I have noticed over my lifetime a very silly squabble over the translation of scripture used when presenting the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
People scream that the King James Version (KJV) is the only “authorized” version as though it were “authorized” by God himself. These people have even gone as far as to say that the salvation of those who use any other translation is questionable.
I find this ridiculous.
The argument that the KJV is the only “authorized” version stems from the preface of the original KJV commissioned in 1609 and finished in 1611.
The preface stated that King James I had commissioned the translation and, as the head of the Church of England, it was the only translation authorized for use in the Anglican churches. This preface survived and is printed in some KJV Bibles to this day.
There are those who would argue that the more it is translated, the more errors will occur. They should know that the Scriptures were translated 13 times before 1611.
The KJV itself is a translation of a translation. In 390, St. Jerome was commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church, the only Christian church in the world at the time, to translate the existing texts in to the Latin vernacular.
A translation known as the Latin Vulgate was the result and in 600, the Roman Catholic Church decreed that Latin was the official and only permissible tongue.
Men such as John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, Myles Coverdale and John “Thomas Matthew” Rogers published English translations of the Bible between 1384 and 1537.
The Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops Bible and the Douay Bible were also translated and printed before the KJV.
Might I add that all of the aforementioned translations, including the KJV, contained the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha was not removed from the KJV until 1885.
My point is that if you believe that the Bible is the infallible, immutable, incontrovertible Word of God, then you must also believe that no amount of revision would be able to shake its immutability.
If it is not wrong to translate the scriptures into an another language so that those peoples speaking that language will then be able to hear the Gospel in their own language (and thus better understand it) then it is not wrong to translate the scriptures out of a dialect that has been dead for 300 years into a dialect that the average English speaking person would be able to understand.
It is the message that is important, not the dialect with which it is presented.
We must end this petty quarrel and concern ourselves with the Great Commission of going unto all nations and preaching the Gospel, and in whatever language the people understand.
We look like children fussing and fighting over how what was said was said. We should instead live up to what was said. Our testimonies are impaired every time an unbeliever overhears these stupid ramblings over whether the other is really saved or not based of what translation he or she uses.
I beseech you as your brother in the faith, get over it!

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