Friday, August 31, 2007

Just a thought

I was thinking about the way the King James Version of the Bible sounds. Sure, words like "Thee" & "Thou" are still recognized as synonyms for "You", & they sound more formal. But what about words like "cometh"? Did people really talk like that? I wonder if someone was dictating who had a lisp, & the scribes wrote it down like it sounded. He meant to say "comes" but it sounded like "com-th" so the scribe wrote "cometh". None of us were there to hear if English-speaking people spoke that way back then, hence this theory. Go ahead & prove me wrong & I won't be upset; it's just a fun thought.

Maybe some Christians reading this are of the "King James only" persuasion, & I don't mean to judge or offend you. I don't know why you feel that way, though. The Bible is inerrant in the original languages in which it was inspired by God, & while we don't have the actual original manuscripts (if we did, people would probably worship the paper instead of the God they read about), we have some mighty old ones, that when compared with each other are practically identical (some words might be different here & there, but it doesn't change the meaning anywhere). When scholars study the original & compare it with translations in different languages, they can tell whether the translation fits with the meaning of the original languages. English-speaking people needed the Bible in their own language so they could read it, & the KJV was one of the first, but even it has been adapted over time. If we don't speak that way anymore, why should we have to read the Bible that way? It's just another translation - not the original! It's fine, but other translations are fine, too, & people should read something that they'll understand what it means. There wasn't anything special about the people who translated the KJV - the Word of God is powerful, & it is meant to be understood. [On the other hand, we have a lot of English translations already, so translators should focus on the thousands of languages that have no Bible translation.]