[Diligent]

I just finished reading King James, His Bible, and Its Translators by Laurence Vance. I give this book a big thumbs up. It's only 150 pages long and is a quick read but seems like a history four times that size. Vance debunks quite a few myths about the KJV in this book.

The most interesting part of the book (to me) is the chapter A Standard Bible. Among other things, Vance shows that the KJV was very quickly accepted by believers as THE Bible, and while the "King James Only" term is usually used as an epithet by modern writers who claim it is a recent idea (20th century), the facts of history show that "King James Onlyism" as an attitude about the received Bible actually goes back to the seventeenth century.

This book is jam-packed with great stuff. It's very easy to read, except for perhaps the first chapter, which goes over a lot of details about King James taking the throne of England and gets a little bogged down with dates and names.



Here's just one great paragraph:

The president of the American Revision Committee, Philip Schaff (1819-1893), at the end of the chapter "The Authorized Version" in his Companion to the Greek Testament and the English Version (4th ed., Harper & Brothers, 1899), claims that "King James's Version can never recover its former authority, for revolutions never go backward. It is slowly by surely declining, and doomed to a peaceful death and honorable burial." But it is Schaff and the products of the Anglo-American revision movement that are dead; the King James 1611 Authorized Version yet lives.