.If it ain't King James... you know the rest.
It’s an interesting thing about Bible translations that they often become symbols of various theological agendas. Anyone who has ever seen the bumper-stickers that say “if it ain’t King James, it ain’t Bible,” or a church sign that says something along the lines of “Ebenezer Independent Fundamental KJV only Tabernacle” has witnessed this sort of thing in action. It’s not new of course, and if you’re interested in the details of how the Authorized (King James) Version itself was ridiculed by some and embraced by others early in its existence, I’d recommend In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture by Alister McGrath.
For several centuries, there were really only two widely used translations of the Bible in the English Language–The Authorized Version and the Douay-Rheims , which was the Roman Catholic response to the earlier Geneva Bible (the puritans loved the Geneva Bible, but its widespread use waned rather quickly, despite its lasting impact on later versions and English society).
Things are different today. If one of the greatest problems facing the world in the twenty-first century is, as I once heard a political scientist put it, the notion of “to every tribe a flag,” it could be that one of the challenges facing Christians is the notion of “to every sect a translation.” I’m not bemoaning the use of multiple translations in itself, but rather the use of translations as a sort of litmus test of particular theologies. There are positives and negatives about every version of the Bible, and it is important to keep that in mind, particularly because these issues–at least among the mainstream versions, and putting aside sectarian translations like the Watchtower Bible and the tweaked KJV used by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints–are really not substantial enough to prevent us from reading, marking, learning and inwardly digesting the word of scripture.