“Pastor told us that he uses the latest version because hundreds of scholars have worked on it, compared to a handful when the King James Version was written and also that it is easier to understand for the modern reader without the thee and thou and thine for instance.’

This is a good question. I have been assured on good authority by a man who I trust is totally honest that the King James is “a terrible translation.”

So why would I use it?

I am convinced that all of the translations are corrupt, especially the later versions with more contributors, as these academics were born within the current lie. For instance, standard Christian academic responses to the excusing of slavery in the Old and New Testament center on the contention that true slavery did not exist in the ancient world and that only the enslavement of Africans by Christian Europeans in the early modern era count as slavery. How can I trust such idiots? Such contentions can only be made by the mind totally unfamiliar with the brutality of Rome.

Furthermore, the foremost historian of classical antiquity, a secular scholar named Michael Grant with no peer since Gibbon or Durant, who is fluent in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, examined the Gospels in these three original languages and, without a doctrinal axe to grind, came to the conclusion that these messages have been translated within anachronistic contexts that have mis-represented the audience Jesus addressed. He was also convinced that they were authentic period documents, contrary to the opinions of many secular scholars who dismiss these works as fable and propaganda.

Of course, the King James Version did not have the benefit of archeology and was working with a lesser command of philology. It cannot be as informed as some more recent translations. However, it absolutely is much less corrupt because it was a relatively honest document, an attempt to clean up an ancient book translated across numerous languages. The one thing that I have found since reading hundreds of primary sources from the past, is that current scholars working since 1945, of all faiths and disciplines almost always twist the words of the past into the current usage of the present and come to their work in a context that precludes understanding the past. I found this in 1998 when I started reading at the Peabody Library, that the assumption that ancient life and ancient boxing were the same as modern life and boxing, had severely twisted the scholarship of honest scholars.

So, do I trust any translation of the Good Book?

I do not.

I also utterly lack the ability to conduct an investigation and am stuck with man’s imperfect, squabbling interpretations.

So my choice is an old version with philological mistakes and sourcing gaps done in 1611[I’m writing from memory and might be a few years off, but the book was in Virginia in 1611] before academics became professional liars for the secular authorities, or a new version that addresses these problems from within the field of the Lie.

Now, before continuing excusing my final reading of the Bible, my past Bible reading, other than picking up random copies in offices and houses and browsing, is this:

-1970s: read my mother’s huge Catholic Bible from cover to cover. I want a book of similar size.

-1980s: read the New English Revised Edition from cover to cover

-1990s: read The Gideon’s version, which is the King James from cover to cover

-2000s: used the two latter versions above for searches, quotes, brief readings, particularly searching the New Testament for a view of Paul, who I was fascinated with

-2010s: reread the New English Revised, along with an exegesis I cannot recall the author of.

2016: reread Judges and Leviticus numerous times in the above edition

-During each decade of my reading I have generally read the psalms in a booklet form left by my father from cover to cover once a year. I want a new, larger print pocket edition. When I told a Christian scholar this he quipped, “You know its in the Bible!” and I had to defend, “But the Bible will be above my boots in the base of my rucksack and I want something in my pocket with print I can read on the train, and I like the Psalms.”

-2020: used the new super-duper superior version of the bible recommended by the above cited Pastor to read, Genesis and Job.

-2020: used the King James to do an exegeses on The Loaves and the Fishes for a seminary student, and to pull quotes for Who Wrote the Songs of Night based on the above reading of the superior version earlier in the year.

So, my Bible reading is, so far, slanted heavily AWAY from the King James.

Also, since I am primarily reading the Bible to understand the moral and linguistic underpinning of Plantation America, which was literally founded in the same decade as this book was written, no tool could be more important. The King James Bible was that which was used to Christianize English Speaking North America and therefor had more impact on Planet Earth than any other version of the book, as it was the guidebook for the building of the greatest war machine and secular cultural continuum in Human History. During the Plantation Era, the King James WAS the dictionary.

My secondary purpose for rereading the Bible one last time from cover to cover and annotating it, is the Arуas project. The profound ignorance of non-Christian antiquity that is the hallmark of the Christian scholar, which is sad considering most of antiquity was non-Christian, is something I’d like to bridge for heathens and Christians. This does not enable such scholars to place their own faith in a realistic context. If I were a Christian, I would want to know what pagans actually believed, not what a modern Christian ignorantly assumes they believed. Ironically, in reading ancient non-Christian texts I have found references that support the notion that educated and uneducated pagans were far closer in their beliefs to modern Christians than to modern secular folk, who are used as the analog to ancient non-Christians in many a sermon I have heard.

In having this discussion in person I was warned by a man not to “write in it,” that I would be desecrating a sacred document by placing a letter code in the far margins so that I could effectively study this book by the method I have used on hundreds of others. And here we return to the worship of priests and scientists as gate-keepers between we and God. For each version of the Bible I have read had been annotated. Why cannot I annotate my Bible as those hundreds of scholars annotate those books reconfigured for our reading, if it is not because I am an inferior being that must seek God through some university-certified guru?

A note on annotation:

I use a letter code developed for each book. In my final reading of the Bible, an H in the margin will indicate that within the lateral text is mention of a hero, a P a prophet, an S a slave or slavery, an A for angelic beings, etc. This is a tool that enables me to quickly go through a book I have read and view the text thematically. There will be no sense in marking M for messiah in the Gospels, but in Scripture, I regard such mentions as important to considering the Gospels and Scriptures as one book.

I will sometimes write in the top or bottom margin the author or book that correlates to the text on that page. For instance, under Cain and Abel I might note, Beowulf, for the poet mentioned Grendel as the spawn of Cain in that work of about A.D. 1,000. This is my attempt to be my own Aristotle, who annotated the Iliad for Alexander, not to be a reductionist twit like Thomas Jefferson who predicted the current soul-eating secular machine when he stripped all of the metaphysics from the Gospels to present Jesus as a pure, universalist, ethical instructor.

Please don’t stone me, and in case you do, I’m getting a leather-bound large print version I can use as a shield when I see you ancient Isrаelites waiting at the train station with your slings and arrows.