Why is it so difficult for some people to accept that the King James Bible is a translation? It is not the definitive word of God. It was created, as are most translations, by a committee, using the best resources available at the time, including earlier translations.
There is a primary difference, however, between it and modern translations: it was created to satisfy the demands of a secular king, i.e., to establish his personal brand of Protestantism as being "official". There were (and are) problems...
a) It was based on a far more limited set of source documents than what are available today.
b) Due to the increased number of source documents -- Scriptural and otherwise -- the knowledge of the ancient languages is significantly better than it was 400+ years ago.
c) Most modern translations are supervised by ecumenical committees, composed of men and women of different denominations to insure that there is no sectarian bias. That is the main difference between satisfying one man's self-justifying interpretation and efforts to achieve an accurate translation.
d) The archaic language of the King James translation is not spoken anywhere on earth (except in churches). Subsequently, it is often misunderstood or (worse) retranslated (sometimes spontaneously) to justify one's own doctrine.
e) Perhaps the most serious error is that people think it is "holy" to speak or read in an archaic (dead) language. It may sound poetic to our 21st century ears but -- JESUS WAS A RURAL CARPENTER WHO SPOKE ARAMAIC, A HEBREW DIALECT OF THE COMMON PEOPLE AND READ FROM SCROLLS THAT WERE WRITTEN IN ANCIENT HEBREW. The authors of the New Testament wrote in Koine Greek, the commonly-used lingua franca of the Mediterranean region. None of those languages have anything in common with early 17th Century Englyshe! The language of the KJV sounds "holy" but it is a very poor representation of the languages in which the Bible was actually written.
f) The unfortunate result is that people re-interpret(!) the Bible on the fly to justify their personal doctrine, whether from the pulpit or in online forums or in their conversations. I highly respect the scholarship of the men and women who have devoted much time and effort to give us the best translations possible, written to be understood in our own language: modern English. (Of course, there are translations into other modern languages but I am not discussing those here.)
If you want to clearly understand God's message to men and women, read the Bible in your own native language.
