What is the KJV Only movement, and is it biblical? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 22

Welcome to the GotQuestions podcast, your questions, biblical answers. On today's episode, you may know that GotQuestions is a ministry that answers people's questions about the

Bible, and today we're going to be discussing the Bible, specifically the King James Version, and the related

King James Only Movement. So on today's show, I've got Jeff Laird, the editor of our

Bible Ref Commentary site, and Kevin Stone, the managing editor for GotQuestions Ministries, and they both have some experience and some expertise on these issues.

So we're going to be discussing this, and for those of you who may not be super familiar with the King James Only Movement, we just want to start out by clarifying, we are not talking about people who use the

King James Version as a preference. If you've used it your whole life, find it valuable, you've memorized in it, we're in no sense trying to discourage you from using the

King James, and we're not even really arguing against people who say they believe that the King James is the best translation or that it has the best

Greek and Hebrew manuscript basis. That's not what this discussion is going to be about. This is primarily going to be about the movement of people who say that the

King James is the only Bible, the only Bible that English -speaking people should use. We think that's a dangerous and a very misguided movement, and so that's what we want to familiarize you with and also discuss why we don't buy into that.

So to start off today's episode, we're going to have Kevin, our literary expert, just talk a little bit about the

King James Version and how it's just impacted both people's lives and to a certain extent changed the course of English -speaking history.

So Kevin, take it away. All right. Well, I appreciate that opportunity, I should say. I am not a literary expert, but I have taught

English literature in the past, and it's still something I love. It's a subject that I love, but I want to start off at the very first here by pointing out that the

King James Version is not written in Old English. I hear this all the time, people just making offhanded remarks about how

KJV, well, that's Old English. I can't understand that Old English. Well, it's probably true that you cannot understand

Old English because Old English is actually a completely different language than what we speak today.

You would need a translator in order to actually understand Old English.

That goes back long, long ways, all the way back to Beowulf and writings like that.

After that came Middle English, which is a little closer to what we speak today, and you could read

Middle English like in the Canterbury Tales and understand what it says, but it still is difficult and it's separated from what we have today.

Then we have Modern English that came along with the time of Shakespeare and the time of the

King James Version translators. So the KJV is not

Old English, it's not Middle English, it's actually Early Modern English.

So just to get that out of the way, we're talking about Modern English, just the language has changed a little bit since 1611 when the

KJV was translated. But the KJV itself is a masterpiece of literature, world literature, it's one of the most influential and beautiful works of literature that's been written ever, and it has influenced the

English language ever since it was written. It has influenced it in style, and in language, and in material or content of literature.

It's been said, and I tend to agree, that any English writing that departs very far from the

KJV style ends up being not good literature, it's just not good writing.

It is the gold standard for style of writing. It's also influenced the

English language, English literature in its language, in its diction, in the words that were used in the

King James. The words of the Bible are just very familiar to us, and they've influenced great literature through the centuries.

There are really three sources that if you read English literature, three sources that are repeated over and over.

Those would be the Bible, the myths of Greek and Roman mythology, and the

Aesop's Fables. But by far the one that's referenced the most in English literature is the

KJV Bible. So if you read Dickens, or Hawthorne, or Dickinson, or Longfellow, you're going to be finding over and over these references to the

Bible. Linguist David Crystal counts 257 phrases from the

King James Bible that are still in use today in modern English idioms.

These would include, as an idiom, prodigal son, drop in the bucket, salt of the earth, give up the ghost, putting words in one's mouth, the skin of one's teeth, land of the living, and the list goes on.

But the KJV has also influenced English literature in its material, its content.

Storylines have been affected throughout history based on what the King James Version and that Bible has put in it.

We also find the themes of the prodigal son and a guiding star all the way through in English literature.

Of course, that all goes back to the Bible. The KJV has been so influential. So, Kevin, that's powerful.

I know so many people who've been so blessed in their lives by studying the King James. So again, please don't understand anything that we talk about today as being an attack on the

King James. That's not our intent. That's not our mindset at all. Jeff has a really interesting perspective on this, in that for most of his life, he attended churches that were either explicitly or implicitly

King James only. So, Jeff, tell us a little bit about your experience with that, but also give us a good background.

What actually is King James onlyism and what do King James only -ites,

I guess for lack of a better term, believe? Yeah, when I was growing up, the churches that I attended used the

King James Bible exclusively. And the churches that I went to generally went even beyond just exclusive use of the

King James. There's a lot of value in a church saying this is the one translation that we're going to use as a standard because there's a lot of consistency.

That's a positive thing. But the churches that I went to would take that further and say that the

King James Bible is the only Bible that any Christian should use. In fact, it's the only

Bible that is actually the word of God, that every other English translation of the

Bible is somehow a perversion or it's been corrupted or there is something wrong with it.

In other words, King James only -ism is a belief that there is only one

English Bible that really is the Bible and that's the King James. Everything else is some sort of fraud or deception or corruption of the truth.

Now, when you're in a King James only church or environment in and of itself, that doesn't really influence things like doctrine.

It doesn't really change anything meaningful because you are, in fact, working with the Bible. You're still reading something that was translated from those original manuscripts.

However, it does start to have impact when you get into things like discipleship and study of the word of God.

Like Kevin was saying, this is something that was originally written when words had subtly different meanings, when phrases had different meanings.

So there are phrases, there are words, there are concepts in the King James that do not translate directly into modern

English. That in and of itself is one of the reasons why the King James was made in the first place was because they were looking for something that matched the common speech that people could understand at the time.

The basic issue with King James only -ism is this idea that there is only this one single solitary version.

Everything else must be wrong. The people that I've encountered, that I have talked to, that I've discussed who hold the

King James only -ism have a very sincere interest in upholding

God's word as infallible, as inspired, as preserved. And God's word is all of those things.

It is infallible. It is inerrant. It has been preserved. It is the one and only truth.

So there's a very positive motivation behind those things. But at the risk of being overly simplistic,

King James only -ism has some connections to conspiracy theory and what we would call anti -intellectualism.

And again, this is not meant to be something that's derogatory, but we can trace where the

King James only perspective comes from. We can see it in history. And it basically didn't really come around until the 1930s, 40s, 50s, when people actually started to look at this.

And it was driven by doctrinal concerns. Those doctrinal concerns were not what we would consider to be

Orthodox Christian concerns. In other words, these were groups that we would look at in our ministry and say held to beliefs that are not scriptural.

Certain aspects of Seventh -day Adventism or the Jehovah's Witness group, as new translations of the

Bible came out, some of those translations were much more difficult to square with their interpretations than was the

King James. That led to people who became frustrated and started to argue against those new versions.

And that goes even beyond the changing of language. Something that Jeff is talking about here is the fact that the

King James only position is very English -centered, and there's no

KJV Spanish, there's no KJV Russian, and so people reading the

Bible in those other languages, somebody reading a Japanese Bible, they can read modern translations that are up -to -date with their language, but they don't read the

Bible. But it's only in English that we have to use a 400 -year -old translation. It's just very odd to me that that would be the case.

Yeah, and there is subtlety and nuance behind the different folks that are in the King James camp.

Again, nobody is suggesting that persons who hold this view are somehow intellectually deficient or that they don't have sincerity behind them.

But the fact of the matter is there just is not fact, evidence, reason to support these things.

The King James position is very much, again, like the hard anti -vaccine concept where it doesn't matter what sort of proof or evidence you show to somebody, they are going to stick with this no matter what.

And to some extent, they will use every single example of proof against it somehow as a backwards proof that it's really true.

In other words, if you can show that 99 percent of scientists do not support the strongest of the anti -vaccine claims, they'll just say, well, see, that proves that 99 percent of scientists are corrupted by Big Pharma or whatever.

In the King James only environment, sometimes you see the same thing where you say, look, when

I compile scholars who all believe that the Bible is preserved and inerrant and it's

God's inspired word and essentially none of them hold to the King James only position, that's usually turned around as a response to say, well, see, that just proves that the

King James is the remnant, the one and only little thing that's left here.

There are a lot of very positive motivations behind King James onlyism.

There are translations of the Bible where people do things on purpose. The New World translation that is used by Jehovah's Witnesses has what

I would call predatory translation choices where somebody deliberately decided to translate something in a way to change the meaning.

A lot of persons in the King James only camp are concerned about that sort of a thing. They're concerned when they read the

King James and then they read an NIV or an ESV and they do not see a particular phrase or an entire verse that's not in there.

That legitimately raises questions. Those are good things. It's good for people to see those and ask about those and question those.

The problem is that the answer in King James only always comes down to all of these other versions are wrong.

They're all corrupt. They're all wrong. They're all evil. One of the things I struggle with in talking to people about that is that there is so much heat instead of light involved in it, that when you want to have conversations about what does this really mean and where does this come from, that's difficult.

Shay, I know you've seen a lot of that through GotQuestions in particular in the way people approach the

King James issue and our ministry. Absolutely. So back when we first launched

GotQuestions, started publishing a lot of articles to the side, we had to decide, OK, what Bible translation are we going to use?

So at the time, and still to a certain effect today, the New International Version is the most popular

English translation in the world. So that's the one we decided to go with, even though it's not really any of our preferred.

None of us think it is the absolute best translation, but since it's the most popular, most well -known, that's the one we decided to go with.

And it's shocking, some of the emails we receive about questioning why we would use a perversion instead of the inspired word of God, or don't you know all the stuff that the

NIV has changed in the Bible? And kind of just to continue our conversation here,

I thought it'd be helpful, let's go briefly into textual criticism and what that is and how it works and how it plays into this.

So the King James, if you're looking at the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts behind it, is taken from the

Textus Receptus, which was put together by Erasmus in the late 16th, early 17th century.

What he did, he took all the Greek manuscripts he had access to, compiled them, tried to judge, okay, which reading, which occurrence is most likely original based on what

I have access to, and that created the Textus Receptus. And then he even went through a little more revision before the

King James translators used it. Well, the number of manuscripts that Erasmus had access to when he did the

Textus Receptus is shockingly small in comparison to the number of manuscripts we have available to us today.

We're talking going from like a handful to literally thousands of manuscripts. So when you look at what's commonly known as the critical text, which is the one used by the

New International Version, English Standard, New American Standard, Christian Standard, all the other mainstream

Bible translations use the critical text. What they did is basically the same thing Erasmus did, just with a much larger pool of manuscripts.

They took all of the Greek manuscripts and used all of them into the equation of trying to determine, okay, which reading is most likely to be original based on all of these different factors.

So to say that there was some weird conspiracy to change the King James or to take words out of the

King James, that's not at all what happened. The science behind what Erasmus did with the King James Version or the

Textus Receptus is very much the same as what we see in the critical text, just with a lot more manuscripts.

And there's a third option, which is called the majority text, which basically is like a vote.

So if there's a thousand manuscripts of the Book of Philippians and 500 of them say this reading and 499 say this reading, well, we're going to go with the one that's 500.

But the problem is there's no English translation that uses the majority text.

While the Textus Receptus is generally close to the majority text, no Bible translation specifically uses just the majority text.

So you have the choice, Textus Receptus, for a limited number of manuscripts put together by essentially one person, or the critical text, which access to thousands of manuscripts evaluated by hundreds if not thousands of scholars over hundreds of years.

It's gone through multiple revisions, improvements, taking new manuscripts discovered into account.

So the idea that the new translations change the Bible, like for example, there are places where if you compare the

King James to one of the newer translations, there is a verse missing. It just skips from verse 36 to 38.

What happened to verse 37? Well, it's not a case of the new translations taking a verse out of the

Bible. It's rather a case of the new translations looking at the manuscript evidence and saying, it really doesn't look like that verse should have been there to begin with.

So it all comes back to what are you using as your basis? I mean, if you're using the

King James version as your basis, well, then yeah, it does look like changes have been made to the

Bible. Things have been taken out or added to the Bible. But if you're looking at the

Greek and Hebrew, the original manuscripts as best as we can determine as the original, well, then it's not a matter of taking out or removing.

It's a matter of determining what really belongs there in the first place. So that's a very quick primer,

I guess, on textual criticism and that there's a lot of science that goes into this and that godly men and women who have dedicated their lives to trying to produce the most reliable Greek and Hebrew manuscripts.

And the idea that it's some horrible satanic conspiracy to make all these changes to the

Bible really is an insult to these men and women who are our brothers and sisters in Christ who spent centuries since the

King James Version trying to come up with the best literary basis, the best textual basis, based on the science of textual criticism.

And we believe God has made it clear He has preserved His Word through overwhelming evidence of what reading should be there.

Yes, there's of course some difficult things. There's the ending of Mark. There's the case in John of the woman caught in adultery, where you don't know for sure, do these belong, do they not?

But overall, even take out all the differences between the King James Version, the newer translations, look at all the minor differences here and there, none of them impact a major doctrine of Scripture.

None of, importantly, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, none of those are even touched by any of these manuscripts.

You can come to the conviction that Christ is God in the flesh just as easily through the

New International Version as you can the King James Version. So when we approach this issue, we need to remember the

King James was not what the Apostle Paul wrote. The King James is a translation of the original

Greek and Hebrew into English based on a certain manuscript tradition just like the newer translations are.

And once we put these things on an equal footing as they should be, we can approach it hopefully with a little less heat and like you said, a little more light and really just try to examine, okay, here are the different possible readings, what makes the most sense, what has the best manuscript evidence and so forth.

And I think reassurance has a lot to do with the best way to look at issues like the

King James only. A lot of what I do from a ministry standpoint is what we call apologetics, which is the idea of defending the faith when people have questions or criticisms and attacks and a great deal of the evidence that I am able to lean on when

I show people, this is why we know that the Bible is accurate. This is how we know the

Bible is inspired. This is how we know the Bible has not been changed, especially when

I'm making comparisons to the Quran or to Hindu texts or to other scriptural ideas.

I'm able to use pieces of evidence and points about manuscripts when I'm talking about those.

All of that information dissolves under the King James only mindset because if the

King James only presentation is correct, then none of those manuscript evidences actually mean anything because now

I'm just talking about all these other corrupted ideas. In other words, the things that erode

King James only, when you look at them correctly, they actually are the very things that we use to defend and support the

Bible as being preserved, inspired, inerrant, unchanged, and so on and so forth.

So one of the things that I try to point people to when they're concerned over King James only is a reminder that the stakes involved here are not about whether or not

Christianity is true. It's not whether or not some particular fundamental doctrine of the faith is true.

It's literally just about whether or not this one particular translation was accurate or not. A few other quick pointers that I think are helpful to remind people of when we look at this are there are some aspects of King James onlyism that sort of fall apart on itself.

The King James translators themselves wrote a preface to the

King James and in that preface they talked about saying not every other version that has been written is wrong.

We are just making our best effort to present this with the best information that we have and oh by the way, we've included some variant translations, some alternate readings.

We've seen some differences in the manuscripts. So the King James translators themselves

I think would be very disturbed by modern King James only attitudes. We can look at the fact that the

King James in a lot of cases does not follow the Textus Receptus manuscripts.

This has led some King James only advocates to claim that the English of the King James is actually advanced revelation, that this is a newly inspired version of the

Word. Honestly, I'm sincerely at a loss sometimes of how to discuss that with somebody.

If you're willing to just say, well this just must be some new revelation from God, well then

I guess anything and everything could be that way. But I always encourage people if you're encountering the

King James only idea, if you're being challenged by it or with it, to actually take a factual look at information.

When somebody says this version is taking out the name of Jesus, for example, you can always point them to the fact that versions like the

New King James, the NASB, the NIV will use the words Christ Jesus almost twice as many times as the

King James. If you read books by certain very dishonest authors, they will cherry pick certain places and say, here are places where modern versions have taken those out.

When you look at the differences in the manuscripts, you'll see that they're much less than a typical

King James only advocate will suggest. And then as Shay was saying, when you actually look at the differences from a doctrinal perspective, it should help to take a lot of the pressure and the heat off of exactly what a person is looking at.

But my view, my experience has been that everything I see tells me that God chose to preserve his word specifically by protecting it from being contained in one single place that was controllable by one single person.

The fact that God preserved his word the way he did with thousands of manuscripts over hundreds of years, giving us the ability to see when somebody makes a typo and then copies it, or to know when some scribe might have accidentally put an extra word in somewhere is powerful evidence of exactly what the original said in scripture.

And I cannot hold to those ideas while simultaneously holding to a

King James only interpretation. So from my perspective, it is more than simply saying that a

KJVO perspective is incorrect. There's a lot of danger behind it because it erodes our trust in scripture.

It makes discipleship more difficult, and it pushes the idea that a lot of people have that they don't need anything except their two eyes and 10 minutes a day to fully understand the

Bible. In other words, God put it in my language, in my words, in my terms, and that's all

I need. Even in the Bible, there's a point where the Ethiopian says to Philip, how am I supposed to understand this if somebody doesn't explain it to me?

And Philip doesn't say, well, you've got the King James there, just read it and you're fine. We need to rely on each other.

We need discipleship from each other. We need these different perspectives and points of evidence to help us.

So to those who are struggling with it or grappling with it, there's a lot of positive information that I think if a person really investigates and really looks at, they're going to come to the conclusion that the

King James is a fantastic translation of scripture. And it is an important work of literature, but it is not

God's one single soul and only expression of his word in English. Right.

So before the show started, Kevin, we were talking a little bit about some of the other literary aspects of the

King James, like words that have changed. And while this doesn't exactly, um, play into whether the

King James is the best translation, but it does play into the fact of, as you mentioned earlier. So if every other language in the world can have a

Bible translation in the way they speak their language now, why should English speakers be in a sense, stuck using a translation, um, into what

English was essentially 400 years ago. So Kevin touch on that a little bit more. Sure.

The language has changed a lot in 400 years. And there are some words that we find in Shakespeare that are, for example, that are no longer used the same way in our language of today.

Shakespeare, for example, when he talked about addiction, he was talking about a tendency to do something or a proneness to do something.

When he would use the word emboss, he wasn't talking about doing detail work on the cover of a book.

For example, he was, when he said to emboss, he meant to track someone with the intent to kill that.

So very different meaning of the word. And so when you read Shakespeare, as he originally wrote, you need to educate yourself a little bit on that vocabulary.

And it's, so it takes a little bit more time, a little more effort to understand what William Shakespeare was saying.

And the same holds true with the King James version. If you're going to read the King James, you're going to have to do some educating of yourself to understand the vocabulary that was used because words like replenish in Genesis 1, 28,

God tells Adam and Eve to replenish the earth. Now to us, the word replenish would mean to refill, which might lead people to the idea that the earth was populated before Adam and Eve and now refill it.

But that's not what replenish meant to the translators of the KJV. The word replenish simply meant to supply fully or to fill with a sense of urgency.

And so God's command was to fill the earth, you know, multiply. That's one example, but then there are many others of words that have changed in meaning in the last 400 years in English.

The word conversation is used often in the New Testament to speak of one's manner of life or the character that one displays through life.

So what you're like, what your actions are showing people. When we hear the word conversation today, we naturally think of verbal communication happening, you know, somebody talking, but that wasn't the meaning back in 1611.

So things like this just make the case that we do need updates to our translations just to communicate with people more effectively.

I preach from the New King James and I have for the past 20 years simply because it's more accessible to people.

I don't have to stop and explain words like replenish or conversation or closet, another one that has changed meaning through the years.

I just have one less barrier in my communication with the congregation when

I'm preaching from a more modern translation. I love the King James. Most of my Bible memory was done in the

King James. So that's what's up here when I'm quoting scripture. I automatically go with the King James because that's what

I prized, but I preach out of the New King James because it's more accessible, easier to understand.

It's absolutely true. I visited a church a few years ago and the worship leader stopped and we're singing one of the old hymns, great hymn.

But before we even started singing the song, he had to explain numerous words in the song.

So when we say this, that's what this word means. And this word means this. And by the time he got done explaining it,

I didn't want to sing the song anymore because I'm like, I shouldn't have to think about all the words that I'm saying when

I'm just trying to worship the Lord. And to me, the biggest argument against King James only is the fact that when the

Bible was written in Hebrew, small portions in Aramaic, and then the New Testament Greek, it was written in the common language of the common people, the way that people spoke the language at that current time.

So to me, it makes sense that when it's translated into another language, it should be translated into how that current culture speaks the language right here and now.

So that's why a Bible written in 21st century English, it should be for 21st century

English speakers. We shouldn't be using a translation that was written in 17th century

English. Can we understand it for the most part? Yes, absolutely. But the way the Bible was written is an argument for the way the

Bible should be translated. So to me, that's just powerful.

It's a great reminder. And it's why the Bible will constantly need, maybe not constantly is the right word, but every couple of decades, a

Bible translation might need to be updated just to make sure the words we're using, one, do they continue to accurately match what the original

Greek and Hebrew word meant? And two, do they communicate to the current audience what the verse is supposed to be communicating?

So language has changed over time. A key aspect to emphasize and to highlight is that those of us who do not take a

King James only position are going back to, as far as we can, the original manuscripts.

We're not translating and then retranslating like the telephone game. This is about going back to the original manuscripts and their information to create those new translations.

200 years from now, if we're all still here, then that's going to be necessary again.

And it's not going to be by updating an English translation into new English.

It's going to be by going back to God's original words, which he did give us, but he gave them to us in Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic.

It would be nice if he gave them to me in English, but he didn't. So I hope this conversation has been helpful.

This is kind of a brief summary. If you use the King James Version, you find it helpful.

That's how you've memorized it. In no sense are we trying to discourage you from using it or trying to push you towards a new translation.

The movement we're trying to respond to here is the King James only movement, the idea that the King James Bible is the only inspired

Bible in English, that we adamantly reject that idea. Each of us uses our primary

Bible, a different Bible in the King James, but we do that because one, we think it's a better translation into modern

English. We think it's more understandable. And ultimately, that should be our goal. If our goal is to understand

God's word, the last thing we want for there to be language barrier adding just to the difficulty, because there's some difficult things in scripture.

There's some confusing things that require some in -depth thought and study, reliance upon the Holy Spirit. We don't need extra language barriers to add to that sometimes frustration.

So keep studying God's word. Use the translation that you have prayed about and that God has led you to continue to use.

Consult your pastors. There's lots of books out there on how to choose the right Bible translation. We encourage you to avail yourself of these.

But keep studying God's word. And if that's the King James Version that God has led you to, fantastic. That's another one.

We just want you to feel absolute freedom that the other major translations of God's word, where it's the

New King James, New American Standard, English Standard, New Living, et cetera. These are all

Bible translations you can trust. And I guess that's probably our ultimate message here. So again, hope this conversation has been helpful and encouraging to you.

If you have any more questions about it, of course, you can visit gotquestions .org and submit a question. We'd be happy to discuss this further with you.

So again, keep studying God's word. Got questions? Bible has answers.