When I first read the Bible in the King James Version, I was struck immediately by the inappropriateness of the italicized words. With a doctorate in English Literature I knew exactly what italicization meant, should mean and, should not mean.

Inasmuch as I loved the word of God and loved the KJV version of the Bible I wanted to love all of it without any reservation. Especially, as I do believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, properly translated, and properly interpreted.

The more I researched the matter the more alarmed I became. Not only was the italicization all wrong from the viewpoint of grammar, but it was also an artistic disaster. The natural iambic pentameter poetry of the beautiful KJV was being ruined by the interjection of the italicized words not really intended to be there.

And of course my greatest concern was the stumble it was creating in regard to conversion and salvation of the lost. The Bible, because of the traditions of men, was in danger of becoming a laughing stock. Galations clearly gives us the warning that "the traditions of men make void the word of God". Here was a glaring example of just that.

It further alarmed me that I had the utmost difficulty even finding research to shed light on the subject. Nearly everything I read seemed to be of two sorts:

One, was the well meaning "defenders" of God's word. Sad to say, most of them were so ignorant that their defense of the KJV was mostly an offense against, not only the Bible but human intelligence.

The others were, predictably, those who in their hearts hate God and the word of God and use any pretext to try to drag both down. With these the italicization mess suited their purposes just fine.

I felt, and still feel, that I was in neither camp, but an honest truth seeker along the lines of Christ Himself who asked us to be Christlike in all things. This position is always the hottest because both the mistaken believers, (the Pharisees) and the mistaken unbelieving heathens have the loudest voices and tend to dominate the market place of ideas in world of religion.

With great difficulty I finally did track down most of the truth of the italics situation, and will here present the bare-bones of it:

Translation of the Bible is a thousands of years long process involving many languages and many translators, mis-translators, along with a host of ignorant and malevolent interpreters of the word of God.

The English portion of this long train of translations now involves more than 30 extant translations of the Bible into English done over a period of the last 700 years.

In one sense they are all good, and as a scholar I welcome them and their existence and relevance, though I disagree with much that many of them do. I say let a thousand flowers bloom and God's people can then sort them out.

I hate monopoly and would be monopolists of every sort and so does God. He allowed sin into the world so there would be a competition of ideas even between Himself and his enemies. The NIV juggernaut would be a current case in point.

In attempting to reconstruct how we got into the italics mess, I found that the wonderful inspired scholars who did the work of the KJV had many pressures on them, not least of which was that of the king and his bureaucrats and such.

There was pressure on them from the beginning to make the Bible easier to read for the lazy and poorly schooled, and the addition of most all of the italicized words was pointedly in response to that pressure.

But, the key issues to understand about their adding these italicized words is that they DID NOT add them as italicized words in the first place. The fact is, they added them as NON-ITALICIZED words.

In some cases they put them in quite small caps inside of brackets. This format can be found in the surviving pulpit Bible of 1611 that the Library of Congress has in its vaults, where I examined it.

In other cases they put these "italicized" words in plain reduced size Roman letters as distinct from the larger gorgeous Gothic script that they used for the rest of the Bible.

In any case, the resulting contrast encouraged the reader to skip-over the italicized words as though they were optional. In short, they de-emphasized the "italicized" words, and conspicuously DID NOT emphasize them as italicization presently encourages.

Then along comes the famous revision of the KJV that occurred in 1769 done by the Oxford scholars. It is this edition that most everyone uses today thinking wrongly that it is faithful to the 1611 edition. It is not. The Oxford scholars just made things much worse when they added about 5 times as many italicized words as the 1611 contained, most of them totally unneeded. The result is a kind of dumbing down of the Bible to pander to popular taste.

Well, where does that leave us Believers today? What should we do, and how should we deal constructively with this mess, especially in light of the fact that partly because of this italicization mess we are now being saddled with the NIV, which is riding us like a rented mule.

I say, bright light tends to disinfect things, and the bright light of truth needs to be employed here to the long term benefit of the KJV, which I love and use every day.

We, the best of us, in the church world, need to educate ourselves on this issue, write on it, and teach and preach on it until it loses its capacity to hurt us, the KJV, and the Word of God.

We need to admit the errors of the past, and do what we can to rectify them and make people aware of them. This is all I am trying to do.

I'm not calling for a revision of the KJV, though that might be an option, if anyone can be trusted to do it, but we can't just ignore this either.

I, myself, have started doing a newly arranged version of the KJV that omits nearly all the italicized words, and those that it keeps are un-italicized. Additionally, I am doing this version in poetic stanzas to help with focusing our modern short attention minds on the brilliance and beauty of the original KJV's Shakespearian language.

It is truly amazing how eliminating 98% of the italicized words and slowing down the pace of presentation, improves the flow of truthful meaning from the inspired authors and translators to the modern mind.