08/26/04
THE BIBLE TEXT
The Bible is the
infallible Word of God, and God has preserved the integrity of His Word for the
Church from generation to generation.
But especially starting in the nineteenth century, many critics began
questioning and denying that truth.
Many Presbyterian and Reformed denominations compromised in their
defense of the truth on this matter.
One of the few Presbyterian denominations to remain faithful as a church
on this issue has been the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. It is important for Christians to be armed
with the truth. In this article we
shall review some of the resources available to help Christians understand the
issues involved.
One resource on-line we have found to concisely explain many of the issues, in the context of its history, is an article at http://www.ourredeemerlcms.org/nttext.pdf entitled “THE NEW TESTAMENT:WHICH TEXT!” by Lutheran Pr. William P. Terjesen. Here are some extended excerpts from that excellent article:
“If you have made any extensive use of the
variety of Bible translations available today, you may have noticed that the
King James Version and the New King James Version include words, phrases,
verses, and even whole paragraphs of text that are missing from other modern
translations. You may have also noticed
that many modern translations have marginal comments regarding ancient
manuscript evidence for certain inclusions or deletions that sound, well,
rather snippy. What ’s going on?
You probably know that whatever English Bible
you use is a translation from the original languages in which the Bible was
written. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew (except for a few Aramaic
chapters),and the New Testament was written
in Greek. You probably also know that
until the invention of movable type and the printing press in the 1400 ’s, publishing
and preserving documents and books meant hand copying; a very difficult and
expensive endeavor. So from the days of
the Biblical authors on until just prior to the Reformation, the Bible was
published and preserved by being hand copied by scribes.
There are thousands of these hand copied
manuscripts of the Bible in existence. There are also ancient translations of
the Bible into Aramaic, Latin, Egyptian, etc., preserved in manuscript form, as
well as hand copied church lectionaries (appointed readings for each day and
each holiday of the church year),and quotations of Scripture in the writings of
the ancient Church Fathers such as
Augustine, Athanasius, Jerome, etc. So the evidence for the text of the
Bible is very extensive and compelling.
In the secular realm the text of an ancient book is accepted with
confidence on far less than ten percent of the textual evidence that exists for
the Bible.
Now just about the time that Dr. Martin
Luther was beginning to study and teach the Biblical truths that led to the
Reformation, a humanist scholar by the name of Erasmus published the first
printed and mass produced edition of the Greek New Testament. His printed text was based on the relatively
small number of late manuscript witnesses that were available to him at the
time. What has been discovered since
his day dwarfs what he had available to him.
Yet, we should not for this reason undervalue the manuscripts he worked
with, or the text of his Greek New Testament.
The manuscripts he used were late, but they were faithful exemplars of
the vast majority of New Testament manuscripts used throughout the church since
the apostolic era. Therefore Erasmus
placed in the hands of the Reformers a printed Greek New Testament with genuine
catholicity, which presented what had been preserved as sacred text in the
church throughout its history.
It is important to realize, lest anyone
deceive you in this regard, that the vast majority of ancient witnesses to the
text of the New Testament favors this Ecclesiastical Text, Traditional Text,
Majority Text,
Received Text, or whatever else you want to
call it. With Erasmus ’ Greek New
Testament, and with other editions of that basic text by editors who followed
Erasmus, scholars had at their disposal a printed edition of the consensus of
ancient witnesses to the preserved, catholic, sacred text of the New
Testament. In time, these printed
editions became known as the Textus Receptus,
or Received Text. When Luther and the Reformers urged us "Back to
the Sources", it was to these extant texts, not to some hypothetically
reconstructed original autograph. It
was the texts in hand that the Reformers and confessors called inspired and
infallible…all of the Bible translations produced during the Reformation and
post-Reformation eras, were translations of the received Hebrew text of the Old
Testament, and the received Greek text of the New Testament, not some
hypothetical reconstruction of lost original autographs...
In the 1700 ’s and 1800 ’s, as more and more
ancient manuscripts and sources became available, it was discovered that some
few of these witnesses differed substantially from the Ecclesiastical Text in
numerous places. These variant readings
were seized upon by rationalistic, sceptical scholars in order to attack the
church ’s doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures. Many conservative scholars responded to this
threat by maintaining that the Ecclesiastical Text was the sacred text that God
had preserved through the church throughout the centuries, and regarded the
variant readings in the minority texts as either intentional or inadvertent
corruptions. They were not overly
intimidated by the variant readings.
However, some conservative
scholars bought into the rationalistic argument that the Ecclesiastical Text
was an ecclesiastical corruption of the text of the NT in the interests of
orthodoxy. Conservatives began saying that the church had corrupted the NT by
smoothing it out and taking out the rough edges. They began to assert that the inspiration and infallibility of
the NT resided only with the original autographs, and that it was the task of
conservative textual critics to use the "earliest and best"manuscripts
and witnesses in order to reconstruct, as closely as possible, the text of the
autographs. Thus conservatives turned
against the Ecclesiastical Text and minimized the doctrine of divine
preservation which had always gone hand in hand with the doctrine of
inspiration. They felt safe in locating
inspiration and infallibility in the (as far as we know non-existent)
autographs, and they confidently began the quest for the original text. It didn’t seem to bother them that behind
their quest lay the idea that for 1900 years labored with a "weak"
text while the "purer" manuscripts lay mouldering in forgotten
corners,only to be brought to light in an era noted more for its apostasy than
for its faithfulness. Is it an accident
that the Reformation had the Ecclesiastical Text as its sacred text?
The nineteenth century culmination of the new
approach to the text of the New Testament came with the publication of the
English Revised Version of 1881.This granddaddy of all modern Bible
translations reflects the text critical outlook of two famous English scholars,
Messrs. Westcott and Hort. They and
the translation committee that worked with them were charged by the Anglican
Church to revise the Authorized version as gently and sparingly as possible,
making only patently necessary changes.
So what did they do? Well, first they edited an altogether new edition
of the Greek New Testament which reflected their preference for a small
minority of ancient manuscripts that differ sometimes sharply from the
Byzantine/Majority text. Then they
translated their new text into English rather than following the text used by
the Authorized Version translators.
They made unnecessary changes to the wording of the AV, even when this
made their version more obtuse and stilted, and unleashed it on the world.
How did the world react? First,the
scholars. By and large they liked
Westcott and Hort ’s new Greek Text, but were mixed about the quality of the
English translation. The nineteenth century
was a time when people snapped hungrily at any novel new idea. And just as they
had done with Darwin and evolution, so they did now with an amazing fascination
for discarded old manuscripts dug out of monastery wastebaskets and
cellars. In the scholarly world
Westcott and Hort ’s Greek New Testament, and the multitudinous revised
editions of it throughout the 20 th
century, have become the almost universally
recognized New Textus Receptus.
But among ordinary folk things were
different. This newfangled revision was
stiff and stilted, retaining little of the beauty of the AV. And many words, phrases, verses and even
parts of chapters were missing or altered.
Where disputed passages were retained,
there were crabby little comments in the margins to aggravate the reader
’s doubt. By and large, the laity would have none of it and
continued to use the AV as if the Revised Version didn’t exist, and for the
most part, forced the clergy to do likewise.
The RV was dead at the starting gate.
It wasn ’t until the Bible translation mania
of the post World War II era that the AV slowly began to make room for various
modern versions. The Revised Standard
Version, the New English Bible, the New
American Standard Bible, An American Translation, etc. all had their
small niches in the Bible reading world.
But it wasn’t until the publication of the long awaited New
International Version that the AV was given a run for its money. Not that the NIV was so good; it
wasn’t. It was dull and
two-dimensional, wordy and unmemorable.
But it was marketed like no other Bible in history. It became the Big Mac of the Bible
publishing world. The Rupert Murdock
owned Zondervan Publishing Co., which
is the main publisher of NIV Bibles,
claims that sales of their baby have outstripped the old AV. This is probably hype, but despite continued
strong sales of the old AV, it looks as though we are entering a post-King
James Version era.
With the exception of the recent New King
James Version, nearly all modern translations of the Bible are in the Westcott
and Hort tradition of New Testament textual criticism. But not everyone has jumped on the
bandwagon. Back in the nineteenth
century a small number of scholars contended vigorously for the Traditional
Text; among them, John William Burgon and F.H.A. Scrivner, two massively gifted
textual critics. Now, while their work
has been largely ignored by the majority, there has always been a small but
ardent group of scholars who have kept the home fires burning for the
Traditional Text of the New Testament.
Outstanding modern exponents of this outlook are Dr. Edward F.Hills (now
deceased) and Dr.Theodore Letis (very much alive). Hills’ book, The King James Version Defended:A Christian View
of the New Testament Manuscripts, and Letis' book, The
Ecclesiastical Text , are notable
for their defense of the Traditional Text from an ecclesiological and
theological perspective.
The work of Hills and Letis must be
contrasted with other groups of scholars who support the Traditional Text for
different reasons. One group has become
known as the "King James Only" group. They
believe that the AV is the perfect, preserved
Word of God for the English speaking world.
For them, the AV is equal in
authority to the original Hebrew and Greek of the Old and New Testaments. The "King James Only" group
generally consists of a small group of fundamentalist Baptists who have little
positive impact on the world of scholarship with the exception that some among
them have managed to keep the works of Burgon and Scrivner in print, despite
the fact that Burgon and Scrivner would never subscribe to their views.
A second group of scholars that must be
distinguished from the work of Hills and Letis is the Majority Text
school. This school, again, mostly
fundamentalist Baptist, have produced two recent notable editions of the Greek New
Testament. Maurice Robinson and William
Pierpont have edited The New Testament in the Original Greek According to the
Byzantine/Majority Textform (1991).This is the Byzantine Greek Text found in
many Bible Software programs such as BibleWorks,Logos, and the Online
Bible. Zane Hodges and Arthur Farstad
have edited The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text (1985). It is important to note that the Majority
Text school is in no way made up of "King James Only" advocates. The fact is that the KJ-Only people consider
the Majority Text people to be in league with the devil! Be that as it may, what the Majority Text
school is up to is attempting to purge the Traditional Text of it ’s slight
"corruptions" in the interest of making it conform more closely to
the hypothetical original autographs.
They, like the critical school of textual criticism, are primitive
restorationists, with the exception that they hold that the Byzantine
manuscripts and witnesses better reflect the originals than do the Alexandrian
texts. But like the critical
school, they are attempting to get
behind the church ’s preserved texts to the posited originals. Both groups assume that the church, to some
degree, corrupted the originals.
Hills and Letis, like Burgon, are not
primitive restorationists. They are, to
use a term borrowed from Letis, "catholic preservationists". This means that they believe that God who
inspired the infallible
Scriptures, has through His church ,
preserved what he gave for the church ’s use and benefit. The inspired, infallible sacred text is not
some minority text hidden in a corner for 1900 years and only lately
rediscovered. Rather, the inspired ,
infallible sacred text is the text everywhere preserved and used in the church
throughout its history. The best text
of the New Testament reflects the consensus of this catholicity of
witnesses. Therefore the text of
Erasmus and his successors, the text that formed the basis of all Reformation
era Protestant Bible translations, which reflects this preserved catholic
consensus; the text which Letis calls The Ecclesiastical Text, but which is
also known as the Byzantine Text, the Majority Text, or the Textus Receptus, is
rightly to be regarded and received as the sacred text of the churches of the
Reformation.
…any discussion of these issues runs the risk
of creating the impression that the differences between the various editions of
the Greek New Testament are more numerous than they are. Therefore, we
should keep in mind that the textual differences
between any given edition of the Ecclesiastical Text amounts to no more than
about two percent. And the textual differences between the Ecclesiastical Text
and the modern critical texts amounts to no more than about fifteen percent. Therefore, over 85%of the text in all
manuscripts and witnesses is identical.
It should be obvious then, that we are not talking about two entirely
different kinds of New Testament. The layman should keep this in mind while
studying these matters. This amazing textual agreement, even between the
divergent Ecclesiastical and critical texts, makes the New Testament by far the best attested ancient text ever.
But we must not be sanguine. While we do not
want to be hysterical or to get caught up in wild conspiracy theories after the
manner of our fundamentalist counterparts, neither do we want to minimize the
fact that the modern critical texts at
certain strategic places in the text make omissions, or alterations that are
far from innocuous. For approximately
twenty five years the Revised Standard Version was published with the last half
of Mark 16 relegated to a footnote in accordance with the then current edition
of the Nestle Greek Text. Other
translations, less bold, included the text but added marginal comments which
cast doubt on it. This is not
harmless. Neither should it be a matter
of indifference when Paul ’s words concerning Christ: "God was manifest in
the flesh …"are changed to the more ambiguous: "He was manifest in
the flesh" on the basis of a few paltry textual witnesses against the
overwhelming majority (1 Tim.3:16). Nor
should we merely shrug our shoulders when the overwhelmingly well attested and
orthodox rendering:"…the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the
Father … "is replaced with the poorly attested and arguably
Gnostic:"…the only begotten God, which is in the bosom of the Father …
"(John 1:18).But enough. We can be
thankful that even in the most critically reduced New Testament text the
doctrines of the Law and Gospel are still set forth clearly and accurately for
the benefit of the church. But this does not mitigate the fact that in the 19th century the discipline of textual criticism went in the wrong
direction; a direction that has had serious consequences with regard to faith
in the authority of Scripture, even down to our day. Nor does it absolve us of the responsibility to study these
matters carefully and return the discipline
of textual criticism to the service of the
church and its divinely inspired, infallible, and preserved sacred text…”
Besides the helpful article above, the
following website has additional information that many might find useful: http://www.holywordcafe.com/bible/
Another internet
resource on the topic consists of a discourse on the Caledonian email list
during the months of July and August 2004.
It includes answers to questions I posed to Dr. Theodore Letis, who is a
preeminent scholar in the field. (It
should be noted that he was mentioned in the article excerpted previously.)
Below are excerpts from some of the posts, which can also be read by
subscribing to caledonian@yahoogroups.com :
From: LetisT@aol.com
[mailto:LetisT@aol.com]
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 10:17 AM
To: caledonian@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Caledonian] Princeton and textual criticism
>In a
message dated 8/20/2004 8:55:54 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
jparnellm@usxchange.net writes:
>Dr.
Letis and others on this list, I would appreciate to read your thoughts on the
article at http://www.wrs.edu/Materials%20for%20Web%20Site/Journals/4-2%20Aug-1997/Battle%20-%20Hodge%20and%20Scripture.pdf
regarding textual criticism. It lumps
Charles Hodge, A.A. Hodge, Warfield and Machen together as essentially having
the same view. Do you agree or disagree?…
I have not
read the article yet--but will do--but for now I can tell you that for my
master's degree in American Church History at Emory, it was my specific theme
to treat how Princeton approached N.T. text criticism from its founding (A.
Alexander), to its fall in 1929. This research is now available from our
Institute: Edward Freer Hills's Contribution to the Revival of the
Ecclesiastical Text. In short, I can tell you unequivocally that
Charles Hodge defended the Textus Receptus and that with Warfield one gets both
the use of the term "inerrant autographa" and the advocacy of the
German criticism of Griesbach via Westcott and Hort, which Charles Hodge had
publicly denounced as an alternative to the TR.
Theodore
P. Letis
Director
The Institute for
Renaissance and Reformation
Biblical Studies
P.O. Box 870525
Stone Mountain, GA 30087
http://www.thetext.org/
From: LetisT@aol.com
[mailto:LetisT@aol.com]
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 11:10 AM
To: caledonian@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Caledonian] Princeton and textual criticism
In a
message dated 8/20/2004 10:19:14 AM Eastern Daylight Time, LetisT@aol.com
writes:
I have
now read the piece (it took all of ten minutes), and I can say that the
author's dependence on Calhoun should be evidence enough that it is little more
than an in-house, self-serving propaganda piece. Calhoun's two vol. history of
Princeton Seminary is a shamefully hagiographic eulogy and not hard history. I
personally sent him (Calhoun) my research on Warfield in its published form
when I met him in Edinburgh while he was still in his research stage for the
project, which meant that he had to refer to it to retain any integrity
whatsoever; but he chose to do so in a mere footnote which no one could find by
consulting his index because my name was deliberately left out of the index. In
like fashion, even though I covered all the ground that Battle did (with more
unpublished manuscript sources than he used), and though my research appeared in
the Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society (1991), no reference whatsoever
is made to my research in this present WTJ article by Battle.
All of
this is very telling, because while at NO point was Battle able to document Hodge
as even using the word "inerrancy," (one will see in the article
that what I have been saying for years is true, "infallible" ALWAYS
served the orthodox, was the word forever used by Hodge, and never
"inerrancy," until Warfield, because this was the language of the
WCF), much less the appeal exclusively to the "autographa" as
final. Furthermore, at NO point did Hodge EVER advocate a critical edition
of the Greek N.T. over the Textus Receptus (yes, he had doubts about I Jn 5:7-8
as he was right to), which Warfield clearly did. Hence, under NO
circumstances whatsoever can the following statement by Battle be considered
true:
"The View of Scripture
defended by Warfield was that previously taught at Princeton" (p. 11).
It
absolutely was not! And the very fact that Battle refuses to allow my
research to be cited is clear evidence that he knows he could not make such a
claim as found above and point his readers to my evidence in the same article.
This
essay is either the unfortunate result of a kind of WTS parochial myopia; or
worse, a lie. in either case it reflects very poorly on the author (outside of
the ranks of WTS, where I suspect he wrote this as a research project for some
class--he told his teachers what they wanted to hear). This essay would NEVER
have pasted peer review had it been submitted to the Journal of the
Presbyterian Historical Society. It is propaganda, not history. Read my
work on Hills mentioned in the last post and this will be obvious to all.
Theodore
P. Letis
Director
The Institute for
Renaissance and Reformation
Biblical Studies
P.O. Box 870525
Stone Mountain, GA 30087
http://www.thetext.org/
In another post Dr.
Letis wrote:
… "inerrancy"
also maintains that only the autographa are ultimately authoritative
(which, however, no longer exist) because only they are free of transmissional
corruption, or textual variantion. This doctrine, therefore, is a
dramatic departure from the WCF which never stated Biblical authority in such
absurd terms. The above is also incomplete because it fails to point
out that this is NOT classic Protestant orthodoxy as found perfectly expressed
in the Westminster Confession of Faith, which says absolutely NOTHING about
"autographs" or "inerrancy," but rather puts its stress on
a PRESERVED text that it calls "infallible." Hence, the doctrine of
"inerrant autographa" is both a late revisionism, as well as a
defection from orthodoxy which never demanded "textual impeccability"
(i.e., no textual variants in trnasmission) in order to have an absolutely
infallible text. One does not understand the doctrine of "inerrant
autographa" without these further elements…”
Theodore
P. Letis
And in another post Dr. Letis wrote:
“My book
titled The Majority Text: Essays and Reviews in the Continuing Debate
was first published in 1987, 17 years ago(!), and it clearly documented in
nearly all the chapters that I wrote, that Warfieldianism ("inerrant
autographa") was a clear defection from classic Protestant orthodoxy
(which the language of the WCF makes perfectly clear), as well as
the cause that Princeton fell to Neo-Orthodoxy in 1929. Moreover, the
book was very positively reviewed in your Evangelical
Theological Society Journal (JETS) at the time. Where have you
been? The literature that recognizes my research is also steadily
growing:
For works
that interact with the chapters in this book, consult the following works:
Donald G. Bloesch’s Holy Scripture: Revelation, Inspiration and
Interpretation (Wheaton: Crossway, 1994), p. 307, n. 18; David B.
Calhoun, Princeton Seminary 2 vols. (Edinburgh: The Banner of
Truth, 1996), vol. 2, p. 469, n. 2; Gary North, Finger's Crossed;
Harriet A. Harris, Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), acknowledgment page, pp. 135 n. 3; 141 n.11; William
Baird, The History of New Testament Research: From Jonathan Edwards to
Rudolf Bultmann Vol. 2 (Augsburg Fortress, 2002), p. 346; Kim
Riddlebarger, The Lion of Princeton: B.B. Warfield on Apologetics,
Theological Methodology and Polemics, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
Fuller Theological Seminary, p. 47.”
And in another post Dr. Letis wrote:
“I do not
have a private definition for either "inerrancy" or
"infallibility." Let me state as succinctly as possible the issues at
stake when one chooses to use the word "inerrancy" rather than the
historic orthodox word "infallibility" (let's not confuse the issue
at this point with extraneous material such as the Chicago Statement).
There are
three reasons why the word "inerrancy" cannot be used by anyone who
considers themselves orthodox. They are as follows:
1) Inerrancy as a word is not a
theological term; nor was it ever used as a theological term until the late
19th century. What are the implications of this:
2) Inerrancy as a word is an
innovation of the faith, just as anyone who wanted to introduce a different
word other than homoousios ("of the same essence") into the Nicean
Creed would be introducing an innovation in the definition of historic orthodox
Christology.
3) Inerrancy as a word is
unnecessary because everything it attempts to say in a non-theological way,
has already been invoked by the historic orthodox word of
"infallible."
4) Inerrancy as a word has no
connection to the notion of inspiration, that is, it does not require
verbal inspiration to be true, since inspiration is not required to obtain
"inerrancy." Any humanly produced document can be inerrant.
5) Inerrancy as a word is a
defection from orthodoxy because it locates final inspired authority in the
autographic form of the text alone.
6) Because the autographic form of
the text does not exist, "inerrancy" is a dangerous word,
because in its definition it demands the application of naturalistic New
Testament text criticism; that is, it assumes that ALL extant editions are
corrupt to one extent or another, while claiming that ONLY text criticism can
"restore" a lost "inerrant," autographic archetype, the
only inspired and authoritative form of the Biblical text.
7) Hence, it was the use of
the word "inerrancy" by B.B. Warfield in the 19th century (a
non-theological innovative terminological alteration to the language of
Biblical authority), that resulted in the "quest for the historical
text" i.e., the endorsement of the Westcott and Hort edition of the Greek
N.T., (which assumes the extant text is corrupt), which in turn evolved
into the quest for the historical Jesus and the Jesus Seminar, the most
blatantly arrogant project of unbelief presently active on this planet.
Moreover, his use of the word at Princeton was a major contribution towards
that Institution going liberal in 1929.
Infallibility, on the other hand, is what
the Church has always said the Bible was, in existing editions, and was
defined as follows in the Latin (and here I give you an excerpt from a
discussion list to which I recently made the following contribution):
Allow me
to say that many have been confused by my advocacy of the word
"Infallible," and my pronounced dislike of the modern term
"inerrant," because the former word is the word always
used by Luther, Calvin, and the Westminster Divines, in its Latin form,
"infallibilitas." On this please consult Richard Muller, Dictionary
of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant
Scholastic Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1985), s.v.
"authoritas Scripturae." There you will see the meaning of
"infallible"contains the sense that Scripture is "without
admixture of error...historically true in its record of words, deed, events,
and doctrines." As for the word "inerrant," it has no pedigree
as a theological term until late in the 19th century and because when it
arrived in a new context (its original context was as an astronomical
term), it always and only had reference to the
"autographic" form the text, a sweeping revisionism of the WCF which
taught a preserved "infallibility," not a lost "autographic
inerrancy." I trust this makes clear that the earlier accusation about me
was intended to suggest not that I actually have a historically more grounded
statement of Scripture (via the WCF), but that somehow I have a weaker view
because I choose to hold to the WCF's language and content on this issue
(because, with this standard my own Lutheran orthodox view is in complete
agreement).
Please
keep in mind that any document is capable of attaining "inerrancy."
Only Scripture, however, is always "infallible" on all that it
speaks, as saith the WCF…”
So information available on-line should get you well started
in understanding the issues. But if you are interested in doing further reading
and research on this subject, here are some books you may want to consult:
• The King James Version Defended ,
Edward F.Hills
• The Ecclesiastical Text ,
Theodore Letis
• The Traditional Text
, John William Burgon
• The Last Twelve Verse of Mark ,
John William Burgon
• The Revision Revised , John William Burgon
And, finally, here is a list of Bible versions
currently in print that are based on the Ecclesiastical Text:
• The Authorized (or King James) Version
(Cambridge University Press, etc.)
• The New King James Version (Thomas Nelson
Publishers)
• The Geneva Bible
• The 21st Century King James
Version (Deuel Publishing)
• The Third Millennium Bible (Deuel Publishing)
• The Modern King James Version (Sovereign
Grace Publishers)
Personally I recommend the Authorized (or
King James) Version. It is the version
still used in the public worship of most of the conservative reformed and
Presbyterian churches, like the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. And it is still in my opinion the best for
scripture memorization. It is the
version our family uses. But the other
versions are available for those who have an especially difficult time with
some of the words not so commonly used in our own day.