Extreme Fundamentalism

• The Church should distance itself from extreme fundamentalism when such positions distort or threaten the core message of the Gospel or cause harm to the unity and witness of the Church.
• At the same time, the Church should exercise love, patience, and tolerance toward believers who may differ on non-essential matters.
• The approach should be balanced: firm against false teaching and harmful extremes, yet gracious and united in essentials.

This biblical guidance encourages the Church to be wise and loving, standing firm against harmful extremes while promoting unity and grace among believers.

Fake Truth and False Teaching: KJV Only - How Far Should the Church Go?

 Introduction

In the life of the Church, the pursuit of truth is paramount. Yet, throughout history, false teaching and misunderstandings have challenged believers. One contemporary issue is the "KJV Only" movement, which insists that the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is the only legitimate English translation. This raises important questions: How should the Church respond to such claims? How far should it go in addressing or opposing them? To answer these, we must consider biblical teaching on false teaching, the nature of truth, and the role of Scripture in the Church.

Understanding False Teaching and Its Danger

The New Testament repeatedly warns about false teaching. For example, the epistle to the Hebrews (Hebrews 5:12) rebukes believers who remain immature in their faith, needing to be taught the basic principles repeatedly rather than growing into mature teachers themselves. This immaturity can open the door to false teachings that distort the gospel.

Similarly, 1 John 2:27 emphasizes that true believers have received an anointing from the Holy Spirit that teaches them all things and protects them from being led astray by false teachers. This highlights the importance of the Spirit’s guidance in discerning truth.

False teaching is often characterized by "various and strange teachings" (Hebrews 13:9), which deviate from the gospel message. The Church must be vigilant to guard the truth without becoming overly rigid or divisive.

The KJV Only Movement: A Case of Fake Truth?

The KJV Only movement asserts that the King James Version is the only authentic English Bible and often rejects other translations as corrupt or false. While the KJV is a historically significant and beloved translation, the insistence that it alone is the true Bible can be problematic. It can lead to a form of legalism that elevates a particular translation over the inspired Word of God itself. It may cause division within the Church by judging others who use different translations. It can hinder the Church’s mission by limiting access to Scripture in understandable language for diverse cultures and generations. The Bible itself encourages understanding and growth in faith (Hebrews 5:12-14), not clinging to elementary teachings or rigid forms that do not promote maturity.

How Far Should the Church Go?

1. Uphold the Authority of Scripture

The Church must uphold the authority of the Bible as God’s Word, inspired and trustworthy. This includes recognizing that God’s truth transcends any single translation. The Holy Spirit guides believers into all truth (John 16:13), and the Church should encourage the use of faithful translations that communicate the gospel clearly.

2. Discern and Correct False Teaching with Grace

False teaching should be addressed firmly but lovingly. The Church is called to protect the flock from deception (Acts 20:28-31) but also to restore those who err gently (Galatians 6:1). The KJV Only stance, when it becomes exclusionary or condemning, should be corrected with biblical teaching about the nature of Scripture and the work of the Spirit.

3. Promote Unity and Maturity

The Church should seek unity in the essentials of the faith while allowing liberty in non-essentials such as translation preferences. Believers are encouraged to grow in maturity, moving beyond elementary teachings and embracing the fullness of God’s Word (Hebrews 6:1-2).

4. Encourage Access to Scripture in Clear Language

The mission of the Church includes making the gospel accessible to all people. This means supporting translations that communicate God’s truth in understandable language for different cultures and contexts. Insisting on one translation only can hinder this mission.

Conclusion

The issue of the KJV Only movement touches on deeper biblical principles about truth, teaching, and unity in the Church. While the KJV is a valuable translation, the Church should not elevate it to a position that excludes other faithful translations or causes division. Instead, the Church must uphold the authority of Scripture, correct false teaching with grace, promote maturity and unity, and encourage access to God’s Word in clear language.

By doing so, the Church honors God’s truth and fulfills its calling to make disciples of all nations.

Greek Room

To try Greek Room, register at app.greekroom.org now!

The Greek Room is a project to improve the quality and efficiency of Bible translation with software tools that help translators and quality control consultants with spell-checking, terminology consistency, translation drafting and other tasks.

Thousands of languages around the world still lack Bible translations; most of them have extremely few resources such as extensive lexicons, existing translations, spell checkers or even spelling standards. Such ultra-low resource languages present challenges for natural language processing tools.

Wildebeest

This tool checks a text for a wide range of character level problems such as encoding errors, characters in the wrong script, characters in non-canonical forms and spurious control characters. The Wildebeest analysis script provides feedback on likely issues in a text. The Wildebeest normalization script corrects problems that can be fixed with very high confidence. See the Wildebeest section for more information, including examples from applying Wildebeest to the 1009 translations in the eBible corpus.

Spell Checking

The Greek Room offers a spell checker based on phonetic string similarity and word alignment, rather than relying on the need of laboriously curated lists of words and morphological rules used in traditional spell checkers. It allows to identify spelling inconsistencies early on in Bible translation projects. Click here to see some examples, including on the English NRSV.

Word Alignment

Word alignment supports applications such as spell-checking and learning word order and morphology. Even more directly, it indicates the strength of translation consistency. With its color-coded word alignment strengths, the Greek Room specifically helps to pinpoint words that are unusual translations, or missing or spurious words. Hovering with the mouse over a word in the source or target language will reveal additional information such as the gloss of a word. Click here to see some examples, including English-German and English-Hindi.

About

Research team: Dr. Ulf Hermjakob and Joel Mathew; University of Southern California (USC) Information Sciences Institute (ISI)
Greek Room in the news: USC Viterbi, Washington Post, Catholic New Agency, ABC News, BBC Radio 4 (UK), BBC Brazil

Greek Room : 

AI Is Helping Bible Translation

 Artificial intelligence (AI), especially through large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP), is transforming Bible translation by making it faster, more accurate, and accessible to languages with few resources. AI tools like quality-control “copilots” automatically flag inconsistencies—such as variations in spelling of names or phrasing—so human translators can focus on nuanced, culturally meaningful decisions.Wycliffe Bible TranslatorsiBelieve.com

A notable project, Greek Room, led by researchers at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, uses AI to accelerate translation into rare and unwritten languages. The system functions as a word-and-phrase aligner, comparing target translations with original Greek texts, identifying subtle mismatches, and suggesting clearer alternatives—freeing translators to work on more complex interpretive tasks.Deseret NewsCBNInsights Magazine

Another practical application is Faithbridge, an AI-powered Bible Q&A app by SIL. It enables translators working in 80 languages to query translation resources—via text or audio—and efficiently access contextual documents and insights relevant to specific scripture passages.ai.sil.org

These tools prove that AI does not replace expert translators—it empowers them. By automating laborious checks and providing smart suggestions, AI makes translation faster, more consistent, and viable for languages that have historically been left behind.

Faithbridge

Faithbridge is a reliable AI-powered Bible Q&A app that enables local language translators to interact with Bible translation resources in 80 languages via audio and text. This saves teams tremendous amounts of time filtering through thousands of translation resources and helps them find exactly the documents they need to learn about the context behind passages they are translating. Faithbridge provides answers based on resources (including images and videos) found within the Bible Aquifier.

https://ai.sil.org/projects/faithbridge?utm_source=chatgpt.com