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Comment by amerine | Hacker News Reader

Do religious groups in the US, specifically, Christians, talk about the history of the King James Bible? Why is it, uh, trusted by so many, when stuff like this hints at a storied construction?

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There is a small but very convinced group that believes that the King James Bible is "perfect", preserved by God to be the only true scripture for Christians.

This is just my opinion, after many hours of researching this phenomenon myself: They mean well, but they're very wrong. The translators of the King James Bible themselves, specifically and without ambiguity stated in the introduction to the KJV that it's important for scholars to update the texts from time to time to allow current culture to understand what ancient writers meant. There are a lot of archaic words in the KJV that don't mean today what they meant back when it was written, for instance.

I used to work with a KJV-onlyist and I had a few debates with him over lunch about it. I gave him a verse with an archaic word in it, and asked him to explain it. As I expected, he interpreted it using the modern definition which made no sense at all. When I pointed out that I had basically tricked him, he flat out refused to even admit he was wrong.

My take on this find is that it's nice and all, but it's a rather minor 'find' in terms of how useful it will be.

What was the verse?

I wish I could remember it, or even just the word, but it was several years ago. It might have been the word 'prevent' which 400 years ago meant to precede, but I really don't know.

Psalms 119:

I prevented the dawning of the morning, and cried: I hoped in thy word.

Versus the NIV's

I rise before dawn and cry for help; I have put my hope in your word.

Would be a good candidate

Not OP but Psalm 37:8b[0] is my go to verse for this. I grew up reading, hearing, & memorizing out of the KJV and kind of prided myself in being able to understand that style of English. Even knowing various words & phrases have changed,I still have no idea what they verse would have meant to the original readers. I can look at a modern translation & see what it "should" say,but wow, I just can't get there from the KJV languagefret not thyself in any wise to do evil.

[0] "fret not thyself in any wise to do evil."

I saw a humorous YouTuber (from the US South?) that made comedy from quoting phrases constantly, but in socially ironic moments.. like people doing somewhat embarrassing things at the mall.. things like that.. it was irreverent overall, but for someone who does not know that many verses, to hear so many, but funny .. it was entertaining..

I understand you are not OP.

I am confused as to whether the word "fret" is considered archaic. I'd settle on "used more often 100 years ago" or something similar, but I have doubts and curiosity.

I don't think its archaic but it is certainly not a common word anymore. My primary reason for using that verse though is that it is just impossible to get at the meaning from the modern vantage point. I have no idea how to parse it to make it make say anything like what a modern translation says or even anything meaningful to be honest. Don't worry to do evil? Don't worry about doing evil? Don't do evil while worrying?

> The translators of the King James Bible themselves, specifically and without ambiguity stated in the introduction to the KJV that it's important for scholars to update the texts from time to time to allow current culture to understand what ancient writers meant.

Wow, I don't think I had seen this before. I think you're probably referring to this section:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Preface#%C...

Or maybe even further

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Preface#%C...

> Yet for all that, as nothing is begun and perfected at the same time, and the later thoughts are thought to be the wiser: so, if we building upon their foundation that went before us, and being holpen by their labours, do endeavour to make that better which they left so good, no man, we are sure, hath cause to mislike us; they, we persuade ourselves, if they were alive, would thank us.

(I didn't realize that the Preface had so much discussion of the history of Bible translation!)

Yeah the KJV was and is still a very good translation, and it was very controversial in it's day. The Catholic church didn't want the Bible in a "vulgar" or common tongue or even being able to read the Bible without their approval and guidance. The Latin Vulgate existed for the learned, and those who knew Latin objected also. I think that's why they felt the need to explain why they made the translation.

Just to add, the Douay Rhiems is a Catholic Bible released a few years before the KJV.

There's a good summary of KJV Christians on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Only_movement

I'm not an expert, but out of the five groups of KJVO Christians listed, only the "KJV as New Revelation" group would seem to be troubled by any of this. If you believe that e.g. the KJV was a translation based on providentially-preserved Greek and Hebrew texts, you wouldn't be surprised that it took work and multiple drafts to translate.

What was taught at a USA top-10 University class on the first day was.. Christian teaching can be grouped into two groups.. one interprets the Bible as historical, allegory, divine guidance and ethical wisdom but not literally true, and the second is.. the Bible is literally the Truth of God, end of sentence. The former groups tend to be the better educated, more literate and more capable of critical thinking in a constructive way. Many of the second group do not actually spend that much time reading, or read in groups just in bits.. and the faith and work focus in other areas. The teacher was a Lutheran or Methodist perhaps.. It was a mixed class of students of many origins, and the teacher was pleasant and handled things well.

The origins of prominence of this edition are certainly political, from an English-speaking origin world. Alliance with this edition has something to do with political alliances between sects it seems like, over time.. people fight a lot over just about everything, including this..

> the Bible is literally the Truth of God, end of sentence. The former groups tend to be the better educated, more literate and more capable of critical thinking in a constructive way.

Your taxonomy is too simple. :-)

There certainly are Christians who seem to focus only on verses in isolation, without considering even the context of the surrounding verses, much less the cultural and historical context into which they were written. But there are others who think that taking the Bible seriously requires taking the historical and cultural context into account; that God did speak, but he spoke to a specific set of people in a specific circumstance; so if you want to hear him speak clearly, you have to go back and put yourself in the shoes of the original hearers. People who take this kind of approach are are both "better educated, more literate and more capable of critical thinking in a constructive way", and believe the Bible to be "literally true" -- at least at literally as the author intended it to be taken literally. :-)

I don't think it's widely trusted. Translations are hotly debated, but I think most people consider the KJV to be a poor quality translation, besides the fact that even if it had been a quality translation at some point the language has changed enough that it's no longer very helpful for a modern english speaker seeking to understand the original greek and hebrew texts.

Something subtle that's easy to miss is the fact that the original text did not contain quotation marks, and neither does the KJV. There are places where by introducing quotation marks, the translator necessarily must make decisions which the original text does not support.

Take for example one of my favorite sayings, Matthew 24:15-16.

ESV: "So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains."

KJV: When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:) Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains:

The quotation marks in the ESV suggest that the parenthetical phrase "Let the reader understand" was spoken by Jesus. But in actuality, it is ambiguous whether that was spoken by Jesus, or whether it is a note by Matthew. Was it Jesus telling us to understand Daniel, or Matthew telling us to understand Jesus? And if it was the former, did Jesus say it knowing that someday it would be read (even though no stenographers were present) and would thereby gain a double meaning?

My personal and completely unfounded speculation on the gospels is that they're a script for actors. (Thus the confusion about whether certain names refer to two people or one person appearing multiple times. It's one person but different roles.) So that part of the verse is a stage direction for the performer.

Hah, I like that. If you need some foundation for it, you could always quote Paul: "You are to imitate me, just as I imitate Christ." (1st Corinthians 11:1)

That's probably a bit too on the nose. The idea came to me while watching a Michael Wood documentary[1] and seeing a street performer in it. The way he told his story reminded me of the way the Bible was written.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272979/?ref_=tt_urv

I grew up in a religious family and community and I asked the same question! There was a debate among people about which version to use and anything but the King James version was wrong.

Why?

Because of Revelation 22:18,19

18. For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:

19. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.

So my first question was: The King James version is a translation, so it had to be changed at some point. No translations are perfect!

Their responses to the question ranged from: King James didn't experience those plagues, he must have translated it correctly, ... to the King James version is the first one translated into English and since The Living Bible or another version is different, then King James must be right as the change happened between the time of the King James and the subsequent translations.

I believe that taking the warning to mean the entire modern collection called the Holy Bible, and not strictly the book of Revelation, is up to you. It does say 'book of prophecy' which clearly narrows it down, but it's all you.

I believe that teaching this interpretation to others (that it means our entire Bible, which didn't yet exist in one book when that was written) also constitutes adding to or removing from the things in Revelation, violating the same warning.

I was remembering Ed Decker explaining that Joseph Smith arbitrarily edited bits all over the Bible. He was explaining this as a problem in the context of that warning from Revelation, when a Mormon pointed out that it was strictly about the book of Revelation, so Ed simply rolled out a list of edits that were made to Revelation.

I didn't piece it together at the time (yesterday). I think I was responding to the supposed case where "someone" thinks it means that, or not, but parent didn't actually say that so it doesn't really matter. I think I strawmanned a thing for no real raisin and I think it's because I'm violating my own warning: someone else's stupidity is a profoundly stupid thing to concentrate on / obsess over. And IRL I'm surrounded. But that's never an excuse... that I consciously & voluntarily got myself into this situation is already a bad sign.

"The Bible" in its current form didn't exist at the time the book of Revelations was written. So clearly it could only be talking about the book of Revelations otherwise the act of compiling the Bible would be violating this warning.

The Living Bible is a paraphrase, not a translation.

I think for some the issue is that if you consider the Bible to be absolute and without error, then the logical conclusion is that the first available translation is the right one and you can't have others that conflict. If, say, NIV conflicts with KJV in some way, then if said that the NIV was right it means the KJV is wrong, and for some people that's yanking out a key pillar of their epistemology.

Another aspect of it is that the modern translations are all copyrighted, whereas KJV is public domain. One criticism I've come across of modern translations is that sometimes they use convoluted ways of saying something just because they don't want to be accused of plagiarizing some other modern translations, and there are only so many ways to write the same sentence. I'm not sure if that's a real issue that Bible translators actually worry about, but it's at least plausible.

> I think for some the issue is that if you consider the Bible to be absolute and without error, then the logical conclusion is that the first available translation is the right one and you can't have others that conflict.

If you considered that the Bible as originally revealed was absolute and without error, that would absolutely not demand the conclusion that the first translation into your language from intermediate texts was therefore “the right one”. In fact, it would (given the inherent act of interpretation in translation) lead to suspicion of any translation from the original (see Islam and translations of the Quran.)

Sure, you can believe that the original text was correct but the KJV is not. I guess what I meant by "The Bible" is "The Bible in English".

As a practical matter, few people know the Greek and Latin and Aramaic of the original texts, so to question the validity of the English Bible is to question the version they know and trust, that is accessible to them. If you question KJV, that opens up some other questions: if the KJV is wrong, which translation is right? Is any translation right? It seems like a hard question for which no answer is arbitrary and unclear and any wrong answer could have unknown bad consequences, and many of these people believe strongly that humans are very fallible when it comes to moral and religious discernment.

One defense against making the wrong decision is to make no decision, and simply to abide by the traditions of your upbringing.

Personally, I don't think Christianity is such a weak system of thought that it all comes crumbling down if you yank out the doctrine of inerrancy of scripture (such as it is available to them), but I can sympathize with those who don't want to try it and find out.

>If you considered that the Bible as originally revealed was absolute and without error

I've never understood how anyone could believe this. Every single book of the Bible has lots of ancient versions, none of which are exactly the same as any other.

Most of the serious Christian apologists these days don't have that kind of faith in the KJV, but rather on the originals as first written by the authors. In fact they don't consider the KJV to be anywhere near the best since much earlier manuscripts have been found since the KJV was translated. William Lane Craig writes about a lot of this in his books. I highly recommend his book "reasonable faith" for a look at the most scholarly philosophical apologetics (from a Christian view). Just don't accept his explanations of atheist thought because it's a giant straw man.

For atheist thought go with David Kyle Johnson for philosophy, Bart Ehrman for biblical history, and Richard Dawkins for science. Sam harris does a ton of philosophy too which is good, just not my favorite.

There is a specific theological movement known as King James Onlyism. Its a minority position and not held among (theologically) liberal or conservative bible scholars. In fact, the KJV version most popular is actually the 1811 Authorized Version, which itself underwent nearly 200 years of revision and updates.

The original translation of the King James, like Luther's German bible, was a monumental work of cutting edge scholarship and had profound social impact. For several centuries leading up to the 16th century no full Greek or Hebrew manuscripts were available for translation.

The main issue with the King James Version is that we have better manuscripts available. The Textus Receptus, which was a truly amazing piece of scholarship at its time, is no longer preferred. Scholars now use an 'eclectic' text, a combination of manuscripts. I believe we have something on the order of 24,000 manuscript fragments of varying length for the New Testament, some even potentially dating to the first century. Modern translators have access to better resources than the KJV translators did.

It's too fragmented for that to really be a first class concern. "Christian" is a broad class that encompasses LDS, Jehovah's Witnesses, Presbyterian, Baptist, Catholic, etc. We have no shortage of controversy and conflict to debate about.

On this particular topic, I'd be more interested in the Italian opinion.

Why Italian?

The Vatican probably?

so, uh, I thought the kjv was... not recognized as valid by the catholic church? Like, the KJV was authorized by the church of England, a, uh, rather different body from the Vatican. I thought a lot of what made the KJV important was that it was early in that split.

I mean, i suppose that the Vatican would probably still have a pretty interesting opinion on it.

Another commenter elsewhere in this thread just mentioned the Preface to the KJV, which includes some specific criticism of the Catholic Church (referred to as "our chief adversaries") for (at the time) disapproving of vernacular language editions of the Bible.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Preface#%C....

I misunderstood a detail here: this section admits that the Catholic Church sponsored an English translation (the Douay-Rheims Bible) but complains that this translation was itself made in response to pressure from Protestants, and that Catholics were expected to seek permission from church authorities in order to read it. So I probably shouldn't have said "disapproving of" but rather something like "grudgingly permitting" or "restricting access to".

I actually had no idea that the catholic church permitted an english translation so early.

It's not that that the KJV is not "valid". It's that it's not recommended over the Catholic version.

The Catholic version contains the "deuterocanonical" books of the Old Testament.

https://bustedhalo.com/ministry-resources/why-doesnt-the-cat...

PS. [mentioned in the article] Apparently the original KJV did include the deuterocanonical books, but they were not considered canon. The Puritans and non-English protestants were the first to omit them entirely.

Because they have the most influence on things "Christian" and the best historical material.

I can tell by your your response that you are not a Christian.

Roman Catholic raised, agnostic. Irish descent and dissolutioned might be more interested in the historical source than the destination.

Similar. Fascinating to me was that some Catholics consider the "Roman" a bit of slur. But to me it was a common, unremarkable description.

Your profile says "greybeard", "skeptic" and "computers" so probably VERY similar backgrounds. Skimming your comments now to confirm :)

Edit: Early, but see Apollo/HP, SunOS/Solaris already. Small world. Any chance of early 1990s Linux, Kermit, Windows packet drivers, KA9Q, Unicos, Mosaic, AT&T 3B2, Pyramid OSX, Usenet, UUCP, C, Perl, TCL, etc?

All those and more. Except for the 3b2. Not much Tcl.

Karnac says you're 54ish and from the Northeast US or Ireland or maybe UK ;)

I suspect not US, which makes the shared experience more interesting, as the world in general wasn't particularly very global at the time, yet we have a remarkably shared experience (I'm EU born, US bred). Yay early (late 80's / early 90's) Internet.

This is one of those rare HN moments that I wish more would notice.

What is karnac? A brief websearch was not enlightening.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnac_the_Magnificent

> This is one of those rare HN moments that I wish more would notice.

Sorry to cut in... but I concur. Sometimes you read comment that makes you think 'wow this person is so similar to me!' but it's a single comment in the middle of a thread and that connection ends up being fleeting.

Hacker News' de-emphasis on Users (i.e. no avatars or extensive profile, or direct messaging) is one of its strengths as it forces the focus into the public discussions; but it can also be frustrating when you do stumble over a like minded person.

Personally, I'd like to see a sanctioned way to build on the HN community via other more real-time platforms, which ultimately could lead to proper friendships with real-life meet-ups etc.

Yeah, I'm a dreamer, I know.

Um not sure about all of those being "technically" "Christian"

Curious why you think that. From my POV, they are all very "Christian".

From the perspective of any Protestant or Catholic, LDS and Jehovah’s Witness are not Christian churches.

In general, outside of their circles, those two are considered heretical cults.

Protestants and Catholics generally disagree on many doctrinal things, but they agree on that.

The KJV has greatly influenced modern English. Because of this, many of its passages resonate with people from or descended from the UK, often in a way that they don’t realize.

I'm Christian, KJV in all uses I've seen of it is simply the "default" version. It's not treated as more correct than any other version.

> hints at a storied construction?

By the way the process of producing that translation was well documented at the time.

I do struggle with biblical literalism of any stripe, after learning just a little about the construction of it. It's always been a moving target, long before the KJV, with parts added and removed for political reasons at various convocations of bishops. Not to mention the many layers of translation, the inconsistencies from the Old Testament that are quoted when convenient and disavowed when not.

In some ways, I can better sympathize with a Mormon true believer or a Scientologist. Their prophets might be absurd and possibly venal, but Christianity is extensively well-documented as a political construction.

That's a great point. There's some much arguing about what different passages in the bible mean, and what get's lost in those conversations that the passages in question are already a derivative source. The thinking must go something along the lines that everyone involved in each step must have been tasked by god himself with the wisdom to faithfully transcribe his wishes... or something of that sort.

That's not lost in the conversation. "Churches and religious groups" vary widely of course, but a core part of seminary training (which most Christian traditions require before someone can be a pastor) is learning enough Greek and Hebrew - and specifically learning how to study the original written language - so that you can consider translations skeptically.

Further, it's very common for Sunday services to consist of the entire church making their way through a book of the Bible together, with the pastor bringing an analysis of the text each week centered on this whole idea of different translations and what did the original mean in the context of its time.

Even among the laity in a church, most Bible reading and study consists of comparing multiple translations and commentaries by scholars that debate what the original context and meaning was.

I had a fellow student in a Latin course whose church taught that the KJV translators were divinely inspired in the same way as the original authors (the original inspiration of the Bible being a very common Christian doctrine). However, that's not a common view among English-speaking Christians, nor even necessarily a majority view among people who prefer the KJV.

Apparently there are at least five reasons that people give for preferring the KJV:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Only_movement#Varia...

Then you have the crazy end of things, accusing NIV of being satanic: http://www.av1611.org/niv.html

https://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Bible/1611_authorized_king_j... (this site is also a good example of how the old internet isn't dead. It's just that the internet we think of today has grown to around it, dwarfing it in size)

Here’s a translation of the US constitution into Spanish: https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/h...

Can you argue about what the law is based on that translation? R is the exercise meaningless merely because you’re not reading it in the original English.

What if the English translation was lost to history. Is trying to engage in constitutional interpretation on the remaining Spanish text fruitless?

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