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The Language of the King James Bible
The Language of the King James Bible by Gail Riplinger $12.95
Demonstrates the precision and power of the KJV.
THIS BOOK reports on recent research from Harvard University which concludes that "The Authorized Version {KJV} emerges from comparison with twentieth-century versions as more attractive and more accurate." (p. 135).
"Even the secular world can spot a counterfeitor. The publishers of the New King James Bible (NKJV) have been charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. They are now paying nearly $400,000 in fines (p. 127).
This book helps you discover the KJV's built-in dictionary.
It also proves that, unlike new versions, the vocabulary of the KJV is precise, internationally recognizable, and contains powerful sound symbolism to communicate meaning.
It reveals the discovery of the world's oldest New Testament fragment which proves that the KJV is correct and the new versions are wrong.
Also exposed are the corrupt Dead Sea Scrolls and lexicons used to create the TNIV, NIV, ESV, NKJV, HCSB, and NASB.
LEARN
The King James Bible contains God's Built-in Dictionary, defining each word, in its context, using the very words of the Webster's and Oxford English Dictionaries !
The King James Bible has a vocabulary and reading level which slowly builds progressively from Genesis to Revelation.
The King James Bible uses words with the appropriate sound symbolism. It has a vocabulary that phonaesthetically fulfills the Bible's own description of itself as "powerful."
The King James Bible is the only extant access we have to the pure language lexicons of the 16th and 17th centuries.
The King James Bible gives a transparent view of the Greek and Hebrew vocabulary, grammar and syntax.
The King James Bible has internationally recognizable vocabulary and spelling.
The King James Bible uses literary devices which enhance doctrinally important concepts and memorability.
The King James Bible has a sentence structure which enhances accurate doctrinal interpretation.
The King James Bible's words and sentences are patterned and woven through its fabric so as to provide a consistency of form and content.
The King James Bible has the precision and longevity of the legal document that it is. (To be equitable all English speaking persons must be judged by the same criteria.)
How it all began...
THE RESEARCH presented in this introduction to the language of the Bible was prompted by a story of one Christian prisoner's phenomenal leap in reading test scores, as a result of reading the King James Bible.
He was advised that he was reading at the fifth grade level when he put his name on a long waiting list to enroll in the prison's high school equivalency program. He then began reading the King James Bible daily. Re-examination the next year showed that he was now reading at the 17th grade level -- post graduate!
How did reading one book, which some falsely claim is difficult, manage to help him, rather than frustrate him? This book answers that and many more questions you may have about the King James version.
Demonstrates the precision and power of the KJV.
THIS BOOK reports on recent research from Harvard University which concludes that "The Authorized Version {KJV} emerges from comparison with twentieth-century versions as more attractive and more accurate." (p. 135).
"Even the secular world can spot a counterfeitor. The publishers of the New King James Bible (NKJV) have been charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. They are now paying nearly $400,000 in fines (p. 127).
This book helps you discover the KJV's built-in dictionary.
It also proves that, unlike new versions, the vocabulary of the KJV is precise, internationally recognizable, and contains powerful sound symbolism to communicate meaning.
It reveals the discovery of the world's oldest New Testament fragment which proves that the KJV is correct and the new versions are wrong.
Also exposed are the corrupt Dead Sea Scrolls and lexicons used to create the TNIV, NIV, ESV, NKJV, HCSB, and NASB.
LEARN
The King James Bible contains God's Built-in Dictionary, defining each word, in its context, using the very words of the Webster's and Oxford English Dictionaries !
The King James Bible has a vocabulary and reading level which slowly builds progressively from Genesis to Revelation.
The King James Bible uses words with the appropriate sound symbolism. It has a vocabulary that phonaesthetically fulfills the Bible's own description of itself as "powerful."
The King James Bible is the only extant access we have to the pure language lexicons of the 16th and 17th centuries.
The King James Bible gives a transparent view of the Greek and Hebrew vocabulary, grammar and syntax.
The King James Bible has internationally recognizable vocabulary and spelling.
The King James Bible uses literary devices which enhance doctrinally important concepts and memorability.
The King James Bible has a sentence structure which enhances accurate doctrinal interpretation.
The King James Bible's words and sentences are patterned and woven through its fabric so as to provide a consistency of form and content.
The King James Bible has the precision and longevity of the legal document that it is. (To be equitable all English speaking persons must be judged by the same criteria.)
How it all began...
THE RESEARCH presented in this introduction to the language of the Bible was prompted by a story of one Christian prisoner's phenomenal leap in reading test scores, as a result of reading the King James Bible.
He was advised that he was reading at the fifth grade level when he put his name on a long waiting list to enroll in the prison's high school equivalency program. He then began reading the King James Bible daily. Re-examination the next year showed that he was now reading at the 17th grade level -- post graduate!
How did reading one book, which some falsely claim is difficult, manage to help him, rather than frustrate him? This book answers that and many more questions you may have about the King James version.
- GenresChristianNonfiction
194 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 18, 2026
Unexpectedly, I learned a lot by reading this small book. It opened with this notice about The Magdalen Papyrus (P64) and its reading of Matthew 26.22—"Using a high magnification device and the epiflourescent confocal laser scanning technique, the small fragment was dated A.D. 66. … It proves wrong the reading in the NIV, NASB, and all the new versions which are based on the Critical Greek text." Riplinger then quotes Dr. Carsten Thiede at length asserting the same thing.
One problem is that Thiede is virtually alone in dating this fragment to the first century. The large majority of scholars date P64 to 175-200 AD. An article by Peter Head in the Tyndale Bulletin says, "This article considers Carsten P. Thiede's arguments concerning the date of P64 and suggests that he has both over-estimated the amount of stylistic similarity between P64 and several Palestinian Greek manuscripts and under-estimated the strength of the scholarly consensus of a date around AD 200. Comparable manuscripts are adduced and examined which lead to the conclusion that the later date is to be preferred."
Another problem is that critical scholars don’t always choose the earlier text to determine what is the more likely reading. The early fragment P37, dated to 250-260 AD, has the Critical Text as opposed to the Textus Receptus.
Sadly, this brief notice in the beginning of the book is the last Riplinger has to say about the Textus Receptus. I was expecting a robust defense of the Textus Receptus in this book as a superior text to the critical editions. Although she often attacks critical scholarship (sometimes using awful puns), only on the first page does she defend the Textus Receptus.
An example of such an attack on critical scholarship is "As students 'decline' their verbs, a parallel decline starts in their souls." How can you learn a language without declining verbs? I am beginning to think Riplinger has never declined a Greek or Hebrew verb in her life.
The next thing I learned after learning of P64 was that "Scholars agree that the English language did not become fixed until the King James Bible (Nuttal's Standard Dictionary [1863 edition?])." "Fixed" is the wrong word to use here. Marg Mowczko points out that the archaic language often associated with the KJV (e.g., "thou", "ye") was already falling out of common use during the 17th century. Nonetheless, the KJV played an important role in the development of the English language, even if it did not "fix" it.
Rather skeptical that "scholars agree" on this point, I asked Google to point me to other scholars who agreed that the English language became fixed with the KJV. It pointed me to three: writer Adam Nicolson (b. 1957) theologian Alister McGrath (b. 1953) and linguist David Crystal (b. 1941). Looking up Crystal, it did not seem to me that he agreed with the point at all. But he has definitely made the KJV a focus of study, having written *Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language*, a book I promptly purchased.
Another important thing that I learned from Mowczko that Riplinger does not address is that today we use the 1769 version of the KJV, not the 1611 version. Riplinger also never gives a clear defense of the King James Only idea that only the King James Version is the word of God. Does this mean the 1611 version or the 1769 version, and why?
A constant theme of this book is that the KJV has a built in dictionary. A fascinating example of this given by Riplinger is the dimensions of Noah's ark, which she claims defines the length of a cubit. Since an adult giraffe is no taller than 216 inches, and one story of Noah's ark was ten cubits, a cubit must be 21.6 inches. This is a bit longer than the commonly accepted length of a royal cubit of about 20.4 inches. So Riplinger interprets 1 Chronicles 11.23's 5 cubits as 9 feet (some modern translations convert this to 7.5 feet). Riplinger interprets 1 Samuel 17.4's 6 cubits and a span (Goliath's height) as over 10 feet, but modern translations convert this to 9.75 feet (CSB) or "nearly 10 feet" (many other translations). Riplinger either is unaware of or rejects the existence of different lengths of a cubit (e.g., royal v common cubit).
I expected, but never received, an explanation of why this "built in dictionary" doesn’t explain obscure terms in the KJV such as gopher wood, unicorn, or satyr.
This would be a good time to bring up the issue of the readability of the KJV. There are some points in its favor in this regard. I did not know that "The KJV vocabulary is said to be of 95% Anglo-Saxon origin." I doubt that this is the exact figure but it seems pretty close. The KJV was designed for easy readability and even today roughly 80–90% of the words used in daily speech are Germanic/Old English. This surprised me because I know from my classical studies that a huge number of words are derived from Greek or Latin.
On the other hand the claim that the KJV is on a 5th grade reading level is certainly wrong. This false figure is obtained by feeding portions of the KJV into analyzers like the Flesch-Kincaid which counts syllables and sentence length, but does not consider vocabulary. The KJV uses many words that have dropped out of modern usage entirely. Even worse, it has many false friends—words that we still use today that have changed their meaning. Riplinger criticized modern translations for changing the KJV's "vile bodies" in Philippians 3.21 to "lowly bodies." But the Greek τῆς ταπεινώσεως means "lowly" or "humble," it does not mean "evil" or "vile." This had me wondering whether Riplinger herself properly understood the meaning of the verse.
Another notorious false friend is the phrase "for God so loved the world (John 3.16)." I was shocked when I first read the Greek: Οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον. Οὕτως doesn't mean "so much," it means "in this way." This was the meaning of "so loved" in the 17th century, but that usage has fallen out of use. Lexham English Version and God's Word Translation get it right, but not a few get it wrong: "This is how much God loved the world (The Message)," or "God loved the world so much (Good News Translation; New Century Version; New International Reader's Version)." The verse is so beloved and so well known that most modern translations simply reproduce the KJV even though the meaning is obscure to most modern readers.
Riplinger seems not to understand the Greek of the New Testament. For example, she criticizes the NKJV translation of Ephesians 3.2: "which was given to me for you," saying, "'was' is not in any Greek text." She prefers the KJV "which is given me to you." Of course, the word "is" is not in any Greek text either, which reads τῆς δοθείσης μοι εἰς ὑμᾶς. The issue is how to render the aorist passive verb δοθείσης into English. Unlike Greek, English regularly uses helping verbs to indicate tense. Both "is given" and "was given" are possible translations of δοθείσης. The NKJV translators, realizing that the aorist is most often used to indicate the past tense chose to use the past tense in their translation of Ephesians 3.2, and they are probably right.
Riplinger criticizes the NASB translation of John 4.29 "this is not the Christ, is it?" preferring the KJV "is not this the Christ?" This is just one of many examples of her preferring more theologically palatable translations over more accurate translations. The Greek reads μήτι οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ χριστός; Here NASB is more accurate, since in questions, μὴ and its variants anticipate a negative response (Smyth 2651). If a positive response is anticipated, οὐ would have been used. Examples where the KJV gets this distinction correct are Matthew 7.16, "Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" and James 3.11, "Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?"
Riplinger cites 10 verses where the word "holy (ἅγιος)" has dropped out of modern translations. I looked up four of these: 2 Peter 1.21; Matthew 25.31; 1 Thessalonians 5.27; John 7.39; and found that the issue was that the word ἅγιος occurred in the Textus Receptus of these verses, but not the critical editions. This would have been a great opportunity for her to explain why we should prefer the Textus Receptus to the critical text, but no explanation was forthcoming. I think she was suspecting that her readers would draw the conclusion on their own that the reason modern translations omitted the word "holy" in these verses is because modern translations are beholden to New Age theology (a constant theme in her book).
I have several more examples written in my notes, but I’m going to give just one last example. Riplinger criticizes modern translations of John 8.35 that read, for example, "A slave has no lasting place in the family. But a son belongs to the family forever (NIV)." This translation takes the Greek articles in ὁ δὲ δοῦλος οὐ μένει ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα · ὁ υἱὸς μένει εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα as generic articles (Smyth, 1122). The KJV reads "And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever." It is an open question as to which translation is preferable but the NIV translation is not unreasonable.
A notable feature of the KJV translation of John 8.35 is the literal rendering of the conjunction δὲ as "and." Riplinger states "The NASB's 1995 printing drops the Greek and Hebrew word 'and' thousands and thousands of times," which is probably true. Modern translators recognize that starting sentences with "and" is unidiomatic most of the time in English, though it is common in biblical Greek. But she claims that all those "ands" are necessary to preserve the arithmelogic structure of the Bible as explained by J.M. Cascione in his book *In Search of the Biblical Order -- Patterns in the Text Affirming Divine Authorship from Revelation to Genesis*. Unfortunately, she fails to explain what this is or why it is important. Fortunately, I found a used copy of the book on Amazon for not too much money so I will be able to examine this apparently bizarre claim, when this book arrives in my mail.
One problem is that Thiede is virtually alone in dating this fragment to the first century. The large majority of scholars date P64 to 175-200 AD. An article by Peter Head in the Tyndale Bulletin says, "This article considers Carsten P. Thiede's arguments concerning the date of P64 and suggests that he has both over-estimated the amount of stylistic similarity between P64 and several Palestinian Greek manuscripts and under-estimated the strength of the scholarly consensus of a date around AD 200. Comparable manuscripts are adduced and examined which lead to the conclusion that the later date is to be preferred."
Another problem is that critical scholars don’t always choose the earlier text to determine what is the more likely reading. The early fragment P37, dated to 250-260 AD, has the Critical Text as opposed to the Textus Receptus.
Sadly, this brief notice in the beginning of the book is the last Riplinger has to say about the Textus Receptus. I was expecting a robust defense of the Textus Receptus in this book as a superior text to the critical editions. Although she often attacks critical scholarship (sometimes using awful puns), only on the first page does she defend the Textus Receptus.
An example of such an attack on critical scholarship is "As students 'decline' their verbs, a parallel decline starts in their souls." How can you learn a language without declining verbs? I am beginning to think Riplinger has never declined a Greek or Hebrew verb in her life.
The next thing I learned after learning of P64 was that "Scholars agree that the English language did not become fixed until the King James Bible (Nuttal's Standard Dictionary [1863 edition?])." "Fixed" is the wrong word to use here. Marg Mowczko points out that the archaic language often associated with the KJV (e.g., "thou", "ye") was already falling out of common use during the 17th century. Nonetheless, the KJV played an important role in the development of the English language, even if it did not "fix" it.
Rather skeptical that "scholars agree" on this point, I asked Google to point me to other scholars who agreed that the English language became fixed with the KJV. It pointed me to three: writer Adam Nicolson (b. 1957) theologian Alister McGrath (b. 1953) and linguist David Crystal (b. 1941). Looking up Crystal, it did not seem to me that he agreed with the point at all. But he has definitely made the KJV a focus of study, having written *Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language*, a book I promptly purchased.
Another important thing that I learned from Mowczko that Riplinger does not address is that today we use the 1769 version of the KJV, not the 1611 version. Riplinger also never gives a clear defense of the King James Only idea that only the King James Version is the word of God. Does this mean the 1611 version or the 1769 version, and why?
A constant theme of this book is that the KJV has a built in dictionary. A fascinating example of this given by Riplinger is the dimensions of Noah's ark, which she claims defines the length of a cubit. Since an adult giraffe is no taller than 216 inches, and one story of Noah's ark was ten cubits, a cubit must be 21.6 inches. This is a bit longer than the commonly accepted length of a royal cubit of about 20.4 inches. So Riplinger interprets 1 Chronicles 11.23's 5 cubits as 9 feet (some modern translations convert this to 7.5 feet). Riplinger interprets 1 Samuel 17.4's 6 cubits and a span (Goliath's height) as over 10 feet, but modern translations convert this to 9.75 feet (CSB) or "nearly 10 feet" (many other translations). Riplinger either is unaware of or rejects the existence of different lengths of a cubit (e.g., royal v common cubit).
I expected, but never received, an explanation of why this "built in dictionary" doesn’t explain obscure terms in the KJV such as gopher wood, unicorn, or satyr.
This would be a good time to bring up the issue of the readability of the KJV. There are some points in its favor in this regard. I did not know that "The KJV vocabulary is said to be of 95% Anglo-Saxon origin." I doubt that this is the exact figure but it seems pretty close. The KJV was designed for easy readability and even today roughly 80–90% of the words used in daily speech are Germanic/Old English. This surprised me because I know from my classical studies that a huge number of words are derived from Greek or Latin.
On the other hand the claim that the KJV is on a 5th grade reading level is certainly wrong. This false figure is obtained by feeding portions of the KJV into analyzers like the Flesch-Kincaid which counts syllables and sentence length, but does not consider vocabulary. The KJV uses many words that have dropped out of modern usage entirely. Even worse, it has many false friends—words that we still use today that have changed their meaning. Riplinger criticized modern translations for changing the KJV's "vile bodies" in Philippians 3.21 to "lowly bodies." But the Greek τῆς ταπεινώσεως means "lowly" or "humble," it does not mean "evil" or "vile." This had me wondering whether Riplinger herself properly understood the meaning of the verse.
Another notorious false friend is the phrase "for God so loved the world (John 3.16)." I was shocked when I first read the Greek: Οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον. Οὕτως doesn't mean "so much," it means "in this way." This was the meaning of "so loved" in the 17th century, but that usage has fallen out of use. Lexham English Version and God's Word Translation get it right, but not a few get it wrong: "This is how much God loved the world (The Message)," or "God loved the world so much (Good News Translation; New Century Version; New International Reader's Version)." The verse is so beloved and so well known that most modern translations simply reproduce the KJV even though the meaning is obscure to most modern readers.
Riplinger seems not to understand the Greek of the New Testament. For example, she criticizes the NKJV translation of Ephesians 3.2: "which was given to me for you," saying, "'was' is not in any Greek text." She prefers the KJV "which is given me to you." Of course, the word "is" is not in any Greek text either, which reads τῆς δοθείσης μοι εἰς ὑμᾶς. The issue is how to render the aorist passive verb δοθείσης into English. Unlike Greek, English regularly uses helping verbs to indicate tense. Both "is given" and "was given" are possible translations of δοθείσης. The NKJV translators, realizing that the aorist is most often used to indicate the past tense chose to use the past tense in their translation of Ephesians 3.2, and they are probably right.
Riplinger criticizes the NASB translation of John 4.29 "this is not the Christ, is it?" preferring the KJV "is not this the Christ?" This is just one of many examples of her preferring more theologically palatable translations over more accurate translations. The Greek reads μήτι οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ χριστός; Here NASB is more accurate, since in questions, μὴ and its variants anticipate a negative response (Smyth 2651). If a positive response is anticipated, οὐ would have been used. Examples where the KJV gets this distinction correct are Matthew 7.16, "Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" and James 3.11, "Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?"
Riplinger cites 10 verses where the word "holy (ἅγιος)" has dropped out of modern translations. I looked up four of these: 2 Peter 1.21; Matthew 25.31; 1 Thessalonians 5.27; John 7.39; and found that the issue was that the word ἅγιος occurred in the Textus Receptus of these verses, but not the critical editions. This would have been a great opportunity for her to explain why we should prefer the Textus Receptus to the critical text, but no explanation was forthcoming. I think she was suspecting that her readers would draw the conclusion on their own that the reason modern translations omitted the word "holy" in these verses is because modern translations are beholden to New Age theology (a constant theme in her book).
I have several more examples written in my notes, but I’m going to give just one last example. Riplinger criticizes modern translations of John 8.35 that read, for example, "A slave has no lasting place in the family. But a son belongs to the family forever (NIV)." This translation takes the Greek articles in ὁ δὲ δοῦλος οὐ μένει ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα · ὁ υἱὸς μένει εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα as generic articles (Smyth, 1122). The KJV reads "And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever." It is an open question as to which translation is preferable but the NIV translation is not unreasonable.
A notable feature of the KJV translation of John 8.35 is the literal rendering of the conjunction δὲ as "and." Riplinger states "The NASB's 1995 printing drops the Greek and Hebrew word 'and' thousands and thousands of times," which is probably true. Modern translators recognize that starting sentences with "and" is unidiomatic most of the time in English, though it is common in biblical Greek. But she claims that all those "ands" are necessary to preserve the arithmelogic structure of the Bible as explained by J.M. Cascione in his book *In Search of the Biblical Order -- Patterns in the Text Affirming Divine Authorship from Revelation to Genesis*. Unfortunately, she fails to explain what this is or why it is important. Fortunately, I found a used copy of the book on Amazon for not too much money so I will be able to examine this apparently bizarre claim, when this book arrives in my mail.
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November 8, 2019EXCELLENT!!!!!!!!!!
February 1, 2020
Excellent preview of the English language of the King James.
April 18, 2023
The insight about the built in dictionary was a new thought for me. In addition how it helped readers improve their reading level.
August 12, 2014
I loved this book. For anyone who wanted to read the original King James Version of the Bible this book it a must. Gail Riplinger shows you how easy it is to read the "old english" most people associate with the Bible and also eye-opening information about the other versions out there claiming to make the Bible easier to understand with their "translations."
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews