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Old 07-10-2008, 08:57 PM
Connie
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Unless I put in prodigious effort I find I'm unable to follow this discussion very far at this point. I hope nobody minds if I pipe up here and try to collect some pieces of my scattered brain by asking a few questions of Steven Avery, perhaps not particularly pertinent ones, hard to know.

Would I be right in thinking, SA, that you and BP agree on what the KJB should look like? That is, you both reject every kind of change at this point?

Do you agree with BP about the finality and perfection of the PCE or Pure Cambridge edition (?) that he favors?

You say he is misrepresenting Burgon. I think I'm following your argument about this but on the other hand I might have drawn the same conclusion BP did about Burgon's hope for a future revision from the very quotes BP put together, even if he shouldn't have put them together without more indication of their context. I haven't read far enough in Burgon to know yet what impression I will have of his own views of the need for a revision. But I might end up agreeing with anything Burgon suggests toward a revision while neither of you would? Is that right?

And here's another question that may seem to come out of the blue at this point but maybe it fits in somewhere. Recently I compared a few paragraphs among the versions just out of curiosity, hardly systematically, and it's led me to a horror of the new versions that I didn't even have before despite being KJB-only for some time now. It's brought me to a sort of fury of indignation at what they did to the Bible that none of the discussions I've read about it so far have done. I haven't done much, a few paragraphs as I said, in Psalms 91 and 23 and Jeremiah for instance, and my impression is that there are a ridiculous number of changes from the KJB in the new versions, ridiculous and utterly indefensible, and they're all in the English or in the translation it seems, not in the underlying texts, just willynilly changes in words to no purpose. "Pinions" for "feathers." "Unreliable stream" for "waters that fail." "Overflows" for "runneth over." And so on. I looked up a few of them in the concordance and found that they had chosen the least representative translation of a particular Hebrew word, as if they were going out of their way to make change for change's sake, anything, just anything at all to destroy the AV. The words are all synonyms more or less but they change the rhythm of the text and make it clumsy without the slightest improvement in clarity that I can see, in fact they make it more obscure: nobody has a problem with the image of feathers, but pinions is a technical term that distances the reader from the text. What on earth is an "unreliable stream" anyway? I'm not completely sure I know what physical reality "waters that fail" refers to either, but "unreliable stream" is no help whatever.

Again, these things have nothing to do with the underlying texts. They aren't even about doctrine. They strike me as vandalism committed against the English pure and simple. Anything to confuse and scatter God's people. If the majority of the changes are of this sort, and let me guess that's what I'll keep finding if I continue with this, I don't feel I need to know much more about the versions dispute, about the Johannine Comma or Mark 16 or any of that, to answer the skeptics. Anyone should reject the revisions based on this mutilation of the English language alone.

I realize this is a separate issue from the issue of whether any revision whatever should be countenanced, and I still think there are probably a few words that could use updating.