Fri Jan 10 09:23:12 1997

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Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 09:17:06 -0500 (EST)
From: ANDREW SMITH 
To: REElliott@aol.com
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Subject: Psychology: KJ onlyism and NTTC
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I was astounded when I first encountered the individuals who support the
odd claim known as "KJV onlyism." When I first heard of this, I wondered,
what would make someone support such a claim, for which there is very
little or no serious evidence of any kind.

Studying the matter further, I apply the axiom "when there's no
justificiation, look for a motivation." There being no academic or
scholarly motivation for this position, one must ask, what is the
motivation for defending this position? And here we can begin to
understand this odd movement.

The motivation seems to be a desire to defend the purity and integrity of
the teachings by defending the purity and integrity of the text. This
group sees later translations as "weakening" the message. This position
is, if not correct, at least understandable, because (from an "ad
hominem") standpoint, many scholars who produced later translations were
far from orthodox in their beliefs - and (from a "de facto" standpoint)
some later texts did indeed have the net effect of "weakening" the
evidence for various doctrinal dogmas, whatever the motivation for the
translation might have been.

So the KJV-onlyism movement represents an understandable emotion reaction
to the situation. Unfortunately, it is also an irrational and indefensible
reaction.

Andrew C. Smith

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