livius drusus

I recently read God's Secretaries about the making of the KJV. It's a page-turner, frankly, and particularly interesting in light of how the theological heirs of the Puritans embrace a translation their ancestors rejected.

Vivisector

If you want an eye-opening experience, then lock horns with a KJV-er, preferably one of Gail Riplinger's disciples. These people can be absolutely, irrationally rabid. Their specialty is to attribute Satan-inspired motivation to other viewpoints, to bring into play the sexual orientation of family members of the translation committees of other versions (I'm not making this up!), hypothesize Roman Catholic conspiracies, and similar irrelevant tactics. Their weapon of first resort, ad hominem attacks, would be funny in its application if you didn't realize that these people are dead serious. Their argument most closely related to logic is that, no copies of the Byzantine text predating the Alexandrian text are available because Byzantine copies were simply read to pieces, whereas Alexandrian copies were discarded on account of their obvious deficiencies.

I was silly enough to get into an exchange with one of these people who took the position that there was no Codex B/Vaticanus; not even sending him a copy of one of the plates (the ending of Mark, of course) was enough to convince him that there was such a manuscript.

Wisdom's Child

The Funny thing about those who are KJV only...
They don't even know that their "Original" 1611 KJV is actually the "Revised" 1789 version. The True Original had Astrology Charts and the Catholic Apocrypha included. The 1789 version removed those vestages of catholicism and cleaned up the language. Publishers though, suspecting that it wouldn't sell as a 1789 revision, hid the truth by billing it as the "Authorized KJV".

If your bible doesn't have the apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments, It's not an Original King James. :rolling:

Knurd

I can't give a conclusive answer, but I can share some of my experiences.
I was raised in a KJV only Baptist sect. Some fundamentalists do not consider the KJV a test of faith, but we wondered if they were True Christians. We thought the SBC was full of devil inspired liberals because they sometimes used other translations. BTW, in my part of the Bible Belt the KJV is still quite popular among SBC Christians.

We believed that "God wrote only one Bible!" And of course, we had it.
The thought goes like this: God inspired the Bible, every word, every letter, every punctuation mark. It was accurate in doctrine, history, and science. Since God went to all the trouble to make a perfect book he surely preserved it. No error could creep in because God preserved his book. Of course when it was translated into English it also had to be perfect. It made no sense to us that we'd have a perfect text in Hebrew and Greek and an imperfect text in English. So the 1611 KJV had to be perfect (sometimes they'd waffle a little bit on this one - perfect on anything that counted).

Now, if one read the new translations one would notice differences. Not only in the wording, but in the meaning of some passages. The more a translation differed from the KJV, the more corrupted it was, in our eyes.

Of course, we never considered that the KJV was itself a revision of another translation (the Bishop's Bible, if I remember correctly) and that the KJV had itself been revised - even to the point of eliminating some books. We didn't consider that the writing of the KJV was largely politically motivated. Going back deeper in time, we didn't consider that the hated Catholic Church decided which books should be in the Bible and which should not.

The Textus Receptus (spelling??) text that the KJV bible was translated from was thought to be the Word of God. The Westcott and Hort (spelling??) text, although from the oldest Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, was seen to be cobbled together by people who hated God, True Christians, and the True Faith.

I left the church for many reasons, and this was one of them. I usually kept quiet about it, but the idea that the translators were rewriting the bible to send people to hell, well, it seemed an unlikely conspiracy theory. It bothered me that this was such a big deal. It bothered me that we were so sure about this, and I slowly began to realize that our leaders were selectively fitting facts and arguments to support an idea that couldn't be changed. It seemed that it ought to be approached the other way around. And that made me wonder about our other unchangeable doctrines.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Hello, Knurd,

The Textus Receptus is very similar to the Majority text, as well as to the Byzantine text. The differences among these 3 Greek texts are rather technical, especially in the gospels.

Essentially, all 3 represent the traditional text of the gospels, as preserved by the Church through the centuries.

The Westcott and Hort Greek text of the NT is a 19th century reconstruction -- nothing more, and nothing less. This W&H reconstruction was based on 4th and 5th century Egyptian Greek manuscripts.

W&H has nothing to do with "Hebrew manuscripts", because it is a Greek text of the NT.

It is true that, in Westcott and Hort's time, these 4th and 5th century Egyptian Greek manuscripts that they were using were some of the oldest. (At this time, lots of NT papyri have been discovered that are a lot older.)

But just because some manuscript is the oldest it certainly doesn't mean it's the best. This would be a basic fallacy in textual criticism.

In my own view -- and I'm certainly not a fundamentalist -- the abandonment of the Byzantine text was a grave mistake. In comparison with it, Westcott and Hort text was definitely a failure. Instead of taking us closer to "the original text of the NT", W&H had taken us in the opposite direction -- into the arid desert of error, confusion, and subjectivity, where alas NT scholarship still remains now.

For more details, please see,

Westcott & Hort fraud
http://www.trends.ca/~yuku/bbl/whfraud.htm

NT Scandals and Controversies (2002)
http://www.trends.ca/~yuku/bbl/cvers.htm

Personally, I'll take KJV over any "modern" NT translation any time... Just because some crazy fundies love KJV, this doesn't mean that KJV is bad.

It's not the translation, it's the underlying Greek text that really matters.

All the best,

Yuri.

walt6

thanks for all your input. It was fascinating reading.

One tidbit of interest is that there is some documentation from this time period that indicates that James was openly homosexual. (Not that there is anything wrong with that! ) It just seems so ironic that the one segment of society so openly hostile to homosexuality uses the bible he created. This little tidbit seems to go unnoticed in the christian community, or perhaps even denied.

Toto

Not unnoticed - denied. "Royalty, Rumors and Racists" BY STEPHEN A. COSTON, SR. AUTHOR OF THE NEW BOOK: KING JAMES The VI Of Scotland & I Of England: Unjustly Accused?

Eldarion Lathria

The KJV is one of the most poetic of bibles. But it contains errors of translation. The original preface, not the kiss-ass one that is usually included, declares that the translators were only humans, humans make mistakes. And King James the VI and I was a bisexual who got more and more homosexual as he got older, a pedant, and something of a fool, though he was wise enough not to get involved in that religious war in Germany.

Eldarion Lathria

Intelligitimate

Could you elaborate on this?

Toto

Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity by Bawer

Review of Stealing Jesus Unitarian sermon