Home » Posts tagged 'King James Version' (Page 8)
Tag Archives: King James Version
The King James Bible: Too Hard to Understand?
“The King James Version is too hard for people to understand! It is written in Old English. Therefore, we need to use a modern Bible version that is easier to understand.”
Is this true?
Before dealing with the most important question–what Scripture says on the subject–a few brief words on a secondary but related question.
The King James Version: Is it Old English?
First, the King James Version is not in Old English. Old English is the language of Beowulf. If you want to hear Old English, watch this:
Is the King James Bible easier to understand than that?
Maybe the King James is Middle English if it isn’t Old English. Here is someone reading from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which was written in Middle English:
Here you can probably make out something here and there, but it is clear that the King James Version is not in Old English, nor is it in Middle English. It is much easier to read than the Canterbury Tales. (Side note: I enjoyed my college class on Chaucer’s classic at U. C. Berkeley.) The King James Bible is in early modern English. English has changed less between 1611 and today than it did from the days of Chaucer in the 1400s to the KJV.
So the King James Bible is not in Old English, nor in Middle English, but in modern English–early modern English. That does not mean, however, that it is necessarily easy to understand. Perhaps it really is “too hard,” and we should overlook the fact that the New King James Version is soft on sodomy, removes “hell” from 22 verses in the Bible, replacing it with easier words to understand, and ones that are in common use, like “Sheol” and “Hades” (2 Samuel 22:6; Psalm 18:5; Matthew 11:23, etc.), is not actually translated from the same underlying language text, and contains other problems. Maybe since the King James Bible is “too hard” to understand we need to just deal with these sorts of problems in the NKJV.
“Too hard”: What is it?
Biblically, what does it mean that language is “too hard” to understand? In the New Testament, the Greek of the book of Hebrews is much harder to read than the Greek of the Gospel of John. The Gospel of Luke and Acts are harder to read than 1 John. Sometimes the New Testament contains really long sentences, like Ephesians 1:3-14, which is all just one sentence in Greek. Why did the Holy Ghost dictate such long sentences? Wouldn’t they be too hard to understand?
The vast majority of people in the first century were simple rural people; farmers, shepherds, and the like, not highly educated urbanites. Literacy was sketchy in many places. What was Paul doing when he wrote Hebrews under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit? What was Luke thinking? Didn’t they know that their Greek would be too hard to understand?
What about the Old Testament? Significant portions of the Hebrew prophetic and poetical books are much more challenging Hebrew than many of the narrative sections of the Hebrew Bible. Why did the Holy Spirit write hard Hebrew and hard Greek in some parts of the Bible? Shouldn’t it all have been easy to understand?
Is there more literacy in the English speaking world now than there was in the first century world of the New Testament, or in the world where God gave the Hebrew Old Testament? When was learning to read–or improving one’s reading level–easier? Surely now.
The question, then, should be: “Is the English of the King James Version significantly more complex and harder to understand English than the Greek of the New Testament was to the New Testament people of God or the Hebrew of the Old Testament was to Israel”? The King James seeks to replicate the syntax of the original language texts as much as possible. That is why every verse from Genesis 1:3 to Genesis 1:26 begins with the word “And”–we may not write that way in non-translation English, but the KJV accurately represents what the Hebrew given by the Holy Spirit says here. We can’t simplify the syntax of the King James Bible without moving it further away from the original language text. If we have to leave the syntax alone, does the King James Version have more archaic words than the Greek of the New Testament or the Hebrew of the Old Testament? There are over 680 hapax legomena or words that occur only one time in the Greek New Testament and close to 1,500 hapax legomena in the Hebrew Old Testament. While not all of those hapaxes would have been rare or archaic words to first century readers, many of them would have been. By way of contrast, there are nowhere near that many archaic words in the King James Version.
Evaluated by the standard of Scripture itself–by the standard of the Greek and Hebrew text God gave to His people–the English of the Authorized, King James Version is indubitably not “too hard.” People who claim that it is too difficult to read should be enthusiastically promoting the Defined King James Bible, which leaves the actual King James Version text unchanged but defines the few archaic words at the bottom of its pages for readers, or works such as David Cloud’s Way of Life Encylopedia of the Bible and Christianity, where all the rare KJV words are defined, instead of encouraging readers to reject the KJB’s fantastic translation of the perfectly preserved Hebrew and Greek Textus Receptus for corrupt modern Bible versions.
So is the King James Bible too hard to understand? If we employ the only objective standard–Scripture itself–the answer is “no.”
Learn more about Bibliology here.
–TDR
“The Anabaptists Church Worldwide” & “Street Preacher Fellowship” cult
There is an organization called “The Anabaptists [sic] Church Worldwide” that supports a “Street Preacher Fellowship.” It is a cult, a false religion.
This blog post will not focus upon peripheral problems, such as the poor English grammar evident in the fact that the organization’s name does not appear to understand the role of the apostrophe and the many grammatical errors in its statement of faith and other documents.
Nor will it focus upon the fact that the cult rejects the congregational church polity of Anabaptism for a form of hierarchicalism with a “Biblical presbytery rule [sic]” and “national bishops” and so is not Anabaptist, but would be better called Episcopalian than Anabaptist, although it may not even understand what episcopalian, presbyterian, and congregational church polity are.
Nor will it focus upon the fact that the cult does not understand that the church of the New Testament is not universal or invisible. Nor will it focus upon affirmations in its doctrinal statement such as that Christians are “at point [sic] of salvation baptized by the Holy Spirit of God into one body . . . and that body being not all [sic] figurative, but altogether real, physically . . . that body is Christ’s . . . each born again child of God is literally made to be . . . members of Jesus Christ’s body, of His flesh and of His bones.” The members of the organization do not, however, literally disappear into the ascended human body of Christ to become part of His literal bone marrow, and, remember, the statement is allegedly literal, “not at all figurative.”
Nor will it focus upon the cult’s extreme Ruckmanism, through which it denies Christ’s promises to preserve the Greek and Hebrew words which were dictated by the Holy Spirit (Matthew 5:18) and denigrates study of the preserved words of God in the original languages. Nor will it focus upon how the cult undermines confidence in the King James Bible through its extremism. Nor will it focus upon the bizarre idea in its doctrinal statement that the Bible actually is God in written form, an idea which the pseudo-Baptist cultist Steven Anderson has also adopted.
Nor will it focus upon the cult’s tendency to name-calling and careless study of Scripture, nor upon the fact that the section in its doctrinal statement on (the wicked sin of) sodomy adds ideas not present in the Bible; nor on the fact that the cult also follows Steven Anderson and rejects Scripture by teaching that sodomites cannot be saved (with the “Anabaptists Church” cult making certain qualifications to this), nor on the fact that it spends more time on sodomy than it does on the nature of God, and that only its statement on sodomy, but nothing else in its doctrinal statement, ends with the affirmation: “This section of the Articles of Faith of the Anabaptists Church [sic] Worldwide is not subject to revision, and shall never be changed by any presbytery without the dissolvement [sic] of the Church Worldwide.” Apparently even the bad grammar in this section of the cult’s articles of faith cannot be changed; but that is not the focus of this blog post.
What is the worst false doctrine of this cult? The worst false teaching is its rejection of the Trinity and of the incarnation of Christ in favor of a bizarre, blasphemous, and ignorant form of modalism. Its article of faith on the Trinity includes the following:
-
2.3 We believe that God is a spirit (John 4:24), and that the Holy Spirit is
that very Spirit of the Lord God (Isaiah 61:1, 10.11, 14), and was the very
breath of Life in Jesus Christ (Isaiah 11:4/ Job 33:4/ John 20:22).
-
2.4 We believe that Jesus Christ is God the Father (John 10:30) manifest in the
flesh (1 Timothy 3:16), and that Jesus Christ was and is the bodily
manifestation of God Almighty.
-
2.5 As a ghost is the spirit of a dead man (Luke 24:37/ Matthew 14:26), we
believe that the Holy Ghost is the Spirit of Jesus Christ which He gave up on
Calvary when He died for our sins (John 19:30/ Matthew 27:50/ Mark
15:37/ Luke 23:46), and as the Holy Ghost (Acts 1:2-8) is the Spirit of Jesus
Christ (Romans 8:9/ Philippians 1:19). These Three being One God, each
exists eternally as God, and as the manifestations of themselves in One as
distinguished from the Other. God is a spirit, and that spirit is the Holy
Spirit, who was the breath of life (Genesis 2:7) of Jesus Christ, who Himself
was the bodily manifestation of God the Father with the Holy Spirit
breathing within Him as the very Life of God. Though the Eternal God cannot
die, God the Father sent His Son into the world to do just that, yielding up
the ghost when He had finished His Father’s work; upon which the Holy
Ghost of God became the working manifestation of God the Father in
baptizing believers into the very body of God, Jesus Christ the Righteous (1
Corinthians 12:11-14/ Acts 1:5).
The statement that “Jesus Christ is God the Father” is modalist heresy and idolatry. It is a damnable false doctrine. It proclaims a false God, a denial and rejection of the true God. Jesus Christ is the Son, not the Father. By teaching that Jesus Christ is God the Father, this cult shows that they are antichrist, denying the Father and the Son (1 John 2:22).
The affirmations in 2.5 make a crazy confusion of Christ’s human spirit with the Holy Spirit. By denying that Christ’s human soul and spirit were separated from His body at His death, instead claiming that the Holy Spirit was present instead of Christ’s human spirit, the “Anabaptists Church Worldwide” cult denies the true humanity of Christ. Only if Christ had a true and complete humanity, body, soul, and spirit, could He represent and save sinful mankind. Section 2.5 denies Christ’s true humanity by claiming that the Holy Spirit replaced the Lord Jesus’ human spirit, something similar to the ancient heresy of Apollinarianism (although if the cult’s members cannot even write in English properly, and think Anabaptists held to presbyterian church polity, it is not likely that they have much understanding of early Trinitarian controversies). By denying the true and complete humanity of Jesus Christ, the “Anabaptists Church Worldwide” cult shows itself to be of the “spirit of antichrist,” and its members to be deceivers and antichrists (1 John 4:3; 2 John 7).
Various parts of their doctrinal statement also teach the idolatrous idea that God is body, soul, and spirit like people are–the Holy Spirit is allegedly God’s eternal spirit part, based on a confusion of the use of the word Spirit for the third Person and also for the human spirit. The words for spirit, ruach and pneuma, are also used for the wind in the Bible, but the Holy Spirit is not God’s eternal wind. God’s eternal body part is allegedly the Son, denying His true incarnation in time (1 John 4:1-3) and thus evidencing itself as antichrist. God’s eternal soul part is allegedly the Father, something for which Scripture gives not a scintilla of evidence. The cult claims Biblical support for its idolatry by assuming that since man is in the image of God, God must be body, soul, and spirit, ignoring the fact that the image of God in man is “righteousness and true holiness” (Ephesians 4:24) and that the image is being progressively renewed in believers through progressive sanctification (Colossians 3:10), so the image of God in man has absolutely nothing to do with the wicked blasphemy that God is an eternal Son-body, spirit-Holy Ghost, and soul-Father.
There are a number of things that a born-again child of God, and a member of one of Christ’s true Baptist churches, could find attractive about the “Anabaptists Church Worldwide” cult. It claims to stand for the KJV; it believes in modesty and gender distinction; it (pretends) to be part of the Anabaptist/Baptist line of true churches; it takes a strong stand against sins the world is promoting, such as homosexuality; it claims to be fearless and bold in its preaching; it practices street preaching, which is very good, and so on. One can hope that perhaps some of the members of this cult are too ignorant to realize that their articles of faith deny the Trinity and the true humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ in favor of modalism and a form of Apollinarianism. Regrettably, none of the above nice things justify its wicked rejection of the true God and of the incarnate Christ. Who cares if you are modestly dressed if you are a blasphemer and idolator? Those that actually believe its doctrinal statement will find themselves in hell with the Antichrist. Those that are too ignorant to understand its heresies have no business preaching to anybody (1 Timothy 3:1) until they learn the rudiments of Christianity on the nature of God.
If you are a member of the “Anabaptist Church Worldwide” and “Street Preacher Fellowship” cult, I call on you to repent of your idolatry and other sins, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and be saved (Mark 1:15), and then separate yourself from this cult and join one of Christ’s true churches. Learn more about Christ’s true gospel and His true church here.
–TDR
Recent Comments