I didn’t understand your point, and I thank you for the clarification. I take blame for the miscommunication and my disagreeable spirit in response to it.

I hope there’s no hard feelings.

I was wondering how Larry would respond to your well written points, but he didn’t. I got the sense that he felt strongly about his positive experience with the KJV in finding salvation, about the poor state of society and morality in his country, and about the apparent confusion he sees in the many different translations that are available today.

It reminded me of the Karenina passage, not because I saw his love for the KJV and “all reasonings [fell] away as superfluous,” but because I felt that his response showed me what was important to him, and why (IMO) he disengaged himself from the discussion. I simply wanted to acknowledge what he shared and wish him well.

Sorry for my absurdities.

Dannii is correct when he points out the fallacy in your statement “but you can parallel the decay in morality with the advent of so many translations.” This is correlation, not cause and effect. Decay in morality has many causes, but I doubt a variety of translations (something that has always existed and directly referenced in a positive light by the KJV translators) has anything to do with it. I could just as easily say that the rise in KJV-onlyism in the 20th century has paralleled the decay in morality, or the advent of air travel has paralleled the decay in morality, or a dozen other possibly absurd correlations, but again these do not equate to direct cause and effect. This is Sociology 101 stuff.

And a minor quibble, but the NIV saw its beginnings in the 1970s, not the 1950s.

@Michael Nichols, respectfully, I find you reference and application from Anna Karenina absurd in light of the actual conversation that has taken place here the last few days. If Larry was merely voicing his appreciation and love of the KJV (an appreciation and love I also hold), he could have simply left his comments on the Versions page of this blog. But he came here to the HCSB page, just as he did on my blog, This Lamp, with a particular agenda against the HCSB. He did this peaceably and civilly, but he had an agenda against both modern translations and denomination-supported translations, as well as a desire to promote a KJV-only agenda. There’s simply no way around that.

Firstly it is expensive to do a full Bible translation! It is right and appropriate to try to recoup some of the costs of such a task, and so charging royalties to commercial publishers is fair enough. But I think more translation teams should give up this right for non-commercial purposes, and some do, like the NET and the ESV.

There is also a mistaken belief that enforcing all the copyrights will help with theological integrity… that there won’t be any chance of someone subtlety distorting the text. But that is much better handled under trademark law. I believe that a good copyright policy would allow unlimited publishing (in any media) for non-commercial purposes, with the restriction that the trademarked name of the translation can only be used if the text is not changed.

I’d like to add one thing to what Rick said: the KJV is pre-Dead Sea scrolls (which means it’s also pre- a great many other things!) Any translation which does not take advantage of such wonderful things as the Dead Sea scrolls is greatly inferior in my opinion.

Larry, you make a theological mistake as well as a logical fallacy in saying “but you can parallel the decay in morality with the advent of so man translations.” If anything, we see moral decay because of the many decades in which a hard to understand translation was widely used. It is unsurprising that children who grew up with a translation they could hardly read would be uninterested in knowing God, and would teach their children to be even worse.

“Levin had often noticed in arguments between the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, an enormous number of logistical subtleties and words, the arguers would finally come to the awareness that what they had spent so long struggling to prove to each other had been known to them long, long before, from the beginning of the argument, but that they loved different things and therefore did not want to name what they loved, so as not to be challenged. He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other way round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent would suddenly agree and stop arguing.”

Larry, thanks for sharing your love of the KJV and how it has impacted your life.

For the sake of clarity, I should say that I have not produced my own translation of the entire Bible. I was referring to my practice for when I am teaching a passage, provided I have enough time, I like to work through the text myself from the original languages. For what it’s worth, I’m much more capable at this in the New Testament than the Old Testament.

As for determining the motives of Bible publishers, I think that’s an impossible game. Better Bibles Blog even has a policy restricting speculation of others’ motives, including that of Bible translators, posted on the homepage:

Do not question the intelligence, spirituality, beliefs, or motives of anyone, including Bible translation teams or those who post or comment on this blog.

I’d want to ask you if you know any Bible translators personally? From the ones I know, I can assure you profit is never the motive. Do publishers want to make a profit after a translation is completed? Certainly. Good translation is expensive. And often millions of dollars are invested into producing a good translation.

The King James Version is no different. Not only was it produced by a denomination (Church of England) which you seem to disapprove of, there was also a very vested interest by the original sponsors and publishers to recoup their investment. And as I already mentioned, the KJV is still under copyright in the UK. As someone reminded me only yesterday, if you simply look at any Cambridge edition of the KJV, you’ll see a copyright notice.

Moreover, copyright ensures you get an accurate copy of a translation. If I want to buy an NIV Bible and I know that it’s under copyright protection, I know that when I buy it, I’m getting the true NIV.

There are currently multiple variants of the KJV circulating because it is not under copyright protection in most places of the world. You can come closest to getting a “true” KJV if you buy a Cambridge imprint, but then you will be paying a percentage to the copyright holders.

This issue of copyright as a mark against Bible translations is really a red herring. Why is there different wording in different translations? Here are the real reasons (and they have nothing to do with copyrights):

(1) The English language changes. What is contemporary for one generation is not contemporary for the next. This is one reason I do not recommend the KJV as a primary Bible for study, although I would recommend it for parallel reading.

(2) The understanding of biblical languages improves. When the KJV was translated in the early 17th century, there were a handful of words that the translators admitted they weren’t certain of regarding their meaning. The birth of archaeology in the intervening centuries has allowed us to have a much larger cache of ancient documents for comparison. And I’m not talking just about biblical manuscripts, although that’s very significant, too. Rather, when we see the same words used in the contexts of other documents, we get a better understanding of the way these words were used and the intended meaning of the author.

(3) There is no direct word-for-word correspondence between the biblical languages and the English language. You state, “If they were all correct and the same, they there would be only one copyright.” But it just doesn’t work that way. A Greek or Hebrew word usually has multiple meanings just as our English words do. Meaning is based upon context, but even then, this can sometimes be difficult to determine. Thus, very godly people, all with good intentions, sometimes disagree on how a particular word or phrase should be rendered. Is it impossible to know the meaning then? No, I don’t think so, but it might take some study. With all the tools available today, even a person without a direct education in biblical languages has access to them on a certain level.

(4) Finally, there is more than one method of translation. This isn’t just a biblical issue, but an issue relating to translation of any document in one language to another. If literalism and word-for-word correspondence was primary, I suppose we should all use Young’s Literal Translation, but I’ve never met anyone who wanted to do so. Based upon the method of translation (formal vs. functional vs. median etc.), versions will have inevitably have different outcomes.

(5) Translations themselves, including the KJV, are the result of fallible people. We don’t like to think about this sometimes, but it’s true. Translators can do the best job they are capable of, but no translation is perfect. The KJV translators admitted as much in their preface. This, again is why reading translations in parallel is very important, especially if you do not have training in original languages.

A translation can be evaluated on how well it met its own goals in relation to its method and how well it communicates the message of the biblical writers. Personally, I’m thankful that we have more than one choice in translations, although you and I might have at least some overlap in agreement that English speakers are “blessed” with perhaps too many Bible versions in comparison to the rest of the other languages in the world.

Again, I would commend to you the words of the original KJV translators (who would have never been adherents of exclusivity of their own translation): “Therfore as S. Augustine saith, that varietie of Translations is profitable for the finding out of the sense of the Scriptures…”

I heartily agree.

I’d also commend to you Better Bibles Blog where we are having this conversation. I’ve learned much here about the nature of Bible translation. I can tell you one thing—good Bible translation is no easy process. It takes a lot of prayer, hard work, study, debate, and sometimes even compromise. That’s simply the nature of it. That was true in 1611 and it’s true today.