Ward Authorized

The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68359-056-9
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 112 Seiten

The King James Version has shaped the church, our worship, and our mother tongue for over 400 years. But what should we do with it today? The KJV beautifully rendered the Scriptures into the language of turn-of-the-seventeenth-century England. Even today the King James is the most widely read Bible in the United States. The rich cadence of its Elizabethan English is recognized even by non-Christians. But English has changed a great deal over the last 400 years-and in subtle ways that very few modern readers will recognize. In Authorized Mark L. Ward, Jr. shows what exclusive readers of the KJV are missing as they read God's word.#In their introduction to the King James Bible, the translators tell us that Christians must 'heare CHRIST speaking unto them in their mother tongue.' In Authorized Mark Ward builds a case for the KJV translators' view that English Bible translations should be readable by what they called 'the very vulgar'-and what we would call 'the man on the street.'

Mark Ward received his PhD in New Testament Interpretation from Bob Jones University in 2012. He now serves the church as a Logos Pro, writing weekly on Bible study for the Logos Talk Blog and training users in the use of Logos Bible Software. He is the author of multiple high school Bible textbooks, including Biblical Worldview: Creation, Fall, Redemption. He blogs at byfaithweunderstand.com.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ward, Mark

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

What We Lose as the Church Stops Using the KJV

Who reads the Matthew Bible of 1537? Nobody I know of. And who misses it? Again, nobody I know of.

The same pretty much goes for other classic English translations of the Scriptures: the Geneva Bible, the Coverdale Bible, the Bishop’s Bible, and—stretching back a few more centuries—Wycliffe’s translation.

Much of English-speaking Christianity has sent the King James Version, too, to that part of the forest where trees fall with no one there to hear them. That’s what we do with old Bible translations.

But I don’t think many people have carefully considered what will happen if we all decide to let the KJV die and another take its office.

There are at least five valuable things we will lose—things that in many places we are losing and have already lost—if we give up the KJV, this common standard English Bible translation that has served us all since before the oldest family ancestor most of us know of.

1. WE LOSE INTERGENERATIONAL TIES IN THE BODY OF CHRIST

I spent an inordinate amount of time before marriage considering which Bible translations I would hand to my children (inordinate because I didn’t even have a girlfriend at the time). I dithered so long in this decision, even after marriage and the birth of my three children, that Grandma ended up deciding for me by buying the kids Bibles. And one of the reasons I struggled so hard was that I knew that if I didn’t hand my kids KJVs I would be severing some rich connections between them and their heritage.

The KJV includes countless little phrases that have made it not just into English but into the stock lexicon of Christian biblical and theological conversation. For example, I was reading along in one theology book and the author said of the Parable of the Wicked Tenants: “What do we learn about the story by this means? Much in every way.”1

I can’t prove it, because he added the word “in” (the KJV just says “much every way”), but I think this was a casual allusion to Romans 3:2 in the KJV. It was not placed in quotation marks. It wasn’t footnoted. Was this author plagiarizing? No, he was showcasing his wit and erudition—and signaling his connection with the English-speaking Christian past. He was sending a message to readers: “I know the Bible so well—the same Bible you grew up on—that its words leak out of my pen as if by accident.” I don’t want my kids to miss such casual KJV allusions.2

I don’t want my kids missing more artful and complicated allusions, either—like the comment, attributed to Walker Percy among others, that someone “sold his birthright for a pot of message.”3 You don’t have to read the KJV to get this one—plenty of people who have never read the KJV understand what’s going on here because it’s based on a stock phrase, namely “selling one’s birthright for a mess of pottage,” which in turn is based on the Jacob and Esau story. But having read the KJV sure helps someone understand Percy’s witticism. No recent Bible translation uses the word “pottage.”

I want my kids to be skilled readers who get all the meaning an author has to give. I want them to feel connected to all the valuable traditions of the Christian church, and that means passing on the store of knowledge upon which Christian authors rely for their allusions and verbal echoes.

Christian leader and theologian Russell Moore was standing at the bedside of his grandmother as she lay recovering from a life-threatening stroke. He said, “I thought she was about to die; she didn’t. But I was thinking, I can sing hymns to her here at the bedside that she will know and that I will know. And I don’t think that will be the case with my children when I am lying on my deathbed, because the way that we sing the hymnody is all so generationally divided up.”4

Traditional hymns—and traditional Bible translations—bind the generations together. Evangelical suspicion of tradition can be healthy, because the danger is ever present that we will “set at nought the word of God” by our traditions. But traditions develop to protect things our forebears valued. Discovering why they did so will strengthen our ties with them.

Moore misses the KJV for this very reason:

There’s something about the beauty, the majesty, and the continuity between generations about the KJV that is sorely missed when it is gone. I suppose that’s why I preach and teach from any number of translations, but when I am sorrowful or grieving or comforting a hopeless friend I turn to the same King James Version I memorized verses from in childhood Sword Drills at Woolmarket Baptist Church. I know that I’m reading the same words my grandfather preached from fifty years ago, the same words my great-grandparents would have read through the Depression, and my great-great-great grandparents would have read in the aftermath of Reconstruction.5

Churches and families that no longer use the KJV might consider having their children memorize key King James passages like Psalm 23; John 3:16, and the Lord’s Prayer. When I lay dying, it will be undeniably meaningful to me to pray with my family to a Father “which art” in heaven, not one merely “who is” there. Parents who teach their kids the KJV rendition of the Lord’s Prayer are tying one little string between them and our rich English Christian history—a history that has much to teach us. We can’t keep all the strings. Some of them must or even should be cut. But let’s at least be aware of what we’re doing.

2. WE LOSE SCRIPTURE MEMORY BY OSMOSIS

When an entire church, or group of churches, or even an entire nation of Christians, uses basically one Bible translation, genuinely wonderful things happen. An individual Christian’s knowledge of the Bible increases almost by accident, because certain phrases become woven into the language of the community. If even non-Christians today who have never read the KJV know many of its phrases because they’ve passed into the lexicon, surely a people who lives by the Book will learn even more Bible through the normal course of everyday life within a Christian community.

Christians in my growing-up years were constantly reinforcing each other’s knowledge of the KJV every time they mentioned it in conversation. We were teaching each other Bible phrases when we read Scripture out loud together in church. (Corporate reading from five different translations just doesn’t work. I’ve heard it done—no, attempted.)

People can memorize any Bible translation on their own, but the community value of learning by osmosis is eroded when people aren’t reinforcing precisely the same wording. It helps to have a common standard. That standard doesn’t have to be the KJV, of course. But no other translation seems likely to serve in the role. If indeed the King is dying, it is just as sure that none of his sons or cousins have managed to become the heir apparent.

3. WE LOSE A CULTURAL TOUCHSTONE

And it’s not just Christians who stand to lose things of value if KJV readership goes from 55 percent to where the Coverdale Bible is right now—at 0 percent. All English speakers will lose a literary benchmark, a source of common phrases, and a key pillar supporting the form of English universally recognized as elevated and religious. And these cultural values are not to be sniffed at. There is a grandeur to the wording of the KJV, and it isn’t just Christians who feel it. If KJV wording fades entirely out of cultural memory, its language may no longer call up any instinctual cultural respect from non-Christian people.

I was listening recently to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on BBC Radio 4, broadcasted live every year from the soaring medieval Chapel of King’s College Cambridge, and featuring perhaps the most famous choir in the world, a choir founded in 1411 by King Henry VI. This is a church service, yes, but it’s also a cultural event enjoyed by countless people who are not Christians.

Interspersed throughout the beautiful carols, sung impeccably by the boy choristers and young choral scholars, there are Scripture readings. And somehow the KJV befits the occasion and the physical setting. I heard through my speakers, in the clear tones of British RP (received pronunciation), “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return” (Gen 3:19). Culturally speaking—and I do love high culture—this is preferable in a cathedral ceremony to the hapless, “You’re made from dust and you’ll return to dust” (International Standard Version).

David Norton, the premier scholar in the world on the history of the KJV, writes in his Textual History of the King James Version that by the mid-century, “the language of the KJB had become what [lexicographer Samuel] Johnson calls ‘solemn language’: it was the accepted language of the Bible and religion, distinguished from ordinary language.”6 As we’ll see later, this distinction creates problems. But here’s one positive: when you quote the KJV, you don’t have to tell people you’re quoting the...