Can you please explain to me why Baptist think they are the chosen one? Jesus was a Jew, not Baptist. I feel like I’m being condemned because I don’t believe in denominations of today. What I do believe is, I am a child of God, and he is my Heavenly Father. Is the KJV Bible the ONLY true Bible? I have a copy of the first Bible written in Hebrew. I’m getting confused. Confusion is not of God. Can you help me understand?  Thank you,  Many Blessings

Answer:

The attitude of those you came across in that church speaks for itself.  These people (who I have never met, so please take my comments for what they are worth) are clearly extremely judgmental.  If we read Romans 2 we can get a feeling for the awfulness of being judgmental.  It is a sad fact that many Christian sects/denominations decide that they are the ONLY saved people.  This is patent nonsense.  No group has a monopoly on truth.  Anyone who puts their faith in Christ, truly repents of their sins, chooses to be a disciple of Jesus and to be baptized into Christ is a saved person, and it does not depend on the name on the door or the human organization under which the conversion happens.  In doing this, Baptists forget their own history, as they were born at a time when the Roman Catholic Church claimed they were the only truly saved people.  When will we learn from our past mistakes?

Now, let me get to your question.  There are a lot of KJV-only people out there.  Many Southern Baptists are in this category, as are the Mormons and some Pentecostals.  Here is what I have to say on this.  This position that the KJV is the only acceptable/inspired translation of the Bible into English is patently absurd.  What possible basis is there for this claim?  The absurdity of this claim is shown because the same Baptist Church making this claim would tell you that the Anglicans are not saved.  But it is the Anglicans who produced the KJV!  Let us look at the facts.  The King James/Authorized version of 1611 was a rather good one in 1611. However, the translators would certainly not have claimed to be in any way inspired.  They would cringe at the amount of authority given to one among many English translations of the day.  They largely relied on Tyndale’s translation, as well as the Geneva Bible.  The translation was an excellent one at the time, but there are a few problems with this translation, that no reasonable person can deny.  First of all, many of the words in the KJV now have very different meanings.  In fact, there is a small number of English words in the KJV that now have, essentially, the opposite meaning now that they had when the translation took place.  It is almost like you need a translation of the KJV into more modern English in order to even use it.  Well, this proves that, even if it were a perfect translation in 1611 (It certainly was not, and its translators never would have made such a claim),  it certainly is not a perfect translation today.  This is a fact.  Period.  There is no rational argument against this fact.

Then there is the matter of the Greek text used to make the KJV.  The translators of the KJV only had a couple of dozen Greek manuscripts to work with when they made their translation.  Essentially, they used the textus receptus of Erasmus in their translation.  The oldest manuscript used in making the translation was from about 1100 AD.  We now have more like 6,000 manuscripts, including hundreds from before 500 AD.  Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Sanaiticus are all from the fourth or early fifth century and are vastly better manuscripts than any that were available to the KJV translators.  I absolutely guarantee that if they had access to the superior manuscripts we now have, the KJV translators would have used these.  There are several passages in the KJV that without a doubt were not even in the original autographs of the New Testament letters.  For example, the KJV includes John 5:3-4 and 1 John 5:7-8.  No serious person can defend that these were in the originals.  Anyone who claims differently proves themself to be dishonest with the data.  These two interpolations are not found in any manuscript before 1000 AD, and they certainly were not penned by John.  This is not opinion.  This is fact.  Anyone defending the KJV as a sort of inspired translation cannot be taken seriously.  If people choose to use the outdated, inaccurate and difficult to read KJV, that is up to them, but to attempt to impose this on others is truly unjustified, and is proof that these people simply do not care about the truth when it comes to English translations.

Beside, what about people who read the Bible in Spanish or German or Chinese?  And what about people who read the Bible in the original Greek?  Are these people lost because they do not read the KJV.  Again…. Absurd and not to be taken seriously.

John Oakes