VULNERABLE MISSION

THE KING’S ENGLISH IN A TAMIL TONGUE
most respected manuscripts available. 11 And the King James Version was insufficient
on two fronts: (1) the Elizabethan dialect no longer reflected the spoken English of the
day, and (2) the manuscripts used in 1611 had been surpassed by superior, more ancient
ones. 12
It might come as a surprise, then, to learn that until the mid-twentieth century, the KJV’s
dominant status in the Church of Christ was never in question. The Scopes Trial in
1925 had the effect of drawing a line in the sand between liberals and conservatives in
the United States, and certain individuals in the Church of Christ began “championing
the sole use of the KJV.” 13 With the publication of the Revised Standard Version
in 1946, more conservative elements in the Church of Christ reacted. 14 Led by Foy E.
Wallace (1896–1979), a polarizing preacher and influential editor of Church of Christ
journals, the KJV enjoyed renewed privilege. During the last decade of Wallace’s life, he
“continued to speak about errors he saw in ‘the new versions’ in almost every sermon.” 15
That was in the late 1960s and early 1970s—the very years that the Church of Christ
presence was beginning to grow in India.
In general, the Church of Christ missionaries to India planted a faith strikingly similar
to the one they knew back home. There was little regard for the unique cultural context
of South Asia. Cultural intricacies were scarcely taken into account as the gospel was
disseminated along the eastern coast from Shillong in the tribal northeast to Madras in
the south. And the gospel as understood by those pioneering preachers was plain and
11 Ibid., 88. Lewis mentions many biblical scholars from the Restoration tradition that were active in Bible
translation. From the nineteenth century: H. T. Anderson, Benjamin Wilson, J. B. Rotherham, Cortes Jackson,
and B. W. Johnson. From the twentieth century: D. Austen Sommer, E. E. Stringfellow, R. C. Foster, W. W.
Otey, S. A. Weston, Stephen England, W. C. Morro, H. B. Robison, Lewis Foster, Batsell Barrett Baxter, Robert
Hendren, J. J. M. Roberts, Chester Estes, Stanley Morris, Hugo McCord, George Estes, Harold Littrell, and
W. E. Paul.
12 See Jack P. Lewis, The English Bible from KJV to NIV: A History and Evaluation, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker,
1991). See especially chapter three, “Doctrinal Problems in the King James Version,” and chapter four, “The
American Standard Version.” For a discussion of the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts available to the KJV
translators, see pp. 41ff.
13 Lewis, “Bible,” 88.
14 The RSV New Testament was published in 1946, the RSV Old Testament in 1952, and the RSV Apocrypha
in 1956. It is important to note that the 1901 American Standard Version, produced in conjunction
with the British “Revised Version” (also known as the English Revised Version [ERV], published 1881–1885),
was heralded by many Restoration leaders. However, the ASV did not cause the level of controversy that the
RSV did since its producers managed to weave it into the larger KJV tradition as an official, authorized revision
of the KJV. There were detractors from the ERV and ASV but in the Restoration tradition there was
actually a good number of preachers and Bible college professors who preferred them. In fact, the ASV and
KJV were often used interchangeably in the Churches of Christ in the twentieth century. The 1946 RSV
New Testament, however, caused major problems. Lewis, The English Bible, 109, writes, “The appearance of
the RSV was for many people the first major challenge to the KJV/ASV domination of the English Bible
field.” The reason for the KJV’s continued dominance was largely because the stilted English of the ASV was
widely critiqued as being far less fluid than the eloquence of the KJV. Charles Haddon Spurgeon famously
critiqued the English Revised Version as “strong in Greek, but weak in English.” Lewis, The English Bible, 76.
This long debate was not at all unique to the Churches of Christ. See Peter Johannes Thuesen, In Discordance
with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible, Religion in America series (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
15 See Terry J. Gardner, “Wallace, Foy Esco,” in The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, 767–68. See
also Foy E. Wallace, A Review of the New Versions (Fort Worth: Foy E. Wallace Jr. Publications, 1973).
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