What is Truth?

There is much debate over which translation or version of Scripture to use.

What I am going to give here is my own experience with a variety of translations.

First of all, few of us reads the actual translation according to Kings James' 1611 English translation.  The wording is definitely archaic and hard to understand.  The version that we read today is actually the 1769 Baskerville Birmingham version.  When the Bibles have been printed, there have been changes made such as spellings of words are updated, some misspelled words in earlier editions have been corrected and so forth.

Up until about 130 years ago, the 14 Apocryphal books were included in every Bible translation. In the 1880's the English Revised Version (ERV) was printed without them.  That was when the books of the Bible went from 80 Books to 66.  They were not a "Catholic" set of Books, but books that were included in all translations until the ERV.

The segmentation of Scripture into verses is a fairly modern one if we take into account the whole of history since the first written Scripture in 1400BC when Moses was given the Ten Commandments in stone.  It was 1560 that the Bible was first printed with numbered verses added to each chapter and was still printed with 80 Books.

One website that gives a lot of historical information regarding Bible translations is GREATSITE.COM.  It is the first site that I have found that offers the information in an understandable manner.  If you do a search for "Bible History" you will find many others.

As far as which translation is the best and which one contains more truth than the other, you will have to judge for yourself.  My first experience was with the King James when going to a Baptist Church in Washington, DC.  That was when I knew I was going to Hell for my sin.  I was six (1951).  About 6 years later when my mother started going back to the Catholic Church, I was exposed to Catholicism and everything was in Latin.  My exposure to their Bible was minuscule.

At the ripe old age of 13 I went to a Church of God camp meeting in Manassass, Virginia with my Aunt where I became a "Church of Godder" (my words in a letter written to my mother).  They used the KJV exclusively.  I still have that Bible my Aunt gave me and I saw where key verses had been marked but I never really grasped the concept of Salvation.

When at the age of 14 went to Catholic School while living with my father, I still remember very little about Bible Study, it was more about learning the Catholic Catechism.  While in High School I attended the Catholic Church, mostly to get next to the cadets that attended the local Military Academy.  Some really cute ones went to the Catholic Church.

I was never a Catholic.  I liked their rituals, their legalism and the mystery.  That changed in the mid 1960's when the Church changed and became more modern and started having mass in English and those changes turned me away from the Catholic Church.  It changed at a time when I needed sameness.

After graduation from High School, I traveled and bummed around a lot.  I looked into a variety of religions.  I actually purchased and read the Satanic Bible.  I was involved with all kinds of New Age crap.  I was involved with witchcraft, seances, Buddhism, Scientology and I even have a book of Mormon.  I wound up in Washington, DC where there is a great concentration of ideas.

After I left Washington, DC, I married and had a child.  Having a child gives you a desire to make yourself better so you can do better by your child than your parents did by you.  Since my mother sent me to church, I figured going to Church with my child would be better.  We joined his family's Presbyterian Church.

They asked me all the right questions to which I responded in the affirmative.  I knew the right answers but I also knew I was lying.  While going to Church, I began a Bible Study with the Jehovah's Witnesses.  We actually studied the Bible.  It was with a twist.  Their belief in Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God Incarnate is missing.  I studied with them for 2 years.  I never joined their Church because they could never convince me there was no Hell.  Their structure was actually closer to Biblical than any Church that I had gone to.

There were years when I went to no Church at all and after many years of wandering the wilderness in circles, "I" decided it was time to look for THE "Truth."  I started reading the only Bible I had available which was "The New World Translation of The Holy Scriptures."  This is the Bible that the JW's use.  What I found is that there are some striking, might I say, obvious, errors in their translation.

John 1:1 in the KJV states, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God."

John 1:1 in the NWTHS it states, "In the beginning the Word was, and the Word was with God and the Word was a god."


If you were reading a familiar passage quickly, you would hardly notice the difference.  I took note of it and read on anyway.  By the time I got partially through the third chapter of John, I came to know Jesus Christ as my Savior.  I knew he was the Son of God.  I knew He died on the Cross for my sins.

There was nothing that was going to stop me from finding THE TRUTH and reading an erroneous Bible in that search was not to be an impediment.

The fact that there are errors in whatever translation you may be reading is not as dreadful as one may think, as long as the seeker is genuinely searching for THE TRUTH.  I was once told that a searching sinner and a seeking Savior will eventually find one another.

Genesis 4:1 in the KJV states, "And Adam knew Eve..."

Genesis 4:1 in the NWTHS states,"Now Adam had intercourse with Eve..."

The difference in the above two translations is purely semantics.  There are those who think that the KJV version is the correct one while the other is crass and irreverent.  They are both correct.  One is aesthetically pleasing while the other is almost salacious in its depiction.   Some have described the one as being just "awful".

Acts 12:4 in the KJV states, "And when he had apprehended him, he put [him] in prison, and delivered [him] to four quaternions of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people."

The mention of Easter is an error in the KJV that I find fascinating.  Easter is not a holiday that had its start in Christianity.  Easter is a bastardization of a pagan holiday which actually had its beginning as a fertility festival.  Then there is the Easter bunny.  When did rabbits start laying eggs?  Why are we promoting heathen fertility symbols on a day that is supposed to be a celebration of THE LORD rising from the dead?  Have Christians totally lost their minds?  Easter is a word that originates from the Teutonic dawn goddess of fertility which was known by a variety of names such as Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, Eostur, Eastra, Eastur, Austron and Ausos.   Her name was derived from the ancient word for spring: "eastre."  Call it Resurrection Day instead.  It has also been associated with Ishtar who was a Sumero-Babylonian goddess of love and fertilty.  We take their symbols and twist them to meet our needs so we can keep on having a holiday, another time for parties.

It would be better if we dispensed with the Pagan holidays and only celebrated those Holy Days that coincide with the Jewish Holy Days.  Jesus was, after all, Jewish and continued to follow the Jewish traditions throughout His life on earth.  The Jews were never told to dispense with the observance of the feasts and other observances.  The Gentiles who were converted were told that they did not have to be circumcised in observance of Jewish tradition.  The Lord's Day is Sunday instead of observing the Sabbath as the Jews did.


And that is what I think of different translations.  If you seek HIM with all your heart, you will find HIM.  Even if you do not have the written Word, creation and the Word is in all that is around us.  We have only but to look for it.  Once we have HIM then we need to prayerfully find in HIS Word what he has for us.  While there are obvious human attempts to distort the Word of The Lord, HE will convict us of our sins IF we are indeed a child of GOD.  Christianity should never be tolerant of error and sin against GOD but should do as was done for them - forgive and show the right way.  Sin is sin.  There are only degrees of sin in the eyes of man.  God only turns His head away from sin and one sin is as bad as another.