THE DIFFICULTY OF THE TEXT AND ITS ACCEPTANCE NOWADAYS.

Many of King James Version (KJV) readers agree with its difficult reading. They assert that its language, sentence structures and sometimes the orthography make the reading partly inaccessible. Instead, they find easier later versions of the Bible or even the reading of newspapers or comic books. So we may find a contradiction between the easiness that 17th century readers found in it and the  21st century readers hostility.

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In order to study such controversy, in 2008 D. A. Waite Jr, a member of The Bible For Today, published the book called The Comparative Readability of the Authorized Version. In his book he explains the grade of readability that KJV has in comparison to other common books. At the beginning of his study, he was totally sure that he was going to find expected results: KJV is harder to read than any 21st century text. Nevertheless, after his exhaustive scientific studies, he found quite the opposite, the sacred book is easier to read than present day influential books. According to the software tools he used, F-K (Flesch-Kincaid), a readability test, the results showed that 74.3% of the books in KJV are on or below the sixth grade level, and 94% are on or below the seventh grade level, which according to the table of scores it is considered to be Fairly Easy or Easy to read.

Ten years before, G. Riplinger had published a book called The Language of the King James Bible, which studied a similar point as D.A.Waite Jr, which had the purpose to demonstrate the precision and power of KJV. Throughout a thorough work and empirical evidences, she reached a similar conclusion as Waite’s later study. By using Pro-Scribe software she obtained irrefutable statistics that actually represented the number of syllables per word, words per sentence… In the table below we can observe how is graded the readability of King James Bible in comparison to the USA Today, People Magazine, and Children’s Books. 

The statistics simply shows that KJV (New Testament) is as easy to read as children’s books and what surprises more, even children’s books use a 5% more of words over 9 letters than KJV.

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Whether we agree or not, these are the data that Riplinger found after her study. As criticism is found everywhere, in the following section we will have a brief look at some critiques that refuted Riplinger’s conclusions.