Mark Ward KJV Critique, Part 2: The Objective Standard for Vernacular Language Scripture & the KJB

Mark Ward, in books, videos, and lectures, argues that the Authorized, King James Version is not sufficiently intelligible for the contemporary English reader, employing many invalid arguments. Part 1 of Thomas Ross's response to Dr. Ward demonstrated that Mark Ward's book Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible sets aside Scripture’s teaching on its own preservation and utterly neglects Scripture’s principles for sufficient intelligibility in Bible translation, while painfully misuses extrabiblical sources and making extravagant, unproven claims. His book is poorly argued and filled with distortions of Scripture, ancient historical sources, and modern writing about the English language.

This video (part 2) evaluates Ward's claims about KJV archaisms and about what he calls “false friends.” An objective standard of difficulty for vernacular Bible translation is set forth by comparing the difficulty of the English KJV with the difficulty of the inspired Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek text. An examination of Mark Ward's survey with the "Textual Confidence Collective" that (allegedly) proves that even KJV-Only pastors do not understand the KJV is commenced (this critique will continue in part 3).

Mark Ward fails to deal with the fact that In terms of both vocabulary and syntax, the English of the King James Version is simpler, less complex English than the Greek of the New Testament was to the New Testament people of God or the Hebrew of the Old Testament was to the ancient Hebrews. Syntactically, the Greek New Testament does not contain only simple sentences such as “Jesus wept” (John 11:35), but also complex ones, such as Ephesians 1:3-14. The body of Ephesians 1 (vv. 3-23) contains only two very long Greek sentences (1:3-14 & 1:15-23). The Holy Ghost did not believe such sentences were too hard to understand, and both God and the Apostle Paul were happy for inspired epistles with such complex syntax to be sent to churches like the one at Ephesus—congregations that were filled, not with highbrow urban elites, but with slaves, with poorly educated day laborers, with farmers, and with simple peasants who had believed on the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Old Testament also contains difficult syntax and not a few very long sentences. For example, Proverbs 2:1-22 is only one sentence in Hebrew. God inspired an entire chapter of Scripture that is just one sentence—all 22 verses, which match the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This chapter-long sentence is divided by logical particles into parts. It contains beautiful reiteration, whereby each new stanza in the first half of the sentence, 2:1-11, begins with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, and each stanza of the second half with its twelfth consonant, lamed. Nor does God ever update the archaic and difficult Hebrew in Job.

Thus, both the Hebrew and Greek Bible contain sentences and syntactical structures that are considerably more complex than anything found in the King James Bible. Ward's critique of the KJV for being too hard to understand would redound, so much the more, on the Hebrew and Greek texts dictated by the Holy Spirit. If Christians must abandon the KJV because it is too hard to understand, would they not much more need to abandon the infallible Hebrew and Greek text? Should not the church at Ephesus have sent their inspired epistle back to Paul, asking him to replace it with something easier to read?

Does the King James Version have more archaic words than the Greek of the New Testament or the Hebrew of the Old Testament? No! There are both fewer total KJV words than are present in the original language texts (c. 12,000 vs. 14,000 words), and fewer “hard” KJV words (archaic vs. hapax, 300 vs. 3,600). Thus, the KJV contains fewer total vocabulary words than the original languages of Scripture, and the number of archaic KJV words is approximately 10% of the total number of “hard” words in the original language text. Learning the approximately 300 archaic words in the KJV involves adding to one’s vocabulary around 6% of what a four-year-old child knows.

Also, Ward never even attempts to argue that even one discourse, pericope, or other macrostructural unit in the entire KJV is unintelligible. Instead, he falsely claims that “almost no one has the kind of dictionary that could truly help them with archaic KJV words." The heart of his anti-KJV case rests upon what he calls "false frlends." Ward falsely claims “modern readers literally can’t … know what they’re missing when they read the KJV" because there could be "countless," "tons" of such "false friends." Ward's affirmations are not made by serious scholars.

Ward's survey of King James Only pastors employs psychological pressure and manipulation tactics to create falsely low statistics about the intelligibility of the KJV. It is useful as propaganda, but useless as science.

Mark Ward is a "false friend" to both the KJV and to scholarship in general.