It is the first objection anybody raises, and usually the last one they are willing to reconsider. I tried the King James. I could not understand it. All those thees and thous. The complaint is offered as a settled fact, and it usually ends the conversation before it starts.

Let me grant the honest part of it. The forms are unfamiliar. Nobody talks that way at work. A reader coming to the Book for the first time meets words he has never used in his life, and that is a real experience, not an imaginary one.

But notice what the complaint quietly assumes. It assumes the old forms are decoration — leftover furniture from another century, doing nothing, costing nothing to remove. That is the assumption worth testing, and it is the one nobody tests. I answered the objection briefly in Preserved, Not Re-Inspired: Why We Hold the King James; here I want to open it up and show the reader exactly what is in his hand. So let us ask a different question than the usual one. Not are these words unfamiliar? They plainly are. The question is: what are they doing? And what happens to the reader when they are taken away?

What the forms actually are

The system takes about a minute to learn. But learning a rule is not the same as seeing what it buys you, so let us take the four things it tells you one at a time and weigh each of them honestly — what it does for a reader, and whether anything is truly lost when it goes.

They are not all worth the same, and I shall say so as we come to them. Two of the four are chiefly equipment: they help you read the Book without stumbling, and a careful translator can carry their sense over into modern English without much difficulty. One of the four is the key that unlocks another. And one of them cannot be replaced by any translator living. That last is what this article is finally about, and it is worth arriving at honestly rather than being told at the door.

A word first about the words. Each of these four has a name that grammarians use, and I am going to give you the names as we go. Do not let them put you off. They are only labels for things you already do every time you speak, and it is worth having them, because a thing you can name is a thing you can look for. That is exactly the argument this article is making about thee and thou: the answer to an unfamiliar word is to learn it, not to lower the Book to meet it. It would be a poor showing to make that argument and then dodge four easy terms.

First, it tells you NUMBER — how many are being addressed. Number simply means whether a word is singular or plural, one or more than one. Of the words you use to address somebody directly, those beginning with T are singular — thou, thee, thy, thine. They address one. Those beginning with Y are plural — ye, you, your. They address more than one.

Watch what that does to the most consequential exchange in the Lord's trial. The high priest puts Him under oath:

"I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God." (Matthew 26:63 KJV)

Thee. Thou. Thou. One man questioning another. Now the answer:

"Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." (Matthew 26:64 KJV)

Thou hast said — singular, straight back to the man who asked. Then, mid-verse, the address widens: I say unto you, hereafter shall ye see. The Lord answers the high priest personally and then turns and speaks past him to the whole council, and to the nation they stood for. Two audiences in one sentence, the second one warned of what it will one day witness. In a Bible that reads "you" throughout, the widening never happens. The verse becomes a private reply, and a prophecy addressed to Israel's rulers collapses into an answer to one man's question.

Second, it tells you CASE — and case is what makes the number readable at all.

Begin with something you already do perfectly, every day, without ever having been taught it. In English a pronoun changes its shape depending on whether the person is doing something or having something done to him. Watch it happen:

• I saw him — but he saw me.
• He saw the man — but the man saw him.
• We saw them — but they saw us.
• They saw us — but we saw them.

The same people all the way through. Only the shape of the word changes, according to which end of the action they are standing at. And you would never get it backwards: the man saw he sets your teeth on edge the instant you read it, and you did not consult a rule to know that.

That is all case means — the shape a word takes according to the job it is doing. The doing shape is called the nominative; the receiving shape is called the accusative. You have been handling both correctly your whole life. Nobody ever told you their names.

Now count the pairs above and notice who is missing. I and me. He and him. She and her. We and us. They and them. Every personal pronoun in English still keeps its two shapes — except one. For the person you are actually speaking to, modern English has a single word doing both jobs:

I / me. He / him. She / her. We / us. They / them. You / you.

One slot in the whole system collapsed, and it happens to be the slot God uses whenever He addresses a man. That is the hole. And it is exactly the hole the King James does not have, because it still keeps the two shapes there as well:

Thou is to thee precisely as he is to him. Ye is to you precisely as they is to them. The King James is not doing anything strange with the second person. It is doing for you exactly what we all still do for everybody else.

Now look down the bottom row of that table once more, because the whole value of it sits there — and not where you would expect to find it. Both plural forms are plural, including you. In your King James Bible the word you is never singular. Not once. It is the plural receiving form, and nothing else.

That single fact is worth more than everything else in this section, because a modern ear cannot hear it. To us you is the word we use for the one person standing in front of us. So when a reader meets "Satan hath desired to have you" (Luke 22:31 KJV), or "the Spirit of God dwelleth in you" (1 Corinthians 3:16 KJV), his instinct supplies one man — and he has misread it before he has finished the line.

And it is no rare word. You stands in your Bible 2,616 times, and every single one of them is plural.

Now see why that word in particular is the dangerous one. Ye gives a man no trouble at all: it is plainly not our English, so it stops him, and he either learns it or looks it up. Thou and thee stop him the same way. The forms that look foreign are the forms that protect him. But you looks exactly like the word he uses every day for one person — and so it does not stop him. It slides past under a familiar face, and he reads a plural as a singular without ever suspecting there was anything to notice.

That is 2,616 places where his ear will tell him one man is meant and be wrong every time, and where nothing on the page will contradict it. The strange-looking words are safe. It is the familiar one that needs the correction.

And the text keeps the two apart with a precision that is startling once you see it. There are a hundred and forty-five verses containing both a T-form and you, and in not one of them are the two words interchangeable. The change of form always marks a change in what is being addressed. Sometimes that is a different party altogether; sometimes it is the same people seen first as one body and then as the individuals in it. What it never is, is variety. Paul supplies the cleanest specimen in the Bible, and you can check this one without knowing a thing about who is speaking or why:

"And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you." (1 Corinthians 12:21 KJV)

A hand is one. Feet are two. And the pronouns follow exactly — thee to the hand, you to the feet, in the same breath, in a single sentence, with the two members named right there beside the words so that nothing has to be taken on trust.

Paul was not reaching for variety, and the translators were not decorating. He is counting. And the moment you know that you means more than one, you can count with him.

The other kind is worth seeing too, because it is the commoner of the two and because a reader who meets it unprepared will think he has caught the system failing. Moses does it constantly. He turns to the nation and speaks to it as one man, then turns to the men standing in front of him and speaks to them as many — and he will do both inside a single sentence:

"so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly." (Deuteronomy 7:4 KJV)

One people, addressed twice over: you, the men who will each answer for himself, and thee, the nation that stands or falls together. That is not a slip and it is not two audiences. It is one audience looked at from two distances, and the pronouns are what let you see the change of distance. Read it with you in both slots and the sentence still makes sense — which is exactly the danger. Nothing tells you anything has been lost.

The system is consistent enough to lean on, too. Search the whole Bible and you never once appears in the nominative — never once as the one doing the verb. The places that look like exceptions dissolve on reading: "the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth" (Genesis 9:2 KJV) — the thing doing the falling is the fear. "the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord" (1 Corinthians 14:37 KJV) — the things are what are. The most familiar of them all is Pharaoh's: "I will let you go" (Exodus 8:28 KJV) — where you is not doing the going, it is what Pharaoh is releasing; the one doing anything in that sentence is Pharaoh. And where a verse begins none of you, one of you, any of you, whosoever of you, the word carrying the verb is the little one in front — none, one, any — with you held by the of. In every such place the actor is some other word.

Which is why "Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you" (Matthew 5:11 KJV) is not sloppy writing either. Both words are plural; only the job changes. Ye are the ones blessed — the sentence is about what they are. You are the ones reviled — the action comes at them from someone else.

But having counted, ask the next question at once, because it is the question this whole article is finally about. Who are they? The plural has told us the company is larger than one man. It has not told us who is standing in it — and it certainly has not said it is you and I.

Matthew names them at the head of the sermon: "And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying" (Matthew 5:1-2 KJV). The ye is His disciples, believing Israel gathered on that mountain. And the blessing rests on kingdom ground — "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:10 KJV). The Lord even sets them in the line they belong to: "for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you" (Matthew 5:12 KJV). Before you — the plural again, and a plural reaching backward through Israel's prophets, not forward through the Body of Christ. I have taken up at more length elsewhere why the words of the Lord on earth are not automatically ours, in But Jesus Said… — Answering the Red-Letter Reflex.

So a plural is not a permission slip. It tells you the company is more than one; it never tells you that you are in it. That is a separate question, answered from the context and not from the pronoun.

And that is what the case forms are for. Not to settle who acts upon whom — the sentence usually says that anyway. They are the key that unlocks the plurals, and the plurals are what set you asking who. Learn the four words and you can tell one from many everywhere in the Book, and having told it, you know when to stop and ask whose company this is. Refuse them, and every you on the page will read as though it were spoken to you alone — which is exactly the error the rest of this article is written to undo.

Third, it tells you the DATIVE — who the action is done for. The dative is the form used when something is given, done, or taken to or for somebody. We still have it in English without noticing: give him the book means give the book to him. That him is a dative.

This is the use that puzzles readers most, because in the King James it is spelled with the same word as the receiving form. When you turns up inside what looks like a plain command — get you straw, take you a lamb, wash you — it is not a stray word and it is not the object of the verb. It is the dative, and it means for yourselves. It tells you the action comes back on the ones performing it.

Pharaoh supplies the clearest case. He announces the new policy:

"Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore: let them go and gather straw for themselves." (Exodus 5:7 KJV)

Then the order reaches Israel:

"Go ye, get you straw where ye can find it: yet not ought of your work shall be diminished." (Exodus 5:11 KJV)

Ye twice in the nominative — you all go, you all find. And you in the middle as a dative: get straw for yourselves. That little word is the cruelty. Straw had been supplied; now the same quota of brick must be met, and the gathering falls on the ones who must also do the making. The whole new burden sits in one syllable — and Pharaoh's own phrasing two verses earlier, let them go and gather straw for themselves, proves that is exactly what it means. A modern version will say get straw for yourselves and carry it over well enough. But the reader of the King James has to know what that little you is doing, or he will read straight past the cruelty in it and take get you straw for a bare command.

Then see the very same wording turned to mercy. When God delivers them out of that bondage, the order comes in exactly the same shape:

"Draw out and take you a lamb according to your families, and kill the passover." (Exodus 12:21 KJV)

Take you a lamb — a dative again: take one for yourselves, household by household. Not a lamb taken on their behalf by somebody else at the centre; a lamb each family lays hold of as its own. The same form that marked Pharaoh's burden now marks God's provision, and it is what makes the passover personal rather than national in the abstract.

Now put two commands side by side that look like the same command, and watch one word part them:

"Take ye a kid of the goats for a sin offering" (Leviticus 9:3 KJV)

"Draw out and take you a lamb according to your families, and kill the passover" (Exodus 12:21 KJV)

Both say take. Both name one animal. But look where each animal ends up.

Take ye a kid — you all take it, and it goes away from them, to the altar, as a sin offering to God. They handle it and hand it over.

Take you a lamb — take one for yourselves, and it goes home with them: to their own house, their own doorpost, their own table, family by family.

One animal is taken from them. The other is taken for them. And the only thing on the page telling you which is the difference between ye and you.

Fourth, the verb endings tell you PERSON — who is doing the verb. Person is simply the grammarian's word for who is being referred to. First person is the one speaking (I, we). Second person is the one spoken to (thou, ye). Third person is the one spoken about (he, she, it, they). You use all three in every conversation you have.

The King James marks the last two on the end of the verb itself. An -est ending means second person — the one being spoken to. An -eth ending means third person — the one being spoken about. The Lord puts both in a single sentence:

"But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth" (Matthew 6:3 KJV)

Thou doest — second person, you, the one addressed. Thy right hand doeth — third person, it, the thing described. Even the past tense keeps its ending: "thou comfortedst me" (Isaiah 12:1 KJV).

Now this is the least of the four, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than dressing it up.

The third-person ending never left us at all — -eth simply became -s. Cometh is comes, goeth is goes, keepeth is keeps. Nothing whatever was lost there. And the second-person -est went out of our speech in company with thou itself, so it costs nothing beyond what thou already cost: where the King James writes gavest, a modern version writes you gave, and the sense is carried over entire.

So do not go looking for a loss here; there is not one worth the name. Look instead at what the endings do for you while you are reading. Turn to the long prayer of the Levites in Nehemiah 9, where they recite God's dealings with Israel from Abraham down:

"And gavest them bread from heaven for their hunger, and broughtest forth water for them out of the rock for their thirst, and promisedst them that they should go in to possess the land" (Nehemiah 9:15 KJV)

There is no thou in that sentence until the very last clause. The pronoun was set down verses earlier and the recital has been running ever since on the endings alone — gavest, broughtest, promisedst — each one holding its verb pointed at God, so that a reader twenty verses deep never loses his place and never has to stop and ask whether he is still inside the prayer. That is a real service, and it is the kind of service these endings render: not information you could get nowhere else, but a hand on your shoulder keeping you in the right posture as you read.

Learn them for that, and because a man who does not know what doeth and comfortedst are will be stopped at the page by words that were meant to help him along it.

Four distinctions, then, and none of them decorative: number (how many), case (who acts and who receives — and which of the four words are plural), the dative (who it is done for), and person (who is doing the verb). Four terms, four minutes, and you have them for life. Modern English threw all four away. It kept one word, you, and made it do the work of four.

Learn the four and you can read the Book as it was set down. But one of them carries a weight the others do not, and the whole of the rest of this article rests on it.

Number cannot be put back. Once thee and ye have both become you, the word sitting on the page is silent about it. The same three letters serve whether the Lord addressed one man or ten thousand, and nothing else in the sentence will tell you which. Word order will not. The stated subject will not.

Understand where the loss actually falls, because it is not where you might think. The translator is not in doubt. He has the Hebrew and the Greek open before him and sees the number as plainly as he sees this page. And he could have shown it: English owns the words, and the Bible in your hands uses them on every page. What he could not do was show it in modern English idiom.

That word matters, so let us be plain about it. Idiom is simply the way a language is spoken at a given time — the words and turns of phrase that sound native to a living ear. It is not a question of what English is able to do, but of what English currently does without sounding strange. Thee and ye have not fallen out of the language; they have only fallen out of use. They are English still, and every one of them is sitting in your Bible waiting to be read.

So the constraint is real, but notice its shape. It is not that the language failed him. It is that he undertook to write in the English now spoken, and inside that English there is no second word standing ready — no plural you the way they still stands ready beside he. The limit came with the undertaking.

He is not left with nothing, though, and it is worth being exact about what he is left with. English can say the thing in a phrase: all of you, you people, you both, or y'all if he will borrow from the American South. Every one of those works. But notice what each costs. All of you puts two words on the page that the text never said. You people makes the Lord sound faintly impatient with the man He is addressing. Y'all stops the reader dead and tells him more about the translator than about the verse.

So the patches exist, and a translator uses one here and there — most often where he judges that a reader would otherwise go badly wrong. In most places he does not, and it would be unfair to call that carelessness: much of the time the audience is plain enough from the context. Moses is addressing the nation; Paul is writing to a church; nobody is in doubt.

But set the two Bibles side by side and see where that leaves them. In the King James the plural is marked more than six thousand times — at ye and at you, in every one of those places, whether the context made it obvious or not. A modern version marks it in a handful. Not because the translator did not know, and not because he was idle, but because no book could carry all of you on every page and still be read. Which is the cost of the undertaking, not a failing of the man.

And this is worth watching actually happen, because the versions do not all behave alike.

Take the upper room again, where the King James runs plural, plural, then singular: "Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee" (Luke 22:31-32 KJV).

The New International Version reaches for a patch here, and reaches well. It renders the first pair sift all of you as wheat, and then, rather than leave the turn invisible, it puts the man's name into the sentence: But I have prayed for you, Simon (Luke 22:31-32 NIV). Two additions, neither of them in the Greek as words — and between them the turn survives. A reader of that version can see that the sifting was aimed at the company and the prayer at one man.

The New King James does not. It reads Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat… But I have prayed for you (Luke 22:31-32 NKJV) — three identical words standing where the King James has two plurals and a singular. Nothing on the page marks the change. A reader there has no way of learning that the Lord turned from the whole company to Peter, and the sifting of the twelve quietly disappears into a private word.

The same two versions part the same way at the temple. The New International Version marks it — you yourselves are God's temple, and God's Spirit dwells in your midst (1 Corinthians 3:16 NIV) — and in your midst is a genuine effort to say among you all, which is exactly the sense. The New King James gives you are the temple of God… the Spirit of God dwells in you (1 Corinthians 3:16 NKJV), and leaves the reader to make of it what he can; which, as we have seen, is usually the individual body of the sixth chapter.

But do not conclude from those two verses that the one version has solved it. It marks the plural where its translators judged the danger worth the cost of extra words, and passes over it everywhere else — including in places where the loss is heavy.

Go back to Nicodemus. The King James gives "Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again" (John 3:7 KJV) — one man, then a nation. The New International Version reads You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' (John 3:7 NIV) Two identical words. The turn from the man to the multitude, which is the whole reason that verse is quoted, is simply not there.

Go back to Paul counting his members. The King James has "I have no need of thee" to the hand and "I have no need of you" to the feet (1 Corinthians 12:21 KJV). The same version reads I don't need you! — and then, to the feet, I don't need you! (1 Corinthians 12:21 NIV) The one place where Paul lays the two numbers side by side in a single sentence, so exactly that anyone can check it against his own body, and the two words come out the same.

And go back to Timothy, where more is lost than a number. Paul writes "that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God" (1 Timothy 3:15 KJV) — singular, three times, one man charged with his own conduct in setting a church in order. That version reads you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God's household (1 Timothy 3:15 NIV). Not merely a singular blurred into a plural: the charge to Timothy has become a rule about people in general. The very misreading this article has been describing is no longer something a careless reader might fall into. It has been written into the text for him.

So the patches are real, and this version does sometimes use them. But look at what using them requires — added words, twice inside a single verse, and only in the places where that translator judged the danger great enough to be worth the cost. Where he judged otherwise, the reader is given nothing, and never learns there was anything to give.

And that is the difference between the two Bibles. It is not that one tells you the number when it matters and the other does not. It is that one tells you always, at every ye and every you, whether anyone thought you needed it or not — and the other tells you when a translator decided you needed it. Which is a poor arrangement, since the reader who most needs the help is exactly the reader least able to tell when he needs it.

The loss falls on you, holding the English. He knew — and within the idiom he had undertaken to write in, he could not show you. And there is no working it out afterwards, because nothing was left behind to work from. A dropped verb can be written in again. A for yourselves can be spelled out. But a collapsed number leaves no trace of itself at all — no gap, no oddity, no rough place in the sentence to make a reader stop and wonder. The verse reads perfectly. It simply no longer says how many.

That is why everything that follows is about number.

It is our English that is the odd one out

Here the whole complaint turns over, so it is worth saying plainly.

Start with the languages the Bible was written in. Hebrew and Greek both distinguish one person from many in the second person, and both mark the difference on the verb as well as the pronoun. Hebrew has one word for addressing a single man and a different word for addressing a company, and marks the difference on the verb besides — it will even tell you whether the one addressed is a man or a woman. Greek does the same with its own words, and changes the form again according to whether the person is acting or being acted upon. Those distinctions are not decoration there either. They are simply how the languages work.

So the translators did not invent an ornamental style. They found the distinction standing in the text before them — in the received Greek and the preserved Hebrew, which do not leave it open whether one man or a whole company is being addressed — and they reached for the English words that would carry it across. What those pages record is not decoration but fact: who God was speaking to.

And notice that the men of 1611 were in the same position we are. They had no autograph either; not one apostle's page lay on any desk in Oxford or Westminster. What they had were the kept copies — the same preserved stream that reaches us — and the distinction was standing plainly in them. That is worth saying, because the whole case here can be made without once appealing to a document nobody living has seen. We are not arguing from originals. We are arguing from the words God kept, which can be opened and checked.

And mark the case exactly, because this is what separates those men from every translator who has come after them. They still had the words. Thou and ye were in the language and ready to hand, whatever the street was doing with them. So a real choice lay open: keep the distinction the Hebrew and the Greek make, or let it drop and write you throughout as their own century was increasingly content to do. They kept it.

A man who has the words and lets them go has released something he was in a position to hold. That is not the position of a translator working in an English that no longer offers him the choice, and the two cases should never be spoken of as though they were one.

And we know they did it deliberately, because they left the proof in their own handwriting.

Here is a fact that turns the whole complaint over. By 1611 ordinary English had very largely gone over to you. In polite speech a man said you to one person as readily as to twenty, and thou was already slipping out of common use and beginning to sound old-fashioned. The translators knew this as well as anybody alive — and when they wrote in their own voice, that is exactly how they wrote.

Open the Epistle Dedicatory at the front of the 1611 Bible, where these same men address King James himself, one man, at length. They write your Majesty, your Highness, and:

…their eye doth behold you with comfort, and they bless you in their hearts…

…so you may be the wonder of the world in this later age…

You, and you, and your, page after page — and not one thou in the whole dedication.

Sit with that a moment. Here were men who said you to a single man when they spoke for themselves, and thou to a single man on every page of the Book they were translating. They were not writing thou out of habit; their own habit was otherwise. They were not reaching after antique grandeur; they had just declined to use it on a king. They kept the older forms in the Scripture for one reason: the Scripture needed them. Hebrew and Greek count, and these men would not hand an English reader a Bible that had stopped counting.

Nor is there anything inconsistent in it. In their preface they were writing their own words to a man they could see, where nobody could mistake how many were meant. In the Bible they were handling God's words to readers they would never meet, who would have nothing but the page in front of them. They allowed themselves a liberty they would not allow the Book.

So take the objection we began with and lay it beside this. The words are archaic. Yes — and they were archaic in 1611. The men who chose them knew it, chose them anyway with their eyes open, and told us so by writing differently in their own preface, bound into the same volume, a few leaves before Genesis.

Now look around at the world. English is not the standard against which other languages are strange; on this point English is the one that lost something nearly everybody else kept. Spanish still separates tú from vosotros and ustedes. French keeps tu against vous. Italian has tu and voi, Dutch jij and jullie, Welsh ti and chi, Russian ty and vy. Modern Greek and modern Hebrew both keep it. So does Arabic — and Arabic, like Hebrew, marks whether you are addressing a man or a woman besides.

German keeps nearly the whole system the King James uses. Du is thou and ihr is ye; dich is thee and euch is you; and German even keeps a separate dir for the very thing we called the dative — for yourself. Set the two side by side and the King James does not look antique. It looks like an ordinary European language doing an ordinary job.

There is more than coincidence in it. Thou and German du, Latin tu, Spanish tú, French tu — these are the same ancient word, carried down separate lines into separate tongues. English did not outgrow thou. English mislaid it, alone among its neighbours, in the last few centuries.

Which puts the objection in a strange light. A believer in Madrid or Munich or Moscow opens his Bible this morning and sees at a glance whether the Lord is addressing one man or a multitude. He needs no footnote and no commentary; his own daily speech tells him. It is the English reader — and very nearly the English reader alone — who is assured by his translators that he has no need to know.

One misunderstanding to clear away while we are here. Many suppose thee and thou are reverent words — a special holy way of speaking, kept for addressing God. They are not, and it matters. In several of those languages the plural doubles as a mark of politeness — the Frenchman says vous to a stranger out of respect, not because he is talking to a crowd. The King James does no such thing. Its forms carry number only, never rank and never courtesy.

You can prove it in a moment. God is addressed as thou — "O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me" (Psalm 139:1 KJV). But so is the serpent — "Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle" (Genesis 3:14 KJV). So is Satan — "Get thee hence, Satan" (Matthew 4:10 KJV). So is the rich fool — "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee" (Luke 12:20 KJV). The same word for the Most High and for the accursed, because the word is not about honour at all. It means one, and nothing more.

And the dedication we just looked at settles it past arguing. Those men addressed the King of England — the highest man in the realm, their sovereign and their patron, with every reason on earth to reach for the most honourable form they had — as you. They addressed Almighty God as thou. If thou were the reverent word, they had it precisely backwards, and every one of them a scholar. It is not the word for honour. It is the word for one.

So when a man says the King James is written in stained-glass language, he has the thing backwards twice over. Those words are not a costume, and they are not our peculiar burden. They are the plain, working, everyday equipment of most of the languages on earth — and of the two in which God gave His word.

So: what is lost?

The first conversation about God's word

Go to the beginning, to the first time in Scripture that anyone discusses what God said.

God gives the prohibition to Adam:

"But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." (Genesis 2:17 KJV)

Thou shalt not eat. Thou eatest. Thou shalt surely die. Singular, three times over — and given to Adam alone, before Eve was ever formed. She comes in the verses that follow.

Now hear Eve repeat it to the serpent:

"But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." (Genesis 3:3 KJV)

Ye. Ye. Ye. Plural, three times over. She has taken a singular command she did not personally receive and restated it in the plural — and added a clause about touching that God never spoke.

And the serpent answers her in the very form she handed him:

"Ye shall not surely die." (Genesis 3:4 KJV)

Then watch what happens when God comes into the garden. He does not address the pair. He returns to the form He used at the first:

"And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?" (Genesis 3:9 KJV)

"Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?" (Genesis 3:11 KJV)

Thou. Thee. Thou. Thee. Thou. God gave the command to one man in the singular, and He comes looking for that one man in the singular, and He holds him to the words as they were actually spoken — "whereof I commanded thee", singular, the same word He used in chapter two.

Look at the whole arc those pronouns preserve. Some of it a careful reader could piece together without them: the order of the chapters tells him Eve was not yet formed when the command was given, and God calls Adam by name in the ninth verse. Let us not overstate the case. But piecing a thing together from three places is not the same as reading it, and there is one thing the pronouns carry that nothing else in the passage carries at all — who each speaker had in view at the moment he spoke. God commanding one man. Eve answering for two. The serpent aiming at the two. God returning to the one. That is not an inference from the arrangement of the story. It is on the page, in the words themselves, marked at every turn.

Read those five verses with you in every slot, as the modern versions have it, and the sentences still make sense. Nothing looks wrong. A reader can still work out, with effort and a good memory for chapter two, that Adam heard it first. What he can no longer do is see it — the text has stopped telling him, and it has stopped telling him without telling him it has stopped. That is the loss, and it is worse than obscurity. Obscurity at least announces itself.

The first assault on the word of God in human history turned on a shift of number — and the Book that keeps the shift is the one people call hard to read.

The pronoun tells you how many, not who

Now the verse everybody quotes, and the place where most treatments go wrong.

Read it first the way a modern version gives it: Marvel not that I said unto you, you must be born again. Flat. One word doing both jobs. A single man is being told a single thing, and there is nothing else to see.

Now restore what is actually written:

"Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again." (John 3:7 KJV)

Thee — one man, Nicodemus, standing there in the dark. Ye — more than one. In a single breath the Lord addresses the man in front of Him and states a requirement that reaches past him to a company. Four verses earlier the singular stood alone: "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3 KJV). Now the number changes, deliberately, mid-sentence.

Here is where care is needed, because this verse is regularly made to prove more than it says. Defenders of the King James commonly conclude from that plural that all people everywhere must be born again. But stop and see what the pronoun actually establishes. It establishes number — that the requirement extends past Nicodemus to a group. It does not establish which group. A plural tells you how many. It cannot tell you who.

Who, then? The text tells you, if you keep reading. Nicodemus is "a master of Israel" (John 3:10 KJV), and the new birth is covenant promise made to that nation — "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you" (Ezekiel 36:26 KJV). The ye is the nation Nicodemus taught, not humanity at large. I have worked that through at length in Born Again, Born of the Spirit, and Born After the Spirit.

That is the discipline the pronouns require and reward. They hand you a fact — one, or more than one — and then hand you back to the context to learn who is in view. They are a tool for discerning the audience, not a substitute for discerning it. A man who uses them as a shortcut around context will reach wrong conclusions with great confidence, and the fault will not be the Bible's.

One temple, or many?

Now push the same tool one step further, because this is where it pays the most and where almost nobody looks.

Once you know a ye is plural, look at what the group is then called — because that word carries a number of its own. Grammarians call it the predicate nominative: the noun sitting after are that tells you what the subject is. In ye are the temple, the ye is the subject and the temple is the predicate nominative. Its number is the thing to watch, and it tells you something the pronoun alone cannot — whether the group is addressed as many individuals or as one thing together.

Scripture does both, deliberately, and the difference is doctrine.

When that noun is plural, the address is distributive — it runs to them one by one, each being the thing named. "Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD" (Isaiah 43:10 KJV). Witnesses — each man a witness in his own right. "Ye are the children of the LORD your God" (Deuteronomy 14:1 KJV). Children — each one a child.

When that noun is singular against a plural ye, the address is collective — they are one thing jointly, not many of it separately:

"Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?" (1 Corinthians 3:16 KJV)

Plural ye. Singular temple. Not each of you a temple — all of you, together, one temple. Paul will not let it be mistaken, and presses it again in the next breath: "the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are" (1 Corinthians 3:17 KJV). He says it the same way to the same church a second time: "ye are the temple of the living God" (2 Corinthians 6:16 KJV). And he says it of the whole structure in Ephesians — "all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord" (Ephesians 2:21 KJV). One building. One temple.

Two things prove this is deliberate rather than incidental.

First, Paul states both readings in a single clause and marks the pivot himself.

"Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular." (1 Corinthians 12:27 KJV)

Body, singular — collective, all of them together, one. Members, plural — distributive, each of them separately, distinct. And in particular is Paul's own signal that he has swung from the collective to the distributive inside a single sentence. He is not being loose. He is being exact, and he marks the hinge for you. He had already laid the principle out a few verses earlier: "For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body" (1 Corinthians 12:12 KJV).

Second, when Paul does want the individual, he does not simply pluralize the predicate nominative. He rebuilds the sentence. He never writes ye are the temples of God. He writes:

"What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?" (1 Corinthians 6:19 KJV)

Here a distinction must be drawn carefully, because two different constructions are easily confused and I do not want you to muddle them.

Ye are the temple is one thing: a plural subject with a singular name after it, which is the collective we have been tracing. Your body is another thing entirely — a possessive. And a possessive behaves differently. Your is always plural in your Bible; it never once addresses a single man. But your attached to a singular noun distributes — it means each of you, his own.

You can prove that without leaving the Gospels: "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on" (Matthew 6:25 KJV). Plural ye all the way through, and a singular body — and every man in that crowd puts clothes on his own. Nobody is dressing a corporate body.

So your body in the sixth chapter is each man's own body, and that is why the argument works: the sin in view is one man's, committed against "his own body" (1 Corinthians 6:18 KJV), and the answer is that this body — his — houses the Spirit of God.

Keep the two constructions apart and the whole chapter opens. Ye are the temple (chapter three) is the assembly, together, one building. Your body is the temple (chapter six) is each man, severally. Paul did not get the individual by writing temples; he got it by changing what he was talking about — from what they are called to what they have.

And here is where it bears directly on the complaint we began with. Modern versions keep the predicate nominative singular; temple survives. What they lose is the number of the ye. You are the temple of God is ambiguous in a way that ye are the temple of God is not, and it reads most naturally as spoken to one person. Which is precisely how 1 Corinthians 3:16 is almost universally handled — collapsed into 6:19 and preached as a rule about the individual body. Keep that misreading and the very next verse loses its subject: "If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy" (1 Corinthians 3:17 KJV) is speaking of the one temple they jointly are, not of a man and his own body.

What that verse means is a larger question than this article can carry, and I will not settle it in passing. Who the defiler is, what the destroying is, and how a man may defile a temple he is not himself part of — those are worth a study of their own, and I intend to give them one. The point here is narrower and it is only about number: the singular temple standing against a plural ye tells you the verse concerns something they are together, and that is precisely what a flattened you takes away. Get the number wrong and every question that follows is being asked about the wrong thing.

A plural ye with a singular name after it also carries the central truth of our own calling. "Now ye are the body of Christ" — the body, not bodies. One. That single word is the joint-body truth of the mystery sitting right there in the sentence: "That the Gentiles should be fellowheirs, and of the same body" (Ephesians 3:6 KJV). It is why Paul can write "There is one body, and one Spirit" (Ephesians 4:4 KJV), and "ye are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28 KJV) — plural subject, singular one. It is why a divided church at Corinth was not merely behaving badly but denying what it was.

Watch him use it for correction. Dealing with sin in the assembly, Paul writes: "Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?" and then, "Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened" (1 Corinthians 5:6-7 KJV). A lump, singular. The reason one man's sin is everyone's business is that they are not a collection of individuals who happen to meet; they are one lump. Flatten the pronoun and the argument loses its foundation.

And he can hold the two numbers together in a single breath when he wants both truths at once:

"I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service." (Romans 12:1 KJV)

Bodies, plural — every man brings his own; nobody can present it for him. A living sacrifice, singular — and what they lay down together is one offering. Not many sacrifices side by side on a shelf, but one, made of all of them. Count the two words and the verse tells you both what you must do alone and what you become together.

The distinction cuts the other way too, and keeps things off us that were never ours. "But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people" (1 Peter 2:9 KJV). Four predicate nominatives in a row, and every one of them singular and collective — a generation, a priesthood, a nation, a people, not generations and priesthoods and peoples. It is one company named four ways, and that company is a nation under covenant, addressed in a letter written to "the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia" (1 Peter 1:1 KJV). That verse is claimed constantly for the Body of Christ. Its own grammar and its own address say otherwise — and the wording is fulfilment language drawn straight from what God said to Israel at Sinai, as I have set out in Peter's Audience: The Little Flock of Israel.

Two chapters apart

Once you can see number, whole arguments open up that are simply invisible in a flattened text.

The Lord says to Peter:

"And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." (Matthew 16:19 KJV)

Thee. Thou. Thou. Singular throughout — and an entire ecclesiastical system has been built on that singular, as I have set out in Roman Catholicism Follows Neither Christ, Peter, nor Paul, as though binding and loosing were deposited in one man and his successors.

Two chapters later:

"Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." (Matthew 18:18 KJV)

You. Ye. Ye. Plural. The same binding, the same loosing, the same heavenly ratification — committed to the company. Whatever was said to Peter singly was said to them jointly not long after, in words any reader can check for himself. In a Bible where both verses read "you," the two passages look identical and the argument cannot be raised at all, in either direction.

But name the company before going a step further, because a plural is no more a permission slip here than it was on the mountain. These are the twelve, and what is committed to them is named in the verse itself — "the keys of the kingdom of heaven". That is kingdom ground, in the program offered to Israel, and the binding and loosing is the discipline of that kingdom assembly. The plural takes the keys out of one man's hand. It does not put them into ours. Neither verse hands the Body of Christ authority to bind or to loose anything, and a man who reaches for Matthew 18 to justify what his own assembly claims has merely traded one wrong claimant for another.

The same precision appears in the upper room:

"Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren." (Luke 22:31-32 KJV)

Read that slowly. You — plural. Satan asked for the whole company; it was never only Peter he wanted. Thee, thy, thou, thy — singular, four times, as the Lord turns and prays for one man in particular, the one who would deny Him and be restored to strengthen the rest. And Peter answers in the singular he was addressed in: "Lord, I am ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death" (Luke 22:33 KJV). Two audiences, one exchange, and the change of number is the only thing that shows it. Flatten those pronouns and the sifting of the twelve vanishes into a private word to Peter.

Smyrna is addressed the same way, and here the two numbers run through a single verse:

"Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." (Revelation 2:10 KJV)

Thou shalt suffer — singular, the assembly spoken to as one. Some of you… that ye may be tried… ye shall have tribulation — plural, the members severally, and only some of them going to prison. Then back to the singular: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.

That last line is among the most individually claimed sentences in all of Scripture, printed on plaques and read at funerals as a word to one believer. Read the verse whole and the thou is the church at Smyrna, addressed as one body, promised a crown as one body — while the imprisonment falls on some of you, one here and one there. Flatten every one of those to you and the two audiences merge into a single blur, and a promise made to an assembly on kingdom ground quietly becomes a personal keepsake.

Job's comforters are handled the same way. The LORD speaks to one man and includes three:

"My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath." (Job 42:7 KJV)

Thee and thy to Eliphaz, who had spoken first and longest — then ye for all three together in the charge itself. The rebuke is personal at the head and corporate in its substance, and one word carries the shift.

And once more, in the plainest possible case:

"And the LORD said unto Moses, How long refuse ye to keep my commandments and my laws?" (Exodus 16:28 KJV)

The LORD said it unto Moses — but He did not say thou. He said ye. The rebuke passes straight through the man standing there and lands on the nation behind him. A reader working from "you" has no way to know whether Moses is being reproved or Israel is, and men have preached it both ways.

What it costs the reader

None of this is mere curiosity about old words. It costs something at the level of a man's peace.

"For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise." (Hebrews 10:36 KJV)

Ye. Ye. Ye. Plural, every time — a corporate body under a corporate promise, receiving it after endurance. That is Israel, and that is kingdom ground, where entrance is conditioned on continuing — as the whole letter is, and as I have shown in Who Was the Book of Hebrews Written To?. Now let a believer in the Body of Christ read that verse as you, alone, at eleven at night, and it becomes a personal condition attached to his own salvation. He will go looking for enough patience to qualify for a promise that was never offered to him on those terms — because he is "accepted in the beloved" (Ephesians 1:6 KJV) already, and sealed "unto the day of redemption" (Ephesians 4:30 KJV). The pronoun was one of the guardrails. Remove it, and a plural promise to a nation becomes a private burden.

Or take the verse men quote at congregations constantly:

"But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth." (1 Timothy 3:15 KJV)

Thou. Thou. Thyself. Singular, all three. Paul is not handing down a code of conduct for a congregation; he is telling Timothy — one man, left at Ephesus to set things in order, in a chapter about the qualifications of bishops and deacons (which I have worked through in Rightly Dividing Church Leadership: The Bishop, the Elder, and the Pastor) — how he himself is to conduct that work. Read it as "you" and it becomes a rulebook for everybody in the building, which is exactly how it is usually preached.

The forms will also dissolve a contradiction that troubles honest readers. Paul writes "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2 KJV), and three verses later, "For every man shall bear his own burden" (Galatians 6:5 KJV). Which is it? The number answers it. The first is plural and mutual — the assembly carrying what a brother cannot carry alone. The second is singular and personal — the responsibility no one can hand off. And the verse that opens the passage does the same work in one line:

"Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted." (Galatians 6:1 KJV)

Ye which are spiritual — the duty is the company's. Considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted — the danger is each man's own. Plural obligation, singular caution, one verse. In a flattened text the whole passage reads as one undifferentiated "you," and the pastoral point — that the group restores while the individual watches himself — is smoothed into mush.

Even the closing salutations carry it:

"The Lord Jesus Christ be with thy spirit. Grace be with you. Amen." (2 Timothy 4:22 KJV)

Thy to Timothy, personally, in the last sentence Paul ever wrote to him. You to the saints gathered around him. Two blessings, two audiences, one verse — and the only thing distinguishing them is a form of a pronoun readers are assured they will not miss.

Reading, not machinery

Now the qualification, because a rule half-learned is worse than none. And the first thing to say is that the numbers can move within a passage, and the reader has to follow them.

Take the greatest commandment. It opens by gathering the whole nation:

"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:" (Deuteronomy 6:4 KJV)

O Israel. Our God. That is the congregation assembled, Moses standing among them and counting himself in. But watch what happens the moment the commandment itself arrives:

"And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." (Deuteronomy 6:5 KJV)

Thou. Thy. Thine. Thy. Thy. Singular, every one — and look at what is being asked for: a heart, a soul, a might. A nation has none of those. Men have them. The call goes out to the whole people and then lands on one man at a time, because that is the only way it can ever be kept. Israel cannot love God unless the Israelites do.

And He does not leave it there. The very next verses walk that one man through his own day:

"And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up." (Deuteronomy 6:7 KJV)

Thy children. Thine house. A nation does not sit in a house, walk a road, lie down at night and get up in the morning. A man does, and his children are his own. Read it with you throughout and the whole movement flattens — the assembly and the single worshipper become one indistinct crowd, and the most personal commandment in the law reads like a policy for a people.

And if anyone doubts the movement is deliberate, Moses gives the same instruction again five chapters later and puts both halves inside a single verse:

"And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up." (Deuteronomy 11:19 KJV)

Ye shall teach them your children — plural, the whole nation charged together. When thou sittest in thine house — singular, one man at his own fireside. The nation is commanded and the man obeys, and the sentence turns from the one to the other without a seam.

The ten commandments are given the same way, and they settle the matter past argument. God speaks them to the whole nation assembled at the mount, and every one of them is singular: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20:3 KJV), "Thou shalt not commit adultery" (Exodus 20:14 KJV), "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife" (Exodus 20:17 KJV). A nation cannot commit adultery. A nation has no neighbour's wife. Every word of it is aimed at one man at a time — spoken to all of them at once, and kept by none of them except one at a time.

Now the qualification proper. Having seen that, do not swing the other way and assume a singular always means one man standing there. It does not, and Scripture says so plainly:

"For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself" (Deuteronomy 7:6 KJV)

Thou art an holy people. Singular pronoun, and a name after it that no man can wear by himself — nobody is a people on his own. He says it again a few chapters later: "thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God, and the LORD hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself" (Deuteronomy 14:2 KJV). That is the whole nation addressed as one, and you know it is — not by a rule about pronouns, but by the very tool we learned at the temple: a singular standing against a collective name.

So the same thou does two different things in the same book, and the way to tell them apart is not a formula. It is to ask what is being said. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife can only be one man. Thou art an holy people can only be all of them.

Paul uses the same device on the other side of the aisle. Warning the Gentile against boasting over the broken branches, he does not write ye:

"And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert graffed in among them... Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee." (Romans 11:17-18 KJV)

"Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off." (Romans 11:22 KJV)

Thou throughout — the Gentile addressed as a class standing in a place of privilege, set over against Israel as a class, exactly as Israel herself was addressed at Sinai. Miss that and the passage gets read as a threat to the individual believer's salvation, which the singular never was.

And where two accounts differ, look closer before you conclude anything. The Lord's dealing with the Pharisees over divorce is recorded twice, and the number is not the same in both:

"For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept." (Mark 10:5 KJV)

"Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so." (Matthew 19:8 KJV)

Singular in the one account, plural in the other — the same day, the same Pharisees, the same question. A hasty reader calls that a discrepancy and a careless one calls it proof that the number means nothing. Look at what each sentence is actually about, and there is no difficulty at all.

Each clause keeps its own number the whole way through, and that is the whole of it.

Mark: the hardness of your heart → he wrote you this precept. Singular, then singular. One settled condition, and one law written to meet it.

Matthew: the hardness of your hearts → suffered you to put away your wives. Plural, then plural. Many hearts, and many wives put away, one household at a time.

And notice what neither of them does. Neither makes the heart something the nation owns instead of the men. A heart is always a man's own — that is exactly what we saw at the greatest commandment, where God asks for a heart and a soul and a might that no nation possesses. Your heart in Mark is the same distributive singular we met in the Sermon on the Mount: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Matthew 6:21 KJV) — spoken to a crowd, and every man in it has one heart of his own.

So both are true, and neither could be said the other way round. What differs between the two accounts is not whose heart it is. It is what each sentence is counting. Mark counts the law — there was one. Matthew counts the divorces — there were many. The two Gospels are not correcting one another; they are telling you two things, and the number in each is exact for the thing it describes.

So the lesson is not that the forms are unreliable. It is the opposite: they are reliable enough that when two passages differ, the difference is telling you something, and the reader's business is to find out what. Where a writer sets both numbers side by side deliberately — the body… and members in particular, your bodies a living sacrifice — he is making a point plainly. Where the accounts differ, he is showing you two sides of one thing. Either way the work is the same, and it is not a trick of grammar. It is reading.

So the pronoun is not a machine that identifies your audience for you. It reports number and nothing else, and number is one piece of evidence among several. The reader still has to ask who is speaking, to whom, under what program, and on what terms — which is simply to say he still has to rightly divide. The old forms do not replace that labour. They equip it. They hand you a fact you would not otherwise possess and leave you to do the work.

That is a good deal more than they get credit for, and considerably more than you will ever give you.

The objection reconsidered

Come back now to where we started.

The complaint was that the archaic words make the Bible hard to understand. But look at what has actually been on display — and notice which of the four distinctions did nearly all of the work. It was number, the one thing no translator can hand back.

It was thou against ye that preserved how Eve altered God's command and how God came back to the man who received it. It was the change of number that showed the Lord addressing Nicodemus and the nation in one sentence, Peter and the twelve in another, Moses and Israel in a third, Eliphaz and his friends in a fourth. It was one singular word — temple, lump, body — set against a plural ye that made a divided church at Corinth one building and one loaf rather than a crowd of separate ones, and makes us one body rather than many. It was a singular pronoun that kept a crown promised to a whole assembly at Smyrna from shrinking into a private keepsake, and another that kept Paul's charge to Timothy from becoming a code for everyone else — while a plural kept Israel's endurance promise off the shoulders of a believer under grace. And it was the movement from our God to thine heart that carried the greatest commandment from a gathered nation down to one man in his own house.

Take the old words out and the Bible does not become clearer. It becomes quieter. The sentences still run smoothly — more smoothly, in fact — and the reader has no idea what stopped being said. That is the peculiar danger of a smoothed text: it does not announce its losses. Nothing looks missing. The verse reads beautifully and tells you less than it did.

And the difficulty was never really the vocabulary anyway. The plainest modern English will not open a verse the Spirit has not opened; "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Corinthians 2:14 KJV). Men who heard the Lord speak in their own living tongue, with no archaic word standing anywhere between them and Him, still "understood not the saying which he spake unto them" (Luke 2:50 KJV). The want was never in the language.

And there is one more answer to give the objection, and the translators gave it themselves. The words were already old-fashioned in 1611. Those men knew it, and when they wrote in their own voice they wrote as their century did — the dedication at the front of their own Bible addresses King James, one man, as you and your Majesty, without a single thou in it. They had the older words still in hand and could have let them fall, as the street around them was letting them fall. They kept them in the Scripture and nowhere else, because the Scripture needed them. So when a man says the language is archaic, the answer is: yes, and deliberately so — chosen with open eyes by men who wrote differently a few leaves before Genesis.

Learn the rule. It takes a minute. T is one and Y is many; thou and ye act while thee and you receive; a you dropped into a command means for yourselves; and -est is you while -eth is he. Then open the Book and start noticing, and you will find that the words you were told were obstacles have been holding the door.

And if the question behind the question is why we hold this Book at all, I have answered that at length in Preserved, Not Re-Inspired: Why We Hold the King James, and pointed to the men worth reading on it in The Defenders of the King James: The Question Beneath the Manuscripts.

You do not need another language to read your Bible carefully. You need to learn your own.

© 2026 Edward R. Cross