Tradition, Dogma & the King James Bible

One of our less attractive characteristics as Christians is the way we find pious and noble excuses for things that we really did for much less baser reasons.  For example, when people swap churches it is often because they had a quarrel with someone else, or had their pride hurt.  But will that ever be the official reason for their leaving?  Of course not!  They always find a highly principled excuse – usually an obscure point of doctrine.  If no excuse lies readily to hand they can always fall back on the old stand-by of “I wasn’t being fed.”

What works on a personal level happens on congregational and denominational levels as well.  We all have stuff in our traditions that is just that – tradition.  Often these traditions are purely as a result of historical accidents – but we do great at piously turning them into high-minded doctrinal issues.

One example of this is the phenomenon of “King-James-Onlyism.”  There are large numbers of Christians, mainly from baptistic backgrounds or ways of thinking, who insist that the King James Bible of 1611 is the only valid translation of God’s Word into English.  Anyone who can google will find studies where carefully selected verses are compared with the NIV and other modern translations to ‘prove’ that the KJV is correct and all other versions are corrupt.

The problem, of course, is that baptistic Christians fought tooth and nail against the KJV when it was first introduced.  They only began using it because the law of the land was used to impose it upon them and to suppress another translation which they much preferred, and then kept using it because of a swing in popular opinion.

The Geneva Bible was produced in the Sixteenth Century by British exiles in Geneva who had fled from the persecution of Protestants under the reign of Mary Tudor, or ‘Bloody Mary’ (1553-1558).  In the Elizabethan era the Geneva Bible rapidly became wildly popular, running through over 140 editions.

However, King James I hated the Baptists, Presbyterians and Puritans.  They frequently used the Geneva Bible to argue that monarchs should not have unlimited power, that churches should not be controlled by the State, and to reject the system (inherited from Catholicism) of bishops and archbishops.  Therefore one of James’ first acts was to replace the Geneva Bible.  He arranged for a panel of translators that would do his bidding, and instructed them to produce a translation which would bolster his own authority and strengthen the church hierarchy.  The result was the King James Version of 1611.

At first the Puritans and Baptists insisted on retaining the Geneva Bible.  But soon it was forbidden by law to do so.  The first instance in history of “King-James-Onlyism” was when the king forcibly suppressed the Geneva Bible in order to spite those Christians who disobeyed him by maintaining such practices as believers’ baptism and rejecting State control of congregations.

One of the groups who grudgingly accepted the KJV was a small congregation in Scrooby in Nottinghamshire.  Eventually they would flee to find religious freedom in America, taking copies of the KJV with them on their ship, the Mayflower.

The Geneva Bible did enjoy a revival after the English Civil War, as it was promoted by the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell.  Unfortunately the Puritans managed to make themselves, and their religion, highly unpopular by trying to ban Christmas and stopping English people from playing soccer.  This pretty well guaranteed that when the monarchy was restored under Charles II that the English population would dump everything associated with Puritanism – and that meant the end of the Geneva Bible’s influence.  So, for any Englishman who loved the king, and wanted to keep having archbishops and getting his babies baptized, there was only one Bible worth having.  The KJV became the default Bible in the English language, and thousands of emigrants subsequently carried it to America.

So, because of repressive laws against the Bible of choice of the early Puritans and Baptists, and because of an understandable popular backlash against the excesses of Oliver Cromwell’s soccer-hating regime, the KJV ended up being used in America by churches that neither loved the king, nor wanted to have archbishops controlling them.

That’s the way history works.  Lots of things end up becoming traditional as a result of such historical accidents.  But what is really odd is that many modern day Baptists and Puritans (in a country that long ago rejected the authority of kings, freed churches from State-control and is pretty useless at soccer) are the loudest at arguing how wonderful the KJV is and how it is the only true English Bible.

People are funny.