Why the New King James Version?

Careful readers may notice that while Tomorrow’s World uses many different Bible translations in our materials, we most commonly use the New King James Version (NKJV). Occasionally we receive questions about why this is so and why we do not use other popular versions, such as the New International Version (NIV), beyond occasional references. A look into the history of Bible translations in English—and the inherent challenge of translating the Bible from its original languages—helps to illuminate the answer to these questions.

Jesus Christ explicitly promised that His words would not pass away (Matthew 24:35), and such promises apply to the entirety of God’s inspired word (Isaiah 40:8). So, we at Tomorrow’s World believe that, in their original writing (often called the autograph), the words recorded by the biblical authors were inerrant—written under God’s inspiration through the Holy Spirit and completely true and reliable (2 Peter 1:20–21; Proverbs 30:5; 2 Timothy 3:16–17).

Yet studying that word in our modern day involves multiple challenges. One is the human chain of transmission; as copies multiplied over the centuries, errors and omissions crept in. A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to determining the true words among the different variations that have been passed down through the years. Thankfully, those “variations” change very little of the meaning—so the vast majority of the Bible’s message is utterly untouched by the small differences in the various copies. God’s word has, indeed, been faithfully preserved.

But God does not promise anywhere that translations of His inspired original words would be perfect—in fact, because languages are rich, are complex, and change over the centuries, it is essentially impossible to translate perfectly all the words of one language into another. And the different cultures behind the languages have great effect as well. Consider how the modern English phrase “It’s raining cats and dogs,” or the modern Spanish idiom “Hablar sin pelos en la lengua”—“To speak without hairs on your tongue”—would seem to a first-century reader. Even when clear words can be found, translators must sometimes choose whether to communicate the literal words or the literal meaning of the original text.

The “Old” King James Version

Understanding a bit about the “old” King James Version, sometimes called the “Authorized Version,” will help illustrate why we tend to use the New King James Version. Completed in 1611 and revised in the 1700s, the King James Version is still one of the most popular Bibles in the English-speaking world today. It is not perfect—indeed, as mentioned, no translation is—but it was a remarkable work for its time.

Working more than 400 years ago, the researchers and translators of the King James Version (KJV) took an admirable approach. First, they sought “formal equivalence” in their translation. That is, while some seek to paraphrase the ancient languages to communicate the meaning but greatly change the words in doing so, the KJV translators sought to create as close to a word-for-word translation as they could. While this might make some phrases confusing in English, they considered that the reader is best served by a translation as close as possible to the original inspired words, rather than a translator’s interpretation of the words’ meaning—though, of course, some level of interpretation is often unavoidable.

Second, the translators went back to the most authoritative and trustworthy copies of the original Greek and Hebrew resources they could find: Erasmus’ sixteenth-century Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Masoretic Text of the Old Testament. While they often kept the language of older English versions (the Bishop’s Bible, the Geneva Bible, and others), they diligently compared those works to Greek and Hebrew resources—as well as to their copies of the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, called the Septuagint, and to their copies of the fourth-century Latin Vulgate translation. Faithfulness to the original languages was a driving goal.

Finally, the translators also sought to create a beautiful work. Many today assume that the thee’s, thou’s, and ye’s of the KJV are remnants from the days of its translation. Actually, those words were already archaic by 1611; yet the translators saw not only that they added a sense of majesty and “high language” to the text, but also that they helped make a grammatical distinction no longer present in English. “You” in English can be singular or plural, while Greek uses different words for the singular and plural “you.” By using “thee” for the singular and reserving “you” for the plural, the KJV translators added elegance and increased grammatical clarity. (Read Luke 22:31–32 in the KJV to see the difference.)

Yet the KJV is not without problems that have confused many over the years. As just one example, it translates the Greek word for “Passover” as “Easter” in Acts 12:4—an error corrected in many later translations. And other KJV mistakes have been revealed by later archaeological discoveries that shed new light on Scripture’s ancient languages. For example, 1 Kings 10:22 in the KJV mentions “peacocks,” translated from the Hebrew word tûkkı̂y. Since then, more has been learned about ancient Hebrew and other Semitic languages, and we now know that the word means “monkeys.”

While the remarkable KJV translation continues to be helpful today, we now have the benefit of an additional 400 years of research and discovery that was unavailable to the translators in 1611 and later editors. And the English language has changed in many ways in the last 400 years, causing some words to disappear from usage and—even more challenging—causing other words to change meaning.

Consider that you might pick up a KJV translation and read John 2:6, where you will see a reference to pots big enough to contain “two or three firkins” of water. But who today knows how large a “firkin” is? Similarly, 2 Chronicles 11:12 speaks of “every several city” and 2 Chronicles 26:21 says King Uzziah lived “in a several house.” How many people today would know that these mean “every individual city” and “an isolated house”? And while the KJV may speak of “ouches of gold” (which sounds painful), a modern reader may not realize that it is speaking of “settings of gold.”

A more challenging case of words remaining in English but changing in meaning can be illustrated by 1 Thessalonians 4:15. There, in the KJV, we read that those who are alive at Christ’s return shall not “prevent” those who are asleep from rising. Is Paul saying that the living won’t somehow “stop” the dead from being resurrected? No. The meaning of the word “prevent” has shifted in 400 years. In modern English, we would say that those are alive will not “precede” or “come before” them.

These are just a few examples, but they should be enough to illustrate that, as remarkable as the “old” King James Version is, the passage of centuries meant it could benefit from an update.

Enter the New King James Version

The translators and editors of the New King James Version, published in full in 1982 with a handful of revisions in later years, sought to maintain the accuracy, beauty, and clarity of the “old” King James Version while updating it based on the latest scholarship and modern language usage.

As a result, readers familiar with the KJV will often recognize wording in the NKJV, but will also find the NKJV easier to read as well as more accurate. In their work to update the KJV text and take advantage of the best of modern scholarship, the translators and editors of the NKJV also sought to avoid some of the mistaken philosophies that tend to cause issues in other modern translations, such as the NIV.

For example, some modern translations lean very heavily on ancient Greek texts often called the “Alexandrian texts,” such as the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. These manuscripts are among the oldest large collections of New Testament text, but are also problematic, showing signs of errors and poor editing. The Codex Vaticanus even attests to the frustration scribes felt toward their fellow workers, who were apparently not following older texts; in a margin note next to Hebrews 1:3, a scribe admonishes a coworker, “Fool and knave, leave the old reading and do not change it!”

Another grave problem with the Codex Vaticanus is its complete omission of the last twelve verses of Mark’s gospel, thus removing Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. Some modern scholars have taken this to mean that verses 9–20 of Mark 16 were not originally part of the Bible. Yet, if one looks closely at the pages on which the Codex Vaticanus was written, one will see that there is a completely blank column where those verses are supposed to be—the only blank column in the entire codex—at a time when vellum, the material on which these ancient works were written, was expensive and never wasted. Serious scholars have concluded that the scribe intended to write the rest of Mark there, but never did.

Even so, while most of the more modern translations lean too heavily on them, the Alexandrian texts still have some value. Occasionally, they get something right that the Textus Receptus or the Byzantine texts—the primary sources for the KJV—got wrong. The NKJV addresses these occasions by providing detailed notes on its pages, pointing out when different ancient texts give different readings. This helps to give Bible students more information, not less.

And the NKJV also avoids many modern translations’ tendency to over-interpret the ancient text. Like the “old” KJV, the NKJV leans more toward a “word-for-word” approach instead of a “paraphrase” approach, which helps to protect against translator bias.

Still, we must always remember that there is no perfect translation—not the KJV, and not the NKJV. While the NKJV fixes some errors of the KJV, it retains others such as the Comma Johanneum—incorrect words ancient copyists added to 1 John 5:7–8 to support the idea of a Trinity. Both the KJV and the NKJV retain those uninspired words (though the NKJV, to its credit, footnotes them as problematic), while the NIV is among those that correctly omit them.

And the NKJV introduces a few of its own new mistakes or confusions. For instance, Galatians 2:20 in the KJV correctly tells that it is “by the faith of the Son of God” that we live—that is, the very faith Christ had within Him—while the NKJV says it is “by faith in the Son of God.” A subtle but important difference!

One Inspired Word, Many Translations

Relying on one main version in our publications—whether the New King James Version in English, the Reina Valera in Spanish, or the Louis Segond Le Sainte Bible in French—helps ensure that we communicate the teachings of Scripture in a consistent, orderly manner that is easy for our readers to investigate and verify. And the New King James Version is certainly a solid translation in English: readable, highly accurate, based on sound translation principles and scholarship, and offering additional notes and comments to help students get the most out of their study.

Even so, because there is no perfect translation, Tomorrow’s World will occasionally cite a different version that either translates a particular verse more accurately than the NKJV or more clearly communicates the sense of a passage. In doing so, we follow the pattern of the Apostles and other writers of the New Testament. Those writers, when quoting the Old Testament, would sometimes use Hebrew-language copies of their day, sometimes use the Greek Septuagint, and sometimes even paraphrase the Old Testament in their own way as they were led by the Holy Spirit.

Regardless of the translation we use in our materials—whether the NKJV or any other—our goal is always the same: to make the truth of God plainly understood.