Hi, sorry if this is in the wrong forums, I don’t quite know enough about bible scholarship to determine whether this is GQ or IMHO, or even GD.
Anyway, I was wondering if there are any credible claims that the KJV version of the bible is actually more accurate than some of the more modern versions. I keep on hearing from people that one should only read the KJV but they never really seem to give substantial reasons.
Is the KJV objectively better?
When it comes to the Bible, there is no relatively best. I recommend the King James version, because it’s the best literature written in the English language. And yes, I know all about Shakespeare.
This page from RelgiousTolerance might be useful to you. It contains stats and basic information about a variety of translations, and a direct comparison of the KJV and NIV.
The KJV is a 400 year old translation of the ‘original texts.’ However, since those 400 years, scholarship has revised and corrected the accuracy of the original texts (because, in fact, the original texts have disintegrated, and all we have are copies of copies of copies…). And since those 400 years, scholarship has advanced in archeology and linguistical studies. And since those 400 years, the English language has evolved.
E.g., at the end of the Lord’s Prayer in the KJV, the phrase “For thine is the kingdom the power and the glory now and forever,” is now widely recognized to be an addition to the original text, and thus, should not be in the bible.
And so, the KJV, as cutting edge, and as beautifully translated as it was for it’s time is today a very poor translation and hard-to-understand translation compared to modern translations.
The Revised Standard Version (and its most recent edition, the New Revised Standard Version) is an attempt to replace the KJV with an updated and more scholarly sound translation.
“Hallowed be thy name” contains two archaic words and one archaic tense.
No it isn’t. The translators of the KJV relied heavily on existing translations, such as Erasmus’s 16th-century Greek translation of the New Testament, which was itself based on prior Greek translations.
Just to follow up on my post, in case anyone is looking for more information – I found an excerpt of a book on Bible translation: History of the King James Version. Of particular relevance to my rebuttal of moriah’s claims is the following instruction given to the translators by King James:
Also of relevance is the full title of the KJV Bible itself, which makes it clear that the work relies heavily on existing translations: (emphasis added)
The translators’ preface (seldom included in recent editions) also contains the following admission:
You’ve confused some issues, here.
References to Erasmus and the Greek are not to translations that he had made (and why would he have translated inything into English?). Rather, Erasmus produced an early verison of what has come to be regarded as the Textus Receptus of the original Greek New Testament in which he used multiple Greek texts, providing a recension of those he considered most accurate that was published (using the new mass-printing techniques) so that more scholars would have standardized copies available to study. (Erasmus did accompany his text with a Latin translation.)
There are two basic “schools” of texts, those that have their origins in the Byzantine world (often presumed to have come from original Antioch versions) and those that have their origins in the Alexandrine world. The texts most available for study at the time of Erasmus (and in the ensuing 80 years leading to the translation of the KJV) tended to be the Byzantine texts as many of the Alexandrine texts were located in Muslim lands and not easily accessible. Since the discovery of a number of Alexandrine texts in the nineteenth century, there has been a flurry of reconsideration of all the texts by scholars (obscured, somewhat, by the shrill screams of the fringe of the scholarly community that only their Byzantine or Alexandrine tradition should be acceptable). One subset of the shrill fringe further holds that the Byzantine-derived Textus Receptus is the only true version, and declares that the NIV, RSV, and other translations that include renderings from the Alexandrine school are, thus, false.
The statements regarding whether the KJV was translated “from the originals” needs to be placed in context, as well. To the extent that a translator would have compared a Tyndale or a Coverdale copy to the original Hebrew or Greek and said “they match,” you can say that the KJV was not translated from the original. However, the earlier English texts were compared against the Hebrew or Greek texts for accuracy and discrepancies were generally resolved with a deference to the oriinal language. From that perspective, one can say that the KJV was translated from the original sources–they just saved themselves some time by allowing earlier translations to provide the basic text.
Beats me. But then again, I never claimed that Erasmus made an English translation.
As you correctly point out, it can generally be said that Erasmus assembled a Greek New Testament from existing Greek manuscripts. However, there were many passages (Matthew 10:8, Matthew 27:35, John 3:25, Romans 16:25-27, etc.) for which Erasmus actually translated from the (Latin) Vulgate and not from a Greek text. In fact, the Greek texts upon which the rest of Erasmus’s work is based were not verbatim copies themselves, but rather editions with inline annotations written in such a way that Erasmus could not always distinguish them from the original text.
I suppose it’s techincally incorrect to call Erasmus’s New Testament either a translation or a compilation.
Shalmanese: Brother Jack Chick and some other fundamentalists claim that the KJV is the only edition that should be read because, in their version of reality, the evil Illuminati of the early Catholic Church (we’re talking about the period 200-700 AD) deliberately corrupted the texts of all existing texts WITH THE EXCEPTION of original copies of scrolls the true believers hid someplace in the Holy Land. I want to say someplace in Syria, but I could be wrong. Chick et al. claim those Syrian (?) texts were found during Medieval times, the drafters of the KJV used those texts before the nefarious Catholics murdered many of them, and the KJV is the only version that true Bible believers should use because it is the only one based upon the original, God-inspired texts. As far as I can tell, a Florida preacher named Dr. Peter Ruckman (and this loony makes Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson look flaming liberals) originated this idea.
I, myself, know too little about theology to tell which of the various Bibles is closest to the original text. I use the KJV because I agree with Alear. It is one of the treasures of the English language, and I find its language much more magnificent than the modern translations.
Poetry is the language of spiritual matters and prose the language of secular matters. Therefore I think that both versions have their place. It could not only vary as to the reason you are reading the bible, but also what part of the bible is being read.
If one is doing a scholarly work, then throw out phrases like “For thine is the kingdom the power and the glory now and forever,”, but for my personal use I like the phrase, I’m used to it and 400 years is enough precedence for me. It doesn’t alter the rest of the prayer and can’t be considered heresy.
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[sup]Like a little heresy would offend me.[/sup][/ul]
My personal opinion is that while an individual could go their entire life with no other Bible than KJV(and could be a good Christian without a Bible at all even), it is the least accurate of the popular modern translations.
Example. Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”
That’s how it is in KJV. It’s wrong. It should read, “heavens” not, “heaven”. The hebrew writers believed in three heavens, the sky(where birds are), outer space, and the heaven where God lives.
The original hebrew indicates plural, but the KJV misses it.
Very minor differences like this exist throughout the KJV, but nothing so drastic that it would cause someone to believe something totally opposite of a core Christian belief.
I agree with you, Peyote, about the KJV being a treasure of the english Language. I hope this isn’t hijacking but I own a copy of the KJV translation of the Apocrypha.
One matter of contention among Orthodox Christians and the KJV is that the KJV uses the Masoretic (Hebrew) text for the Old Testament. Why would this be a problem? Two reasons:
1: The Septuagint text seems to have been the preference of the early Christians. (http://www.protomartyr.net/orthodox/bible/otcanon.html)
2: The Masoretic text was compiled centuries after the foundation of Christianity (http://www.bartleby.com/65/ol/OldTesta.html), suggesting the possibility that editorial decisions by the Masoretes may have been influenced by a desire to distance themselves from Christian interpretation.
There is a fairly recent book on the writing of the KJV, which goes into much detail on this. (Sorry, can’t remember the exact title.)
But from my study of this (I glanced thru it for about a half-hour in a bookstore) I was surprised to see several mentions of cases where the political power (King James, or his appointees) specifically pushed for certain translations because of the current political climate!
[King James was, after all, a semi distant relative of his predecessor Queen Elizabeth I and it could have been argued that there were others with just as much claim to the throne, plus he was still facing Barons who felt no great loyalty to him.]
So for example, there are many places where the KJV chooses phrasing that emphasizes heirarchial authority even if that is not the most accurate translation. But it was important to King James at the time.
So it’s clear that many other influences affected into what went into the KJV other than purely what was the most accurate translation. So I’d think the answer to the original posted question is that the KJV is NOT the most accurate.
t-bonham@scc.net, was it either Wide as the Waters or In the Beginning? I started a thread to discuss those two books over in CaféSociety - didn’t want to hijack this thread.
I don’t know what happened with that post. What is there is the part that I deleted and no sign of my remarks concerning the last part of Dogface’s post.
A short version is that I don’t understand the idea of “Christian interpretation” of the OT being more reliable than the Jewish interpretation. Some people are complaining that this or that doesn’t use the source and yet when it comes to “Christian” vs. “Jewish” interpretation some seem to think “Christian” makes it the better source.
kniz, the claim (not my belief) notes that the Masoretic text restoration was completed in the tenth century. By that time, there was a long tradition of anti-Jewish feeling in the Eastern Church. (It also appeared in the Western Church, but did not come to full bloom, there, until the twelfth century.)
Since some copies of the Septuagint (and many commentaries based on the Septuagint) were older than that particular recension, it is held by some people that, where the Hebrew text differs from the Greek Septuagint, the Masoretes apparently changed the Hebrew to favor their interpretation of how the Hebrew text should have looked.
That argument is mostly based on wishful thinking. Copies of of several books of the Old Testament found among the second and first century BCE Qumran Scrolls match very closely to the Masoretic text while differing from the Greek Septuagint. There are some Qumran scrolls that differ from the Masoretic text with certain passages included or removed from one or the other, but where the same passage is provided, the texts are extremely close. Of course, prior to the discoveries at Qumran, it was harder to compare actual ancient texts to the Masoretic texts, so it was easier to make the claim that that Masoretes might have fudged some passages. We can still argue over the provenance of some passages, of course, but arguing, now, that the Septuagint is more reliable than the Masoretic text is an exercise in theological assertion, not scholarship.
However, since many people base much of their theology on the particular nuances of individual passages, it is important for those people to justify/rationalize their own selections.
To the best of my knowlege, these points are raised correctly. Just a few minor notes, mostly regarding the Old Testament:
There are two ways to translate, word to word and idea to idea. For example, a word to word translation of the Russian “Medved nastupil na neho uchach” would be “A bear stepped on his ear.” An idea to idea translation would be “He can’t carry a tune in a bucket.” The KJV is a word to word translation. The advantages of this are that every Hebrew word is always translated by the same English word (also true of the Greek, I believe), which is important for word study. Another is that translating idea to idea presupposes that you understand what the various idiomatic expressions mean, which is often not true of dead languages. The disadvantage are that meaning can be lost or distorted, as in my example above.
The KJV is the basis of a family of translations. The Revised Standard Version (RSV) and the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) make use of new textual discoveries and new understandings in syntax (KJV has almost no adverbs in the OT; we now know from studying other ancient Semitic languages that adverbial thoughts are expessed using infinitives), but retaining the flavor of the wonderful KJV language in modern English. (The major difference between the RSV and the NRSV is gender-inclusive language.) The New King James Version (NKJV) uses contemporary English which follows the KJV as closely as possible, but uses the same textus receptus that the original KJV translators used, ignoring new textual discoveries.
Also, keep in mind that the KJV is in the public domain. No one has to pay to quote it, reprint it, or cite it in books and/or pamphlets. This is not true of other translations. A fair number of sources (especially smaller ones) use it because it is essentially free.