One of the key values of the KJV is its longevity as a translation. Updates have been rare and slight, except for the famous 19th century KJV Revision, which bombed worse than Paul Kelm's version of evangelism, absent the Gospel, packed with plagiarized droppings from Fuller Seminary.
But that is not all. The KJV team tried hard to make their words match the original, so the translation is the best possible experience for those who only know English (which now means almost all seminarians).
The WELS college faculty, now submerged into the ladies' school of ministry in New Ulm, hated the NIV - the "classic" NIV, the holocaust NIV exterminated by its greedy, rapacious publishers. The college professors murmured against the NIV in classes but said little or nothing when WELS made the new, even worse NIV their standard. The New NIV is truly the ideal bad paraphrase for the KJV-Never bumpkins who run the sect.
Those who respect the KJV also honor Justification by Faith - not just among Lutherans.
The KJV translators were not great, famous writers, but they lived at the same time as Shakespeare (actually the Earl of Oxford). English was at its peak, but that does not explain the beauty and cadence of the KJV verses, many passages welded into our memories - The 23rd Psalm, 1 Corinthians 13, and the Lord's Prayer.
The modernists skip all around with their Nida Dynamic Equivalence, so a word or phrase translated one way is changed in another location.
I am not arguing for a word for word translation, which only happens in clumsy interlinear Bibles. Those like Lenski who provide a translation showing off the Greek grammatical points will produce a New Testament that becomes humorous at times (yet effective for teaching Greek).
The KJV translators themselves were awed by the finished product, which gradually pushed the Geneva Bible into the dustbin of history. Nobody ordered the KJV to dominate. That kind of tyranny had to wait for WELS to ban everything except their precious New, Improved, NIV. You will notice that changing year by year, though English does not change so fast. They must think their original and subsequent editions were pretty bad, no?
The explanation for the KJV lasting 400+ years and dominating the reading of all English Bibles is simple. The KJV teams worked from faith in Jesus Christ and a genuine desire to take what was good from before and make it even better if possible.
Tyndale set the stage - and he was a rare genius in giving life to his work, which was most of the New Testament and a large part of the Old Testament. One writer said that Tyndale outshone Luther, but that is debatable and includes Luther's entire team. Nevertheless, the KJV's genius began with Tyndale. Honest scholars give credit to the earlier efforts, to Luther, to the Geneva Bible, and 50+ faithful scholars of the KJV translation.
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| If you hate the New NIV, don't worry, they will keep changing it, year after year. The WELS clergy nicknamed it the Nineveh Bible, but they whispered in Gath lest the joke be heard in plush carpeted halls of the Love Shack. |
