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.