King James only Folks

Every translation since the KJV has attempted, in one way or another, to speak to modern readers. To some Christians, this smacks of giving in. My grandfathers would have pealed an amen! to the idea of standing fast on the KJV, but the average Christian today has little reason to consider the small differences between English Bible versions worth fighting for or sufficient to dictate doctrine.

In truth, not even the KJV translators themselves believed that the KJV was the single worthy translation of the Word of God. That's one of the misnomers of the KJV-only crowd. Nowhere do the translators claim that. Many of today’s most prominent evangelicals—men whom you might think would be traditionalist enough to advocate KJV-only, don’t. Important evangelicals of the recent past as diverse as Billy Graham, James Dobson, and Carl F. H. Henry haven’t taught that the KJV is the only true translation for at least a few decades.

In the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s first decade at Liberty University, other translations were endorsed. Even C. I. Scofield, a champion of the KJV (and my grandfathers’ preferred interpreter of the Scriptures), wrote in one of his thousands of footnotes to his once-popular Scofield Reference Bible:

"The writers of Scripture invariably affirm, where the subject is mentioned by them at all, that the words of their writings are divinely taught. This, of necessity, refers to the original documents, not to translations and versions; but the labours of competent scholars have brought our English versions to a degree of perfection so remarkable that we may confidently rest upon them as authoritative."