Mark Ward - Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible

AUTHORIZED

THE USE & MISUSE of the KING JAMES BIBLE

MARK WARD

Authorized: The Use & Misuse of the King James Bible

Copyright 2018 Mark Ward

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

www.LexhamPress.com

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the ESVBible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are from the King James Version. Public domain.

Scripture quotations marked (HCSB) are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible, copyright 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2009 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Holman Christian Standard Bible, Holman CSB, and HCSB are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.

Scripture quotations marked (NASB) are from the New American Standard Bible , copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION, copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (NKJV) are from the New King James Version, copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996, 2004, 2007, 2013 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (ISV) are from the Holy Bible: International Standard Version, copyright 1996forever by The ISV Foundation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INTERNATIONALLY. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked (CSB) have been taken from the Christian Standard Bible, copyright 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Christian Standard Bible and CSB are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.

Print ISBN: 9781683590552

Digital ISBN: 9781683590569

Lexham Editorial Team: Elliot Ritzema, Lynnea Fraser, Danielle Thevenaz

Cover Design: Bryan Hintz

Except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air.

Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians ( KJV )

What is the use of correct speech if it does not meet with the listeners understanding? There is no point in speaking at all if our words are not understood by the people to whose understanding our words are directed. The teacher, then, will avoid all words that do not communicate; if, in their place, he can use other words which are intelligible in their correct forms, he will choose to do that, but if he cannoteither because they do not exist or because they do not occur to him at the timehe will use words that are less correct, provided that the subject-matter itself is communicated and learnt correctly.

This aim of being intelligible should be strenuously pursued. What use is a golden key, sif it cannot unlock what we want to be unlocked, and what is wrong with a wooden one, if it can, since our sole aim is to open closed doors?

Augustine, On Christian Teaching

Clearly there was no condescension whatsoever in Tyndales feelings about the people for whom his Bible was intended. The best proof of this is the fact that by far the greater part of the King James Version New Testament, universally considered to be among the glories of English literature and to be the source of much that is best in it, is in fact Tyndales work. In writing for the common people, in writing for the Ploughman, who would not only have been ignorant of Latin but illiterate altogether, he created a masterpiece.

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things

Dedication

For months, the dedication in my book manuscript read To the least of these. But then I read a book by an evangelical White House aide who had that very phrase struck from a piece he wrote. It was struck by a fellow staffer who commented on the draft, Is this a typo? It doesnt make any sense to me. Who/what are these?

I dedicate this book instead to

Neighborhood Bible Class in West Greenville, SC.

Contents

O ut of every 100 Americans who pulled a Bible off a shelf today, 55 of them pulled down a King James Version. I feel fairly safe in saying that the King James is the only 1611 release still on any bestseller lists.

All the same, 55 percent is only slightly more than half, and the trend line is clearfor it started near 100 percent. The English-speaking Christian church, which was once almost completely unified in using the KJV , is no longer unified around a particular Bible translation.

Why? Because people say they can no longer understand it.

I grew up reading and hearing the KJV , and I dont recall having any trouble with the verbiage. I dont remember ever being baffled by, We had been as Sodoma (Rom 9:29) or Let him that glorieth glory in this (Jer 9:24). Early on I felt a sufficient mastery of Elizabethan diction not only to read it but to speak it. I even remember as a third grader asking my beloved teacher, Mrs. Page, if we could all use King James English for a day. (She said yes, but it never happened. Little kids remember these things.) Somehow toddlers managed to learn this style of speech, in a time before not just antibiotics but Sesame Street.

But there are people, many people, who insist that KJV English is too difficult. Many of them, in turn, have already jettisoned the KJV . The 55 percent who have held on to it do so for various reasons: habit, conviction, or merely a loyalty and love that we quite naturally attach to things we value.

So though I didnt know it as a third grader, I was growing up at the tail end of a remarkable period for English Bible translation, a period the likes of which we may never see againa period in which one Bible version not only dominated church worship, theological writing, and personal devotion, but even became a touchstone for English-speaking culture at large. Even now, KJV phrases show up in New York Times headlines on a regular basis. Culturally literate people who have never cracked open a Bible are sometimes surprised, upon finally doing so, to discover many famous phrases of whose provenance they were hitherto ignorant. For example:

By the skin of his teeth.

Am I my brothers keeper?

He doesnt suffer fools gladly.

It was a labor of love.

Cleanliness is next to godliness.

(Oh, waitthat last ones from Shakespeare. Or was it Ben Franklin?)

But if fewer and fewer English speakers open the KJV , its famous phrases seem likely to fall out the back of the language.

ENGLISH BIBLE TRANSLATION

People care about KJV English, because people care about English, and they care about Bible translation. The most popular blog posts I write are about English Bibles. These posts always get social shares and comments, because everybody has an opinion on whether translations should be formal (sometimes summarized as word for word) or functional (sometimes summarized as thought for thought). Everybody has a passage in this or that translation that they love or that they object to. Everybody has a favorite English Bible translation, or is on the hunt for one. Which Bible translation is best? has a lot of search-engine value, I can tell you. People want to know, because they care.