I am a new member, and just read through the full debate, but not this thread. (So forgive me if I repeat what others have said! 100+ pages was a bit much for me!)
I am a person who has read 10 translations of the Bible over 50 times, plus French, some Spanish, the NT in Greek, and a lot of the OT in Hebrew. But, because of the archaic grammar, obsolete words, I have never been able to get through the KJV, although I have memorized many key verses in KJV, from my Sunday School days in the early 1960's.
So I did come into the debate a bit biased, (as an understatement). I have also done translations of the Hebrew and compared them to KJV for Hebrew classes (we compared to many versions, ESV most often came up as closest to the Hebrew!) and in my translating Greek, I can point to small errors in the KJV on almost any page.
Ok, so I am not biased, but rather have completely rejected the KJO claims. Although, I believe in its time, it was a crucial translation which greatly impacted the western world for immense good! One should never argue against the historical value of the KJV. I have also debated KJ Onlyists, and set them packing on a number of occasion, but from a much different angle than the tact that Bob Enyart and Will Duffy took.
My argument has always been how badly the KJV has been translated, compared to the newer versions. Besides being wooden, and claiming to be a word for word translation (which would be impossible with Greek, and in many cases for the Hebrew) the KJV simply makes mistakes.
I thought that would be the approach here, but I can see the value of using the actual earlier Bible with margin notes, to show the error corrections, especially because although the Middle English script was hard to read, it was certainly easier for people without a background in Koine Greek to read, and to transliterate into a more modern English.
It was a novel approach, and I was greatly rewarded by this discussion. I have read White's book on the KJO Controversy, and I did not see much overlap on the original posts by the anti-side. ("Anti" as in the KJV as the only "perfect" version!) I commend the scholarship and research that the Enyart-Duffy team did, too! Esp, the photos which showed the notations in the margins for changes.
It might be nice to do a similar debate, but use the Greek and Hebrew to show major translation mistakes. I also understand very few Greek manuscripts, and much later ones were used, which were very corrupt to translate the KJV.. I would love to see a few more photos of the Byzantine Greek, complete with their margin notations, which were incorporated into the next generation of manuscripts, resulting in the very corrupt versions the KJV used.
Kostenburger et al, in their text "Going Deeper with New Testament Greek" gets into this in the introduction and it is a good piece towards the effort to finally and completely put this KJV Only fallacy to rest, once and for all!
Congrats to Enyart-Duffy for an excellent job. My condolences to the loser, Will Kinney, who parroted things, and yes, looked very similar to the Mormons I had once on my door, claiming Joseph Smith to be the "final prophet, " or whatever he was. I appreciated that analogy from the winning side!
And thanks for letting me post this so much later, and the discussion not being closed to further replies!
I am a person who has read 10 translations of the Bible over 50 times, plus French, some Spanish, the NT in Greek, and a lot of the OT in Hebrew. But, because of the archaic grammar, obsolete words, I have never been able to get through the KJV, although I have memorized many key verses in KJV, from my Sunday School days in the early 1960's.
So I did come into the debate a bit biased, (as an understatement). I have also done translations of the Hebrew and compared them to KJV for Hebrew classes (we compared to many versions, ESV most often came up as closest to the Hebrew!) and in my translating Greek, I can point to small errors in the KJV on almost any page.
Ok, so I am not biased, but rather have completely rejected the KJO claims. Although, I believe in its time, it was a crucial translation which greatly impacted the western world for immense good! One should never argue against the historical value of the KJV. I have also debated KJ Onlyists, and set them packing on a number of occasion, but from a much different angle than the tact that Bob Enyart and Will Duffy took.
My argument has always been how badly the KJV has been translated, compared to the newer versions. Besides being wooden, and claiming to be a word for word translation (which would be impossible with Greek, and in many cases for the Hebrew) the KJV simply makes mistakes.
I thought that would be the approach here, but I can see the value of using the actual earlier Bible with margin notes, to show the error corrections, especially because although the Middle English script was hard to read, it was certainly easier for people without a background in Koine Greek to read, and to transliterate into a more modern English.
It was a novel approach, and I was greatly rewarded by this discussion. I have read White's book on the KJO Controversy, and I did not see much overlap on the original posts by the anti-side. ("Anti" as in the KJV as the only "perfect" version!) I commend the scholarship and research that the Enyart-Duffy team did, too! Esp, the photos which showed the notations in the margins for changes.
It might be nice to do a similar debate, but use the Greek and Hebrew to show major translation mistakes. I also understand very few Greek manuscripts, and much later ones were used, which were very corrupt to translate the KJV.. I would love to see a few more photos of the Byzantine Greek, complete with their margin notations, which were incorporated into the next generation of manuscripts, resulting in the very corrupt versions the KJV used.
Kostenburger et al, in their text "Going Deeper with New Testament Greek" gets into this in the introduction and it is a good piece towards the effort to finally and completely put this KJV Only fallacy to rest, once and for all!
Congrats to Enyart-Duffy for an excellent job. My condolences to the loser, Will Kinney, who parroted things, and yes, looked very similar to the Mormons I had once on my door, claiming Joseph Smith to be the "final prophet, " or whatever he was. I appreciated that analogy from the winning side!
And thanks for letting me post this so much later, and the discussion not being closed to further replies!
