(Friday Church News Notes, September 12, 2025, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org

We are convinced that the King James Bible is still the peerless English Bible. I am convinced that nothing can take its place, and it is essential to keep the “one Bible standard” in the churches. 

The King James Bible is God’s gift to the English-speaking people. It is the product of more than 200 years of godly labor and scholarship (e.g., Wycliffe, Tyndale, Geneva, KJV). It is the product of an unparalleled committee of some 50 biblical scholars who produced a true masterpiece. It is based on the preserved Hebrew and Greek texts. It was translated in an era of faith. In contrast, any Bible translated today is tainted by the climate of apostasy. Even “evangelical” Bible scholars are highly tainted. 

The King James Bible has been acclaimed as the apex of the English language. For example, Dr. Leland Ryken, professor emeritus of English at Wheaton College, highly praised the beauty, dignity, and power of the KJV. In his 2002 book The Word of God in English: Criteria for Excellence in Bible Translation, Rykencalled the KJV a “peerless literary masterpiece” (p. 270), “unquestionably the most beautiful book in the world” (p. 267), “the noblest monument of English prose” (p. 258), and “matchless in its literary qualities among all English translations” (p. 188). There are only about 200 words in the KJV that are so antiquated as to require a dictionary. While Shakespeare used a vocabulary of roughly 21,000 English words, the vocabulary of the King James Bible is composed of only 6,000. The individual words tend to be short and simple. The words of the KJV average 1.3 syllables and 4 letters (D.A. Waite, Jr., The Comparative Readability of the Authorized Version).

 In fact, the slight antiquation of the KJV can be seen as an advantage. Edward F. Hills, Ph.D. in textual criticism from Harvard, observed, “The language of the Bible should be venerable as well as intelligible, and the King James Version fulfills these two requirements better than any other Bible in English” (The King James Version Defended, p. 219). As for “thee” and “thou,” this language is necessary to distinguish between the singular and plural second person pronoun (thee, thou, thy, thine – ye, you, yours). The Hebrew and Greek have this distinction, but it is lost in modern English and in the modern English versions, including the NKJV. Pronouns beginning with “t” are singular (thee, thou, thy, thine), and those beginning with “y” are plural (ye, you, yours). The King James translators did not adopt thee, thou, thy, thine because these were common to their day, but because they wanted to faithfully translate the original Scripture into English. Consider, for example John 3:7: “Marvel not that I said unto THEE, YE must be born again.” Because of the KJV’s accurate translation of pronouns, we see immediately that this was spoken to the individual (THEE), Nicodemus, but it encompasses all men (YE). 

We don’t need a new Bible, but we certainly need to pay much better attention to the Old One. Every member of a New Testament church is to be a serious Bible student, and every church should pursue a path to make this happen. See Deuteronomy 6:6-9; Psalm 1:1-3; 119:9, 15, 16, 24, 31, 36, 45, 54, 72, 81, 92, 97, 99, 103, 105, 111, 113, 117, 127, 131, 140, 143, 147, 148, 163; Matthew 28:20; Acts 2:42; 17:11; Ephesians 4:11-16; 2 Timothy 2:15; 3:15-17; Hebrews 5:11-14.