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“The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.” Psalm 12:6–7
For nearly three hundred years, the English-speaking world had one Bible. Since 1881 it has been handed hundreds of competing versions, no two alike, each one asking the reader, quietly, in the margins and in the missing verses: yea, hath God said?
“Yea, hath God said... in words? Surely he meant only the ideas. Surely a modern reader deserves a modern bible. Surely they all say the same thing.”
How the question is asked on this front
Here is the claim you have heard: the modern versions are just the same Bible in easier English. It is the one claim this page will test. Because if they all say the same thing, then comparing them side by side should prove it. And if they do not say the same thing, then somebody changed something, and the only honest questions left are what was changed, who changed it, and why.
One Book became a marketplace. Every new version must differ from the versions before it, because a translation must be sufficiently new to be owned, licensed, and sold. The King James Bible belongs to nobody and can be printed by anybody. A modern version is intellectual property with a rights department. Novelty is not a byproduct of the modern bible business. It is a requirement of it.
The Evidence · Exhibit A
Sixteen whole verses, present in the King James Bible, are gone from the text of the NIV. Not retranslated. Gone. The verse numbers remain, stepping over the empty places. Here is every one of them, with the words you lose.
Open an NIV and check any of them. The text runs Matthew 17:20, then 17:22. A footnote may whisper that some manuscripts include the verse. The page does not.
The Evidence · Exhibit B
Where whole verses were too obvious to remove, words were. Watch what happens to the blood, to every word, and to the name of God in the flesh.
Notice the pattern in what gets touched: the blood, the deity of Christ, and the authority of every word. The knife is not random.
The Evidence · Exhibit C
Where verses could not be cut outright, they were fenced. Open a modern version to the end of Mark and you will find twelve verses, the resurrection appearances, the Great Commission, the ascension, set behind a bracket and a note: “The earliest manuscripts and some other ancient witnesses do not have verses 9–20.” Open it to John 8 and the woman taken in adultery stands behind the same fence.
Read that footnote again and ask what it is doing. It is not translating anything. It is asking the reader a question about the reliability of the page in his hands. It is, word for word in function, the question of Genesis 3:1 set in eight-point type. A bible that footnotes doubt into its own text has already told you what its editors believe about preservation, which is: nothing.
And this is why the versions can never stop multiplying. Once the text is a scholarly reconstruction rather than a preserved Book, there is always another edition, another committee, another copyright, another decade's bible to replace the last decade's. The reader is not being given the Word. He is being subscribed to it.
The Evidence · Exhibit D
Nobody walks from the King James Bible to the NIV in one step. There is a version built for the first step.
The NKJV was sold to believers as the King James with nothing but updated English: same underlying text, same Bible, easier words. It is the only modern version marketed specifically to people who trust the King James Bible, which is exactly why it deserves the closest look on this page. A counterfeit aimed at strangers is one thing. One aimed at family is another. Here is what “nothing but updated English” actually changed:
Even where the NKJV keeps every verse, its footnotes do the NIV's work. At Matthew 18:11 the verse stands in the text while the margin reports that the “NU-Text”, the same Alexandrian critical text behind the NIV, omits it. Hundreds of notes like it run through the New Testament. The reader is introduced, politely and repeatedly, to the rival authority.
That is the gateway's whole function. It does not take the Book out of your hands; it teaches you to check your Book against another one. Once the footnote is the referee, the next version is a formality. The serpent did not hand Eve different fruit first. He handed her a question about the tree she already had.
What saith the Scripture
God's standard is stated in his own Book: every word, pure words, kept and preserved from this generation for ever (Psalm 12:6–7). Not the general drift of the ideas. Words. The modern versions fail that standard by their own printed admission, sixteen missing verses at a time, one footnote of doubt at a time. The King James Bible does not ask you to trust a committee's latest reconstruction. It asks you to trust that God did what he said he would do: keep his words.
“For God is not the author of confusion” (1 Corinthians 14:33). Look at the shelf of competing versions and ask yourself plainly who authored that.
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“And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” Acts 16:31
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