No Bible in English offers an easier understanding of the mind of God than a King James Bible. The knee jerk reaction often encountered at that statement is that American readers dulled by decades of television, video games and Harlequin Romances find the wording odd. They resent any intellectual food not already chewed and spit into their mouths as a bird would feed its young. As a result they flinch at inflected pronouns (thou or thee for example) and balk at thinking through an exactly worded statement.
Generations of English speaking people had their minds honed to a sharp edge by learning to read a King James Bible. From colonial times and for much of the westward expansion of the American People, the King James Bible was the foremost and sometimes the only book to be found in the average home. We can read the writings of these people and we can plainly see that they did not speak Early Modern English.
Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe and many, many more writers from the 18th and 19th centuries wrote in an English much closer if not identical to our own. Nevertheless, they cut their teeth on a King James Bible and it honed their intellects. In the late 19th and the 20th centuries, the public became convinced that newly minted Bibles conforming to a more secular and modern English would make the Bible more relevant. The result has been a lessening of Bible understanding in the general public and a dearth of Bible reference in modern literature.
The first and probably the most devastating result of the new translations was the collective recalibration of how English speaking people perceived the Bible. Until the 1880s, English speaking people thought of the Bible as the King James Bible, and the King James Bible as the Bible. That attitude produced nothing but good. People may have argued over how to interpret its words, but almost no one doubted its words. Slowly, as the idea that the exact wording now stood in doubt crept into the universal consciousness, the public lost confidence in any Bible.
As a public trained to see Superman's cape as indestructible began to see men unravel it from the edges, they began to see that it was not indestructible after all. If that cape could be slowly unraveled by pulling on loose threads, then obviously it could be destroyed by mortal men and was not really bullet proof. By the late 20th century that attitude towards the Bible had permeated every strata of English speaking society concerning the Bible itself. The belief that the Bible is riddled through with inconsistencies and errors is ubiquitous.
It was not socialists and atheists that distilled that belief, it was Evangelical scholars who could play intricate mind games wherein they corrected their bibles with one hand and revered it as the Word of God with the other. Like the bare butt emperor who paraded down the street to his shame, these foolish fellows want the public to exclaim the holiness of their craft. Their error is much like the idolaters of Isaiah's day.
They that make a graven image are all of them vanity; and their delectable things shall not profit; and they are their own witnesses; they see not, nor know; that they may be ashamed. Who hath formed a god, or molten a graven image that is profitable for nothing? Behold, all his fellows shall be ashamed: and the workmen, they are of men: let them all be gathered together, let them stand up; yet they shall fear, and they shall be ashamed together. The smith with the tongs both worketh in the coals, and fashioneth it with hammers, and worketh it with the strength of his arms: yea, he is hungry, and his strength faileth: he drinketh no water, and is faint. The carpenter stretcheth out his rule; he marketh it out with a line; he fitteth it with planes, and he marketh it out with the compass, and maketh it after the figure of a man, according to the beauty of a man; that it may remain in the house. He heweth him down cedars, and taketh the cypress and the oak, which he strengtheneth for himself among the trees of the forest: he planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish it. Then shall it be for a man to burn: for he will take thereof, and warm himself; yea, he kindleth it, and baketh bread; yea, he maketh a god, and worshippeth it; he maketh it a graven image, and falleth down thereto. He burneth part thereof in the fire; with part thereof he eateth flesh; he roasteth roast, and is satisfied: yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire: And the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image: he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me; for thou art my god. They have not known nor understood: for he hath shut their eyes, that they cannot see; and their hearts, that they cannot understand. And none considereth in his heart, neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, I have burned part of it in the fire; yea, also I have baked bread upon the coals thereof; I have roasted flesh, and eaten it: and shall I make the residue thereof an abomination? shall I fall down to the stock of a tree? He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?, Isaiah 44:9-20.
For those of my readers who retain the ability to reason, follow the Lord's train of thought. He begs the idolater to ask himself where his work came from. He chopped down the tree himself. He used part of the tree to cook his food and to warm his hands. He then took the residue and fashioned a god from it. Then he falls down and worships the work of his hands. Cannot that same man reason? Can he not see that what he worships is the work of his hands? It cannot deliver his soul, it is a lie.
There is no comparison of the origins of the King James Bible and the origins of modern bibles other than in the slanderous histories that modern scholars use to justify their villainy. The King James Bible is like an Olympic torch handed by Jesus Christ to the apostles who themselves handed it off to the nations. They did not hand it off in Greek and Hebrew, they handed it off in vernacular languages. Those holding those bibles endured savagery, but rejoiced in Christ Jesus and passed on that torch. By the grace of God they evaded the inquisitors of the Roman Catholic Church and kept the faith. The King James Bible is an Anabaptist Bible, delivered by the grace of God to the Protestants of England who gladly translated it into English.
Modern Bibles are like the idols of old. Their adherents who carved them from the dull wood of two Millenia's worth of pagan thought disguised as scripture, are probably the only people dumb enough to not see that they worship a lie. In every century, the apostates and heretics of that age have toyed with scripture to make it conform to themselves. Our age is no exception. The dregs of that apostasy survive in countless old manuscripts happily dragged out into the open by gullible scholars. Wherever those manuscripts prosper, the society in which they thrive starves for lack of salt. Brother Paul Scott and I seek to deliver the Vietnamese people from that starvation. We will show them how that the King James Bible cannot be unraveled from the edges and that it is indeed bullet proof. The Vietnamese who have learned English rejoice at a precisely worded bible and do not shrink as lazy Americans do at precise thought expressed on paper. They can chew their own intellectual food.