Dr Paul Allen

I have come to realize through years of obsessive-compulsive love of English that the distance between my English and that of the KJV is mostly due to something over which I and the KJV translators have no control: language change.  The reason I can write an entire book evaluating the English readability of the KJV and yet not say one negative word about the choices of the KJV translators is that I don’t blame them for failing to be prophets.  Language changes in far more interesting and complicated ways than I understood as an eighteen-year-old KJV reader. No one can fully predict the future of the English language, even those who—like the KJV translators—help shape that future. But the biggest problem with KJV vocabulary is not actually the dead, obsolete words. When you run across emerod, you know you don’t know what it means, so you know when to pull out your dictionary. The biggest problem in understanding the KJV comes from “false friends,” words that are still in common...

One of the more surprising truths of the Christian religion is that we don’t know for sure how to pronounce the name of our own God. Good evidence suggests it should be   Yahweh , but good evidence is all God has chosen to leave us—not certainty. There is one thing we do know, though: God’s name is not  Jehovah . That word is a colossal, unrepealable, European mistake. People can get really uptight about the way the name of God gets translated in English Bibles. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, a non-trinitarian religious group, have made it one of their leading distinctive to insist that the best way to translate the Hebrew word יהוה (YHWH) is with the English word  Jehovah . Their custom-made Bible, the New World Translation, uses it over 7,000 times. Even the venerable King James Version uses it seven times. But there are at least two excellent reasons why  Jehovah  should not appear in any English Bible. 1. Jehovah was created by a misunderstanding. First,  Je...

Luke 9:55-56   But Jesus turned and rebuked them. 56 Then he and his disciples went to another village. (NIV) Luke 9:55-56 But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. 56 For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. And they went to another village. (KJV) Luke 9:55-56 But He turned and rebuked them, [a]and said, “You do not know what manner of spirit you are of. 56 [b]For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them.” And they went to another village. (NKJV) Luke 9:55 NU omits the rest of v. 55. Luke 9:56 NU omits For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them. WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? The Codex Bezae (D). In the restricted manuscripts area, stored away in a metal cabinet, Codex Bezae is the prized possession of the Cambridge University Library. It derives its name from the Protestant reformer, Theodore Beza, who after having it for more than...