What is the deal with insisting that the King James version of the Bible is the only version that should be used? I heard a commenter on a radio show, the name of which I didn't catch, saying that the NKJV and the NIV were corrupted versions of the Bible and that they were dangerous and misleading translations of God's written word.

I'm not talking about paraphrased versions of the Bible like "The Message" or "The Living Bible," but major modern translations of either the Masoretic text or the Textus Receptus. If these versions are doing much damage to Christianity as a whole, I haven't been able to figure out where. I would think that in a major Bible translation you would be able to find some glaring contradictions with my Christian beliefs, or with what Bible scholars would call Christian principles or theological standards.

There are some modern "translations" which aren't translations at all, but rather are aberrations. These would include, "The New World Translation Bible" which is put out by the Jehovah's Witnesses. That version was actually rewritten, not translated, and with the help of a man who was later forced to admit that he was not actually the Greek scholar the Jehovah's Witnesses touted him to be. Simple punctuations were changed in that version to completely change the meaning of a passage and shoehorn it to fit into the Jehovah's Witness cult system.

I can site a couple of examples. In John 1:1, the NWT says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god." You see how God, is diminished there, by rendering him as "a god," with a lower case g? The last few words of that passage in the Greek text reads, "kai theos een ho Logos." The actual literal translation would be, "and God was the Word." You can't faithfully and truthfully translate it any other way. Even Greek scholars who don't believe in God will agree with that.

Another way in which the NWT completely changes textual meaning is through the subtle use of punctuation. Look at Luke 23:43. In the King James Version of the Bible for example, it reads;
43 And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.Take careful notice of the placement of the commas. In the NWT, the placement of the comma after the word "thee" is moved one word to the right, and is placed after the word today. A new reading of the sentence that way changes entirely what Jesus was conveying to the man next to him. Instead of telling the man that he would in fact join Jesus that very day in paradise, Jesus is now telling the man that he would be with Him in paradise alright, but someday down the road.

Another corruption of the Bible would be the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible. This is just another rewrite of the Bible, mostly intended to give Joseph Smith himself a substantially puffed up place in Bible history. Whether he's solely responsible for the numerous insertions or additions or changes he made to the text is uncertain, since it wasn't published until twenty-three years after his murder. That doesn't really matter though.

The material point here is that this rewrite is another attempt by a cult to reshape the Bible and then wedge it into a support for their belief system. Smith was not as subtle as the Jehovah's Witnesses, however. He just stuffed many new passages in (mostly in Genesis) wherever he felt like it an even mentioned himself and a couple of supporters (prophetically) by name in the Book of Isaiah. It's ridiculous, and sad that so many are taken in.

I guess what I'm saying is, there are enough distractions out there being created by the enemy through cults like these and their deceptively dishonest renderings of God's Word. We as believers don't need to add to the distractions of the enemy by trying to pull our brothers and sisters away from a version through which God feeds them spiritually, simply because it isn't the KJV.

There have been a number of new Bible translations to come out in the relatively recent past, including New American Standard Version (NASB), Revised Standard Version (RSV) and New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) and the New International Version (NIV), the New King James Version (NKJV), and others. After going back to the ancient Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, they were translated anew, into contemporary English, instead of the Elizabethan style English of the 1611 King James version. The main difference here, is readability.

I tend to look at the fruit of a thing. Thing of the fruit born of the KJV and these other versions. They are all being used to lead people to Christ. That's really what it's all about, isn't it?