KJV Only?

Recently I observed a young man publicly sitting peacefully and reading the Bible. When I walked by him, it made me smile. I thought, how great it is to see this man growing in his Faith. Just about that time, I heard another man (a KJV-only advocate) address this young reader and ask him what version of the Bible he was reading. The conversation that followed between these two men had nothing to do with encouraging, edifying, or building each other up.

Let us get back to the story. The young man responded by saying that he was reading an NIV Bible. The other man replied, "Oh, you mean the non-inspired Version (NIV)." The young man reading his Bible said that he had never heard anyone refer to the NIV like that before. The young reader was trying to appease the man and said, "I also have an ESV and an NLT which I enjoy reading." The KJV-only advocate responded by laughing and sarcastically telling this young man that he should not be reading the Evil Satanic Version (ESV) either. The conversation went on for a bit. Standing there watching this take place ticked me off. I used to be guilty of doing this very thing under the guise of speaking the Truth. This inspired me to be more outspoken and to add a KJV-only discussion to my website. I did apologize to this young man for the unfortunate hatefulness of the KJV-only advocate and told him that he was an encouragement to me. I was guilty of false followship in this belief system (KJV only). Regrettably, back in the day, I was also out in the world bashing other Believers for reading anything other than the KJV. 😩

​There is a drive in every religious group (Morman, Jehovah's witness, Muslim, etc.) to have a single black-and-white text and have no questions about it. But that is just not how God gave us the bible. No two Greek manuscripts read identically to one another. The King James Translators had to make choices (with uncertainty) between the available text, which can be seen in their footnotes. The manuscripts available at the time of the KJV translators were far fewer than we have today. Click the button to watch a great discussion on this topic. ✒ 📜

KJV Only?