KJV Info Page

Please contact me if there are any questions about or problems accessing the following web links. Three of the articles linked below originally appeared in the Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary Journal where they can still be found. They are linked here (below) for the sake of convenience. See https://dbts.edu/journal/

First is a scholarly article on the KJV Translator’s Original 1611 Preface to the KJV and how this preface completely refutes the King James Only position. Ironically, the King James Only view flatly contradicts the translators of the KJV. It is recommended that the two early sections on “Ruckmanism” and the “Textus Receptus Position” be skipped by most readers.

Second is the actual KJV preface itself by the original KJV translation committee. This preface, though a bit long-winded and in archaic Elizabethan English, brilliantly describes the need for new translations in the common language that people speak every day and reveals the KJV to be a revision of earlier English translations that would itself need future revisions as the English language continued to change and as scholars continued to get more light on Greek and Hebrew. They recognized that by giving a new translation they would face the hostility of those who preferred earlier translations. (Can you imagine a "Tyndale Only" cult that rejected the KJV as a perversion of God's providential once-for-all-time English translation by Tyndale? Or a "Wycliffe Only" cult that rejected the new Tyndale translation because it wasn't in Middle English? If not, then apparently you have never met a "King James Only" advocate.) The reasons they gave to justify their new translation 1n 1611 are the same reasons all translation committees still give for justifying their new translations. It is a tragedy of history that this preface is no longer printed with every copy of the KJV since it is the single most powerful refutation in print (by the translators of the KJV themselves!) of the King James Only view.

 Third is the KJV Translator’s 15 Guidelines for Translation. These guidelines are excellent and, apart from the archaic Elizabethan wording, could have come from any modern translation committee.

Fourth is is a scholarly article on the various clear and undeniable errors in the KJV.

Here also is a Christianity Today article on the background and origin of the KJV and the reasons why King James wanted a new translation. Yes, he had ulterior motives. No, he was not a saint. He was a power-hungry advocate of the divine right of kings who hated and eventually outlawed the earlier Geneva Translation.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2001/october22/6.36.html or click here for an excerpt of the key points of that article.

Well known Christian author C.S. Lewis weighed in on the regular need for new translations in his preface to J.B. Phillips translation of the New Testament which he (C. S. Lewis) liked very much. Though the language of the KJV was beautiful, said Lewis, it was too archaic to be understandable by modern speakers of the English language. This was already true in the 1950s when Lewis wrote; and since then the problem has only gotten worse. This excellent essay by Lewis is titled "Modern Translations of the Bible" and can be found as chapter 10 of God in the Dock: Essays on Theology & Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970). Here is a link to that essay for those without access to the book: click here.