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Did The KJV Translaters Claim Theirs was best/Only English Version For The Church?

Discussion in 'Bible Versions & Translations' started by JesusFan, Jun 6, 2011.

  1. JesusFan

    JesusFan Well-Known Member

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    Did they feel "inspired" by God, and their version best/only one for Church to read and have?

    Can we today claim more than they did themselves?
     
    #1 JesusFan, Jun 6, 2011
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 6, 2011
  2. annsni

    annsni Well-Known Member
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    If you read their preface, they most certainly did not and I agree that we should honor them and their belief that a Bible in the "vulgar" tongue is vitally important.
     
  3. revmwc

    revmwc Well-Known Member

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    King James made that claim.
     
  4. Mexdeaf

    Mexdeaf New Member

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    Never. They would likely be embarrassed to know that such a doctrine as KJVO is known today.

    Of course one can claim anything, such as some claim that Dean Burgon was KJVO (by the contemporary definition) when he definitely was not. Doesn't make them right, however.
     
  5. JesusFan

    JesusFan Well-Known Member

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    wasn't he behind the RV, it "correcting" the mistakes behind the TR text?

    Would he be considered today someone in the MT camp, would nOT support use of the Critical Greek text, but would approve using MT and others to "correct" mistakes from TR?
     
  6. NaasPreacher (C4K)

    NaasPreacher (C4K) Well-Known Member

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    In fact he insisted that his authorised version was the only one that could be used. The poor Baptists of that day had their beloved Geneva Bible outlawed.
     
  7. Mexdeaf

    Mexdeaf New Member

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    All that I do not know- I am not a student of Dean Burgon. However I do know that in his writings he was open to the alteration of the KJV text and did not consider it perfect.
     
  8. David Lamb

    David Lamb Active Member

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    Have you got a source for that, revmwc? I came across this at this site, which even though it looks like a site supporting KJVO views, is at pains to refute the idea that King James himself, or his parliament, made such claims about the bible translation which in America, and increasingly here in the UK, bears his name:
    http://www.buzzardhut.net/index/htm/Which.Bible.pdf

    It is a historical fact that the King James Bible had become known as the "Authorized" Version due to its universal acceptance among Christians of the world, and not due to a proclamation from King James himself.

    Hills states: "Although it is often called the 'Authorized Version,' it actually was never authorized by any official action on the part of the Church or State.

    Says Dr. Lee, Principal of the University of Edinburgh: "I do not find that there was any canon, proclamation, or act of parliament, to enforce the use of it. 'The present version' says Dr. Symonds, as quoted in Anderson's Annuals, 'appears to have made its way, without the interposition of any authority whatsoever; for it is not easy to discover any traces of a proclamation, canon or statute published to enforce the use of it.' It has been lately ascertained that neither the King's private purse, nor the public exchequer, contributed a farthing toward the expense of the translation or publication of the work."

     
    #8 David Lamb, Jun 7, 2011
    Last edited by a moderator: Jun 7, 2011
  9. Logos1560

    Logos1560 Well-Known Member
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    As king in Scotland, King James had grew up with and used the 1560 Geneva Bible. King James did permit the Geneva Bible to be printed in England during the early years of his reign although he had indicated his opposition to it at the Hampton Court Conference. A few years after the 1611 KJV was printed, he is said to have issued a command that prevented the Geneva Bible from being printed. So far as I know, that order did not actually outlaw the use of the Geneva. It was after the death of King James and during the reign of his son that the even strongest opposition to the Geneva Bible arose under Archbishop William Laud.

    The Geneva Bible could not be printed in England after 1616. KJV-only author David Cloud claimed: “In 1616 the king [James I] issued a command that only the King James Bible was to be printed in England” (Faith, p. 584). MacGregor wrote that the last quarto edition of the Geneva Bible printed in England was in 1615 and the last folio in 1616 (Literary History, p. 145). MacGregor wrote: "After the Geneva Bible ceased to be printed in England, about 150,000 copies of it were imported from Holland for English household use" (p. 146). McGrath observed that “official opposition to the Geneva Bible could not prevent it from becoming the most widely read Bible of the Elizabethan, and subsequently the Jacobean, era” (In the Beginning, p. 127).


    David Norton indicated that William Laud played a “role in securing the dominance of the KJB” (History, p. 104). John Lee noted: “The total suppression of the Geneva Bible was not attempted for several years; and when it was at last effected, it was ascribed in a great measure to the rising influence of Laud” (Memorial, p. 92). Kenneth Bradstreet maintained that “the popularity of the Geneva Bible so disturbed King Charles and Archbishop Laud that they did everything they could think of to discredit and get rid of it” (KJV in History, p. 103). Conant noted: "So pertinaciously, indeed, did the people cling to it [the Geneva Bible], and so injurious was its influence to the interests of Episcopacy and of the 'authorized version,' that in the reign of Charles I, Archbishop Laud made the vending, binding, or importation of it a high-commission crime" (English Bible, p. 367). Edmunds and Bell affirmed that “Laud made it a high commission crime to import, print, or sell the Geneva [Bible]“ (Discussion, p. 116). Anderson pointed out that “one of the first books most strictly prohibited to be printed, imported, or sold by this Archbishop was the English Geneva Bible” (Annals, II, p. 390). Norton pointed out that Laud gave “the Geneva Bible’s commercial success as one of his reasons for its suppression” (History, p. 91). Anderson quoted Laud as saying that the “Bibles, both with and without notes, from Amsterdam” . . . “were better print, better bound, better paper, and for all the charges of bringing, sold better cheap” (Annals, II, p. 390). Laud’s decree to prohibit the importing of the Geneva Bible was around 1637. Bradstreet noted that Laud’s “propaganda campaign suggested that it was near treason to purchase a Bible printed in a foreign land when Bibles printed in England could be had” (KJV in History, p. 103). From 1637, some foreign publishers were said to print Geneva Bibles with a false date of 1599 perhaps to try to keep those who obtained them from getting in trouble with Archbishop Laud and the High Commission Court. Jack Lewis maintained that Archbishop Laud even ordered copies of the Geneva Bible burned (English Bible, p. 32). Bobrick asserted that Laud "even inserted Catholic prints of the life of the Virgin into Scottish editions of the King James Version of the New Testament and burned every copy of the Geneva Bible he could find" (Wide as the Waters, p. 278). David Katz maintained that these pictures printed in this KJV N. T. edition “were purloined from a small devotional book put out by the Jesuits at Antwerp in 1622” (God’s Last Words, p. 46). Daniell also confirmed that in 1646 William Prynne wrote that “he [Laud] would suffer no English Bibles to be printed or sold with marginal notes [i. e. the Geneva version] to instruct the people, all such must be seized and burnt . . . but himself gives special approbation for the venting of Bibles [KJV’s] with Popish pictures taken out of the very Mass book, to seduce the people to Popery and idolatry” (Bible in English, p. 458).


    Daniell confirmed that the Geneva Bible "was suppressed in the seventeenth century" (Tyndale's N. T., p. xii). Derek Wilson wrote: “It took the determined efforts of crown and mitre to kill off the Geneva Bible” (People’s Bible, p. 121). David Norton indicated that “in fair competition” with the Geneva, the KJV “would probably have lost, but its supporters had foul means at their disposal” (History, p. 91). Norton observed: “Strangulation of the Geneva Bible in the press was the most diplomatic and effective long-term policy for the establishment of the KJB in England, Scotland and the American colonies that could have been hit on” (p. 94). Did the KJV ever face such extreme suppression and opposition from an ungodly king and state church as the Geneva Bible faced? McGrath pointed out that the Geneva Bible did not need any “endorsement by the political and religious establishment to gain enthusiastic and widespread acceptance” (In the Beginning, p. 127).
     
  10. Logos1560

    Logos1560 Well-Known Member
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    Any objective reader who reads the preface of the 1611 edition of the KJV can see that the KJV translators did not claim inspiration and could even be understood to reject any claim of inspiration for their translating.

    The KJV translators wrote: "No cause therefore why the word translated should be denied to be the word, or forbidden to be current, notwithstanding that some imperfections and blemishes may be noted in the setting forth of it. For whatever was perfect under the sun, where Apostles or apostolike men, that is, men endued with an extraordinary measure of God's Spirit and priviledged with the priviledge of infallibility, had not their hand?"


    The KJV translators also indicated that translations [which would include their own] could and should be tried by the greater authority of the preserved Scriptures in the original languages.

    In the preface to the 1611 KJV entitled "The Translators to the Reader," Miles Smith favorably quoted Jerome as writing “that as the credit of the old books (he meaneth the Old Testament) is to be tried by the Hebrew volumes, so of the New by the Greek tongue, he meaneth the original Greek. Then Smith presented the view of the KJV translators as follows: "If truth be to be tried by these tongues [Hebrew and Greek], then whence should a translation be made, but out of them? These tongues therefore, we should say the Scriptures, in those tongues, we set before us to translate, being the tongues in which God was pleased to speak to his church by his prophets and apostles."
     
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