Can Matthew Henry Help You Understand KJV English? Yes and No.
I recently read a promoter of exclusive use of the King James Version who argued that if anyone has trouble understanding KJV English, they can just go to Matthew Henry’s commentary for all the explanations they need. I was skeptical. I still am. It’s just not the job or the concern of a turn-of-the-18th-century commentator to help turn-of-the-twenty-first-century readers understand turn-of-the-17th-century English words that have either died or changed in the last 400 years. So I checked one...
Why Do Our TR-Only Brothers Reject the NKJV with Such Passion? The Trinitarian Bible Society’s “Examination of the New King James Version”
I come to the Trinitarian Bible Society’s two-part, 38,000-word “Examination of the New King James Version,” written by Albert Hembd, with a question. The question is precise and direct: Will the author ever mention a specific passage in which the NKJV translators made a better choice than did the KJV translators? I am writing this paragraph before reading anything Albert Hembd has ever written; I’ve never even heard of him before writing these words—and he’s got a lot of space in which to say...
A False Friend (Kind of) in Shakespeare
I’m a fan of the music of Philip Glass. It’s the Western classical tradition stripped down to its essentials: triad after exciting triad (until it gets old, which it sometimes does, but listen to the composer play Mad Rush and tell me if the repetition gets old!). My introduction to Glass was through my brilliant cinephilic friend Elijah W. and the profound, wordless documentary (?) Koyaanisqatsi. Good stuff. I was excited recently when Spotify notified me that a recording of new Glass...
Plagiarism by Time Machine!
I originally posted this article on the Logos Talk Blog, and I obtained permission to repost it on my personal blog because I’m trying to have a reasonably complete record of my thoughts on the KJV under my “KJV” category for anyone out there in Internet Land who is interested. In my recent book, Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible, I argued that there were two major kinds of archaic words in the KJV, not one. And in the most flagrant example I’ve ever seen of plagiarism by...
Future.Bible Conference
In one week I'll be "speaking" "at" a "conference" on the future of the Bible that is all online—actually, I recorded the video today and am now uploading it. My talk was really fun to put together, and I gave it this title: "Anything Invented After You're Thirty-Five Is against the Natural Order of Things: A Media Ecology of Bible Software." In my talk I try to show a via media between techno-utopianism and the doomsday views of Ned Ludd. You can sign up to view my talk at this link.