I read the King James as my primary translation because of its beauty, but also because of the distance from the events of the day. Given the war news and dramatic emotiveness of this very day, the anniversary will not be noted as much as the media was gearing up for yesterday.
Four hundreed years ago, people fought and died, wrote secret letters, formed secret societies, and were secretly arrested and secreted away by governments over the issue of how to translate the Bible. Yet today, it is the quiet gentle place where few can find discord.
Translation of the Bible is always a political act. King James Version was created under political leadership as a response to political issues in the translations available at that time. The text itself is colored by political viewpoints going back thousands of years, but those viewpoints end when the book came of the printer 400 years ago today. Given that timeframe, many of the political views are either bald or easily identified once they are pointed out.
In contrast, current translations contain politics which tend to be invisble to me. I may be too closely allied with the intentions of the translator. Sometimes such specific issues of viewpoint are at stake that I do not fully understand how my thinking is meant to be manipulated by the word choice even after it is pointed out. These new translations have to viewed with the same caution that we analyze the newspapers on this historic day. In contrast, after 400 years of settling down, the King James Version is almost (but never completely) a place of rest.
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