I own almost every English Bible translation there is. I read most of them.
But when it comes to actually studying the Word — digging into what a passage means, building a post, working out a doctrine — I rely on one. The King James Version, or its modern-language cousin, the New King James.
That is not a claim that God is absent from the others. It is not a claim that I have studied manuscripts and decided KJV wins some scholarly argument. I have not. I do not know the first thing about Greek textual families, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
This is simpler than that. It is a personal conviction about where I go to learn, and where I go to enjoy.
What I Read for Enjoyment
I read the NIV. I read the ESV. I read the NASB. These are real translations, done by real scholars working from the original languages — not someone’s paraphrase of an English Bible already in print.
I enjoy reading them. Sometimes a modern phrase lands in a way the older English does not, and something clicks that I had read past a hundred times in the KJV.
What I will not touch are paraphrases — The Message, The Living Bible, anything in that category. Those are not translations. They are one person’s opinion of what the text means, dressed up to read like Scripture.
I stay away from them for two reasons. First, I am an opinionated man myself, and I know it. Second, someone else’s opinion — however sincere — can drift from the truth of God’s Word without either of us noticing it happen. I would rather not build anything on ground that shaky.
What I Study and Build On
For study, it is KJV or NKJV, and nothing else.
The difference between those two is not theological. NKJV took the same text and modernized the pronouns and the verb endings — thee and thou become you, eth endings become plain present tense. That is the whole change, as far as my purposes go. The substance underneath is the same.
Why this text, specifically, for the actual work of study? Because it is the text Christianity in the English-speaking world has been reading, preaching, and arguing over for four hundred years. The theological vocabulary most believers already carry — justification, sanctification, propitiation, the very words I have to stop and explain in plain language in every post I write — came out of this text. Studying inside it puts me inside that same stream instead of one step removed from it.
Establishing this kind of consistency in how I approach Scripture has truly become the groundwork foundation of this journey.
The Difficulty Is Not What It Looks Like
Here is the thing I am most certain of in this whole post, and the thing I most want a reader to hear.
People decide the KJV is too hard before they ever actually try to read it. They open it, hit “wherewith” or “howbeit” in the first chapter, and close it again, convinced it is a wall too high to climb.
I did the same thing for years. I told myself it required a seminary degree to make sense of. It does not.
What changed it for me was not a class or a guide. It was deciding to stop deciding it was too difficult, and just reading it — every day, the way you would read anything else you wanted to actually understand.
Once I did that, the language stopped being a wall. It became just another way English sentences are put together — strange at first, the same way any unfamiliar pattern is strange at first, and then simply familiar. I am convinced that almost anyone who can read a comic book can come, in time, to read the KJV just as easily. Maybe more easily, once the rhythm of it gets into your ear.
That is not a knock on anyone who reads a different version. It is a testimony to what daily reading does to a text that only looks impossible from the outside.
Why This Matters for Everything Else I Write
Every scripture quote on this site comes from the same text for a reason. Not because I think it is the only Bible God uses. Because consistency in study matters, and because I have come to trust this particular ground enough to build on it.
Read whatever version helps you love the Word. But when you see a verse quoted here, you will know exactly where it came from, and why.
