Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight we're going to be speaking on the topic," Does God want us to use archaic Bible translations?" In other words, does God want His Word to be in the living language spoken by any particular group of people at a given date? Or does he want His Word preserved in a special holy language, language that is different from everyday speech? Now, I want to say at the outset that this message is not an attack on the King James Bible.
I have enormous respect and appreciation for the King James Version. The only issue we're going to be talking about tonight is the issue of language. What language does God want His Word to be in? The point of the message is not to convince you to get rid of your King James Bible and start using, say, the NIV or the Living Bible, not at all. The point of the message is to persuade you to quit using the 1769 revision of the King James, and start using one of the more recent revisions of it.
Now I've recognized the fact that most Christians who use the King James Bible don't realize they're using this 1769 revision of it. They probably think they're using the original 1611 edition. But they're not. Anyway, we're going to be getting into all of that in a few minutes. Now let's first talk about this concept of," Is there a special holy language in which God has spoken to mankind?" Because this is at the root of the issue.
Now, I was brought up believing that Hebrew was the language that God spoke to Adam and Eve in. It was the language that he originally gave to mankind. And that since Shem, the faithful descendant of Noah, was not involved in building the Tower of Babel, well, then his language never changed. So Shem and his descendants would have continued to speak Hebrew, the same language spoken in the Garden of Eden.
Now, I would say it's a reasonable deduction that Shem's language was not changed when the other languages were changed at Babel. But what about the question of," Did Shem speak Hebrew?" You see, it never occurred to me that all languages go through change. Abraham lived about 2,000 years after the creation of Adam. Think of the changes that English has gone through in the past 2,000 years. In fact, English didn't even exist 2,000 years ago, except as a general German language.
Now, you can trace old Anglo-Saxon back about 1,500 years, but even then it wasn't a monolithic language, it was a number of different dialects. And none of them would be intelligible to any of us today. In fact, if you've ever looked at Wycliffe's Bible, which is just 700 years old, it's virtually non-readable. It's like reading a foreign language. That's just in 700 years.
So where do we get the idea that there were no changes in man's language from the time of Adam up to the building of the Tower of Babel, and then during the next thousand years or so after that? Well, this is what linguists see, that is scholars who study languages. They recognize that Hebrew is part of a family of what was called up until 1950, the Hamito-Semitic languages. That is, the languages of the lineage of mankind descended from Ham and from Shem.
Now, Hebrew would be in the subfamily of Semitic languages, and then it would be in the group of Northwest Semitic languages. Now, that group includes not only Hebrew, but also Aramaic, Canaanite, the language of the Philistines, the Phoenician language, and Elamine. Now, the scriptures himself demonstrate the change that occurred in the language of the descendants of Shem within just two generations. Turn with me to Genesis chapter 31. Let's start with verse 43. Now I'm reading here from the New King James.
It says," And Laban answered and said to Jacob,' These daughters are my daughters, and these children are my children, and this flock is my flock. All that you see is mine. But what can I do this day to these my daughters or to their children whom they have born? Now therefore, come, let us make a covenant, you and I, and let it be a witness between you and me." So Jacob took a stone and set it up as a pillar.
Then Jacob said to his brethren," Get stones," and they took stones and made a heap, and they ate there on the heap. Laban called it Jegar Sahadutha, but Jacob called it Galeed. Now, Laban was Jacob's uncle. He was just one generation removed from Laban. And yet, look at the difference in their language. They're both saying the same thing, but Laban is speaking a form of Aramaic, and Jacob is speaking a form of Hebrew.
Again, if you think that Hebrew was some special language that no one else on earth spoke except the descendants of Shem, or in this case, the faithful descendants of Abraham. Notice when the spies went into the city of Jericho and they stayed at the house of Rahab, well, they were able to speak to one another. Now, Rahab was not a Hebrew; she was a Canaanite. But you see, the language of the Canaanite people was part of the same group of languages as was Hebrew. They were able to converse together.
So when God chose Hebrew to have His word written down in, He wasn't choosing some sacred language, the language of the Garden of Eden or something. He was choosing a Semitic dialect. I mean, not just an ordinary language, but a language that wasn't even one of the great languages of the world, like Aramaic, that was spoken by a large group of Semitic people. He was using the dialect that was spoken by the descendants of Abraham, which was a closely related language to that of the Canaanites.
But God Himself showed that Hebrew wasn't some holy language. When the Jews were later deported to Babylon, they began speaking the language of Aramaic, which is related to the Hebrew language. They're both part of the same family group, because Aramaic was the official language of Babylon. Well, so then God immediately began using Aramaic in His inspired Word. A large chunk of the book of Daniel was written in Aramaic, and are also our parts of Ezra.
So God did not treat Hebrew as though it were some sacred language, that His Word could only be in this language. But, you know, that was the attitude of the scribes and the Pharisees. They wouldn't allow the Scriptures to be translated into Aramaic or into any other language. It had to be in Hebrew. So in the synagogues, in Jesus' day, a man would get up and read the scriptures from Hebrew, even though the majority of the people there could not understand Hebrew at that date.
And then they would have a special person who was assigned this duty to translate what had just been read in Hebrew into Aramaic so that the people could understand it. But the scribes said," No, this is too holy to take God's Word and actually write it down in Aramaic." Was that how God viewed things? Well, he had already shown that he didn't view Hebrew as this sacred language, because he inspired part of the Old Testament to actually be written in Aramaic, to start with.
Secondly, he allowed his word to be translated into Greek. And it wasn't translated into classic literary Greek, but rather into Koine Greek, the language that just the people on the street spoke. This translation is known as the Septuagint. All right, then God sends His Son to the earth. What course would Jesus take? Would He side with the scribes and Pharisees and say," No, this is going to be in Hebrew?" Did he teach his followers the Hebrew language so that they could read God's Word in Hebrew? Not at all.
From everything we can tell, Jesus spoke in Aramaic. He may have even spoke in Greek. Everything that we have preserved of his teaching is in Greek. Nothing is in Hebrew.
And yet it's not, again, in the special polished literary Greek, but it's in Koine Greek, the kind of Greek that was spoken in the streets, something that no other books were even written in, that the educated people of the day laughed at, that the New Testament, the book of the Christians, was just written in the language of the street that common people spoke. So God gave us His mind on this matter, how he felt about it. There wasn't going to be a special holy language.
The apostles didn't set up schools to train people to read Hebrew. In fact, later they didn't set up schools to train people to read Greek, either. When the apostles and their disciples went into places where Greek wasn't spoken, where Aramaic or Latin was the common language, they immediately had the Scriptures translated into the language spoken by the people.
But, you know, in a few centuries, Christians fell back into the same attitude that the scribes and Pharisees had had, that the Bible had to be in some kind of special holy language. Now, that didn't happen for several centuries after the time of the apostles. As I said, the Bible was readily translated into Latin and Aramaic, and in all kinds of languages, even Germanic languages, in the first three, four, or five centuries. Now, during the days of Jesus, most educated Romans could speak Greek.
Even though Latin was their native language, Greek was sort of their literary language. It was the language of the educated people. But when you got to around the year 400, when the Roman Empire was on the verge of collapsing, at least in the West, most Romans no longer spoke Greek. Latin was the only language that they knew. Now, there had been plenty of translations made of the Bible into Latin, but the Pope wanted to get one uniform translation that was of a higher quality than what was available.
There would be an official version of the Latin Bible instead of these many unofficial versions. So he sponsored an educated man named Jerome to translate the scriptures into Latin. And his translation became known as the Latin Vulgate. Vulgate meaning the language of the people, the vulgar language, the language people talked in. So the idea wasn't to put the Bible into some holy language, but to put it into the language that most people were speaking in the Western Roman Empire.
So even as late as the year 400, even the Roman Catholic Church saw the need of the Bible being in the language of the people. But then what happened?
Well, over the next thousand years, as people got used to the Bible being read in church from the Latin Vulgate, pretty soon it took on some kind of holy significance that the Bible needed to be in Latin, and church officials generally opposed translating it into the common languages that people spoke, into French, or one of the German dialects, or languages like that. It needed to stay in Latin. Now, even as late as, say, the year 1500, Latin was still the legal language throughout nearly all of Europe.
Laws were passed in Latin. Most legal documents were in Latin. Educated works were often written in Latin, even at that late date. But the ordinary people couldn't understand Latin anymore, and yet the Church took no steps to get the Bible into the language of the common people, because they view that as degrading the Bible, to have Jesus talking just the way that ordinary farmers and peasants and storekeepers talked. I mean, it should be in something a little higher than that.
Well, the same thing that happened in the west happened in the east. Now, in the east, they spoke Greek, so they didn't have to work with a translation, but the Greek language continued to change, just as all languages do. And instead of modernizing the Greek Bible through the centuries, the Greek Orthodox Church kept the old Greek just the way it was. And so pretty soon, the Bible was in an archaic language.
Greek-speaking people could understand the words, but they couldn't often understand them correctly because the language had changed. It was stilted and awkward. It wasn't the language people spoke in the streets. In the Russian Orthodox Church, the Bible got stuck in ancient Slavic. Again, they had translated it into Slavic during the era where they saw that the Bible needed to be in living languages, but then that took on a holy significance, and the Russian Orthodox Church wouldn't update it.
In Ethiopia, the same thing. The scriptures got stuck in ancient Amharic, the language of the Ethiopian people. Whatever it is, there's this wrong notion that God's Word should be in some kind of special holy language. And yet God has revealed His mind on the matter, in that He didn't keep it in a holy language.
If He had wanted to do that, He would have kept it in whatever language was spoken to Adam and Eve, and we don't know what that language was, or he would have kept it in Hebrew, the language of Abraham and his descendants. But no, he changed it into Aramaic, and then he changed it into Greek. But even when he changed it into Greek, he didn't go with literary Greek. He went with the language people spoke in the streets. He wanted His Word in a living language that common people can understand.
He made that very clear in just the very way that He inspired the Scriptures, and then we can see the example of the apostles and the early Christians of getting the Bible immediately translated into the living languages of their day. So one of the very good things about the Reformation was the emphasis of getting the Bible translated into the living languages of all peoples. Luther translated the Bible into German. Tyndale got the Bible translated into English.
Other Reformers and their students got the Bible translated into French and Italian and other languages. And what I find is that most people who use the King James today feel that they're very much in line with the spirit of the Reformers. In their minds, they're thinking," If I had lived back in the days of Luther and Tyndale, I would have been one of the people arguing that the Bible needs to be in the language of the people.
I would not have been part of this traditionalist group that said," No, the Latin Vulgate is the Bible. It's the Bible that's been used in Europe for a thousand years, and there's something very unholy about putting it into modern language." Well, let's talk just a little bit about the history of the King James Bible. William Tyndale, as I mentioned, is known as the father of the English Bible, because he translated the Bible into English in the year 1526.
Now, the Bible had been translated by the Lollards, by some of the students of John Wycliffe, into English several centuries before then. But as I said, by the year 1526, English had changed so much that the old translations of the Lollards, often known as the Wycliffe Bible, was really not understandable to most English people. Now, Tyndale was put to death for having the Bible translated into English. This was done at the instigation of Henry VIII.
Yet, ironically, in the year 1537, not that many years after he had put Tyndale to death, King Henry VIII accepted an English Bible, whose New Testament was simply a revision of Tyndale's. It was known as the Matthew Bible. Well, later, this same New Testament was revised again, and it was known as the Great Bible. And then not that many years later, another revision was made. It was known as the Bishop's Bible. Now, during the reign of Queen Mary, all printing of English Bibles was stopped.
She went back to the Latin Vulgate, and that became the official Bible in the churches in England at that time. Well, many of the Englishmen who did not want to be Roman Catholics fled to Geneva and other cities in Switzerland, where they were granted asylum. And under the support of John Calvin, they had the Bible translated into English. They didn't want to use the Bishop's Bible since it was associated with the Anglican Church. They wanted their own translation.
And it came to be known, as I said, as the Geneva Bible. Now, it was the first English Bible that had verses in it. We're so used to having verses in our Bible that most people think that's how God gave it to us. No, He didn't. There were not chapters and verses in the original scriptures. That's a human addition. And the first ones to do it were the ones who translated the Geneva Bible. Now, one of the things I don't like about the Geneva Bible is that it was essentially a study Bible.
The translators weren't content to just translate God's Word. They put study notes in the margins that would influence somebody to interpret the Bible along Calvinistic lines. Tyndale himself was guilty of the same thing of adding notes in his Bible. Well, after Queen Mary died and Elizabeth, a Protestant came to the throne. Most of these English Protestants who had fled to Switzerland and to other places returned to England. And during the reign of Elizabeth, you had two competing Bibles.
The official Bible of the Anglican Church was the Bishop's Bible, which was a revision of Tyndale's. And then you had the Geneva Bible that the people we know now as the Puritans that they favored, these ones who had returned from Geneva. Well, after Elizabeth's death, when King James came to the throne, he agreed to a new translation to replace these two competing Bibles.
Now, one of the reasons he wanted this is he strongly disliked the Geneva Bible for the same reason I dislike it because of these notes in there, notes that were often hostile to his own views, but which adulterated the Word of God. He wanted a Bible that had no human adulteration, that would just be God's Word without human study notes. So under his direction, 54 translators were appointed to bring about a new translation of the Bible. They were divided into three groups. Now I say a new translation.
Actually, they were given the task of more revising what was already there. In fact, these were the instructions that were given to them under the authority of King James. I'm going to read to you this an exact quote," The ordinary Bible read in the church, commonly called the Bishop's Bible, is to be followed and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit." So in other words, their job wasn't to start a fresh translation, but to revise the existing translation, the Bishop's Bible.
They were not told to revise the Geneva Bible, interestingly, but rather the Bishop's Bible, which, as I said, was essentially a revision of the Tyndale translation. So the King James was gonna be a revision of a revision of a revision of a fresh translation, which was Tyndale's. So no one should imagine that it was an original translation, that there was something holy and special about it.
I think we can say they did a very good job without somehow placing them in the realm of infallibility, that these were somehow inspired translators. Well, the King James Bible was first published in 1611, and then it almost immediately went through updates and revisions. It took almost 40 years before the King James Bible was able to replace the Geneva Bible that was favored by the Puritans and by the pilgrims who came here to the states. Again, another irony.
So many of the people today, the fundamentalists who are King James-only people, they look to their ancestry to people like the Puritans and the pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower. And yet those people refused to use the King James Bible. They denounced it as a satanic work, and they used instead the Geneva Bible. Well, as I said, the King James Bible kept getting updated and revised through the decades. The last and the most extensive update done on it was in the year 1769.
Now, these updates were done, usually under the authority of either Oxford or Cambridge University in connection again with the state church. Now, when the King James Bible was updated in 1769, even by that date, it had been around for a little over 150 years, it had already acquired sort of a holy language status. The English language had changed quite a bit. The people in 1769 didn't speak like we do today, and yet they didn't speak like people did back in 1611.
But because people were used now to the language of the King James, to hearing thee and thou, and shalt not, and thou art, and, you know, phrases like that. The 1769 revision didn't bring the King James Bible up to date with the language of 1769. For example, you can compare the language of the 1769 King James Bible, and unless you have something special, that's the King James Bible you have, if you're a King James user.
And if you read it, it does not sound like the language of, say, the Declaration of Independence or the United States Constitution. And yet those two documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are only a few decades removed in time from the 1769 revision. In other words, even the 1769 update wasn't a true update bringing it current with the language of the time.
People were already falling into the trap of God's Word needs to be in a holy language, not in the language that everyday people speak. The same trap the Pharisees had fallen into, and then the Roman Catholic Church, and the Eastern Orthodox, and all of these other churches. The Reformers had overturned this, King James had overturned it, and yet they were doing the very thing that was contrary to the Spirit of the King James translation.
The King James Bible had put the Bible in the English that was spoken at the time in the year 1611. Now they wanted to phrase it in that language to an extent. And they did update the language a little bit. I have the 1611 edition in my library, and you can compare it with the King James that's generally used today, which, as I said, is the 1769 revision. And there is definitely a difference in language. The major difference is in spelling, but there are also differences in language as well.
Well, then what happened? Why are we still using the 1769? Why wasn't there an 1869 revision and all of that? Well, actually, the King James Bible was supposed to be updated in the year 1870. But by that time, when they got ready to update it, the issue of the Greek text came up. The men on the committee to update the King James felt that there were now better Greek texts available than what had been available to the man who translated the King James in 1611.
And so they wanted to update not only the language, but also the Greek text. And so the revision that was to be done in 1870 turned into what became known as the Revised Standard. But even then, those men kept sort of this holy language, the thees and the thou arts and stuff like that, but used a different text. The language was more modern, but still it was archaic language. But conservatives rejected the revised standard, and so they stayed with the 1769 revision.
As a result, the King James Version became frozen in time. We're still using the 1769 revision today, as if this is somehow God's language, and His Word can't be put into the common language, the living language that we speak today. Now, you may be thinking," Well, so what if the King James is frozen in time? What's wrong with that?" Well, let's look at some of the problems that that creates. The first thing is the archaic language, the title of this message.
God has always wanted His Word in the common language of the people. Like I say, he didn't hesitate to put it in a lowly dialect, part of a subgroup of a larger family that was part of a bigger branch of languages. There was nothing magic about Hebrew. It was just a dialect of a Canaanite language. And again, he put it in the common Greek, breaking all traditions of putting a book in the spoken language of the people instead of in literary Greek that everything else was written in.
God wants His Word in a living language that everyday people can understand. Now, I well realize that a person who has grown up with the King James, or has been given that when they got converted to Christianity and has been reading that, that they could become fairly familiar with King James English. I mean, through my years of study and practice as an attorney, I'm very familiar with legalese, but I don't think you would like trying to read a Bible that was written in legalese.
When I want to spread the message of the kingdom, I don't write my book in legalese. I use very common language that most people can understand. Well, it's the same way with King James English. Yes, a person can learn it and get fairly proficient with it. But for people who haven't grown up with the King James Bible, you often don't realize what a communication barrier it creates. Now, I'm not an uneducated person. I'm an attorney. I'm used to reading ponderous instruments with complicated wording.
But I'm still taking for a total loop when I get confronted with King James English. Most of the time, I don't know what it's saying. Let me give you an illustration. This probably happened about 15 years ago. I was visiting a church that used the King James Bible, and a man was preaching from one of the proverbs, he was a very good preacher, and the proverb he was reading from had something to say about a froward man. And I mean, he went on, and it was a very motivating message, and got me stirred up.
And I mean, I felt like going out of that meeting hall and finding the first froward person I could and rebuked them, except I had no idea what a froward person is. I'd never heard that word before. It sounds like" forward," but it wasn't forward, it was" froward." What's that? It was obviously something bad, and he did a good job of denouncing such a person. He never explained what the word meant. I don't know if he knew what it meant.
Or again, 10, 12 years ago, I remember somebody speaking to me about a magazine for Christian men, and I said," Well, what's it called?" He said," Well, the title is quit you like men." And I said," Excuse me, would you say that again?" He said," Quit, you like men." I said," Well, okay." And I'm thinking to myself," Quit you like men." I mean, that made no sense to me whatsoever.
And again, I'm not some backward, uneducated person, but I mean, that's not sensible in today's English, and I'm not familiar with King James English. I know what" quit" means, but it doesn't make sense in that syntax," Quit you like men." I mean, I had no idea what does that mean? I mean, I couldn't even figure it out. Well, since then, I've been around King James preaching more.
I've gotten a little bit more used to it, and I realize it means" behave like man." And again, if you've been reading from the King James and hearing it preach every Sunday most of your life, you've gotten used to these archaic expressions, and they may not be a barrier to you. On the other hand, you yourself may not understand what they mean.
I mean, I preached on this subject to a church once, and I asked the people there," How many of you raise your hands, could tell me what a froward man is, or a froward person?" Well, no one raised their hand. Now, afterward, someone told me they were pretty sure what it meant. It means someone who's stubbornly willful. They weren't sure enough that they were afraid if they raised their hand, I would call on them, and then they might give the wrong answer.
So not a single person there was so certain of what that word meant that they could raise their hand. Now, see, that's terrible. God wants His Word to be understood by us. And if we don't even know what we're reading, what is the point of having God's Word frozen in a particular century when there's no need for that? And again, as I said at the beginning, I'm not saying let's go use the Living Bible or something. There are versions of the King James Bible in today's English. Why are people afraid to use them?
Let me give you some other examples of archaic language that maybe you understand if you're a King James person, but I guarantee you, the average person out there in the streets has no idea what it's saying, and it is creating a barrier between God's living Word and today's living English, because it's having to take His Living Word and go through the medium of language frozen in time. We're going to read you just some passages.
Philemon 1: 7, it says," For we have great joy and consolation in thy love." This is from the King James," Because the bowels of the saints are refreshed by thee, brother."" The bowels of the saints are refreshed by thee." Now, what does that mean? Well, the New King James says," For we have great joy and consolation in your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed by you, brother." What they would have called bowels in 1611 is what we would call somebody's heart today.
Verse 14 of that same chapter, Philemon verse 1, Paul says," But without thy mind, would I do nothing?" What does that mean? Well, the New King James has it, but without your consent, I wanted to do nothing. Quite different. One is understandable to today's people, the other one isn't. Again, Hebrews 13:22," And I beseech you, brethren, suffer the word of exhortation, for I have written a letter unto you in few words." In that syntax, it makes no sense to a modern speaker of English.
The New King James translates it," And I appeal to you, brethren, bear with the word of exhortation, for I have written to you in few words." Oh, and 1611," Suffer meant to bear with something, or to permit it." How about this passage? Genesis 25:29, King James reads," And Jacob sod pottage, and Esau came from the field and he was faint.
Jacob sod pottage." I guarantee you, you could go out on the street of any city and just pick a hundred people at random and ask," What does it mean to sod pottage?" And I don't think a single one of them would be able to answer that. New King James reads," Now Jacob cooked a stew, and Esau came in from the field, and he was weary. Now why on earth would we not want to read it in a language we can understand?
Why do we think there's something holy about language from 1611 that somehow English in the year 2011 or whatever doesn't have?" Two verses from 1 Corinthians 10, verses 24 and 25, and the King James read," Let no man seek his own, but every man another's wealth.
Whatsoever is sold in the shambles that eat, asking no question for conscience's sake." At first verse," Let no man seek his own, but every man another's wealth?" That sounds like it's saying," Covet the wealth that somebody else has." And then whatsoever is sold in the shambles, eat it if it's sold in the shambles? What does that mean? New King James reads," Let no one seek his own, but each one the other's well-being.
Eat whatever is sold in the meat market, asking no questions for conscience's sake." See, one is a living language, one is a language that's frozen. However, as much of a barrier as those archaic words present, there's an even much greater danger in using the 1769 King James Bible, that is, in using a Bible that's frozen in time. That danger is that many of those same words that were around in 1769 are still commonly used today. However, the meaning of those words or of certain phrases has totally changed.
And yet the unsuspecting reader doesn't realize that the word he's reading doesn't mean what he thinks it does, because it's being used in the sense that it had 250 years ago, and he's giving it the sense that it has today. Let me give you some examples of what I'm talking about. Philemon 1:8, Paul says," Wherefore, though I might be much bold in Christ to enjoin thee, that which is convenient." Now," convenient" today means something that doesn't trouble you. That's easy to do. Is that what Paul was saying?
No, in 1769, convenient meant fitting. Though I might command you what is fitting. Or Philippians 4:6, it says," Be careful for nothing." What does that mean to someone reading that today? That sounds like," Don't be careful in anything." Is that what Paul was saying? No," careful" has changed its meaning. In King James Day, the English word" careful" meant" anxious." Paul was saying," Be anxious for nothing." In Hebrews 3:9, God talks about the time when the Israelites tempted Him and proved Him.
Well, those are both words that we use today often. To tempt someone means to try to entice them to do something. But that's not what it meant. In King James Day, it meant to test someone. We can't tempt God, but we can test Him. It's wrong when we do that, but we can try to do that. What about proving God? What does that mean? Again, in the days of King James, prove meant to test or to try somebody.
In Hebrews 13:7, the writer says," Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the Word of God, whose faith follow considering the end of their conversation." Well, conversation today means speaking. It would sound like to anybody reading that for the first time that he's saying that we should watch how our leaders speak. But in King James Day, conversation meant conduct.
The writer is saying," Consider their conduct." And when he says," Consider the end of their conversation," he means the outcome of their conduct. You see, the words are still modern words, but they have changed meaning over the centuries. Or again, Hebrews 10: 36 says," For you have need of patience, that after you have done the will of God, you might receive the promise." Well, in King James Day, patience meant endurance. Now, these changes of meaning can affect life issues and can affect our theology.
For example, Matthew 6:25 in the King James says," Take no thought for your life what you shall eat or what you shall drink." Now, in today's English, that means don't plan for it. To take no thought of something means you don't even think about it. You don't plan. Is that what the Bible was saying? No, in King James Day, take no thought meant don't worry, don't be anxious. That's what Jesus was telling us. I mentioned bad theology can come out because of the change in meaning of words.
Now, in the King James Bible, here is not just a change of meaning, but it's also some bad translating. The translators took three different Greek words that to the early Christians meant three very different things, and translated all three of those words by one English word, and that word is hell. The three Greek words were Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus. But you see, in King James Day, the word" hell" had more of a vague meaning, the thought of the underworld. But today hell means the lake of fire.
For example, people read in their King James Bible that Jesus descended into hell. And they think that means that after he died, God consigned him to the lake of fire. But the Greek word there is Hades, not Gehenna, and Gehenna is the lake of fire, that Jesus descended into Hades. And in King James Day, saying that he descended into hell meant the same thing as Hades, the underworld. They weren't saying that he was sent to the lake of fire.
But because of the change of meaning of the word" hell," people come out with a very skewed theological understanding of what happened when Jesus died. Another theological error that has arisen in the last few centuries, because of the change of language, is the word" Godhead." People use that today. They talk about the Godhead. We know if you said that to the early Christians, they would have no idea of what you were talking about, because there is no such word in the Bible.
I mean, yes, the word is there in the King James, but what people don't understand today is that in the days of King James, Godhead meant Godhood, like manhood, womanhood, childhood, godhood. And that's why in Colossians 2:9, talking about Jesus, it says," For in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily." It means all the fullness of godhood bodily. That is simply archaic language, but people don't understand that. And so they've created a new entity that there's a Godhead.
We don't have a God ruling over us. We have a Godhead. As I said, no one would have known what you were even talking about five or six centuries ago, and certainly not in the early centuries of the church. This is the problem in using an archaic translation. So the question naturally becomes, why on earth would any committed Christian, particularly a kingdom Christian, insist on using the 1769 King James Bible?
Well, there are answers, but first let me tell you what the rationalizations are for keeping the 1769 King James Bible. Then we'll talk about the real reasons why people insist on using an archaic translation. Now my dictionary defines a rationalization as to ascribe one's acts or opinions to causes that superficially seem reasonable and valid, but that are actually unrelated to the true, possibly unconscious and often less credible causes. To put that in more plain language, it means you're making excuses.
You're not really giving the true reasons why you want to stick with an archaic translation. Let's look at some of these rationalizations or excuses. Usually the first thing I'm told is," Well, modern translations have changed God's Word." The King James Bible uses the only authentic Greek text that we have of God's Word, and that's the Textus Receptus. Well, I've given a separate message on that subject of the Textus Receptus, so I'm not going to go into it now, but let's just assume that that is the truth.
Now, that's not a rationalization, it's not an empty excuse. If we're talking about why do you use the King James Bible instead of the New International Version, or the Living Bible? But that's not my question. My question is, why are you using the 1769 revision of the King James Bible, and not one of the modern revisions, or a translation like the New King James Bible? The New King James is a fresh translation that's made from the exact same Greek text as the King James Bible.
Not only that, the translators tried to follow the wording used in the 1769 King James. In other words, they could have translated it into language that would probably be better, more readable English, but they wanted to follow language that was similar to the language of the King James. So I point this out to people," Well, okay, fine, yeah, don't use the Living Bible or the NIV.
Why don't you use the New King James Bible," or the Third Millennium Bible, which is just simply an updated revision of the King James, is not even a new translation. Well, see, now at this point, then this excuse of, well, modern translations have changed God's Word, it becomes a rationalization, not a real reason.
Because if that was the real reason, if that was the only reason why you're using archaic hard to understand language, then you would be eager to use one of the modern revisions that keeps everything that's traditional about the King James, but is in language that's easier to understand. Now, I'm not going to list all of those revisions that are available. They are something you can find on the internet.
Or if you write scroll publishing, they'll send you a list of current revisions of the King James so that you're not stuck in using archaic language.
So the question we're asking is," Why are you still using the 1769 revision, and not one of the newer revisions, that were made by people who believe in the inerrancy of the Scriptures, who believe that there is something very special about the King James and the Greek text that it uses?" Ah, see, it's a rationalization, because once that objection is removed, people don't say," Oh, good, I'm glad to find out there's these revisions. I'm gonna immediately change." Well, no, then they go to something else.
So then the rationalization I hear is that, well, the English of the 1769 King James, of course, they don't say the 1769, but that's what they mean. They say it's easier to memorize in modern English. Now, that's an interesting claim.
You're telling me that the sentence, for example," Whatever is sold in the shambles that eat," asking no question for conscience sake, that that's easier to memorize than" eat whatever is sold in the meat market, asking no questions for conscience sake." I guess I'd have to ask the question," It's easier for whom?"" It's not for me, I can tell you that." But it may well be easier for someone who has grown up with the King James Bible, because that's how they've always heard that verse.
But that's not a matter of the 1769 King James language being easier to memorize. That's how I've already memorized it, and it's easier for me to just stick with what I already know. Now, if we're honest, there is only one way to demonstrate that the English of the 1769 King James is truly easier to understand than, say, the language of the New King James Bible. And that would be to do a double-blind test, which is how everything else is tested in the real world when you're really seeking after truth.
What you would need to do is first get a group of people, let's say school students, who have no familiarity with either the 1769 King James Bible or the new King James Version. In other words, the students would have to be blind to the purpose of the contest, and they have no prior bias that would affect the results. Okay, then, to make it doubly blind, you would need to have the memorization contest organized and run by a group of people who are similarly blind. That is, they have no stake in the outcome.
They have no special bias toward one side or the other. In fact, ideally, they would be people who have no idea what the contest is even about. Okay, then these objective people, blind, you know, so to speak, they would need to separate the students at random into two groups. Each group would be given passages from the Bible that they are to memorize. These passages would be selected totally at random, and one group would have to memorize it from the 1769 King James, and the other from the New King James.
Okay, then the students would be given, say, a written test, and they would have to write out the passage they were supposed to memorize. And then the instructors would have to give them an objective score based on how many words they got right or how many words they missed. And then they would have to compare the different scores for the two groups of students to see if there was any statistical difference between the two.
Then ideally, you would do this same contest in several different places, so you could compare results in many different locales to see if you always got the same result.
Now, if somebody did that, and they found that, yes, in the majority of cases, the students who were using the Old King James were able to better memorize that language than the students who were having to memorize the language of the new King James, then someone could really make the claim that the language of the 1769 King James is actually easier to memorize. But you see, no one has ever done an objective test like that. That's just a made-up reason. It's a rationalization.
Yes, it's easier for them to memorize the King James, because that's the Bible they've grown up with. But that says nothing about someone who has never heard the King James Bible before, and saying that they have an easier time memorizing its language than they would the language of, say, the New King James. So it's just an excuse.
Well, the next rationalization I hear is that the King James Bible, and again, they mean the 1769, contains such majestic, beautiful, poetic language that we should stick to it for that reason. Now, I don't disagree with the notion that the 1769 King James contains language that's more majestic or beautiful or more poetic than the way we speak English today.
I mean, I would agree that the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare is a lot more pretty than the language that I speak, and that the Jacobean English of the King James Bible is more poetic and beautiful than the way people speak English today. But what does that have to do with the issue? God didn't give us the New Testament in beautiful, poetic language. The Greek-speaking Gentiles in the days of the apostles and the early Christians, they made fun of the inferior language, the inferior Greek of the New Testament.
As I mentioned, God inspired the New Testament to be written in the everyday Greek that the common people spoke, not in the beautiful, polished Greek that, for example, Plato wrote in. So we already know what God thinks about keeping his word frozen in archaic but poetic language. That's not what he wants. And it's not how you would do things.
If you were given important instructions, particularly if they were life-saving instructions to your children or to an employee or maybe to a babysitter to whom you were entrusting your children? Would you give it in King James language? Would you give it in archaic language that was beautiful, but which that person might well misunderstand? No, you would never do that, even on a small matter that didn't involve somebody's life.
But when we're talking about the scriptures, we're not just talking about someone's life, but their eternal life, their soul. Can we afford to take the risk that they're going to misunderstand something because we want the language to sound poetic and beautiful? God didn't take that risk. So who are we then to veto what God did? Okay, then I'm given another rationalization.
People say," Well, there's something special about this particular translation about the King James Bible that no other English translation, either the ones before it or the ones after it, have." In fact, some people have even told me that the translation that was made under the authority of King James was inspired in a way that no other English translation has.
In other words, not only is God's original word inspired, which was given in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, but that this English translation is inspired by God as well. Now, that is an interesting claim. What evidence do you have for such a claim? How can you tell that, say, this translation of King James was inspired, but the one made by the English people in Geneva who did the Geneva Bible, that that one's not inspired, or that the one that William Tyndale made and gave his life for, that's not inspired.
But, oh, the one King James authorized, that is inspired. How can you tell? In fact, it's interesting that the two groups today who are the primary users of the King James Bible are, number one, the Anabaptists, that is the conservative Mennonites and Amish and Hutterites if they're not using German, and then evangelical fundamentalists, Baptists, and groups like that. Now, interestingly, nearly all of these groups who are still attached to the King James Bible are groups that strongly oppose infant baptism.
And yet every single one of the translators of the King James Bible had been baptized as an infant, and that had been their only baptism. None of them believed in what is commonly called believers or adult baptism. Many of the people who read the King James would not even consider people with their beliefs, the beliefs of the King James translators and their practices as even being Christians, and yet they somehow want to canonize the translation they made and make it infallible.
The other thing is that the King James translation is a product of a state church. It was done under the authority of the king, and explicitly under the authority of the Church of England, which was a state church. Every man on that translating committee, whether he was Puritan in his thinking or Anglican in his thinking, believed in a state church, and he was appointed by the state. Again, nearly everyone who uses the King James Bible today is someone who's totally opposed to state churches.
And yet they somehow, again, canonize these people who did the translating. Even though if those same men were here today, they would not allow them in their churches, and they probably wouldn't even view them as being real Christians. It's particularly ironic when kingdom Christians canonize the King James translation and treat it as though it is inspired and that nobody can revise it or touch it, because all of the men who did the translating had to subscribe to the 39 articles of the Church of England.
And here are just a couple of those articles, articles 37-39." It is lawful for Christian men at the commandment of the magistrate to wear weapons and serve in the wars." We confess that vain and rash swearing is forbidden Christian men by our Lord Jesus Christ and James his apostle. Yet so we judge that Christian religion does not prohibit, but that a man may swear when the magistrate requires in a cause of faith and charity, so it would be done according to the prophet's teaching.
So two of those articles would go directly against Jesus' teaching and against the convictions of kingdom Christians today, that is, going to war and taking oaths. So how ironic, again, that kingdom Christians would then treat those men that they had some kind of special inspiration that no one else could ever have since or that no one had before them.
But you know, even if such a claim were true that the original 1611 King James Bible was inspired by God, well what bearing would that have on your using the 1769 revision of that Bible? You see, you're not using the original 1611 Bible that you say was inspired by God. You're using a revision of it that was made by a group of Oxford professors. Now, those professors didn't just update the language or change the spelling, although that was the primary thing they did.
They also changed how certain verses were rendered. So I have to ask, what was so special about those professors that made their revision the last revision of the King James Bible that can ever be made? In other words, the original version isn't correct, and the New King James, or the Third Millennium Bible, or any of these others, they're not correct. But that revision made in 1769, that is the absolute Word of God that cannot be changed.
I mean, were those men more godly than the ones who've done more recent revisions? Is there some evidence that they had a special anointing of the Holy Spirit on them that no one has had since? It starts getting pretty silly, doesn't it? Now, as I said, those are rationalizations. Those aren't the real reasons why kingdom Christians, why committed Christians, insist on using an archaic translation. Let's look at the real reasons, and I think there's just two real reasons.
First, I think that these well-meaning Christians insist on using an archaic version because they've fallen into the same trap, into the same mold of thinking that the scribes and Pharisees had fallen into. And again, I don't mean to step on your toes, but you've gotten into a form of thinking that God's Word should be in some special holy language. It should not be in the language that we speak every day to one another.
It's the mistake the scribes made, it's the mistake that people made in Martin Luther's day who insisted on using the Latin Vulgate. It's the mistake the Russian Orthodox Church used in insisting that the Bible remain in ancient Slavic, or that the Greek Orthodox Church made in saying the Bible has to remain in ancient Greek? Everyone wants to believe that God's Word should be in this special language.
But the title of this message is," Does God want us to use archaic translations?" He's already spoken on the matter. In the manner in which he inspired the Bible to be written, he chose ordinary languages. And in the case of the New Testament, he specifically chose a non-literary form of Greek, the form of Greek spoken in the streets used by everyday people.
So he has answered that question forever on whether he wants His Word in beautiful poetic language that's hard to understand versus common language that everyone can understand. Then I think there's a second reason why people stick with the King James Bible, and that is, it does take a bit of trouble to change if you're already using it. You've already become familiar with the language of the King James Bible. You've memorized numerous passages using the King James. You don't want to have to change and start over.
That's understandable. But what about getting the gospel of the kingdom out to mankind? Do you care more about your convenience than in reaching people with Jesus' gospel in a language that they can easily understand? What about your children? If you raise them with the 1769 King James Version, then you're getting them in the same trap that you're in. When they're adults, they're not going to want to change either, because they've already memorized so much of the Bible in the archaic King James.
So then they're going to raise their children the same way. And this problem is then going to get passed on from this generation to the next and to the next until Jesus returns. Now, as I said at the beginning, they started revising the King James every few decades, and they did that up till 1769. What's wrong with continuing to do that today? Isn't that the sensible thing, the way that God has shown He wants things done? I mean, the English language is going to keep changing.
The longer people stick with the 1769 revision, the harder and harder it is going to be for other people to understand it, and the easier it's going to be to misunderstand it, to think you're understanding what you're reading, but you're misunderstanding it because those words have changed meaning over time. You see, a kingdom Christian can't afford to be a traditionalist. We have to do things God's way, and His ways are higher than ours.
We humans may think that He should have put His Word in some special holy language, but He thought differently. Let's not negate God's way of doing things by freezing His living Word in a language that's no longer living.