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By Root 1099 0

” while the Kingdom of God is no longer “within you” but “in the midst of you,” a comedown from the mystical to the sociological. Some important words were mistranslated in K.J.V. Thus the Greek doulos is always given as “servant,” though it actually means “slave,” an error that gave the false impression that Jesus and Paul were not concerned with the greatest social evil of their day. The Hebrew Sheol often appears in K.J.V. as “hell,” though it is really a general term for the afterlife, like Hades, and not a place of punishment. Tyndale correctly translated the Greek agape as “love,” but K.J.V., influenced by the Vulgate, in which the word is translated by the Latin caritas, changed it to “charity.” R.S.V. returns to Tyndale’s rendering, which gives more sense to such phrases as “faith, hope, and love.” It also uses “steadfast love” as an attribute of God in place of K.J.V.’s “mercy,” another example of a gain in accuracy producing a literary loss, as happens in “His steadfast love endures forever.” Very occasionally, when the Revisers feel that an inaccurate phrase is too hallowed to monkey with, they allow it to stand, as when they leave “the valley of the shadow of death” in the Twenty-third Psalm, though everywhere else they change “shadow of death” to the more literal “deep darkness” or “gloom.”

The other kind of legitimate change in R.S.V. is made to clear up obscurities. The Revisers state that K.J.V. contains over three hundred words whose meanings have changed so much that they are now misleading. In the K.J.V., “suffer” is used for “let,” “let” for “prevent,” and “prevent” for “precede” (“I prevented the dawning of the morning” in the 119th Psalm means merely “I rose before dawn”). Other examples are “careless” for “in security,” “cleanness of teeth” for “famine,” “communicate” for “share,” “leasing” for “lies,” “feebleminded” for “fainthearted,” “reins” for “kidneys,” and “virtue” for “power.” Some words have become obsolete, among them “daysman” (umpire), “chapmen” (traders), “publicans” (tax collectors), “ouches” (jewel settings), and “neesings” (sneezings). Certain stylistic improvements, too, lead toward clarity. The startling advice, in I Corinthians 10:24, to “Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth” turns out to mean “Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor.” In Job 40:8, R.S.V.’s “Will you even put me in the wrong?” is clearer than K.J.V.’s “Wilt thou also disannul my judgment?” And in Proverbs 28:21, R.S.V. is clearer with “To show partiality is not good” than K.J.V. with “To have respect of persons is not good.” One is baffled by K.J.V.’s rendering of Genesis 29:17—“Leah was tender-eyed, but Rachel was beautiful”—but not by R.S.V.’s “Leah’s eyes were weak.” I had always thought Paul’s “It is better to marry than burn” meant “burn in hellfire,” but R.S.V. makes it “aflame with passion.” In addition to such improvements in detail here and there, some parts of the New Testament are better rendered in R.S.V. than in K.J.V., notably the Acts of the Apostles and much of the Pauline epistles. This is because the Acts and the Epistles are largely narrative or argumentative prose, written in a rather flat, workmanlike Greek, and clearness is what is needed and what R.S.V. can supply.

Had the Revisers limited themselves to these changes, surely no man would have cause to mislike them. But they have gone beyond legitimate and useful revision to produce a work whose literary texture is quite different from K.J.V., and they have mutilated or completely destroyed many of the phrases made precious by centuries of religious feeling and cultural tradition. Their intention was to revise the 1901 American Standard Version “in the direction of the...classic English style of the King James Version,” but though they apparently think they have done so, they have actually shown little respect for K.J.V. For they also had a more important aim: to produce a Bible “written in language direct and clear and meaningful to people today,” a Bible as close as possible to “the life and language