What Bible is the pure Word of God? the one you most don't want to read...

From a comment:

I'm afraid this one--

"What is the real version of the Bible? The one you most don't want to read, pilgrim."

--doesn't work for me. The one I most don't want to read is the Good News Bible, with the New American Bible a close runner up. And what's that one for people who only have a vocabulary of fifty words? Maybe that's the Good News...

I knew I'd get that response when I wrote that. What I meant was this: people want to play with the Bible and affect to be biblical scholars and say "this word here of course really means" and "this, of course, is a mistranslation" and "of course this rendering is very misleading" and so on. This is the play of vanity. They're not reading the Bible in a way that their vanity, worldly pride, and self-will are passive, but very active. They are filtering everything they read through vanity. Their motivation is to dictate to the Word of God what it means, rather than to take it in at its level.

All these issues come into play in the rejection of the King James Version. Vanity disdains taking the Bible as a whole, and as pure. There is also shallowness involved of course (the comic book readers who just don't know how language communicates, and who just don't know about things like form and unity and containment and so on in a work).

Think about this: when you hold in your hand the complete thing; the complete, pure Old and New Testaments, you approach it differently. When you hold in your hands a construct stitched together by ridiculous men, using their 'newly discovered "better" manuscripts' (which is another issue), full of holes, full of renderings that vary from rank dumb ('correcting' the text, like the devil's words repeated in the New Testament, the commonest mistake of rank amateur and dumb translators) to dictating to God "what He means", i.e. vain in the most typical human ways; but just the holes and lack of understanding of figures used by God to communicate, the dumb paraphrases, etc., etc., this gives warrant for the vain to approach God's Word in a vain 'correcting' manner rather than in a manner where they are approaching something that is higher than them.

The vain want the Word of God to be at their level. They don't want to have to approach the Word of God as something that is above them. The King James Version assaults the vain in this sense.

Besides all this there is this aspect of it all: the vain reader of God's Word has no interest in the whole of the Word of God. The vain reader only has interest in the parts. It's with the parts that vanity can manipulate and have its way. The serious reader, the reader that is meeting God's Word at it's level, is passive to God's Word in the way one has to be passive, subjecting oneself to God's Word and not subjecting God's Word to one's self-will and demands; this is the approach that one who is serious and who desires to take in the whole of God's word has.

The King James Version is the complete Word of God, pure and undefiled. Vanity knows this, and vanity for this reason disdains to read the King James Version. Says it's for "hicks" and people who "don't know scholarship" and so on...

What Bible is the pure Word of God, pilgrims? The one you most don't want to read.