When I was younger and more disputatious (seriously, I’ve toned it down a lot ), I used to spend too much time arguing about the Bible with KJV-only fundamentalists. The debates were about as dumb as unproductive as you’d imagine, but I still wish I could go back with this bit of information provided by New Testament scholar Daniel Wallace :
The Greek text which stands behind the King James Bible is demonstrably inferior in certain places. The man who edited the text was a Roman Catholic priest and humanist named Erasmus. He was under pressure to get it to the press as soon as possible since (a) no edition of the Greek New Testament had yet been published, and (b) he had heard that Cardinal Ximenes and his associates were just about to publish an edition of the Greek New Testament and he was in a race to beat them. Consequently, his edition has been called the most poorly edited volume in all of literature! It is filled with hundreds of typographical errors which even Erasmus would acknowledge.
How did I not know this? This would have been a great trump card. The only thing the KJV’ers liked less than ornery evangelicals like me was medieval Catholic priests.
For more by Wallace about what Erasmus got wrong, see this post at Justin Taylor’s blog .
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