The King James Only Controversy on BAM

The King James Only Controversy and Confidence in Scripture

In studio today, a friend, a guest, a scholar in residence at Grand Canyon University, and the author of the King James Only Controversy, James White, delighted to have you in studio.

Today.

It's good to be with you.

You have written a controversial book about a controversy, and I want to be the first to say that I think this is a tremendous piece of work. In my endorsement of this book, on the back cover of the book, I say a clear, compelling, and conclusive case contradicting the claims of King James Version only advocates.

Your confidence in God's preservation of scripture through credible translations such as the NIV and the NASB will be solidified. And I think that's one of the things that you wanted to do through the book, is enhance and solidify the confidence that people have in the word of God.

That's very true, especially in light of the claims that are commonly made by King James. Only advocates who would cause people to doubt whether the Bible translation that they're utilizing, if it isn't a King James, is going to accurately lead them to a knowledge of.

God.

I've had many people contact me who were using another translation, and the book has helped them to get through the confusion and the concern, the real concern that was caused to them, that maybe I haven't been getting everything God would have me to have.

Your problem is not with the King James Version, but with King James Version only.

Exactly. The King James Version of the Bible is a tremendous work of scholarship, and it certainly served the church tremendously well, but the King James Only movement makes the King James something that the translators never intended for it to be.

And really, in many ways, I'm standing for what the King James translators believed about how you should do translation, the necessity of revision, and so on and so forth. And so we are not here to say, if you find the King James Version to be your translation of choice, that there's something wrong with you, or trying to convince you to abandon the use of that translation at all.

Instead, the book responds to those who would say, unless you use the King James Version, you're not actually reading God's Word.

How the New Testament Was Preserved and Copied

Let's take a little bit of a whirlwind tour from the secular Koine Greek, the common language of the day in which the majority of the New Testament came to us. From the secular Koine Greek of the day, to where we are today.

Okay.

Well, first of all, the language itself, a very beautiful language, a very expressive language, and it's the language the people spoke at the time. So God communicated to us in a way that was understandable to the people of the day.

He didn't write it on a kindergarten level. He didn't write it in the high classical Greek. He communicated to people like you and I in a language that we could understand.

By the way, there's a principle there for us in looking at modern Bible translations.

Very much so. I'm concerned about many of the translations that have come out very recently that are attempting to make the level of the Bible simpler than the Holy Spirit did.

So you don't want college level or first grade level, maybe fifth or sixth grade would be appropriate.

You don't want unnecessary confusion, but neither do you want to lose anything that's there. It is a tight line that has to be walked, and I believe that there are a number of modern translations that do it quite well.

But from that language, you have the writing of the scriptures themselves. They are God-breathed. It is the scriptures that are God-breathed, not the men that are writing them. They're not described as being God-breathed.

It's the scriptures that are God-breathed. It's God speaking to us. But we don't have what Paul wrote to Ephesus or to the Church of Colossae. We don't have that letter anymore. In fact, I think you'd probably agree with me if we did, it would probably be someplace in a shrine and people would be lining up to worship it, just like they did in Israel of old.

We don't have those. And so the question that looms in everyone's mind is, how did those words that were given by God come to be in my possession today in my English Bible? What was the process? And unfortunately, the King James only controversy thrives in the fact that that's not something that we talk a lot about.

It's not something that we emphasize a lot in our sermons and our teaching, helping people understand that. What we recognize is that the first difference between the Christians and the Jewish people before them is that the Christian people wanted everyone to hear about Jesus Christ.

And so they were very open in allowing their scriptures to be copied. If a letter was, for example, found in the Church of Colossae, when a Christian would come through and he said, I want to read about this, it talks about the preeminence of Christ, they would be allowed to make a copy.

And very, very, very quickly, entire sections of the New Testament ended up buried in the sands of Egypt. They ended up in Gaul, in Italy. They're being translated into Latin and other languages very, very quickly.

The scriptures were spread all over the known world because people everywhere believed that people needed to hear the message of the good news of Jesus Christ. Now there are two side effects of that methodology that God chose to use.

The first is a wonderful one. And as you know, I deal a lot with Mormons and dealing with the claims of the LDS Church. And one of the claims they make is that the scriptures have been altered and changed and many plain and precious truths deleted because someone didn't like it, so on and so forth.

There was never a time in history when any one man, group of men, religious organization had control over all of the manuscripts of the Bible. If all we had was, say, the originals in control of a powerful religious group today, we would have no way of knowing whether 1 ,000 years ago, 500 years ago, they decided to change the theology and delete the deity of Christ or insert this doctrine, insert that doctrine.

We would have no confidence of that.

So because they're spread out all over the world, that's an impossibility.

It's an impossibility. In fact, if someone does come along and try to make some radical change in a manuscript, when you compare that one manuscript against the other 5 ,000 that we have, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

So that was never a possibility for anyone to do. And when we talk about the preservation of scripture, I believe this is how God has preserved it in that way. But there's a second result of that. And that is, if you and I were to take the Gospel of John and sit right here in a well-lit place and we're both to hand write a copy of the Gospel of John, I'll let you say that yours would be the most accurate, but ours would not be word for word identical.

We would make errors. We would skip lines. We would misspell words. There's all sorts of common errors that human beings make when they do that type of activity. I do it in front of a word processor with word processing equipment that checks and corrects my spelling as I type.

I still make errors. That is what happens when in the history of the New Testament you have Christians simply making copies and sending them out all over the place. You have what we know as textual variance.

That is places where the Greek manuscripts will differ from one another. There are no two Greek manuscripts in the world that read word for word identical with any other. Now, most of them are exceptionally close.

85 of the text in the New Testament exhibits no variation at all. Of that remaining 15%, at least 90 of that is easily resolved. So we're looking at about 1 to 1 .5 of the text in the New Testament where you have to do serious textual examination to be able to determine the original reading.

One of the illustrations I like in your book is where you say, okay, let's say we had an original and 10 people sat down in a room and copied that original. You'd end up with 10 different copies. If you lost the original, you would be able to get back to it with those 10 copies that are different.

In fact, it's really interesting. Dan Wallace at Dallas Seminary has his students do a little thing every semester where he takes an apocryphal story and he tells one person, you be sloppy while you copy it and you be the smart one.

You be real careful and you just try to hurry through it. And then they just get rid of the original, copy those, and then destroy them. And then their project is, can we get back to the original? And I think he said he's done this 32 times and in every instance, they have been able to get back to the original within one word and that word was either to or also.

And the reason is because you don't all make the same mistakes at the same place.

Exactly. The smarter students are going to make the lesser mistakes. They're not going to make mistakes in the same places. By comparing against other manuscripts, you're going to see real obvious errors, so on and so forth.

So we are able, modern Christian scholars truly believe, that not only do we have the original readings in the manuscripts that we have, what I mean by that is that no original readings have simply fallen out.

They haven't simply just disappeared. We have the original readings, but we are able to determine with an extremely high level of accuracy what those original readings are. And when we don't know, when we are uncertain, that's why your NASB and your NKJV and your NIV have those little notes down at the bottom of the page.

And the King James Version did it as well.

The King James did it originally. There were a number of notes like that, but most of the modern King James translations do not have that in their margins, but many of them did for many, many years.

Erasmus, the Textus Receptus, and the Human Process Behind the King James

Take us to the time of Desiderius Erasmus. Now you are around 1516 and you have the first printed, published version of the Greek manuscripts.

That's really where the modern history of the Bible begins in the sense that now we are getting to the foundations of the King James Version. Of course, printing is invented in the middle of the 15th century.

The first thing to come off the press is a Latin text of the Bible.

And of course, he sat down with 5 ,000 manuscripts.

No, Desiderius Erasmus was a Roman Catholic scholar. He was a Roman Catholic priest. He was known as the Prince of the Humanists. And at that time, the term humanist simply meant a person who wanted to go to the original sources, an individual who wanted to not just simply hear what everybody else had said about a subject.

He wanted to read about it for himself.

So when you call him a Catholic humanist, you are not saying that in a pejorative way.

In a pejorative sense at all. In fact, he was a pain in the side of the established church in many ways for many of the things that he wrote. But he wanted to put out the first printed and published edition of the Greek New Testament.

He also provided a new Latin translation along with. He originally started work in England, then he went to Basel, Switzerland, and he thought he might find some more manuscripts there. His first edition was based on about six manuscripts.

We have, of various portions of the New Testament, 5 ,366. Today he had six. They all came from the same family of manuscripts. None of them were more than 1 ,000 years old. In fact, the older they were, the less he trusted them.

So in other words, he didn't trust even some of the better manuscripts that he had available to him. But what he had to do is he had to sit down, he had to compare the manuscripts, and he had to determine when they differed what reading to put into his text.

Now why is that important? Well, Erasmus put out five editions during his lifetime. The third edition became the most popular. His editions, along with some other editions, were available to the King James translators and were utilized by the King James translators as the basis of the King James New Testament.

Why do I emphasize this? King James only advocates need to deal with the fact that human beings, frail, sinful human beings like Desiderius Erasmus, were involved in making the textual choices that make up their King James New Testament, just like in the NIV or the NASB, and in point of fact, they had less information available to them than we have available to us today.

And so the King James didn't just simply fall down out of the sky. There was a human process that was involved in its translation, just as there is a human process involved with the NIV, NASB, or any other modern translation.

Tradition, Translation, and the Difference Between Formal and Dynamic Equivalence

Well, let's talk about James I, who actually commissioned the project in around 1604. The project is done in seven years, which must mean it's the perfect project. And there are those that would say, look, James I was morally bankrupt, he was a homosexual, therefore we can't trust the King James version.

On the other hand, there are those who say, look, we can't trust the NIV because Virginia Mollenkot, who was an English stylist who worked for a small period of time on the NIV stylistic changes, she wasn't on the translation committee, was a lesbian, and that came out later on, therefore we can't trust the NIV.

Let's talk about the absurdity of using those kinds of arguments.

Unfortunately, King James-onlyism can be defined as the argument that uses double standards and circular arguments more often than anything else I think I've ever encountered. And here's a good example of this.

Otto Scott, for example, has written a book that details a lot of the problems that King James had on a personal level as far as his personal life was concerned and his behavior. But that does not have any impact upon the accuracy of the King James as a translation.

And yet modern King James-only advocates will attempt to say that everyone from Westcott and Hort to all the modern translators who were involved in modern translations were somehow infected with some type of either sinfulness in regards to their personal lives or theological problems, and that this automatically results in corrupted translations or corrupted Greek or Hebrew texts.

The problem with that is that modern Greek texts, for example, the Nestle All in 27th edition that I hold in my hand right here, you will notice at the bottom of the page there are extensive notes that are provided to you and what you have down here is information given to you about all the different readings the manuscripts have.

Now if you are trying actually because you are a sinful person to hide something in the scriptures, you are not going to provide extensive footnotes at the bottom of the page that says oh by the way all these other manuscripts read like this.

You are just going to go ahead and delete what is there and get on with it. That is not what modern scholars are doing and that is not what modern translations are doing either. And again everyone needs to examine the arguments that are presented by anyone, myself included, and see if they involve double standards and in the King James-only controversy do those who support the King James as the only infallible Bible on the planet utilize the same standards in examining the King James and where it came from.

As they do modern translations, in my research that is an unambiguous answer to that and it is no.

On page 22 of your book, the King James-only controversy, you talk about translational disputes, disagreements over how to translate what was originally written by the prophets and the apostles and you talk about two different kinds of translational disputes.

The one is a textual dispute and you give John 6 .47 as an example. The second is a translational dispute to give John 3 .36 as an example. Talk about that for a moment.

Well most of the differences between the King James and the modern translations are based upon one of two types of things. In the first instance, what we would call a translational dispute. You have the exact same Greek and Hebrew terms in the manuscripts that we are utilizing.

The manuscripts evidence that the King James translators utilized is the exact same in the verse, for example, of what we utilize today and yet the modern translations will translate it differently. For example, we are all familiar with Paul's words to Timothy, study to show thyself approved.

Most modern translations say be diligent. Now both are translating the exact same Greek term, they are just translating them in different ways and some people feel that the King James really defines how everything should be translated.

They start with the King James and sort of argue in circles from there, but they say you are trying to insert things because of the way you translate things. The other type of difference is textual and that is where the Greek or Hebrew manuscripts that we are utilizing differ from the Greek or Hebrew manuscripts of the King James.

So at that point you are translating a different original into English and obviously that is going to result in a different reading in your English translation.

By the way, there is so much that could be said about that and when we talk about translational disputes, people might think that is boring, but if you pick up this book and you start to read about it, the first thing it will do is it will make you understand how we got the Bible we have today and the second thing it will do is it will give you such incredibly interesting information on even how languages are translated from one culture to another.

I think that is something we ought to just touch on for a moment, James, and that is the difference between dynamic equivalency and formal equivalency. Big words perhaps, but the concept is pretty easy, especially if you are bilingual.

Most definitely, unfortunately a lot of Americans are not bilingual, but if you are familiar with another language, even if you just took a semester of Spanish in high school or something like that, you are aware of what these issues are.

You can translate from other languages into English in more than one accurate way. Most of us when we start studying other languages, we start translating as formally as we possibly.

Can.

That is literally we are simply taking, well this word means this and this word means this and frequently our translation isn't very good, it doesn't make really good sense, but at least we have some idea.

Formal translations are those translations that attempt to maintain as close a possible connection to the wording of the original language text.

NASB is a very good example of that.

NASB is very close, the King James is a very formal translation, but there is no perfectly formal translation. It can't be done. Greek word order for example defies English word order and you cannot just simply assign a meaning to a word and stick with that all the way through because you and I don't use words with the exact same meaning in every single context.

We change our meaning as we change context. So do the biblical writers. So the more formal translations will be a little bit maybe more difficult to read, they won't flow. Now you have other types of translations, dynamic equivalent to translations and these individuals, we are not talking about paraphrases here, there are some paraphrases out there, some that are very nice, but basically a person is just saying, well I think the writer was saying such and such.

A dynamic translation is attempting to maintain as close a contact as possible with the original text, but they recognize that there are places where if you give a literal translation, English speaking people are not going to understand what you are saying.

And actually you are missing the point.

You are missing the point and you are not translating meaning and so a dynamic translation will sacrifice the literal words if it can help with the meaning. The example that I use in the book is Luke 9 .44.

In Luke 9 .44 in the King James and the NASB, Jesus says, let these words or these sayings sink down into your ears. Now you and I don't speak that way. The NIV says, listen carefully to what I am about to tell you.

Now that is the dynamic equivalence, that is what it means. Now the literal Greek words are, let these words sink into your ears. But what does that mean and that is what the dynamic translation is trying to get at.

Give me two examples from languages that we are familiar with today, German or French.

Well the one I have used for years, all my students are sick and tired of hearing about.

It.

The Germans have a phrase, which literally means, the morning hours have gold in their mouths which doesn't mean anything to you and I. However that is their way of saying, our saying, the little bird catches the worm.

The French say, which literally means, I have the cockroach. But what that means in their language is, I am depressed, I have the blues. And so when we translate things, how are we going to translate them?

If we want to translate meaning, then we are going to have to, and in fact when we read a translation of a foreign language text, we are awful appreciative when they help us.

With the meaning.

So if you do a formal equivalency and the text comes out, I have a cockroach, translating from the French, basically I am not going to understand what you are talking about. But if you say, I have the blues, you have given me a dynamic equivalent of what the person was trying to communicate in the idiom of the French language.

And the argument of course that most people make is, look, if you are giving a dynamic translation, this is the people who for example would oppose the NIV, they would say, if you are giving me a dynamic translation, you are interpreting one step that I want to do for myself.

It is a lot safer to provide a merely formal translation. You are really hanging yourself out for some shots if you give a dynamic translation. And yet you have probably spoken with people who upon encountering the NIV or a translation that communicates with them much better, their entire understanding of faith has increased dramatically because they just could not understand before.

And so God has a place for both. I suggest that people do not limit themselves to any single one, but that they compare back and forth.

It is kind of interesting, I speak Dutch and there are certain things that I am trying to communicate to my wife and I have no English word to communicate it. So I can only say it in Dutch. And so this whole issue becomes clearer if you understand other languages.

We are going to be coming back in just a few moments with your questions right here on the Bible Answer Man broadcast. Any questions that have to do with the King James Version only controversy today, you can get in by dialing 800 -821 -4490.

Again to ask questions of my in-studio guest James White, the number 800 -821 -4490 will be back in just a few moments with more. Welcome back to the second half of the Bible Answer Man broadcast. I am your host Hank Hanegraaff, President of the Christian Research Institute.

I am in studio today with James White, the author of the book, The King James Only Controversy. It is kind of interesting that I had actually begun writing this book. I developed the acronym KJV Only and I was about a month into the project when I heard that you were doing it.

But knowing of your background I knew that I had better wait and see what you came up with. You came up with this book, sent me the manuscript, I quickly wrote an endorsement for this manuscript and aborted my plan.

So thank you for saving me all that work. This is an excellent piece of work.

I appreciate that and I am very appreciative of the fact that there have been many, many people. The mail has been 25 to 1 positive. People who have been very, very thankful for the fact that they now have a reason to trust the Bible that they have been utilizing.

They don't feel like they are constricted. We have to realize that some of the folks who take the King James Only position can be extremely, extremely strong in their denunciation of modern translations and things like that and it can cause real problems in people's lives.

So I have been very, very thankful for the reception the book has received.

Well, you have had a good reception. You also have had some rather interesting opposition. Tex Mars writes, don't write me again, speaking to you, unless in sincere repentance you are a devil. And I understand well why Miss Riplinger does not respond to your ridiculous assertions.

Why dignify the lying claims of a servant of Satan? Kind of strong words there. I saw the book that you brought in today where Gail Riplinger, who wrote New Age Versions, quotes Samuel talking about how the mighty have fallen, referring to me, the fact that I broke my shoulders.

I only broke my shoulder and have had people assail my character, therefore the mighty have fallen. These people really take this issue seriously. And one of the things you do in your book is you divide the King James only people into categories so you don't paint with a broad brush.

There are people who are very strongly committed to King James Version only, but they are not going to assail the character of those who have an NIV in their hand.

That's exactly right. And that's a real important distinction to make. I am frequently accused, I'm sure you've experienced the same thing, of individuals like that will contact me. And you paint with a broad brush when I ask for specifics.

Well I can't give you specifics, but there are those who go way beyond the call and engage in rather nasty calumniation, shall we say, of anyone who disagrees with them. But there are those who hold the King James, but not with the type of anger toward others and they do utilize different arguments.

And in fact, we should distinguish between the two major King James only groups. You have those individuals who are really King James only in the sense that the King James translation itself is something special about it.

It's either inspired and errant, it's advanced revelation as Peter Ruckman says. It is a re-inspiration of the Bible. And then you have what I call TR only individuals, TR standing for the Textus Receptus, the Greek text that is utilized as the basis of the King James and their arguments will be a little bit different though I have to admit.

In every conversation I've had, I've debated D .A. Waite, I recently debated Thomas Strauss, and in every conversation I've had with individuals who defended just the Greek text, it eventually worked around to having the same impact and the same effect.

In other words, even when I could present clear and obvious errors in the TR, the answer was well, it's a matter of faith.

I think it should be pointed out that the TR, or the Textus Receptus, the received text, is a term that as I recall was coined by the Elzever brothers, or Bruden as you would say in Dutch, who wrote in Leiden.

They were publishers basically and that was a publisher's blurb.

It was an advertisement.

And it was in 1633, long after the King James Version, the first edition had been completed.

They said this is the text that has been received by all, therefore Textus Receptus means received text. The problem is the TR, first of all there's over a hundred different editions of it and most people aren't aware of that, but the TR that a lot of King James only advocates have today did not exist until 1894 when Scrivener created it, and in fact that text did not exist until 1611 when the King James translators created it.

There is no one manuscript in the world that reads word for word like the TR, not at all.

Folks, this is a fascinating book, the King James Only Controversy. You've got to get a hold of it. It is a resource for a lifetime. It's available through the Christian Research Institute. Actually I was going to charge $15 because we throw in some other things.

I'm going to do something special. I'm going to give it to you for $10, less than what you can buy it in a bookstore. I want to put it in your hands. This is something that you need in your library. Again, the King James Only Controversy, radio offer number 337 by my in-studio guest James White, a suggested donation of just $10.

I want to go to our first caller up today, Don Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, listening on WORD. Don, welcome.

Hi.

How are you doing?

I'm really honored to be on your program, Hank.

Glad to have you.

Hey, this book, if anybody is listening and they've ever been through this, if they have a friend in this, it's worth every penny. This book is worth its weight in gold, especially for me. I went through this.

I have some guys that work, and we went through this. One of the problems I had was, it's almost like you have to witness these people. How do you try to communicate with these people?

Yeah, that's a good question. How do you communicate without creating heat?

Well, the heat, unfortunately, is already there. In fact, that's one of the main problems, is that this whole movement splits churches, destroys ministries. It's a very difficult thing on that level. The heat's already there.

Unfortunately, with a committed King James only advocate, who is already thinking and arguing in circles, all the facts in the world, they're impervious to logical argumentation. There's nothing that you can do at that point.

You can simply present the facts and say, now Christians, who are followers of he who called himself truth, should not utilize bad argumentation and illogic. We as Christians should have a very high standard of truth, a very high standard in what we accept to be true.

You can call them to accept those standards, but you can't force them. I think it's important to realize, I believe that the King James only movement is a tradition. A lot of people who hold this, you know what happens when you start questioning somebody's traditions.

Boy, I'll tell you, the sparks can fly. A lot of these folks, really the major group that believes this are independent Baptists. I grew up very, very conservative Baptist. I'm a Reformed Baptist. The point is, we Baptists don't think we have any traditions.

Those people who don't think they have traditions are the most blind to their traditions.

If I may, sir, one thing that I really found the most helpful of all was, I have a 1611 translation, a reprint.

From Thomas Nelson.

No, it's like from, it's a 1911 reprint. Okay. And when I find those verses that were different from what is printed now compared to what was originally printed, they're wholesale changes that were made errors, which throws the entire inspired argument out.

Yeah, that's a really good point. In other words, King James version is not King James version.

Well, exactly. And what you are carrying today, what most of the King James only advocates have today is the 1769 Blaney revision, which differs in a number of places from the 1611. But I'd like to ask the caller, have you ever shown a King James only advocate page 80 where I talk about Jeremiah chapter 34, verse 16?

I showed him nine different verses. And at that point, it's like he shut down, this was a pastor of an independent Baptist church. And he was like, basically like what you said before was, you just have to take it on faith.

Right.

Right. And it's, they're not, once confronted, it's like they're going to retreat into their shell. Yeah.

But you know, the good thing is, and the answer ultimately to your question is to prepare yourself as though your life depended on it. And if God opens their heart, then you can give them answers and use those answers as springboards or opportunities for, for sharing how we really got our Bible.

Good talking to you, Don. I want to go to Russ Austin, Texas, listening on KIXL. Russ, welcome.

Hi Hank and James, it's Russ Austin. You were here not too long ago.

Yeah, I remember.

Yeah, I got to meet you while I was here and that was a great blessing. And I'd just also like to say that a great blessing to my life and I'd just like to thank y 'all for what y 'all are doing.

Appreciate it, Russ.

And this is a subject that I've been kind of studying some lately, and in these tapes.

I have invited a number of individuals who defend it as being the best to interact with some of the most glaring problems in it. And I could give you a whole list, it wouldn't mean anything to you, I talk about them in the book.

And they are not really willing to put the TR in the same position of examination as something else. And that's a real problem. When you say, when you ask the question, well, when you have variant readings from different families, which one do you take?

Modern Greek texts do not simply say, well, you always take the reading found in this family. You see, the practice of textual criticism today involves you in examining every single manuscript in its own context.

And so, there are times when a modern Greek text, like the Nestle All in 27th, which just came out, will take a Byzantine manuscript reading, and I should explain that the major families are the Alexandrian, the Western, the Caesarean, and the Byzantine.

The Byzantine is primarily what the textus receptus is. There are times when it will take a Byzantine reading over against an Alexandrian reading because in the context, that is what is suggested. A modern textual scholar is going to look both at the external evidence and the internal evidence.