The effort to render new, and more accurate translations of the ancient Hebrew and Greek texts, into modern 21st century English is terrific. There is no less willingness to render honest translations. If you know anything about English grammar, there is no gender-neutral pronoun for the third person singular. "He" and "She" are specific.Languages are one of my hobbies. I speak French, German, Russian, and Portuguese. No one has a problem with the Holy Scriptures being rendered into a modern version of lannguages other than English. When this is done, using authoritative source documents, that were unavailable 400 years ago, and the translations are done using modern tools like computer software, no one objects. But when the same thing is done in the English language, people go ballistic. Translation is part art, part science. Translators often use synonyms, and grammatical devices to render one language into another. example: "The Lord cares for me" is in the original Hebrew.The KJV translation committee rendered it "The Lord is my shepherd". The verb "cares" was rendered in a noun "shepherd", in order to convey the meaning more precisely. The Hebrew text reads- "When God began creating the heaven and the earth" is translated by KJV as "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth". The grammar of the Hebrew, which is a present participle, is rendered as a prepositional phrase. This is also done for clarity, and to make the Hebrew concept more understandable to an English speaker.The Dead Sea Scrolls are of unquestionable authenticity. Other various documents and manuscripts that have been discovered in the intervening 400 years, are closely scrutinized, to ascertain their reliability. Any suspect document is discovered, with a very high degree of certainty. The Textus Receptus (the first collected published edition of the New Testament in Greek) was assembled from source documents, which were believed to be authoritative in the 17th century. The translation committee did not have the modern chemical and radiologic verification tools, that are available today. The KJV source documents are more likely to be inaccurate than the source documents in use today.I do not think that all modern translations are paraphases. When I took a college course in New Testament, I was advised by the professor to use the Today's English Version, which follows the grammar and syntax of the Koine Greek with a high degree of accuracy. The New KJV, uses many of the source documents, that were unavailable to the 17th century commitee, and it has eliminated the "thee/thou" and the verbs that end in -est. No serious Bible scholar considers the modern translations to be paraphrases.I do not see which church I attend to be relevant to this discussion. I live on a mountaintop in Afghanistan. I attend services at the military chapel on this base. There are usually about 20 or so people in attendance.
