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Bible Study
See other Bible Study Articles

Title: Questions
Source: [None]
URL Source: [None]
Published: Jan 23, 2024
Author: Vicomte13
Post Date: 2024-01-23 12:12:33 by Vicomte13
Keywords: None
Views: 6183
Comments: 26

People believe different things, based on differing evidence.

Here, there are several people who believe, ardently, in their heart of hearts, that the King James Version of the Holy Bible is perfect, and directly from God. Nothing in it is wrong, or can be.

I do not ask these questions to mock anyone's belief; I ask to understand it, the extent of it. Were I ever to adopt such a belief, I would need to be convinced it was true. I do not say that I cannot be convinced; that is not true. I COULD BE convinced, were I shown the proper evidence.

So, let me ask my questions. I would like a thoughtful answer from a KJV- Only believer.

Of course, once I send this, it is in the air, and each of you may do as you please with it. It is much easier to attack me, claiming that my question is insincere, claiming to know the interior of my heart, etc. And in this way, to dodge the question. But the question remains. I would hope that we could avoid that step, and just answer my question.

(To help, I will give what I believe the KJV-Onliest's response would be. If it is right, the KJV-Onliest could simply aver that: "Yes, that is correct." If it is wrong, he may correct it.)

Question 1: Following the time frame and the genealogies present in. Genesis, Chapters 1-5, the earth is approximately 6000 years old. There can be some fluctuation and some uncertainty, especially in connecting Moses to a particular reign of a particular Pharaoh in Egypt. This might add a few hundred years, here and there.

The Septuagint Greek, likewise, renders a world that is about 12,000 years old, give or take, but we are using the KJV, and it is about 6000 years old, about 2000 years before the Flood, and 4000 years since.

Do you agree?

My view of what the KJV-Onliest will state: "Yes, that is correct. If you add up the years of the genealogy tables in Genesis 4 and trace them forward, you get a precise number of years from Adam to the Flood, and there are references to the ages of Adam's sons and their offspring after the Flood, to the sons of Isaac and the descent into Egypt, and then to the number of years the Hebrews were in Egypt. Connecting Moses' Pharaoh to the historical timeline is imperfect, but it was in Egypt, and we can narrow it to a certain band of time, perhaps 100-200 years. So, we cannot state with certainty that the world was created on EXACTLY October 7, 3761 BC, as the Orthodox Jews do, because the Bible record gets fuzzy in terms of exact lifespans and dates with Moses, as a ballpark that is about right, give or take a few years.

The world is NOT 15,000 years old, let alone 4.5 billion. Plants were created on the third day of creation, and various animals were created on the 5th Day, and the 6th, with the creation of Adam being last, but this was all in 3 days.

Now, "a day in the sight of God is a thousand years" the KJV says, so MAYBE, just MAYBE, there was a 3500 year span between the creation of plants and the creation of man. But it says nowhere that a day is 500 million years, or a billion years. So, maybe you could tack on a few thousand years for the first 5 days, but that's it.

According to the KJV, the world is about 6000 years old. Maybe 11,000, if one reads those days without men as "a thousand years", maybe not. That is not perfectly clear.

What IS clear is that it is NOT 4.5 billion years old. That is flatly contradicted by the Bible."

Is that a fair statement of the KJV-Onliest's belief?

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#1. To: Vicomte13 (#0)

Let me throw some thoughts out there in regards to your questions.

Firstly I think you are sincere, I believe you're always sincere.

I think The KJV preserves Gods word perfectly. I'm not going to say you have to believe the KJV only to be saved. I'm not going to say other Bibles don't contain his word or at least some of it. I do think at least some of them are flawed though. Such as the NIV which seems to call Jesus a sinner because he was angry. I also don't believe you have to believe the earth is young in order to be saved. I do think it is foundational though. I think if you don't believe that and you talk to other people to show them that the Bible is Gods word that it gives them a reason to not believe since you have to change the simple meaning of words to make it fit with what the world is currently saying about the age of the earth. So I think it would undermine some peoples potential faith. I think if you cannot trust the foundation the Bible is laid on then why believe the rest of it many people would conclude. I think the foundation is under attack so Gods word can be discredited.

I haven't added up all of the begats but the numbers you throw out in my opinion are in the ballpark.

I don't claim to be a Bible scholar or know it all. Even though I may come across that way sometimes by the way I talk. Sorry about that.

In Second Peter 3:8 where it says "8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."

Here is what I notice. It doesn't say a day is a thousand years and it doesn't say a thousand years is a day. It says "IS AS". To me that is saying how can I put this. It is saying that God is outside of time. That what seems like a long time to us is a short "time" for God because he is timeless. It is also saying this in the context of Christs return so that if it is a long time to people it isn't a long time to God and to be patient he will return.

If plants were created on X day and it was thousands of years in between. Then everything would die in the thousand of years of darkness it would seem to me. Also I would bet if you did look up day and night in the Greek or Hebrew I bet you that it is the same word used in other parts of the Bible and no one interprets those times as being a thousand years.

Also I've heard it said well if a thousand years is as a day and day is as a thousand years then it cancels itself out. Just passing on what I have read.

There are some of my thoughts. Unfortunately not many people are here, so that someone smarter than I could give you answers.

A K A Stone  posted on  2024-01-24   0:06:37 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#2. To: A K A Stone (#1)

No no, that is what I perceive to be the view of KJV-Onlyists: that the Word of God is True, and the KJV is the accurate Word of God, and that, therefore, when Genesis says that the world is a few thousand years old, that is true. Were it not true, then it Genesis becomes a metaphor or an allegory, and if that is the case, anything else can be. I think you are right on the money in terms of these beliefs.

There is no need to be a more accurate scholar; the minute details are not important to my question. The big picture: how old does the Bible say the world is, that is what I asked. And I think you are spot on. It SAYS the world is a few thousand years old, and until the 19th Century and the rise of certain sciences, everybody who was a Bible believer believed that. The writers of Genesis were not writing metaphor; THEY believed that.

So, WE can look and say, "well, we think the world is 4.5 billion years old, so we have to reinterpret what is written metaphorically, because we want to preserve our natural beliefs, and yet preserve the authority of the text.

I also agree with you about most translations. I don't think that the NIV translators intended to change the meanings, but they did. Every translation made after the mid-1800s was made by minds that either accepted evolution, or rejected it, but they BOTH had it in their minds, and sought to reflect their belief, one way or the other, into the text.

If one goes back before the 19th Century, in English you have the KJV, the Catholic Douai-Rheims/Challoner translation, and some older English translations by the Calvinists (the Bishop's Bible, the Geneva Bible).

The full KJV (presented to English monarchs at the time of their coronation), contains the Deuterocanonical ("Apocryphal") works, because the Church of England never took the harsh stance of Martin Luther against those books. So, if one buys a full KJV in English, one will have the full deuterocanon in it. In America, the influence of Baptists and other non- Anglican Protestants has made the Deuterocanon a theological issue, and completely removed them from the books. The KJV itself, as used in England, has the "Apocrypha" in it. The only difference is the order of these books, which are inserted within the Catholic Bible at the places they belong chronologically, but which are separated and placed at the end in the KJV.

The other thing to know, pre-18th Century, is that the Catholics recognized the superiority of the prose of the KJV, and so in the early 1700s, Bishop Challoner, took the Douai-Rheims Bible, the Catholic translation, and adjusted the language to reflect the KJV in every single place that he could. There are no theological differences in the translations. Where they differ is in certain books of the Old Testament (Esther is the main one) where the Catholics had always used a different base text (Septuagint tradition versus Jewish tradition), and so the language translated was different from what the KJV was based on. In such cases, Challoner left the older Catholic language.

If you set the Challoner/Douai-Rheims) and the KJV side by side, you will be reading the same Bible, except in those certain books (none in the New Testament, and only a few in the Old Testament (Esther and Daniel being the ones where the textual differences are most pronounced.)

There never was a theological difference between the Catholics and the Anglicans who produced the KJV. The difference has always been questions of Church governance, going back to Henry VIII's decision to declare himself the Head of the English Church (vice the Pope) because he wanted a divorce that the Church would not grant. And so it came to pass that English Catholics and Anglicans and everybody else essentially used the KJV until the late 1800s.

In 1970, the Catholic Church began usind it's own new translation of the Scriptures into English, the "New American Bible", which is based on modern English, and uses the original Greek and Hebrew manuscripts as the base texts, as opposed to the Latin Vulgate. We should recall that the KJV translators themselves were all educated in the Vulgate, and they COMPARED their translations to the Greek texts and Hebrew they had, only changing the words where these differed. The KJV is at heart a translation of the Vulgate into English, with corrections. Revelation in the KJV is a straight translation of the Latin, because they had no Greek manuscripts to consult.

This is why I am always happy to use the KJV. It WAS the Catholic Bible, in all of its essentials, until 1970, and the text is still official, just not used in most services. The Catholics don't CALL it the KJV, they CALL it the "Douai-Rheims", but thanks to Bishop Challoner in the 1700s, it really IS the KJV text.

Most people don't know this. The Catholics don't, because the Bible is great reading but not the final source of authority in the Catholic Church - the Church is - so the differences in translation don't matter much. The Protestants don't because they don't know (or necessarily care) about what the Catholics have been doing.

To me, the KJV, British editions (published with the "Apocrypha" in them) is a complete Bible. The variants in Daniel and Esther don't matter in the conversations I have (because I'm always focused on Jesus, and in the New Testament, the Douai/Challoner Bible and the KJV are the same thing).

Of course, what a KJV-Onliest and a Catholic think the Bible IS differs, but the TEXT is the same. I'm a scientific, evolution-believing Catholic, like the last 7 or so Popes. As a scientist, I recognize your points regarding the text. If one takes the text as being the literal revealed word of God, and that God INTENDED for us to have this text to answer our questions, then the text itself is of vital importance. If it is your highest authority, then it has to be RIGHT. That it doesn't happen to be my highest authority does not change the fact that I understand why, to someone with your perspective, the text has to be perfect, because your faith is based on it.

While I'll get cute and quote the original KJV with its horrendous medieval spellings and print conventions of 1611 in it, I only do that to be obnoxious. There IS a clear difference in the translations made BEFORE evolutionary theory and afterward. All of those made afterward, but people who either believe in evolution or are worried about it, is inflectd by this belief that the text has to modified to reflect "reality". (The Catholics, because they ALWAYS thought of the Bible as a metaphoric source book and did not place ultimate authority on it (see St. Augustine, writing in the 380s), actually don't have this particular problem of text manipulation - simply because it doesn't matter as much to them. Protestants have to be much more exacting, because it's the literal final authority, so what it SAYS affects everything.)

And this is why the KJV is the source text I always want to use when discussing anything across religious boundaries. It's the only way to bring on the most sincere KJV-Onliests (who do the purest work - see the amazing film that guy made), and they're going to disagree with the people who use the NIV more than they do with me about the text, because I know that the KJV text, under a different name, WAS the Catholic Bible used in all English-speaking Churches until I was 7.

All of that is to say that I AGREE with you, precisely BECAUSE the KJV translation was really excellent, AND because it comes from a time before the anxieties and fears of the translators about natural science and inclusive politics put pressure on them to inflect the language. I may think that Genesis is a metaphor, but I want to get the language of the ages there. The people who wrote it didn't think it was a metaphor, and I want to know what THEY thought, not some blend of ancient words and 21st Century sensibilities.

It doesn't bother me that the ancients got scientific things wrong. Having had neither telescopes nor microscopes, how could they possibly know? They didn't, and that's not what they were thinking about anyway. I know you don't think about it that way, but I do. I would rather have my ancient religion straight, as it was. I'll make the corrections in the physical background to what I know things to be - doesn't change the message for me. You would probably find that approach disturbing, and that can't be helped. What I find disturbing is people messing with the original text BECAUSE they are trying to alleviate their own concerns about what it SAYS versus what they believe. Changing the text itself, in translation, to address modern fears strikes me as dishonest. No! It says what it says. To me, it's better to read it as it really is, and realize from that reading that you have to take it as a metaphor or throw it out completely, rather than change what it is and claim that your changed thing is real.

These are all of the reasons why I agree with you that the KJV is the best text in English, the most influential. And while the NAB is fine for Catholics, who don't place the same sort of weight on the Bible as Protestants do (what's important from a Catholic perspective is that they get what Jesus said exactly right, since he's the only authority in or outside of the Bible that can actually move the Church to change directions...and slowly at that), the KJV (called Douai/Challoner) was the Catholic Bible used in Church from the 1700s until after 1970, and still is an officially sanctioned translation.

In fact, in a parallel to the KJV-Onliest, traditional Catholics (the Latin Mass types), will ONLY use the Douai/Challoner, which is the say, the KJV. Go figure.

I myself prefer to use it in all discussions.

Because I am a Catholic, and do believe in evolution, and think that the Jesus ended the land covenant with Israel - and because I see the open conflicts between what Jesus said and Paul, John and James (Jude is writing about Enoch, and Peter just exhorts Jesus and love of each other, so he's harmless in ways that Paul, and to a lesser extent James and John, are not), to ME, by far the most important thing is to get what Jesus said exactly right. And for THAT I think you need the Greek manuscripts used by the Eastern Catholics, translated into exacting English. So I use the Eastern Orthodox English translation of the Patriarchal Text and compare that to the Greek. (Or rather, I used to compare it to the Greek. I have found it to be so precise, with great footnotes, that I have come to trust it and just use that.)

Now, to ME, in truth, almost all of the Bible translations get everything important about what Jesus said right, so I'm perfectly happy to pick up anybody's translation - from the NIV to the New World Translation, and go straight to the words of Jesus...and start to systematically attack every part of their traditions that don't comport with Jesus. I do the same thing with the Catholics too. The only difference is that Catholics almost always AGREE with me that, yeah, we should do better. They at least recognize the authority of Jesus. I have found a lot of other people too caught up in their own church traditions to the point that Jesus is ultimately less important to them than the other traditions they place on a greater footing than him. I always internally laugh at this, because it means that I - the Catholic evolutionist - am REALLY the more Christian, since I place Christ ABOVE all else, including all the rest of the Bible. I find that others won't do that...and that it always - in every case - means diluting Christ with crap. It makes people mad when I won't.

And Christ in the KJV? Perfect as can be.

When it comes to Bibles, I am the KJV's biggest fan. It's an official Catholic Bible (under another name). The Orthodox use it. The Protestants will use it, either claiming (as you do) that it is the only RIGHT one, or accepting that it's old, but still good.

You will never find me arguing against using the KJV. Our purposes are different, but the KJV is the best for mine. And of course you think it came from God.

Vicomte13  posted on  2024-01-24   9:10:03 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#4. To: Vicomte13, AKA Stone (#2)

I am liking this civil debate, y'all...makes it worthwhile reading with strong points made by both commenters.

Regards...MUD

Mudboy Slim  posted on  2024-01-24   9:54:48 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


Replies to Comment # 4.

#5. To: Mudboy Slim (#4)

To me, it's not a debate! I am telling a KJV-Onliest why I agree with him that the KJV (Douai/Challoner to the Catholic) is the best text to discuss the Bible.

And I am trying to discuss the Bible from his perspective. My own is my own, and it doesn't matter for these purposes. It isn't really opposed to his on a great number of things. I just want to bring into sharp relief exactly what his beliefs are, and clear away the underbrush of what other people believe, that gets injected all the time.

The deuterocanon/apocrypha, for example. This is an old, angry debate between some Catholics and many Protestants. But we don't have it, if we use the KJV, because the deuterocanon/apocrypha are all part of the KJV. They're not in the same order as in the Catholic Bible, but so what? They're THERE. That Luther and the Calvinists rejected it completely, and their heirs have added a lot of anger to that, is irrelevant to us: the Anglicans who translated the KJV included the deuterocanon in the Bible, in a separate section. They did not get so wild and angry as to throw it out. So it's there. So a subject of angry debate with others is simply removed.

I don't think there's anything IN the deuterocanon that makes any moral difference anyway, because I think the whole moral law comes from Jesus, so for ME it's not a "Biblical perfection" issue. But I know to Protestants it IS, given what they think that the Bible is. And I note that the KJV translators, in their Anglican wisdom, translated them and left them in their Bible. So the KJV-Onliest and I have no quarrel. No do we really have a quarrel about their importance. He gives no importance to them, and I give no great importance to anything other than what Jesus said and did. This, of course, the KJV-Onliest does NOT agree with, but in THIS context that doesn't matter. The full KJV is great.

Oh, and because I don't really believe that it's "inspired by God", I only use the medieval wording and print conventions of the real ORIGINAL KJV to be obnoxious. I am perfectly fine updating the spelling and print conventions. And I know that, really, the KJV-Onliest is too - though having taken the stance that only the original KJV is the true revealed word, he's relieved to just be able to use the KJV with practical modern spelling, not thinking that really makes a difference. I agree, it doesn't, though for different reasons.

There is a purity to KJV-Onlyism that I appreciate. His sources are accessible to me. I can read it, and see what it says, and THAT is the final authority. (Now, of course, I see powerful conflicts in the authority, and think that those conflicts must be resolved, and my resolution of those conflicts is to put Jesus on top of it and resolve everything according to him. Whatever conflicts with Jesus is wrong. I am perfectly ready to use the KJV Jesus to do that. While reading "reign of God" for "basileus tou theou" paints a more accurate picture in my mind than "Kingdom of God", that is really nuanced, and doesn't make a difference grosso modo.

But here, I'm not pushing this. I am really interested in fleshing out the beliefs, and I am grateful for the KJV as common ground. Because he's correct: if you run around in different translations, you can find a translation that suits you. Having an unchanging text forestalls those games on the part of others, and because Jesus says exactly what I want him to say in the KJV, I don't need to find another translation and am perfectly content to use that text. It's perfect.

Vicomte13  posted on  2024-01-25 09:56:22 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


End Trace Mode for Comment # 4.

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