King James Only?

[tampastranger]

[tangent]

[gameld]

tampas: i am not sure if you are aware of this, but there is one serious copyist error made in the kjv that has major theological implications:
romans 8:1 (kjv): there is, therefore, now no comdemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus and walk according to the spirit and not according to the flesh.
romans 8:1 (others) there is, therefore, now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
the last part in the kjv is actually a mis-copying from verse 4. i hope you can see the theological differences in the translations.
that being said, i can understand liking the kjv for its more poetic style and beauty of language that is no longer used in any real fashion. it's like reading shakespear, but scripture. however, lewis (who this forum is devoted to) even said that we should continuously re-translate into more modern vernacular in his essay 'modern translations of the Bible.' (from God in the dock)
lewis realized that, in reading the kjv or any other translation, we were not reading the original text and so some modification for clarity is needed as the language grows and changes, as all languages do.
i encourage reading your preferred translation as long as you realize that reading it in anything but the original language is going to be faulty and so we must adjust our understanding according to that.

[David Jack]

[alecto]

Long ago in a language class, we translated parts of the Gospels out of Old Slavonic. Before this, like many Americans I believed that the KJV used archaic English and was therefore perhaps not as good as modern translations. But when my translations into English began sounding like KJV, I realized that the organization and sentence structure must be coming from the source. The similarity to KJV was too close for coincidence. Since then I've done translations from Greek. I would say that about half of what sounds archaic in KJV is actually good word-for-word matching to the Greek. It is obviously the best English translation, though a modern English translation that was made by people willing to hold to the same standard would be nice. We also have a larger vocabulary in English now, so we could avoid some of the confusion that comes from not having as many words as Greek. We could put some of the original jargon back in that gets translated with vague terms like "sorcerer".

But when I want to go find out what the Bible says, I read the KJV. If I have a problem figuring something out, I go back to Greek. Hebrew is much harder for me, but when it comes down to it, if I'm not going to work out the Hebrew I'll fall back on KJV before the other modern translations.

See. I just called the KJV a modern translation. The Vulgate is an ancient translation. Ha!

[tampastranger]

[tampastranger]

[gameld]

tampastranger: i am glad you see your support of the kjv as a personal preference and that other translations may be better (and even maybe sometimes worse) than the kjv at certain times. that is all i ask. you like kjv? you like kjv. i'm not going to tell you that an aesthetic is wrong. i only ask that you critically look at romans 8:1 in kjv compared with any other translation, original greek, or any other language. romans 8:1 in kjv has a serious, theology-changing copyist error that has yet to be removed in kjv. other translations have corrected this error, fortunately. it is something i warn people of any time they use the kjv.

[tampastranger]

gameld, thank you I just today read your post, and immediately went to my Bible, guess what, it is a Holman Bible, purchased in 1971 and that typo is not in my Bible, it says condemnation. I thought you might like to know that. Thanks.