Once we establish the primary argument that the Scriptures are known to be the Scriptures down to the very word, we can then work on other arguments to support that main argument. One of the arguments in favor of the KJV is its beauty the qualities of which seems to be lost on modern translations.

Historically in the West the Good, the True, and the Beautiful have traveled together. Their qualities interrelate and interpenetrate. God is the Good and what He makes is good. God is the True, the source of Truth and what He says is therefore true. God is the Beautiful and everything He makes, commands, and purposes is also beautiful. As such, it should not seem foreign to our ears for the Christian to make arguments for the goodness of Scripture, the truth of Scripture, and the beauty of Scripture.

Indeed, the content of Scripture, or shall we say the substance of Scripture is beautiful, but my focus is on the accidents of Scripture – the shape of the words, the order of the words, the excellency of translation, the majesty of translation, and phraseology. In this sense, in the sense of Scriptures shape, the Scriptures are a work of art. Unfortunately, by the 70’s the evangelical church has largely left of pursuit any meaningful pursuit of art.

Hans Rookmakker, chair of art history at the Free University of Amsterdam and colleague of Francis Schaeffer, once wrote in his work, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, that

“Evangelicals have also underestimated the importance of art. They have thought of biblical pictures as being representations of biblical stories. But they did not see that the salt had become tasteless, that there was so much idealization, so much of a sort of pseudo-devotional sentimentality in these pictures that they are very far from the reality the Bible talks about.”

Rookmaaker, Death, 75.

As it was in Rookmaaker’s time so it is in ours. In our modern day we need look no further than God Is Not Dead II. Certainly, there are belligerent atheistic professors on college campuses and Christians need to be ready to give an answer of the hope that lies within them with meekness and fear. But as the story goes the evil professor is every bit a caricature, a form of idealization, and religious sentimentality in this and similar movies, abounds. They are like Hallmark Movies with some extra Christianity sprinkled in.

Art is the betrayer of culture. Art tattles on a culture. Art tells us what a culture truly believes. And Western culture believes

“Man is dead. He is nothing but a machine, a very complex machine, an absurd machine.”

Rookmaaker, Death, 129.

In the West, man is widely construed as a mere biological machine making temporal bodily transactions for the maximizing of pleasure and minimizing of pain. Machines are not concerned with beauty. They exist for accuracy and efficiency, but they are in the end dead things.

Does anyone take pause after saying, “Hmmm, we have found new hope in the CBGM and the employment of computers to do the work of men?” No, we forge ahead as dead machines having dead machines do the work of dead machines. Would believing text critics agree with my assessment? No, but have they dealt with the beauty question in their own work? No. Does their failure to treat the beauty question play into the current cultural language of men being dead machines therefore our art will be like us, dead and mechanical? Yes.

How often do you read in the preface or arguments for the modern versions that beauty is an essential element of the work? Perhaps not the translators, but how about the readers? How many of them seek beauty in their preferred text? None, because in large part the current ecclesiastical culture seems to have absorbed the culture and language of those around them. Don’t believe me? Take the time to read Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self and come back for round two. Instead, all we hear about the next translation cash-grab is its accuracy and efficiency. Again, the language of lifeless machines. Is accuracy important? Of course. Is beauty less important? Never, because of the proximity of beauty to the Good and the True.

Indeed, if X is good and true, it should be equally as beautiful. If the Scriptures are good and true, then they should be at least as beautiful. But alas they are not. In fact, this is not even a stated aim of either the progenitors of the new translations nor is it the stated aim of those who read those translations. Why? At this point we can only guess, and my guess is that they do not care if their Bible is beautiful as to form because they are not sure it is good and true. Which is also why they keep making new Bibles at will. So, while they fail to care for the beauty of their text they tacitly argue against the goodness and truth of their own text by not making it beautiful.

To further the point I take you again to another of Rookmaaker’s works, Art Needs No Justification. In it he writes,

“So if an artist depicts the Christmas story, he does so not only because it happened so many years ago, but because he understands that to be still of great value and importance to us. And he will show what his understanding of it is. Therefore, if we see the many cheap and sentimental Christmas cards we really have to question what they stand for. Should that be the understanding of that story now? Isn’t that too cheap, unworthy of the reality of the Son of God coming into the world? Is that the quality of our Christianity? If it is, and I think it is, it raises many questions!”

Rookmaaker, Art, 43.

In another place he gives this accounting,

“I saw a painting that depicted the ‘column of fire at Mount Sinai.’ It was in the form and on the level of a poster. I saw a young artist painting ‘Ecce Homo,’ Christ among his enemies, but it was badly done, and therefore below the line [of appropriateness and decorum]. If one cannot paint a good head, how can one tackle a subject so difficult that many artists in the past avoided it, as it was so hard to do in a convincing and right way? We must know our limits and choose our genre as well as our subject since the genre itself is part of the communication.”

Rookmaaker, Art, 48.

In sum, translators show their understanding of translation and of the thing they are translating when performing the art of translation. If the translator will not or cannot make a beautiful translation of the Scripture in addition to its being accurate, this inability or failure tells us something of how the translator understands his discipline and of how he understands the nature of the Scriptures as good and true. As such, it may be that the subject of translation is too difficult for the translator/artist. As Rookmaaker points out, if the translator cannot make the translation beautiful, then perhaps he/she does not know his/her limits or chosen genre.

If the Scriptures are indeed the written words of the Creator God in the person of Jesus Christ, does it not stand to reason that they be beautiful and that we aim to make them beautiful? And if the Scriptures are not translated beautifully and if beauty is not a primary aim along with goodness and truth, does that not show how cheap we hold the Scriptures? Or to borrow from Rookmaaker again, does not our constant proliferation of ugly translations bespeak “the perceived quality of our Christianity” as ugly and unkempt?

So many seek to make Christianity attractive with smoke machines, laser light shows, and skinny jeans while we churn out ugly translations with the language and speed of a dead machine.

Having read Mark Ward’s book Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible a couple times now I thought it good to offer a brief but pointed assessment of his main argument, that is, the False Friends Argument. In sum Ward rightfully maintains that the KJV has what he calls false friends. False friends are words that the reader thinks he knows but ultimately does not. As a result, the reader goes on his merry way thinking he understands what the Bible is saying at that point, but in reality, he does not.

Setting aside the critique that what amounts to a false friend differs from person to person and the critique that other versions of the Bible also have false friends and the critique that all of the great books of the western world [e.g., Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Milton’s Paradise Lost among others] contain false friends, I thought I would take a more direct approach. Concerning the words deemed false friends by Ward in Authorized, I thought I would count how many times these words appear in the KJV and then see if we can draw the same conclusions that Ward does. The following is a list of these words and the number of times they appear in the KJV according to the Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible:

1.) Apt – 4x
2.) Careful – 7x
3.) Equal – 18x
4.) Incontinent – 1x
5.) Enlargement – 1x
6.) Honest – 7x
7.) Heresies/Heresy – 4x
8.) Kindly – 10x
9.) Fell on his neck – 1x
10.) Issues – 2x
11.) Staggered/Stagger – 4x
12.) Heady – 1x
13.) Bowels – 37x
14.) Conversation – 20x
15.) Pitiful – 3x
16.) Swellings – 7x
17.) Necessities/Necessity – 13x
18.) Miserable – 3x
19.) Approving – 1x
20.) Watchings – 6x
21.) Meats – 7x
22.) Overcharge – 1x
23.) Unicorn – 6x
24.) Commendeth – 3x; Commend – 8x; Commended – 6x; Commending – 1x
25.) Convenient/Conveniently – 10x
26.) Remove – 44x
27.) Spoil – 106x
28.) Halt – 11x

Ward also includes “judgement” and “wait on” but both are very much still in use today and in the same sense. The former in court rooms and the latter in restaurants. I excluded these because they are terrible examples of supposed false friends.

Total Number of Sampled False Friends: 353
Total Number of Words in the KJV: 788,137

Percentage of False Friends Among Total Words in the KJV: 0.000447 or 0.045%

What is more, if we remove 3, 14, 24, 26, and 27 [equaling 206 of the instances above], the total number of false friends falls to 147 which is 0.000187 or 0.019%. But to continue our run with Ward’s argument let’s use the 0.045% number.

There is about 100,000 hairs on the average person’s head. 0.045% of those hairs is 45. Are we to shave the head and start over because 45 hairs are yet to be tamed?

This is a 2020 McLaren 600 LT. It costs $256,000+.

0.045% of $256,000 is $115.20. Ward would have us, the owners of the McLaren, sell our car because we think we understand $115.20 worth of equipment, but we really don’t. Is anyone going to sell this car simply because there is some high-performance module, he/she thinks he/she understands but, in the end, does not?

Touching the reading of Scripture, our current calculations allow for approximately 5 false friends for every 10,000 words of the KJV. That said, there are 42 books out of the 66 books of the KJV that are less than 10,000 words and, in many cases, much less. In short, you may have to read multiple books of the Bible before you come across 5 of the false friends listed above and yet Ward calls us to choose a different translation.

A proponent of the False Friends Argument might retort, “Well, there are more false friends than those mentioned in Authorized.” Even if we admit them there would need to many many more, more by orders of magnitude. Furthermore, I assume that Ward chose the most obvious and impactful one’s for his book so I am not sure the quality of the examples will improve the False Friends Argument going forward. Even if such an argument were to be substantiated, the False Friends proponent would then need deal with the Relativity argument, the Other Versions argument, and the Western Literature argument mentioned above. Then there is the whole discussion revolving around western philosophy of education which Ward doesn’t even hint toward.

In summary, given the above, I believe the False Friends Argument as stated in Authorized is uncompelling in total or at best about 0.045% compelling. Indeed, there are words in the KJV that people think they understand but do not, but they are so few as construed in Authorized to stand as an argument in favor of abandoning the standard sacred text of the believing community.

Mortimer Adeler in How to Speak; How to Listen, reminds his reader that an example is not for proving but for explaining some element of one’s position. Additionally, it is commonly understood that an example does not meet at every point the thing being explained. If I offer an example of how a Golden Retriever is a dog by pointing to a German Shepherd, there will be considerable overlap in the comparison, but it will not be perfect overlap. Such is the nature of comparative examples.

The thing I aim to explain is the mechanism whereby a faithful Christian can faithfully move from one version of the TR to another or from the Geneva Version to the King James Version. I say a “faithful Christian” because they are faithful in holding to version X at Time 1 and at Time 2 he/she is faithfully moving to another version. To do this I want to draw on the grounding Scriptural concept of the faithful’s moving from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant exemplified most clearly in the persons of Nicodemus and the apostle Paul.

By version I mean, “a particular form of something differing in certain respects from an earlier form.” Put simply the New Covenant is a particular form which differs in certain respect from an earlier form i.e., the Old Covenant. The Reformed Orthodox understood these two covenants to be the same in fundamental substance but to differ in several respect, accidental respects. For our purposes we will focus on five of those respects: time, clarity, perfection, amplitude, and duration [Hereafter: the 5Rs]. Turretin says of the similarity of the two covenants,

“The orthodox maintain that the difference between the Old and New Testaments (broadly considered) is only accidental, not essential (as to the circumstance and manner and degree of the thing); not as to the thing itself, which was the same in each.”

Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 2, Twelfth Topic, Q. 8, Sec. XVIII.

On the differences he writes the following we have our 5R,

“…as to time because the Old preceded Christ, while the New follows him.”

Turretin, Institutes, vol. 2, Twelfth Topic, Q. 8, Sec. XVIII.

“As to clearness and obscurity because in the New the mysteries are far more clearly set forth, the veils and shadows and ceremonies and types being take away.”

Turretin, Institutes, vol. 2, Twelfth Topic, Q. 8, Sec. XIX.

“As to perfection, for although the Old Testament had an essential perfection as to the substance of the covenant of grace, still it did not have an accidental perfection as to degree.”

Turretin, Institutes, vol. 2, Twelfth Topic, Q. 8, Sec. XXII.

“As to amplitude because the Old Testament was restricted to one nation – salvation was then only of the Jews…But the New is extended to all indiscriminately.”

Turretin, Institutes, vol. 2, Twelfth Topic, Q. 8, Sec. XXIV.

“As to duration because the Old had become antiquated and should continue only until the time of reformation. The overthrow of the Jewish republic, the confusion of the tribes and the irreparable destruction through so many ages of the temple…evinces this even openly.”

Turretin, Institutes, vol. 2, Twelfth Topic, Q. 8, Sec. XXV.

First, let us touch on these terms and their use regarding different versions of the same covenant. Note that the orthodox regards the covenant essentially the same and only accidentally different. As it touches the “Which TR” question, we would say the same of all the tradition of the TR. The differences between the TR’s can be subsumed under the 5Rs. Erasmus’ TR and the Elzevir TR where substantially the same but different as to time, clarity, perfection, amplitude, and duration. Before I dive in, the following comparisons could be made between versions of the TR or versions of the KJV. I will choose either one to keep it simple, but the comparison is not only limited to the Greek or the translation but could be applied to both.

In time, the Old Covenant came before the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ while the New came after. In like manner, Erasmus’ came before the work of Stephanus and Beza while the Elzevir’s came after those works.

In clarity, the Old Covenant was composed of shadows and figures while the New Covenant clarified those shadows and figures in Christ as Savior and Lord. In like manner, the work of Stephanus and Beza clarified the work of Erasmus.

In perfection, the Old Covenant was complete for its time but was made more complete in the New Covenant at the consummation of the Christ-complex [i.e., the virgin birth, sinless life, death, burial, resurrection and ascension]. In like manner, the work of the KJV translators made more complete that which was already complete for its time in the Geneva.

In amplitude [i.e., breadth or range], the Old Covenant made a way to atone for sins and right worship of the holy God for a specific family, Abraham’s family, Israel. The New Covenant made a way to atone for sins and for right worship of God in Christ for all of humanity – Jews and Gentiles. In like manner, while the Geneva was the clear and complete translation for its time, the KJV provided greater breadth and range for the English-speaking believing community so much so that the KJV was the standard sacred text across oceans, denominations, social strata, and cultures for 400 years.

Finally, in duration, the Old Covenant was clear, ample, perfect for its time, but the New Covenant is eternally durative in Christ. In like manner, as was mentioned above the when compared to its versional peers, TR/KJV has held the position of standard sacred text for over four centuries.

What was the authoritative status of those saints in the New Covenant given the prior existing Old Covenant? 1.) the New Covenant was essentially the same but accidentally different as touching the R5. 2.) the New Covenant superseded and absorbed the Old Covenant, thus, to hold to the sacrificial system after the death of Christ was contrary to the prescriptive will of God [i.e., immoral]. 3.) the move from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant was a work of the Holy Spirit through the word and faith. Simply because God in the person of Christ upbraided the Pharisees for not accepting Him as Messiah and the subsequent New Covenant did not mean the Pharisees accepted this truth and moved from the old version to the new version. Still, those like Nicodemus and Paul did and that by the power of the Holy Spirit through the word and faith. 4.) there is only one covenant and one version of that covenant in play at a given time. In the Old Testament, to claim that sacrifices were superfluous because of Jesus’ coming sacrifice would have been disobedience to God. In like manner to say that we must continue the sacrificial system even though Christ has already died would also be disobedience to God.

What was the epistemic status of Old Testament saints given the advent of the New Covenant? Given all the above, is anyone warranted in besmirching the belief in the Old Covenant at Time 1 for an Old Testament saint at Time 1? No, such a claim would not only besmirch the belief of the Old Testament saint but also the character of God as covenant maker and keeper. Can we say that in Time 1 the Old Testament saints did not have a real covenant with God under the Old Covenant? Again, no, and for the same reasons immediately above.

With the advent of the New Covenant at Time 2, assuming that an Old Testament Jew [e.g., Nicodemus] also knew of the New Covenant as expressed in and through Jesus of Nazareth, could that Old Testament Jew hold to the Old Covenant and not be in violation of God’s prescriptive will? No. And this lack of changing from the Old version to the New version led to Israel’s being set aside. Only at the advent of the New Covenant did holding to the Old Covenant priorly construed become an immoral act, and not before. Which is to say that Nicodemus could have been a faithful saint in his youth and before the coming of Christ. Then at the coming of Christ recognized Him as the Messiah and instigator of a better covenant, thus believing and living a life where the Old Covenant is subsumed under the New. In this scenario Nicodemus is always faithful. Faithful in holding to the Old Covenant at Time 1 and equally as faithful in transitioning and holding to the New Covenant at Time 2. At no point can his belief be impugned.

In like manner, a Christian or Christian community can hold to Erasmus’ TR at Time 1 and then a Christian or Christian community can hold to Beza’s at Time 2 and that Christian or Christian community remains faithful in both the holding and transitioning. Again, in like manner, a Christian or Christian community could hold to the Geneva at Time 1 and then hold to the KJV at Time 2 and remain faithful in both the holding and transitioning.

You may ask, “Certainly the New Covenant was progression on the Old, how do you know the KJV was a progression on the Geneva.” My answer is in large part because the KJV has been the standard sacred text of the English-speaking community for over 400 years or approximately 20% of the Church’s entire existence if you take the beginning of the Church to be Pentecost. The English-speaking Church moved from the Geneva to the KJV, and it has been that way longer than the USA has been a nation. I take the KJV longevity to be more than a mere historical fact though. I take the KJV longevity among the English-speaking church as the leading of the Holy Spirit through His word to His people by faith. The phenomena of the longevity of the TR and the KJV is a historical fact that is the result God’s providence via the Holy Spirit working in and through His word for the preservation of His people and word.

Summary:
1.) God gave two versions of His covenant which were essentially the same but accidentally different as to time, clarity, perfection, amplitude, and duration.
2.) At no point did God institute these different versions of the covenant at the same time and in the same way.
3.) A faithful saint could faithfully hold to the Old Covenant at Time 1 and faithfully transition to and hold to the New Covenant at Time 2 without such a transition causing the saint to be immoral or besmirching his/her belief.

In like manner,
1.) God though His singular care and providence has given us different iterations of the TR and KJV and they differ accidentally as to time, clarity, perfection, amplitude, and duration.
2.) Given their differences as to time, clarity, perfection, amplitude, and duration, at no point could these different versions of the TR and KJV be equally God’s word at the same time and in the same way.
3.) A faithful saint could faithfully hold to Version A of the TR or Version X of the KJV at Time 1 and faithfully transition to and hold to Version C of the TR and the 1769 KJV without such a transition causing the saint to be immoral or besmirching his/her belief.