The King James Bible - By Far the Best

The King James Bible:By Far the Most ReliableTranslation in English

Comparing the KJV and theNew International Version (NIV)

Robert PyeJune 2009

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INTRODUCTION

“For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of himshall the Son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his ownglory, and in his Father's, and of the holy angels.” (Luke 9:26)This is not a KJV-only paper. It is not attempting to prove that the KJVis inerrant or that it is ‘the only word of God’ in English translation.However, it does attempt to show that the KJV is by far and away themost accurate and most reliable translation of the Bible available inEnglish today.There are five reasons for this:1.The KJV is a word-for-word translation, not a dynamictranslation. Its translators did not paraphrase the originalmanuscripts.2.The KJV team used Byzantian manuscripts as their Greek-textsource for the New Testament. There are compelling reasonsfor believing that these manuscripts (the

Textus Receptus

) arefar more reliable than the manuscripts originating in Egypt.3.The KJV team had every incentive to make a

faithful

translation, while the modern translators had every incentiveto produce a text which was sufficiently different from theKJV to constitute a

new version

. The question of fidelity tothe original was secondary.4.All principal modern translations of the Bible into English usea composite Greek text compiled by two English scholars,Westcott and Hort, published in 1881. Both of these men areknown to have had strong, lifelong connections with occultsocieties and to have held a number of beliefs diametricallyopposed to many key pillars of Christian doctrine.5.The theology of the KJV has been tested extensively for over three centuries by leading Protestant theologians, preachersand pastors, and has never been found wanting or inconsistentin any respect.

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Proliferation

The proliferation of Bible versions today is startling proof that they cannot all bereliable. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. So many Christianstoday are sorely lacking in faith because they are no longer being given the Word of God in its purest form. Poor quality Bible translations undermine faith and diminishthe Gospel of Christ.The result is confusion, apostasy and a continuing increase in the countless so-calledChristians who deem it natural to mix their beliefs with New Age philosophy.Much of this can be traced directly to the cunning way modern translations underminemany central doctrines of Christian belief. This paper shows how this has come about,with particular reference to the NIV (New International Version). However any other modern version is equally vulnerable to this kind of forensic analysis.ALL of the following Bibles are essentially Catholic Bibles. They are based on thecritical text of Westcott and Hort (1881), which in turn is based on two manuscriptslong championed by the Catholic Church, the

Vaticanus

and the

Sinaiticus

: New International Version (NIV)American Standard Version (ASV)English Standard Version (ESV)Revised Standard Version (RSV) New American Standard Version (NASB) New King James Version (NKJV) New Century Version (NCV).The Douay-Rheims version, which is still popular among ‘traditional’ Catholics, isalso unreliable. It is actually a translation of a translation. St Jerome translated theBible into Latin in the 4

th

century, using the

Septuagint

as his source. The latter wasitself a Greek translation of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew (plus someAramaic). Thus the Douay-Rheims version takes the Old Testament on a grand tour from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English. The tour through the New Testament is alittle shorter – from Greek to Latin to English – but still fraught with problems.Furthermore, the Latin link in this chain of translations was filtered through the mindof just one man, Jerome, whose thinking was heavily influenced by the ChurchFathers – whose theology was frequently suspect and heavily coloured by Gnostic and Neoplatonist ideas. The Douay-Rheims translation is therefore a ‘translation of atranslation,’ from Latin into English. Since the Council of Trent (1545-1563) haddeclared the Latin Vulgate of Jerome to be free of doctrinal error, it was taken to be a perfectly reliable source document. The Douay-Rheims translation was also produced by the Jesuits as a tool of the Counter-Reformation, whose central aim was the

destruction

of Protestantism and Bible-based Christianity. [The Challoner revision of 1750 was actually a

new

version which made extensive use of the KJV. As such, itlikely contains fewer errors than the original D-R.]While an analysis of a representative sample of verses from the Douay-Rheims andversions other than the NIV is beyond the scope of this paper, the reader is invited togo online and make a comparison for himself (

Blue Letter Bible

is an excellentwebsite for this purpose – through it does not have the D-R).

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