We have written nothing on this subject for some time but three letters in the Correspondence section of this issue are a reminder of how important it continues to be. Our first correspondent, Mr. Andrew Haylett, commenting on the switch in Bible versions (from KJV to NIV) in the ninth printing of John Blanchard’s Right With God, asks if the change is Trust policy. The Rev. Ray Lanning, one of the younger ministers in Grand Rapids, Michigan, whose help in these columns is much appreciated, raises the same question. Our third correspondent on the same issue is a long-standing friend, Mr. John Grier, who is in close touch with book and Bible sales in the U.K. He points out the danger of Banner publications gaining an increasingly archaic image if Trust publications stay anchored to the King James version.

   

There are some things which seem clear to us:

1. We confirm that for the present, at least, the Trust lays down no requirements to its authors on the version of the Scriptures which they should use. Some have used the American Standard Version of 1901 (John Murray, for example, in Redemption, Accomplished and Applied, 1961) and others, more recently, the NIV. 2. The near-land-slide to the NIV across large sectors of the evangelical world is due more to “battleweariness” over the versions issue rather than to the NIV’s real superiority among the modern versions. In the 1950’s many evangelical Christians tested the RSV and rejected it. The Inter-Varsity Fellowship in the mid-sixties was still treating the KJV – “the Authorised Version” – as the standard translation in commentaries. Yet now, despite deficiencies which could never be laid against the RSV, the NIV has been accepted near-blindly. (No doubt the weight of such names as that of William Hendriksen contributed to this but let anyone compare Hendriksen’s own translation of the NT, in his several commentaries, with the NIV and see how widely the two differ).

The case against the NIV is really a broader one than Mr. Haylett’s letter suggests. Certainly it appears free of any doctrinal bias (on the part of the translators) but there is the constant use of the principle of ‘dynamic equivalence’ which means, as R. K. Harrison says, ‘that the translators presented what was thought to be the general sense of the passage, and not always a more careful rendering of specific words’. Let the serious student compare the NIV rendering of Romans 8:1–11 with John Murray’s Commentary and he will see that at certain important points the translators actually impose their sense upon the text.

3. Except for the few who have the time and gifts to examine every version for themselves, we are all very much susceptible to the claims of publishers. Unhappily, financial considerations are involved. The ASV is scarcely known because no publisher or Bible Society cares to push it. The NASB (also called NASV), possibly the best of the modern versions, also suffers from poor publicity. At present the success (in sales terms) of the New KJV is being contested—the publisher’s claims for its circulation are impressive and R. K. Harrison (Professor of Old Testament at Wycliffe College, Toronto) can write, New KJV is favorite.* In some countries (Australia, for example) The Good News Bible has been so incessantly pushed by the Bible Society that people might be forgiven for supposing that other versions have already disappeared from the earth.

4. Issues beyond the text of the Bible itself are involved in this whole debate, for example the whole relationship of language to culture. How could the KJV hold its place for over three hundred years, imprinting its language on countless generations, while no purely 20th-century version begins to look like achieving real permanence? The issue of the preaching/teaching role of the church is also involved. Is it accidental that the boom in new versions runs parallel with low views of the pulpit and the necessity of preaching?

There is already something wrong with a version of the Bible which appears to make everything perfectly simple, and the role of the translator is viewed altogether too highly if it is supposed that he can eliminate what Peter calls things ‘hard to be understood’ (2 Peter 3:16). The first thing that is needed to make the Bible live is spirituality in the pulpit and in the pew.

5. It is beyond doubt that a great part of the richest Christian literature in the English language employs the King James version—from the Puritans and Bunyan to Spurgeon and Lloyd-Jones. For that reason—if for no other—the KJV will be read as long as that heritage in literature remains. Almost invariably those who are loudest in decrying the KJV are conspicuous in their neglect of this same literature. There is a very strong case for the modern version which genuinely transmits all that is best in the KJV. We hope that it will soon be widely seen that the NIV has gone too far and lost too much.

*Article in NFD Journal, Nov./Dec, 1985, p. 12. But the British version of the New KJV (named the ‘Revised Authorised Version’) has already been allowed to go out of print by its publishers.

Reprinted from The Banner of Truth May, 1986.