Three Reasons a Common Argument against KJV-Onlyism Fails

I’m done addressing KJV-Onlyism at the popular level on December 31, 2024 (with a few little exceptions I mention in my wrap-up video), so I’m clearing out my files—and posting a few scripts that never made it to the channel.

I’ve heard many people over the years say that KJV-Onlyism makes the pastor a sort of priest between the believers in his church and the Lord. They need him to tell them what the impenetrable language of the KJV means. So holding onto the KJV is just a way for him to hold on to a kind of priestly, autocratic power over them.

I think this common argument fails—for three reasons.

First fail

First reason: I’m just not that cynical. Love isn’t cynical. In my experience, KJV-Only pastors sincerely believe the things their Bible college professors told them about Greek New Testament manuscripts and about the quality of the KJV. That’s at the same time one of the most encouraging and most frustrating aspects of KJV-Onlyism: I find I just can’t blame most of its adherents for believing a lot of the arguments they’ve heard from Bible college professors who ought to have to known better.

In my experience, too, KJV-Only pastors encourage Bible reading. I’ve heard them say many times—at least my KJV-Only pastor in high school did—that their people should side with the Bible against them, that they would listen to any constructive criticism given from an open Bible. To this day, despite having moved out of the KJV-Only position I was in then as a teenager, I love what my pastor said and I believe that he was absolutely sincere. He really did and does want to follow the Bible. He lived a life of integrity and service; he still does.

A friend of mine who went to two KJV-Only Bible colleges, where he never even heard of a “systematic theology” book—until, later, someone gave him a Logos Bible Software base package and he started educating himself, grew up in the home of a Hyles-Anderson grad pastor from back in the day. I asked him, “Why aren’t you bitter against your dad, considering all the areas of theological and biblical ignorance you now see he has?” He answered, “Because my dad is true blue. He has served the Lord faithfully within the framework of what he was taught in KJV-Onlyism. Yes, that framework has significant flaws, but my dad was a Christian father with integrity.” I prefer to believe that my KJV-Only brothers are like this man until they give clear demonstrations to the contrary.

Second fail

Second reason that argument fails: If we expect our KJV-Only brothers to be gracious to us and to the living translators of evangelical English Bibles, we need to be gracious to them. It’s the Golden Rule. One of the rampant problems I do see among KJV-Only and Textus-Receptus-Only people of all stripes is that they are radically uncharitable to brothers in Christ who work on the ESV or NIV. They say that these translations exist only for money, which is pretty cynical—and which is never, ever buttressed with any arguments or appeals to evidence. It’s just stated as if it were an obvious fact. They say that these brothers who make new translations are either dupes or devils who are undercutting the sound doctrine found only in the KJV. One writer at the Trinitarian Bible Society wrote a 38,000-word piece absolutely pillorying the NKJV, accusing its translators of promoting annihilationism and of undercutting the Bible’s teaching that salvation produces a changed life. He exploded minor differences between the KJV and NKJV into massive, hidden theological shifts. He didn’t make any attempt to let the NKJV translators explain their reasoning by checking their commentaries or articles. That was uncharitable. It was wrong. It was sin. I have sufficient evidence from this man’s own words to condemn those words.

But the right response to sin is not more sin. The right response to someone’s malicious misreading of another brother’s motives is not a malicious misreading of the motives of everybody else in their tribe. Whenever possible, again, I want to assume the best about my brothers. That’s what love does. It believes all things. It covers a multitude of sins.

Third fail

Here’s the third reason I don’t believe that KJV-Only pastors are all secret tyrants: People who have only heard about my work and never actually encountered it might be surprised to hear me say this, but KJV English is not, by and large, impenetrable. Most of it is intelligible to a reasonably educated English speaker. And if you grow up with it, you really do learn to get past the great majority of the minor differences between KJV English and contemporary, spoken and written English. I did this as a kid myself. I refuse to overstate my case about the readability problems caused by the KJV. And I truly believe that someone can disagree with me over the gravity of those readability problems. We’re talking about the proper weighting of things we all value; we’re not talking about one side being capital-R RIGHT and the other being capital-R WRONG.

So here’s the first half of my case, put simply: if edification requires intelligibility, it ought to weigh a lot with us that, even according to KJV-Only folks who put out big archaic word lists, there are literally hundreds of dead words in the KJV. Besom, beeves, bolled, bewray. Every time I type out these words in my writing app, at least one of them gets corrected! Bolled became “boiled” this time around, for example, before I changed it back. And it’s still marked with a red line; that word isn’t in our English, and my computer knows it. And you and I know it. It isn’t okay, according to 1 Corinthians 14, that there are hundreds of dead words in the Bible I hand to my kid. How many of these words should be allowed to stack up before it’s time for a revision? Good people can differ over this, I think.

And here’s the second half of my case: if edification requires intelligibility, it ought to weigh a lot with us that there are also “false friends” in the KJV, almost 100 by my count so far. False friends are words we don’t know we don’t know, words that will trip up a noticeable percentage of readers. Truth be known, in my experience, KJV-Only pastors are just as tripped up by dead words and false friends as the rest of us are. So I kind of don’t blame them for not clearly seeing the phenomenon (unless they’ve read my book and watched my videos, in which case I do blame them a little!).

A study I’d love to see someone do: look at hundreds or even thousands of sermons to see how often KJV preachers are tripped up by false friends. It would be a way to add objective, empirical analysis to refine my lived experience: what I have seen is that most KJV-Only brothers are in the same boat as the rest of us when it comes to dead words and false friends.

Back to first

And that kind of brings me back to my first reason for rejecting the idea that KJV-Only preachers hold onto the KJV in order to maintain their autocratic power over their people. They sincerely don’t think they’re being tripped or impeded! They think it’s easy to look up dead words, and often it is with the right KJV edition—you just look at the footnotes.

That’s still a problem, in my book: why can’t the footnotes clarifying the text just be brought into the text, so when you memorize or recite, you and your hearers will understand? If the KJV isn’t perfect or inspired, what’s the problem with changing “besom” to “broom” or “chambering” to “immorality”?

And these pastors mostly don’t even know about “false friends.” Until they watch my channel or read my book, which I happen to know many of them are doing. If I treat these brothers in Christ with cynical distrust; if I go around questioning their motives; they will rightly smell a rat and stop listening to me.

Sure, there are autocratic pastors out there, and not a few of them exist in the KJV-Only world. But they exist outside it, too. And I’m appealing to the average, mainstream KJV-Only pastor—I’m appealing to common ground: you and I both want our church members to understand Scripture when they listen to it preached and, all-importantly, when they read it privately. If you want them to succeed in that effort, follow the principle of Scripture—edification requires intelligibility—and give them a translation of whatever Greek New Testament edition you prefer into the English they actually speak.