Instead of a Blog: Hey, Jude, read the King James Version

Click here if you are not using Microsoft's
defective Windows Explorer browser. Why?
Posted February 25, 2006
re: Bible

Smarty-pants liberals scoff at those risible Fundies who revere the King James Version of the Bible as if this mere translation were, why, the Word of God! And hey: some may go overboard about the translation. But try actually reading its competition critically and aesthetically: The KJV is still the best.

Hey, Jude: The King James Version's Obvious Superiority

When people ask about my education, I often respond by slighting my formal schooling. But I usually make one exception: surely the teaching I received from the church I grew up in was the most important influence on my early learning as well as on my later self-education.

And sometimes I'll make that claim more particular: it wasn't just schooling and teaching and reading. It was teaching and reading the Bible that was important to me. And not just the Bible: it was the King James Version of the Bible. It provided not only an early spark to my love of language, but it remains one of the main sources for whatever literary standards and excellence I may have since cultivated. Why? Well, in Sunday School, we read a great deal of its words aloud. This is a great learning method, especially for out-of-the-ordinary texts. But there's something more. A few select portions of it were driven home Sunday after Sunday. Take, for today's example, the doxology of Jude:

This, I submit, is great writing. It's close to poetry. Well, it is poetry. Notice the metrical elements? At the close of every Sunday service, the pastor of the church ended his final prayer with those words from the epistle to Jude. This provided a sense of closure, almost epiphany — Catholics might receive something similar upon hearing the words The Mass is ended; go in peace. But the words from Jude are far, far better.

The King James Version was an improvement, you might say, on the pathbreaking translation of Tyndale (modern spelling courtesy of Daniell):

A very different presentation, eh? Still, Tyndale worked closely with the best Majority Text manuscripts (which has to be said in his favor) — but had I been exposed to that translation, when young, I would never have remembered it.

Something called the New King James Version offers a poetic rendering of the phrases, with some fiddling with the text:

Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, And to present you faultless Before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, To God our Savior, Who alone is wise, Be glory and majesty, Dominion and power, Both now and forever. Amen.

Another edition, called the 21st Century KJV, puts us back into prose, and fiddles less, subtracting only one word and one comma from the original KJV rendition:

But to move away from the apparently burdensome shackles of Jamesian scholarship and artistry and diction, and to the new translations that most Protestant churches actually use these days, we see a remarkable degradation in quality. And we also see the addition of some words not in Tyndale or the King James editions. Here's the New International:

The American Standard Version adds those extra concepts, but keeps that great old word exceeding:

The New American Standard drops power for authority, which is ugly, but more in line with modern usage (probably — did the ancient Koine Greek allow for the distinction between power and authority?):

I'm curious about the phrases referencing Jesus and the past that are in the newer versions but not the older. Would Tyndale and King James's translators have left out important concepts? I don't read the Koine Greek, so I'm at the mercy of translators. But according to Young's Literal translation, those concepts are in the passage:

But here's a translation based on the Majority Text that claims to be literal. See what's missing?

This suggests to me that the Majority Text has no mention of the past, no mention of Jesus in this passage, and that the modern translations are either based on less common originals, or else contain glosses not found in the original text of the epistle to Jude. (The fact that evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians would use such translations strikes me as rather funny. The very Bible they believe to be inerrant contains words not in the best* manuscripts!)

But for my purposes, what is wrong with using the newer translations is that they are

Now, for a religious person, the first aspect, poetic beauty, may be nice to have, other things being equal, but if the beauty does not reflect the actual text being translated, perhaps it shouldn't matter. If the original lacked poetry, then the translation should stick to duller prose.

The common-sounding flavor of modern translations makes it easier to sell to lazy readers, to people with aesthetic senses dulled by textbooks, pop music, and the lackluster oratory of presidents from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush. But since the flavor of the revered texts in ancient languages was often at great variance to modern usage, most modern translations do more than translate words into the nearest equivalents. Instead, they translate whole sets of words into interpreted (and very different) modern sets. The word seed in the Old Testament is a good example. It means many things. And in modern translations, those other things are what you find in the text, not that great word seed. But the word seed is integral to understanding how the ancients thought. In metaphors. Agricultural metaphors, to be exact. If you want to understand the original text, the original metaphors must be included. Of course, a modern person reading seed in relation to the generations of man may not immediately think of seeds in a field, cultivated over the years by farmers, but the scum left in a used condom; for us, seed has become seedy. Ick.

But that's our problem. If you want to understand the Bible — or Aeschylus, for that matter, or any ancient writer or text — you have to be willing to learn some different frames of reference. You have to become educated.

The King James Version is superior to most other translations on the ground of frames of reference. It takes the reader out of his or her normal world-view and almost forces him, in part by its deliberately archaic style (thee and thou, for instance, had been mostly dropped by Shakespeare's time, but the King James translators adopted the archaism to indicate the flavor of the original's grammar and custom). The poetic language also helps (though as Richmond Lattimore ** pointed out, the King James translators tended to homogenize very different styles from book to book.)

Learning King James language thus helps a person, Christian or otherwise, to transcend the narrow confines of our times.

And since Christianity is allegedly about transcending worldliness, then using a King James version would make much more sense than sticking to some flapdoodlish modern text. Yes, you can sell such a Bible to today's near-illiterates easier than you can sell the KJV, or even its glossed modernizations. But, after you've sold it, have the readers bought Christianity? Or some modern, dumbed-down substitute?

For me, however, the issue is not whether I'm buying Christianity but whether I'm truly understanding the intent of the texts. And, also, that I'm reading literature of some quality, and not the bland prose specified by some marketing department. On both counts, the King James Version remains the English translation best suited for humanists who care about literary excellence as well as understanding original meaning. It should not be the only translation used, but it should be the primary one.

And for Protestant Christians, the King James Version should weigh even more in favor. That it does not says something very odd about today's English-speaking Christianity.

* There is a lot of argument about what constitutes the best texts, of course. The Majority Text, as used by the Byzantine church and then spread throughout Europe, strikes me as a pretty good tradition. Divergences from it, not used up until later scholarship, are certainly interesting. But they don't strike me as better. And anyone who believes that a guiding hand had something to do with a holy book would surely prefer the Majority Text over various minority traditions. A scholar's edition of the Bible, translated, would include notes on all major manuscripts, and many minor ones. Even my Scofield Bible — a birthday present from my mother when I was coming of age, and surely the best present I ever received — has a note that the ending of Mark, included in the KJV, is not found in the two most ancient manuscripts, the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus. .

** For what it's worth, I do not favor using just the King James Version when reading the Bible. The modernized spelling and tweaked vocab editions might make more sense for common use. But still, it's the KJV that should be taught. But what of other usable editions? Regarding the New Testament, I place Richmond Lattimore's translation as the second-best, and Tyndale's translation as the one I consult third-most-often. Various literal translations come next on my list, and the works of modern Jesus Movement scholars thereafter. Translations of the Old Testament are a lot harder to evaluate, as are various apocrypha. When it comes to the books of Job, Jonah, and Ecclesiastes, I still haven't found better renditions than the King James scholars' work. .


Text-based menu: about \|\|\|\| essays past \|\|\|\| current \|\|\|\| other writing \|\|\|\| other dots com & net & org etc. \|\|\|\| classic texts