Originally posted by TheOliveBranch:
Could your end results have been impressed by who was doing the teaching?
Possibly. I knew these were men committed to academic honesty and integrity. They defended their positions from the Word with rigorous standards of exegesis and study. They did not simply declare other people to be wrong. They gave reasons for it. And in matters of liberty, they granted liberty and decency for people to disagree. In the end, you did not have to hold their position. You simply had to defend your own with Scripture rightly used.
You may be trying to give advice for belief in the modern translations, but I fail to see what this advantage would be in studying all translations. You are, in effect, taking the modern translations, leaving out all TR, KJV, etc. and declaring them inferior without giving what would cause you to take this stand. Please don't make this an arguement of which is best.
In my over 6600 posts, I have very many times given solid, undeniable reasons for what I believe. My position is in fact the one held by the vast majority of orthodox Christianity for all of church history.
I am not taking all the MVs and leaving out the KJV and the TR, or declaring them to be inferior without reason. I have given reasons in other places why I say what I say. The KJV is an excellent translation. But it is 400 years old and based on the TR which is a demonstrably inferior text, compared ot the other options. But "inferior" in this respect is a slight matter of degrees. The TR has readings with little or no Greek manuscript support. It was formed by a textual critic who used less than a dozen of the more than 5000 manuscripts now available. It was changed at least 4 times prior to the translation of the KJV and we do not even have the TR it was translated from Scrivener's TR was edited on the basis of the KJV and Scrivener himself points out dozen's of the problems in the TR.
The KJV uses outdated language, uses words that need to be updated for modern times because those words have changed meanings. It uses stilted sentence structure and difficult grammar. For the modern reader, there are better choices in our own language. That does not mean the KJV is bad or wrong.
The MVs are generally better because they have a better textual base (using all manuscript evidence rather than only some of it). They are also translated into contemporary language just as the KJV was 400 years ago. The MVs have the same purpose that the KJV did back then. It is simply up to date and in the language that we speak.
I have often said I don't care what version (among the faithful ones) that someone uses. But whatever you use, you must have a proper doctrine of bibliology. That is where the KJVOs fall short. They have an admirable passion for God's word. They lack a biblical doctrine of God's word. Some of them are committed to intellectual dishonesty, having been confronted about their error and refused to repent of it. Others are simply mislead and are repeating what someone has told them. Either way the outcome is the same ... the biblical revelation about Scripture is compromised. That we must not take lightly.
This is why I am taking on this very deep and lengthy study, so that I can come to conclusions with some sort of support.
I highly recommend this. But be aware that you can spend a lot of time chasing after the wind (in the idea of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes). You can get caught in a lot of foolish speculation (to use the words of Paul). These must be avoided. There is a great deal that can be gained from a very little study. In reality, the discussion about English versions is pretty useless. The KJV, NKJV, NASB, NIV, and ESV are all good choices and each has it benefits and drawbacks. They should be compared. Discussions about Greek texts is largely academic and probably useless for most. Both are discussions that I have been deeply involved in here.
Long story short ... I have given lots of reasons for my belief in this forum. There is no shortage of my defending it. What I resent from people like Bryan is the implication (or outright statement) that those who disagree with his position do not have a believing heart. That is highly offensive. There is no way he can know the state of someone's heart. To say that there is no fruit from modern versions is to have one's head in teh sand. Those are emotional arguments that have no place in honest discussion of these issues. We must be honest with the facts first and foremost.
I encourage you to study. It is a topic worthy of consideration. But be careful about getting bogged down in useless minutae. It is can be damaging to our life mission.
