King James Onlyism and Textual Criticism in Plain Language

Sadly, this isn’t a joke.  Neither is Bible burning in Southern Baptist churches.

I wish it was all a dream. But there are Christians (so-called) who believe that the King James Bible 1611 AV (“Authorized Version”) is the only inspired and infallible Bible available to the church today. All other translations, especially those based off of the Alexandrian manuscript tradition, are severely corrupt, uninspired, and deceptive to the world. Despite the complete and total absence of substantiated argumentation for these claims, King James Onlyists are proud and bold to be who they are. Take, for example, the Amazing Grace Baptist Church, which says on their front page:

This page is about why we believe that God has preserved His word for the English speaking people through the King James Version 1611. We make NO apology about it either. Were not ashamed of it, that’s why we dedicate a whole section to nothing but the KJV. We use ONLY this Bible and none else. All other Bibles for the English speaking people are perversions of God’s Word…There are certainly more phonies out there than there is room for me to name them all here, but here are some of the most popular ones. NIV, NKJV, ESV, RSV, NRSV, RDB, TLB, NASB, REB, CEV…

Of course, this is only one of several varieties of King James Onlyism. Consider the slightly less aggressive “statement of faith” of Sioux Falls Great Plains Baptist Divinity School:

We believe the Bible is verbally and plenary inspired, and that it is authoritative for all faith and practice; that the King James Version is the only true and accurate translation of God’s Word in the English language.

Here, the assertion is that the King James Bible is the best (and “only”) accurate translation. Whatever the case, a lot of people aren’t even aware of King James Onlyism. But those in theological (and especially Baptist) circles know all about the movement – and they also know how rude and nasty many proponents of this movement can be. Let’s clear our mind for a moment and look briefly at King James Onlyism and Textual Criticism, in plain language.

Lesson 1: Bible translations are translations - they are based off of a source text. The Bible was originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. A good translation would obviously be based upon the original languages, not a Latin, Arabic, or German translation of the source text. A translation of a translation is two times removed from the source text, so it obviously won’t be as good. To know what the Bible originally says, we would have to know the original languages and have access to texts closest to the original.

Lesson 2: Not all Bible translations are translated from the same source text. There isn’t a single copy (manuscript) of the Hebrew Old Testament or a single copy of the Greek New Testament to translate from. There are over 5,700 manuscripts for just the New Testament alone (10,000 fragments of OT around the world), and they’re not identical. There are “textual variations,” that is, differences between manuscripts. The obvious question is, which manuscripts do we translate from, and which variant reading is closest to the original? That’s the problem addressed by “textual scholars” (Bruce Metzger, Kurt Aland, Bart Ehrman, etc.).

Through years of pain-staking work, textual scholars have put together a “critical edition” of the Greek New Testament, the Nestle-Aland 27th edition, and the Hebrew Old Testament, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. These Bibles primarily contain a text of the New/Old Testament that most closely represents that original. To prove that, they also contain a critical apparatus, a listing at the bottom of the pages of all the variants and the manuscripts they are in. This way, anyone can compare differences and see what variations are clearly mistakes and which variations are probably the original. (More recent publications (“diglots”) of the New Testament contain both a critical edition of the New Testament and an English translation on the other side of the page)

Since Uthman burned every Qu’ran manuscript but one, Muslims don’t have the ability to know what Qu’ranic manuscript is closest to the original. Indeed, there is virtually no “critical edition” of the Qu’ran. With the Bible, however, we can be honest with history, and at the same time gain more information about what is being communicated through a text because of the abundance of copies.

Clearly, textual criticism is one of the central battlefields of Christian apologetics. Liberals and skeptics insist that we can never know what Jesus (or anyone else) said because there are too many textual variations. Conservative Christians, however, assert that the Bible (especially the New Testament) is, in fact, a reliable document.

Bart Ehrman, for example, has said numerous times that if we counted up all of the textual variants of the New Testament, that number would be close to 400,000. And since there are only 138,162 words in the New Testament, there is an average of 3 variants per word. Thus, there’s no way we can have an accurate knowledge of what was originally written in the Bible.

But this objection ignores two important things. First of all, more manuscripts is going to mean more variants, but that doesn’t mean less reliability. For example, consider the following sentence with the textual variation (#):

Congratulations! You’ve just w#n a trip to the Florida Keys!

There is a 1/10 ratio of variant to words in this particular “manuscript.” But, now we find another manuscript that has a different variant:

Congratulations! You’ve just won a trip to #he Florida Keys!

As you can see, the amount of total variants went from 1 to 2. That’s a 100% increase! Therefore, we can’t know what this text really means, we’re told.

But obviously this isn’t true. Our reliability of knowing what the text original said has not decreased at all. In fact, we are even more certain that the original was “Congratulations! You’ve just won a trip to the Florida Keys!” because we have two different texts that support our most obvious suspicions: that “w#n” was originally “won,” and that “#he” was originally “the.” Our confidence in the text hasn’t dropped at all, even though there are more variations.

The second problem with the objection about 400,000 thousand variants is that it forgets to mention how 99% of textual variants have no effect on the meaning of the text. In fact, there is only one meaningful variant for every three pages (about 4,00o total variants, which is 2.9% of total words in the NT). So while textual critics on the left try to undermine the Bible by saying “there’s too many variants,” honest scholars realize that even though there are more variants, more manuscripts mean more reliability, not less reliability.

Although the discussion between sides has taken place for over a century, perhaps the most technical and scholarly debate regarding this subject took place in January 2009 between Bart Ehrman, author of Misquoting Jesus and The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, and James R. White, author of Scripture Alone and The King James Only Controversy.

Lesson 3: All of the manuscripts that we have available to us today weren’t written all at one time or at one place. And all of the manuscripts we have today weren’t discovered at one time or at one place. Therefore…

Lesson 4: There are manuscript traditions, that is, different families of Bible copies. These are the manuscript traditions for the New Testament:

1. Western - Seems to be more prone to paraphrasing and other corruptions (written 3rd-9th century).
2. Byzantine - This is the most numerous tradition (about 80% of all New testament manuscripts). They were written between about 500-1600 AD, but the vast majority were created (copied) during the later period and discovered around the same time period.
3. Alexandrian - Written the earliest (2nd-4th century), but often discovered the latest (1750-1900): represents the best form of the original (since they are the earliest).

Lesson 5: The Bible was constantly being translated from manuscripts throughout all of history (say about 100 AD – today). In every century, Christians were translating the Bible into their native language (like Latin, which took place in 405, and German, which took place in 1534, etc.). But, while Christians were translating the Bible they could only translate from the manuscripts that were available to them. So, when Luther translated the Bible into German, he obviously couldn’t translate from manuscripts that weren’t discovered until the 1800s.

Lesson 6: In the same way, when the King James Bible was translated in 1611, it could only translate from the best manuscripts of the day. And, unfortunately, some of the best manuscripts we have – like Codex Alexandricanus, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus – weren’t discovered until over a century later.

Indeed, the King James Bible was the cutting edge translation of its day. In 1604, King James had a meeting on religious toleration called the Hampton Court Conference. Dr. John Reynolds of Oxford raised the idea of a new translation. The Geneva Bible (1559), which had an integrated commentary with illustrations, and the Bishops Bible (1568) were the dominating translations at the time. King James approved of the project, and though this Bible would be built off of the Bishops Bible, it would not have a commentary like the Geneva Bible. So they started in 1607 to revise the Bishops’ Bible, 48 scholars, some working at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge. In 1611, the first copies came out, dedicated to the king. It read in the front title page, “Appointed to be read in Churches.” Of course, there were more revisions. The 1613 edition of the KJV had over four hundred variants to the original KJV. Be it as it may, within a few years the King James Bible had become the standard around the English-speaking world.

Lesson 7: The King James Bible was based on an inferior text. The three most valuable texts we have of the New Testament – Alexadrian, Sinaitic, and Vatican – were not yet available to the translators of the King James Version.

It’s clear that King James Onlyists have a lot to answer. Why is only the 1611 version of the King James Bible the “inspired” Word of God? Why not the better 1613 edition? And, why should anyone believe that the King James Bible is the only inspired Word of God when it’s not based on the best manuscripts?

Of course, the best answers King James Onlyists like Gail Riplinger, Kent Hovind, and Peter Ruckman can give  is that the Alexandrian manuscript tradition is “a cult.” But there is actually no credible argument that’s been given by King James Onlyists to suggest that the Alexandrian manuscripts are inferior to the texts used to produce the King James Bible.