Monthly Archives: November 2024

Editorial

Bible words matter

King James Bible words are very exact, and each word has a precise meaning, which means that changing words and punctuation can and does change meaning.

We are talking about the print history of the King James Bible, and its editorial accuracy today.

So, let’s take a word we find in the KJB. How do we know what that means? Let’s say it’s a challenging word, an unusual word.

The most important thing we can do is see how the word is used at that place (the context), and also at parallel passages what is said, and also how that word is used elsewhere in the KJB.

This is where there is a difference between a consistent KJBO approach and those who look to the original languages. The proper approach is to start with and steer the course in the English.

The problem with going to the original languages is that they aren’t really going to the originals but to what lexicons say those words allegedly “really” mean. In other words, they are definitions in English, and these definitions may vary to or even disagree with the KJB words. So it’s a very dangerous place to go to.

I want to show what happens when you go down that path. There’s a preacher named Bryan Ross. He says he stands for the KJB. But the problem is, he doesn’t believe in any finally fixed English, he doesn’t see the authority of meaning in the distinctiveness of English. He’s a “near enough is good enough” kind of guy. He calls this “ball park” or “semantic matrix” approach “verbal equivalence”, which may as well mean “vibrations in meaning”.

So, instead of seeing “charity” and “love” as two different words with different shades of meaning, he claims they are just synonymous. And he does the same with other words, like “Passover” and “Easter”. (Easter is the Christian word for Passover, but indicates more than just Christ the Lamb, as it speaks of resurrection.)

The word “charity” means “love in action”, which is different from just saying “love”. Once you understand that every Bible word has a distinct meaning, you won’t be just acting like “joy” and “gladness” are the same, or again, “travelling” and “journeying”.

The KJB translators knew that the same original word could and should be translated to different English words. And the meaning depends on this flexibility, because for a variety of reasons “joy” is not “gladness”. The syllables and sounds are different, the subtleties of association, the nuance of difference in the concepts… this means that where each word is used, it is the right word to be used. And if one word, then we should not substitute for it another word.

That’s why it’s wrong to say that varieties of words for any single place are okay in perpetuity. That’s why it’s wrong to allow that the KJB can still be changed. We know that there has been a sufficiency in the grace of God in that there has been a history of some variety, but this is only to do with the past, and not an excuse to allow the same “problem”/”phenomenon” to be perpetuated in the future.

God has a finite message in the Bible, as complex and as grand as it is. So likewise God is outworking in history to have precision of words, a singular standard, as the outcome of all things. We are not living in a perpetual universe of uniformitarianism, rather, we are living in a universe that has a start, middle and end. The end is where English is established through out the world, and people are turning Christianity in some vast numbers before the end of the world.

When Jesus commanded His Church to teach all nations, that included teaching them Bible words, it actually ultimately includes the teaching of English and the KJB.

Investigating, learning and understanding Bible words is a good thing. We also have helpful resources like W. Aldis Wright’s Bible Word-Book and the Oxford English Dictionary. But remember, man can be wrong or ignorant, but God is always right. Therefore, the KJB trumps the dictionary.

To stand for the precision of the KJB words is not to stand for something labelled by Bryan Ross as “verbatim identicality”. That concept is nonsense, since English is not the same as a Greek, and a printing of the KJB now is not the same as a printing in 1611. What we are seeing is a refining and clarifying position through time, after all, people in the past did not conceive how right the KJB actually is. Now that English is global, stable and computer-utilised, it follows that the Scripture has been able to come into its final fixedness.

FURTHER STUDY

Words are important: Isaiah 55, Proverbs 30:5, 6, Luke 4:4

Words are exact: Titus 1:2, John 17:17, Luke 16:17

Teach the nations: Matthew 28:18-20, Prov. 1:23, Rom. 10:18

Editorial, General

Thinking about the entire KJBO debate/controversy

One side in the debate formulates its belief based on Scripture.

The other side does not. The other side formulates its belief based on Enlightenment philosophy.

So when it comes to interpreting the Scripture, one side is interpreting believingly. The other side is interpreting, again, under the influence of Enlightenment philosophy.

It could not be more clear: the King James Bible perfectionist argument is between two sides with very different belief systems.

In fact, we could go so far to suggest that these two belief systems are really a conflict over a view of how far God has an interventionist role in history as relating to the manifestation/presence of the Scripture.

Or to put it another way, how far God has provided a method of interpreting from Scripture how much He reveals in Scripture He has an interventionist role in regards to supplying the same Scripture.

Editorial, Review

Mark Ward: wannabe academic and wasted efforts

King James Bible anti-perfectionist, Mark Ward, has put a lot of effort into trying to argue that it is getting to difficult too understand the King James Bible.

He is trying to create a profile for himself with some books and materials which try to identify words that might be wrongly understood in the KJB.

What Ward did not do is approach the area like he wanted to actually help people. Instead, he approached the area like as if he was being funded by certain sources, with the intent of extending markets of sales. That is, the attempt to break people from solely relying on the KJB and an attempt to sell more people more Bible study “resources” in line with that view.

Further, Ward has been approaching his work not in a “ministry” sense (i.e. to serve the other without being a burden) but in a marketing sense, creating lines of revenue to sustain himself.

I believe in prosperity doctrine, so I am all for ministries giving and receiving. Maybe Mark Ward could learn a thing from Kenneth Copeland and put out his own Reference Study Bible, King James Version, Pure Cambridge Edition. (After all, Copeland himself put out the PCE several times, so his really was a ministry of excellence!)

In Mark Ward’s crusade against certain words in the KJB, he surprisingly didn’t highlight some very significant resources, like W. Aldis Wright’s Bible word-book.

If he’d used that book, and its preceding incarnation, he would have seen what mid-19th century people called “archaic” in the KJB. He would have noticed that the same words that get attacked today were already listed and defined there.

When we hear Mark Ward speak, then, we are not hearing a dispassionate, fair and impartial treatment of the subject. No, we are hearing a propagandist. Ward’s background and interests are much more around visual communication and public relations than about teaching and edifying the dumb lambs of the Body of Christ.

Besides his self-promotion, he has a very clear agenda, and it is about product sales and trying to infect King James Bibles users with modernist thinking.

So there’s no need to buy Mark Ward’s books when plenty of superior information is freely available:

https://archive.org/details/biblewordbookag00eastgoog

https://archive.org/details/biblewordbookag01eastgoog

https://archive.org/details/thebiblewordbook00wriguoft

https://archive.org/details/biblewordbookglo00wrig

https://archive.org/details/biblewordbookglo00wrigiala

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, the men of old were men of renown.

Isn’t it funny that the same words which are said to be “archaic” or difficult or whatever then are the same today… maybe we are reading Biblical English after all, and not “1611 English”. I’d go so far to say that these same words would be ones ploughboys in 1611 would have struggled with.

Editorial, General, Review

An answer to Bryan Ross’ view on Psalm 12 and marginal notes

Bryan Ross is a good man, a believer and he does believe that Psalm 12 is about the preservation of Scripture … but does not see the psalm as specifically prophetic, only generally prophetic. Thus, he does not see that the psalm would have something about the KJB in particular, but takes it about the Scripture in history in general.

Bryan Ross says, “Many King James advocates hold either explicitly or implicitly that Psalm 12:6-7 is referring to the KJB. In other words, they have in their thinking the notion that David is speaking directly about the KJB in this passage.”

Actually, the Holy Ghost is speaking about the KJB, David obviously didn’t know about the KJB.

Ross then goes on to talk about, “The expression ‘as silver tried in a furnace of earth purified seven times’ at the end of verse 6 is taken to be a direct reference to the KJB. This argument is made because the KJB is the seventh translation of the Textus Receptus into the English.”

The correct phrasing is that there are seven major Protestant iterations of Bible translations in English from Tyndale to the KJB. The KJB is the seventh. Even Richard Bancroft, in instructing the KJB translators, told them to look at these six Bible translations.

Ross says, “This assertion is based upon the numerical argument that seven is the number of perfection coupled with King James having been the seventh translation of the TR into English; therefore, it is argued that the King James is ‘perfect.’”

Actually, the reasoning is based upon the fact that the Bible prophecy says seven times, and there are seven major Protestant translations from Tyndale to the KJB.

Ross then suggests that the passage might “necessitate a sevenfold refinement process in any receptor language in order for God’s ‘perfect’ word to exist in that language.”

This does not make sense, since God’s words are perfect, and the process prophesied of in Psalm 12 is about English translation, not about Scripture itself becoming more perfect.

Ross then turns to the modernist view, which says that the words are pure, not that they go through any process. This of course makes no sense since the Scripture is passing through the Earth, and even Ross says the passage is about preservation, so preservation must be a process not merely a state of being.

Ross bizarrely can see nothing of the Holy Ghost as he regards the Psalm being written by someone who did not have “an early 17th century English translation in mind. Rather David is referring to the ‘words’ he is the process of writing in Hebrew.”

Ross then is dangerously locking himself into the modernist mentality, as if Scripture is human, limited to the human mind of its author, and most dangerously, the modernist hermeneutic that Scripture was only for the time it was written in.

Does Ross believe the same thing about Messianic prophecies in Psalms or Isaiah? No, I am sure he believes them. Suddenly he recognises the Holy Ghost being able to know the future, but when it comes to Psalm 12, poor David is only limited to his own mind?! Surely the Holy Ghost is looking ahead to the KJB, and is showing where the process of preservation would lead.

While Ross does understand that David wrote Hebrew and these words went into English, he does not allow the prophecy to be able to talk about the KJB, which is very much how the modernists also think.

Ross also discusses the margin notes in general and in relation to this psalm.

Ross argues that marginal notes are “alternatives” and are often essentially synonymous to the main rendering. This is a wrong approach, in that they are clearly variant, as close as they might be. Ross tries to argue that the textual variants (approx. 20) are mainly saying something synonymous. This approach does not stay with the clarity and certainty of the textual readings of the KJB, but allows ambiguity rather than textual resolution rule. Pastor Ross is doing exactly what the modernists do, in that they think the margins/centre columns are glorifications of uncertainty rather than resolutions on rejected variants.

When it comes to the variant translation in Psalm 12:7, and there are hundreds of these throughout the KJB, and the KJB translators were noting what was a more literal rendering of the Hebrew, but where the sense was to be given as they have it as their main rendering, not the margin.

Marginal material, particularly the “Or” type notes, came from disagreements among the translators, and drawing upon other sources, e.g. other translators, commentators, Fathers, etc. Whatever the majority of the committee(s) decided as the preferable rendering stood as the main text, while the less supported one (i.e. rejected) was put to the margin. In this way, we do not read the KJB margins as any way viable alternatives or as valid possibilities, etc., but as words, which after over 400 years of KJB use, are to be considered as permanently rejected.

Unfortunately Bryan Ross has a non-exactist or non-precisionist view of the KJB words, and seems to give more current and future credibility to other words that are not actually the main text of the KJB than what should be given to them.