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Writer's pictureBible Brian

Preservation and KJVOnlyism


A frustratingly common response to any preference for translations other than the KJV is that if you don't believe the KJV is the perfect translation, you are therefore saying God has not preserved His word. God, of course, has preserved His word, and so the KJV must be the perfect translation.


It doesn't take much to see the flaw in this argument. By definition, translations are not the original. If you have a translation, you are at least one source removed from the original. This is certainly the case with the KJV, which isn't even written in a language that existed at the time the Bible was completed. The original Bible was written in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, which we still have.


The KJV, by contrast, was written in an archaic form of the English language. Not only is it not the original Bible, it is not even written in a language the prophets, the Apostles, nor the original audiences, would have understood. Furthermore, if every KJV in the world was deleted or destroyed, the word of God would still be very much preserved in the world. If every KJV, HCSB, ESV, NIV, every English translation in the world was deleted or destroyed, we would still have the preserved word of God. If every translation, in every language, was destroyed, we would still have the preserved word of God.


What if we then sought to translate it again? In this case, the new translations would look quite different. They would look different from each other for the same reason they already do. There are multiple ways to translate the Bible from its original languages into English. There are things like synonyms (different words with identical meanings). There are words with no exact English equivalents, and scholars must decide how to accurately convey them. One thing is for sure: If we were to make a translation today, we would make a translation for today, and so the extinct or archaic words found in the KJV would likely not be used in a new translation.


When you turn a translation issue into a preservation issue, you are actually suggesting the 47 scholars who translated the KJV did a better job than the 1 God who inspired the works they were translating from. In my language, that's called "blasphemy". These scholars did not destroy the manuscripts from which they translated the KJV, but in order to suggest losing the KJV is equivalent to losing the word of God, you must contend that they did.


Translation and preservation, contrary to the inane rants of KJVOnlyists, are not the same thing. You can believe God has preserved His word without believing 47 English scholars in the 17th century managed to perfectly translate it. Proponents of the KJVO position must defend the latter idea.

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