Afterwards, I read through the New American Standard, which is the version I personally use for preaching today. Last year, wanting to read still another translation, and always planning to spend time in the most famous of translations, I set myself to read the King James. The experience has been most miserable.
It feels nice to open, and sits nicely in the lap, and looks impressive on my shelf, although its bulk rendered it inconvenient for travel so that I quickly found myself reading it only at home during my morning devotions.
Devotions are meant to be a time of stillness before the Lord, a daily period of attentiveness to the word where we seek to hear His voice and attune ourselves to His presence throughout the day. They are not, as a rule, a good time for experimental reading, and yet into my efforts to engage the King James text an unsolicited voice kept inserting itself, noisily, bombastically, irritatingly.
It was the voice of C. Cyrus Ingerson Scofield was a civil war veteran who came to Christian faith as an adult, later pastoring churches in Dallas and Massachusetts. Affiliated with D. In other words, it is the Bible which has dominated a very visible portion of the Christian imagination for the last years.
In full knowledge of this, for over a year I pressed through with my readingβonce through each book, four times through the Psalms, pages in total, countless marginal notes and footnotes. Ditching it felt a bit like ditching them. The first of my problems with the Bible were its invasive edits into the text. Scofield or possibly editors had taken it upon himself to update a selection of language in the King James. But every five to ten verses or so there was notation that indicated a word had been changed.
