The Dangers of KJV Only-ism (Why You Should Run From It)

Did you know the 1611 King James Bible fell from heaven to earth? Well, not exactly, but people actually believe that. Some even believe it was written by angels and not by men. And the same people will say that if the Bible you have in your hands doesn't have the initials KJV on the cover, then it's corrupted, it's tainted, even dangerous to read. Now, while many of you grew up reading and enjoying the translation, we're going to learn about the history of it, and I believe many of you don't even know the background. We're going to see what makes the translation unique. Then we're going to see where the translation falls short. Finally, we'll learn about the dangers of KJV-onlyism, meaning that's the only Bible and everything else is less than or shouldn't be read. And then finally, the million dollar question is this. Should you use the 1611 KJV for personal Bible study yourself? The answer is going to surprise you. Welcome back to Get Into the Word. My name is Robbie Gallaty. Before anybody clicks away or fires up the comment section pushing back on my interpretation, let me just say plainly, because I mean this, the King James Version of the Bible is a treasure, one of the most beautiful, influential books intentionally translated in the English language. It has shaped literature. It's shaped the hymns we sing. It's shaped the preaching of generations and generations before us. Many people have clung to the King James Version of the Bible and it has led them home to glory to be with the Lord. So if the KJV is the Bible you read and you love, keep reading it. This video is not an attack on the KJV. It's a call out to the KJV-onlyism crowd. These are individuals who say and

have a core belief that the 1611 KJV, King James Version, is the only legitimate, authorized, accurate English translation of the scriptures. They even go a step further and say that every other translation of the Bible that has come after, the ESV, NIV, CSV, LSB, NASB, everyone, they're all corrupted. Now before we dive into the history of this translation, I need to unpack the myth of a re-inspired Bible, as the proponents of this translation will suggest. Some believe, not all, again I don't want to strawman argument this, but not all, but some believe that the original translation was supernaturally re-inspired by God, given by angels in heaven, as I mentioned earlier. So I went looking for the claim that the KJV was literally handed down by angels. I scoured the internet. I looked at books and the truth is I can't point to any major teacher who says it in those exact words. So I'm not going to put words in anyone's mouth, although I've heard that in churches before. But what is taught loudly is something just as remarkable. There's a stream within the King James Version Only crowd or movement that is associated most famously with a man named Peter Ruckman. He's a man who teaches what's called double inspiration or advanced revelation. This is the idea that the Holy Spirit inspired the original writers, yes, but then in 1611 he did it again with the translators of the 1611 Bible. So in the same way God inspired Peter and Paul, James and Jude to write the New Testament letters we have, God decided to do it again in 1611 with the King James Version translators. It's the re-inspiration movement or idea. And here's the shocking part. Some in this camp argue, this is wild, that where the English of the King James Version

is different than the Greek translation where you get it from, the English always wins. Think of it this way. If there's a disagreement between the English which was translated from the Greek, if the KJV English differs from the Greek, the English always wins in the King James Version. The translation in a sense corrects the original language in which it was written. Now think about that claim. Brand new revelation coming down to a committee of scholars in England 400 years ago, 1600 years basically after it was written down with the same kind of inspiration given to the apostles of Jesus' day, to produce a book of the Bible that we read today. Now here's the irony, and I can't get past this. The KJV translators never claimed for themselves that inspiration, not once. You can read from their own preface, which I have here. They openly said they were building on those who came before them. That even an ordinary translation of the Bible is still the word of God. And that they fully expected, don't miss this, their work to be approved upon later. They believed their work would be improved later on. The men who made the KJV translation would have been horrified to hear today someone call it the only Bible that God has ever blessed. So the only Bible worth reading. Now before we move on, I want you to think about this. The people who defend this book most fiercely are defending it in a way that the translators

themselves rejected. Now let me show you how the translation was actually made, and this will really give some light to the history. Because it didn't come from heaven, it actually came through history. And the history is fascinating. I want you to picture England in the year 1604. There's a man named Richard Bancroft, who was soon to become the Archbishop of Canterbury. And he's not a fan of the Puritans and their favorite Bible that they're lugging around and promoting, the Geneva Bible. By the way, I love the Geneva Bible, but back then they didn't like it. At the time, there were three English Bibles in circulation. The Great Bible, which was the Bible of the Church of England, the Bishop's Bible, and the Geneva Bible. The first two were authorized by the Church of England and preferred by the clergy. But the Geneva Bible, this was something, the higher-ups, the haughty-taughty, the religious elite, they hated this Bible, why? Because the people loved it. The Puritans loved it. If you want me to do a video, by the way, on the history of the English Bible, I teach this to seminary students when I talk about preaching, I'd love to do that. If there's a need for it, I'd love to do it.

Comment below, I'd love to hear from you. Because I have a whole lecture on this. Also, if this video, let me just pull over and park, is beneficial to you and you haven't subscribed, I think like 75% of you who watch every week haven't subscribed, do me a quick favor. It really, really helps the channel. Subscribe and even share this with someone who is a Christian or learning about Bible translations if you think it'll be beneficial. It really helps. Why did King James want a popular Geneva Bible completely replaced? I mean, it was the popular Bible. Why produce another translation? Well, it wasn't because the translation was bad. Contrary to popular opinion, it was actually brilliant. He hated it because of the fine print. You see, the Geneva Bible was packed with anti-monarchy marginal notes, like anti-establishment notes that question the absolute power of the kings or the rulers. To King James, that wasn't just theology, that was treason. He then used a church conference as the perfect excuse to authorize a brand new translation. Handled by Richard Bancroft, the bishop at this time, the project had one ultimate goal, non-negotiable in a sense, non-questionable. No marginal notes allowed. The King James Bible wasn't just born

out of a desire to learn the scriptures, don't miss this, and this is history, it was born out of political damage control. And not to mention, King James didn't do this because he loved the Lord or wanted to serve the Lord. He did this because he wanted his name on a Bible that would be remembered forever. And here's how he did it. 54 of England's finest scholars, though only 47 are in the printed copy, these 54 scholars were divided into six panels. Two of them were at Oxford, two were at Cambridge, two were at Westminster, and their assignment was simple. Not to start from scratch, from the original Greek and Hebrew, they were told, this is crazy but true, they were told to produce a revision of the bishop's Bible that came before. Now, let me just pull over for a moment. One day I'll show you this if I have time. But I actually own, I was gifted, this is wild, an original bishop's Bible and a great Bible. So at my office, in my safe, because they're my prized possessions, I actually have the great and the bishop's Bible. which was the authorized versions. They're not complete, but they're almost. I've watched these, I've looked at these Bibles. I've taught from these Bibles. They're good translations.

The King James Version of the Bible is not from the original Greek and Hebrew. It's a revision of a revision. And the Bishop's Bible, if I remember, it was put together by like nine bishops. I'm not saying they did bad, shoddy work, but that's what it was. And along the way, certain words that William Tyndale had produced before started to get changed. William Tyndale had rolled back older church language and made it more modern. So for example, Tyndale's word congregation, which by the way, I think would be great today, instead of calling it a church, we think of a building or a place, he called it the congregation, the ecclesia, the ekkod in the Old Testament, which was a people. So what I tell people is you don't go to church, you, in a sense, assemble as the church. Where we gather, that's a congregation. Tyndale's word love became charity, and you see how this works for the church. You know you need to do something, you need to express it in charity. When the panels finished, a review committee of 12 people, two from each panel, went back through the entire process. They looked at every word, and then they included 14 books of the Apocrypha, which is the intertestamental period,

just as the earlier English Bibles had done before. The work took two years, and then finally went to press in 1611. I think it took nine months to print, because you have to imagine, every word is typesetted. The letters are typesetted into a plate, and then you have to change it for every single page. It's exhausting to think about. And here's what most people don't know. The King James you're holding today is certainly, if you have an original or King James version, the King James you're holding today is not the 1611 translation. In fact, I would say, the people that are fighting for this don't even realize, don't miss this, what I'm about to tell you. Over the next century and a half, the text was cleaned up, words were re-spelled, there was re-punctuation, they re-edited the translation again and again and again. John Wesley himself, the founder of Methodism, put out a revision with thousands of changes. But the one you hold in your hand today is actually the 1679 Oxford Scholar edition by a man named Benjamin Blaney. He produced what is now the standardized edition, for all practical purposes, of the King James Bible that is printed and sold today. Now, here's what I'm saying. Most people that are arguing for the 1611 King James,

again, I have a Bible page on my wall from the end of Malachi of the King James version. If I were to show you the original 1611 translation, you would be hard-pressed to read anything. There are words there we don't even use anymore, much less translations and letters that are foreign to us. The main other question is this, how many differences from the original 1611, which was supposedly given by angels heaven to earth, how many changes are in the modern Bible today that we have that called the King James version, how many differences between Blaney's, let me say it this way, 1769 version and the original 1611, between 80, brace yourself, and 100,000 changes? They changed, no, I'll give you this. Most are minor spelling punctuation changes, but there are about 450 major changes. We wouldn't even be able to read the original version because of the language and the archaic words and the meanings that are different. Here are two examples that I think are substantive. Here's one of them, Matthew 6, 3, from the original 1611 version, you can look this up, accidentally printed this line, let not thy right doeth. That's what it says, let not thy right doeth, which Blaney corrected to the proper phrase, let not thy right hand do it. Okay, you say, well, that's not a big deal.

Well, there's a difference between right and right hand. Okay, that's a big deal, that's just one. Give you another one, Psalm 69, 32. The 1611 version misprinted and added these words, and your heart shall live that seek good. Blaney, years later, corrected it back to the original Hebrew, which said simply, those that seek God. See the difference? There's an addition of words there that aren't in the original language or original manuscript. The one that I'm interested. and this is what got me started on this, has to do with my passion for making disciples. And if you open a standard KJV Bible and look at the phrase or the words from Ephesians 4, which is kind of the quintessential passage on disciple making, 11 through 13, you will find two seemingly innocent commas that completely reshape the structure of the local church. Now I wanna put it on the screen and I'll read it to you, but I want you to see what the original King James says, and God, he gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers. Before we go further, I want you to know in the original Greek and Hebrew, there are no punctuation marks. Those are supplied later by the translators. Verse 12, for the perfecting of the saints, comma, for the work of the ministry, comma,

for the edifying of the body of Christ. Verse 13, till we all come into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God until a perfect man, until the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. You get the point. Now let's go back. Because of how these commas break up the sentence, the text reads like a threefold job description exclusively for the professionals. These are professionals who only are called to do them, the pastors, the evangelists, the ministers. These are the ones who are expected to do the work of ministry, which is threefold if you read it this way. They are to perfect the saints. Number two, they're to do the work of ministry. Number three, they are to build the body of Christ up until they attain the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, a mature man. That's their role. While everyone else in the congregation sits idly by in the pews. But here's the catch. In the original Greek manuscript, like I said, there are no commas. The commas weren't inspired by God. They were inserted by a 17th century translator. And I would submit to you, watch this. I preach a whole sermon titled The Comma That Kept the Church in a Discipleship Coma

for 300 years, 300 or 400 years, depending on if you take it to today. But here's the deal. I would submit that the single grammatical choice of this person is the massive reason why the Western Church has been stuck in a coma of discipleship. Why? Because why would we go out and empower the people to do the work of ministry when it's our job as the leaders? Now, I was raised in the Catholic Church where there was an insurmountable, as I was a child, my father now has accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior, and we go to a Protestant church. Obviously, I preach in a Protestant church. But I asked my dad growing up, I said, Dad, did you ever think ever that you could be like the priest, ever? He said, Robbie, the priest was like right under Jesus, like he was the closest thing to heaven. There was this insurmountable chasm between the clergy and the laity. The priest performed all the sacred ministerial duties while the parishioners passively sat by and watched from a distance. Here's what I've learned. After I surrendered to Christ, I started attending Protestant churches that would repeatedly say this line,

every member is a minister of the gospel. But here's the tragic reality in that. That's true, but the tragic reality is that while our theology has changed, our practice hasn't. Every modern translation, thankfully, corrects the problem by stating it this way. Watch what the modern translation says. God gave the apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers to equip the saints, no comma, for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, which is the outflow. So the job of the leader of the church, you ready for this? Your pastor, your student pastor, your children's pastor, is to equip you to partner in ministry to advance the gospel. And oh, by the way, this is how you grow as a Christian. You see, the pathway to maturity is through doing ministry, not waiting for maturity on the backside. You grow through doing ministry for the Lord. Another thing to note, too, is the Apocrypha, as you study this, I mentioned this earlier, was so woven into the early King James Bible that by some accounts, for a time, a publisher could be punished if they didn't include it, or worse, even put in jail for leaving the Apocrypha out.

Today, almost every King James on the shelf omits the Apocrypha entirely. Now, before we move on, I want you to think about this. The 1611 King James Bible, most defended, is the 1769. It's not the original King James. And so a lot of people have no idea that they're defending a manuscript translation, which was, brace yourself, the 11th revision. Now it's time to understand. Okay, I get that, the history. Now we understand the translation choices behind the version. Every English Bible is a translation, and a translation has to be translated from something. The New Testament of the KJV came mostly from a Greek text called the Textus Receptus. It's a Latin word for the received text. And here's what most people in many pews or padded seats in America or abroad have never been told. The text was assembled by a Dutch scholar named Erasmus. And Erasmus' first edition came out in the year 1516, almost 100 years before the KJV. Erasmus was a brilliant scholar, but he worked fast and he had a deadline. And he only had a handful of Greek manuscripts that he could physically get his hands on to translate in the city. And the two manuscripts that Erasmus leaned on most heavily dated to roughly the 12th century or the 1300s, copies made around 1,000 years after the apostles died.

Now lock in, because this is important. And I wanna clear up one thing, because I've heard it said and almost repeated it myself, people will tell you the received text goes back to the 8th or the 9th century. And we need to be careful here, because here's the truth. The family of manuscripts it belongs to is called the Byzantine tradition. And it became the dominant standard text around the 8th century, that's all true. But the actual physical manuscripts that Erasmus held in his hands, it's all historically documented, years later were mostly from the 11th earliest or 12th century AD. Now, I want you to get that right. And you have to understand that as we move forward. So 11th, 12th century. I wanna give you a window into the human process of the translation. In 1 John 5, the received text, which became the King James Version, contained the single clearest statement of the Trinity in the whole Bible. It's called the Comma Johannium, the Comma Johannium. The problem, it shows up in almost none of the Greek manuscripts. The earliest Greek copies of scripture don't even have a reference to this that come from the apostles.

It lived mainly in the Latin tradition. And the story goes that Erasmus added this into the Greek translation under immense pressure after his first two editions came out. Now, with that in mind, here's the question that changes everything. What if we found copies of the Bible, of the manuscripts, that were way older? Manuscripts that were closer to the source of when they were written. What would we do with that discovery? Well, the answer is we did. Let me introduce you to two of those manuscripts. The first one is the Codex Vaticanus. The second one is the Codex Sinaiticus or Sinaiticus. Both were discovered around the same time. And the second one, which is crazy, was discovered at a monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai. Both of them date back to the fourth century, roughly around the 300s AD. That's some seven, feel the weight of this, seven to 800 years prior to the medieval copies that Erasmus used to build his text, which is behind the King James Version of the Bible. I wanna make this practical so you understand what I'm saying. Imagine a family is telling a story that was passed down for years. Would you rather hear the story firsthand from the great, great, great grandfather

who was there to witness it, or from a cousin who's retelling it thousands of years later? Now, both might be faithful, but the one that's closer to the source in the original language is the one that you measure the others by. Even if the source is only singular, or in this case, two, it trumps all the ones later because it's closer to the original. The original languages, it was closer to that, the original context. Here's the point. The earliest, most reliable witnesses that we have are those two documents. And here's why I'm saying that. This is the whole principle, the one I build this entire channel on. I want you to. get as close to the original language as possible. I want you to get to the original eyewitness account as possible. Not because King James is a bad guy, although he may have done some bad things, but because closer to the source is more reliable. And reliability is exactly what we want when we translate or study or read the Bible for ourself. Now, here's where the King James-only argument tries to turn the tables. And here's what they'll say.

Those old manuscripts are corrupted. They're missing verses. Somebody's cut things out. And I understand why that's scary. I've been down this road, by the way. I went really deep into this conspiracy idea, and I've come back by God's grace. But when a verse you grew up with shows up in a footnote later in a translation like the CSB or the ESV or the New American Standard, your stomach drops. It feels like someone is taking the word of God away from you. But follow me carefully, because the truth is actually the opposite of what it looks like. The older manuscripts aren't shorter because someone removed verses like John chapter eight with the woman caught in adultery, you know that one, or the end of Mark chapter 16, which is bracketed. You read that too, and you're like, wow, what happened here? Or other translation footnotes that say this verse was not in 1 John, in the original older manuscripts. They're shorter because over the centuries, a scribe thought it was beneficial to add words to help the hearers. And I can prove this to you, and I wanna show you exactly how it happened. For nearly 1,500 years before the printing press, every copy of a Bible was made by hand, by a scribe, one word at a time. And those scribes loved the scriptures.

Picture one of them at his desk copying the Gospel of John. He reaches a hard verse and writes a little note in the margin, an explanation, if you will, just trying to help, because he knows he's copying this for a prestigious family or a church that's meeting. And so 50 years later, another scribe gets a copy of that manuscript to reproduce. And he sees a note in the margin, and he can't tell if it's a comment made by the scribe or it's actually in the text, whether he accidentally left it in, put it in, or whether it was in the margin. So he doesn't know. Wanting to be faithful to the manuscript, not wanting to lose a single word of God, he adds it. He thinks he's doing something reverent. He copies the margin note into the text, and from that point on forever, it's in there. Now, here's what I'm saying. He's not doing that out of corruption or malice. He's doing that out of a sincere desire to help. And the problem is this. Who ends up hurting from this? We do, because we want to go back to what God actually said. It's the reason you go to a restaurant, and when the waitress comes out with your burger and fries, the last thing you want from the transportation from the kitchen to the seat where you're sitting is for the waitress to be eating your fries, saying, mm, boy, those, you're gonna love this meal.

Mm, that's right. You don't want anybody messing with your meal. We definitely don't want anybody messing with God's word. Here's a real example. John chapter five, at the pool of Bethesda, the King James includes a line, and this is gonna shock you, so brace yourself, but it includes a line about an angel coming down to stir the waters. Remember this? The man couldn't get in, because when the angel would stir the water, he wasn't able to get in because he was disabled. It's a beautiful detail, but it's missing from the oldest and best manuscripts. The best explanation is that it began as a marginal note explaining why the people waited by the water, and then over time, it slipped into the text, and it became dogma. I mentioned earlier, but you see the same thing in the ending of Mark. We also see the same thing with the woman caught in adultery, John chapter eight. These passages are not in the earliest manuscripts of the Bible, and here's the point. I want you to walk away with this. None of this should shake you or me as a Christian. It doesn't shake any Christian doctrine. It doesn't change what we believe. The Trinity is taught all over the Bible,

even though it was added by this scribe later. We don't lose anything in the translation. We simply learned that a handful of lines were later additions. Friends, listen, the building doesn't fall because one brick turned out to be added later or removed later, and why do we all know this? Because God gave us so many manuscripts, more than 5,000 Greek copies of the New Testament, more than any other document in the ancient world by a mile, so when there's a question. We don't guess, we just compare. The abundance of the manuscripts isn't a threat to your faith, it's the very thing that brings us confidence. Now let me show you the most important, stunning proof of all of them. And this one is downplayed, and I don't think you understand the weight of this, but it's the greatest archeological find probably of the millennia, of all of the, maybe ever. In 1947, near the Dead Sea, in caves at a place called the Qumran, I take tours to Israel and we stop there every time to witness this firsthand. Scrolls were discovered that had been hidden roughly for about 2,000 years, likely by a devout, separatist Jewish community who most scholars call the Essenes.

They were priests in the temple who left to live in the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord to come by leaving the corruption and worshiping God. Now here's why this matters, and you have to understand the problem it solved. Before 1947, the oldest complete Hebrew copies of the Old Testament that we had came from around A.D. 1000. That is 1,000 years after the time of Jesus. So skeptics and critics had a field day. They asked questions like, how do you know the Old Testament you read today wasn't changed over centuries of copying by hand through scribes? You don't even have any early manuscripts. In fact, the closest you can go is over 1,000 years. The scrolls came out of the ground and turned everything on its head. And among them, the crowning jewel was the Great Isaiah Scroll. It was a complete copy of the entire book of Isaiah, and it was dated back to 125 B.C. Feel the weight of that. The single scroll that they found pushed the date back for the evidence over 1,000 years closer to the source. So they did the obvious thing. They laid the 125 B.C. scroll next to the medieval copies that we had that translated the King James or modern versions today, and they realized that the scroll of 125

matched exactly the Hebrew scroll we had from 1,000 A.D. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was the greatest archeological find of any time, much less from the 1940s, because it changed everything. And here's what I found. When they compared the two manuscripts across all 66 chapters of Isaiah, the differences came down to minor spelling and small variations, letters or different ways you spell a letter in the text. None of it changed the meaning or the message. The prophecies of judgment, the promises of redemption, the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, Isaiah seeing the Lord high and lifted up, all of it intact. After 1,000 years of copying by hand, the text held. Do you know what that means? It's the Old Testament version of everything I just showed you. When God finally let us check 1,000 years of scribal copying, the scriptures passed the test with breathtaking faithfulness. The Dead Sea Scrolls didn't expose the Bible as a fraud. They actually proved how carefully it had been preserved. So let me finish by putting it all together. We have more than 5,000 New Testament manuscripts and Old Testament copies that reach back before the time of Christ. The most well-attested collection of writings in the ancient world.

This book you hold in your hands, the Bible, has been tested and tried and confirmed to be true. The King James Bible did not fall out of heaven. We learned that. No angel carried it down a stairwell to earth. It was revised from an earlier English Bible, translated by godly men in 1611 from a Greek text assembled in 1516 from a handful of medieval copies that were given before. And the edition you read today is mostly from the 1769 Benjamin Blaney edition. That's not an insult, that's history. And those translators would be the first to tell you, don't elevate it greater than anything else. It was a translation meant to be updated. And here's what I want you to hear, especially if you grew up loving the King James version of the Bible. You don't have to choose between loving your Bible and telling the truth about it. We have more reasons to trust the scripture than any other book in the ancient world ever produced. The variations are real, yes, but they're tiny. And not one of them puts a single doctrinal. difference of your faith in danger. I met with the guy who was the leading translator for the New King James Version of the Bible, Dr. James Price, and I was trying to ask him, should I leave the modern translations, go back to the original?

And he said, Robbie, the differences in the translation don't make a difference with the doctrine. So read the translation you love, but don't make the translation a test of who's truly saved or who's truly faithful or who really has the word of God because we have a corner on the market. That's a wall the King James translators never built, and it's a wall Jesus never asked us to build as well. And I wanna leave you with one thing, and this grieves me more than anything. We will argue for hours about which Bible is the only Bible and never actually open it. Don't believe me? Talk to some ESV guys. I used to be one, totally, yeah. Or the NASB crowd or the NIV crowd. I mean, you talk to some of these guys, no shade at you, but that's the reality. And I want you to think about where we live. We are the most Bible-saturated generation in all of human history. 5,000 manuscripts, scrolls older than Christ, Bible apps in our pocket, dozens of translations on our shelf. We have more access to the Bible than ever before, but our affection for God's Word has waned. I like to say it this way. We are a literate society. We can read, but are illiterate to the Bible. Friends, the miracle isn't that we picked the right cover.

The miracle is that after thousands of years, you can hold the very Word of God in your hand that was given by God to his people for us to read. So don't just defend it, open it. You can't say God doesn't speak with a closed Bible by your bedside. Get as close to the original as you can, the Greek and Hebrew. You can have Bible apps and studies and Logos, because the closer we get to the source, the clearer the voice of God becomes in our life. And so let me encourage you, get into the Word until the Word gets in to you. If this video helped you see something new in God's Word, make sure you subscribe to the channel or share it with a friend. It really helps us get the Word out. And if you haven't hit that bell, it reminds you of upcoming videos. Until next time, get into the Word until the Word gets into you.