"Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse" - Romans 1:19 & 1:20
Coming from someone that was born and raised in a Portuguese speaking country, their version of the bible seems much more "accessible", But I acknowledge the fact that it might come at the cost of the accuracy of the translation.
Native english speakers often agree the KJV is beautiful in writing and speech.
Not almost, it was deliberately archaic when written.
But also...the “angloworld” as a whole doesn't.
Now, lots of Christian denominations do favor more modern translations, but the KJV refuses to go away.
Fun fact from the church I grew up in (Mormonism): aside from the Bible and the Book of Mormon, Mormons have a book of scripture called Doctrine and Covenants, which contains revelations from God directly to Joseph Smith. But what's funny is that this book is also written in faux-Jacobean English. Smith didn't think it through!
The KJV was so dominant in 19th Century America that Smith (like most people probably) just assumed that if God spoke directly to us, he would use language that sounded like the Bible. So when he purported to write down the words of God, that's exactly what he made them sound like. He didn't think about the fact that the the KJV is written in Jacobean English because it was written in the Jacobean era, and that scripture only sounds old to our ears now because that translation has persisted for so long.
So today, lots of Christian churches are adopting newer translations of the Bible. But the Mormon church is stuck with the KJV forever because Joseph Smith established the tradition that that's how God sounds when he talks to us. We can't just produce a modern translation of the D&C because it's supposedly the primary source!
You could, though! It would probably be comparably controversial to translating the Hebrew Bible into Modern Hebrew:
Now that I work with a bunch of Portuguese speaking people, I find that I have a hard time communicating about anything related to work in an informal manner.
That leads to some awkward (albeit funny) situations in which sometimes I forget non-domain-specific words in Portuguese, and just Google Translate them (back into my own native language!).
In one instance I could not come up with a good enough translation for the word "henceforth", so I translated it and got "doravante", which I obliviously used it when establishing new deploy procedures. I got some laughs from my co-workers because apparently "doravante" is an absolutely archaic word.
It really isn't that archaic. It might not be the best resource for Biblical scholarship, but it's quite readable today. The KJV is so dominant in English culture that English's course of evolution is probably guided by it.
The KJV has probably been more influential on English than Shakespeare on English or Cervantes or Dante on their respective languages. Consider that, until recently (1950s?), the KJV has been read daily by a large portion of English speakers.
(I'm Catholic and native Spanish speaking, I don't have any cultural attachment to KJV)
That being said, I usually go with Young's Literal Translation due to its explicit focus on, well, being a literal translation of the original Textus Receptus and Masoretic Text; whereas even KJV does its share of editorializing, YLT actively avoids it. Unfortunately, the consequence of such a literal translation is that it makes even KJV look modern and comprehensible by comparison ;)
1. Faith is the substance of things hoped for (Hebrews 11), and we don't possess [proof of] what we hope for (Romans 8:24).
* This means that anything the scripture places in the realm "of faith" is something that we don't have tangible proof of
* For example, we have righteousness "by faith" but no undeniable proof of this righteousness, as in Galatians 5:5: "For through the Spirit we eagerly await by faith the righteousness for which we hope"
2. The existence of God, and the creation of the world, are placed in the realm of faith by the scripture.
* "Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists" (Hebrews 11:6)
* "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." (Hebrews 11:3)
Therefore the existence of God and the creation of the world are purposefully consigned by God to the realm of unverifiable facts.
This makes sense intuitively, because it makes the gospel appear weak and foolish in accordance with 1 Corinthians 1:27, and prevents anyone from approaching the subject based on their own intellectual powers as in Matthew 11:25.
And in light of this, the verse you mentioned in Romans can be taken to be about mankind, who were originally literally shown things by God Himself corporately, rather than about any particular man or all men individually.
In my opinion, this logic precludes apologists from appealing to natural theology as a legitimate way of convincing someone to believe in God or to convert to the Christian faith. According to this line of thinking, submitting evidence to someone that can be verified by observation in order to convince someone that God exists or that Christ is God is actually undermining faith.