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--Steve Brown-- Is the 1611 King James Version the only legitimate translation? We’ll talk about it on Key Life. This is Key Life, dedicated to the message that the only people who get any better are those who know that if they don’t get any better, God will still love them anyway. That teaching raises a lot of questions. So here’s author and seminary professor Steve Brown, along with Pete Alwinson from Forge Truth with answers from the Bible that will make you free.

--Steve Brown-- Thank you, Matthew.

--Steve Brown-- Happy Fourth. It’s tomorrow.

--Pete Alwinson-- I know. Well, yeah, it's coming. Yeah.

--Steve Brown-- I'm a flag-waving patriot and I can't help it.

--Pete Alwinson-- I know. I'm a constitutionalist. I I love the I love the Constitution of the United States.

--Steve Brown-- They they, you know, they criticize us for being that.

--Pete Alwinson-- Yeah. Do you care?

--Steve Brown-- No.

--Steve Brown-- But, but we're not Christian nationalists. We're here to build the Kingdom of God.

--Pete Alwinson-- Well, I'm a nationalist in a sense. I'm glad I'm an American.

--Steve Brown-- We want Christianity and I'm a Christian.

--Pete Alwinson-- Yeah.

--Steve Brown-- So they those things are not exclusive of one another.

--Pete Alwinson-- We want our nation to be affected positively by the Gospel.

--Steve Brown-- I agree.

--Steve Brown-- Well, we're agreed on this.

--Pete Alwinson-- Yeah, we. We agree on a lot of stuff, Steve.

--Steve Brown-- In fact, it's kind of scary. I'm going to disagree with you just so we can disagree sometimes.

--Pete Alwinson-- You do that regularly.

--Steve Brown-- That's Pete Alwinson and he's been coming in for years on Fridays and we've been answering literally thousands of questions. If you have a question, you can call 1-800-Key Life. That's 1-800-539-5433 or you can you can record your question or you can send your question to Key Life Network Post Office Box 5000, Maitland, Florida 32794. In Canada, it's Key Life Canada Post Office Box 28660 Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6J8. Or you can email your question to Steve at Keylife.org.

--Steve Brown-- And if you can help us financially, please do. We are a member of ECFA in the states and Force in Canada, both of those organizations oversee our practices to make sure that we're ethical. But we were before they came along. I promise we'll be faithful with your gift and we'll use it for God's glory and for the help of your brothers and sisters in Christ. So if you can help us, and if you can't, we understand. Pete, lead us in prayer and we'll get to these questions.

--Pete Alwinson-- You got it. Our great God, we come into your presence right now just for a moment to remember how easy it is to come before you. All because you, Lord Jesus, did the very difficult work of taking on human flesh, of living 33 years away from the throne room of heaven and six hours on the cross, experiencing hell for us. We honor you. We praise you. We thank you for the love that sent you, the the grace that you lavish upon us. And so we we honor you. We praise you. Lord, we pray that you would help us to remember all that you have done. Even this weekend when our preachers preach and our worship leaders lead, we pray for them. We pray for those in spiritual authority over us, Lord, that we would we would be able to hear from them how how great you are and how great is your grace.

--Pete Alwinson-- And Lord, I thank you for Key Life, and I thank you for those that do so much behind the scenes. Thank you for Steve. Thank you for the team here. And and Lord, thank you for our listeners. Lord, it's a battle to follow you sometimes in our broken world. And we ask for grace for your people who listen to Key Life. Father, strengthen them, encourage them, and even use this time of Q&A right now. We pray in their lives and in ours. We pray for your glory, Jesus. Amen.

--Steve Brown-- Amen. Pete, as you know, in 1611, the first King James Version of scripture was translated. And there is a movement in our time that would suggest that that and the the versions that have come from that and are faithful to it are the only legitimate translations of scripture. And I have an email in my hand that asks what we think about that particular movement.

--Pete Alwinson-- The King James only movement. Yeah.

--Steve Brown-- Yeah.

--Pete Alwinson-- Yeah, and and interesting because the Bible was written originally in the Old Testament in in in Hebrew, translated about 300 years before Christ into Greek, and the New Testament was written primarily, mostly in Greek. So it would be interesting to say, why would they say this would be the only version that we should use? Really, what they mean is is this the only version of English that we should use?

--Steve Brown-- Yeah, you're right.

--Pete Alwinson-- That really clarifies that question.

--Steve Brown-- It really does.

--Pete Alwinson-- So that that begs the question, why would they say that? What do you think? Why why does this school of thought? And there are people that we love and agree with on many, many theological issues.

--Steve Brown-- Oh, yeah. This is not a this is a family argument.

--Pete Alwinson-- It's a family argument. I like that where you put that. Yeah, yeah, it's so so why why why would we say to our other brothers and sisters, why do you say that? What would they say?

--Steve Brown-- I know. I get it. I'm old. I hate change. I don't like any hymn that was written before the after the 17th century.

--Pete Alwinson-- You didn't live back then.

--Steve Brown-- I know, but I don't like change. And I grew up in the King James Version. I memorized Scripture from the King James Version.

--Pete Alwinson-- Yeah.

--Steve Brown-- And then these young Turks come along and they want to change it. Doesn't matter whether it should be changed. It should. But that's a reason. I honestly believe it is a lot of that. Although there is more to it than that.

--Pete Alwinson-- Yeah, I think that I don't think it's an anti-intellectual approach.

--Steve Brown-- I don't think it's a It's probably a concern for for biblical orthodoxy and and and and faithfulness to true and sound doctrine.

--Pete Alwinson-- But having said that, we know that the King James 1611 was so good because it used the most up-to-date found ancient documents up to that time. But we have found others and more have been compared, more documents, more original languages have been found and compared. So we have even more knowledge than they had then. I think another major idea and point to keep in mind is that language is inevitably on the march.

--Steve Brown-- It is. It changes.

--Pete Alwinson-- It changes. And the words that were popular when I was in my teenage years are not popular anymore. And even how we structure sentences. A lot is different. Language is always on the move. And so the King James language uses words that are somewhat archaic now that we don't understand them. And and even the sentence structure is is not as faithful to the original languages.

--Steve Brown-- It's true.

--Pete Alwinson-- So there are not not every translation of the Bible should we follow, but we would respectfully disagree with the with the King James only movement.

--Steve Brown-- The only. That that has that. By the way, we just in the case of the the Qumran Scrolls, that predates anything we had of Scripture by a thousand years.

--Pete Alwinson-- Yes, right.

--Steve Brown-- That means a thousand years we could get closer, a thousand years closer to the original than we were before.

--Pete Alwinson-- And that was what, 1949? Something like that. 48, 49. And and so 1611, that comes a long way to be able to compare these documents. So if if you there's there's some good books on textual criticism of the Bible in a good way. To understand the history of the Bible. Greg Lanier from Reform Seminary has written a good book on how we got the Bible. Check that out. There's some good good stuff.

--Steve Brown-- Okay, that's good. So but at the same time, I do love King James. I love I I

--Pete Alwinson-- I know.

--Steve Brown-- I grew up with it.

--Pete Alwinson-- Me too.

--Steve Brown-- It has a warm place in me and that's cool.

--Pete Alwinson-- Yeah. So we're not putting that down. We're just saying, read another version, too, a more modern one.

--Steve Brown-- When you and I say the Lord's prayer or when we say Psalm 23 out loud, we're using these and thous because that's how we memorized it.

--Pete Alwinson-- That's right.

--Steve Brown-- Because you're supposed to.

--Pete Alwinson-- That's right.

--Steve Brown-- We've always done it that way.

--Pete Alwinson-- That's right.

--Steve Brown-- This is an email. Does the Bible say that we are all, including non-believers, children of God?

--Pete Alwinson-- You know, interesting, because when you were in Seminary, they used to talk about the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man.

--Steve Brown-- It was called the Korean confession and we used it. I served a student pastor in a couple of years after that of a little church on Cape Cod. And we had used that Korean.

--Pete Alwinson-- I never heard that name, that title.

--Steve Brown-- Yeah, and I but I you know, I was at a liberal graduate school and I didn't I thought that's something like Apple Pie. And and the flag, it's just it is. Everybody's a child of God. And I remember this lady that came up to me after a service and said, that's not in the Bible. And I said, of course it's in the Bible. She said, I don't think so. I said, I'll give you some verses. And that afternoon, I got out my concordance. It's not in the Bible.

--Pete Alwinson-- It's not in the Bible.

--Steve Brown-- We're all creatures.

--Pete Alwinson-- That's right.

--Steve Brown-- And the love of God is pretty broad, so I'm not saying he doesn't love anybody or he never listens to the prayers of unbelievers. God does what he wants.

--Pete Alwinson-- Uh huh.

--Steve Brown-- But you become a child of God. John one, if you believe on his name, he gave the power to become the children of God.

--Pete Alwinson-- That's right. That and that's the Gospel. That's the good news. You know, in a in a historic sense, the reason they said that is because they they they were diminishing the whole reality of sin. And they're just saying, well, there's one creator and that's God. And so therefore the creator God is a father of us all. In in that broad sense, yes. But not in the salvific sense, not in the New Testament sense. But it it it basically says, see, we're all saved. We have one we're all children of God. No, no, we do need to be born again.

--Steve Brown-- Oh, man, that's so well put. And that was exactly what I was being taught.

--Pete Alwinson-- Yeah.

--Steve Brown-- I mean, it was very clear that the problem of salvation was not an issue.

--Pete Alwinson-- That's right.

--Steve Brown-- That was already settled for everybody.

--Pete Alwinson-- For everybody. So then we just try to do good things. So you know, this is this is the words mean things and we have to be careful in what we're saying.

--Steve Brown-- We really do. And as you said, in the general sense of God being the father, the creator, in that sense, it's okay.

--Pete Alwinson-- Yeah.

--Steve Brown-- But you got to stop and say, but let me say something else. But there's a little bit more needs to be said about that.

--Pete Alwinson-- Absolutely. Absolutely.

--Steve Brown-- And we and that's the basis of real biblical revelation.

--Pete Alwinson-- That's right.

--Steve Brown-- Always clarity.

--Pete Alwinson-- And we do care for all all of God's people, all of God's creation to bring them to Christ.

--Steve Brown-- True. Hey, Key Life is a listener-supported production of Key Life Network.