I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a church. I went into my spiel and at the end, the pastor asked what version we use. I explained that in our material, the reference is printed so the church can use their own version. He seemed to take umbrage w/ that statement because obviously the DVDs will be quoting Scripture. He then went into a long dissertation on why the KJV is the only version for him.
I sat and listened to him for no less than 20 minutes. His main premise was that all the other versions have footnotes that have other possible translations for the word and he wanted a version that had perfectly preserved the original text. He went on and on about how there were no footnotes in the KJV because it was perfect and how he believed every single word that was in it.
I really just kept my mouth shut because the one time I opened it to say something, he went on a 5 minute diatribe about why I was wrong.
My question is...did Jesus speak the King's English? What about Moses? From what I've heard through the grapevine, there are no autographs (originals) of the Biblical text left...meaning all we have has been copied by human hands. As painstaking as the copying process was in the early ADs, it was done by humans. There is bound to be a slight error. That's why people like Dan Wallace are combing the earth for earlier and more reliable manuscripts, so we can be sure that what we have is the most accurate.
Does the potential for minute errors weaken my faith? Absolutely not. I believe it's important to question these kinds of things, as long as you search for the answers. The thing that weakens faith is when you leave these doubts out there to fester and never resolve them.
That being said, the KJV is the most impossible-to-understand version and I'd pull my hair out if I had to read it all the time.
I'd love to hear from you all on this. Are you KJV people? Does version matter to you?
