Most modern English Bibles descend, at some distance, from the King James Version of 1611. The New King James Version descends from it directly. It was made to do something that none of the earlier revisions had tried: bring the King James Version’s English up to date while keeping the same underlying Greek text, the Textus Receptus or Received Text.

That aim explains both its strengths and the arguments around it. This article compares the two, and describes the King James Only movement, which holds that the older translation should not be replaced at all.

The King James Version today

The history of the King James Version is told in The King James Version. Two points matter here.

First, the King James Version most people read is not the text of 1611 but the Oxford edition of 1769 prepared by Benjamin Blayney, with standardised spelling and punctuation. So “updating the King James” was not a new idea: printers and editors had been quietly doing it for a century and a half.

Second, its New Testament was translated from the printed Greek editions of the sixteenth century, in the line of Erasmus, Stephanus and Beza. These were later called the Received Text, from a phrase in the preface of an Elzevir edition of 1633. They were based on a small number of late medieval manuscripts, mostly of the kind now called Byzantine (see From manuscripts to printed Bibles).

From 1881 onwards, most new English translations used a different Greek text, built on older manuscripts such as Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus (see Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus). Readers who wanted modern English therefore also got a different text, and readers who preferred the Received Text had to keep the English of 1611. The New King James Version was designed to close that gap.

Making the New King James

The project was sponsored by the publisher Thomas Nelson, then led by Sam Moore, and was begun in 1975 with meetings of scholars and church leaders in Nashville and Chicago. Its executive editor was Arthur L. Farstad, a New Testament scholar. Some 130 translators, editors and reviewers took part, by the publisher’s count.

The New Testament was published in 1979, the Psalms in 1980, and the complete Bible in 1982. The translators described their method as ”complete equivalence,” by which they meant following the form of the original closely while also conveying its full meaning, in contrast to the “dynamic equivalence” of translations such as the Good News Bible.

What it changed

The most obvious changes are in the English.

  • ”Thee,” “thou” and the old verb endings were removed throughout, including in prayers addressed to God. “Believeth” became “believes.”
  • Obsolete and misleading words were replaced. In 1 Thessalonians 4:15 the King James Version says that the living “shall not prevent them which are asleep,” where “prevent” meant “go before.” The NKJV says they “will by no means precede” them. In 2 Thessalonians 2:7, “he who now letteth will let” (where “let” meant “hinder”) became, in the NKJV, “He who now restrains.”
  • Some traditional terms gave way to modern equivalents: “Holy Spirit” for “Holy Ghost,” and “love” for “charity” in 1 Corinthians 13.
  • Individual renderings were corrected where the King James translators had chosen a word now thought inaccurate. A well-known example is Acts 12:4:

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. (Acts 12:4, KJV)

The Greek word is the one for Passover, and the NKJV says “after Passover,” as do the ASV and the World English Bible. (Some defenders of the King James Version argue that “Easter” is correct here, because Herod’s Passover celebrations would have followed the feast; most commentators disagree.)

  • Capital letters were introduced for pronouns referring to God, which the King James Version does not use.
  • Quotation marks were not added. The NKJV, like the King James Version, leaves speech unmarked, so readers must still work out where a speech ends.

What it kept

Much was kept on purpose. The NKJV retains the King James Version’s sentence structure wherever modern English allows, and many of its best-known phrases. In Psalm 23 it still reads “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.” It keeps “LORD” in capitals for the divine name, as the King James Version does (see How Bible translations differ). It keeps the King James practice of printing in italics words supplied by the translators for English sense. And it keeps the King James Version’s traditional renderings at disputed points of interpretation, such as “virgin” in Isaiah 7:14.

Above all it keeps the Received Text in the New Testament. In the Old Testament the NKJV used a modern edition of the Masoretic Hebrew text, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, but this differs much less from the Hebrew behind the King James Version than the modern Greek texts differ from the Received Text.

The footnotes: NU and M

The NKJV’s most distinctive feature is in its footnotes. Instead of quietly choosing a Greek text, it prints the Received Text and notes where two other texts differ:

  • NU marks readings of the critical text, as printed in the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament and the United Bible Societies’ edition, the text behind most modern translations.
  • M marks readings of the Majority Text, the reading of most surviving Greek manuscripts. The NKJV used the edition prepared by Zane Hodges and Arthur Farstad, The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text (1982), also published by Thomas Nelson.

The preface presents this as letting readers judge for themselves, without claiming that any one tradition is always right.

The notes reveal some interesting patterns. The Received Text sometimes stands alone against both the others. The clearest example is 1 John 5:7–8, the passage known as the Johannine Comma:

For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. (1 John 5:7, KJV)

The NKJV keeps the words in its text, but its note says that both NU and M omit them and that only a handful of very late Greek manuscripts contain them. Erasmus added them in his third edition of 1522, after a Greek manuscript containing them was produced (see When manuscripts disagree). The World English Bible, which follows the Majority Text, reads simply:

For there are three who testify: (1 John 5:7, WEB)

Another example comes at the end of the Bible. Erasmus’s manuscript of Revelation lacked the last few verses, and he supplied the gap partly by translating from the Latin Vulgate. In Revelation 22:19 the King James Version therefore speaks of God taking away a person’s part “out of the book of life”; almost all Greek manuscripts read “tree of life,” and the NKJV’s note records the difference. The World English Bible reads:

If anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, may God take away his part from the tree of life, and out of the holy city, which are written in this book. (Revelation 22:19, WEB)

Elsewhere the Received Text and the Majority Text agree against the critical text, for example in including Acts 8:37 in some form, or the longer ending of Mark. The notes thus show readers that “the Greek text” is not a single thing, which is valuable whatever text one prefers.

How it was received

The NKJV sold well and found a lasting place, particularly among readers who valued the King James tradition but found its English difficult. It is used both in churches that read the King James Version in worship and want an easier text alongside it, and by readers who prefer the Received Text but not the English of 1611.

It was criticised from two directions.

  • Scholars who prefer the critical text argued that it is a modernisation of a text that should have been abandoned, and that by printing the Received Text in its main text and the better-attested readings only in footnotes it gives the weaker evidence pride of place.
  • Some defenders of the King James Version argued that it departs from the 1611 translation more often than its name suggests, and that its NU and M notes encourage readers to doubt the text in front of them.

Others have noted that its English, while modern, keeps the long, clause-heavy sentences of the King James Version, which some readers find harder than a translation written in fresh modern English.

The King James Only movement

A minority of English-speaking Christians hold that the King James Version should be the only English Bible used. The views gathered under this name differ widely, and it is fair to distinguish them.

  • A preference for the King James Version on grounds of its beauty, its long use in worship and its familiarity. Many who hold this view have no quarrel with other translations.
  • A preference for the Received Text. Some, such as the scholar Edward F. Hills in The King James Version Defended (1956), argued that God’s providential preservation of Scripture is seen in the text the church actually used, and that the Received Text represents it best. Organisations such as the Trinitarian Bible Society hold a version of this position. Those who hold it often accept the principle of a modern-language translation of the Received Text, though not always the NKJV.
  • A belief that the King James Version itself is uniquely preserved or inspired in English, so that it may correct the Greek and Hebrew where they differ. This is a minority within the minority.

The modern movement is often traced to Benjamin Wilkinson’s Our Authorized Bible Vindicated (1930) and was popularised by David Otis Fuller’s anthology Which Bible? (1970). It has been answered at length by scholars such as D. A. Carson, in The King James Version Debate (1979), and James R. White, in The King James Only Controversy (1995). Its critics point out that the King James translators themselves did not claim finality. In their preface they described their work as an attempt “to make a good one better,” and wrote:

we do not deny, nay we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession ... containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God.

They also printed alternative renderings in their margins and revised the text in later printings. Defenders reply that the question is not what the translators thought of their own work but what God has preserved in the churches’ use.

A shared question

Behind the arguments about these two Bibles lies a question every translation has to answer: which Greek text should be translated? The NKJV’s answer was to translate one and show the others in footnotes. That is an honest way of handling a disagreement, and it is the one place where most readers of English Bibles can see the textual question at all.

Open Word Bible takes a different text but a similar attitude. Its New Testament is translated from the SBL Greek New Testament, a modern critical edition, and its Old Testament from the Westminster Leningrad Codex. Where the manuscripts disagree, its reasoning records say so and explain the choice, so that readers who prefer another text can see exactly where it would make a difference. Its drafts are AI-assisted and await review by named human reviewers, it uses the King James and New King James only for comparison, and it is released under CC0.

Sources

  • Farstad, Arthur L. The New King James Version: In the Great Tradition. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1989.
  • “Preface.” The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
  • Hodges, Zane C., and Arthur L. Farstad, eds. The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
  • Carson, D. A. The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979.
  • White, James R. The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations? Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1995; 2nd ed. 2009.
  • Hills, Edward F. The King James Version Defended. Des Moines: Christian Research Press, 1956.
  • Metzger, Bruce M. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994.
  • Norton, David. A Textual History of the King James Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  • Smith, Miles. “The Translators to the Reader.” Preface to The Holy Bible. London: Robert Barker, 1611.
  • Bible quotations are from the King James Version and the World English Bible (both public domain), as marked; the NKJV is quoted only in short phrases.