searchingtruths
New Member
Well said
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Has English Degraded?
- Thread starter Anthony Pritchard
- Start date
Did Thomas Curtis in 1833 suggest that the inconsistent updating of the KJV in 1769 degraded it?
In 1833, Thomas Curtis wrote: “I stated that I conceived both Universities to have acted seriously in error: the one [Oxford] venturing to alter the Authorised Version (particularly in 1769) in numerous instances; and the other [Cambridge] adopting those alterations, as it would appear, without examination” (Existing Monopoly, p. 19). Thomas Curtis alleged: “The public Authorised Standard has been abandoned, and NO ONE FIXED AND SPECIFIC STANDARD (even in very important critical matters) has been substituted in its place” (p. 84). Thomas Curtis claimed: “’Besides necessary alterations in spelling,’ our modern Bibles [KJV editions] ‘DIFFER GREATLY [AND INTENTIONALLY] FROM THE AUTHORIZED VERSION” (p. 2). Thomas Curtis contended that the modern editions of the KJV "departed widely from the original edition of 1611, to the great deterioration of our Vernacular Translation" (p. 35).
David Norton observed: “Led by Thomas Curtis, a committee of dissenting ministers campaigned for a reliable text of the KJB” (Textual History, p. 116). Gordon Campbell wrote: “Curtis argued that the text of the Bible ‘has developed at least 10,000 critical and intentional departures from King James’ version’” (Bible, p. 149). Gordon Campbell pointed out: “At least one of the mistakes in the Blayney text identified by Curtis’s group has persisted to the present day, in the final phrase of Judges 11:19, which in 1611 was correctly given as ‘unto my place,’ was printed in Blayney’s text ‘into my place.’ The error has been corrected in the New Cambridge Paragraph Bible published in 2005, but not in standard editions of the KJV” (p. 150). David Norton noted: “Curtis’s basic position was that, besides many accidental errors, the modern [KJV] texts contained a very substantial number of intentional changes from the authorised text, and that only those changes that corrected printing errors could be reckoned legitimate” (Textual History, pp. 116-117). After referring to a collation of the first 1611 edition with the 1613 folio, David Norton asserted: “Curtis’s claim that no substantive change to the original was permitted was shown not to be the view held in the time of the translators, thus affirming that there was precedent for the continuing work on the text” (p. 119).
In 1833, Thomas Curtis wrote: “I stated that I conceived both Universities to have acted seriously in error: the one [Oxford] venturing to alter the Authorised Version (particularly in 1769) in numerous instances; and the other [Cambridge] adopting those alterations, as it would appear, without examination” (Existing Monopoly, p. 19). Thomas Curtis alleged: “The public Authorised Standard has been abandoned, and NO ONE FIXED AND SPECIFIC STANDARD (even in very important critical matters) has been substituted in its place” (p. 84). Thomas Curtis claimed: “’Besides necessary alterations in spelling,’ our modern Bibles [KJV editions] ‘DIFFER GREATLY [AND INTENTIONALLY] FROM THE AUTHORIZED VERSION” (p. 2). Thomas Curtis contended that the modern editions of the KJV "departed widely from the original edition of 1611, to the great deterioration of our Vernacular Translation" (p. 35).
David Norton observed: “Led by Thomas Curtis, a committee of dissenting ministers campaigned for a reliable text of the KJB” (Textual History, p. 116). Gordon Campbell wrote: “Curtis argued that the text of the Bible ‘has developed at least 10,000 critical and intentional departures from King James’ version’” (Bible, p. 149). Gordon Campbell pointed out: “At least one of the mistakes in the Blayney text identified by Curtis’s group has persisted to the present day, in the final phrase of Judges 11:19, which in 1611 was correctly given as ‘unto my place,’ was printed in Blayney’s text ‘into my place.’ The error has been corrected in the New Cambridge Paragraph Bible published in 2005, but not in standard editions of the KJV” (p. 150). David Norton noted: “Curtis’s basic position was that, besides many accidental errors, the modern [KJV] texts contained a very substantial number of intentional changes from the authorised text, and that only those changes that corrected printing errors could be reckoned legitimate” (Textual History, pp. 116-117). After referring to a collation of the first 1611 edition with the 1613 folio, David Norton asserted: “Curtis’s claim that no substantive change to the original was permitted was shown not to be the view held in the time of the translators, thus affirming that there was precedent for the continuing work on the text” (p. 119).
Anthony Pritchard
Well-Known Member
You are dodging and ignoring verifiable facts, seeming to run from the truth. Your response does not change the truth.
Mike B
Active Member
Logos, I do not mean this to be disrespectful...instead it's more of an observation from following so
many of these threads. I'm glad that you are not teaching a new Christians class in "Can I trust the Bible",
as based on your comments (and those of others) those new Christians might be questioning whether
God has indeed preserved His words, or not.
So many words (or phrases) deleted from so many texts, or added in from a "margin note", or by a
transcriber. Not to demean the more modern bibles in any way, but I stick to my KJV because I trust
it was carefully translated by the best men for the job, and from manuscripts originating in Antioch
versus the more liberal (at the time) Alexandria. I do not have an education in biblical manuscripts,
but have learned enough to know I can put my trust in the KJV.
Others, like yourselves, have differing opinions, and I'm OK with that, but I do not care for being made
to feel like some kind of heretic with a target on my chest, especially on a Baptist forum, because I choose
the KJV over other translations.
We (all of us) are better than that.
Although I do not believe the KJV itself was uniquely inspired, for me it is the translation near and dear to
my heart and my relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
Believe I'll hang on to it.
many of these threads. I'm glad that you are not teaching a new Christians class in "Can I trust the Bible",
as based on your comments (and those of others) those new Christians might be questioning whether
God has indeed preserved His words, or not.
So many words (or phrases) deleted from so many texts, or added in from a "margin note", or by a
transcriber. Not to demean the more modern bibles in any way, but I stick to my KJV because I trust
it was carefully translated by the best men for the job, and from manuscripts originating in Antioch
versus the more liberal (at the time) Alexandria. I do not have an education in biblical manuscripts,
but have learned enough to know I can put my trust in the KJV.
Others, like yourselves, have differing opinions, and I'm OK with that, but I do not care for being made
to feel like some kind of heretic with a target on my chest, especially on a Baptist forum, because I choose
the KJV over other translations.
We (all of us) are better than that.
Although I do not believe the KJV itself was uniquely inspired, for me it is the translation near and dear to
my heart and my relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
Believe I'll hang on to it.
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I have not recommended nor advocate the Critical Greek Text.
I prefer the KJV, having read it over 60 years. According to the doctrine of truth taught in the KJV, I advocate and defend presenting the truth concerning the KJV and concerning other Bible translations. The KJV does not support the making of non-true claims for it or the making of misleading or non-true accusations against other English Bibles such as the NKJV. I properly challenge unproven or misleading assertions.
You have not been asked to stop reading the KJV. It has not been suggested that you should feel like "some kind of heretic" because you choose the KJV over other translations. You seem to be imagining something that is not true. Are you trying to make me a target with your seeming negative innuendos against me?
If you do not try to advocate opinions and traditions of men concerning the KJV as being a doctrine of God when they are not, why would you feel like "some kind of heretic"?
Mike B
Active Member
Perhaps your words come across stronger than you intend them to. I use the KJV, only, and some of you folks
aren't real keen on that idea.
Absolutely not. I'm simply giving you a "real world" idea of how your posts may come across
to others.
Perhaps the truth is sometimes too strong for you. God has not given believers a spirit of fear of the truth. I have not objected to you using the KJV only.
I echo @Logos1560
I think most have their favorite translation for studying God's Word. Mine is the NASB (it includes the additional text but notes older manuscripts do not...I like the info).
To teach and share the gospel I like using God's Word in a more easily understood translation (the NASB is a bit awkward). I never want my own preferences to be a stumbling block to others.
But I would never dream of demeaning God's Word in another translation.
Nobody here, @Anthony Pritchard , will fault you or another Christian for using the KJV or NKJV. The important thing is not the translation of God's Word you use but that God's Word transcend the translation and finds life in you.
I think most have their favorite translation for studying God's Word. Mine is the NASB (it includes the additional text but notes older manuscripts do not...I like the info).
To teach and share the gospel I like using God's Word in a more easily understood translation (the NASB is a bit awkward). I never want my own preferences to be a stumbling block to others.
But I would never dream of demeaning God's Word in another translation.
Nobody here, @Anthony Pritchard , will fault you or another Christian for using the KJV or NKJV. The important thing is not the translation of God's Word you use but that God's Word transcend the translation and finds life in you.
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Have you approved, recommended, or advocated any English Bible translations based on the Byzantine/Majority textform?
Acknowledging their existence does not indicate any acceptance or approval of them.
Would your use of a KJV-only-type linguistic argument suggesting that Modern English is degraded prevent you from actually accepting or approving of them? Does your opening post in this thread indicate that you would not approve of them?
Anthony Pritchard
Well-Known Member
Logos, you are off topic. The thread is about whether Modern English has degraded, not about whether I approve or recommend specific translations. I acknowledged the early English translations because they demonstrate the linguistic categories English used to carry, and because they stand in the preserved stream. Wycliffe, Tyndale, Coverdale, Matthews, the Great Bible, and others show the development of English as a receptor language. That acknowledgment has nothing to do with your attempt to force me into a KJV‑only category.
You are repeating your pattern. You take a simple acknowledgment and treat it as if it were a claim. It is not. I acknowledged the existence of English translations based on the Byzantine or Majority textform. That does not imply approval, disapproval, advocacy, or rejection. It is a factual statement, not a position.
Your question assumes something I have not stated. My linguistic argument concerns the loss of certain grammatical categories in Modern English. It does not prevent me from accepting or approving any translation based on the preserved text. You are trying to turn a linguistic observation into a doctrinal restriction. It is not one.
Your attempt to frame my position as KJV‑only‑type is incorrect. I have stated repeatedly that I am preserved‑text‑only, not KJV‑only. You ignore that distinction every time you reply. You also ignore the fact that I have acknowledged the validity of preserved‑text translations in other languages. That alone removes me from the category you keep trying to place me in.
Your questions do not follow from anything I have said. They follow from assumptions you added. Stay with the topic. The thread is about English, not about your attempt to assign me to a category I have already rejected.
As already pointed out more than once, that alone does not remove you from the category of KJV-only. You demonstrate again that you evidently have a wrong definition and understanding of the term KJV-only. Accepting the validity of preserved-text translations in other languages does not prove someone to be not KJV-only. Peter Ruckman and many KJV-only advocates accept the validity of preserved-text translations in other languages.
I am not placing you in any category. I merely accurately describe what your own statements in your own posts suggest in relationship to a correct definition and understanding of the term KJV-only. It is your own use of KJV-only arguments that seems to identify your approach.
If God blesses you to learn and grow from reading the KJV, pour it on it. We just don’t limit the word of God to that version or any other version that comes from the TR. We just want the same respect we give others. Saying we are reading a modern perversion does not respect us or God’s word used in those modern versions.
If it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.
I do not attempt to force you into a KJV-only category. I would hope that you choose not to use erroneous KJV-only arguments. You yourself seemed to group or categorize Traditional Text, Textus Receptus, and KJV all together as part of one of two options or possibilities until I pointed out that would seem to involve use of the fallacy of false dilemma. You had seemed to include KJV-only as part of your preserved option. Why am I supposedly to blame that you presented only two options or choices? A preserved stream argument is a KJV-only argument as I have documented. KJV-only advocates will use the term Traditional Text for the KJV's underlying texts. I have soundly identified KJV-only reasoning when it is displayed in someone's posts, and I clearly did not force anyone to use KJV-only reasoning.
You were unclear and inconsistent in your posts until I brought up this matter of the fallacy of false dilemma. Now you say that you were not offering only two choices or two options.
Mike B
Active Member
Don't believe I've ever even so much as implied such a thing.
I was generally speaking, not speaking of anyone in particular. But trust me, what I posted is true. Apologies for any offense.
In his introduction to a modern-spelling edition of Tyndale's New Testament, David Daniell noted: “When James I gave his Bible revisers the huge Bishops' Bible as their foundation, which meant that the Vulgate-based Rheims version would be attractive to them, he ensured that a wash of Latinity would be spread over Tyndale's English. The result, and we must assume, the intention, was to create a safer distance between the Scriptures and the people. Though in the general working vocabulary there were more Latinate terms in use by 1611, Latin words and constructions have, as they had then, the ring of Establishment authority, which is not the same as the Koine Greek that Tyndale was translating for the first time” (p. xxiv). David Daniell wrote: "For King James to lay down as the foundation of his new version the most Latinate of recent indigenous Bibles was unfortunate indeed, and destroyed the chance of the new version being in the best modern English" (p. xiii).
David Daniell asserted: “Those scholars were tied by having, at the King’s command, to base their work on the ill-done, backward-looking, heavily Latinate Bishops’ Bible of 1568 partly because it had no marginal notes” (William Tyndale, p. 344). David Daniell also observed: "Appeal to Latin, so characteristic of the Authorised Version, tends to flatten differences, and make one special kind of language for everything, something a little antiquated, a little removed, and feeling therefore, for the New Testament, rather artificially holy" (p. 139). David Lawton asserted: “The style of the King James Bible was meant to align the reading of the Bible with the worship of the Church of England; and its slightly old-fashioned language was meant to express the great antiquity of that Church” (Faith, p. 81). In an introduction to an Oxford World’s Classics edition of the KJV, Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett wrote: “Unlike Tyndale, who had translated the koine Greek of the New Testament into a direct and forceful contemporary vernacular, the language of the new translation [the KJV] was often deliberately archaic and Latinized” (p. xxviii). Kevin Killeen and Helen Smith refer to “the Latinate English of the King James Bible” (Oxford Handbook, p. 21).
Robin Griffith-Jones wrote: “The archaisms characteristic of the KJV characterize as well the prayer book of 1604 –and then of 1662” (Burke, KJV at 400, p. 71). Robin Griffith-Jones asserted: “The language of the prayer book was by 1611 as archaic as the language of the Tyndalean KJV” (Ibid.). Stephen Prickett maintained that the KJV “was to be deliberately archaic, latinized, and conservative” (Hamlin, KJB after 400, p. 30). Stephen Prickett wrote: “It [the KJV] did not arise from nowhere, but (for all the vilification of him) drew heavily on Tyndale, not to mention Coverdale, the Geneva Bible, and the others. A natural conservatism in the fact of a very rapidly changing language would probably have given the new translation an archaic feel anyway, but the instructions to follow, where possible, the Bishops’ Bible, and a clear political agenda merely reinforced this tendency” (p. 33). In this same book, Hannibal Hamlin and Norman Jones referred to the KJV’s “increasingly archaic language (which was at least slightly archaic even in 1611 when it was first published)” (p. 20).
David Crystal wrote: “The [KJV] translators were consciously conservative, and frequently introduced archaism and traditional readings, especially from Tyndale and Coverdale” (Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English, p. 64). James M. Ault, Jr. referred to “the archaic prose of the King James Bible” (Spirit and Flesh, pp. 48, 165). James M. Ault, Jr. also referred to “the seventeenth-century language of the King James Bible” (p. 209).
David Daniell asserted: “Those scholars were tied by having, at the King’s command, to base their work on the ill-done, backward-looking, heavily Latinate Bishops’ Bible of 1568 partly because it had no marginal notes” (William Tyndale, p. 344). David Daniell also observed: "Appeal to Latin, so characteristic of the Authorised Version, tends to flatten differences, and make one special kind of language for everything, something a little antiquated, a little removed, and feeling therefore, for the New Testament, rather artificially holy" (p. 139). David Lawton asserted: “The style of the King James Bible was meant to align the reading of the Bible with the worship of the Church of England; and its slightly old-fashioned language was meant to express the great antiquity of that Church” (Faith, p. 81). In an introduction to an Oxford World’s Classics edition of the KJV, Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett wrote: “Unlike Tyndale, who had translated the koine Greek of the New Testament into a direct and forceful contemporary vernacular, the language of the new translation [the KJV] was often deliberately archaic and Latinized” (p. xxviii). Kevin Killeen and Helen Smith refer to “the Latinate English of the King James Bible” (Oxford Handbook, p. 21).
Robin Griffith-Jones wrote: “The archaisms characteristic of the KJV characterize as well the prayer book of 1604 –and then of 1662” (Burke, KJV at 400, p. 71). Robin Griffith-Jones asserted: “The language of the prayer book was by 1611 as archaic as the language of the Tyndalean KJV” (Ibid.). Stephen Prickett maintained that the KJV “was to be deliberately archaic, latinized, and conservative” (Hamlin, KJB after 400, p. 30). Stephen Prickett wrote: “It [the KJV] did not arise from nowhere, but (for all the vilification of him) drew heavily on Tyndale, not to mention Coverdale, the Geneva Bible, and the others. A natural conservatism in the fact of a very rapidly changing language would probably have given the new translation an archaic feel anyway, but the instructions to follow, where possible, the Bishops’ Bible, and a clear political agenda merely reinforced this tendency” (p. 33). In this same book, Hannibal Hamlin and Norman Jones referred to the KJV’s “increasingly archaic language (which was at least slightly archaic even in 1611 when it was first published)” (p. 20).
David Crystal wrote: “The [KJV] translators were consciously conservative, and frequently introduced archaism and traditional readings, especially from Tyndale and Coverdale” (Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English, p. 64). James M. Ault, Jr. referred to “the archaic prose of the King James Bible” (Spirit and Flesh, pp. 48, 165). James M. Ault, Jr. also referred to “the seventeenth-century language of the King James Bible” (p. 209).
Modern English has changed; of that there is no doubt. Whether it has degraded has yet to be proved. To take modern slang as the proof of degradation will not do because there was also slang in 1611. Is the language of the ESV translation, or the NASB, degraded? I think that would also have to be proved.
Are 'gender-neutral' translations such as the NLT and NRSV (and to a lesser extent, the NIV) degraded? I think that might be proved because references to the Lord Jesus can be obliterated by substituting 'they' or 'them' for 'he and him.'