“Seek Yahweh while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return to Yahweh, and He will have compassion on him. Turn to our Elohim, for He will abundantly pardon.”

Isaiah 55: 6-7

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King James Bible Believing Churches: Are You Kidding Me?

What a title for an editorial. As a believer, I am almost ashamed to use it.

The title is not just an attention-grabber, though. There really are churches in America that are set up and based on the belief that the King James Version of the Bible is the only truly inspired version of the Bible. There is at least one of them in Greenville, South Carolina near where I live. The preacher has a Sunday morning radio ministry. He starts his show by explaining to the listening audience that his church is a “King James Bible believing church”.

He doesn’t say which King James Version he’s talking about. I wonder if he knows there are several of them.

I was driving home from my daughter’s and son-in-law’s house in Greenville when I first heard him, and I was appalled. I listened to him preach while I drove, and I became offended. By the time I got home and turned off the car, I was angry.

What kind of preacher would stand in front of a group of churchgoers and make such a foolish statement?

Let’s assume that the churchgoers actually believe that the King James Version is the only inspired version of the Bible. What kind of preacher would agree to serve as pastor in a church like that? If they want to have their ears tickled, let someone else do it. It is not my job to tell them what they want to hear. My job is to tell people what Yahweh is telling me.

Their faith is in the King James Version or one of them, not Yahweh. That has to be true, because Yahweh didn’t say one word about the King James Version. Why would He?

His Name is Yahweh

When I finished writing His Name is Yahweh more than 20 years ago, I spoke before as many church audiences and Christian groups as I could, and I told them about the importance of Yahweh’s Name. I prepared PowerPoint presentations of various lengths to lay out the facts with supporting scriptural documentation. My purpose was to show them that everything I said was accurate and that it came straight from the Bible in the original texts.

One of the slides in each presentation said that Yahweh’s Name appears in the original Hebrew texts of the Scriptures (the Old Testament) almost 7,000 times. It has been edited out of most Bibles including the King James Version, all of them.

According to Charles Ryrie, the exact number is 6,823 times, but I didn’t count them myself to verify that his number is correct. The exact number was not and is not important to me. It’s disturbing that people believe a Bible version is error free when we know that there are almost 7,000 errors in it associated with Yahweh’s Name, and those are not the only errors in the King James Version.

Stubborn and Stiff-Necked People

Eventually, I realized that King James Bible believers are difficult people to talk with. They are some of the most stubborn and stiff-necked people I know. They give ultra-Orthodox Jews are run for their money in that regard. The difference between them is so slight that it barely registers. They are dead wrong, but they are dead certain that they are right.

Almost none of the ones I have talked with know that the original King James Version came out in 1611 AD and that it bares almost no resemblance to the King James Bible versions that people use today. The New King James Version came out in 1982. It was an attempt to make the King James readable for the masses, but no King James version including the New King James Version shows Yahweh’s Name correctly. All of them are error ridden.

No Bible Translation is Error Free

I’m not picking on the King James Bible. There are no error free versions of the Bible. As far as I am concerned, the New Jerusalem Bible is the most accurate translation of the Old Testament on the market today, and the Aramaic English New Testament is the most accurate translation of the New Testament.

I’ve read all of the top contenders, and I am not guessing. To reach those conclusions, I had to study the Old Testament (a.k.a., the Tanach) in the original Hebrew, and I had to get to know an Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek scholar who shed light on things that never entered my mind until he illuminated them for me. His name is Andrew Gabriel Roth.

Serious study is something that King James believers are not prone to do. They are so satisfied that they know all there is to know that they won’t look and refuse to listen.

New Testament Translations are Even More Problematic than Old Testament Translations

New Testament translations are more problematic than Old Testament translations for a couple of important reasons. First, the New Testament is loaded with quotes from the Old Testament. That’s to be expected. No one who wrote anything that was later included in the New Testament thought he was writing about a new religion. All of them were pointing out that the Messiah is the Person who was talked about in the Old Testament. He is Yahweh, and He fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah.

See His Name is Yahweh: Revised Edition.

According to Acts 11: 26, believers were first called “Christians” in Antioch in about 40 AD to 50 AD, but Christianity didn’t become the religion we know today until the 300s AD when Constantine became the Roman Emperor. Constantine set up the Catholic Church for political reasons as much as anything else. He wasn’t even a believer.

It’s important to repeat that no one who wrote anything included in the New Testament thought he was writing about a new religion. Most of them went out of their way to make the point that they were not talking about a new religion. For all practical purposes, what we call “Christianity” today is a new religion.

See The Trilogy.

Second, most or all of the original New Testament documents were written in Aramaic, not Greek. To understand how we know that, you have to know a lot about Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. The proof that the original New Testament documents were written Aramaic is revealed by the mistranslations in the Greek manuscripts, and there are many of them.

Anyone who is willing to listen, study, and pray can see it. As the Messiah said, “The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Matthew 26: 41) The flesh is intellectually lazy, too. He told me that. Lots of churchgoers are intellectually lazy people who foolishly believe that they know all there is to know. I learned that I can’t change them. Only Yahweh can do that.

Most or all of the original New Testament documents were written in Aramaic shortly after the Messiah’s death and resurrection. At some point later, sometimes decades later, they were translated into Greek, and many translation errors were made. More than 1,500 years later than that, in 1611 AD, those Greek manuscripts were translated into English, and more translation errors were made.

So today, large numbers of believers place their faith in the belief that the King James Version is error free. That’s not true. It’s a translation of a translation with many errors.

Yahweh’s Message is Getting Out Despite Our Mistakes

Even though we have done our best to make things difficult for Yahweh, He continues to use flawed humans to get His message out. The Messiah said,

“My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.” (John 10: 27)

Yahweh leads us to the truth Himself. We can hear His voice if we will listen. That’s what I have been doing for more than 20 years, and that’s why I am able to write things like this.

I am not trying to earn a living by selling this message. I give it away. And I am not trying to create a cult following and enrich myself at Yahweh’s expense. I’m just telling people what Yahweh has shown me and told me.

The Super-Religious and the Self-Righteous

Yahweh did talk about people who are super-religious and self-righteous, though. People who are self-professed King James believers fall into that category. This is what He said:

“Enter through the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Matthew 7: 13-14)

When He talked about the narrow gate that leads to life, He was talking about faith in Yahweh:

“Everyone who calls on the Name of Yahweh will be saved/delivered.” (Joel 2: 32, Acts 2: 21, and Romans 10: 13)

Calling on the Name of Yahweh means to have faith in Him. I call it “the faith of Abraham”. Yahweh did, too.

Again, see The Trilogy.

The Messiah also said,

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14: 6)

He is Yahweh, and faith in Him is the narrow way that leads to life. That message is all over the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New Testament.

It’s not about religion. Religion is the wide gate and the broad way that leads to destruction. He most assuredly was not referring to the King James Version or any other version of the Bible as the gateway to life.

I have no idea who will find this editorial interesting and informative, but I know that some of my readers need to think about what I am saying and take it very seriously.

At best, the belief that the King James Version of the Bible is the only inspired version of the Bible is ignorant beyond imaging. Again, I’m not picking on the King James Version. See the SnyderTalk editorials below:

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“I am the good shepherd. I know My sheep and My sheep know Me — just as the Father knows Me and I know the Father — and I lay down My life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also. They too will listen to My voice, and there shall be one flock and one Shepherd. The reason My Father loves Me is that I lay down My life — only to take it up again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from My Father.”

John 10: 14-18