and Hort are now entangled in a lot of controversies.  In Codex Vaticanus, Codex Siniaticus and Codex Alexandria, there are over 3,000 contradictions between the 4 gospels.  Westcott and Hort changed the original greek text over 8,000 times.  In the case of the NASB (New American Standard) one of the members of the translation committee named Adam Logsdon later recanted his work in producing the NASB and stated: “I fear I am in trouble with the Lord”.  This is the foundation of sand many modern bible translations are built on.  No translation is 100% perfect, but another advantage the KJV has, is that its imperfections and problems are widely known and well documented, not so with modern translations.  So for me the old tried and true King James Bible is reliable and I use it to preach on nearly every occasion (sometimes I bust out my Geneva Bible).  When you preach from the KJV people in our culture recognize it as the Bible they know your not reading the back of a cereal box.  The majestic vernacular and phrasing is widely recognized.  Also the authorized KJV was made to be read aloud in the church, it says it right on the preface of most KJV bibles.  Its poetic flow was made to be preached out of.  I also believe that because it is the only proven translation that has stood the test of time, it is the preserved Word of God to the English speaking world.  All this said, I do not consider myself in the KJV only camp because it is not really a point of contention for me and I’m not willing to divide over it.  A person can be saved using a modern translation because it still contains the gospel.  I know many of my dear friends use modern versions and while I don’t agree with their choice of Bible translation, it does not mean they are any less and I am certainly nothing more.  I sincerely challenge you to do your own homework on this issue.