Faithfulness to Hebrew and Greek is Why the KJV is an Excellent Translation

The following statement is from Adam Nicholson, God’s Secretaries, pages 210, 211. It refutes the nutty Ruckmanite position that the KJV is advanced revelation over the Hebrew and Greek and there is no longer a need to study the biblical languages, but it wisely affirms the KJV as an excellent and unique translation that is faithful to the original languages. The chief reason the King James Version is such an excellent version is that the peerless team of translators aimed to create in English a version faithful to the preserved Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts. They weren’t willing to bend the original to fit English according to the prominent “dynamic equivalency” doctrine of our day. Rather they bent English to fit the original. They “pushed English toward the condition of a foreign language.” Nicholson writes, “[The] English is there to serve the original not to replace it. It speaks in its master’s voice, and is not the English you would have heard on the street, then or ever. It took up its life in a new and distinct dimension of linguistic space, SOMEWHERE BETWEEN ENGLISH AND GREEK (OR, FOR THE OLD TESTAMENT, BETWEEN ENGLISH AND HEBREW). These scholars were not pulling the language of the scriptures into the English they knew and used at home. The words of the King James Bible are just as much English pushed towards the condition of a foreign language as a foreign language translated into English. It was, in other words, more important to make English godly than to make the words of God into the sort of prose that any Englishmen would have written, and that secretarial relationship to the original languages of the scriptures shaped the translation.”


(Friday Church News Notes, August 21, 2015, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)

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