Three Myths about King James Bible

before I get going wanted to point out that a new book that I have published is now out check out the affiliate link below if you want to find out more big moments in history tend to be velcro for myths about their creation whether it's George Washington in the Appletree Julius Caesar having been born from a c-section hence the name or that Columbus actually discovered America and not the Caribbean these myths just tend to grow and while some myths are worse than others invented to make things greater than they were or created as just outright fabrications many myths from history are a result of misremembered facts or misjudging the context of an earlier period of time right now we're gonna look at three of the myths about the King James Bible now we are not going to be wading into a lot of the claims today by KJV only folks or the counterclaims to that movement but rather we're gonna look at the broader myths the myths that are often told in popular textbooks or just from time to time as would be story tellers of history actually misjudge either the context or some of the facts as they occurred so we don't want to say that these myths are pernicious lies or anything like that but rather they misjudge the story they overturn things they stop us from noticing some of the nuance and the shading about the origin of the KJV first the myth is that King James was so opposed to Puritanism that he wanted the Bible in order to silence them this myth is more of a problem of our popular recreation I find of the story of the KJV this tends to happen mostly around the time of Thanksgiving things like school plays and parades during the Thanksgiving season are times when we usually hear about how religion was forbidden back in the old world and all these huddled masses yearning to breathe free and so they put together some ramshackle chips and headed over the Atlantic at times it can actually sound like the Bible itself was stripped from the hands of believers in fact I remember my child taking part to play in his pre-k days actually was the King James going around everyone in the head and taking their Bibles I've heard popular accounts though that should know better that telev scores of people executed under Elizabeth first for the simple fact of being a Puritan Elizabethan and Jacobean England start to sound a little bit like Stalinist Russia of course we don't to make light of persecution or even of oppression but the situation in England was more about ending dissent than outright persecution both under Elizabeth's reign and under the reign of James the first the Anglican Church you have to understand was clearly Protestant everyone knew it was Protestant later claims about Anglo Catholicism or some kind of throwback as if aniconism had avoided Protestantism is a modern invention the issues in the days of Elizabeth and James though were centered on worship this animated not a few people one fact I always pull out to folks in order to tell them that what you're dealing with however are two versions of Protestantism is that during Elizabeth's reign in the 1560s when they were arguing about vestments both sides actually cited the same sources against one another well you haven't read so and so and if you did you would know that these vestments are wrong well you didn't read so-and-so and they said that they weren't wrong with that they were a matter of conscience so in the end what is happening in the Anglican Church itself during these years is really more of a debate among siblings and that doesn't make it irrelevant it just means that what we're dealing with is not a dominant church that has an opposing theology or confession at its core rather we're looking at different applications and those can be very important things but they don't make you utterly divided one from another more importantly the pilgrims who eventually made their way to this new world were not fleeing from James they were sent they were chartered they were allowed to come in many ways with James began by allowing dissenters to leave it is kind of separating the two Squa blurs you go to the other side of the Atlantic and when you're there as long as you send trade back well then you'll be allowed to worship than whatever church you happen to build back here its Anglicanism so when James is sitting there at the Hampton Court conference and he has not even been crowned yet and he's already dealing with this Anglican versus Puritan fight what he's dealing with is not a love of Anthon ism and a hatred of Puritanism in fact James had been king of Scotland and Scotland was thoroughly reformed and it had tossed out many of the liturgical and ecclesiastical practices that were endorsed and used in England RAAA what James does is he sides with the established church he realizes that he can't allow the dissenters to overturn everything that had only lately been established and protected so one of James famous quotes during this Hampton Court conference no bishop no king or another way of reading that is no Anglicanism no king but you see any politician would say the same then and now I will not overthrow everything that is established reforms are to be done in a piecemeal and slow process and you must follow the leadership he's not gonna allow the tail to wag the dog so James does shut them down he silences them in a way but the way James silences them is in their complaining about worship so when the myth says that King James opposed Puritanism and therefore lobbied or rallied for a Bible that eventually became known as the King James Bible or the authorised Bible that wasn't an oppositional move to Puritanism in fact it was the opposite James said look I'm not going to get into this squabble about worship and he actually makes fun of the Puritans at the conference but it is in fact a Puritan himself who suggests that a way forward a way to get off the subject of worship would be to translate a new Bible you see both sides Anglicanism with the bishops Bible and the Puritans or Reformed folks with the Geneva Bible had actually brought in the Word of God as you might say a set piece in their fight this is our Bible and that's their Bible and we will not use their Bible this kind of a thing so when James hears that he can put them all to work translating a new Bible he says AHA this would actually work this would actually be a good task since you both share a commitment to the scriptures in fact one of the key features of the King James Bible shows this the fact that in its 1611 printing it has no notes nothing it has a title page and it has the Bible James specified that they were not going to use theological notes that were so common and other products and Bibles so you see the Bible for King James was not a point of sticking it to the Puritans but rather of trying to get them to accommodate and have commonality and common ground with their Anglican opposition probably what's behind this myth or some half-remembered truths about the Wickliffe Bible being scorned and oppressed or that Tyndale was executed for the translation of his Bible that's about a century earlier for Tyndale and far earlier than that when we go back to the story of Wickliffe this is not the story of the King James Bible though no Bibles were taken out of their hands in fact long after the KJV was printed and established as the choice for English speakers they were still published the other Bibles the Geneva Bible and so on so what James is trying to do is not ruin Puritanism but reform them and get them on to a more positive vision for the Church of England second is the myth that the Bible itself the King James Bible was authorized by the crown this myth is I think do larger to the fact that we even call it the King James Bible in America or it is known as the authorized Bible in Britain there is this long-standing legacy of saying that the Bible is somehow officially sanctioned by the crown now the names are not bad we're not gonna get rid of them it's gonna be the KJV or the authorized version however the story is mislaid when we say that this is somehow required by the crown James does influence the King James Bible as I already said he specifies that if they're gonna be allowed to do this then they must have no notes and he had a couple of other small stipulations but at no point does James sanction specify require or demand that the Bible is officially the text of the Anglican Church rather what he does is he does send a letter asking that anglican churches put a copy in every one of their congregations now that's a tall order the prices were a bit steep at the beginning but you see influence is not the same as authorization in fact the King never did this the last English King to actually authorize a Bible officially was Henry the eighth with his great Bible back in the 1530s ever since then you have royal influence but not royal sanction the closest that comes the royal sanction is that one family the Parker family was given the copyright or the legal rights to print the King James Bible maybe that's where some of this myth comes from you see that one person is given the copyright and the Assumption must be that well the King has the copyright and he loans that out to the publisher that's more modern publishing than it is back in the 17th century you see to publish any Bible in England require this copyright whether it was required or not these are the Wickliffe lost back from the Middle Ages and some others along the way that basically made it illegal without royal sanction to publish the Bible now what James did not want was a series of adaptations or changes to the Bible that would rehash the debate restock the anger and so as was very common he gave one copyright license to the Barker family two others were allowed to publish the King James Bible in the original and that was the University of Oxford in Cambridge because of their long-standing tradition of training people in theology you see James was ultimately embarrassed to inherit a divided Anglican Church he would an either side to really feel earthy one and once he puts them on the road to translating the Bible he very much is happy to see it to succeed but he doesn't do so by Fiat or by some kind of authorization from the crown and so while the name King James Bible or the authorized Bible will never go away it is in fact not true that James did anything officially as the king third and lastly is this idea that the King James Bible was relatively untouched or altered until the rise of modern translations in the 1880s with the publication especially of the our viii or revised version now this is a bit of a hot water subject the KJV only folks and those who counter the KJV only folks love to get into the squabble about if the KJV ever changed you'll meet all types of folks that are sixteen eleven only KJV only folks and there are others who argue that in fact there is no material chains whatsoever over the course of the cage of his life that it was sort of unblemished for three hundred years we can find all kinds of things online frankly about what constitutes a serious change in the text or not to begin we can say that there were some changes made there were alterations slight improvements little things like this we're not going to focus on the fact that sometimes printers published an errant text so they had errors themselves in the print run that's common for the day in fact that's the story of the famous wicked Bible published actually by the blocker family and which famously they forgot to put the word not and thou shalt not commit adultery these types of things and so the wicked Bible was printed saying thou shalt commit adultery now it was actually a tragic story the book er patriarch is actually thrown into prison for a while and pays a massive fine for doing this so we're not talking about those types of changes there were going to be typographical improvements or fixes tweaks like that along the way those are not serious changes there were however some changes that were more deep you might say some of the language was fixed here and there how much well that's more in the eye of the beholder I don't myself find that these changes later are ultra radical they're not flipping the text or modernizing it per se so in many ways the 1611 Edition does more or less carry on the problem in the debate amongst those who are KJV only in these things is that they only look at additions that are marked or labeled as the King James Bible you see when someone took the King James Bible in the new world in America and updated it and revised it and changed its language in almost no case is it printed with the name King James Bible so for example John Wesley famous founder of the Methodist movement actually released a new Testament which he revised the King James Bible to be in a refreshed English style he also tweaked some of its theological nuances and things like this but by and large he said look the KGB's fine but I need it to be in the language of the people Leslee of course is on these evangelism circuits leading lots of folks of low or no education to the faith and he realizes that the King James Bible is just simply too highbrow you might say but see that Bible is a revision of the King James Bible it is foundationally the same though it is only modernised and there are our number of these in fact quite a few so wouldn't we say that the King James Bible was unchanged well if you only look at King James Bibles so-called well that certainly gonna be the case however there was a movement of foot already by the 1700s particularly after the founding of America and around 1776 after that the King James Bible lost its copyright infringement policies why well because America was no longer answering to the crown that copyright that the crown had given to one family and horse by this point it has gone from the Barkers to a different family that copyright law no longer applied to the new nation and so when folks wanted to update revise modernize the spelling or the wording of some places they were free to do so these Bibles would be printed under often a different name but they were nevertheless an implicit you might say charitable response to the King James legacy not by trying to tarnish it and call it unworthy or any of these types of things but rather to say we need to modernize it we need English in the way that it is spoken now and so in general the implicit idea is that the King James Bible was already by the end of the 1700s beginning to lose its grasp in terms of its language with those who were there in the new United States this is far more so in the eighteen hundreds of course and certainly by the end of the 1800s when you see the revised version come out much of their argument was not only a change in the foundational documents of the Greek but also that the Bible needed to be in a language spoken now so incensed that third myth is a truth and an untruth true in the sense that if you only want to look at the KGB runs over the centuries yes never really changed all that much but all around it people use the King James Bible to create a new Bible that is essentially the same as the King James Bible with an updated language or an updated wording that was meant for the people this is actually a long-standing tradition the RV was not necessarily the first but that's another video [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 342,193

Rating: 4.5501137 out of 5

Keywords: Ryan M. Reeves, King James Bible, KJV, James I of England, Authorized Bible, 1611 King James Bible

Id: _wvsJk8GL6M

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 15 2018