“But what about...”

Follow the “originals only” doctrine to its end. The originals crumbled to dust within a century or two. If inspiration lived and died with them, then no human being in eighteen centuries has ever held the word of God, and God's promise to preserve his words “for ever” failed on schedule. That is not a modest doctrine of scholarship. It is a doctrine of lost scripture wearing academic robes.

Now watch the Book itself: Timothy knew “from a child... the holy scriptures” (2 Timothy 3:15), and what Timothy held were copies. The Lord Jesus stood in the synagogue, took up a copy, read it aloud and said “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:21). Scripture, in a copy, by the Lord's own usage. Inspiration without preservation is a promise God never kept, and this site is built on the claim that he keeps them all.

Old proves old. It does not prove good. A Bible worn out by daily use does not survive seventeen centuries; a Bible nobody trusted enough to read stays mint on a library shelf. The two “oldest and best” witnesses disagree with each other more than 3,000 times in the Gospels alone, one of them is missing whole books, and the other carries two apocryphal writings in its New Testament. Age is their only credential, and it is the one credential Scripture never asks for: what God promises is not the survival of the oldest copy but the preservation of the words.

The full case, with the witnesses' own records: Front II, The “Oldest and Best” Lie.

Thee and thou are not decoration. They are data. English used to distinguish the second person singular (thee, thou) from the plural (ye, you), exactly as the Hebrew and Greek do, and the KJB keeps that distinction on every page. In John 3:7 the Lord tells Nicodemus, one man (thee), that ye, all of you, must be born again. Modern English flattens both into “you” and the precision is simply gone. On this point the KJB is not older English. It is more accurate English.

As for difficulty: the KJB is built overwhelmingly from one and two syllable words. Run any readability test you like across Genesis or John in the KJB and a modern version, and then decide who was actually protecting you from hard reading.

Open a 1611 printing and a current KJB side by side and see what actually changed: spelling (“loue” became “love,” “sonne” became “son”), typography (the long s retired, roman type replaced black letter), and the correction of printers' errors. The 1769 standardization was orthography, not text: the same words, dressed in settled spelling. That is a different universe from the modern critical text, which changes actual readings, words present or absent, from edition to edition, and is currently on its 28th.

One of these is a Book whose words settled and stood. The other is a subscription. The objection confuses a haircut with a heart transplant.

Same claimed text; different delivered words. The NKJV breaks Abraham's prophecy of Calvary with one added word (Genesis 22:8), softens “corrupt the word of God” to “peddling” in the one verse that warns about corrupting the word (2 Corinthians 2:17), turns “are saved” into “are being saved” (1 Corinthians 1:18), demotes the Son to a Servant four times in Acts, and trades “hell” for “Sheol” and “Hades” twenty-two times.

And its margins footnote the “NU-Text,” the same Alexandrian critical text behind the NIV, hundreds of times: training the King James reader to consult the rival authority. That is not an update. That is a gateway, and it was aimed at you specifically. The documented case: Front I, Exhibit D, and the Comparison Table (filter by NKJV).

God's words were preserved in the Hebrew Masoretic text and the Greek Received Text, and every faithful translation made from that stream carried them to the nations: Luther's German Bible, the Spanish Reina-Valera, the Italian Diodati, and their kin. The battle line this site draws is not English against the world. It is the preserved text against the corrupted one, in every language, and the same 1800s revision that struck the English Bible has been exported against those translations too.

For the English-speaking world, God's providence settled the question in 1611, and the arithmetic of the result is signed accordingly.

Nobody here worships paper and ink. We believe a Person, and the Person made promises about his words, and he is the one who set the valuation in Psalm 138:2, not us. Honoring what God magnified is not idolatry; it is taking him at his word, which is the oldest definition of faith in the Book.

Now turn the question around, because it only ever gets asked in one direction. If no Bible on earth is the very word of God, then you hold a doctrine of lost scripture, and every verse you quote comes with an asterisk. This site asks the question nobody asks the critic: which words, in your hands, today, do you call the word of God? We can answer in one sentence. Listen carefully to how long theirs takes.