* Project Announcement *

We have a publishing contract for the project. We are now seeking pastors who are willing to review the work on the KJV update before publication. If you are a pastor and are interested in doing so, please contact us via email at the following address.  contact@thsbiblesociety.org   Or if you know a pastor who may be interested, we encourage you to spread the word. We are not able to say at this time when the update will be published. Please help us to speed up publication, and be praying about what God is doing through this project. May God be magnified.

Working on a Minimal Update to the KJV in 2025

The Holy Scriptures Bible Society is conducting this project, now in its seventh year, to faithfully and definitively update the antiquated language of the King James Version (KJV) of the Holy Bible for our generation. The KJV was translated more than 400 years ago, and while it is a beautiful and excellent translation of God’s word, many words and definitions used by the version have become archaic and generally unfamiliar. This unnecessarily poses problems for its readers and hearers to understand and learn God’s book. Our goal is to alter as little of the text as possible to bring it up to date, while fully maintaining the same meaning and style of the KJV throughout the entire Bible. The purpose of the project is to help readers and hearers of the KJV to better and more easily understand the word of the Lord; as it is written, “So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air.” (1 Corinthians 14:9). Imagine the KJV 2025; that should paint a good picture of the vision for this work. A modern KJV that uses words and expressions that are equivalent in meaning to the antiquated ones for 100% of the text could be an enormous blessing for millions of people. This project includes making known the grammatical number of second person pronouns; the KJV does so, and this is important for many of its readers. In certain instances, not doing so can lead to a misunderstanding of the word of the Holy One. For students of the holy scriptures who primarily use a different translation, this work may prove to be a useful study resource. Our Bible society is aware of many other attempts to update the KJV, including recent ones. The position of the Bible society is that they are inadequate. For they have significant flaws, such as updating parts with a different meaning, loss of information, deviating from the KJV in other ways, lacking quality and credibility, and keeping much archaic language. The New King James Version (NKJV) in fact is not a strict update of the KJV into contemporary English, for it contains new translation from the original languages and significantly differs in meaning from the KJV in many places (e.g. Genesis 49:6, 2 Kings 23:29, Job 17:6, Psalm 139:16, Isaiah 9:3, Matthew 6:13). Other substantial differences in the NKJV include the loss of distinction between singular and plural pronouns, and textual notes regarding variant readings from different source texts. To date, a satisfactory and strict KJV update has not been found to exist, which is why this project is still needed.

By God’s leading, this project to update the KJV began in April, 2019. A project Committee is to complete the work. The Lord is with us in this project. This is an enormous task, and God’s servants should labor together to complete it. We now have a draft of the update for the whole Bible, praise the Lord. If you believe that a faithful modern edition of the KJV would be a blessing to you and others, then please support the project in some way. There are a variety of ways that you can help. Pray for the Lord’s blessings upon the work and laborers. Share with others about the project. The Bible Society is earnestly seeking help and partners to complete the project, including institutional backing from churches and other organizations, as well as project volunteers. There are Editor and Advisor volunteer positions that are open on our project Committee. If you are interested in serving on the Committee without payment, please contact us. We currently do not have the funds to pay Committee members. The vision for the project is that the update would be completed by a large committee of Christians. This is a very challenging project, and the final product should be of the utmost quality with no errors. Having additional Committee members could be very helpful. If we can raise enough funds, then we could pay Committee members for their work. So we are conducting a fundraiser primarily for this purpose. If you would like this project to be completed more quickly, then please donate. Donations are being accepted through our GoFundMe fundraiser, which you can visit by clicking here. The purpose of the project is not to make money, and no project members are to gain any financial profit from the work. Also, the Bible Society that is conducting the project is a US, non-profit organization; this means the members of the Society legally cannot receive any profits from its operations. If you would like to receive project updates by email, please send us an email and let us know to add you to our newsletter list. You can also check back here later for updates. May the blessings of the Almighty abundantly be upon you.

Contact

Email (preferred): contact@thsbiblesociety.org

Phone (U.S. number): 1-352-448-6314