Is Online Baptism Just Theatrics?

 My social media venue of choice is Second Life, the twenty-year-old virtual world I first encountered in my graduate school years.  If you spend enough time in “SL,” you’ll likely run into virtual weddings, virtual dancing, virtual dating, virtual meals at imaginary restaurants, and – if you’re like me and visit a variety of SL churches – virtual baptisms of new believers.

This isn’t a new practice in Second Life.  Over my decade and a half visiting there, I’ve seen dozens of new churches practice what I think of as “digital sacramentalism,” avatar performances of the Lord’s Supper and baptism via cartoon personae.  I saw my first digital baptism fifteen years ago and the most recent just three months ago.

QUESTION: If you’re at home, alone in your room, and staying completely dry while you watch your avatar go through scripted motions, are you really being baptized, as some Second Life churches claim?

 

ASIDE #1: WHAT IS REAL BAPTISM?

Ah, for the good ol’ days, when the only arguments about baptism were whether you could do it on babies and if mere sprinkling would even count.  To be fair, however, I shouldn’t be glib about such distinctions.  The history of doctrinal differences over baptism is rife with congregation-busting disputes and outright violence and death (look up the Münster Rebellion and the German Peasants’ Revolt of the 1500s to glimpse how the anti-infant baptism movement was born of violence).  For our purposes here, let’s have a quick, oversimplified summary:

Most Lutherans remain fans of infant baptism, holding to the idea that a saved household of faith can be baptized in its entirety, babies included (see Acts 16:15).  Most Baptists disagree, pointing out that Scripture always shows confessions of faith being made before any specific person is baptized.  Meanwhile, early Churches of Christ appear to tie the idea of baptism to actually being regenerated, “saved” through the act itself (“born of water and the spirit,” as in John 3, and baptism “for the remission of sins” as in Acts 2:37-38), a position reminiscent of age-old Roman Catholic and Orthodox ideas.

I’m not going to solve any of those debates.  I am, though, going to muse a little on ancient languages.  None of my regular readers are surprised by that. 😊

Baptizó and its variants, the koine Greek terms often translated as “baptize” in the New Testament, aren’t always translated that way.  In Mark 7:4, for example, the term is used twice to refer to washing cups, plates, and utensils.  In Luke 12:50 and Mark 10:39, it’s perhaps better translated as “undergoing” something (in this case, persecution).  And at its root, baptó, it simply means “dipped”—martyrs robes dipped in blood (Rev. 19:13), bread dipped in wine and passed to Judas (John 13:26), and the rich man’s request that the beggar Lazarus dip the tip of his finger into cool water to pass on a few thirst-quenching drops (Luke 16:24).

Immersion, washing, simple dipping – for those arguing that true baptism requires full immersion, the biblical language test doesn’t offer a lot of solid support.  Even those arguing that baptizing (“washing”) dishes is itself “immersion” will be chagrined to learn that Roman-province dishwashing in the time of Christ involved rubbing plates with sand and then simply splashing them sandless with water.  That’s a fun fact; drop it at your next fancy cocktail party.

 

BACK TO SECOND LIFE

The most recent baptism I saw occurring in Second Life took place at a virtual pond on the virtual grounds of a newer virtual church.  It was a very pastor-centric church, by which I mean the pastor was the center of all gatherings of the faithful – no in-service liturgical music, no extended time of prayer and intercession by the laity, no time of congregational praise and worship (see Ephesians 5:19-20 and Colossians 3:16-17 for Biblical elements of a church service).  The Scripture reading (done by the pastor) and the sermon (done by the pastor) were the full content of the service, tucked neatly between opening and closing prayers (done by the pastor).  Oddly, this virtual church site had, at that time, a boiler-plate statement of faith promoting “Christian baptism by immersion.”  Yet here they were one evening, conducting a digital baptism in a pixel pond.

As I watched, I wondered how a faith community could simultaneously hold the belief that true baptism must be by full immersion in water, yet feel that showing virtual-world cartoons mimicking that act could be just as valid.  I kept imagining the converted Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 saying to Philip, “Behold, here is a picture I drew of some water.  What is there to prevent me from drawing myself into the picture being baptized?”

Above I mentioned the Second Life practice of celebrating the Lord’s Supper in a virtual world.  Frankly, this practice makes a good deal of sense to me.  Participants are present with one another in voice and behavior, forming a common union (as in, communion) to celebrate and proclaim the saving death of Christ.  Participants can have their own communion elements at home (and even the most devout Biblical literalists are satisfied substituting cookies and juice for bread and wine).  There is joint devotion and proclamation of Christ at work.  In my mind, it’s an example of the universal communion of saints.

Does virtual baptism match up with that?

Alternatively, I have attended one baptism in Second Life that intrigued me with its real-world tie-ins.  At this church, the requirement for virtual baptism was that it take place at the same time as the new believer's actual baptism in real life, being performed by a representative of a real-world Christian congregation.  That moved me, I confess.  It not only allowed the Second Life friends of the new believer to participate in the celebration; it ensured that the real human behind the avatar entered into fellowship with a physically accessible body of believers.

The pastor of the first example I cited made no mention of a real-world church membership when he performed his avatar baptism.  I’m not certain whether the new believer was counseled after that time to seek out a congregation.  I’m not even certain if the new believer still attends the Second Life church where he was baptized.  I do know this, though: those of us assembled were told nothing about any connection to local believers by the baptizing preacher.  All discussion was about how the avatar being baptized was now a member of that community, the virtual-world church.  We were all led to understand that the inanimate cartoon’s baptism by proxy was the real deal, sufficient in itself.

 

ASIDE #2 – BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD

Speaking of inanimate ... if a cartoon avatar can be baptized on my behalf, who or what else can be?  This idea of proxy baptism brought to my mind Paul’s much-debated comment in 1 Corinthians 15:29, presented almost as an aside in his discussion of why resurrection of the dead must be a physical reality:

         Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf
         of the dead?  If the dead are not raised at all, why are
         people baptized on their behalf?

Latter Day Saints (a.k.a. Mormons prior to 2018) have adapted this verse into a full-blown religious ritual of being baptized for those who have died, thereby leveling up the dead in their afterlife.  This doctrine explains the founding and initial growth of the Ancestry.com genealogy business, owned by the LDS church until 1997 – after all, you can't be baptized for the dead if you don't know who they are, and the digital age provided whole new tools to expand a practice started quietly in 1840.

Commentator Matthew Henry suggests a less literal interpretation of this Bible verse, reminding us of the idea of baptism by fire and persecution that might lead to martyrdom, as if Paul were saying, “Why would people risk being baptized and dying for this faith if they didn’t believe they’d be resurrected again one day?” Henry offers the suggestion in a tentative manner, probably because he knew there was only a little contextual support for the idea.

John F. MacArthur is similarly tentative in his New Testament Commentary, suggesting after much analysis that the verse could be read: “If the dead are not raised at all, why then are they [many present Christians] baptized for [become believers because of the testimony of] them [deceased faithful believers]?”  In this sense, the verse demands to know why anyone would get baptized based on the testimony of those who then got martyred, unless of course they really believed what they were hearing about a resurrection.

I’m about to get really nerdy with words here, so you can skip the blue text if you don’t care to tiptoe through linguistic geekdom: MacArthur is likely wrong in this analysis, since he chooses to render the Greek term ὑπὲρ (hyper) “because of [the dead].”  Hyper is a tricky preposition to translate from koine, but it’s probable that MacArthur’s idea would make sense only if the preposition were followed by the accusative case of the nominative hoi nekroi (the dead).  In this Bible verse, it isn’t.  It’s followed by the genitive case, tōn nekrōn.  In that construction, most Greek lexicons agree the preposition more strongly suggests the meaning of being physically “above” something or, in its figurative use, “on behalf of,” “representative of,” or “instead of” the dead.  While “because of” is a possible rendering, it’s generally a minority translation.

There we go, blue is all gone.  Sorry.

To MacArthur’s credit, he gives a much more thorough analysis of the verse than can be gotten from Matt Slick, antagonistic bad-boy author of the Carm.org apologetics web site.  Slick weighs only a single viewpoint here, citing a source claiming baptism of the dead was a nearby pagan practice.  Actually, his claim is that baptism for a better afterlife was a nearby pagan practice in a religion mentioned in Homer over half a millennium earlier, without evidence of it being "for the dead."  It doesn’t occur to Slick to ask why Paul, who is trying to encourage readers to believe in the resurrection, would use as his example a pagan practice they shouldn’t believe in.  “Here’s a falsehood that proves this truth,” Paul would be saying.

Other interpretations of “baptism hyper the dead” include:

· A practice by the Corinthian believers of being baptized for those who came to believe in Christ, but who died before they could partake in a formal baptism (mentioned by commentator Matthew Poole, although not favored by him);

· A practice of Corinthian ancestor baptism which Paul mildly opposed or considered harmless but which he decided to use as an example anyway – again, weak because of the idea of using a falsehood to support a truth (discussed by theologian and writer Dan Doriani here).

· The practice of waiting until being on one’s deathbed to get baptized, being "as good as dead" (a practice out of place, however, in the age of Paul, discussed in the grandiosely titled commentary Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible);

· The idea that “the dead” here meant the Messiah, referring to "the dead One" as plural in the sense of the royal “We,” with believers baptized for His (Their?) sake (an imaginative rendering mentioned in Barnes’ Notes, without Barnes giving it any credulity);

· A reference to Hebrew body-washing rituals for the newly dead, using the more generic "washing" interpretation of baptízontai I talked about earlier (found in three of the commentators mentioned above: Barnes, Poole, and Gill).

 

So, who’s right?  I’m going to make a bold assertion here: We don’t know and we likely never will.  I realize it’s odd to speak with such certainty about an uncertainty.  And I’d be more than happy to be proved wrong by a new discovery in some Asia Minor cave with ancient scrolls entitled “How My Corinthian Pals and I Baptized People for the Dead and Why We Did It.”  An openness and willingness to grasp other ideas does me good.  My research this month led me to appreciate those like John MacArthur and Dan Doriani who are willing to make their best guesses but who, unlike Matt Slick, don’t speak with absolute conviction about a single conclusion.

 

WHICH BRINGS ME BACK TO SECOND LIFE

So, what is it that makes me hesitant about virtual-world baptisms?  Am I just being judgy because it seems different to me, a little unorthodoxed, or is there something deeper that concerns me about it?

I guess I don’t trust virtual communities to be actual, durable communities.  I’m wrong to feel that way in some cases, since I know several churches in Second Life where the congregants have direct connections with the pastors, able to reach them by phone, even to visit them in real life.  Sometimes, the pastors really are pastors, too, ordained and serving congregations in the real world.

So I suppose I have questions for those other SL pastors:

• Why are you baptizing this avatar?  Does the real-life person behind the avatar not have access to a real-world church?  Is that why they came to you?
• Where do they go now?  Do you know where they can connect with other Christians in real life?  Can you direct them to a nearby congregation for church fellowship?
• Is this virtual baptism performative?  Are you doing it because it’s a cool expression of your virtual pastorship, displaying for all to see that you’re digitally legit?  How much Self is in your Service?
• What discipling comes next?  Are you starting on a new path, side-by-side with this new believer, taking them under your wing in a Priscilla & Aquila manner to teach them The Way?
• Three months from now, will you even know where the person you baptized is?

 

Organizing my questions like that reveals my true concerns to me.  No, I guess I don’t care whether the water’s real.  Water baptism is a symbol.   It's a symbol of spiritual death and resurrection into new life, and when it’s in Second Life, it’s a symbol of the symbol.  It’s accepting the resurrection of Christ and the salvation His death opens to us that matters to me, not whether the baptism is by sprinkling, pouring, immersing, submerging, or even by pixelized plunking.  We’re not baptized to get saved, we’re baptized because we’re saved (oops, I’m revealing my Anabaptist leanings there; sorry, Luther).

Here's the rub: We’re baptized into a community, demonstrating that we’re joining that community.  Yes, baptism is a metaphor, but it reflects the reality of becoming a part of the body of Christ.  How much of a body is SL?  If I’m in Second Life, you can’t hug me after my baptism, not really.  You can’t lay hands on me in blessing or join your hands with mine in prayer.  You can’t sit next to me warmly, being quiet by my side when neither of us has the words to pray as we ought.

We are Body, and we join Body through baptism.  But a digital world is dispersed.  If our hand is in Los Angeles and our head is in Detroit, our knees in Paris and our eyeballs in Zurich … then what kind of Body are we?  Better asked, what kind of Body am I baptizing you into if I'm your digital pastor?  Am I telling you, “We’re your church now!  Welcome to the Body!  You’re a detached leg, but you’re fine.  You don’t need the rest of us parts nearby.  God bless, brother!”

So I return to the question I opened with, slightly modified: If you’re at home, alone in your room, and staying completely dry while you watch your avatar go through scripted motions, are you really being joined to the Body of Christ?

Or are you one lone part, cut off from the other parts, all spread around the world with no real connection, no physical joining, scattered carnage pretending to be alive?

Did they baptize you, really?

Or were they simply baptizing pieces?  Baptizing the dead?

Marana Tha,

YoYo Rez / Yolanda Ramírez

MY GUNS and MY GOD

Personal Weaponry in the Kingdom of Heaven

 “As far as the Bible is concerned, the use of guns is a matter of personal conviction.  There is nothing unspiritual about owning a gun or knowing how to use one.”  ~ www.gotanswers.com

“Some trust in chariots, and some in horses …”  ~ Psalm 20:7

ON A BREAD HUNT

      I honestly thought this blog post would be a quick look at five tricky Bible verses that might baffle readers even when translated into perfectly understandable English.

     Five?  As my grandma would have said, I had los ojos más grandes que el estómago – eyes bigger than my stomach.  Five were too many, so I’m tackling just one.  Maybe I’ll double up monthly posts to squeeze more in.  For now, though, come on this single, short journey with me.

 

The Verse:

Ecclesiastes 11:1 – Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. (KJV)

 

     Huh?  If I cast bread on water, won’t it get soggy and dissolve?  Am I casting with a fishing pole, or just tossing it willy-nilly?  Is it my goal to find it again?  If so, why toss it in the first place?  And how many days are we talking?

     Before you say, “Stop being silly, Yolanda, it’s a verse about giving so that you’ll receive,” bear with me for a bit.  If you’ve read my posts before, you’ll know I’m a language geek who likes to play with the words on a deeper level.  It’s my weakness.  Well, one of them.

 

RESOURCE ONE: My husband

     Mr. Yolanda (full disclosure: not his real name) is usually my first stop when I have ideas bouncing around my head.  He’s patient.  He almost never rolls his eyes at me.  I appreciate that.  I asked him how he’d interpret this verse and, to keep things in context, gave him the follow-up verse with it:

Cast thy bread upon the water: for thou shalt find it after many days.

Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth.

     “It’s about responsible investing,” he told me later that day.  “The bread is your worldly goods.  You cast them out, maybe internationally since it’s over waters.  You’ll diversify the portfolio, portioning it out safely to seven, maybe eight types of risk levels, since you don’t know whether one or two might yield negative outcomes, the 'evil'.  Be patient in the bear markets.  You won’t get stable returns until many days have passed.”

     Not bad.  Maybe not the exegesis you’d dig out of your Scofield notes, but solid nonetheless, given his point of view as a funds professional.

     Me, though, I’m in education.  In my mind, the “bread” is the knowledge I dole out to students.  I’m scattering seeds, not loaves.  Do the students listen to me?  Yes.  And no.  There are many of them – seven, eight, two dozen, a whole sea of faces, and I toss out my knowledge and, I hope, my wisdom, never sure which portion will be a benefit to the many who need it.  Will they come back one day to tell me they’ve benefited from what I tossed them?  No idea.  But I believe.

     So, my husband was wrong.  It’s not a finance metaphor about personal gain.  It’s a teaching metaphor about giving of yourself.  I mean, right?

     Or did we each bring our own bias to the verses?  Sometimes we humans can read our own pre-existing ideas into Bible texts, “finding what we sought” rather than seeking until we find.  Maybe I needed to look closer.

 

RESOURCE TWO: Into the Weeds

     My inner linguist steps up.  She wants to know why there’s bread being tossed on water in the first place.  She knows that words don’t always have just one meaning (which is why she’d never pound on her puppy for eating seven pounds of British pounds, but would instead send the puppy to the pound). So, let’s pick through the words a little.

     Lechem is a transliteration of the Hebrew term shown in this verse as “bread.”  A little earlier in Ecclesiastes, the same term is translated as “meal.”  The KJV also renders it “seeds” or “loaves” or “food” or “provisions” in Isaiah, Job, Psalms, and (literally) thousands of other places in the Hebrew text.  From seeds to full meals is a wide range of translation options.

     Mayim is the waters.  All waters.  We’re talking big or small here, from the skins of refreshing H₂O carried in Hebrew camps, to the rising and receding overflow of the Jordon River, all the way up to the vast, primordial seas of creation found in Genesis.

     And salach is the action word – “cast,” for sure, but with dozens of other translations from the KJV team, even translated as “divorce” in a couple spots.  All these English renderings have a sense of sending something away from yourself.

     Great.  I’ve got my imperative-mood verb, my direct object, and my indirect object all aligned, but the possible literal renderings are many.  Exactly what kind of lechem am I salach-ing into those mayim?  If I’m “shipping away provisions overseas for a return,” then my husband’s trading-foodstuffs interpretation is winning.  But if I’m “scattering seeds upon the soil of receding river banks,” then my talents-sharing interpretation may have more backing.

     Too many word-by-word options – lobbing loaves into lagoons, pitching pitas into ponds, chucking ciabattas into channels, whipping Wonder bread into wadis (yeah, wadis are a thing, look it up).  Perhaps I’m just spinning my wheels here.  I need to go deeper on this.

 

RESOURCE THREE: Hitting the Histories

     Moving past my semantics approach means it’s time to tackle the sociolinguistics of the verse.  Put simply, I need to ask: Did any other society use “casting bread upon waters” as a metaphor?

     Eureka!  It turns out (my books tell me) that ancient Greeks had the phrase σπείρειν ἐπὶ πόντῳ, “to sow on the sea,” which was apparently used to indicate a useless, meaningless act of labor.  We’d say something along the lines of “just spinning my wheels here” (you knew I wasn’t mixing metaphors up there just for giggles, right?)  Casting seeds on the water meant a task was thankless, profitless.

     The Greek poet Theognis of Megara uses the saying just that way when he writes: “He who does good to the lowly gets little thanks.  He might as well sow seed on the salty waters.  You’d no more get any benefit back by doing good to the lowly than you’d get full-grown grain from throwing seeds on the water.”

     If that sounds familiar, it certainly should.  It’s the exact opposite of what the Ecclesiastes writer Qoheleth says about casting lechem, bread or seeds, upon the waters.

     Despite his own pessimism in other parts of Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth turns this cynical Greek saying on its head.  Our verses, the opening to chapter 11 of Ecclesiastes, read like an argument crafted directly and specifically against the very words of Theognis quoted above.  “You’re wrong, Theognis” Qoheleth seems to say.  “Given enough time, your seeds will bear fruit, even if landing among the good and evil alike.  So, give what you’ve got to seven, eight, to more, whether they're good or evil.  Then wait a while.  You’ll see that good can come.”

 

SO, YOUR HUSBAND WAS WRONG?

     Nope.  I realize my husband and I experienced the words differently, but many Bible scholars agree with him (Jamieson-Fausset-Brown and Midrash commentaries among them) that the verse applies to wise overseas investment.  Other commentators agree with me (Ellicott, Benson, and more) that the bread is “seed” and the seed is any good thing or act given to the needy.  Still more commentators take slightly different angles.

     Remember what I said earlier about “finding what I sought” vs. “seeking in order to find”?  It may be a misguided bias of mine to expect that a verse of Scripture means something, some THING, one thing and one thing only.  Who am I to say that the All-Powerful God who inspires Scripture can’t layer it to reveal multiple experiences to multiple people?  Would that be too hard an approach for the Creator of a whole universe?

     My husband, ever prudent, thoughtful, and generous in his financial and charitable activities, experienced the verse within the context of his own Christian journey.  Lechem is provisions crossing oceans, and his philanthropy flows from that.

     I, always striving and praying to be a source of knowledge and wisdom for my students, experienced the verses in my own walk’s context.  Lechem is seeds cast on wet, ready soil, filling hungy minds.

     Ours aren’t personal interpretations of Scripture.  Instead, they are personal affirmations crafted by the Spirit for individual children of God.

     And you?

     Seed or slice or loaf or meal, your life’s lechem is for you to discern.  When you find it, child of God, you’ll see you have plenty of lechem to go around.  Don’t be afraid to toss it out there.

 

Marana Tha,

 

Cosmic Parx (a.k.a. YoYo Rez)

JESUS AT THE BORDER

  Setting: Just outside the gates of a mighty, ancient city.

GUARD:        Identity scrolls, please.

JESUS:         I’m sorry, what?

GUARD:        Identity scrolls.  To let you inside Jerusalem, we’ve got to confirm your citizenship.

JESUS:          Oh!  We’ve never had to do that before.

GUARD:        New policy.  Border security crisis.  A lot of riffraff getting in.  Sicarii.  Zealots.  MS-13.  You know the types.

JESUS:          I’m afraid we didn’t know we’d need identity scrolls.

GUARD:        Undocumented, then.  (writes that down) You're seeking asylum, I assume?

JESUS:          Actually, I’ve come to take away the sins of the world.

GUARD:         Uh huh.  Purpose of trip?  Business?  Pleasure?

JESUS:          (puzzled) It’s ... it’s Passover.  We’re here for Passover.  Just like the thousand other people behind us in line.

GUARD:         Pilgrimage, then.  (writes that down)  Name?

JESUS:          Jesus of Nazareth.

GUARD:         Place of birth?

JESUS:          Bethlehem.

GUARD:         (suspiciously) You just said Nazareth.

JESUS:         The family moved around a lot.  Bethlehem.  Egypt.  Up to Galilee.

GUARD:        (muttering) Migrant workers.  (louder) Number of people in your party?

JESUS:          Well, there’s Simon called Peter, and Thomas called the Twin, James called the Lesser, Levi called Matthew –

GUARD:         Whoa, whoa, whoa!  ALL your friends have gang names?

JESUS:         (exasperated) We’re not a gang!  Anyway, there’s Simon called the Zeal—  You know what?  There's twelve of them, that’s all you asked.

PETER:        (pokes head in) Twelve, but seventy more who follow close behind.

JAMES:        (also pokes head in) And a lot of women, too.

JOHN:          (joins in) Wait, don’t we count the women among the Seventy?

ANDREW:    (intrudes) Oh, and He has sheep not of this fold, in another flock!

JESUS:          Really NOT being helpful, guys.

GUARD:        All right, then.  We’ll call you a "growing caravan trying to cross our border."  Now, have you got anything to declare?

PETER:         (excitedly) That He is the Christ, the Son of the living of God!

GUARD:         Okay. (writes that down) Anything else?

JESUS:         This donkey.  I’m hoping to ride it in.  You know, once we clear the gates.

GUARD:        Uh oh.  That might be an issue.  We’re worried about disease crossing the border.  Animals and migrants like you tend to be unclean.  You haven't been near any lepers or demon-possessed people lately, have you? 

(Foot shuffling and inaudible murmurs among the group.)

GUARD:        Look, mostly we’re worried about violence.  Can I get your word that you’re not going to whip anyone up into civil disobedience or irritate the priests and elders in any way?

PETER:         Hey, we call this guy the Prince of Peace.  You sound like you expect Him to start kicking over tables right in the temple.

JESUS:            ... again, NOT helping ...

GUARD:        I’ve gotta be honest with you.  A group of outsiders, a bunch of gang names, no documentation, possibility of disease coming over the city border ....  Your prospects for getting in don’t look great unless we can work something out.

JESUS:           Huh?  What do you mean?

GUARD:        You know.  Work something out.  A little something.  To work it out.

JUDAS:        (cutting in)  Yo, Jesus, I got this.  (to the guard) Maybe a little silver will hurry things along?  What do you say to ... thirty pieces?

GUARD:        I say, Welcome to Jerusalem, blessed pilgrims!  Please pass through the eternal Wall guarding our city!

JESUS:         (muttering as He passes)  Eternal my eye.  I tell you, not one temple stone will remain atop another when—

JUDAS:        NOT helping.  (pause)  You know, I’ll be needing that money back eventually.

King James Onlyism

 

"ONLYISM"?

       As a Christian, you’ve probably wondered at some point about which Bible translation is the “best” one.  There’s also a chance you’ve met at least one person who insists that the Authorized Version, also called the King James Version, is not just the best but the only translation an English-speaking Christian should use.

      “King James Onlyism” – I promise, I didn’t make that term up – is a small but vocal subset of fundamentalist evangelicalism.  Its adherents are often members of independent Baptist churches, although they can also be found among Oneness Pentecostals, Holiness congregations, and, occasionally, more conversative Mormons.

      As the word “Onlyism” suggests, adherents don’t simply prefer the KJV text because of its beautiful Elizabethan prose.  Their view is that the 1611 Authorized Version of Scripture is the only sacred text inspired by God, based on the only legitimate ancient manuscripts.  Other English translations, they believe, are based on corrupt manuscripts.  Some KJV Onlyists believe that there’s a conspiracy among ungodly Bible translators to pull people away from the true God by altering Scriptural truths and pushing corrupt translations on the unsuspecting masses.

      There’s more.  Extreme King James Onlyists sometimes claim that the King James Version can be used to correct the ancient manuscripts from which it was created.  If a New Testament verse in KJV English doesn’t match the Greek of the Textus Receptus (that’s “received text” for us civilians), then it’s the ancient manuscript that’s wrong.  The inspired English of the 1611 KJV corrects mistakes in ancient versions.

 

CAN ANYTHING BE TRANSLATED PERFECTLY?

      Let's take a step back, though.  Is KJV the best?  In fact, is any English translation “best”?

      “Traduttore, traditore,” is an old Italian proverb.  It means, “The translator is a traitor.”  The proverb isn’t claiming that translators are dodgy tricksters.  It means that it’s impossible for any translation to be absolutely true to the original language on which it’s based.

      If you’re of a literalist mindset, you may reason that if you use a Bible version that’s a literal translation, you’ll be accessing the best version of sacred text.  Not so.  Consider a simple example from a modern language, Spanish:

¡Buenos días!  ¿Qué pasa?

      A literal translation of these words to English would be “Good[s] days!  What passes?”  That misses the mark.  The actual meaning of the utterance is, “Good morning!  What’s up?”  No one cares what’s passing, and no one instinctively knows that days are usually used for mornings in Spanish.  ¿Qué pasa? causes further issues when you alter its context or tone.  Among friends, it’s a casual “Wassup?”  But if it’s said by a police officer approaching your fender bender, ¿Qué pasa? is better rendered, “What’s wrong?”

      That’s a tiny phrase ported between two modern languages.  Consider the added challenges of translating the Bible, a tome of more than 700,000 ancient words written over a thousand-year period in various cultures and languages.  Calling such a task “monumental” is an understatement.

      That’s part of the reason we see such variety among translations of the same Bible verse.  Consider, for example, 1 Corinthians 15:30 below:

“I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.” (King James Version)

“I affirm, brethren, by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.” (New American Standard Bible)

“Every day do I die, by the glorying of you that I have in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Young’s Literal Translation)

“For I swear, dear brothers and sisters, that I face death daily. This is as certain as my pride in what Christ Jesus our Lord has done in you.” (New Living Translation)

 

      The New Living Translation above is the least literal rendering of that text.  Arguably, it may be the most accurate if what you’re looking for is meaning rather than near-literal rendering.

 

THE APPEAL OF KING JAMES ONLYISM

      So why are some believers so attracted to King James Onlyism?  I’m no sociologist, but I suspect it has a great deal to do with taking refuge against the constant change and upheaval of modern living.  When the world seems tossed about in chaos, and when even the Bible can appear in such varied renderings as the four samples above, there’s an understandable impulse to cling to something surer and more solid.  The Apostle Paul’s assurance that we now only know things partially, "seeing through a glass darkly," does little to comfort some of us.  We want surety.  We want exactitude.  Forget the glass darkly and give us the microscope precisely.

      It’s become a common quip to joke that you want the words of Jesus in the exact King James English He spoke them.  But consider, more seriously, the tenets required to believe the KJV to be the only authoritative Word of God available in His kingdom on Earth.  You need:

• A belief in the divine inspiration of the original authors of each distinct text in Scripture
• A belief in the divine inspiration of those who gathered the texts into collections
• A belief in the divine inspiration of those who over the centuries inserted and removed different sections of that collected bundle as canon lists shifted and evolved
• A belief in the divine inspiration of the Holy Roman Catholic Church theologians who declared the “final” canon based on the Septuagint manuscripts used by Jesus and the Apostles
• A belief in the divine inspiration of the Protestant Reformers who further finalized the final version, booting Hebrew Scripture selections found only in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Masoretic texts
• A belief that the English-language Geneva Version of 1599 was semi-inspired divinely, since the KJV translators report using it extensively to guide their own translations; and, finally,
• A belief that 47 Church of England scholars and theologians were divinely inspired over seven years to produce the 1611 Authorized Version as an English translation that corrected problems with earlier mistakes in ancient manuscripts.

 

      If that sounds tedious, it’s because I meant it to be.

      But I’m not done.

      KJV-Onlyists you encounter online do extensive deep-dives into details of original manuscripts.  I’ll oversimplify the discussion for you: they accept the Masoretic Hebrew and the Textus Receptus Greek texts used to create the King James Version.  They reject the Septuagint text regularly quoted (without doubt and without controversy) by Jesus and His Apostles.

      So the next required leap of faith is believing that God got over His acceptance of the Scripture version used by Jesus and implemented better versions of the Hebrew Scriptures for definitive use a millennium and a half later.

      Frankly, that’s a lot of revision work on God’s part.  Why was the Septuagint good enough for Jesus but not good enough for James?  (Yes, in my head I sang that last line to the tune of “Gimme that Ol’ Time Religion.”)  Don’t get me wrong – God has all the power, and He certainly could have crafted a winding, seventeen century-long path of Bible-tweaking inspiration complex enough to make even Rube Goldberg envious.  My question is, would He?  That question is particularly pressing for the biblical literalists among us: Would God leave Christians without a perfect text for that long a time, using a pathway of that much confusion?  Is that the kind of Author he is?

 

SO WHAT’S THE BEST BIBLE TRANSLATION?

      I can’t give an answer to that question.  I’ll be bold, though, and turn to a source I trust: the very scholars and theologians who spent their time translating the 1611 Authorized Version.  They make their opinions of Bible translations very clear in their introduction to that celebrated text.  I’ll quote them with their original spelling, since I wish to be true to their words (and because, hey, it looks so darn cool):

 

Therfore as S. Augustine saith, that varietie of Translations is profitable for the finding out of the sense of the Scriptures: so diversitie of signification and sense in the margine, where the text is not so cleare, must needes doe good, yea is necessary, as we are perswaded.

 

      There you have it.  A variety of translations helps you make sense of Scripture.  Footnotes and margin notes help you out even more.  When the text isn’t clear, look to another translation and see if the ideas come across better in that one.

      For you see, the 1611 translators felt that the Word of God was retained, still preserved, even in less-than-perfect translations.  Of the Septuagint itself – the text they chose not to use – they have many good things to say, assuring readers that it contained the Word of God, since the Apostles and the Lord themselves saw fit to use it.

      That’s the final hurdle for the followers of the King James Onlyist movement.  To hold to their convictions, they must reject the guidance of the very translators they say were divinely inspired to create the one true version of the Bible.  They must look these 1611 scholars right in the eyes, right in the Introduction, and tell them, “You’re wrong, divinely inspired translators.  We know more about the inspiration of your work than you do.  Consult other versions, you say?  Clearly, you’re trying to corrupt the unsuspecting masses.”

 

It’s good to be back writing, and …

Marana Tha!

YoYo Rez, a.k.a. Cosmic Parx