Question: You have exposed several modern translations that are corruptions of the Word of God. Is ...

Question: You have exposed several modern translations that are corruptions of the Word of God. Is The Berean Call KJV-only?

Response: We use the King James Version in our publications and in public meetings. Several of Dave’s early books, at the request of his publisher, used the New American Standard Bible, but after investigating some of the problems with modern translations, it was decided that subsequent publications use the KJV. There are some compelling issues concerning modern translations that bolster such a decision.

We do not, however, support the position of KJV-only individuals such as Gail Riplinger or Peter Ruckman. In reviewing some of the books dealing with the issue of translations of the Bible, we have found that quite a few of the “KJV-only” promoters take extreme positions that cannot be reasonably supported. For example, not a few claim that the King James Version itself is inspired and therefore an inerrant version; they consider the English of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to be the highest form of language and therefore the inspired language.

Those who attest that the KJV is without error go far beyond what the translators themselves claimed, who, in their introduction to the 1611 KJV titled “The Translators to the Reader,” acknowledged that this is not a perfect translation. As the KJV translators noted, “Now to the latter we answer; that we do not deny, nay we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession, (for we have seen none of theirs of the whole Bible as yet) contains the word of God, nay, is the word of God.” As God has promised to preserve His Word, they also seemed to have greater confidence in His preserving ability than some of us do today.

We have heard of some KJV-only promoters stating that all foreign language speakers must learn to read and understand the English of the KJV in order to have God communicate accurately to them. We have contacts with some missionaries who have been greatly concerned about the confusion that is introduced when an existing foreign language translation (based upon the same text family as the KJV) is replaced by using the English KJV to produce a “new” foreign language translation. We have seen this happen in Korea and Mexico and have heard of similar developments in other nations.

In short, we see that the devil doesn’t much care which side of the road one runs off of, as long as we still end up in the ditch. It seems that as much damage is done by the extreme elements of the KJV-only movement as is done by those promoting corrupt translations. On page 8 of Which Bible Is God’s Word?, Gail Riplinger has stated that “there will never be a version that would be as reliable as the King James Version....” William Tyndale was burned to death for the crime of trying to translate the text of the Scriptures into the common language. The Lord answered his dying prayer with a series of events that eventually produced the King James Version, which itself owed much to Tyndale’s translation, the Great Bible, and the Geneva Bible that preceded it. The language that we speak continues to change. Should the Lord tarry, the gulf between modern vernacular and King James English may become as great as that between Latin and the English of 1611. Can He not move with the same power and force as He did then? He certainly can.