bookslover
Puritan Board Doctor
I'd be interested to hear just why you think the KJV should be thus shelved.
Robert and Tom: The KJV should long since have been retired because the language is more than 400 years old now - actually, in the New Testament, it's older than that since about 80% of the New Testament consists of Tyndale's translation imported more-or-less entire into the KJV, and Tyndale's translation was nearly 100 years old then.
I, too, love beautiful language, but the Bible is a special case. Since the purpose of the Bible is for God to communicate with us, clarity should take precedence over beauty. If beauty obscures a passage, then the beauty should be sacrificed for clarity. In all books, understanding its message is the purpose of reading. And that's especially true in the Bible's case.
There's no reason why people should have to struggle with (in the New Testament) 16th-century language in order to be able to understand it. Any decent modern translation (NASB [sort of], ESV, and possibly the CSB [I say "possibly" because I've read very little of it, as yet], etc.) is superior to the KJV for the purpose of communicating to people living today. And that's going to be even more the case as time rolls on.
Besides, Christians living in non-English-speaking countries have gotten along without the KJV just fine. They have God communicating to them in French, German, Tagalog, whatever.
Clarity over beauty. Time for the KJV to enjoy its retirement.