Solomon was right when he wrote that there was “nothing new under the sun”—at least in the absolute sense. Newness, as we know it, actually consists of a fresh approach, a unique arrangement, a different perception of previous thoughts and facts that are brought forward to our present view.
The New King James Version is “new” in this sense. Certainly our chapters, “A Firm Foundation,” “A Royal Legacy,” and “Something Old,” show how very indebted we are to the past, in particular to God’s continued grace through the ages in revealing and preserving His Word.
However, we don’t wish merely to revel in past tradition. We want to build afresh on the labors of our predecessors, expanding and improving our standard version of the Bible for the present and the future. We feel this to be a more profitable and solid procedure than beginning totally anew with each generation, thus falling into the pitfalls that all such experiments are prone to. We ought not to impoverish ourselves by refusing to draw from the labors, successes, and failures of those who have gone before. As a noted journalist has observed, “The past is not dead. It isn’t even past.”
Just as Chapters 2 and 3 emphasize new details that improve the accuracy of the NKJV over past editions of the KJV tradition, so the present chapter describes some of the features that we believe improve the beauty of our English Bible.
Styling
The earliest (1611) edition of the King James Bible is extremely difficult for modern readers to understand, as illustrated by the samples shown previously in Chapter 1, “A Firm Foundation.” Even the popular 1769 edition, the King James Version commonly used since that date, is discouraging reading for most new users today. Not only the spelling and punctuation, but also the order of words and phrases in sentences, are often confusing.
Therefore, while the true sense of a New King James passage was being established at different levels of review, the process of re-styling for clarity was being performed simultaneously as a separate discipline. Painstaking care was equally exercised in this process to maintain the lyrical grandeur that has popularized the King James Bible throughout its illustrious history—always keeping in view the primary concern for precision of translation.
As warranted, poetic and prose sections are clarified in the NKJV by adding quotation marks, substituting semicolons for KJV colons, using colons to introduce phrases and clauses, and dividing long sentences where expedient. Sometimes, however, the power of a passage is unfolded by the cascading sequence of clauses in a long sentence, as in Ephesians 1:1–6.
In combination with other contemporary modifications in English style, including careful shifts in word order, minor features of re-punctuation eliminate much of the reader’s difficulty with former editions of the King James Bible. Precise understanding of the thought is thus enhanced.
Poetry with a Purpose
Since so much of the Old Testament is poetry, it would be difficult for the reader of the New King James Version not to notice the new poetic format that greatly improves readability. If you leaf through The Oxford Book of English Verse, The Oxford Book of American Verse, or The Christian Book of Mystical Verse, to take just three deservedly popular books of poetry, you will notice that most poems in English have the left margin “justified,” or lined up straight, and the right margins ending wherever the line does. Also, these lines, even when not beginning a new sentence, are generally capitalized.
Because the KJV has always printed poetry in the same style as it did prose, many readers have been unaware how much poetry there actually is in the Bible. At least three avid KJV readers have told the author: “I hate poetry!” Judging by the Old Testament Psalms, Proverbs, and the Prophets, apparently the Lord does not!
In 1885 a first attempt was made to indicate poetry by special indentation in the English Revised Version. The American Standard Version of 1901 and its updated editions, the Revised Standard Version of 1952, and the New American Standard Bible1 of 1971, continued this policy.
The NKJV is thus by no means unique in presenting poetic sections as poetry. However, the format is a decided improvement over the older revisions and certainly a great deal more attractive than the KJV’s failure to distinguish poetry from prose at all.
Compare, for example, the famous poem on “time” in Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 in the old format and the new:
The very structure of the thought is enhanced by the NKJV’s presentation of the words on the page.
Another nice thing about printing poetry as poetry is that one can leaf through such a historical book as Genesis, for example, and quickly note ancient Hebrew verse appearing here and there throughout the sacred text. As early as Genesis 2:23 we see Adam’s poetic description of his newly acquired wife, and as late as chapter 49 we have Jacob’s long prophetic poem about the future of his twelve sons.
God is a Poet! We, too, should learn to appreciate poetry.
Special Formats
The Old Testament in the New
Unique to the NKJV, as recently observed, is the method of indicating Old Testament quotations in the New. It is very helpful for Bible students to know what in the New Testament is a direct citation from the Old. Some have used italics to indicate them, but the KJV/NKJV tradition italicizes supplied words to smooth out the English translation. Other methods are bold face or ALL CAPITALS. We found these methods to be unaesthetic and tending to give too much emphasis to Old Testament quotations.
Our solution was to use a typeface called “oblique.” It looks somewhat like italics but can be distinguished if examined carefully. For example, note the following quotation in Hebrews 5:6:
The He, says, and place are in italics because they are not in the Greek but definitely needed to complete the English. In the quotation itself the only word that is supplied is the understood word are. The rest of the quotation is in oblique type. The letters that are obviously different in the two typefaces are the a’s and e’s, though there are little differences in all the letters.
New Testament Poetry
Poetic or hymnic writing in the New Testament that is not quoted from the Old Testament appears in regular type, such as 1 Timothy 3:16:
Letters
Another helpful indicator of kind of literature can be seen in correspondence that appears within the body of the text. For example, Nehemiah 6:5–7 quotes Sanballat’s unfair and untrue letter as follows:
When entire books are letters, however, such as Romans through Jude, they are not put in this indented form. The three components of ancient letters—the writer, the addressee, and the greeting—are helpfully indicated, as in 1 Thessalonians 1:1 by the spacing between the three elements:
The Ten Commandments
The NKJV uses another special format for the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20:1–17), thus making the separate commands stand out clearly:
None of these innovations is for the sake of mere novelty. Rather, our desire is to make the NKJV a most attractive and readable version of God’s Word—a work of beauty and a joy to read.
Notes
1. See first note in the Introduction.
2. The reading God (Theos) is in ninety-seven percent of the Greek manuscripts. The rest are divided between “who” (hos) and “which” (ho). See Chapter 10 for more information on New Testament textual data.