Two Stories: a Christian Bible and a Jewish Magazine that Make for Bad Religion
This post has evolved, over a number of weeks, into a morass of a critique, taking on two venerable and very different foundational literary establishments, the King James Bible and the popular religious press. It might seem quite unwieldy to make critical judgments about these two things in the same place at the same time but read on, perhaps the focus will sharpen. We will tiptoe around theology and scholarship, in hopes that we trample neither but that our own footsteps are rightly placed between those two towering hedges.
Since my most recent post,
(https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/1797607806021886628/3655238780916104218),
regarding the mistranslation of a verse in Isaiah which caused a theological storm of invectives, lies, accusations, and a highly un-Christian (at least in the name) level of violence which would seem to be quite excessive until we consider that the question raised by this misunderstanding or mistranslation from the original Hebrew text of Isaiah has caused, and continues to cause, one of the most important debates in Christianity's long violent history.
In a nutshell, Ahaz, an Old Testament (8th century BCE) king of Judah, was besieged by Assyrian and Israeli forces and sought the advice of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah told him that a young woman who is currently with child would bear a son whose name will be called "Immanuel." Before this son was very old, according to the prophecy, the Assyrian and Israeli kings would leave his land. According to the scripture, this is what happened and the story ended.
In the meantime, when the books of the Hebrew Bible were originally translated into Greek, the translator of this passage in Isaiah changed the Hebrew word for "young woman" (alma), to a Greek word that can mean "virgin," or simply, "young woman" and wrote "will become with child," changing the entire meaning of the passage.
Some 700 years later, the author of the Gospel of Matthew (who, for the record, never met Yeshua) either read this passage or invented out of whole cloth, a virgin birth for their Messiah, Yeshua bin Joseph. The Matthew author made the virgin birth an important part of the nativity story, tying it to Isaiah, and over time, the concept of the virgin birth of the Christian Messiah has become one of the most foundational of Christian beliefs in spite of the fact that it was never prophecized in that way and in spite of the fact that it is mentioned only in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and in the Luke version, no prophecy is even mentioned.
Since that time, English Bible readers have read in the Tyndale, Wycliffe, and most notably in the King James Bible, that Yeshua was born of a virgin mother, coincidentally quite like the births of numerous Middle Eastern deities for multiple millennia BCE.
The idea that one of the most dearly held beliefs of Christians, especially of fundamentalists, is based on an error of either deliberate or accidental origin led me to wonder just exactly how many of the beliefs of Christians today are based on clearly disputed claims. As a means of tying, in my mind, the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament, I have been reading widely in Jewish publications in an effort to learn more about Jewish belief and culture in order to understand the intersection of Judaism and Christianity.
One such magazine is Mosaic, published to "advance Jewish thought" by Bee.Ideas, LLC, an affiliate of the Tikvah Fund.
Two articles, in particular, caught my attention. The first is by a regular Mosaic columnist who withholds his name and simply calls himself "Philologos" (lover of words). The Philologos column ran for 24 years in The Forward and since 2015, has run in Mosaic. The article is rather provocatively titled "How the King James Bible Misled Generations of Readers." It seemed to fit easily into my inquiry about the relative believability of the specific accounts in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
The anonymous author uses 951 words to state, rather weakly, that over time, somehow, between the Koine Greek, the Latin Vulgate, the Wycliffe, Tyndale, and Geneva English Bibles and in the King James Version, confusion has arisen as to the language of "through," into," or "in" a "glass" (metal mirror), one might see "darkly." Where he intended to cast doubt as to a theological darkness or a physical one, we are left to speculate. What took me by utter surprise was that of all possible passages, he chose this one which is known but little considered by rank-and-file Christians or by Biblical scholars, for that matter.
My larger point here is that there are hundreds of passages in the King James and earlier translations that are either vague, ambiguous, theologically confusing, subject to serious debate, or are, in fact, demonstrably false. Why the Philologos author chose this passage is an enigma. My guess is that he found something he could write about that would generate little controversy and yet make him sound at least superficially erudite. Since I do not know him and since he conceals even his name, a cynic like me will have some difficulty in taking him seriously. If he were making a real effort to try to consider these numerous issues in a serious way, he chose for his example, a passage that almost no King James Bible reader would care about. For one writing with seeming authority in a widely read publication, this choice is academically unforgivable. We will return to this seemingly harsh judgment later.
He writes:
Taking the Bible literally is, as everyone knows, the hallmark of a religious fundamentalist. Of course, terms such as “literalism” and certainly “fundamentalism” have their origins in certain debates within American Protestantism, but that doesn’t stop people from applying them to Orthodox Judaism. Such usage has always bemused me, since a major tenet of rabbinic Judaism is that the Bible is not to be taken literally. Ancient and medieval rabbis quite consciously saw this as what distinguished them from rival Jewish sects. -Philologos, Mosaic, September 2023
The author is clear that the Hebrew Bible is not to be taken literally (in his belief system). This kind of statement would cause any serious-minded person to ask from where this conclusion arose. I have neither the knowledge nor the background to comment on Jewish theology but I am certainly qualified to judge whether Christians should take the King James Bible literally in light of the scholarship that has taken place for the past 2000-plus years. We will explore this in the following sections.
The author further asserts that:
That might surprise some readers, but one need not know much about Judaism to know that it is true. Two examples will suffice: the Talmud and other contemporary works insist that the lex talionis—“an eye, for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, . . .”—refers to monetary compensation. Nobody’s eye should be gouged out; rather, like American courts today, rabbinic judges were supposed to assess the cost to the plaintiff of the injury through a set of formulas and compel the tortfeasor to pay accordingly.
A second example is the biblical injunction, “Thou shalt not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.” Straightforward though it sounds, the rabbis take this to prohibit any consumption of meat and milk together (even if they come from different species, let alone unrelated animals), to mandate the use of separate dishes for meat and dairy, and so forth. This is hardly the sort of reading that liberal Protestant theologians who reject literalism would come up with, but it is by no means a literal interpretation. When it comes to more arcane cases of sacrificial ritual, the talmudic rabbis are quite explicit that their readings differ from the more literal interpretations of the Sadducees—and record intense strife over these issues. (Jeffrey Bloom, Mosaic, September 2023.
Bloom is clear, here, writing in a journal dedicated to "advancing Jewish thought" that Jewish people, in general, do not attempt to keep all 613 of the required laws. In fact, he makes light of the idea. The modern person is left with the question. "If I want to keep the faith, which laws are important? Thousands of years have allowed hundreds of rabbis to wrestle with these questions, producing a wealth of interpretations. An attempt to reconcile these interpretations could finally leave one stark-staring mad.
One rabbi, Hillel the Elder, writing in the first century CE, was able to state with a clear mind, in clear language the following:
"That which is abhorrent to you, do not do to your brother. That is the whole of the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn." (-Hillel the Elder, Jewish Encyclopedia)
One wonders that if one rabbi can distill the Torah in this way, why do we support an entire profession of priests, rabbis, pastors, and chaplains? The answer is clear and simple: because people need them. That is a sufficient reason, it seems to me but it does nothing to advance our quest to determine the relative value of an archaic language text which is insisted by many faithful Christians to be the ONLY valid text.
Beyond that, however, we must question how far we travel with faith, to what degree we apply it to our daily lives, and finally, as hard as this question might be, to what extent might we have been fooled by the professional clergy who have a vested interest in our ignorant and/or willing compliance?
Let us return now to the first Mosaic article we considered, "How the King James Bible Misled Generations of Readers." The rather grandiose and clearly provocative title would suggest that the author would be presenting tantalizing and revelatory facts that would astound and stupify. Instead, as we have seen, he completely deflates his own balloon with banalities and minutae.
If the author truly intended to make the reader think critically about the King James Bible and its possible misleading of thousands of faithful Christians over four hundred years, he could have found far more convincing and far more important examples than the one very weak one that he chose.
Entire books have been devoted to the study of the King James Bible and its many textual and theological problems. One of the best-written and most easily understood is God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson.
But that virtual anonymity (of the translators) is the power of the book. The translation these men made together can lay claim to be the greatest work in prose ever written in English. That it should be the creation of a committee of people no one has ever heard of—and who were generally unacknowledged at the time—is the key to its grandeur. It is not the poetry of a single mind, nor the effusion of a singular vision, nor even the product of a single moment, but the child of an entire culture stretching back to the great Jewish poets and storytellers of the Near Eastern Bronze Age. That sense of an entirely embraced and reimagined past is what fuels this book. (Nicolson, Adam. God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition, 2003)
Nicolson makes no hesitation in claiming the King James Bible to be "the greatest work in prose ever written in English." I will concede, here, that this is likely correct. I would argue that at the very least, it is certainly the most influential.
The author provides a detailed chronology of the events that culminated in the production of the translation. I have truncated this chronology, keeping the most important events.
England 1603–1611
1603 March 24: Queen Elizabeth dies.James I (VI) accedes to throne of England and begins to promote union of England and ScotlandCatholic plots to turn England Catholic effectively neutralizedOutbreak of plague in England1604 Othello, Merry Wives of Windsor and Measure for Measure producedHampton Court Conference on future of churchKing and Bancroft draw up Rules for TranslatorsTranslators appointedBancroft issues new canons for the church and becomes Archbishop of CanterburyWork begins on the initial phases of translation1605 Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Volpone, Westward Ho! produced1606 Gunpowder Plotters mutilated and executed at St Paul’sJesuit Henry Garnet hanged, drawn and quarteredParliament reassembles; anti-papist legislation; £435,000 voted to the king1608 The king demands that the new translation is completed ‘as soone as may be’1610 Henry IV of France stabbed to death; James turns white at the newsFebruary: Parliament reassembles. Shakespeare Sonnets publishedThe Tempest played at WhitehallRoyal debts mount1610 Revision Committee meets in Stationers’ Hall in London1611 King James Bible published
(Nicolson, Adam. God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition, 2003.)
Nicolson shows that the translation was a product of more than fifty translators, divided into work groups, and assigned different sections to translate. The translators were clerics, scribes, scholars, and printers. The texts they had available were in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. Some texts of the New Testament were translated from the Latin Vulgate back into Greek before being translated into 1611 English. There is actually very little known about the actual textual sources in use. (Nicolson, 2003)
The purpose of the new translation is clear. By using language that glorifies the King (throughout mythologies, the ancient representative of the gods themselves) continuing through Biblical history, James is establishing an unquestioned right to rule granted by the Creator. Here are the first and last paragraphs of the preface to the 1611 edition bold type added for emphasis:
TO THE Most High and Mighty Prince JAMES, By the Grace of God, King of GREAT BRITAIN, FRANCE, and IRELAND, Defender of the Faith, &c.The Translators of the Bible wish Grace, Mercy, and Peace, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
GREAT and manifold were the blessings, most dread Sovereign, which Almighty God, the Father of all mercies, bestowed upon us the people of England, when first he sent Your Majesty's Royal Person to rule and reign over us. For whereas it was the expectation of many, who wished not well unto our Sion, that upon the setting of that bright Occidental Star, Queen Elizabeth of most happy memory, some thick and palpable clouds of darkness would so have overshadowed this Land, that men should have been in doubt which way they were to walk; and that it should hardly be known, who was to direct the unsettled State; the appearance of Your Majesty, as of the Sun in his strength, instantly dispelled those supposed and surmised mists, and gave unto all that were well affected exceeding cause of comfort; especially when we beheld the Government established in Your Highness, and Your hopeful Seed, by an undoubted Title, and this also accompanied with peace and tranquillity at home and abroad.
...
The Lord of heaven and earth bless Your Majesty with many and happy days, that, as his heavenly hand hath enriched Your Highness with many singular and extraordinary graces, so you may be the wonder of the world in this latter age for happiness and true felicity, to the honour of that great GOD, and the good of his Church, through Jesus Christ our Lord and only Saviour.
It is clear that the translators had a very specific and particular purpose in how the old texts were translated. James I (VI) was placed on the throne of England, Great Britain, France, and Ireland directly by the hand of God, and by His hand, that King rules.
Beyond the divine right to rule, the King James Bible takes another important place in the sordid and violent history of Christianity. It is quite clearly and deliberately a work of Protestant (and anti-Catholic) theology appearing at a time during which England and the continent were struggling with Catholicism vs. Protestantism and the political and social fallout which manifested itself in murders, executions, bombings, civil and international wars and other unpleasantnes.
While this description and view of the King James Bible might seem irreverent, I wish to be clear that I am criticizing not the text, nor the translation itself, but the uses and misuses to which it has been used and attached. The language, the poetry, and the grandeur of the translation will always be an adoration of the English tongue, not unlike the language of the time's most remembered playwright, William Shakespeare.
There is no argument that the KJV has contributed more to modern English idiom than any other single source unless one takes the entire Shakespearean canon as one work. Even then, nothing rivals the influence of the KJV on the phrases we read and hear regularly:
bite the dustgo the extra mileto put words in someone's mouthlabor of lovewolf in sheep's clothingthe apple of my eyesign of the timesland of Nodlamb to the slaughtera fly in the ointmenta multitude of sinsa man after his own heartby the skin of your teethcharity begins at homeeat, drink and be merryfall from gracefat of the landsee eye to eyeheart’s desireholier than thouscapegoatland of Goshenmy brother’s keepersuffer fools gladly
This is an easy and quick example, but there are many others.
An excellent article by Charlie Garrett, "Errors in the King James Version (Boy, are there a lot of them): King James Onlyism Frightening People into Bad Theology While Making Lots of Money in the Process," appearing in 2021 on the website (https://superiorword.org/errors-in-the-king-james-version/).
Garrett does not spare feelings in his
approach:
"Why would anyone bother with compiling such a list? The reason is that adherents to King James Onlyism have come to substitute what the Bible says with the King James Bible itself. The book becomes the object of their idolatry. This may sound laughable, but there is an entire cult built around the King James Version of the Bible. Other cults do the same with other texts, such as the Latin Vulgate or the Greek Septuagint." (Garrett, 2021)
"This is the trap that too many Christians have fallen into, thus believing that God has somehow preserved His word in an exacting manner that is 100% infallible in one particular version or another. They then choose a version, claim that the version they have chosen is God’s only infallible word, and condemn all others as being of the devil. This leads to a cult-like mentality and very poor theology." (Garrett, 2021)
We will take a little time and space here to discuss one simple sentence in Genesis:
"To understand the difficulty of accurately translating a verse from the original to English, or how an insertion for clarity could later be thought of as original, we can take a very simple sentence from the Bible, Genesis 1:1, and make a comparison of a few translations. First, the original says
b’reshit bara Elohim eth ha’shamayim v’eth ha’arets
a direct translation would be –
“In beginning created Elohim the heavens and the earth.
Note that the two uses of eth in the Hebrew are not translatable. Rather, the word is an untranslatable mark of the accusative case, being generally used to point out more definitely the object of a verb or preposition.
A few translations of this verse are –
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (KJV)
In the beginning, God created the universe. (ISV)
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (NIV)
In the beginning God created heaven, and earth. (Douay-Rheims)
In [the] beginning God created the heavens and the earth, (LSV)
In the beginning God (Elohim) created [by forming from nothing] the heavens and the earth. (Amplified)
In the beginning God formed the heavens and the earth. (SLT)
These are but a few of the variations of this verse. Notice how the KJV says “heaven” instead of “heavens.” Later, they will translate the exact same word as “the air” (Genesis 1:26, etc.), “the heavens” (Genesis 2:1, etc.), or some other variant. Being a plural word, their translation is wrong in Genesis 1:1. Further, the word “the” before beginning is not in the Hebrew and should be italicized as is normal with that translation for inserted words." (Garrett, 2021)
Garrett gives hundreds of examples and I would recommend his article to anyone who is interested in seeing how simple errors can have huge theological consequences. I could practically quote the entire article but I will consider here his look at the Hebrew book of Isaiah because it is the most often quoted Hebrew book in the Christian effort to find the Messianic prophecy in the Hebrew Bible that is congruent with their theology.
Isaiah 1:7 –It should say, “like the overthrow.” It is a noun. See Deuteronomy 29:23 1 demerit.Isaiah 13:19 –It should say, “like the overthrow.” It is a noun. See Deuteronomy 29:23 1 demerit.
Isaiah 14:29 –The KJV uses the term “Palestina.” This is utterly ridiculous. The word signifies “Philistine,” coming from the Hebrew pelesheth. There was no such thing as “Palestine,” until so named by the Romans in the second century AD. Out of 8 occurrences of the word, the KJV botched four of them. 1 demerit.
Isaiah 14:31 –The KJV uses the term “Palestina.” This is utterly ridiculous. The word signifies “Philistine,” coming from the Hebrew pelesheth. There was no such thing as “Palestine,” until so named by the Romans in the second century AD. Out of 8 occurrences of the word, the KJV botched four of them. 1 demerit.
Isaiah 16:9 –The place, with the same spelling, is called Jaazer here, and Jazer in Numbers 21:32. 1 demerit for inconsistency was applied in Numbers.
Isaiah 30:6 –The word “bunches” should be singular. It is the “hump” of camels. 1 demerit.
Isaiah 47:6 –The word “mercy” is plural – “mercies,” as in Jeremiah 42:12. 1 demerit.
Isaiah 65:16 –The Hebrew twice reads (and should be translated) “in God Amen,” or “in the God of Amen.” (See Revelation 3:14). 2 demerits.
Isaiah 66:1 –It is “the heavens.” It says, “footstool for My feet.” 2 demerits. (Garrett, 2021)
If any translation of any sacred text contains a single error, it cannot, by definition, be perfect, infallible, or any other such word or concept when considered theologically. It can, at best, be a general guide to faith and practice. Had I, myself, witnessed with my own eyes the hand of YHWH, writing the scripture, I might believe it infallible but a book with two (conflicting) creation stories, two (conflicting) flood narratives, two (conflicting) Exodus accounts, four Gospels which do not agree on much at all, and fifty translators is so far from infallible that the mere idea becomes, to use Nicolson's word, ridiculous.
image: https://superiorword.org/errors-in-the-king-james-version/
The like wee are to thinke of Translations. The translation of the Seventie dissenteth from the Originall in many places, neither doeth it come neere it, for perspicuitie, gratvitie, majestie; yet which of the Apostles did condemne it? Condemne it? Nay, they used it, (as it is apparent, and as Saint Jerome and most learned men doe confesse) which they would not have done, nor by their example of using it, so grace and commend it to the Church, if it had bene unworthy the appellation and name of the word of God. (KJV, Preface)
From these and many other examples, we have shown that the translators were doing their best to fulfill their charge but that faith, in spite of the grandiose rhetoric, took a backpew when compared with politics of power.
I believe we have considered the King James Bible in the manner in which we intended, to ascertain that the translation cannot be relied upon. This is disturbing, given that many of the world's English-speaking Christians would go to their graves to defend it.
Our question here, though, is not of the King James Bible's influence but of its misleading effects.
Writing in Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens discusses the nature of authenticity in sacred texts:
Such questions of authenticity become even more fraught when they involve the word itself becoming flesh; the fulfillment of prophecy; the witnessing of miracles; the detection of the finger of God. Guesswork and approximation will not do: the resurrection cannot be half true or questionably attested. For the first 1,500 years of the Christian epoch, this problem of “authority,” in both senses of that term, was solved by having the divine mandate wrapped up in languages that the majority of the congregation could not understand, and by having it presented to them by a special caste or class who alone possessed the mystery of celestial decoding. (Hitchens, Christopher, "When the King Saved God" Vanity Fair, May, 2011)
"The mystery of celestial decoding." Hitchens certainly has a way with words. But his words here open a new book, the Book of Human Claims to Know the Mind of God. It is an unpublished book because as soon as publication is imminent, another human claims to know the mind of God so that he can control the behavior of someone else. The cycle repeats ad infinitum.
Hitchins continues (bold text for emphasis):
Until the early middle years of the 16th century, when King Henry VIII began to quarrel with Rome about the dialectics of divorce and decapitation, a short and swift route to torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It’s a long and stirring story, and its crux is the head-to-head battle between Sir Thomas More and William Tyndale (whose name in early life, I am proud to say, was William Hychyns). Their combat fully merits the term “fundamental.” Infuriating More, Tyndale whenever possible was loyal to the Protestant spirit by correctly translating the word ecclesia to mean “the congregation” as an autonomous body, rather than “the church” as a sacrosanct institution above human law. In English churches, state-selected priests would merely incant the liturgy. Upon hearing the words “Hoc” and “corpus” (in the “For this is my body” passage), newly literate and impatient artisans in the pews would mockingly whisper, “Hocus-pocus,” finding a tough slang term for the religious obfuscation at which they were beginning to chafe. The cold and righteous More, backed by his “Big Brother” the Pope and leading an inner party of spies and inquisitors, watched the Channel ports for smugglers risking everything to import sheets produced by Tyndale, who was forced to do his translating and printing from exile. The rack and the rope were not stinted with dissenters, and eventually Tyndale himself was tracked down, strangled, and publicly burned. (Hitchens, 2011)
At a time when the Bible was a tool of both salvation and condemnation, war and peace, slavery and freedom, the "authorized" version took on a great task, that of providing the citizens of the English-speaking world with not a guide to faith and practice but a rule book which must be obeyed even if extraordinarily contradictory and not fully understood.
Hitchens quotes Nicolson in his discussion of errata in the King James Bible:
Take an even more momentous example, cited by Adam Nicolson in his very fine book on the process, God’s Secretaries. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Saint Paul reminds his readers of the fate that befell many backsliding pre-Christian Jews. He describes their dreadful punishments as having “happened unto them for ensamples,” which in 1611 was a plain way of conveying the word “example” or “illustrative instance,” or perhaps “lesson.” However, the original Greek term was typoi, which by contrast may be rendered as “types” or “archetypes” and suggests that Jews were to be eternally punished for their special traits. This had been Saint Augustine’s harsh reading, followed by successive Roman Catholic editions. At least one of King James’s translators wanted to impose that same collective punishment on the people of Moses, but was overruled. In the main existing text, the lenient word “ensamples” is given, with a marginal note in the original editions saying that “types” may also be meant. The English spirit of compromise at its best.
Such a simple and almost subtle difference in language, but one that has caused much strife for the Jewish people around the Christian world since the Bible suggested that God would punish them forever for the great sin of rejecting the Christian Messiah, who in their defense, did nothing that he was supposed to do according to the prophecy as edited and redacted by the rabbis during and following the Babylonian captivity.
For all of its faults, Hitchens finds value in the language of the King James Bible:
Those who opposed the translation of the Bible into the vernacular—rather like those Catholics who wish the Mass were still recited in Latin, or those Muslims who regard it as profane to render the Koran out of Arabic—were afraid that the mystic potency of incantation and ritual would be lost, and that daylight would be let in upon magic. They also feared that if God’s word became too everyday and commonplace it would become less impressive, or less able to inspire awe. But the reverse turns out to have been the case, at least in this instance. The Tyndale/King James translation, even if all its copies were to be burned, would still live on in our language through its transmission by way of Shakespeare and Milton and Bunyan and Coleridge, and also by way of beloved popular idioms such as “fatted calf” and “pearls before swine.” (Hitchens, 2011)
The political purposes of making the King James translation cannot be dealt with lightly. Seventeenth-century England and all of Europe were caught up in Catholicism vs. Protestantism. Less than one hundred years had elapsed since Luther's theses and an even shorter time had elapsed since Henry VIII left the Catholic Church and formed the Church of England. It was for the Church of England that the King James Bible was created. The purpose was to clearly establish a Godly rule for James and his (protestant) successors for all time.
King James believed that a single, authorised version was a political and social necessity. He hoped this book would hold together the warring factions of the Church of England and the Puritans that threatened to tear apart both church and country. Most of the translators were clergymen belonging to the Church of England, but at least some had Puritan sympathies. King James issued over a dozen rules that the translators had to follow. He disliked the Geneva Bible, the Bible used by the Puritans, because he believed that some of the comments in the margin notes were seditious and did not show enough respect for kings. James’ new translation was to have no commentary in the margins.King James favoured the hierarchical structure of the Church of England and wanted the new translation to use words that supported a bishop-led hierarchy. In keeping with his preferred views on church government, he specified, “The old ecclesiastical words [are] to be kept; as the word church [is] not to be translated congregation.” (I personally believe “congregation” is a better translation of the Greek word ekklÄ“sia in some verses.) King James also ruled that only his new Bible could be read in England’s churches. The political motives of King James had a direct influence on the translation of the KJV (Mowczko, Margaret https://margmowczko.com/ 2015)
All of this did not work out well for James's son Charles, who as Charles I, fought with Parliament over that very divine right to rule, exacerbated by his need for money to maintain the court, and he lost his throne and his head in 1649, just thirty-eight years from the first publication of the King James Bible that was supposed to enthrone a Stuart king for all time.
Mark Ward, in his book Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible writes of the value of a Bible in the language of the people for whom it is intended, a vernacular translation. This was the intent of the King James Bible, making a Bible for the Church of England that English-speaking people could agree upon and understand. There had been a long history and tradition of infighting among church officials as to whether a vernacular translation was necessary and proper.
The KJV translators were not KJV-Only. They would most definitely support the work of later translators building on their foundation and being helped by their labors. They themselves used multiple Bible translations as a basis for their work. They used the Bishops’ Bible as their formal basis, marking up large, unbound copies of it made just for this purpose. The instructions the KJV translators received from Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury and the “chief overseer” of the KJV, included these foundational words: “The ordinary Bible read in the Church, commonly called the Bishops’ Bible, to be followed, and as little altered as the Truth of the original will permit.”29 Their instructions also included this line: “These translations to be used where they agree better with the text than the Bishops’ Bishops’ Bible, viz.: Tyndale’s, Matthew’s, Coverdale’s, Whitchurch’s, Geneva.”30 Far from seeing other Bible translations as threatening or suspect or even simply needless, they saw them as valuable assets. They built on the good work of those that had gone before. (Ward, Mark. Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible . Lexham Press. Kindle Edition.)
Ward is not without humor.
And we can’t erase all the historical and cultural distance between the people of Bible times and the people of our day. In fact, New Testament Bible characters themselves were 1,000 years removed from King David and 2,000 years removed from Abraham. That distance will always create some difficulties in understanding.
Sheep, for example. I’ve never touched one. I’ve rarely seen any. I’m from the sheep-less suburbs. And I imagine there are Pacific Island Christians or Inuit Christians who have never seen a sheep, not even on TV. And yet the Bible is full of sheep imagery. What can we do? Change “sheep” to “llamas” or “lawnmowers”—something sheep-less peoples are familiar with? No, when faced with this problem, Bible translators tend to add study notes explaining what sheep are and the point of the “Good Shepherd” metaphor. I, for one, wouldn’t want to call Jesus the “Good Alpaca Herder.” (Ward, Mark. Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible . Lexham Press. Kindle Edition.)
His point is that we cannot abandon an entire translation due to language evolution. Our task as he sees it is to update the language so that understanding comes before authority. This has not been the hallmark of church leaders at any time in history that I know of and is certainly not a hallmark of the Church of England's practices, in spite of their claims. He believes that all translations, made in good faith, have value, but warns strongly against any translation being considered or claimed to be the only one.
Ward concludes:
But it is a misuse of the KJV to ask it to do today what it did in 1611, namely, to serve as a vernacular English translation. For public preaching ministry, for evangelism, for discipleship materials, indeed for most situations outside individual study, using the KJV violates Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 14.( Ward, Mark. Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible . Lexham Press. Kindle Edition.)
In the nineteenth century in the U.S., the King James Bible was used as an authority by the proponents of the practice of kidnapping and enslaving people to do the hardest work. This is not a fault of the translators but of the interpreters. The argument went that if slavery were authorized in both the Old and New Testaments of the King James Bible, then its practice was not only allowable but was positively Biblical! This is not to say that there were no other translations that included passages friendly to the idea of slavery, but the King James Bible was authorized and therefore officially the Word of God. In fact, the King James Version was authorized only by the Church of England, but protestant churches throughout the American South reveled in its authority.
The Declaration of Causes for the Seceding States, 1861 contains the following: (bold type for emphasis)
That in this free government *all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights* [emphasis in the original]; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.
The statement does not mention the King James Bible by name but in 1861, it was an established standard. Abraham Lincoln was sworn in on a King James Bible. Jefferson Davis was sworn in on the Alabama State Bible, a King James Bible. (Archives of Alabama)
I do not see a clearer example of how the King James Bible and its unquestioned "authorization" have been horribly and tragically misused.
In his tract, "A Christian View of Segregation," G.T. Gillespie, writing for the Presbyterian Synod of Mississippi, wrote: (bold type for emphasis)
The Principle of Segregation May Be Defended on Biblical Grounds and Is Not "Unchristian." While the Bible contains no clear mandate for or against segregation as between the white races, it does furnish considerable data from which valid inferences may be drawn in -support of the general principle of segregation as an important feature of the Divine purpose and Providence throughout the ages.
There are doubtless many other parts of Scripture which may have some bearing upon this question, but which we cannot undertake to deal with in this discussion. But to summarize the interpretations of the passages above considered, the following conclusions would seem to be warranted: (a) Since for two thousand years the practice of segregation was imposed upon the Hebrew people by Divine authority and express command, and infractions of the command were punished with extreme severity, there is certainly no ground for the charge that racial segregation is displeasing to God, unjust to man, or inherently wrong; (b) Since Christ and the Apostles taught the love of God for all mankind, the oneness of believers in Christ, and demonstrated that the principles of Christian brotherhood and charity could be made operative in all relations of life, without demanding revolutionary changes in the natural or social order, there would appear to be no reason for concluding that segregation is in conflict with the spirit and the teachings of Christ and the Apostles, and therefore un-Christian. ("A Christian View of Segregation," G.T. Gillespie, writing for the Presbyterian Synod of Mississippi pdf: University of Mississippi eGrove Pamphlets and Broadsides Citizens' Council Collection 11-4-1954 A Christian View on Segregation G. T. Gillespie)
In the Crimson Review, in his article, "A MORAL CRUSADE: The Preservation of Segregation by Southern Baptists in Alabama," Morgan Hundley wrote: (bold type for emphasis)
The Little Rock Central High School crisis of 1957 precipitated the next phase of the Southern Baptist Convention’s response, as described by Wayne Flynt. This entailed a period of staunch segregationist stances which lasted until the late 1960s and early 1970s. From this point forward, the SBC supported segregation due to the violence that was erupting in the South. In Alabama, many Southern Baptists viewed the riots as evidence that the races were meant to be separated as God intended. The SBC wrote in 1958, “Some of the tragic governmental conflicts involving race have obscured the fact that there are proven and accepted ways by which Southern Baptists may express their Christian concern for the minority’s welfare and progress.”In this example, segregation is presented as a form of Christian and brotherly love. The SBC is arguing that in order to “love thy neighbor” as Christ exemplified, the races must be separate. In addition, certain Southern Baptists strongly held onto the concept of a clear separation of church and state because God’s law superseded man’s statutes. If government mandates contradicted God’s rulings in the Bible, then the canon’s commands must be preserved. This, once again, sustained their belief that integration was immoral and their definition of God’s vision was correct. (Crimson Review, Volume III, No, 2, Spring, 2021, University of Alabama)
The authority they cited was, of course, the King James Bible.
J. Russell Hawkins wrote The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy to show how the Bible was used to support segregation in South Carolina during the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights Movement. In his book, he traces the resistance of some Southern church denominations that used the (King James) Bible to support segregation in schools and other institutions and how the popular press has largely ignored their influence. (Hawkins, 2021, Oxford University Press)
Writing in Religion and Politics, Kenneth Frantz interviews Hawkins:
R&P: And in your book, the two groups you focused on were Baptist and Methodist. Would you mind talking about why those two groups in particular?
JRH: There are a couple of reasons for that. Just pragmatically speaking, if you’re going to try to do a manageable research project, or if you want to talk about an appropriate sample size, you couldn’t do better than talking about Southern Baptist and Southern Methodists. Because you’re talking about the majority of white Christians in the state at that point. So, one, you’re looking at the critical mass of people and the right numbers. You’re looking at people who have ample documents and archival material to look through to investigate this question.
Most importantly, the reason I think that these two groups are really important to look at side by side, is that the way their ecclesiology functions, their church polity functions, is really distinct. The Baptists are a congregational model, which says every congregation does whatever they want. There’s no kind of accountability to the Southern Baptist Convention. There’s no bishop in play. If they don’t like their pastor, at some point, the congregation can just get rid of their pastor and call another pastor. The Methodists, however, are a completely different story. The Methodists are accountable and answerable to a council of bishops. There is a general conference. It has authority over different annual conferences. And then within those annual conferences, there’s accountability with superintendents. Pastors within the Methodist denomination are assigned. The congregation doesn’t get to pick and choose and say when it’s time to go and when it’s time to come. And so, for that reason, the church polity question is really significant because it demonstrates that this segregation in Christianity that I’m talking about in this book was strong enough that it overrode some of those distinctives in terms of church polity. For those reasons, I went with the Baptists and Methodists, and why I think it’s important to tell both of those stories.
Both of these groups, at this time, used the King James Bible as the theological authority although there was the use of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and others at this time.
We have seen a number of examples of how the King James Bible has been misused by the leaders of religious and political institutions in England and in the United States. We will leave it right there and return to our original considerations.
My final judgment on the periodical Mosaic is that the editors should consider articles that actually have something to say beyond the banalities I have already cited. The snipe at the King James Bible is poor journlism and worse theology. A short article on whether Jewish people take the Bible literally is a mistake in and of itself. That topic deserves an encyclopedia, not a notion. "Jewish thought" is certainly bigger than "Philologos" and the article by Jeffrey Bloom.
My final judgment on the King James Bible is this: The King James Bible is a text sacred to many English-speaking Christians. Some of them see it as the only or best translation of the ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek texts. They are wrong. There is no best or only translation. The version that is best understood by the reader is the best translation for that reader.
The King James Bible stands as the absolute literary standard for the Elizabethan and Jacobean English periods. Next to it stands the work of Shakespeare and Marlowe.
As a spiritual guide, the King James Bible has significant value for believers. Caution is urged, however, in the interpretation of the archaic language. The interpreters themselves had considerable trouble. The believing Christian will find both spiritual comfort and terror. The agnostic and the atheist can find secular comfort and horror as well. Let us revel in the poetry and simplify the theology from now on. Hillel the Elder and Yeshua bin Joseph spoke clearly in any translation.
The King James Bible and many other sacred texts have been used by men for millennia to control the behavior of other people and to consolidate power in churches and in priests, preachers, imams, and rabbis.
I believe the time has come to end arguments over points of theology in sacred texts and see that the race of homo sapiens has two clear paths ahead, one which might preserve the species and one which likely will not. Full stop.
Works cited are identified in the text.
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