King James Onlyism

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heisenburg

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To those that believe in KJO, and I know there is at least one on here. What exactly do you mean? I will give you my understanding, please correct me if I am misrepresenting KJO.

My Understanding is that…
  1. The only valid bible is the King James.
  2. ALL other versions of the bible are faulty at best
  3. The King James Version was divinely guided when translated.
  4. (heard of this bumper sticker) If it aint the KJV it Aint the bible!
Problems…
  1. How can KJ be the only valid bible? Are there no valid French? Spanish? German? Chinese… etc Bibles? r does it jsut mean that it is the only version valid for english
  2. Where did the idea of KJO come from. Not even the original translators preached this.
  3. Which version of the KJV? The Original still contained the Deuterocannonical (sp). Or is it the Adulterers bible? Or is it just the Version we have today (keep in mind, I understand that all versions of the bible have had ‘printing press issues’ and thus, mistakes were made, but corrected)
  4. Why is it that Historians trace the history of KJO only back to 1881.
The origins of the King-James-Only Movement can be traced back to the publication of the Revised Version (RV) in 1881.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King-James-Only_Movement
(i know wiki isn’t the greatest reference point, but it is still a valid complaint)
5) Most importantly… What about the people prior to 1611?

Anyway… If I am misrepresenting your belief, please correct me. If I am not misrepresenting your understanding, please, help me understand why you feel KJV is the only valid bible…

In Christ
 
I got to work and…well obviously started surfing the net…but will get to your questions when I can.
 
heisenburg said:
To those that believe in KJO, and I know there is at least one on here. What exactly do you mean? I will give you my understanding, please correct me if I am misrepresenting KJO.

My Understanding is that…
  1. The only valid bible is the King James.
  2. ALL other versions of the bible are faulty at best
  3. The King James Version was divinely guided when translated.
  4. (heard of this bumper sticker) If it aint the KJV it Aint the bible!
Problems…
  1. How can KJ be the only valid bible? Are there no valid French? Spanish? German? Chinese… etc Bibles? r does it jsut mean that it is the only version valid for english
Click to expand...
I don’t know about Chinese but for German you have the Luther Bible; for French, the Louis Segond; for Spanish, the Reina Valera. Each of these is , in to own language what the KJV is to English. I have no idea if there’s such a thing as Louis Segond-onlyism or Luther-onlyism, &c.

Btw, I know it’s a stereotype, but I have met fundies thought the KJV contained the actual words of Jesus. When the movie Godspell came out a friend refused to see it because he thought the title was blasphemous. I told him “godspell” was just an Old English word for gospel & he said “That can’t be right, Jesus uses the word ‘gospel’ in the Bible.” KJV, of course.
 
Off Topic, but one of the ladies leading my RCIA worked in a copying place and she did spellchecking. A protestant pastor came in and she checked over a pamphlet for him and said “Well, it’s all ok except here where you spelled honor with a ‘u’, that’s the old English way of spelling it.”

“He pulled himself up real big and indignant like,” she said, “and spouted off, ‘Young lady! If it was good enough for the Lord Jesus Christ it is good enough for me!’”

She opened her mouth but her boss tapped her back and handed the man the pamphlet back. “Not worth it,” her boss said after the pastor had left.

Still cracks me up! Sorry about the off topicness.
 
King James is a horrible translation. It is a translation of the Latin translation of the Bible, and is written in high-Shakspearian English. Thus, it was not clearly understandable at the time by most literate people at the time.

The King James onlyism is because the King James Bible was translated by the King of England who said it would be the official Bible for his country.

Thus, if you believe that the King of England is infallibily correct, that is the translation for you.
 
The pretty darn fundamental Southern Baptist Church I grew up in must have gotten over its KJO hang-up b/c I can remember helping my mother pass out ***Good News America, God Loves You!, ***an RSV new testament back in the 1980’s…I’d truthfully never heard of KJO until I came on here and converted, lol.😃
 
I have not posted, nor was I planning on posting, KJO rational on this website. I would expect you can understand the reasons. It is not a Roman Catholic issue. It is not your argument or debate but instead one that has been relegated to the most conservative of Christians. When one realizes that Bob Jones University is the liberal in this battle, you can understand why I would say that.
That people who have weighed in on this thread are uninformed about a KJO is not surprising. Like Catholic in Name Only (CINO) are ill informed about their own Catechism, so too are many KJO supporters lacking in their defense of this issues.
Now to answer your questions;
KJO advocates believe in the providential preservation of the Scriptures. Essentially that that down through the centuries God has exercised a special, providential control over the copying of the Scriptures and the preservation and use of the copies, so that trustworthy representatives of the original text have been available to God’s people in every age.
The doctrine of preservation is biblical:
Psa 12:6 The words of the LORD [are] pure words: [as] silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.
Psa 12:7 Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.
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As far as the question of other languages, I will quote Dr. Thomas Holland:
In time, if God so wills, He may preserve another translation and bless it as He has the Authorized Version (however, with the nearness of the hour it seems rather doubtful). After all, it is God’s book and He is permitted to do whatever He wishes with it in whatever language He chooses. As for the second part of the question dealing with other languages, again the Lord most certainly can do so. In fact, He very well may have. I will not limit God, as textual scholars have done, in saying He is unable to provide for us or anyone His perfectly preserved words. I will say that if God does so, He will bear testimony to such even as He has done with the King James Bible.
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I can only tell you there are many Spanish and Korean brothers in Christ who DO feel like they have perfectly perserved the scriptures in their own languages. I do not know too much about that topic even though I should. I would have to email some of them to get the exact names and specifics, and can do so if someone would be interested.
As far as the Apocrypha, we do not reject it, we simply do not feel it is inspired. It was included in Bible’s of the times with various notes and such as to its place in the canon. I hope you understand how general I have to be about topics that could take days to respond in full! It is not the belief of most KJO advocates that the translators were aware they were perfectly preserving the Bible. In fact, quite the opposite. The authors of the original manuscripts themselves were not aware they were writing the infallible word of God!
As far as when KJO became an issue, it became an issue when the church attempted to use a flawed translation. Similiar to the Roman Catholic contention that your Pope has been infallible for all time when acting in the manner, the word slips me, prior to Vatican I, we likewise contend the KJ Bible was preserved perfectly since 1611.
I have run out of time.
 
Hi Heisenberg,

Don’t laugh too loud at King James onlyism. There is a growing number of of Douay onlyists among Catholic “traditionalists”.

On the subject of some Protestants’ perception of the Bible, several decades ago, there was a government commission in Canada on the subject of bilingualism. When the commission went to Western Canada, one old farmer stood up and said,“I don’t see why these people insist so much on speaking French. After all the Bible was written in English.”

Of course that was years ago… 😉 And I suspect that some Catholics think the Bible was written in Latin.🙂

Verbum
 
Well, I really wasn’t laughing at it… I don’t agree with it, but knew I was not too knowledgeable on the subject. When I saw that Rightly was a KJO, I wanted to take the chance to get more information. Not to laugh at, but understand.

Anyway… Rightly, if you have any good links I can research on it, i would be appreciative. Again, it is not my intention to mock that belief. I am just genuinely curious where the belief came from and how it overcomes some obvious (at least to me)problems.

Thanks for the info you have provided thus far

In Christ
 
If the KJO advocates believe in the providential preservation of the Scriptures, I suppose that they also believe that God acted through the Catholic monasteries and monks during those centuries in which they copied the bible by hand.
 
heisenburg said:
My Understanding is that…
  1. The only valid bible is the King James.
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The only valid bible can be found online at scripture4all.org/.
The OT was original written in hebrew. The NT was written in greek.
heisenburg said:
  1. ALL other versions of the bible are faulty at best
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ALL English versions are faulty!
heisenburg said:
  1. The King James Version was divinely guided when translated.
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Absolutely, not!
heisenburg said:
  1. (heard of this bumper sticker) If it aint the KJV it Aint the bible!
Click to expand...
The person behind the wheel of the vehicle is an idiot!
 
Pierre_Marie said:
Uh, it was.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_Vulgate
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**Quoted from your citation: “The Vulgate Bible is an early 5th century version in Latin, partly revised and partly translated by Jerome on the orders of Pope Damasus I in 382.”

Before the Vulgate, the original texts were written in Koine Greek by various authors after c. 45 AD and before c. 140 AD. Its books were gradually collected into a single volume over a period of several centuries.**
 
tabcom said:
Before the Vulgate, the original texts were written in Koine Greek by various authors after c. 45 AD and before c. 140 AD. Its books were gradually collected into a single volume over a period of several centuries.
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Yeah, and that single volume is what we call “the Bible”, and was in the Latin language. There never was any “single volume” before the various books were translated, and put together, all in the Latin language. There never was a “Bible” in Koine Greek, Aramaic, etc. before it was ALL in Latin.
 
Pierre_Marie said:
There never was any “single volume” before the various books were translated, and put together, all in the Latin language. There never was a “Bible” in Koine Greek, Aramaic, etc. before it was ALL in Latin.
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I’m having difficulty understanding what your point is? Are you saying that the Vulgate is the inspired word of God? Or that the Vulgate is the first compilation of the Books of the NT? Could you please explain?
 
tabcom said:
I’m having difficulty understanding what your point is? Are you saying that the Vulgate is the inspired word of God? Or that the Vulgate is the first compilation of the Books of the NT? Could you please explain?
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My apologies.

What I am saying is that “the Bible” first existed as a translation from various languages into Latin. Never before was any single language used for all the books in “the Bible”.

The inspired Word of God is what the Church tells us it is, that is, translations that meet the Church’s approval - and even then “the Bible” isn’t the “begin-all end-all” of the Faith.
 
Thank you Rightly…
It is a lot of material, but I will read through it before making any comments…

I will say this…

If some one says KJO because thats the one they like the best… I dont really have a problem with it. People like Differant bibles for diffeant reasons. Personally, My favorite overall is NRSV, though right now I’m reading NLT and NAB

My problem comes in when people say it is a devinely inspired translation that always exists… or that it trumpts all bibles of today in all languages, or even in jsut the english text.

Personally, my favorite Protestant bible is NIV.

As a comment though I can see why people may not like a ceartin type of bible… Personally, in my own personal studies, I’ve found a larger number of errors in the NLT. There are passages that were out right change in a thinnly vailed attempt to counter Catholic teaching.

Any bible regardless of Translator that modifies scripture to try and ‘make a point’ is nothing less than a false prophet/teacher and should be called what Paul and other Letter writers call them…

Antichrists…

Regardless… thank you for taking the time to research those links for me…

IN Christ
 
Yes, I desperately long for a NAB or RSV-CE Bible as helpful as my NIV Life Application Study Bible. It’s a wonderful book. It would benefit greatly from Catholic insight. I was briefly excited by an “Archaeological Bible” in Wal-Mart. But when I flipped to its discussion of the Deuterocanonicals…well…it wasn’t pretty.

Thanks everyone for the insights into KJ only-ism. Before everyone judges these folks to harsh, the King James is the only Bible made available to many protestants. It’s easy to understand how someone can be convinced on an emotional level that it is the only true, inspired Word of God. My first Bible was a cheap KJ version. When my mother finally bought me a NIV version when I was a bit older, I, too disliked the “modernism” in it. And I was only about 10 or 11 at the time!😃
 
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