Leland Ryken: Celebrating the King James while accepting the modern versions as well

Since the Moorman-White debate I've been gathering information on this subject from so many directions it's becoming a scattering influence for me. When I originally began my blogs I expected to link to other blogs as well as to acquire as much information as possible, but I quickly found that to be beyond my ability to keep in any kind of order. That is what is happening now. It's not a bad thing in itself, I'm glad to have all the new links and information, but it's going to take me a while to be able to make use of it for my own purposes.

Just to restate it -- sorry to repeat myself so often but it seems necessary -- what occupies me primarily in the Bible versions controversy is the effect of the work of Westcott and Hort on today's Bibles. I'm not KJV-Only, meaning I don't believe the King James Bible is perfection in itself; I do believe any translation is to be updated as language changes, and to be corrected as better sources become available.

The problem in this case is that what happened back in 1881 seriously interrupted that normal flow of things, and inaugurated such a cavalier attitude toward Bible translation that it brings any thought of revision NOW under well-deserved distrust. The committee that was dominated by Westcott and Hort went way beyond their commitment to produce a minimal revision of the King James Bible, instead substituting Greek texts that seriously change the text, and making over 36,000 mostly unnecessary changes in the English.

This is all documented and discussed by Burgon and I still haven't done enough to bring out his evidence for that.

Instead of taking Burgon's warnings seriously, the Revision that came out in 1881 and the corrupted Greek text on which it was based, have been accepted to one degree or another as the basis of all translations since then. The Alexandrian Greek Text promoted by W-H is incorporated in the Nestle-Aland and United Bible Societies Critical Texts which underlie the new translations, and a comparison of the English texts of the various new translations with the KJV and prior translations shows indefensible changes based both on the corrupted Greek texts and on the changes-for-change's sake in the English that can be traced back to Westcott and Hort.

This amounts to what Burgon called a "mutilation" of the English Bible, and to one extent or another all the modern versions are mutilated in the same way, giving changed meanings, false readings, as well as bad English.

This is really where I should be putting all my efforts and I hope I'll soon get back to it.

Their work also seems to have inspired the rather casual multiplication of translations and editions of the English Bible over the last century as well.

Discussions of anything concerning the Bible these days, such as the reliability of its transmission from earliest times, treat the corrupted Greek texts as just another family of texts, and in fact treat them as better than the texts behind the KJV. Arguments against the KJV-Only position often spend much time trying to prove the KJV is flawed, or focusing on the error of believing any translation could be inspired by God or perfect in itself, even spending whole books on this error while slighting or completely ignoring "the elephant in the living room" which is the corruptions of the underlying texts of the modern versions.

Ignoring this problem is also the case in this next example, an interview with Leland Ryken, professor of English at Wheaton College. Professor Ryken wrote a book in celebration of the 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible, available of course at Amazon.

Here I'm going to post an audio of the interview with him about the book. It's a very inspiring description of the making of the King James Version, no KJVOnly could ask for more as far as his admiration of it goes. He does a wonderful job of describing its manifold superiorities in every possible way, from its translators to its use of language to its effect on literature and the culture.

However, Professor Ryken accepts without criticism some of the modern Bibles, particularly the ESV but also the RSV and the NKJV, even comparing them favorably with the KJV in some respects. He rejects some others on the basis of their translation philosophy or philosophy of style, but he says nothing at all against the underlying texts, accepting them uncritically as so many others do these days.

With that caveat, for his wonderful appreciation of the King James AND some interesting information about it that was clarifying to me and probably new to many, he is well worth hearing, so here is the interview, Celebrating the King James Bible on its 400th anniversary.