First of all, I would like to say that I only use that KJV and refuse to use any of these other translations. That said I do not believe that the King James Version was inspired. If it were inspired then all other translations that have been used by the many faithful men before the KJV was finished as well as those that cannot understand English must have been inspired as well. Are we prepared to say this? How do we decide what has been inspired and what has not? If the KJV is the only thing that we have today that has been inspired then what are the Spanish and German and all the other languages supposed to do? Was God's inspired Word not in existence before 1611?
I believe that a much more logical thing to say is that God's Word has been preserved in the existing manuscripts of the Majority Text. I also believe that as a result of the extreme carefulness and great knowledge of the KJV translators that we can say that the KJV is as close as we can get to God's inspired Word in the English language. Therefore, I believe that it can be helpful at times to go back to the Greek or Hebrew to discover different shades of meaning to the words used (many times the English does not have an exact word or phrase to fully describe the Greek or Hebrew word). This can be done by simply looking up the word in a Strong's Concordance. This will give you the Greek or Hebrew word, its meaning and how it has been translated in different parts of the Bible. This makes it possible for anyone to be a Greek or Hebrew 'scholar' without actually knowing those languages.
I do not want anyone to misunderstand me. I do not believe that any of the modern translations are good and I do believe that they all contain drastic contradictions as a result of being translated from the Critical Text. And while I do believe that it is theoretically possible to have a new translation based on the Majority text that would be better for us today as a result of being in our modern language, I believe that such a translation would not be as accurate because it would not use the various more precise forms of different pronouns and words that do not exist today. If anything were to be changed about the KJV today, I believe it should only be the punctuation and some spelling and capitalization (which should be done very carefully so as to be sure that the original meaning was not changed) because much of this has changed today and making those changes would make many passages more clear (the punctuation of a sentence can greatly affect its clarity and capitalizing pronouns and words referring to the deity could help clarify many passages that would otherwise take some study to understand). This very thing was done to the KJV that we have today. I understand that the people who did the NKJV tried to do this; however, I do not believe that they were as careful when they did what they did. Therefore, I am sticking to the KJV.
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10-14-2008, 09:35 PM
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