YOU HAVE NOTICED THAT SOMETIMES I POINT OUT TO YOU SOME MATTER ON WHICH YOUR KING JAMES VERSION OF THE BIBLE IS NOT ACCURATE, or I may quote a verse from another translation in not quite the same words you find when you look it up in your King James Version. Some of you probably wonder, “Why doesn’t he just stick to the old King James Version with which we are all so familiar?” Here is the answer: I do this because you are entitled to be told THE EXACT TRUTH as to just what the Word of God really says. If I couldn’t tell you the exact truth, I’d stop broadcasting. No matter how old an error is, no matter how we have become accustomed to it or have grown to love it because of its familiarity, IT WON’T DO TO BE MISTAKEN ABOUT WHAT GOD REALLY SAID.
Am I attacking religion or the Bible by correcting errors in this way? Not at all. RELIGION IS THE SUPREME TRUTH, and only when we get manmade mistakes out of it can we have the purest religion. So what about the Bible? Well, let’s start at the beginning.
As you know, the Bible was written many centuries before there was any such language as English. The Old Testament was originally written in the Hebrew language; and about 300 B.C., a group of 70 scholars in the city of Alexandria translated it into Greek — and their translation is called the Septuagint (meaning “seventy”). The New Testament was originally written in the language which Jesus Christ spoke — Aramaic (a language closely related to Hebrew) — later translated into Greek. All Catholic versions of the Bible were translated from the Greek into Latin, by Jerome, whose translation was called the Vulgate; and from the Vulgate into English. Protestant Bibles are nearly all translated into English from Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament and Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Thus, in these repeated translations, there were multiplied opportunities for errors to creep in