Several people have asked me why I have moved to the New King James Version of the Bible. It's good to have an answer for such questions, especially when moving to a different version of the Bible will put me "out-of-sync" with everyone else in my church, suddenly having a different version to read from. Of course, it would be no worse than what the NIV translators have done to countless churches by their discontinuing of the revered 1984 NIV, replacing it with what is essentially their failed Todays NIV, not as a minor revision, but as one that attempts to keep up with the formidable shifts in current English, which clearly have their roots in the cultural shifts of our age.
My quest for a new version began with the NIV revisions of 2011. I've used the NIV for the last 25 years. These revisions at first seemed purely a matter of cowering to the feminist agenda. So I began to seek answers and ask God's leading.
A couple of years back, my mother-in-law had given me a NKJV study Bible, which I had begun to read. Finding the language very easy to understand, and familiar to the KJV which I had read as a child, I decided to read it through. When the Bible Gateway replaced the 1984 NIV with the 2011 NIV (without announcing the change or making it clear that anything had even changed, or so it appeared to me), I took offense. The word of God isn't something we can trust and update on a whim, like a Microsoft Windows patch. My initial assumption was that somehow a new group had taken over the NIV and were trying update it, like software, such that it would be incumbent upon those who wish to keep up-to-date to upgrade. I suppose this was a harsh judgment, and perhaps it isn't true at all. So I only state here that it was my original thought, not my conclusion. At present, I do not know if Biblica's motives are driven by profits or some more noble ideal. However, it doesn't matter to me any more.
The changes to the NIV are no longer the issue. Over the course of 2011, I did more research and reading and praying and studying, and have come to the conclusion that many modern translations (since about 1950) are tainted with what I will simply term "the spirit of this age", this secular age, this age of faith in the superiority intellectual authority over and above that older faith in the spiritual authority of God's word. Our age is one of authority based on knowledge and skill in academic areas, and this, when used as a prerogative to tamper with the Bible, I regard as arrogance.
The choice, then, is between the ideals and translation principles of the translators of the past as opposed to the ideals and principles of modern translators. A young friend in Chicago recently chided me on giving preference to old things: "You like everything that is OLD" he re-emphasized, as if to underscore his derision of all things not created, composed or written within his lifetime. Perhaps he is right, and I am suspicious of all things new. But I am especially suspicious of those who wish to continually update a Bible translation, as if there were innumerable mistakes in the previous one, or as if our language has so vastly evolved that a mere 25 years has rendered the English of the 1984 NIV obsolete.
So, I have to admit, that yes, I am somewhat in awe of the translators of 400 years ago, who worked without electricity or computers, and yet produced a translation that, even after 400 years, is till beautiful and quite readable, such that the changes made in the NKJV were almost exclusively to remove the thee and thou and -eth and -est forms, and update a few words that are genuinely different in meaning now than then. I am in awe of their translation principles, which show such great reverence for the Bible as the God-breathed Scripture it is.
Rather than try to enumerate these principles, I will simply refer to the book by Leland Ryken, The Word of God in English. The most important of his points is that a word-for-word translation, in principle, is demanded and expected by those who truly regard the Bible as God's word, not man's word, and who believe that it is inspired by God, not only in general in it's thoughts, but its very words. This is the respect paid to any literary work in translation, and should all the more be our demand for an English translation of the Holy Bible.
1. So the first reason is that, as God's word, a translation of the Bible must honor the very words in the original language. The KJV and NKJV do this, as do other word-for-word translations like the English Standard Version, and all translations that predate the 20th Century, including Tyndale's, Luther's (German), Wycliffe's and the Septuagint (Latin) and many others.
2. The texts used for the KJV and NKJV New Testament are consistent with the majority texts moreso than the Alexandrian texts that are preferred by the NIV and other translations, presumably because they are older. So the NKJV doesn't omit verses or relegate them to footnotes with such judgmental remarks as "the oldest and best manuscripts do not have this".
3. Additions in italics. The ESV is another very excellent word-for-word translation. Some have recommended it to me. But it lacks one feature of the KJV and NKJV which I like very much, a feature which I believe shows the deep respect the translators of these versions had toward the Bible: As a word-for-word translation, where a word has to be added to the original to make the English readable, that word is shown in italic font. It is helpful to me to know when the original lacked some word, which the translators felt necessary to add. I often try reading the sentence without that word. Often I wonder what made them insert it. And I am free to omit it when I read or meditate on the verse. But at least I KNOW. With other translations, I don't know. Until I learn Hebrew and Greek, I have to trust the translator to give me a translation, not insert words without letting me know about it.
4. Otherness. When reading ancient writings of any period or place, there is a certain quality known as otherness, whereby the user perceives the distance between his own time and place and that of which he reads. Perhaps it is a word that doesn't have a good counterpart in English, like baptism, or a word that has a lot of meaning that an uninitiated reader will not understand, like propitiation. Word order may be a little awkward at times, or sentences my be long and arduous. That otherness is preserved in word-for-word translations, while paraphrases like the NIV and NLT deliberately make the word of God sound more like it was written by New Yorkers just last year than Jews several thousand years ago.
5. Words over meaning. Most recent translations, it is no secret to anyone, appear to be tainted with the notion that what the Biblical authors meant to say is more important that what they DID say, or at least that their very words aren't as important as their meaning. With this notion that the reader deserves to have something said to him or her as he or she wishes to hear it, not as it was said, drives the choices made by most of the translations I have looked at, even in a few cases, the King James Version. So it is hard to find a really neutral version that uses a harsh word where the original language uses a harsh word, or a mild word where the original uses a mild word. With the stated goal of making the word more "transparent", "readable" or "understandable", current translators feel free to even insert words to clarify the meaning of the text, though the author seems to have left a question, an ambiguity of language, or something unclear. The translator cannot make that call; the reader must. Otherwise, there is the impression that the original writer was not inspired enough, and so needs help from a translator.
6. Culture wars. Last, and least of all, there are the cultural wars that Bible translators seem to think they must participate in by obliging the feminists who will not accept that "man" in the Bible means "man and woman", even if it isn't explicitly written so, and so demand that the Bible be re-written in language that is politically correct. This trend will not stop. Inasmuch as translators have given in to it today, translations in the future that do not will be burned and banned and those who read them publicly pilloried for it. But no one would dare to so correct Shakespeare's preference for "his" over "his or her", and "brother" over "brother and sister". Whatever is right for venerated literature is certainly the minimum standard for Bible translation and publishing.
Consequently, I have no further need to consult ANY of the thought-for-though translations, including the 2011 NIV, NLT, GNB, etc. And while there are several other word-for-word translations that are fairly good (pretty much equivalent actually), they lack the italicized additions as well as the pedigree of the NKJV, and usually are based on the older, but more newly-discovered, Alexandrian NT texts, and so, make the writings of centuries of Christian writers, preachers and theologians, out of touch with us today.
This is a highly personal matter, of course. So I can't say with authority what version is the BEST. I'm sure a more educated and eloquent person than I could make a pitch far superior to mine. (This isn't false humility either; it happens to me all the time.) And I can't say that the NKJV is a perfect translation. But next to the 1984 NIV, which I will always love and read, it has the most to offer, and will not likely be revised again and again, as the NIV has been, for several hundred years.
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