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A Sincere, Accurate Assessment Contrasting Translational Choices Versus Underlying Original Language Text
Sufficient Intelligibility and False Friends
The most prominent recent conversation about the Bible (that I’ve seen) revolves around “sufficient intelligibility” of the King James Version. Some words used by the King James translators have changed in meaning since their translation. Podcaster Mark Ward declares about one hundred words as “false friends.” As an overview of the definitional usage, “false friend” means the following provided by an AI aggregation:
A false friend is a word in one language that sounds or looks similar to a word in another language, but has a different meaning. It is also known as a false cognate or bilingual homophone.
Unlike the new Mark Ward usage of the terminology, false friend does not refer to a word in the same language that over the centuries radically changed in its meaning. Instead, linguists calls this a “semantic change.” Mark Ward did not originate the concept of “false friend.” He simply uses the two word phrase in a different way than its original and definitional usage. It does not refer to the changing meaning of the word. That is semantic shift or semantic change.
History of False Friends Versus Semantic Change
At the same time, Ward was not the first to use “false friend” in the novel way that he does. British linguist, David Crystal, began using the term “false friend” to refer to words in William Shakespeare’s writing that have now changed in meaning from their original understanding in Elizabethan English. He accumulated an appendix of these words as long ago as 2010. As far as I know, Crystal and Ward are the only ones using “false friend” like they have and do. In some ways, it’s an either rhetorical or marketing tool. Others are now imitating this new usage, but Crystal coined “false friend” for Shakespeare and then Ward for the King James Version.
Semantic shift or change is real. Ward and his host of assistants have searched for words with semantic changes in meaning in the King James Version. However, they’re a little late to the party, because those using the King James Version already provided these lists of words and their meaning for decades. In 1998 the late D. A. Waite and his Bible For Today at great effort published The Defined King James Bible. Even before Waite’s book, men wrote helps in this way. Thomas Nelson Press published The King James Version Wordbook in 1994.
In 1978 in An Introduction to Language, Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman wrote (p. 314):
In the King James Version of the Bible (1611), God says of the herbs and trees, “to you shall be for meat” (Genesis 1:29). To a speaker of seventeenth-century English, meat meant “food,” and flesh meant “meat.” Since that time, semantic change has narrowed the meaning of meat to what it is in Modern English.
Two Actions
You can see that Fromkin and Rodman referred to this alteration of meaning, as do many others, as a “semantic shift.” This occurs in every language over time. Words take on a new meaning and contemporary readers should be informed of this in an older book or translation. Two different actions could alleviate the confusion for one hundred or so words most egregiously affected by semantic changes.
One
One, the meaning of these one hundred or so words could be placed in the margin. The Trinitarian Bible Society definitely does that in their classic and Westminster reference Bibles. Why should someone do a total retranslation of the King James Version, when this simple solution exists? It does not even require a giant group of Hebrew and Greek scholars to put in thousands of hours to accomplish this task. That work is done already.
The 1611 King James translators placed into the translation marginal notes. This isn’t new. There were 7,342 of them. The marginal notes were designed to provide readers with additional insights into the text. They often included alternate translations, explanations of obscure passages, and clarifications on specific terms or names found within the biblical text. Some notes defined biblical terms or provided context for certain characters, enhancing the reader’s understanding of the scriptures. When I say scriptures, I mean what God inspired, the original language text.
As some of you reading here might know, providing a definition in the margin is unacceptable to Ward. I’ve never heard him give an answer as to why. He defames and castigates any church leader who opts for public continuation of usage of the King James Version, even with provision of definitions. Ward recently said these leaders are sinning by continuing to have the KJV as their church Bible. The only option for Ward, besides changing to a modern version, is the next one.
Two
Two, someone could update the translation of the King James Version in the spirit of the Blayney edition of 1769, that almost everyone already uses. Some will say, “That’s already been done.” People will mention The New King James Version first. I’ve already written here in many posts how that the underlying text is different for the NKJV, which eliminates it as a possibility. I believe there are over one hundred places where the NKJV translators came from a different word, not identical to the King James Version.
Another new translation that claims the same underlying text is the Modern English Version. This was started in 2005 under the leadership of James Linzey, a Southern Baptist. Many men worked on the MEV from a lot of different denominations with many different doctrinal and gospel positions. It was published in 2014 by Passio, an arm of Charisma Publishing House, a Charismatic organization. I haven’t looked into the MEV like I have the NKJV, so I don’t have much to say about it.
Some have given the Modern English Version a good review and some bad. It seems like originally it was meant to meet a concern of chaplains in the British military and what they should give to their soldiers. The MEV does question the underlying text of the KJV in its footnotes, calling into doubt the text preserved and available to the Lord’s churches. I can’t in good conscience hand to someone or recommend to him a translation that denounces the very text from which it was translated. The MEV does that.
Semantic and Translational Choices Versus Underlying Text
With everything said so far about semantic and translational choices in the English translation of the original languages of the Bible, how does that contrast with a different underlying text? The modern versions don’t translate from the same Hebrew and Greek words. There are thousands of differences in words between the critical text, the underlying text behind the modern versions of the New Testament and that of the Textus Receptus, the underlying text behind the King James Version. Thousands. Those are different words, not words that could have variation in meaning so someone could understand them in different ways.
It’s important to translate words right. Translating the original language words into intelligible language is also good. If you can, you want to translate into words that people can understand. You don’t want to translate into words that have a different meaning now than the word in the underlying text. This is called “getting it right.” When someone translates, if possible he should try to get the English word with the same meaning as the original language word. At the same time, having the wrong underlying word is worse.
Having a hundred words with a translation with a changed semantical meaning is not as bad as actual wrong words. Someone can learn the old meaning of the word that has had a semantical change. A totally different or wrong word is still different and wrong, even if it’s translated right and intelligible. No explanation or translation can change the wrong word in the underlying text. That’s worse than a “false friend.”
Important Consideration
I ask that you also take the next obvious truth into consideration. Someone such as Mark Ward and others, but especially him, will say it is sin to distribute one hundred words he assesses as unintelligible in translation. Yet, he will not consider or call it sin to distribute five thousand wrong words. This comparison should qualify the outrage over intelligibility. I’ll let you judge. Those one hundred misunderstood words look like more of a red herring next to five thousands wrong words.
Ward himself to his credit won’t say that semantic change is an error in translation. It isn’t. However, the wrong word is an error. You can never translate the right word from a wrong word.
What’s lost with the hodgepodge of English translations on the market today? It dismisses the biblical and historical doctrine of preservation of scripture. Among other things, that is what is most unacceptable in an evaluation of this issue. In the late nineteenth century, B. B. Warfield at Princeton Seminary invented a new doctrine of inerrancy to compensate for this very betrayal of the doctrine of preservation.
Mark Ward speaks with certainty about a sin of unintelligibility. He isn’t certain about the words of scripture though. He calls it confidence, something less than being certain. And that’s fine, to be expected from his and others’ perspective.
How Can There Be Any Sin in Sincere? Mark Ward Strikes Again
Mark Ward made a video about me, and then SharperIron linked to it with my name. Is this a case of my living rent free in Mark’s head? I don’t know. I’m fine with his letting it go. He can’t do it though. Maybe I’m bringing him more audience. His numbers go up when he uses me in his presentations. They go way up. The terminology is “clickbait.”
In this edition of the Mark Ward show, he says that I helped prove his point about his “false friends” in the King James Version. He titles the episode: “Let a Leading KJV-Onlyist Teach You a False Friend!” Oh so clever, Mark Ward, the Snidley Whiplash of Multiple Version Onlyists. Yet, “Curses, foiled again!” Foiled again, because Dudley Do-Right of TR Onlyism is of course not in fact jumping on the Snidley false friend train track. What happened?
1 Peter 2:2
For many years, I have used and still use 1 Peter 2:2 as a major Christian worldview reference and helping understand the word “sincere.” Mark says “sincere” now is a bad translation in 1 Peter 2:2 and a “false friend.” I ask, “How can there be any sin in sincere?” Answer: By stretching the truth.
Mark dug deep into this blog to find a post and an exchange in the comment section as the highlight of his program. Here is 1 Peter 2:2:
As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby.
I’ve referred to “the sincere milk” many times as the “pure mother’s milk” (here, here, here, here, and here among other places). Ward says “sincere” is a false friend to a reader of the King James Version, because sincere means something different today than it did in 1611 (or 1769). Instead, he says (and says that I say) it means “pure.” He reports that I think it should mean pure too, but because I’m KJVO, I won’t admit that, even though I believe it. He’s saying I’m not sincere about sincere.
Sincere Milk
Welcome to the Snidley Whiplash mindreading class, SW101. I said that “sincere milk” is not common language for today. It isn’t. Almost nobody would know what that means without explanation. Perhaps people knew better in 1611. Still, I don’t think another translation today would be better than “sincere” in 1 Peter 2:2. “Pure milk” doesn’t get it done. It misses the point of that expression in the original language. I talk about the meaning in the comment section of the post to which Ward referred:
The mother’s milk goes to her baby without any other intervention, no human intervention, straight from mom to baby, unlike other milk. God changes us through revelation, not through our discoveries. With God and His Word there is no variableness or shadow of turning. His Word and God are not relative as is everything else. It comes direct and so undiluted or affected unlike our eyewitness or findings. We can’t trust these lying eyes or that there hasn’t been some kind of intervention in nature. This is why faith is superior to human discovery, because it depends on God.
The sincerity, the purity, is that it comes as one, which is the meaning of the Latin “sin,” one. There is oneness to the nature of God and to His revelation. It is entirely cohesive, non-contradictory, not mixed with any kind of error.
Mark Ward doesn’t include this part in his presentation. Why do I think “sincere” is still a good translation that needs no update in 1 Peter 2:2?
Pure or Sincere?
Play On Words
The Greek word translated “sincere” is adolos. The “a” portion of the Greek word means “no.” It’s called an alpha privative, expressing negation or absence. The previous verse, 1 Peter 2:1, uses dolos, the King James translators translated it guile. Guile could also mean deception. I believe there is a purposeful play on words by Peter between dolos and adolos, emphasizing the contrast between the speakings of men and the speakings of God. The speakings of men have dolos and the speakings of God have adolos.
Does adolos strictly mean “pure”? No. Sincerity conveys that someone speaks without deception, the error that enters into the speech or writing for a man-engendered reason. “Pure” doesn’t communicate that. In this sense, when the modern translators translate adolos as “pure,” that’s a false friend to those who read the word.
Meaning of Pure
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says in Matthew 5:8:
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Is “pure” here adolos? Is it without guile or not deceptive? No. This is the Greek word katharoi. An English word that comes from this is “katharsis.” This is what people think when they hear “pure” today. Yet, that’s not what Peter is saying in 1 Peter 2:2, that the Word of God is pure in that sense.
What I thought and wrote in the one post to which Mark Ward refers is that “sincere milk” is the “pure mother’s milk.” That is different than saying it is “pure milk.” He says that I wrote that “sincere” means “pure.” I wasn’t saying that and I didn’t say that, which is why I believe Mark Ward left off the latter context of what I wrote and really focused on my reference to the Oxford English Dictionary. He isn’t sincere about my position ironically. That adulterates his commentary on what I wrote.
Christian Worldview
From a Christian worldview standpoint, God’s Word is revelation so it goes from God directly to the hearer like a breast-fed baby gets his milk directly from his mother. There is no intermediary. Evidence on the other hand involves, one, someone’s lying or deceived eyes, and, two, a context that is not neutral. I like to the say that the crime scene is contaminated.
When human beings look at evidence, they don’t see it clearly. God’s Word or will, therefore, can’t come through human discovery, but through the direct undiluted revelation of God. Revelation by nature is non-discoverable or else it wouldn’t be revelation. Revelation is “sincere milk.”
“Sincere” is still the best translation, but we also still have to explain it. If we translated adolos “pure,” that would more likely, I believe, lead someone astray on the meaning of the word, a false friend to the one reading it. I really do think this and Snidley Whiplash, someone who rejects the perfect preservation of scripture, misrepresents me on this. He’s a false friend to me.
Me a King James Onlyist?
I want to say one more thing about what Mark Ward does. He also deceives his audience by calling me a leading King James Onlyist. Calling someone King James Only, he knows is a pejorative. Mark Ward knows that double inspirationists (Ruckmanites) and English preservationists don’t see me as a leading King James Onlyist. Why? Based on the most fair understanding of that label, I’m not. Why not?
One,
I believe that translations should come from the original language texts, the Hebrew and Greek, not from the English. That means that I vouch for translations that are not the King James Version. Hence, I’m not King James Only. True King James Onlyists won’t do that and don’t believe that.
Two,
I do not reject an update of the King James Version. The only ones who do not know that are those who read misrepresentations from people like Mark Ward. I believe preservation is found in the original language text from which an update would come and did come in 1769 already. We do not use the 1611 today. An update already occurred. How could I be against that?
Three,
I don’t think an update of the King James Version is wrong, so I also think some words in the King James Version are archaic or out-of-use. I’ve said this again and again. It doesn’t mean I support an update. I have other reasons why I want to keep the King James Version. The main one is its underlying textual differences between the King James and modern versions, something Mark Ward says he won’t debate.
Four,
I say all the time that I think someone could make a different translation of certain words in the King James Version. Someone could translate the Hebrew and Greek words in a different way and they’d be right. The translation of the King James isn’t the only way or ways to translate the original language text. I know I would make different choices than the King James translators, but that doesn’t mean I think they’re wrong either.
A False Friend
When I study the Bible, I study the original languages. False friends don’t occur to me, because I’m studying the words in their original languages. I also know because of studying the original languages that translated words very often are false friends. Mark Ward exaggerates the importance of these words. He treats himself like he’s come upon something highly significant. He hasn’t. I don’t think his point about false friends means nothing, but there are greater concerns by far than these.
Mark Ward is a false friend about the King James Version. He poses like he really wants to help those who use it. I don’t see it. By far, he’s a greater danger because of the doubt he casts upon the BIble that people use. He relishes those who start using a contemporary translation that varies from the underlying text of the King James Version vastly more than the total number of false friends he reports.
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