Wednesday, September 06, 2017

Fun with the King James

It is, I am told, the difference (addition) of a single Greek letter found in the newer (newer is not better) manuscripts used by the Authorized Version (KJV) that causes the familiar passage to be rendered as:
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. (Luke 2:14 KJV)
The modern scholarly translations, which use older Greek manuscripts, render it as:
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased! (Luke 2:14 ESV)
Juuuuussst a little different in meaning.

My favorite people in the world are KJV-only types. It takes admirable chutzpah to insist, as some of the more ardent proponents do, that the King James text is more accurate that the Greek from which it was translated. That would violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, applied to information. Awesome.

2 comments:

  1. To quote Michael Bird:

    "The Bible did not fall out of the sky, bound in leather, with the words of Jesus in red, written in ye auld Elizabethan English, and complete with Scofield footnotes."

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    1. You should tell your pastor that you think GBC should be a Douay–Rheims Only church. I'd tell him, but I've been coming since 1999 and I'm still just a visitor.

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