Why We Read the King James

Walk into a bookshop and there are dozens of English Bibles. Our family reads the *Authorized Version* — the King James Bible — and it is worth knowing why.

Here is the reason, in three steps.

*First, God promised to preserve His words. Not just to give them once, but to keep them. The words of the LORD are pure words... Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever (Psalm 12:6–7). For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven* (Psalm 119:89).

*Second, if He kept that promise, the words should be found in the text His people actually used — the Hebrew Masoretic Text of the Old Testament (devotion 89), and for the New Testament the Greek text that was read, copied and preached in the churches down through the centuries, called the Received Text*. That is the text the King James translators worked from.

*Third, the King James is a faithful English translation of it* — made by a large body of scholars working in the language at its finest hour, and it has stood for four hundred years.

Two things to be clear about, because people will misunderstand you. We are *not saying the translators were prophets receiving new revelation. And we are not* saying the English corrects the Greek and Hebrew. We are saying God kept His word, that it comes to us through the Received Text, and that the Authorized Version renders it faithfully.

Now here is the honest part. Some English words have *changed meaning since 1611. When Paul says he was let (Romans 1:13) he means hindered — nearly the opposite of what it sounds like. Conversation means conduct. Prevent* means to go before. A good study Bible marks these, and learning them takes less effort than people think.