The King and I
November 15th, 2008Thirty Days Hath Gynuary…
Reader Ed, a heavy-duty Christian, posted the following comment in response to my post on memorizing Psalm 37, from the King James Bible:
Congratulations! I’d be envious, but that would be sin :).
“but it has a serious purpose.”
I firmly believe that, as you indicate, the Word has power inherent in it.
People think that the more readable a translation, the better it is. Most modern translations are based on original texts that are not the same as the text used for the King James. These texts were assembled about a hundred years ago by two men who were not pious men, to put it mildly. These translations range from Literal to “well that’s what we think they meant”. They even relegate some verses to footnotes as if they shouldn’t be in there (“most ancient manuscripts do not include this verse”. How inspirational! ).
The King James (and Modern King James) are very literal translations of a text (the Majority Text or Textus Receptus) ) that stands the test of time. Over 95% of all scripture fragments are in agreement with it.
My point is that when I want to “nail” a varmint like a demon attacking me or someone else, I want the most accurate weapon I can get my hands on.
Something that maintains the power of the original Word to the best degree possible.
It’s the Word that draws men to God. It’s the Word that repels “harmful spiritual influences”.
I don’t know a whole lot about translations, although I know that some of the worthless and dangerous modern churches have allowed atrocities such as a rewrite performed by a far-left lesbian activist. This woman said something about the Bible being “open,” as if it were a wall anyone could walk up to and spray with graffitti. No, dear, the Bible is not “open.” It was written centuries ago, and that’s the end of it. Shakespeare is not “open.” The Constitution is not “open.” Emily Dickinson’s poems are not “open.” If you want to write your own disgraceful parody and call it a Bible, fine, but we already have a real Bible, and yours will be of no value unless someone needs a heavy object with which to press wrinkles out of a tie.
If I ever practice law again, I’ll tell the judge statutes and rules of procedure are open. “I know the Federal Rules used to say the deadline was 30 calendar days, your honor, but the Rules are ‘open,’ and I changed it to three months. Also, I have amended the calendar to include a new estrogen-centric month called Gynuary.” Oh yeah, that will fly. It is amazing, the things you can believe when you’re a leftist.
I had no idea the KJV was considered superior by people like Ed. The reason I chose it for memorization is that it is simply better English. The art of prose reached its peak hundreds of years ago; with a vocabulary of a few thousand words, our predecessors created works we lack the skill to equal. If you can understand the English of the KJV, you will have a better understanding of modern English, too. And you will use it more skillfully. And who wants to recite dry modern translations? Nobody wants to hear that. “Hey, dudes, let’s, like, not judge other dudes ’cause it’s uncool.” Please. Don’t grime up my ears with that mess.
Ed cites fundamental reasons why the KJV should be accorded more weight than modern translations. I have no reason to doubt what he says. If he’s right, good for me. I thought it had a bunch of errors in it (e.g., “Thou shalt not kill”), but I was willing to memorize it anyway, because of the quality of the language. I figured that if there were problems with things I memorized, I could always learn those while I was memorizing. Then I’d have the KJV on tap, and I would also know where the landmines lay.
I had no primary education. I went to public schools until I was in the seventh grade, so I got the liberalized, watered-down curriculum. Fortunately, I had some native ability, so I picked up English on the streets. That is literally true. Okay, not “on the streets,” but on my own. To this day, even though I knocked the top out of standardized tests and made it to the national spelling bee, I make errors an educated person should not make. Having a pile of beautifully wrought passages in my head at all times is already helping me improve my writing.
Most Americans are illiterate by the standards of a century ago. The things high school graduates wrote back then outshine typical writing produced by modern college graduates. That is no exaggeration. I’ve seen the garbage lawyers write these days, and I’ve seen letters uneducated people wrote long ago. The lawyers lose.
When I want to check up on King James, I go to The Complete Jewish Bible. It seems like a good choice. It was edited by a knowledgeable religious Jew, so it addresses errors introduced due to ignorance of Judaism.
Here’s another interesting thing about the KJV. My parents came from Eastern Kentucky; my dad was from the coal country near West Virginia, and my mother was from a county a little farther west. When I was a kid, my grandparents and most of their siblings were alive and vigorous, and I heard them use a lot of archaic language. Some of it passed down to me, from my parents. Sometimes I see familiar things in the KJV. It reminds me that some of the linguistic idiosyncrasies people outside Appalachia make fun of are actually correct.
I am now working on Psalm 3. It’s short. I need the rest.
November 15th, 2008 at 10:00 AM
The Kid and I blame reality TV and teh internetz, but anywayz, I like blamin’ the lawyerz betta!
November 15th, 2008 at 11:41 AM
You might want to reaseach this issue a whole lot more. I know that KJV owes a great debt to the Tyndale bible, the first English vernacular bible and probably one of the seeds of the great protestant/catholic split in England.
Also, bear in mind that newer translations have access to the dead sea scroll, modern scholarship, etc. etc. But I don’t know if they are superior to KJV, just that I’m not sure Ed’s position is a settled one.
Regardless, the word isn’t The Word. The Word is Jesus, and The Spirit makes us one with The Word. Thanks to this, we’re not dependant on dead trees and ink for our relationship with God.
November 15th, 2008 at 2:55 PM
“Most Americans are illiterate by the standards of a century ago. The things high school graduates wrote back then outshine typical writing produced by modern college graduates. That is no exaggeration.”
You really don’t start to see a decline until Marxism, and then Leninism, became fashionable with the western liberal intelligentsia around the Great Depression. One of Lenin’s stated goals was to completely decimate western language structures with more “proletarian” systems. What’s going on in public schools today is this philosophy writ large.
I had the misfortune of working as a TA in an ancient history course while in grad school. I remember trashing about half the class after the first test because they had no concept of even basic concepts like paragraph creation or sentence structure. (and it’s probably no coincidence that a plurality of the students were journalism majors). They wrote answers that revealed a basic functional illiteracy, yet were shocked that their one-sentence statements on an essay exam didn’t merit an “A”.
One of the things that really concerns me about an Obama presidency is that he’s insisting that every American high school student should be able to go to college. From what I’ve seen first-hand, affordability is not the real problem, but being a socialist, his first instinct is to throw money at the problem and hope that solves it rather than really dealing with the core issue of illiteracy that his philosophical forbears have abetted and encouraged.
November 15th, 2008 at 4:31 PM
“You might want to reaseach this issue a whole lot more.”
Not really.
November 15th, 2008 at 5:39 PM
Hey Steve, did you ever read any of the suppositions that Shakespeare might have been involved in the translation of the King James Version?
November 15th, 2008 at 6:03 PM
The KJV was what I always turned to when I was a kid and feeling sad or wondering about life – until years later, I thought it was the only version of the Bible. I still like it, but I also pair it with the NIV (don’t know if I’m committing some sort of blasphemy by saying that or not, but it doesn’t really matter) when I’m trying to pick apart the meaning a bit, with different words. The language in the KJV is indeed lovely.
November 15th, 2008 at 9:53 PM
I “pair” the KJV generally with a good Bible search program that allows me to do word studies using the Hebrew and Greek. Once you can do that, you can throw a lot of translations out the window (well, some are a pleasure to read, and some include notes that can be priceless, so I don’t literally mean to toss them), since the clarity you’re seeking is a lot easier to find using a decent search engine.
.
The trick is to read the words (you’re “studying”) in several Biblical contexts; it gives you a good idea of what they originally meant (well short of the “good idea of what they meant” of a linguist …but equally well above what any casual verse reading would be). A decent Bible search program allows you to do this expeditiously. (I recommend the *old* version of QuickVerse, v4f.)
.
I found a [legally authorized!!! by Parson Technology] copy of QV4 to download from Unity Baptist church, found here: http://tinyurl.com/584hx9
.
You will need the 4.0g patch to make it run under XP & Vista, found here (this is provided the guy who originally wrote QV btw): http://tinyurl.com/5ommu4
.
I just checked (unzipped it), and it looks like the Unity Baptist d/l is a working version of the old program. From the filesize it does seem to include the KJV verses; it doesn’t include the Greek/Hebrew or the Strongs (email me if you’re interested), which you quite need for word studies with deeper meaning. Though its going to be quite usable just as it is.
.
So I’d recommend giving this a try.
.
Full disclosure: I’ve got several (a dozen or more) various translations (and transliterations), and some are more enjoyable (or more scholarly-ist “correct”) than others. But I always end up reading – and quoting – the KJV because it’s such a pleasure to roll the phrasing off my tongue.
.
And I totally agree that comparing the literacy of a high-school grad of a century ago, with a college grad of now, displays how poorly the modern education establishment, *educates*. Sad.
.
Don’t bode well for the future either.
.
November 15th, 2008 at 11:06 PM
Hey Steve, welcome to your first schismatic fight, and like most of them is comes down to arguing about “I am million time more holy/humble than thou art!”
Unfortunately, the KJV and NKJV are no more inherently “right” than any other translation of the Biblical texts. Come on, you were on a kibbutz, right? Observant Jews pray in Hebrew not because it sounds cool but because it is the words that their scripture is written in. Anything else is a translation.
Furthermore, the KJV has several notable mistranslations associated with it because one of its sources was Jerome’s Vulgate.
There are whole groups of people who consider the work of those translators in the 1600’s to be divinely inspired. (See King-James-Only movements…ex. Peter Ruckman and Don Waite)
The Bible and its passages are worth memorizing no matter the translation used. There is nothing more inherently holy about the KJV/NKJV.
November 15th, 2008 at 11:11 PM
And Phil, William Shakespeare was a theater owner. The plays were written by Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
November 15th, 2008 at 11:34 PM
Pam — I can Haz Dockterat LOL
November 16th, 2008 at 7:02 AM
[…] The Hog looks at the King James Version and draws conclusions. Most Americans are illiterate by the standards of a century ago. The things high school graduates wrote back then outshine typical writing produced by modern college graduates. That is no exaggeration. I’ve seen the garbage lawyers write these days, and I’ve seen letters uneducated people wrote long ago. The lawyers lose. […]
November 16th, 2008 at 7:57 AM
When my head swelled up with the sin of pride at the reference, I realized that I am not a “heavy duty Christian” :).
I used to read the New American Standard. One day, preparing for a bible study with some friends, my wife read a verse from her NIV. My friend, his wife and I (KJV, Modern KJV, and NASB) thought she (NIV) was confused on what verse we were looking at. I wish I could remember the verse. The NIV had a totally different wording and meaning.
Anne: In our current bible studies, sometimes I ask someone what the NIV says to help clarify the KJV. I see it more as a study guide.
Greg: I realize Jesus is the Word. The promise made to man. I also believe that the reason God permitted no “engraved images” was that He didn’t want us distracted from the true representation of Himself: the written (or spoken) Word that He gave us.
I understand that there is much debate about modern translations, and I used to laugh at the “KJV only” folk, but a study of Westcott and Hort (the fathers of modern translations) reveals much. Actually, when they came out with their text, their attitude was “older fragments are more reliable and closer to the source”. Since then, modern archeology has seen an explosion of discovery of material as Greg refers to. These discoveries have only strengthened the KJV position. These new discoveries give us the “Majority Text” (95% of which agrees with the KJV).
The other texts don’t come close.
Copyright derivative law keeps modern translations from following too closely with the KJV.
There’s money involved with the scholarship. Copyright derivative law keeps them from tracking the KJV too closely.
November 16th, 2008 at 12:00 PM
What MunDane said.
The KJV is a beautiful translation, but there’s nothing, aside from its beautiful language, that makes it more accurate than others. It is, in fact, rife with errors…but since I read my Bible in the original Hebrew, I don’t have to worry about those. We have plenty of our own translations, and each one has its good and bad points. Being translations, they will inevitably be different from the original.
November 16th, 2008 at 1:30 PM
In the big law firm I used to work for, we would joke about how it was the “Civil Procedure for Defendants”, and inapplicable for Plaintiffs. Of course we were the Evil Insurance Defense, so that probably had something to do with it.
November 16th, 2008 at 4:26 PM
I would quibble with Ed as to the base text issue. A couple of the new translations are by very devout (and traditional minded) groups which have done a very nice job of rendering their translations. I am very fond of the ESV. It is one that someone liking the KJV but wanting more contemporary English could grow to love dearly (very accurate translation rendered with an eye toward the mjesty of language artistry of the KJV). I hear generally good things about the new Holman translation. The NASB is good to have for Bible studies, as it is excrucuately accurate in translation, but it is awkwardly rendered English in too many places for my likely.
As to the rest, yes, mostly inferior, some grossly so.
I would suggest that you take a look at the ESV.
November 16th, 2008 at 4:49 PM
Hmm. It occurs to me that I may have been a bit too cryptic on the use of a good Bible search program to aid in discerning the intent of a Biblical passage.
.
You don’t need to be a linguist – I’m certainly not, as I read neither Hebrew nor Greek – to be able to use the original languages quite profitably in an English-only word study.
.
Any translation/transliteration is going to be based to some degree on original texts, whether whole or fragments thereof. And its my common-sense observation that people can, and do, *justifiably* disagree on changes of meaning in language (let alone in translations) over a span of decades, let alone aeons.
.
A good search program negates SOME of the need to be a linguist to study doctrine though.
.
Let’s say in your search you are doing a word study on love in the NT. The colloquial usage of “love” can mean several things in English, depending upon the context of its usage …but in comparing the original Greek, you find different [original] words translated to “love”.
(Love is used 179 times in the KJV NT. Phileo, philadelphia, philarguria, philandros, philoteknos, philanthropia, philadelphos, agapao, agape, and theo …were all translated in English to simply “love”. See 1John 21:15-17 for an interesting difference in usage; I’ve heard a ton-of-sermons based on this. Umm, this kind of word study can be accomplished in minutes.)
.
You have to “dig deeper” than just the translation to understand the *doctrinal* importance of the usage of “love” (in this word-study) in the English verse or passage.
.
So you use a word [study] search to find the context of those original *specific* meanings. The results are – sometimes – quite surprising. And – as Paul instructs – quite profitable – *for the study of “doctrine”*.
.
Just keep in mind: faith isn’t *necessarily* about doctrine (which I’m sure you *do* keep in mind). But study – eventually – almost always *is*. (Can’t think on when it wouldn’t become so, at least.)
.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:26 AM
I am working my way into George Lamsa’s translation from the Aramaic. Pretty cool!
November 17th, 2008 at 1:42 PM
One of our church’s associate pastors have to translate an entire book of the Bible from its original Greek; it might have been Ephesians, but I don’t remember exactly. Anyway, his translation was extremely close to the one in my KJ’s study Bible. In fact, my study Bible lists lots of the original Greek words and their possible alternative derivations, and why a particular one was chosen.
My point? The KJV seems to be quite representative of the original language contained in the Bible, pre-translation. My brother-in-law swears by the New American Standard, and he’s probably onto something there, in that it does change some of the more archaic expressions into modern ones.
One final thought, such as it is: a friend of mine’s church used the NIV as its standard. However, whenever they do an in depth Bible study, they keep a KJV nearby.
November 20th, 2008 at 10:19 AM
Like KM, I would suggest the English Standard Version as well. The objective of the ESV was the most literal translation from current sources while still creating readable English. The ESV is descended from the heritage of the NASB, but does not use the KJV-like prayer language that the NASB uses. I have been using it for a couple of years and really like it.
While the NIV is very popular, I don’t think it’s the most accurate translation.