Someone asked, "What is the King James family of Bibles?"
That is my expression, so it was probably confusing. I use and favor the King James or Authorized Version of the Bible. There are several reasons.
One is that the Bible is really the Tyndale Bible made kosher by the first Stuart king, James (who followed Elisabeth). Tyndale was closely connected to Luther and his translation.
Another reason is the New Testament text. The KJV and slightly modernized KJ versions use the traditional Greek text while the NIV boobs treat God's Word as their personal sandbox. Horsing around with the New Testament began with Wescott and Hort, the fraud Tischendorf, and a horde of apostate disciples.
Modernists were helped by scholars' almost total amnesia concerning the Byzantine Empire's history, a Christian and Greek-speaking empire that lasted 1100 years.
What? It lasted 1100 years?
Yes, Greek-speaking Christians (and the most literate ancient nation) did preserve the text with great precision. That is why we have so many Byzantine NT texts, a fact used against the traditional text.
Tischendorf "found" both of the new texts (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) that were used to revise and change the New Testament. In other fields the scholars are suspicious of a man who finds an object so sensational that it makes him world famous. No one really knows the origins of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.
I wonder how many people know that a committee votes regularly on the text of the Greek NT. If three out of five vote against a verse, out it goes. They make the politicians of the smoke-filled rooms seem saintly in comparison.
The LCMS and WELS abandoned the KJV for the ecumenical, dumbed-down, impossible to read aloud NIV. Big money was involved. The NIV is perfect for the Church Growth Movement ("make disciples") and women's ordination (pronoun abuse).
The updates of the KJV are - the New KJV, KJV II, etc. The KJV we use is actually a slightly modernized version of the orginal. A commission took out some of the extra commas and the more ancient words.
The KJV was made to be read aloud in church. It was intended for memorization. Now the flavor of the month translations have ruined memorization.
The KJV was overwhelmingly the dominant English Bible until the 1960's or so, a span of many centuries. One billion have been printed.
The English language is built upon two foundations - the KJV and Shakespeare.
