The literary argument had other weaknesses. President McKay pointed out the most obvious ones: an archaic style and terms that were sometimes charming but markedly difficult for most modern readers to understand. Clark allowed the problem but insisted that the Authorized Version could be understood in all essential parts by the careful, thoughtful reader. A little work with a reference book, he felt, could overcome this small obstacle.
Perhaps President Clark's own diligence led him to overestimate the ambitions of the ordinary reader. Even so, his own experience undermined his position. Difficult Jacobean words and phrases might here and there be overcome by the few who would bother to consult reference material, or when readers encountered familiar material such as the Sermon on the Mount. But such measures would hardly suffice for those attempting to understand, say, the intricate and sustained arguments of the Epistle to the Romans. President Clark himself admitted he did not grasp much of Paul, which is no wonder. The famous apostle is difficult enough to read for any length of time in the original Greek; for the average reader, the challenge is yet more severe in archaic English. For the Church's young members, attempting to view the overall message of Paul or Isaiah or Hebrews through the dense lens of Elizabethan prose is very nearly hopeless.
Other facts further diluted the "beautiful literature" argument. In presenting ancient documents to a modern world, modern translators had, in many passages, been faced with either retaining the elegance of the KJV or offering a modern accurate rendition. To choose elegance over accuracy ran explicitly counter to the calls of Brigham Young and others for exactness in translation. It also ran implicitly against a more general dislike of elaborate religious display; Latter-day Saints and Protestants alike had long disparaged what they saw as the gorgeous robes, overly ornate cathedrals, ostentatious public ceremonies, and other trappings of Catholicism. Yet for Mormons to insist on retaining a beautiful language no longer accessible to the common person differed only in degree from contemporaneous American Catholics who insisted on a beautiful and mysterious Latin Mass.
Earlier in the century, Latter-day Saints had already expressed reserve toward the tendency of scholars to inflate the humble dialects of many of the original biblical writings into a "masterly English." Twentieth-century scholars made a similar point, demonstrating what the scholars of the RV and ASV, to say nothing of the KJV, did not know, namely that the New Testament had been written in Koine or "common" Greek. As one eminent authority has put it, "an elaborate, elegant style is unsuited to" biblical translation, "and in proportion as it is rendered in a conscious literary style, it is misrepresented to the modern reader."
Beyond the literary argument, an even weaker claim for the authorized translation was President Clark's assertion that it was the Bible of Mormon tradition, one that had successfully guided the Church from its beginning. This was technically true, of course, but, as already suggested, Joseph Smith would have been the last person to make allegiance to an inaccurate Bible an official practice when he knew of an alternative. His use of the KJV was incidental to the time and location of his birth and, even then, he refused to be confined by it. The Book of Mormon itself scoffed at tradition-bound souls who refused progress in hearing the word of God.
President Clark reinforced his "argument by tradition" by noting that "the great bulk of our people know and use only the Authorized Version, and do not have access either to the Revised Versions . . . or to other versions." Moreover, he said, "references in our Standard Church Works and our Church literature are to the Authorized Version," and Bible commentaries and dictionaries are in good part keyed to it. In a comment perhaps more revealing than he knew, Clark added that the "Authorized Version is to most of us The Bible, and we would feel we had been disloyal to the record of God's dealings with men if we were to use any other text (we love the Word of God as therein given)."
The sentiment was appropriately reverent, but the logic was not cogent. And what little force the point then held is rapidly evaporating. Gaining familiarity with other versions and access to them were scarcely insurmountable problems even in President Clark's time. And what was then a minor difficulty was only compounded by his making the KJV seem more official to ordinary believers. Commentaries and dictionaries by the most competent scholars are, of course, no longer "keyed" primarily to the KJV.
In a subset of the tradition argument, President Clark made much of the fact that the RV and ASV had not displaced the King James Version in popularity. He was sure that the RSV would fare no better. There was substance to this claim, since the KJV had, in fact, retained an entrenched loyalty. But this became less and less true as time went on. Recent translations like the New English Bible, Today's English Bible, the New International Version, the RSV itself, and a number of others have continued to gain an increasing share of the market. And even if the weight of President Clark's assertion had endured, to insist on a Bible that is more popular than accurate remains a problematic posture.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In