I just watched Todd Friel’s wretched video posted on YouTube just yesterday.[1] Friel rightly BLASTS a new Bible translation meant to make the Bible sound “cool” to the youth of our day.
To be fair, the translation he speaks of could hardly be considered that. It has no scholarship, no pretense at being an improvement. It is crazy weird - sounds more like a children’s Bible storybook (something I am also not always thrilled with) than a serious translation.
But let me just say that I would not set it aside as the single most terrible translation. It is really the product of the view that all modern translations have of the Scriptures. A low view. Modern scholarship, to one degree or another, views the Word of God, the Bible, as the product of men and not God. Therefore, they believe it to be subject to the same problems as any literary work of man.
Chase down the history of the Word of God. You will discover that there are two very distinct flows of thought on the subject. One held to a very high view of Scripture and the Word of God. The other held, from the beginning, a lower view. The very claim that there are “older and more reliable” manuscripts betrays the spirit that the Bible may be unreliable. If it is unreliable, it is the product of men and not and can then be tampered with without impunity.
Only one version of the Bible comes from that line of reasoning that held to a high view of the Word of God. That is the King James Version. We do not need an easier to read version, we do not need a cooler version, nor do we need a more accurate version. We simply need to believe that God can and has preserved His Word infallibly and then find that Word. It is only possible for that to be the King James Version of the Bible.
