Why the King James Version?

J. Reuben Clark, Jr.
The 1950s brought a significant change for readers of serious literature. The Revised Standard Version appeared and met the stiff resistance of J. Reuben Clark, dedicated and forceful member of the Church's First Presidency. In the wake of President Clark's still influential response, a substantial number of Saints for the first time moved beyond assuming the preeminence of the KJV, to believing they had scholarly and prophetic reasons for assuming it.

Brigham Young still had six years before him as an earthly prophet when J. Reuben Clark was born in the rural outpost of Grantsville, Utah, in 1871. Although his intellectual prospects were initially modest, Clark went on to an illustrious career in national public service. After graduating from the University of Utah as valedictorian, he attended the Columbia Law School, served as a principal editor of the Columbia Law Review, and graduated as one of the top students. Later, he became solicitor of the U.S. State Department, then U.S. undersecretary of state, and finally ambassador to Mexico. Throughout his public career, Clark's brilliance, integrity, and thoroughness earned high praise from senators, justices of the Supreme Court, and U.S. presidents. Indeed, he regularly declined the urging of men like Harry Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times, to run for president himself. In 1933 Clark resigned as Mexican ambassador to serve as a counselor to Church president Heber J. Grant. He continued in the First Presidency until his death in 1961, one of the longest periods of such service in LDS history. One of the enduring legacies of his service resulted from his encounter with the scholarly revision of the text of the English Bible.

The complete Revised Standard Version was launched in 1952 with a publicity campaign such as few, if any, of its predecessors had enjoyed. That, of course, did not protect it from adverse criticism. Some thought the translation was unnecessarily conservative and did not deviate sufficiently from the KJV. A more vocal group believed it not only deviated excessively but was itself devious -- scarcely Christian. The project had been sponsored by the liberal National Council of Churches, and this alone was enough to insure the mistrust of many evangelicals and the undisguised contempt of their fundamentalist cousins. Pamphlets bearing titles like “The New Blasphemous Bible” and “The Bible of Antichrist” are as indicative of the virulent response as the fact that Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate investigation committee formally charged members of the RSV translating committee with allowing Communist influences to subvert the Bible.

Mormon responses were more reserved, though some did use the occasion to affirm the stature of the KJV. An unsigned editorial in the October 1952 Church News asserted: "For the Latter-day Saints there can be but one version of the Bible" -- the King James Version. One year later, Apostle Mark E. Petersen echoed that the Bible "officially used in the Church" was the KJV. J. Reuben Clark clearly was not the only Latter-day Saint who disliked the new Bible; he was merely the most articulate.

President Clark rebelled for much of his adult life against "the pettifogging, doubt-raising attacks" of the higher critics, and he was equally disdainful of the new "lower" or textual critics. His passionate objections to the revisions of 1888 and 1901 launched him on a decades-long course of meticulous research in defense of the KJV. Over the years, he expressed his views in personal correspondence, in private conversations, and in public sermons. Upon the appearance of the RSV -- which, in the wake of earlier revisions, he considered "more of the same, only worse" -- Clark spent several additional years preparing his research notes for publication. The result was his monumental 1956 tome, Why the King James Version.

In the book, President Clark presented his case with a lawyer's skill and a churchman's zeal. His arguments were interwoven and reiterated throughout his work, but for purposes of analysis they may be separated into six categories. Most of these he shared with KJV apologists of various denominations. Some, however, were distinctive to the Latter-day Saints, and these were perhaps the reason why the issue of the KJV's status did not rise even to the level of serious debate in Mormon ranks. Compared to the three revisions (1888, 1901, and 1952), President Clark believed the Authorized Version was (1) doctrinally more acceptable, (2) verified by the work of Joseph Smith, (3) based on a better Greek text, (4) literarily superior, (5) the version of LDS tradition, and (6) produced by prayerful souls subject to the Holy Spirit, rather than by a mixture of believing and unbelieving, or orthodox and heterodox, scholars.

Easily the most important of these arguments -- the one that controlled and motivated his entire KJV apology -- was Clark's belief that the revisions were infected with a despicable, conspiratorial humanism. "As one notes . . . the havoc which [the revisions] work upon vital portions of the Scriptures as contained in the Authorized Version, . . . one can but wonder if there be not behind this movement . . . a deliberate . . . intent to destroy the Christian faith." Adding a self-revealing metaphor, he proclaimed the King James Bible the "citadel of Christianity."