As some of you know from my book,
51 Reasons Why the King James: A Path from Doubt to Faith,
I started my repentant believing life in Christ in the desert with a Bible
that looked identical to this one.
In August of 1980, there were so many things I didn't know.
I was in the middle of the desert, and I didn't know any Christians to talk to.
Let me read it right out of the book.
"I prayed something like this.
'Father, in the name of Your Son, please let the Holy Spirit
reveal to me the scriptures.'
And I began in Genesis and Matthew, Old and New Testaments.
That's it.
I had no fancy commentary series, knew no Christians
to help me understand, and certainly trusted
none of my occultic friends to help.
I was on new ground, holy ground.
I was left to rely on my heavenly Father to help me understand as I read.
I asked Him the answer when I didn't understand
the meaning of words.
And I trusted Him that He knew, even though I didn't,
He knew the answer to every question.
It was two years later, in Bible college one morning,
a word was clearly defined in class, exactly the way the Lord
put in my heart when I had prayed to Him
in August of 1980.
I smiled and quietly said, 'Wow, God!
You knew what You were talking about!'"
It is so easy to trust God's words, when you have
nothing else to stand on.
But when I went to Bible college, and then seminary,
we had scads of Bible versions.
They were practically coming out our ears,
and more obscure ones seemed to appear every day.
And we had teachers, drumming it into our ears
that the King James was too difficult to read --
all the while promoting the legendary "original Greek" texts,
of course, as if they were easier?
Some people say the King James is too hard to read.
They point out a passage in 2 Corinthians especially,
as the hardest verses in the King James Bible.
But it's not really hard, if you trust God,
and you take your time.
Want to go through it with me?
Hi, I'm David Daniels from Chick Publications.
First, let me save you a lot of heartache and clear away a few lies.
This is a lie you hear every day: "The New Testament Greek
is deeper in meaning than any English translation.
In fact, some words don't even translate the meaning
into English.
That's why you have to learn Greek."
Here are some facts.
1) The entire Greek New Testament has a total of about 138,000 words.
That sounds like a lot.
But: 2) The Greek New Testament
has only about 5,400 different words.
It's a simplified subset of Greek.
It's not Greek-complex, but Greek-simple.
Of those 138,000 total words, 80% of them, 8 out of 10,
can be read with just 310 vocabulary words.
So: 3) If you learn those 310 words,
you can read 80% of the Greek New Testament.
That isn't so hard, is it?
But some words appear only one time in the whole Greek New Testament.
They have the magical name, "hapax legomena."
It just means the New Testament has that word only once.
4) There are 2,000 hapax legomena (words that occur only once)
in the Greek New Testament.
Then you hear a second lie: "The hapax legomena
are technical terms."
No, they're not.
They're just terms that occur once.
People may have used those terms 20 times a day.
But the word was only written down once in the Greek New Testament.
That's all it means.
Here's another fact: 5) The Classical Greek language,
had at least a 147,000 word vocabulary.
That means there are more words in an ancient Greek dictionary
than every single word in the entire Greek New Testament.
All the Greek New Testament vocabulary, including the 2,000 that only occur once,
5,400 words, is only 1.1% of words in ancient Greek.
So for every vocabulary word in the Greek New Testament,
there were 99 more in regular written Greek.
And the Greek dictionary according to some
had closer to 200,000 different words.
Wait a minute.
You mean all that talk about the magical, deep,
unable-to-fully-translate Greek is only 1 percent of actual Greek?
Or less?
Of course!
You know why?
Because Koine Greek, which the New Testament uses,
was just a trade language!
A trade language is a compromise language,
with way simple vocabulary, so people of many different countries
don't have to learn everything of a language
in order to communicate.
It was something that caused all the different countries
of the Roman Empire to speak to each other,
to buy, sell, and do trade with each other.
That's why it's called a "trade language."
So I know it's bursting a bubble these Bible scholars stick before us,
but the Greek New Testament was written
in the simplest Greek there is!
God, in the fulness of time, decided to make His message known
in the simplest of terms.
Every language known to man has thousands upon thousands of words.
That's plenty of words to translate the mere 5,400 words
of the Greek New Testament.
We may not always be able to translate with JUST ONE WORD.
We may use a phrase or a few words, but we will always be able
to translate the meaning.
That's the way God designed it.
And don't let the next teacher you hear get away with
passionately moving his arms as he says, "I'll see if there's a way to transmit
the deep meaning of this Greek word for you in the English language.
Oh, it's so deep."
Don't let them fool you.
The English language has 600,000 words.
That's plenty enough to translate anything from 5400 Greek words.
Remember, God didn't make monster "Greek brains" and
tiny brains for everyone else.
We all have the same kind of brain.
When Jesus said, "Go ye into all the world,
and preach the gospel to every creature," He didn't mean
"but only in the original Greek."
He meant in every language to every common person,
because God saw to it that it was easy to translate.
The only ones who make it complicated are the critics,
who don't want God to mean what He actually said.
And maybe, they want it to look hard
so they get paid money to have a job of
interpreting it for the common folk, like priests do.
But what about what some say is the hardest passage in the King James?
If it's so easy, why is that so hard?
Anything can be done, when it's done patiently
and prayerfully.
So let's go over it together.
The verses are in 2 Corinthians.
Let me set the stage.
In 1 Corinthians, Paul had to write a lot of rebukes
to the congregation at Corinth.
They were really doing a lot of bad things.
And he came down hard on them, rightly so, for their sins.
And read it -- there were many!
But now, just like the heart of God, the Holy Ghost moved Paul
to write a very different second letter.
This is the one that says, "I still love you -- do you still love me?"
"I corrected you.
I was hard on you, but it worked a godly sorrow,
and you rose to the occasion!
So let's reconcile now."
There were hurt feelings from 1 Corinthians.
But they needed to be said.
And now they worked, so it was time to show
the reconciling love of God for them.
1 Corinthians is the letter of correction.
2 Corinthians is the letter of reconciliation.
So God gave Paul a lot of feeling words in 2 Corinthians.
That is a different kind of Greek vocabulary
from the logical vocabulary we usually read.
It's the same for us in English.
Using our feeling English vocabulary words
can be uncomfortable for us.
The words are words about our kidneys, or reins, the bowels,
those deep feelings in our gut.
Here are some of his feeling words in 2 Corinthians:
Comfort -- 14 times.
Consolation -- 5 times.
Sorrow, sorry -- 13 times.
Suffer -- 7 times.
Affliction -- 5 times.
Tribulation, despair, grieved, straitened -- twice.
Bowels -- twice (that's those inner feelings
and affections down in your gut).
Heaviness, anguish, tears -- once.
Heart -- 11 times.
Get the picture?
Any translation that doesn't transmit those feelings to you
is not saying what God said through Paul.
I read a bunch of Bible versions of this
to Jack's partner George, and there was no comparison.
The King James transmits the feelings, the heart, of God.
The rest strip away the feelings in this passage I'm going to show you.
So now turn to 2 Corinthians 6:11-13.
11 "O ye Corinthians, our mouth is open unto you,
our heart is enlarged.
12 Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened
in your own bowels.
13 Now for a recompence in the same,
(I speak as unto my children,) be ye also enlarged."
Try to imitate what the Holy Ghost is saying here through Paul.
These are body language words.
"Our mouth is open."
Try it.
Open your mouth, just a little.
That's what you do when you're trying
to be open to someone else, and hoping they open to you.
You're open and hopin'.
"Our heart is enlarged."
That's not about having an enlarged heart.
Don't be all bunched up and closed.
Open your ribcage, let your mouth open.
He's describing an emotion, almost pleading,
with body language words.
"Ye are not straitened in us."
Straitened is tightened, narrowed down, cramped.
Try this: squeeze in your belly.
Feel that tightness?
It makes you focus on yourself.
When you let it relax you feel better.
Did you try it?
It says, we haven't closed ourselves off from you.
No!
His heart and mouth are open to them.
I picture his hands open to them, as well.
"But [ye] are straitened in your own bowels."
Paul isn't closed off to them, but they have
closed off their feelings from Paul.
So Paul continues.
"Now for a recompence in the same."
Recompense is a response in a similar manner.
"(I speak as unto my children)."
See how tender these words are?
"Be ye also enlarged."
Open up your hearts to us, as well.
God through Paul wants to reconcile, to bring things back
to a good relationship between Paul and the Christians
at Corinth.
It's tender, it's special.
And they are deep, emotional words.
How do you say things like that, filled with such feeling and yet
not pushing too hard on your fellow Christians?
2 Corinthians tells you that.
No, it's not something we can run right over.
But it's tender.
It was put there for us to feel what Paul felt,
and what's more, what God feels.
It was never meant for us to glance at it
while jogging through our day
So now, Brothers and Sisters, you have just gone through
what some say is the hardest passage
in the King James Bible.
So guess what?
The rest of it is easier!
You will soon realize, if you prayerfully
read your King James Bible, that it is a lot easier to understand,
and a lot deeper, than all the pablum that is offered up
in the name of being easier, and all the so-called scholarly stuff
that is supposedly "more true to the original languages."
Getting the heart of God from the King James:
It doesn't get any more true than that.
God bless you, and have a wonderful day.