If you ask an American Christian (in this case used to refer to the type of Christianity, not the type of American) about the conception of ‘Christianity’ you will usually see a definition of Christianity that is unconsciously structured around a set of concentric circles, where each layer in you progress, the more and more legitimately Christian the remainder is, depending on what the current threat is. If you’re looking at things where there being lots of Christians is a good thing, ‘Christian’ includes everyone who even says ‘god damn’ at some point, even if the last time they went to church was inhaling near a parson on the train. If it’s important to exclude people (because of, say, their disagreement with you on whether or not gay people should be burned alive), then suddenly, the mindset wants to pull back, across different boundaries of ‘really’ Christian.
Some of these boundaries are obvious and some of them are less obvious. People who never attend church, they’re not really Christian, even if they claim to be. People who attend church very rarely, they’re less Christian, but they are in a different layer to the first group. And you can go further and further into the layers of this horrible onion and find really specific nitpicky things that legitimise the American Christianity of a person, you’re going to find one particular boundary that’s been set up is about choice of Biblical translation. What’s more, amazingly, the translation that seems to centralise this mindset the most, and one of those dog-whistles that shows you’re dealing with the Shithead Brigade is a deference and reverence reserved for one, particular, correct translation of the Bible: The King James Version.
Man, America loves its kings.
The King James Version of the Bible was first put together in the early 1600s, and for the time, there’s a lot of conservative writing. The idea was to make it so that the Bible, when read aloud in public, would convey a proper tone of seriousness and importance, which meant that even for the day its grammar and word choice was pretty pompous. It’s that particular Biblical Speak which is only really grammatically coherent for a period just before the King James Bible was written, and it’s where you get a lot of thees and thous and evereth they dideth the thingeth.
It’s also a translation with a lot of problems!
One particular problem is that it flattens out some terms. This can happen in any translation naturally; for example, when we translate Magic: The Gathering cards to Japanese, while we in English have a bunch of different terms for different, specific types of undead like zombie, skeleton, ghost, spirit, wight, ghoul and ghast, these terms are all kind of just covered by a single word in Japan, which created some challenges in translating these card names meaningfully in other languages. That’s okay, translation is an art, not a science, but you can see a lot about what people do and don’t translate.
Sometimes this is about one language being more specific than another; in the Bible’s base text, there are about fifteen different words that the KJV translates into English as ‘Prince.’ More damningly, there’s one word that gets translated as ‘servant’ when one type of person has them, and translated as ‘slave’ when another type of person has them, which is pretty explicitly an ideological choice. This serves to obscure the role of slavery in the Biblical text, and also, tends to ambiguate the way that slavery works. Another fun one is that Hades and Gehenna, two different ideas in the original text, are invoked, they both get translated in the KJV as ‘Hell,’ a subject on which the Bible is normally pretty sparse.
Fact is, Biblical translation is hard. There are words in the Bible that appear in no other text, anywhere, and whose meaning we have to kind of guess at. Sometimes that guess is easy, sometimes the guess is a bit broader. I’ve talked about Shamgar, Son of Anath, a folk hero who murdered a bunch of people with a ?????. The typical translation of that ????? is ‘ox goad,’ but we have a term for an ox goad, and it’s not that term.
These are known as hapax legomenon, which is also a great name for a military rank that’s meant to look like some kind of cube-shaped chicken. There are a lot of these in ancient texts, and when you translate them, there’s different ways to handle that. None of these methods, though, can convey to you what the original text meant – and in English, we don’t have a meaningful literary way to convey ‘untranslated,’ or ‘untranslatable.’ It’s funny, it’s a byproduct of our position in the world, this supremacy we’re used to that there’s an implied relationship to other languages that you shouldn’t have to see untranslated words, that you should be able to convey everything in English alone.
But that’s general translation problems. Because these American Christian mindsets that anyone using a non-KJV translation are ultimately, as with almost every time I talk about this fundie stuff, conspiracy theorists. The idea runs that any translation after the KJV is corrupted, because it changes God’s word. How do you know it changes God’s word? Because it’s not the KJV. But, you might try to futilely argue, the KJV is just a translation, it’s not the core text. But, but the response comes, if there’s a difference between the translations that implies the KJV is wrong, and that can’t be the case.
Some of these folk commit to the next step, which is to say that the King James Version of the Bible is divinely inspired. This perspective is ridiculous if you’re outside of the space, but you gotta remember, this is a community that leaps to magic really quickly to explain things. But some don’t, and the lack of willingness to commit to that is tied to instead trying to demonstrate some scholarship that undermines other, later translations.
Funnily enough they very rarely point out those problems I underscore – you know, the way that some translation is impossible. Instead, it’s much more likely to pick around specific points of doctrine that the KJV kinda enforces (there’s a whole argument about the positioning of a comma representing the trinity) and therefore, the lack of those specific points mean the new texts are an attempt to lure Christians away from true things and undermine these important doctrines (that can be undermined by the moving of a comma).
But okay.
So why.
Why did the Bible only get perfected when it was translated into English, and why is it every subsequent translation is in fact an evil permutation enforced by Roman Catholics or liberal Protestants, depending on who you ask. Who benefits from this, you ask.
And then they take a deep breath and whisper the Jewwwwwwwwws–