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Doctor-Why-Designs — KJV/NIV Comparison Luke 11:2-4
#bible #kjv #niv #bibleversions
Published: 2018-08-24 05:07:32 +0000 UTC; Views: 740; Favourites: 1; Downloads: 3
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For the Christians who follow me on here who don't know, I'm a solid KJV proponent when it comes to Bible versions. One such reason as to why is passages like this, where the newer Bible version removes phrases and words that are key to the passage, and are present in the original texts.The NIV is a prime example of textual editing and removal, based on a select few manuscripts that at the time they were translated were perceived to be the oldest surviving texts, but have been since proven to be poorly kept inaccurate copies of the originals. These faulty manuscripts, as well as the translators desire to simplify the 'wordy' text, leads to omissions like seen above.
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Comments: 16
If one thing changes, everything change with it. God does not change and his word either.
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Man may try to change God, but God will never change.
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So you feel qualified to critique translation from the original Greek in favor of one done centuries ago, by those who had very real political goals in their work. Do you know ancient Greek better than modern international panels of experts, or do you reject the idea of a British king possibly using religious translation as a means of endorsing his power when he does so as a rival to Catholic and other doctrines?
I am not saying the NIV doesn't have some sort of agenda, either, but the odds are they have less pervasive of a slant than a dead king ensuring his subjects thought the way he wanted them to when literacy was low and the one book they all cared about was the very one he ordered translated--and the one I personally have heard from people schooled in Hebrew was badly translated. So, at least the Old Testament is suspect in the KJV to people who know Hebrew. How reliable an interpretation could the King James' New Testament be if NIV work is so different, given this?
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The NIV is not translated from the original Greek. Neither is the KJV. Both were translated from ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Latin sources from the same age but from different sources.
The testament is not in the King who authorized the translation, but in the men who did it, who were more respectful of the source material, than their 19th and 20th century counterparts. They believed in the infallibility of the texts they were translating and carefully made concise choices to accurately match the source material in the English of the day. Unlike the NIV translators, they went for a literal translation of every word and phrase, adding words only to help the text translate well.
Remember that the desire to have a Bible in the common tongue of England had preceded even King Henry VIII's establishment of the Anglican church. From at least the 700's there were incomplete attempts by various bishops to translate the scriptures into the common language, until John Wycliffe and William Tyndale.
William Tyndale learned Greek from the greatest Bible scholar of his day, Erasmus, the genius behind the Textus Receptus.
An example of this is in John 7:8. In the KJV reading taken directly from the Greek, it conveys that Christ intended to go up to but later, and not with his brothers.
In the NIV, the translators left out the word 'yet', effectively making Jesus a liar, by having him tell his brothers he was not going to the feast at all.
Are we to take the words of two High Church Anglican liberals from the late 19th century, who followed after a faith+works salvation, believed in communication with the dead, were part of ghost hunting societies, and even denied the existence of Heaven and the deity of Christ, dictate to us that the texts that what had been used primarily for Bibles for most of Church history were corrupt copies of the original writings and that incomplete manuscripts found in a 4th century monastery in Saudi Arabia and in a 16th century Vatican library were really the original words of God? The only English Bible translated from the source text of the NIV by Westcott and Hort's time was the Catholic Douay-Rheims version, as it was translated from the Catholic Latin Vulgate and not from Erasmus's Textus Receptus.
The KJV's source manuscripts agree with 95% of all the known texts found around the world. The NIV is based on that 5%.
Wouldn't it be better to have a version that is not only based on the bulk of the original texts, but also is in agreement with documents written by the early church fathers from the 2nd and 3rd centuries?
The KJV has been around for 400 years, with only small editorial changes done to it (i.e lyone becoming lion). the NIV has been around for close to half a century and it has changed vastly in wording between the different editions based around it. The NIV2011 is 60% similar to the NIV1984 and 31% to the TNIV, and has about 8% of its verses translated in an entirely new way.
The NIV2011 was received negatively because of the gender neutral interpretation the new edition took, and how it affected Messianic passages.
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Most of what you just wrote about how the NIV came to be, and continues to change, is blatantly incorrect given what I learned in my own research and from a Methodist college. Even if I grant you that, I was also educated by that college in world history, English, and history of the Christian church. I know better than to think the work done by King James' men was solely and independently of his political or religious leanings and utterly what was provided in the source material. The supposition this is so can only be considered gullible. Western kings do not rule that way, especially during the era of Christian sects killing each other over differences of doctrine. Further, I have spoken to people directly who know the original language of the Old Testament. In parts they called it "mind control" for its slant, according to those who know both Hebrew and English.
It is not advisable, either, to think immutability of a document is an argument for its validity. "Venerated" can simply be stagnant, regardless of its truth in translation (which is always difficult). A venerated document may be unable to keep current with a different world even if perfectly translated and perfectly applicable to all of the audience, neither of which are assured, and it is dangerous to think alterations to an interpretation made shortly after publication are themselves a sign of unreliability. The world reacting to the NIV is much more literate and active than the audience of the KJV, and many changes you may want to cite could simply be more particular responses or more accurate interpretations from a world of qualified people.
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Every college tells things differently, man. Like the Baptist college I went to, focused on the differences between the Textus Receptus based Bibles versus the UBS based Bibles, pointing out the wide variance of changes not just in the source texts, but in the resulting bible versions themselves, that the translators chose to make.
To insult the translators of the KJV is as unlearned men, is a slander on one of the greatest achievements to come from the Reformation.
Here's my source on the changes between the NIV 1984 and 2011 editions. None of the subsequent changes to the KJV equal to the changes that were made to the NIV.
www.slowley.com/niv2011_compar…
The current variation of the KJV we have today is based on the editions made in 1769, and that was an update in the language of the day.
Isn't it curious though that polls taken from 2014-2017 showed that the KJV is still the most read Bible version, with the NIV in the number 2 spot by a far margin?
In the U.S. alone, 31% of Bible readers use the KJV, versus only 13 NIV users.
What I find humorous and sad is writers of books and articles who jump around using different versions in one article.
you saying that he world reacting to the NIV is much more literate and active than the audience of the KJV, You've obviously never been to an old fashioned evangelistic church service before.
the KJV Bible reigned as the chief Englih version for over 260 years, and was (and still is) the Bible of great evangelists and missionaries across the world.
Winston Churchill said that the KJV had been translated into 760 languages. Most of those more than likely came from missionaries.
Some of the languages didn't even have a written form until the missionary came in, and these were men who had no knowledge of the ancient languages.
What have these new versions caused based on the W&H/UBS texts? confusion, and dilution. These are the bibles of the cults, the charismatic movements, and the prosperity gospels. These are the bibles that man choose to put there own ideas in over than creating an accurate translation. They have created church services that are nothing but concerts for 7/11 praise songs (seven words repeated 11 times). You expect me to believe that all this mass confusion is better than a king and a group of men of unified faith wanting every man that spoke their tongue to be able to have a copy of the true words of God?
Remember that God can use rulers, even ones with wicked intent, to his advantage. Sure Henry VIII, was a gluttonous and lustful man, wanting to preserve his lineage, but honest depravity is better than pious hypocrisy. The church had become like the hypocritical Pharisees and Sadducees that Jesus condemned almost constantly.
It's something to think about world history and Church history and how they reflect each other. In the days of the Roman Empire, Britain and Germany were two of Rome's problem areas. In the Reformation England and Germany were the Church of Rome's problem areas. Also like the Roman Empire, the Roman Church split into an Eastern half and a Western half, The Eastern half being the Greek Orthodox church.
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You don't seem to realize nothing there fundamentally helps your argument.
Baptist, you say. I went to a Baptist church when I was younger. We stopped going there. I have never had a religious conversation (in person) where Baptists treated most dissent or disagreement along any lines as anything but an insult to their faith or their worldview.
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Well...I do tend to ramble when I write a lot of words...when half asleep.
Let's just settle on the agree to disagree with this subject....for now.
Independent baptist as well.
If there's one doctrine my pastor vehemently opposes, it's Calvinism, it's the bone he goes to the most in sermons and Sunday school, denouncing the idea of predestination with a passion. Mine seems more focused on Roman Catholicism but that may be from reading a lot of Jack Chick stuff growing up.
To me one needs to be open to learning new things, as well as staunch in ones beliefs. There are a lot of misconceptions and half-truths that are still parroted by instructors and preachers alike, like...the high priest wearing a rope around his ankle or waist and having bells on the hem of his robe, for in case he messed up the ritual in the Holy of Holies and his dead body had to be dragged out. I heard this repeated by one of my instructors, despite it being a medieval legend long since debunked by scholars.
Oddly enough, the biggest argument I heard at that college, was about the teachers, and how there was the differing opinions they had on missions and evangelism.
The college I went to was The Crown College of the Bible, in Powell Tennessee, the personal mission of Clarence Sexton. He believed it was God's purpose for him to create a traditional Bible college for Christians to go to without compromising their beliefs. It has stretched out internationally, and has two other campuses, one in England, and the other in Nepal.
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Evangelizing one's faith without being willing to adapt the message to the audience is ineffective policy. If you want converts, you need to at least phrase things more befitting the audience's sensibilities. Short of that, the validity of your truth is irrelevant to your audience, since no one in the audience would appreciate it. That could mean different emphasis in the message notwithstanding how strictly the evangelist keeps to original translation. The Gospels are all about that; each of the four (the four an ancient committee of politicians and leaders accepted for an orthodox approach to the religion) has a different emphasis, even differing details where present or absent, but the same core message. The Bible as a whole, and the faith itself, must be regarded the same way.
Perhaps the most important statement we can't alter as Christians is "love thy neighbor". Jesus was Jewish but showed no expectation for the faithful to be as a prerequisite for salvation, which means we cannot pretend any one branch of faith believing in God--or, correspondingly, any one interpretation of the Bible done with the right motivations and capably--is the sole means of worship. Nothing made or remade by Humans can be considered unquestionable or beyond critique, either, so we can't elevate our objects of faith to the level of idolatry without consequences. Believe what you will, but acknowledge your neighbor could be right when you aren't. None of us really know what is Truth because we aren't God.
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Evangelizing does take different paths for different people. The book of Acts displays this plainly. When preaching to the Jews who knew the Scriptures, The apostles preached mostly on Jesus. When Paul preached on Mars Hill to the Greeks, he used a marker dedicated 'to the Unknown God', and introduced them to the God of the Bible, beginning with Creation. In my missions class, we went over numerous missionaries who had to work through several obstacles to reach the people they were preaching to, like Don and Carol Richardson in New Guinea. When they presented the gospel to the Sawi people, the Sawi viewed Judas Iscariot as the hero of the story, because their tribal culture saw a deceiver and betrayer as the good guy. The Richardsons had to change their approach by using the tribal custom of the Peace Child. The Peace Child was a child of one tribe given to another as a sign that there would be no more war between those two tribes as long as that child lived, and if anyone killed him, his blood would be on their head. Reintroducing Jesus Christ as the Peace Child between man and God opened up the Sawis to the gospel, and to this day, the Converted villages have been at peace.
then there is the story of the Zooks, who were missionaries to the Mouk people in New Guinea. The Mouks were a people gripped by fear and mistrust in their own religion. No one was allowed to speak against the men only ceremonies, because if they did, especially if they were a woman, they'd be put to death. The Zooks presented the gospel from Genesis to Christ with pictures and dramatizations, rather than with traditional preaching services. The gospel true to its meaning, was the 'Good News' that the Mouk People were waiting to hear. No longer were they bound by superstition and lies, fear and segregation. They found a God who loved them, not angry spirits that hated them. Many critics called it Christianity destroying yet another culture, but what is the good of a culture if it keeps them in subject to a lie, that everyone knows is a lie, but are afraid to speak out against it because it would mean their deaths?
This is where your faith and my faith differ. God is infinite, man is finite. God inspired a handful of men from various walks of life over 1500 years of human history to pen down a concise collection of historical, judicial, spiritual and poetical writings, weaved together almost perfectly that no other franchise or religious backstory in history has ever come close in its unity.
I do not think it is idolatry to believe that a being beyond our simple comprehension was able to keep His personal message to His creation unblemished since its completion 1900 odd years ago.
There has to be a reason, more than our small minds can fathom as to why, in spite of all the what the experts say about it, why the KJV, the Masoretic/Textus Receptus based Bible, has continued to outperform all of its 20th and 21st century successors.
Just compare the Bible's origins to the stories of similar holy books, the Koran and the Book of Mormon. The Koran wasn't put into written form until a full century and a half after Muhammad's death. Joseph Smith got the Book of Mormon from golden plates that nobody could see but the truly faithful.
The Koran took ideas from the religious soup that was the Middle East of its day. Christianity Judaism, Folklore, Persian legends, all helped shaped the book the Islamic faith hold so dear.
The Book of Mormon has no basis in scientific or historical fact in its accounts of the lost tribes of Israel, and considering he claimed to have translated it by looking through a peep stone inside of a hat.
Unlike either of these books, the writers of the Bible had a basic understanding of science and history.
You see? I believe that God revealed His truth to us, through the inspired writings of scripture, and we, like King Jehudi (Jer. 36:16-24), have taken a penknife to His word, and cut it up and cast it into the fire.
As for what you said about Jesus not showing no expectation about being a prerequisite for salvation.
*Ahem*
John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
Any conclusion that Jesus did not present himself as the sole source of salvation is moot and not based in Biblical study in the light of that testament alone, straight from the Lamb's mouth, no less.
John 6:63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.
John 17:3 And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.
Acts 4:12 Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.
The Exclusivism of Biblical Salvation is the motivation behind true evangelism, like seen in the missionaries I mentioned above.
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First off, I didn't say you didn't have to accept Christ to be saved. This may be the case but I tend not to think so. What I said was you didn't have to be Jewish, which is impressive since Jesus Himself was and didn't require it. Very important distinction there. If there's a better argument for pluralism of whichever Christian sect being potentially a valid means to salvation, I don't know it. It would argue for Judaism being valid means for salvation too, but that gets murky.
Second, you are inconsistent. You stand by missionaries with different emphases as you specify above (whose approaches seem good and sincere, besides effective), but swear to only one interpretation of a holy book: a book assembled by a political committee for the purpose of orthodoxy unto a growing and disparate list of beliefs around the same central figure--after which time, divergent views were suppressed and stamped out whenever possible--then reassessed by a political, social, and religious leader (King James) certainly vying for control and approval by a population with poor literacy and no worldly capacity to question his men's work without appearing to side with rival views of faith and governance. It does not mesh to support missionaries taking the good and effective approaches, as you describe, but you are so opposed to the possibility your form of the Bible is the only one worth having. You cannot be adaptive with the Word but not in your acceptance of how the Word comes to be or is perpetuated in a changing world without being a contradiction unto yourself.
Lastly, I strongly recommend you stop thinking the longevity of a document is a valid argument for its righteousness. The Bible's own existence is hardly first-person reportage or contemporaneous to events depicted most of the time. The four Gospels in it only came to be well after the events of Jesus Christ, so pointing out other books' delay in creation is hardly a fair criticism. Also, The Latin Bible was around a long time, too, but I think we would both agree with Luther in the concept of it's needing reassessment or revision. The King James Version Bible is great and I do appreciate it, but I am not swearing off all other forms because I believe it is an infallible conduit of God's very Word. Nothing Humans create is perfect and we misinterpret all sorts of things all the time, often deliberately. In matters of religious texts, this is even worse. The very best scenario is the KJV could have a few accidental errors or oversights made in good faith and the NIV may be more accurate, receptive to different and legitimate views, or otherwise apt to represent the faith of a world 400 years after the life of King James.
Of course, the likelihood of a Bible organized and authorized by an Anglican king being utterly true in spirit, and perfectly accurate in translations from other languages when not all words and phrases are known or are directly relatable from one culture to another over thousands of years, is quite low. This is a time when religious persecution compelled other sects to up and leave their home islands because "uncivilized" and "new" continents became available and were preferred. These people believed the rule of such monarchs was worse than carving a new home out of wilderness where they believed the natives were terrible heathens. But the Bible authorized by monarchs like these has no call to be questioned 400 years later? Consider that carefully.
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In reality, Judaism, at the time of Moses, was supposed to welcome non-Jews to come to know God. It was the Jews who developed the racial religious distinctions.
Judaism's sacrifices were a shadow of Heavenly things, and there has been a lot of connections made between the Crucifixion and the plethora of sacrifices that the Jews had to perform constantly. Jesus was promised to mankind in the Bible as early as Genesis 3. If you look at it plainly, the whole Bible is mostly focused on the lineage of Jesus, even though it gets kinda hazy between II Chronicles and the Gospel of Matthew.
As one of my instructors put it, the OT asked people to come to God, the NT instructed people to go out for God.
There are several cases in the Old Testament of Jewish prophets going to the gentiles. The most famous of all was Jonah, who reluctantly went to the Ninevites to warn them about God's impending judgment. Nahum succeeded Jonah in witnessing to the Ninevites, some 50 years later after the people returned to their wickedness.
It's not an inconsistency believing people can be witnessed to different way, and believing one translation (not interpretation like modern versions) is the correct version of the Bible. Those missionaries all believed the same about the Word of God. The missionaries even started printing Bibles for the people, and helping them learn to read.
These 54 learned men from every great college of England, some knowing as many as 6 languages(Lancelot Andrewes) believed with all their heart and soul that what they worked on for 7 years was an "exact translation of the holy Scriptures into the English tongue." New versions don't even come with that guarantee, because the ones who interpreted them chose dynamic equivalence over a word for word literal translation.
The Truest translation in the English language was the wellspring of truth behind the ministry of these missionaries. The KJV was written to be an unbiased translation of the Bible, with the only footnotes in the margins to help the text, not to convey any anti-hierarchical or Catholic ideas in the text.
King James was trying to keep his kingdom together, and one of the best ways he determined how was to have a new Bible version that did not have bias.
The fact is the NIV doesn't do what you suggest. It removes connections to deity, cools down Hell, and purposely drifts Biblical narrative towards vices that the original texts outright condemned. How can a dynamic equivalent, coming from a source text that left out the whole last 12 verses of Mark. In fact, one of their sources wasn't some ancient undiscovered manuscript, but the Latin version that Luther said needed to be updated! There is nothing new about the New International Version, other than it being an update of a bad copy, that Luther, Erasmus, and the KJV committee saw the truth about, they chose manuscripts from other sources than the Latin Vulgate text as the basis for their's.
The whole New Testament was written down within 30 to 70 years after the ascension of Christ, by people who knew and witnessed Christ. Think of that, that's like from the 1980's to WWII, to today. The Koran took the equivalent of from the U.S. Civil War to now.
You look at the Bible continuously through man's fallibility, I look at it through God's infallibility.
There are essentially two Bibles, from two groups of Christianity. There is the one that became the Protestant Bible, spread by non-Catholic groups for over 2000 years, and then there is the one that became the Catholic/Modern Bible. This Bible version is the basis for most modern Bibles, all Catholic Bibles, and even the Jehovah's Witness Bible. In this modern age, these two Bible lineage's have begun playing out their ancient feud on a global scale, with both sides accusing the other side of heresy, idolatry, and being a cult.
I look at things in a different light than you do. Consider that must've been something more at play than political moves for power and religious intolerance. Take what happened in 1588, when Philip II 'moved by God' sought to return England to the Catholic fold. He had his 'invincible' fleet devastated, because the English had foul weather on their side.
Remember also that the Plymouth colony was saved by the fortuitous circumstance of a Native American who had been a slave and converted to Catholicism.
Squanto.
As the wise King Solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun. Today we still have political and religious differences. I look at today's see the base nature of man as unchanged.
The Bible is a culturally universal book. In its day, the New Testament was actually culturally groundbreaking.
In a time when women were second class citizen, here was a belief system that commanded the husband to ensure the needs of his wife, before his own. It was a strange idea among the polygamous Greeks to have just one woman to show your love and affection to, and you couldn't get rid of her through divorce! Fast forward to today, when fidelity to one man or woman is a rare thing, and divorce is sky high.
If anything, the culture has reverted back to the Greeks of Paul's day.
The fact that many of our laws today have basis in the simplest of the Biblical commandments (thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not lie, etc). The only thing out of date for today's time is the laws given just for Israel judicially and ceremonially.
I'm not looking at the monarch who authorized it, I'm looking at the God who used the monarch.
Proverbs 21:1 The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will.
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1: But did the Jews believe anyone was saved by Yahweh without following rabbinic law? I am fairly sure that was not the case. Paul of Tarsus had to deal with that. I studied the letters of Paul expressly and specifically for a college course, which is enough to know the early church had no sense of orthodoxy, so putting those letters into the New Testament demanded a slant for it to work within a faith made to conform with doctrine only emergent after the different churches existed. I know this because I studied them. The rest of any Bible must have a trace of that interpretation for a goal of common practice, and this means alternate beliefs--perhaps more legitimate ones--were eliminated from common practice. Period.
2: There is no such thing as a perfect translation in all meanings and contexts. Language does not work that way.
3: If the NIV is entirely or partially a product of bad translation or misleading speech, how would an international body ever settle on a final product? Occam's Razor--rather than presume hundreds of people across the world working on a single project in differing capacities are working in bad faith for the creation of propaganda, and your version is the right one, it makes much more sense to trust these experts are not, in fact, contriving to mislead the entire planet able to confirm or refute their work at the speed of internet servers. They are much more likely to be doing a decent job and correcting the imprecise or dare we say, slanted previous work of the source material. If men from the 1600s rejected specific sources and these interpreters do not, it is possible learned men from the late Middle Ages could have been a little presumptuous about what constituted the right source material.
4: Still years after the fact and subject to Human memory and interpretation, influenced by what one person or another wants to be true and endorse.
5: Plenty of aboriginal tribes helped and cooperated with European settlers without converting. They were just good people without knowing the Word. This is not an argument for divine intervention, only moralistic behavior unto those who eventually took advantage of the situation to marginalize or destroy those same tribes. If you want to say any assistance done to Christians at any time is God acting through others, great. It also destroys your exclusivist view only one moralistic path can be the right way to God.
6: Who said the King James Version Bible isn't a great influence on the world? I am just saying it's not perfect. No real authority of Christendom was a perfect conduit of God's will. Even if king James wanted to be, and was sincere in that belief, his view was objectively flawed on a global scale because of its limitations to his own time and place. This is the nature of reality in an environment where we cannot know everything, as well as relate this all-knowing wisdom to everyone in an audience. The KJV cannot be the end-all, be-all text for all people of all time because the context of that work cannot fit for all people of all times. It is a document for a specific purpose and written for a single generation of British with their own views and disagreements with that Anglican king. I am telling you as a historian, you cannot accept any monarch would proffer an unblemished means to God even in his own time (let alone into the centuries after him) without rejecting objectivity when looking at history and historical leaders. This is patently absurd.
Lastly, to quote you: "the correct version" of any religious text. That's all I need to point out. The hubris of that statement is plenty.
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1. I didn't quite make it to the New Testament study. In my one semester we mainly did a crash course over the Old Testament, and that was mainly to learn the common themes, Christ in the book, and trivia about the book in question. The common belief I learned there is that the Jewish saints had faith in the coming Messiah, but by Christ's day, the idea of what the Messiah was had been skewed to a looking for a monarchical saviour, not a spiritual one. I believe God chose Paul.
2. It isn't perfectly translated, it's perfectly preserved.
3. Curiously, the NIV alters the verses that in the Masoretic Text and the KJV proclaims God's power in preserving His Word. The interpreters changed it to a verse about God protecting from the wicked.
Psalm 12:6-7
KJV
The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.
Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.
NIV
And the words of the Lord are flawless, like silver purified in a crucible, like gold refined seven times.
You, Lord, will keep the needy safe and will protect us forever from the wicked.
Sometimes I find it humorous that KJV critics point out the flaws in the logic of the KJV committee producing an accurate translation of the Bible, when there is an comparable example within the source texts for modern versions, treated the same way as the Textus Receptus is by KJV believers. The Greek LXX, a Greek translation of the Old Testament supposedly put together by 72 Jewish scribes (6 from each tribe of Israel) for Ptolemy II to put in the Library of Alexandria.
Somehow a Hebrew Holy book that was translated into Greek, and then translated to Latin, and finally into English, is better than one primarily translated directly from Hebrew into English?
The KJV translators were working with a direct translation of the Hebrew, while the NIV interpreters have been working with a text that has gone through 3 language barriers.
Further, the NIV's own Masoretic text source is not ancient, but was created from the works of Rudolph Kittel, the father of Gerhard Kittel, the 'Scholarly' expert behind Hitler's Anti-Semitic Nazi Church. Later, Kittel would remark on his works for the Reich as being the most bitter deception of his life.
His father was a Nazi Sympathizer, and and Anti-Semite, yet, his work is used as one of the bases upon which new Bible versions get their Old Testament from.
As you pointed out, one has to consider the right source material, and an Old Testament derived from a Greek translation for a ancient pagan library, and a Masoretic Text interpreted by a documented Nazi, hmmm, somehow a translation okayed by a 17th Century Protestant king looks pretty good, IMO.
4. Yet, you find unity in what the witness recount. These men were of one faith, contrary to what rummaging liberals might say.
5. Divine intervention comes in strange ways, whether from pagan aborigines, or rough weather. Remember that in the Bible, God used pagan people to punish Israel whenever they turned to other religions. In fact God called the pagan emperors Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus his servants. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the southern kingdom of Judah, and Cyrus agreed to send the Jews back to Judah. while neither men truly converted to worship the God of Israel, they both respected Him.
It's not a question of salvation here, it is knowing that everything in this world, be it man or beast, nature or kingdoms, kings or peasants are subject to God's sovereignty.
The call of salvation is inclusive to all, but exclusive in the path it takes.
6. King James himself was not perfect (no one is, except Jesus), but better than many of his predecessors and successors. Many of his contemporaries, even those who opposed him, talked about his chaste and pure nature, and how he never came into a discussion over morality with his religious opponents. It's been only after King James death that the myth of his homosexuality came out, but it was immediately refuted by those who knew the king personally. Our contemporaries do this ruler an injustice by believing in 400 year old gossip. In fact, King James spent more time with his wife than any king of England. King James was also one of the first anti-smokers, finding the habit of both smoking and chewing tobacco detestable.
We're talking about a man who bowed before a servant to ask him forgiveness for striking him after falsely accusing him of a wrong.
God could not have chosen a better king to help preserve His word in the English language.
The contemporaries of his day made many allusions to King Solomon, based on scripture. the similarities that were made between them were being their mother's only child, both being young when they were first crowned, both being doubly crowned, both being crowned twice, both were well learned and writers, and finally both lived a relatively peaceful reign of 60 years.
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1. Point made, then.
2. Perfectly preserved is meaningless unless perfectly translated. As stated, that is impossible in all contexts and over extreme passage of time.
3. You seem to oppose the result rather than the efforts in the NIV project, which is direct from original sources most of the time and reviewed by a panel of people trained in such things. I don't know who you're citing to claim otherwise, since the link you posted before was deemed insecure by my online protection system and I have never seen anything remotely endorsing your claims in any reputable organization, but that's the nature of the NIV project. My point stands either way: the probability is lower of an international propaganda campaign of vying lies by means of translation than this effort simply correcting or clarifying an older product you prefer.
4. More people in agreement about memory doesn't help prevent bias in a group in agreement. If they are of like mind, this merely reinforces the bias. Also, you should look up the phrase "confirmation bias".
5. Deliberately dodging the point.
6. Why would an absolute monarch's opponents risk their own beheading by citing real moral failures of their sovereign? Of course they didn't speak against his character. Of course stories endorsed his rectitude. There is no way to know how accurate, consistent, or relevant these account are when it comes to being open-minded in translating the Bible--the most important single piece of influence he had on the entire country. To call out the king on immoral behavior in his lifetime, fairly or not, could be suicidal and certainly pointless when the state controls the narrative. It was not a free press.
I notice you didn't remark about the hubris of claiming to have "the right version" of a holy text. My final word on this entire topic is going to be a fair warning about the fundamental motive you display in presuming to know what the right means to faith is, and the same as many wise people have said many times in the past. What you believe is right, you declare is right essentially because you say so. Substitute King James Version and Christianity for any other equivalents (the Qur'an and Islam, what-have-you) with the core motive of what drives your rhetoric here and it would be just as supported by any rational backing. (That is to say, it isn't.) Faith is intangible for a reason, and as such, it cannot be definitively known if there is only one right way. Any claim to possess the sole, right way and operate on the assumption your opinion is in keeping with it does nothing to support the claim--and anyone can do the same with as much validity. Many have, and arrogance was shown to be their worst weakness.
Is it not enough to live joyfully in your faith? There is no need to live pridefully in it. If Christ can choose to humble Himself to a mob of stupid, murderous Humans for their eventual benefit, we can acknowledge the possibility someone else's Bible is better, or ours may not be as great as we wish it was.
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