Wanted: A Bible For The Twenty-First Century And The New Millennium

 

 

At the dawn of the twentieth century, an attempt to provide the world with a Bible translation in modern English was well underway. The Twentieth Century New Testament (no Old Testament was ever produced) was produced in England and released in three parts between 1898 and 1901. A revised one volume edition was issued in 1904.

The excuse for this version was that “English-speaking people of today have not, until quite recently, had the opportunity of reading the Bible in the English of their own time. Though in the course of the last hundred years the Bible has been translated into the vernacular of most countries, the language of our Bible remains the English of three hundred years ago.”

Although the Revised Version had just recently been published (1885), it was viewed as inadequate because it was not translated “into the language of our own time.” But although the translators of The Twentieth Century New Testament rejected the English of the Revised Version, they wholeheartly received its underlying Greek text.

Both the title page and the preface to The Twentieth Century New Testament state that the Westcott and Hort Greek text is the text from which this translation was made. Nothing ever became of this version, although Moody Press issued a reprint in 1961 that restored the traditional order of the biblical books which had been changed in the original edition.

The Twentieth Century New Testament was actually not the first new translation published at the beginning of the twentieth century—that honor goes to the American Standard Version (ASV) of 1901—but it was the first to capitalize on the fact that since a new century was dawning, what better thing could there be to do than issue a new English Bible translation.

Since the publication of the ASV and The Twentieth Century New Testament, new Bible translations have appeared throughout the twentieth century with reckless abandon: Weymouth, Moffatt, RSV, NRSV, NIV, NASB, Goodspeed, Moulton, Centenary, Concordant, Amplified, Jerusalem, Living, Berkeley, Phillips, Lamsa, New Scofield, New World, New American, NKJV, and many others. None of these versions will do, however, for what we need is a Bible, not only for the twenty-first century, but for the new millennium.

The last decade of the twentieth century produced a flood of new English versions. As the commencement of the new century and millennium drew closer, several new versions took advantage of this fact.

The International Standard Version claims to be “the all new English language Bible that will take you into the 21^st century.” The Holman Christian Standard Bible “is an all-new translation combining faithfulness to original texts with 21^st century English vocabulary and style.”

Another new version went a step further. The Twenty-first Century New Testament, by Vivian Capel of Bristol, England, is a literal/free dual translation “which enables a study of the literal meanings of the original text to be combined with a reading in modern English.”

The left-hand column on each page contains the literal translation while the right-hand column contains “a free translation in which the thought and ideas of the original are expressed without too much concern for the exact wording.”

The purpose of the literal translation is to “adhere to the original text as closely as possible, and in particular, to preserve the mood, tense, voice and intensity of verbal forms, as well as conveying shades of meaning of other words that are often lost.”

The free translation “provides an easy-to-read rendering which, while maintaining accuracy as far as possible, has not been inhibited by the fear of straying from the original form and wording.”

The words bless, blessing, grace, justify, righteous, righteousness, and sin have been banished as “theological expressions.” The word repentance is changed to “reform” or “change one’s ways.”

This translation is obviously the work of a Jehovah’s Witness. First, in John 1:1, Christ is merely “a god.” Second, there is an extended translator’s note on the Tetragrammon (commonly “LORD” in the AV but sometimes “Jehovah”) in which is explained that “the four letters YHVH have been included in square brackets in the literal translation as an alternative to ‘Lord’ in those quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures where the Name occurs.” And third, the American distributor of this version is Stoops Manufacturing Company of Aurora, Ohio, an outfit that sells books on Jehovah’s Witness doctrine and practice including books against blood transfusions and the Trinity.

The boldest attempt to capitalize on not only the new century and the new millennium, but on the King James Version itself, is The 21^st Century King James Version. This translation was first released in 1991 as a New Testament with Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. The whole Bible was published in 1994.

Then in 1998 the Apocrypha was added between the Old and New Testaments and the title changed to the Third Millennium Bible. Because the Third Millennium Bible adds the Apocrypha, it is even claimed that the KJV currently in use is “a somewhat shortened edition of the Authorized Version.”

This Bible claims to be “the direct successor” of the 1611 Authorized Version. Supposedly, the only things that have been changed in the text are “obsolete and archaic words not readily understood” and places “where the meaning of words currently in use has changed since 1611.”

However, such is not the case. Sometimes a harder word is used to replace a simpler word in the KJV: “band of soldiers” is changed to “detachment of soldiers” (Matthew 27:27), “excess of riot” is changed to “dissolute excess” (1 Peter 4:4), and “equal” is changed to “equitable” (Colossians 4:1).

But while insisting on the removal of archaic and obsolete words, the Third Millennium Bible uses the word “nonpareil” in reference to the Authorized Version in the very first paragraph of its preface.

The word nonpareil, which means “having no equal,” is certainly not a commonly used word that would be understood by the majority of the readers of the Third Millennium Bible.

In spite of all the new versions produced in the last ten years, including all those clamoring to be the version of the new millennium, it is my contention that we already have a Bible for the twenty-first century and the new millennium: the King James 1611 Authorized Version.

The fact that most Christians don’t believe this is immaterial, for men that are not Bible believers, and even unsaved people—consciously or unconsciously—acknowledge the continued supremacy of the Authorized Version (“for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light”  -  Luke 16:8).

When a secular book refers to events in the Bible, it can quote the biblical record in any number of versions. The version of choice, however, is still usually the King James. In the Reader’s Digest publication The World’s Last Mysteries (1978), when mention is made of the Queen of Sheba (p. 41) and the Tower of Babel (p. 170), it is the KJV that is quoted, not the RSV, NASB, Jerusalem, Phillips, Berkeley, or any number of other versions that could have been used.

When Katherine Paterson wrote a novel about a set of twin sisters (Avon Books, 1980), she went to the King James Version and found her title: Jacob Have I Loved, a phrase worded differently in modern versions. Well, some would say, that was 1978 and 1980, surely things are different now?

Think again.

When lectures delivered in, of all places, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, in 1989-1990, by Slavoj Zizek, were recently compiled into a book, the title chosen was: For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991). The recognizable phrase in the beginning of the title was not taken from any modern version of the Bible but exclusively appears in the King James.

In the title of the work Strange Fire: Reading the Bible after the Holocaust, edited by Tod Linafelt (New York University Press, 2000), we can see once again the influence of the AV, for most modern versions render “strange fire” in Leviticus 10:1; Numbers 3:4, 26:61 as “profane, “unauthorized,” “unholy,” or “illicit.” Yet, the AV reading was again chosen.

In the economics textbook Price Theory, by Steven E. Landsburg (5^th ed., Southwestern Publishing, 2002), when reference is made to the Queen of Sheba, the biblical account is quoted from the King James Version (pp. 394-395). Then on page 470, in the midst of a discussion of transactions costs, the author uses the word riotous. Found three times in the Authorized Version (Proverbs 23:20, 28:7; Luke 15:13), this word has been removed by all modern versions—including the NKJV.

When Judge Roy S. Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court (known as the Ten Commandments judge), unveiled a monument featuring the Ten Commandments in the Rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery, Alabama, on August 1, 2001, the four-foot-tall granite sculpture had the Ten Commandments carved into the likeness of two stone tablets.

The Bible version used: the King James Authorized Version. Two things about this monument are worth mentioning. First, the monument was not constructed or installed with any tax funds. And second, attempts by Democrats to place a counter-monument featuring Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech next to the Ten Commandments was not authorized by Judge Moore, who must approve all displays located in the Judicial Building.

In the religious realm, Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired (Simon & Schuster, 2001), by Benson Bobrick, does not even cover modern versions, ending its narrative with the King James Version. Alister McGrath, the general editor of The NIV Thematic Study Bible, recently penned, not a history of the NIV, but a detailed history of the AV called In the Beginning: the Story of the King James Bible and How it Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (Doubleday, 2001).

Martin Manser’s I Never Knew That was in the Bible (Thomas Nelson, 1999), is a “fully revised and updated edition” of The King James Bible Word Book of 1994, which was itself originally published in 1960 as The Bible Word Book. Manser’s work “adds more than 300 new entries, including a large number of phrases commonly heard in everyday speech but not often recognized as having been used in the King James Bible.”

The publication of this work would not have been undertaken if Thomas Nelson Publishers did not believe that millions of Christians still used the old King James Bible. And when Mark Taylor wrote The Complete Book of Bible Literacy (Tyndale House, 1992), he stated in his preface: “Although many people now use modern translations, the biblical phrases that are embedded in our culture are from the King James Version. Unless I indicate otherwise, all Bible quotations in the book are from that venerable translation.”

So contrary to all recognized scholarship, Christian or otherwise, we have a Bible for the twenty-first century and the new millennium: the King James 1611 Authorized Version.                                 U