“Bible agnostic.” This is what KJVOs called me because I used several translations of the Bible. I think they assumed that this would guilt me into joining their ideas. Instead, the King James Onlyists paved the way for me to look at the Bible critically for the first time. Why? Because the KJVOs viewed the history of the Scriptures more negatively than anyone.
Moderate churchgoers believe that no translation of the Bible is perfect, only the Greek and Hebrew texts. I never questioned this as I grew up. So you can imagine my confusion when a KJVO asked me, “But which Greek and Hebrew texts?” Having heard nothing about this from the church, I had no idea what he meant. The texts? I don’t know. What? Eventually, the King James Onlyists filled me in on their varying understanding of the history of the Scriptures. Behold, the collective pseudo-history of the Bible according to the King James Only crowd:
King James Only Pseudo-History:
After the Biblical authors wrote their texts (which gradually wore out), scribes copied them nearly perfectly for hundreds of years. But in the mid-300s C.E., some scribes from Egypt copied the New Testament, but changed and removed some things. They hated the Trinity, so they “took out” verses pertaining to it, such as 1 John 5:7[1]. Their two favorite corrupt manuscripts were Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. However, due to their corruption, someone his these manuscripts away for centuries. Meanwhile, all the good manuscripts disappeared, and the Catholic Church imposed the Latin Bible on Western Europe.
After the invention of the printing press, a Protestant Catholic Priest (wrap your head around that) named Erasmus collected some of the good (but slightly differing) New Testament manuscripts. He printed them into a Greek text, which the reformers used to translate the first English Bibles (William Tyndale’s, e.g.). A century later, King James I of England commissioned his own Bible translation— the King James Version. But for whatever reason, God decided to divinely inspire these particular translators to translate that Greek text perfectly. So now, this was the Bible of Bibles, the perfect standard for all things Scripture.
In the mid-1800s, however, those corrupt manuscripts (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) reappeared. So two Jesus-haters named Westcott and Hort printed them into a text for more Jesus-haters to translate to English. They claimed that these manuscripts were more accurate to the originals. Nearly one hundred years later, a bunch of gays and lesbians (I kid you not) used this text to translate the NIV, among other versions. So now you know where THEIR Bible comes from and where YOUR Bible comes from—according to them.
What King James Onlyism Taught Me:
This story is seriously twisted (if you want to learn more about the flaws of King James Onlyism, The King James Only Controversy by James R. White is a great resource).[2] But the real story makes little difference. By the King James Only Crowd’s own admission, the history of the Bible does not lend itself to the idea of inerrancy. We don’t really know what the Biblical authors said at each turn. Without a divine re-inspiration (the KJV), we don’t have a perfect Bible. Every Biblical manuscript differs, and each contains thousands of deletions, additions, misspellings, etc. The process of comparing our manuscripts to figure out what the authors most likely said is called “Textual Criticism” (which is what Erasmus and Westcott and Hort did). We need textual criticism because the process by which we got the Bible is so imperfect. Unlike moderate Christians with their pop-apologetics, the King James Only crowd freely admitted the imperfection of how the Bible got to us.
They asked questions that I would have asked had I known the basic history of the Bible. How can you call a collection of contradicting manuscripts “inerrant”? Why would God allow the most reliable manuscripts (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) to disappear from sight for over a millennium?[3] Why would God keep his inspired words in archaic dialects of languages spoken by a small percentage of the world? Good questions. The problem with the King James Only crowd is not their questions—it’s their answers to them. God re-inspired the Bible. The ultimate “Godidit.” No need for biblical references or any particular reasoning.
Once I understood the history of the bible (the KJVO version and the real story), I had some questions to tack onto theirs. Why did God inspire his message into a medium available only to the wealthy for most of history—that is, literature in an illiterate world? Why didn’t God make his words available to anyone in the Americas for fourteen hundred years after their completion? How is it that even today, there are still around 2500 language groups that have zero access to a Bible that their people can understand? What exactly does God expect of people who have no chance to access his gospel?
How odd that the arguably most gullible sect within American (and Austrailian) Christianity led me to think critically about the information with which the church bombarded me. Realizing that I had been misled about the inerrancy of the Bible made me wonder how else I had been misled. Click here to read about My Departure from Christianity.
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Footnotes:
[1] Apparently they forgot about Matthew 28:19.
[2] James R. White is one of the more scholarly Christian apologists (Alpha and Omega Ministries), which is why you likely haven’t heard of him. His book does well at addressing the specific flaws of King James Onlyism. His readers will learn some details about the history of the Bible, textual criticism, and linguistic phenomena that they probably hadn’t encountered before.
[3] “I mean, do you really think that God would allow his people to be using the wrong bible for hundreds and hundreds of years, and then all of a sudden in the 1800s, we’re going to find the right manuscripts? It doesn’t make any sense.” —Pastor Steven Anderson, New World Order Bible Versions, 2014
Some resources on King James Only ideas of Bible history:
What’s the Big Deal About the KJV?
New World Order Bible Versions
The Attack— Chick Tracts
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