The Superiority of the King James Version Bible

Here is some evidence for the superiority of the King James Version over the modern English translations of the Bible. Some of the reasons that I personally use it is because it does not contradict itself, it illuminates the scriptures for me in a greater manner than other versions, and lastly, for the beauty of the language spoken in it. While any version of the Bible is better than none at all; still the majority of the new versions lack the clarity, essence and power of this older one (the KJV). The new versions promise to be easier to read and many are. However the way in which they were interpreted, and what from what they were interpreted is in question. Perhaps, some have thought that the new versions were interpreted from the same set of New Testament Greek texts as the King James Version. They were not. By the following two verses of scripture, it is made clear that we have certain "rules" for interpretation. The interpreters are not given the liberty to "choose the text" that "seems" appropriate to them. Yet these rules were completely ignored by the scholars who created the new Greek New Testament. "Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you". -Deuteronomy 4:2. "Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him. Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar" -Proverbs 30:5-6

The "rules" these liberal "scholars" used in creating a completely new Greek text from two corrupt texts which don't agree with each other have names. They are, "Eclecticism"

and New Testament "Textual Criticism." The following is just a very small example of the evidence it brings forward from many sources. Eclectic- "Selecting or employing individual elements from a variety of sources, systems, or styles" -American Heritage Dictionary. "Bruce Metzger describes the eclectic text as one in which the editor 'follows now one and now another set of witnesses in accord with what is deemed to be the authors style'..." -Daniel Segraves, The Search for the Word of God, pg. 11. "Textual criticism... involves subjective judgment... By "eclectic" they mean in fact free choice among readings... The editor chooses THAT READING WHICH COMMENDS ITSELF TO HIM as fitting the context... the weight of the manuscript is ignored... the editing of an eclectic text RESTS UPON CONJECTURES..." E.C. Colwell, The Study of the Bible, University of Chicago Press. "An eclecticism based solely on internal considerations is unacceptable for several reasons. It is unreasonable. It ignores the over 5,000 Greek manuscripts now extant, to say nothing of patristic and versional evidence, except to cull variant readings from them... It has no principled basis for rejecting conjectural emendations. It has no history of the transmission of the text. Therefore the choice between variants ultimately depends upon guesswork... Textual criticism ceases to be a science and one is left wondering what is meant by sound principles in the NIV preface" -W. N. Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text. Eclecticism's results- "The Westcott and Hort text has 2,288 differences from the Received Text that have an effect on translation. The Nestle text has 2,212 and the Bible Societies text has 2,077. There are 1,995 of these differences which are common to the three Greek texts by comparison with the Received Text. Of the differences in the Bible Societies Text, 2,018 (97.2%) are identical to differences found in the Westcott and Hort text", Everett W. Fowler, Evaluating Versions of the New Testament, Maranatha Baptist Press. "To say that a translation is based on an eclectic text, is simply saying that the translators selected readings from various texts to CREATE A NEW TEXT WHICH NEVER REALLY EXISTED ANYWHERE." -Daniel Segraves, the Search for the Word of God. And it is that text that is the basis for practically ALL modern versions. Therefore, per these scholars, we have actually two different BiblesThe second stream- "As far as the Greek MSS are concerned, the minority text rests primarily on only two, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus" -D. Segraves, The Search for the Word of God. "The NIVs statement- The two most reliable early manuscripts do not have Mark 16:920... The two (Codex Sinaiticus or "Aleph", and Codex Vaticanus or "B") certainly do omit the verses in question, but it is not true that they are "the most reliable" MSS." -Daniel Segraves. (MSS=manuscripts) "The older MS from which Codex B (Vaticanus) was copied must have infallibly contained the twelve verses in dispute. But (the copyist) prudently left a blank space...

Never was silence more eloquent! By this simple expedient, strange to relate, the Vatican Codex is made to refute itself even while it seems to be bearing testimony against the concluding verses of St. Marks gospel, by withholding them... By leaving room for the verses it omits, it brings into prominent notice a the end of fifteen centuries and a half, s more ancient witness than itself. The venerable author of the original Codex from which Codex B was copied is thereby brought to view. And thus, our supposed adversary (Codex B) proves our most useful ally: for it procures us the testimony of an hitherto unsuspected witness." -John W. Burgon, The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to St. Mark. Is Codex Vaticanus otherwise reliable? "It bares traces of careless transcription in every page. The mistakes which the original transcriber made are of perpetual occurrence. They are chiefly omissions, of one, two, or three words; but sometimes of half a verse, a whole verse, or even of several verses... I hesitate not to assert that it would be easier to find a folio containing three or four such omissions than to light on one which should be without any. In the gospels alone, Codex B (Vaticanus) leaves out words or whole clauses no less than 1,491 times: of which by far the greatest portion is found in St. Marks gospel... The codex is disfigured throughout with repetitions. The original scribe is often found to have not only written the same words twice over, but to have failed whenever he did so to take any notice with his pen of what he had done" -." -John W. Burgon, The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to St. Mark. What of the other "reliable MSS"? "Codex Sinaiticus... abounds with errors of the eye and pen, to an extent not unparalleled, but happily rather unusual in documents of first-rate importance. On many occasions, 10, 20, 30, 40 words are dropped though very carelessness. Letters and words, even whole sentences, are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled: while that gross blunder... whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same words as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament. Tregelles has freely pronounced that the state of the text, as proceeding from the first scribe, may be regarded as very rough. But when the first scribe and his very rough performance have been thus unceremoniously disposed of, one would like to be informed what remains to command respect in Codex Sinaiticus" -." -John W. Burgon, The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to St. Mark. The characteristics of Vaticanus, and Sinaiticus-They differ "...Not only from ninety-nine out of a hundred of the whole body of extant MSS. besides, but even from one another. This last circumstance, obviously fatal to their corporate pretensions, is unaccountably overlooked. As said of the two false witnesses that came to testify against Christ, so it may be said of these witnesses who are brought forward at this late day to testify against the Received Text, "But neither did their witnesses agree together." -Fuller, True or False. "Without a particle of hesitation...they are... the most scandalously corrupt copies extant... (they) exhibit the most shamefully mutilated texts which are anywhere to be met with... (they) have become known (by whatever process, for their history is wholly unknown) the depositories of the largest amount of fabricated readings, ancient blunders, and intentional perversion of truth, which are discoverable in any known copies of the Word

of God." -Fuller, True or False. "Aleph (Sinaiticus) is covered with attempts at correction by the hands of at least ten different scribes. The handwriting of the various individuals who attempted to correct the many errors of the MS suggests the approximate date of such efforts. While the codex itself is usually dated from the fourth century, and many of the corrections were attempted at that time, most of the efforts are dated during the sixth and seventh centuries." -D. Segraves, The Search for the Word of God. "There are over 5,000 (known) Greek manuscripts... of the New Testament... They contain several hundred thousand variant readings (differences in the text)... The vast majority of these are misspellings or other obvious errors due to carelessness or ignorance on the part of the copyists... In very broad an over-simplified terms, one camp generally follows the large majority of the MSS (between 80-90%) which ARE IN ESSENTIAL AGREEMENT among themselves but which do not date from before the fifth century A.D., while the other generally follows a small handful (often less than 10) of earlier MSS (from the third, fourth and fifth centuries) WHICH NOT ONLY DISAGREE WITH THE MAJORITY, BUT ALSO DISAGREE AMONG THEMSELVES. The second camp has been in general control of the scholarly world for the last 100 years... The fundamental difference between the New Testament in the American Standard Version, Revised Standard Version, New English Bible, Todays English Version, New American Standard Bible, New International Version, etc. on the one hand, and in the King James Version on the other is that they are based on different forms of the Greek Text. (There are over 5,000 differences between those two forms.) W. Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text, Nelson Pub. pg. 16. "The first stream was translated into the languages of the people- Other languages into which the Bible was translated included Latin, Egyptian, Ethiopian, and Armenian. Many translations date to within 50 years of the death of the last apostle. About A.D. 350 the Bible was for the first time translated into the Germanic, or Gothic, language, the forerunner of the English language." -D. Segraves, The Search for the Word of God. "The Received Text in Hebrew and Greek, began with the apostolic church, and reappearing at intervals down the Christian Era among enlightened believers, was protected by the... church in her different phases:... At Pella in Palestine... 70 A.D... By the Syrian church of Antioch... By the Italic church in northern Italy; and also at the same time by the Gallic Church in southern France and by the Celtic church in Great Britain; by the pre-Waldensians, the Waldensians, and the churches of the Reformation. this first stream appears with very little changes in the Protestant Bibles of many languages, and in English, in the Bible known as the King James Version." -Fuller, Which Bible? "The choice is clear. There are, only two basic texts from which translation is done. One is the Majority Text, upon which the KJV is based; the other is the critical text DEVELOPED by W-H (Westcott and Hort), UPON WHICH VIRTUALLY EVERY OTHER TRANSLATION FROM 1881 UNTIL THIS DATE IS BASED. The former is represented by thousands of extant MSS, early (second century) translations, lectionaries, and church fathers; the latter is seen in a tiny band of MSS, represented most frequently by B and Aleph, which violently disagree among themselves. These texts differ in thousands of places; THEY CANNOT BOTH BE THE WORD OF GOD!" " -D. Segraves, The Search for the Word of God.

"We notice that the KJV stands apart from all other translations on every point, its origin, its translators, its method, its language, its acceptance, but the most significant difference of all is that of the text used." -" -D. Segraves, The Search for the Word of God. "If you ask what they (the KJV translators) had before them, truly it was the Hebrew Text of the Old Testament, the Greek of the New... whence should a translation be made, but out of them?... Neither did we run over the work with... haste... neither were we the first that fell in hand with translating the Scripture into English, and consequently destitute of former helps... Neither did we think much to consult the translators or commentators, Chaldee, Hebrew, Syrian, Greek, or Latin, no, nor the Spanish, French, Italian, or Dutch; neither did we disdain to revise that which we had done, and to bring back to the anvil that which we had hammered; but having and using as great helps as were needful, and fearing no reproach for slowness, nor coveting praise for expedition, we have at the length, through the good hand of the Lord upon us, brought the work to that pass that you see." -Miles Smith, (one of the translators of the Authorized (KJV) Version), in 'The Translators to the Reader', London: Trinitarian bible Society, 1911, pgs. 28, 30.