Why do some believe that the KJV Bible is the only Bible?

[benaiah]

There no hard feelings. You can express your opinions. But be warned when you do quote those that have a known “Militant Anti-Catholic” stand, you will encounter comments like mine. Especially more so if they come from someone associated with Jack Chick.

Continue to enjoy.

And God Bless and Go live the Gospel

Hello Joey Warren,
No offence taken. I must add though, that up until the late 50’s and early 60’s (pre-Vatican II), most fundamental Baptist & Protestant thought was somewhat anti-Catholic in a lot of ways. I feel it has improved since then considerably, but still alot of the books exist (especially from the 18th & 19th century) that would be considered by Catholics as Anti-Catholic in tone, regardless, they still have value for research when it comes to manuscript evidence and textual criticism.
God Bless,
Benaiah

 

[chrisb]

Grace and Peace flameburns623,

Great post! God Bless!

Frankly I love the KJV and I read it often.

Peace and God Bless.

 

[Sufi]

Gimme a break!

Ok I will because you certainly need manners:

**Hadith - Bukhari’s Book of Manners # 296, Muslim, Tirmidhi, Darimi, Abu 'Awanah, Hakim, and Ibn Hibban.

… Nawas ibn Sam’an reported that the Prophet of Allah, saaws, was asked about doing good and evil. He replied, “Doing good is having good manners. Doing evil is what troubles you inside and what you would not like others to know about.”

Hadith - Bukhari’s Book of Manners #360, Abu Dawud, Tirmidhi, and Hakim

The Prophet of Allah, saaws, said, “He who does not show mercy to our young or show esteem for our elders is not one of us.” **

**Hadith - Bukhari’s Book of Manners #286 and Ahmad

Abu Huraira, r.a., said, "I heard Abu al Qasim (the Prophet saaws), say, ‘The best among you in Islam are those with the best manners, so long as they develop a sense of understanding.’** "

When you develop a sense of understanding. Then reply to my posts. Until then, have a nice day.

 

[Sufi]

kellie:

Hmmmm, I’m not sure if this is a sarcastic comment thrown at the Christians on here or not.

But after your comments to exoflare I would hope not, so I will answer you.

Over time, the different breakaways of Christians translated their own Bibles, as they don’t think the Apocrypha should be included, and many other reasons such as Greek/Hebrew translations.

Who gave who authority to do the translations? Were these people knowledgable enough to translate it? Who were these translators and what were their qualifications?

As can be seen in this thread, the KJV did include the Apocrypha at one stage, then it didn’t.

I know this. I’ve asked countless times who deleted it and who gave the authority to deleate these 13 books out of the Bible, and why was it deleted?

Joey asked where he can get a copy of these old bibles.

NOT to be taken that sacred Scripture is re-newed as you put it.

As you should know, Christians don’t re-new Scripture

No I don’t know. I’ve read 3 English translations of the Bible and verse have been deleted as well as verses have been added.

 

[Sufi]

Although Jack Chick and I do agree on one thing. The NIV is a work of Satan.

Whole verses taken out and relegated to a footnote.

That’s like cutting out a piece of God and throwing it on the ground IMHO.

This is what happens when non authorized and un qualified people translates something.

 

[JoeyWarren]

Hello Joey Warren,
No offence taken. I must add though, that up until the late 50’s and early 60’s (pre-Vatican II), most fundamental Baptist & Protestant thought was somewhat anti-Catholic in a lot of ways. I feel it has improved since then considerably, but still alot of the books exist (especially from the 18th & 19th century) that would be considered by Catholics as Anti-Catholic in tone, regardless, they still have value for research when it comes to manuscript evidence and textual criticism.
God Bless,
Benaiah

I can agree with that.

 

[chrisb]

Although Jack Chick and I do agree on one thing. The NIV is a work of Satan.

Whole verses taken out and relegated to a footnote.

That’s like cutting out a piece of God and throwing it on the ground IMHO.

Be aware Joey but even the NAB share this novel approach to Historic/Critical Translation as the NIV. Is it from the ‘same’ author?

Thanks.

 

[jonfan]

Apparently Erasmus whose intepertationt he KJV was based on did not believe in the sacraments.

Although Erasmus remained a Roman Catholic throughout his lifetime, he harshly criticised what he considered excesses of the Roman Catholic Church and even turned down a Cardinalship when it was offered to him.

In his Treatise on Preparation For Death he made clear his position, that faith in the atonement of Christ, and not in the sacraments and rituals of the church, is the only guarantee of eternal life.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus

 

[JoeyWarren]

Be aware Joey but even the NAB share this novel approach to Historic/Critical Translation as the NIV. Is it from the ‘same’ author?

Thanks.

How about rephrasing that so I know what you are saying?

 

[jonfan]

Apparently Erasmus whose intepertation the KJV was based on did not believe in the sacraments.

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

• Some people wrap themselves in the Stars & Stripes
• Sometimes Evangelicals emphasise their Protestantism by being belligerently anti-Catholic when the surrounding culture is at least nominally Catholic
• Sometimes Catholics emphasise their Catholicism by being belligerently anti-Protestant when the surrounding culture is at least nominally Protestant.
  It does not necessarily follow that those who are emphasising their identity are themselves at all devout - indulgences, or salvation by faith alone, can both perfectly well be vigorously affirmed because to affirm them is a challenge to the surrounding majority culture: IOW, it is possible to use religious affirmations as a weapon with which to clobber “the other lot” who are in the majority culture.

There is no reason why the Bible, or one of its versions, can’t be used in this way, in which it serves as a tribal totem around which the minority can gather. It then acts as

• a symbol of the solidarity of the tribe
• a means of defining who is in the tribe & who is not
• a means, therefore, of avoiding being tainted by the “outsiders” (which may be why KJV-onlyites have proved to be divisive & very unfriendly to other Christians; not that tjhey have any monopoly on these traits)
• a means of reinforcing the identity of the group in an environment which is not friendly to them.
• some people want certainty & can’t easily get by without it - the AV/KJV gives [the illusion of providing] the certainty of being the the one absolutely changeless, therefore trustworthy & unfailing, source of reference in religion.
  Why is the AV/KJV in particular used for these purposes ? Several reasons. In a culture which is Protestant Fundamentalist, it serves as “the Bible”, & therefore, it provides several of the functions of the Bible in Fundamentalist Protestantism. In FPism, the Bible is a single entity which functions in many ways; in Catholicism, the Bible is one of many entities, each with its own function. So the Bible in FPism tends to act as Bible, Liturgy, Sacraments, sacramentals, teaching authority, all wrapped up in one.

…continue…]

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

…continued & ended]

The AV/KJV has this function of being “the Bible” in English-speaking FPism to a unique degree & in a unique sense partly for the reasons give above, which are common to FPism generally, & also because

• it is easy to think of it as being “the Bible” -
• it has a long tradition behind it, of very nearly 400 years;
• so it is “tried & tested”.
• It is aesthetically superior to most or all other English Bibles - it looks like like what it is said to be: sacred, deserving reverence, & so forth.
• Many Bibles look like a Norman Mailer blockbuster - they don’t look “holy” at all.
• It is one of the very few Reformation-era Bibles still in use in English-speaking Christianity, & that makes it a connection to the past in much the same way as Apostolic succession is a connection with the past for many Catholics.
• Catholic apologetic makes use of the “argument from prescription” - the same sort of argument emerges in KJV-onlyite objections to translations any later than the AV/KJV.
• FPism is a very tradition-minded form of religion - the AV/KJV is part of that tradition, & a living & powerful one.
• Other versions are shown to be wrong by their very variety, they are a Babel of disagreement & blasphemy. The AV/KJV can be proved from the Bible to be God’s unique infallible preserved God-blessed Bible.
• Other versions cut out bits of God’s Word
• The Bible = the AV/KJV, so no other version can be the Bible; so others must be from man or satan
• Later translations are difficult to accommodate to FP tradition; & I think there are several reasons for this:
  The AV/KJV was produced within a particular understanding
• of what the Bible was
• of what “the truth of the Bible” was
• of what the Biblical texts were saying

• this is true of all translations; translators are people of their time, inevitably. In 1611

• the OT was understood as a book written in the oldest language, Hebrew
• the Bible was treated as giving a consecutive history of the world from its creation 6000 years ago in just under a week to the year 96 AD
• the OT was the sole authoritative source for ancient history
• the books were taken to be written by the persons to whom Jewish or Christian tradition ascribed them
• prophecy was understood as purely predictive, & predictive of Christ in particular
• & so on…
  No scholar would hold any of these positions today - they fit with FPism of the KJV-onlyite type, but not with the Biblical background as rediscovered over the last 150 years.

The point about prophecy is especially important - if Ezekiel 38, when it mentions Meshech & Tubal, is talking about Mushki & Tabal, tribes known from Assyrian inscriptions, it is that bit harder to see Ezekiel 38 as a prophecy about Moscow & Tobolsk & the power-politics of the USSR or the CIS.

And if there is no reference in that chapter to Russia’s politics, it cannot be used for drawing up schemes of “end-time prophecy”. The AV/KJV is much easier to use for such schemes than more recent versions - the people who made them knew too much about the Bible to use it for purposes its contents don’t allow. When the AV/KJV was made, the ancient Near East & its ways was sufficiently unknown for the Bible to be used as it was never meant to be. KJV-onlyites seem not to bother with scholarship much - there are Fundamentalists who are very well informed about the Biblical background; but KJV-onlyites seem to restrict themelves to English-language books.

There are textual scholars of the NT who regard the Byzantine text which (more or less) underlies the 1611 NT as preferable to others, but they are not themselves operating as Fundamentalists, let alone KJV-onlyites - the solutions are compatible with KJV-onlyism; the methods are not.

IMO the real clue to KJV-onlyism is that it is Fundamentalist, & often Dispensationalist. ##

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Although Jack Chick and I do agree on one thing. The NIV is a work of Satan.

Whole verses taken out and relegated to a footnote.

That’s like cutting out a piece of God and throwing it on the ground IMHO.

The text of the Biblical books is as as prone to corruption as that of Homer or any other of the Classics. That is the problem with having human beings copy texts.​

There is in principle no different between the textual critic of the Odyssey who is aware of the doubts of Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BCabout lines 601-604 of Book 11 of the Odyssey; & the textual critic of John’s gospel who notices that some authorities for the text of the gospel put 7.53-8.11 after Luke 21.38, some omit the entire episode, & that some include it as part of the text of John.

The same applies to Mark 16:

• some witnesses to the text give all 20 verses (the “Longer Ending”)
• many give only the first eight
• some insert an appearance of the Risen Christ between verses 14 & 15 of the “Longer Ending”
• Another ending takes the form of an appearance of the Risen Christ after verse 8, without the “Longer ending”
  The textual variations in the Vulgate are less well-known, but they are no less real. And whatever the difficulties that textual variation may make - but how much is that, to anyone who is not an “[version name]-onlyite” ? - to the ordinary Christian, they can’t be ignored. To deal with them honestly is the only proper course, even if they are not put in the margin or at the foot of the page. The men of 1611 put the variant readings or meanings in the margin - it was one of their criticisms of the 1592 Vulgate that no variants were included.

What is “cut out”, is cut out precisely because it is considered not to belong to the text in the first place. There is a difficulty - what is meant by “belonging to the text” ?

For example - if a passage was added to the text when the text had not yet been stabilised, but existed in more than one form; or if the canonised text existed in more than one form, by being extant in two different languages reflecting different forms of text; what does it mean to say “this passage belongs to the text” ? There are readings in the Septuagint which reflect a form of the OT earlier than the Masoretic Text; quite apart from variations in the order of parts of books. So the definition of “what belongs to the text”, depends on the meaning of the question.

I am very fond of the AV - it mediates the Word of God adequately for general religious purposes: it functions as Scripture perfectly well on the whole, just like any other version. It is primarily the Spirit of God Who makes it effective in the life & personality of the reader, not the written text; so its deficiencies are in no way fatal to its being made fruitful by God; and the same applies to any other version. What would be superstitious, would be to suppose that God is chained to any one verbal formula - as though prayers not in Latin or not in 16th-century English, must necessarily be invalid; as though the Spirit of God were unable to understand anything not decked out in “to-uswards”, “forasmuches”, & “yea verilies”.

KJV-onlyites & “traditional” Catholics have a lot in common. It’s fascinating to see how much. ##

 

[lak611]

I am a Catholic, but I own a KJV Bible. I also own the NRSV, NAB, NASB, and Douay-Rheims. I use all of these translations in my Bible study classes at my parish (Catholic).

What was interesting was once I was in a coffee shop doing my Bible study homework. We were stludy the infancy narratives (during the Advent and Christmas season). A man saw that I had Bibles and then said that he knew that there was nothing in the Bible that proved that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Christ. I then read him the appropriate verses in Matthew and Luke from the NAB. He said that what I read to him was not scripture. Then I got my KJV and read the same verses to him. He said that he was mistaken; the Bible really did prove the virgin birth! Sadly, this man was supposedly a Catholic, baptized, confirmed, went to Catholic school as a kid. Hopefully, I got him to think since I showed him the truth from the Bible. He believed the KJV, since the “thees, thous, and thys” are in it. I didn’t have my Douay-Rheims version with me that day, but he probably would have believed that one too, since it also has the “thees, thous, and thys”.

 

[Chris_LaRock]

a group of “street corner evangelists” from Bob Jones University came to our university in Chattanooga, TN and started preaching to the STUDENTS that hey were going to hell if they did not believe KJV only. It was a pretty good indication to me that the KJV only folks had crossed that blurry line into cult.

I like the KJV too, but this stance is just heritical! The Apostles didn’t have the KJV, and I doubt very much they went to hell!

Funny, yet sad at the same time that some people make idols of the bible when they should be worshipping the one who inspired it.

I personally like studying various translations. It’s a hobby of mine to take in knowledge of the different renderings.

2Timothy 3:16: All scripture, inspired of God, is profitable to teach, to reprove, to correct, to instruct in justice:

 

[lak611]

I like the KJV too, but this stance is just heritical! The Apostles didn’t have the KJV, and I doubt very much they went to hell!

Funny, yet sad at the same time that some people make idols of the bible when they should be worshipping the one who inspired it.

I personally like studying various translations. It’s a hobby of mine to take in knowledge of the different renderings.

2Timothy 3:16: All scripture, inspired of God, is profitable to teach, to reprove, to correct, to instruct in justice:

I like a lot of Bible translations. My favourites are the Douay-Rheims, KJV, NASB, RSV, NRSV, NASB, and NAB. I use all of them for my Bible study class at my church (Catholic). Currently, we are studying Romans and Galatians. I have already done studies on Revelation, Acts, Wisdom, Psalms, the Gospel of John and the Johnanine epistles, the Infancy narratives, the Passion and Resurrection narratives, the Gospel of Matthew, Genesis, and the minor prophets. :bible1:

 

[Chris_LaRock]

I feel that many of the modern bibles dumb down the text too much in an attempt to modernize it. As a result, we get watered down over simplified bible translations that cause the scriptures to lose thier impact. For example:

Romans 3:23

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; (KJV)

Everyone has sinned and is far away from God’s saving presence. (GNT)

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

I like the KJV too, but this stance is just heritical! The Apostles didn’t have the KJV, and I doubt very much they went to hell!

Funny, yet sad at the same time that some people make idols of the bible when they should be worshipping the one who inspired it.

I personally like studying various translations. It’s a hobby of mine to take in knowledge of the different renderings.

2Timothy 3:16: All scripture, inspired of God, is profitable to teach, to reprove, to correct, to instruct in justice:

I much prefer AV “righteousness” to the Vulgate “iustitia”, which comes in turn from Tertullian & possibly from the Old Latin version(s).​

“Justice”, which translates Vulgate “iustitia”, sounds too much like just dealing between men - rather than the righteousness with which God is Himself righteous; that is, the righteousness which is a defining element of His character. He is not simply holy; all gods are that - He is holy by way of being righteous; He cannot not be righteous. ##

 

[Vidi_Aquam]

The short and simple answer is… because they are idiots !!!

Amen.

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Presbyterians of those days were staunch Anti-Catholics and believed the RCC is the Whore of Babylon and that the Pope is the Anti-Christ.

I did check them out:

Will Durant : He eventually became Presbyterian also after discovering Darwin, be came a a Socialist.
willdurant.com/bio.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Durant

Does that stop him being a decent historian ?​

J.A. Froude was also an known anti-Catholic. He started out as Anglican, but migrated as well to the Presbyterism. He studied at Westminster.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Froude
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._A._Froude

Presbyterianism is the word you want. He wasn’t very keen on Catholicism, but why should he or anyone else have to be ?​

Quote from :newmanreader.org/biography/jafroude.html

Roland Bainton: An Old School Lutheran. Another known anti-catholic:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Bainton

Owen Chadwick: Old School Church of England. He wrote many books on the Papacy (some of them attacking it ).
Another anti-Catholic:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Chadwick

He can’t have been that anti-Catholic, as he had an excellent opportunity to show his supposed anti-Catholicism in his two-volume account of “The Victorian Church”. He fails to show it.​

James Hastings : A Scottish Presbyterian Minister. A Kirk!

A kirk is a church - how can a minister be that ? ISTM your sources, whatever they may be, are showing the very bias they complain of in non-Catholics. Just like those Muslims who were violent in protesting against being called violent.​

Probably a supporter for slaughtering Catholics in Scotland who would not give their faith.

In the early 1900s ? I don’t think so. To accuse someone of advocating murder without offering a scrap of evidence for such a charge is immoral We would not much like it if a non-Catholic said that about our clergy. #​

The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge : The Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge is a 1914 religious encyclopedia, published in thirteen volumes. It focuses on Christianity from a primarily Protestant point of view. NUFF SAID!

Of course its authors had their points of view - every one has. But most people make an effort to control their biasses. What matters is the quality of the scholarship that went into the Encyclopedia - not its Protestantism, not whether Catholics like what is said, not its conclusions; which are, after all, the conclusions in articles written by a great number of different authors. None of what you say convicts any of the authors of any error - save that of not being Catholic. but that is not an error at all.​

Being Protestant does not automatically disable one from understanding Catholicism, nor vice versa - this is why sympathetic insight is so necessary. ##

Schaff was Swiss born and German bred and schooled (Old School Lutheran ) and Herzog was born and schooled in Germany (Old School Lutheran)

NONE OF THESE SOURCES ARE UNBIASED.

Neither are Catholic sources of that date, or for long after. Or even now, at times. Chadwick OTOH is about as fair-minded as one could possibly ask for - to call him anti-Catholic is grotesque.​

Is there something inherently wrong about German historical or theological education in the 1800s ? If so, then the Catholics of Germany were equally handicapped, for they too were German ##

MOST ARE KNOWN ANTI-CATHOLICS OR AT LEAST ARE “PROTESTANT EXTREMISTS”.

That’s easy to say, but not so easy to prove. Please prove it. If they are critical of the Church, that doesn’t prove they are anti-Catholic - the Church often acts in a way which invites criticism. History is too untidy to lend itself to easy & straighforward divisions between Catholics (good) & Protestants (bad): life is not neatly arranged in that way; it’s messy and complex. Any historical writing which presents one group as good & all others as bad, is propaganda, not history; nor is it Christian.​

And how are any of the above “anti-Catholic” ? Or “extreme” ? ##