The King James Version: An (Admiring) Bicycle Trip Through Its Demerits

Page from 1550 Stephanus Textus Receptus, the source for the King James Version New Testament textFrom the Mailbag:

A while ago, you recommended two books to me:
* The Bible as Literature by Gabel
*The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NRSV) With the Apocrypha

I am slowly working my way through the Gabel book.  I find it readable and easy to understand.  The Bible’s notes, too, are very interesting. Perhaps a minor point, but I find the font and the way the notes are set out at the bottom friendlier on the eyes, too.  So, thank you for the recommendation.

On page ix of the Gabels book, I read this:

“The source-text for our quotations from the Bible is not the King James Version (KJV, also known as the Authorized Version).  Though honored by time and the affection of countless readers, it is unfortunately not satisfactory for our purposes.  As a translation it is too often inaccurate, its archaic language frequently obscures the meaning for modern readers, and its New Testament is based upon inferior originals.”


In the “To The Reader” section of the Bible (yes, I read it!), I found this:

“Yet the King James Version has serious defects.  By the middle of the nineteenth century, the development of biblical studies and the discovery of many biblical manuscripts more ancient than those on which the King James Version was based made it apparent that these defects were so many as to call for revision.”

I was wondering if you could expound a bit more on the ‘defects’ of the KJV. What are ‘inferior’ originals and what are ‘superior’ originals? How do they determine this?

Thank you so much for the note.  Your letter covers two separate questions that cover two separate “stages” of producing a translation.

The first is the original-language source materials which the King James Version translates, that is, the manuscripts.  This is a textual critical problem and is by far the bigger of the two problems.

The second is the translation and any mistakes or missteps that were made at that level.

So, first, to the textual criticism:

The King James translators relied on the best textual criticism of their day: Erasmus’s Textus Receptus [TR], the first edition of which appeared in the year 1516.

 For those new to Biblical textual criticism: there are several major divisions, or “text-types,” of Greek New Testament manuscripts.  The three basic text-types for New Testament manuscripts are:

• The Alexandrian (the oldest of our New Testament MSS [manuscripts] are generally admitted to be in this group);
• the Byzantine (sometimes called The Majority Text because this group contains the greatest number of manuscripts, the group from which the TR and KJV are derived); and 
• the Western.

Substantial differences exist between the text-types.  Many of these differences are essentially stylistic: the Byzantine textual tradition offers different word order and grammatical structure in some spots to smooth out the Greek compared to the rougher Alexandrian texts.

The Byzantine Text also likes to mute, gloss, or minimize passages that cause exegetical difficulty.  The example usually given is that it drops out the more ancient texts’ reference to Isaiah in Mark 1:2, which takes care of the fact that part of the following quotation comes from Malachi.  So the King James Version follows the Byzantine Tradition in reading, “As it is written in the prophets” without the Alexandrian (and apparently ancient but mistaken) mention of Isaiah.

You ask how one determines which texts are “better.”  That depends to a great degree on what your needs and desires are.  For instance, if you want an older text, the evidence is considerable that the Alexandrian text-type has the edge (and you can tell through a variety of features, from “ancient witnesses” who agree with that text to features of the language to more physical features like handwriting).  If you’re looking for greater elegance, stronger internal harmony, and so on, the Byzantine Text will be your preference.

Erasmus constructed the Textus Receptus under strange circumstances.  His first edition uses six Byzantine Texts, which are later than the Alexandrian text-type manuscripts (unavailable to Erasmus).  And it was a little rushed owing to a publishing deadline.  (His publisher wanted to beat a competing Greek New Testament to press.  History is full of weird facts like this.)  All of his manuscripts dated from the 12th century or later; if the ancient manuscripts all had substantial agreement with those manuscripts, that would not be a problem.  But of course they do not.

He also dipped into another group of manuscripts, the Latin Vulgate, and “back-translated” some passages from them from Latin into Greek.  Some of those translations were of dubious authenticity, but Erasmus has a pretty well documented fetish for the Vulgate.  (In one famous passage I can’t quite remember the phrasing of, he says something like, “Paul deserves to be presented in polished Latin,” as he polishes his sources.  This was a well-established scholarly habit of scrubbing rough style.)Page from the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible commissioned for use in the English Churches. King James Version, to you.

Then there’s the famous “Joahnnine Comma” (1 John 5:7-8), which has no authority in the ancient Greek manuscripts (except for a very late, back-translated manuscript called Codex 61, but which appears to have been a medieval gloss on the Latin translations of the Greek text.  Compare the Comma in the King James with the English Standard Version.  The KJV reads:

For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.  And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.

and the ESV:

For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree.

As with the New Testament, so the “Old Testament.”  The values of the King James committee were to preserve many of the readings found in the Greek Septuagint and St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translations of the Hebrew text (neither of which was really close to faultless).  Though they did use a Hebrew text (Daniel Bomberg’s 1524 rabbinic text), they extensively dipped into the Septuagint and Vulgate.

So the texts of the King James are questionable.

As for the translations: The King James is an amazingly felicitous translation with beautifully rich English rhythms and diction.  It borrows freely from the great translations of Tyndale and Coverdale, preserving some of their miracles of English rendition.  It uses a high Latinate style, and is designed to be read aloud.  (Some day when you’re bored, run through the Psalms looking at the meter.  Great stuff.)

But there’s been four hundred years of scholarship since 1611 that has illuminated a lot of phrases and passages that were unclear to the translators.   When they got turned around, it was usually with weird results, and examples can be found on nearly every page of the Old Testament in particular.  For instance Job 22:30 reads “He shall deliver the island of the innocent: and it is delivered by the pureness of thine hands.”  The ESV more faithfully renders:  “He delivers even the one who is not innocent, who will be delivered through the cleanness of your hands.”

Of course I know a lot of King James Only Christians.  They generally put forward arguments that show very slender understanding of textual criticism and the way that it produces a text.  But the book works for them, so I’m not inclined to set them straight unless they want to foist their view on others. 

If you’re going to pick a translation to stake it all on, at least you’ll have good style.

Comments

[Kathy]

Thank you so much for this detailed reply. (And thanks for fixing up my misspelling of Gabel! I didn't have the book in front of me at the time.) Oh, and I got the "Fully Revised Fourth Edition" of the Bible. ;)

I was once part of a fellowship that had some rather vocal KJV-Only people. This included:
* showing a video of why the KJV is right and other translations are wrong
* inviiting someone to come speak at church about the KJV (We were told the talk was going to be on "How We Got Our Bible". When I found out the speaker was a KJV-Only proponent, the title of his talk took on a different meaning. My family did not attend the talk.)
* making remarks such as "Gee, I wonder why they left THAT out. Seems pretty important to me." (or similar sentiments) whenever someone would read a passage from a non-KJV Bible that didn't quite agree with the KJV.
* their son telling his teacher at the Christian school that the NIV (which the school used) was defective

*sigh*

Your post brings up another question:

The values of the King James committee were to preserve many of the readings found in the Greek Septuagint and St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate translations of the Hebrew text (neither of which was really close to faultless). Though they did use a Hebrew text (Daniel Bomberg's 1524 rabbinic text), they extensively dipped into the Septuagint and Vulgate.

So, what are the problems with the Vulgate and the Septuagint?