In visiting church plants, I encountered an old church dogma that I thought was long forgotton and yet has been revived by a new, contemporary church plant. It is the KJV Only dogma. In it's simple form, it is a church dogma that tries to convince people that the King James Bible is the only English translation that correctly communicates the truth of God to English speaking people. The KJV Only folks believe that any other English translation contains errors that lead to watered-down truth. I'm amazed this dogma has ever existed in the church, confounded that it continues to exist and perplexed that a contemporary church plant would voluntarily embrace and propogate this dogma.
The origin of this dogma seems to be the 1940's or 50's and some of the controversy around the publication of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. The dogma re-surfaced in the 1070's with the publication of the New International Version. In some circles the dogma is very anti-Catholic.
The primary fruit I have observed from this dogma is it plants fear into a person's heart; fear that a person will miss the real truth of God if any version of the Bible is read but the KJV. A secondary fruit is it demeans the King James Version, turning it from a beautiful, though archaic English translation, into an object at the heart of a conspiracy theory.
Curb your dogma! If you enjoy the KJV, bless you as you read, study, memorize, and pray over God's word. If you enjoy other translations, bless you as you read, study, memorize, and pray over God's word. If you are really uncomfortable reading an English translation out of fear that God's word has been distorted in the translating process, you can take time to learn Ancient Hebrew & Koine Greek in order to read it in it's original languages. Of course, then you'll have to decide which version of the Hebrew & Greek texts to use...
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Hello once again. I ran across these facts last May about the KJV.
The 3rd paragraph is very interesting:
After 30,000 inhabitants of England died from The Plague, King James I thought that a new translation of the Bible might help hold the country together. There had been several English translations of the Bible already, and each English version of the Bible had different proponents. King James wanted a Bible that would become the definitive version, a Bible that all English people could read together.
King James assembled a committee of fifty-four of the best linguists in the country. They believed that the most important quality of the translation would be that it sound right, since it would be read aloud in churches. So when the committee would gather, each man read his verses aloud to be judged and revised by the other men.
The translators also deliberately used old-fashioned language. At the time they were working on the Bible, words like "thou" and "sayeth" had already gone out of fashion. Some scholars believe that the translators wanted to give the sense that the language in the Bible came from long ago and far away.
The first edition came out on this day in 1611, but for decades, most people preferred the Puritan Geneva Bible, because of its plainer language. It was only after England went through a civil war that the King James Bible came into fashion
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