# Authorized ![rw-book-cover](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41sBbBpxCiL._SL200_.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[Mark Mark Ward]] - Full Title: Authorized - Category: #books ## Highlights - But traditions develop to protect things our forebears valued. Discovering why they did so will strengthen ([Location 147](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=147)) - our ties with them. ([Location 148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=148)) - When an entire church, or group of churches, or even an entire nation of Christians, uses basically one Bible translation, genuinely wonderful things happen. An individual Christian’s knowledge of the Bible increases almost by accident, because certain phrases become woven into the language of the community. ([Location 160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=160)) - when you quote the KJV, you don’t have to tell people you’re quoting the Bible. They just know. ([Location 188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=188)) - And Hitchens: A culture that does not possess [the KJV’s] common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin ([Location 198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=198)) - one. To seek restlessly to update [the Bible] or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare.9 ([Location 200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=200)) - as the KJV fades, so does at least some of the trust Christians have in their Bible translations. ([Location 206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=206)) - Bible translations succeed or fail based on Christian trust, because only a vanishingly small percentage of Bible readers can, and even fewer do, go through the laborious process of checking their English translations against the Greek and Hebrew. ([Location 221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=221)) - But historically speaking, the KJV did provide a trusted common standard. One thing we as a church did not have during the KJV’s long heyday—or heycenturies, really—was major conflict over English Bible translation. ([Location 229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=229)) - Given all the things we’ll lose if we, the English-speaking church, continue to give up the KJV, we’d better have very good reasons for giving it up. Weighty reasons. And I can think of nothing more weighty than the single reason embedded in Long’s story: I can’t understand this. KJV language, many contemporary readers say—and not just non-Christians—is too difficult to follow. It’s foreign and ancient. ([Location 287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=287)) - So if the KJV is indeed too difficult to understand for modern readers, we’ve got a significant problem—the most significant problem a translation can have: What’s the point in using a translation in old English that people can’t understand anymore? ([Location 302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=302)) - “We don’t want to dumb down the Bible—what, are you going to ‘translate’ Shakespeare too?” ([Location 322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=322)) - Tyndale boldly told a clerical opponent, in words I myself uttered acting as Tyndale in a school play in twelfth grade, “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”8 ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=339)) - Objections to the readability of the KJV are not beside the point. They are the point. ([Location 343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=343)) - We need to examine KJV English to discover whether its difficulties outweigh all the values of retaining it. ([Location 344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B078WG2LHX&location=344))