hen a young Christian walks into a Christian bookstore to buy a Bible, he is probably unaware of the debate which surrounds his search for a translation. To the extent he is aware of some controversy on the subject, he is likely to interpret it as a collision between a small tribe of mindless traditionalists ("If the KJV was good enough for Paul, it's good enough for me!") and those intelligent enough to see that the Word of God must be presented in the language of the people.
This is most unfortunate because the real debate concerns the nature of God's Word, and our consequent approach to it. In seeking to understand this, the best place to start is at the beginning.
Until the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, copies of the Bible were all made by hand. Consequently, the ancient copies of the New Testament are called manuscripts. Most of these manuscripts are very similar, but a handful contain considerable variations.
Now when the Reformers first rejected the abuses of the Roman Catholic church, they did so on the basis of sola Scriptura Scripture alone. The Catholic response to this was to begin assembling collections of all the variant textual readings of the manuscripts in what were called "polyglots." What was their point? It was that the Reformers could say they believed in Scripture alone, but in which textual family was it to be found? Without an infallible church without experts there was no way to tell.
The Reformers answered this question, not as neutral scientists, but as confessing Christians. The Word of God, they said, was basically found in the received text, which was representatove of the manuscript family containing the overwhelming number of manuscripts. The Reformers asserted this, not on the basis of a neutral science, but on the basis of faith in God's preservation of His Word. They looked at the history of manuscript transmission to see what God had done; they did not look at the manuscripts to see what man had to do. For the Reformers, and for all consistent Christians, the doctrines of the Bible's inspiration, and the Bible's preservation are twins. What good is an inspired Bible which no one of us has?
This answer was accepted generally by evangelical scholars until the last century. At that time, those who believed in the divine inspiration of the Bible came under attack from liberal theologians and textual critics. Unfortunately, the response of evangelical scholars was similar to their response to the theory of evolution an anemic attempt to have it both ways, i.e. continuing to believe in the Bible while accepting the new critical approach to textual studies.
As a consequence, evangelical scholars gradually came to the conviction that the science of textual criticism was in fact a neutral science. In other words, the worldview of the textual critic and translator does not matter. This is why the evangelical advocates of modern versions say that it does not matter; the foundation stone of all the modern versions is that textual criticism is a neutral science and that Christians and non-Christians alike can be good practitioners of this science.
So we must understand there are two different approaches to textual work. One expresses confidence that God has protected His Word down through history. This is a faith position faith in God. The other presupposition says that it is up to man, through neutral, scholarly, and scientific means to determine what the original text of the Bible was. This is a faith position too faith in man.
The practical result of all this is that the modern versions are based upon a handful of texts from the third, fourth and fifth centuries, discovered in this century and the last. In contrast, the KJV and NKJV are based upon the overwhelming majority of available manuscripts, dating from as early as the fifth century, and in continual use since that time. It is a choice between the eighty percent of ancient manuscripts, which are internally consistent, and the twenty percent of slightly older manuscripts, which differ considerably with one another. But it is important to remember that antiquity of manuscripts is not really the issue here. It is like two rivers; one is hundreds of yards wide, and you are able to walk upstream for ten miles. The other is a creek ten yards wide, and you are able to go upstream for eleven miles. Nevertheless, you know that the broad river, given its breadth, must begin a lot farther upstream than you are able to go.
It should not be surprising that this ongoing confusion and debate about the original text has resulted in a less than scrupulous approach to translation. Most modern translations accept a philosophy of translation called "dynamic equivalence." (There are exceptions here, most notably the New American Standard.) But for the most part, modern translations, in the name of getting the "idea" across, are notoriously sloppy about getting what God actually said across.
In contrast, in the KJV and the NKJV the translators are very strict about translating every word. And where, for the sake of sense, it is necessary to add a word not in the original, that word is put in italics so that the student of the Bible can see that it was added. Because they are strict translations, such italicized words are kept at a minimum.
Because of "dynamic equivalence," the popular NIV feels very free to insert many words to convey what the translators believed to be the "sense," and the inserted words are not marked in any way. They have also felt free to omit, without any indication, many words in the original. At the very least, we can say that the NIV approach to the Bible's inspiration (as indicated by how it is handled) is a little fuzzy around the edges.
God's words are truth. Those who profess to serve the truth must repect the vehicle which brings it.
