King James Only
From RationalWiki
King James Only is a belief found among some English-speaking Christians that the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible from 1611 is either the best translation, or the only reliable or genuine translation of the Bible. It is most prominent among fundamentalist Independent Baptists and is also found in other churches from the Mormons to the snake handling sects to some ultra-conservative Anglicans.
Some people may just like the KJV's text better than other texts (e.g. they were raised with it, or think its language has more gravitas as in "Thou shalt not steal."), but the usual justifications for this position are that the modern translations were from "corrupted" manuscripts, or were done by a conspiracy of Bible-denying liberals and secular humanists, or some combination thereof. The most likely reason, though, is they like all the "thees" and "thous" and believe them to have some kind of mystical woo when speaking of the deity that modern English does not have. This is exactly why the KJV was written in language that was a bit archaic even for 1611.
In the original preface to the KJV, the translators themselves wrote [1]:
- the very meanest translation of the Bible in English ... containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God.[2]
and
- we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, ... but to make a good one better ...[3]
Implicit in these statements is the translators' belief that the KJV, like older translations, was not perfect, but was an improvement.
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[edit] New Age Bible versions
One textual analysis written by Gail Riplinger, a strong proponent of King James Only and a trained interior decorator, is The New Age Bible Versions, which compares various contemporary translations side by side with the King James. It is a barking mad paranoid rant that exploits variant readings and translation errors, along with sketchy gematria and argumentum ex culo, to make the point that the Bible is being corrupted by translators who are attempting to slowly remove the name of God from the Bible.
Criticisms abound, from the obvious (Riplinger is a kook with tortured-at-best logic) to the technical (older, closer-to-the-source manuscripts are better than the ones the KJV was based on; variant readings are not inherently corrupt) to the spurious (Riplinger, as a woman, should not be teaching about the Bible).
[edit] Parallel movements
There is a parallel movement to King James Only among some traditionalist Catholics who hold to a Douay-Rheims Only position.
The Douay-Rheims bible was translated from the Latin Vulgate, rather than the original Greek and Hebrew versions, and many Catholic traditionalists believe that to translate the Bible from anything but the official Latin Bible of the Catholic Church is heresy. That Douay-Rheims includes so many obscure Latin and Greek-derived words (many long obsolete, or never even really established in English) as to be near-incomprehensible to the modern reader — indeed, far more so than the merely archaic King James Version — apparently doesn't matter.
Note that the Catholic Church no longer holds this opinion, and no longer endorses the Douay-Rheims version.[citation needed]
[edit] Notable promoters of King James Onlyism
- Jack Chick
- Texe Marrs
- Jack Hyles
- John R. Rice
- Alberto Rivera
- Bob Jones University
- William Branham
- Gail Riplinger - author of New Age Bible Versions
- Peter Ruckman - the lunatic fringe whom even the rest of the KJV-onlyites avoid.
- Amazing Grace Baptist Church of Canton, North Carolina gained international media attention in 2009 for announcing a Halloween book burning of all Bibles except the KJV, plus "Satanic" authors like Billy Graham, Rick Warren, and Mother Teresa.[4]
