Jack: One of the objections we get, and this can come from higher-ups also, is about King James himself, about him being a homosexual.
David: Okay, well, first of all, the guy who created that rumor waited till over 15 years after James died. And there was nobody there to raise an objection. So that's kind of silly to begin with. But there are a couple of books about it (King James Unjustly Accused by Stephen A Coston).
But what you need to know are a few things. 1) If someone says, "Yes, James did his big deals from his bedroom," well, for a king of any culture, the most secure place has to be your bedroom. The place where you give all your secrets has to be your bedroom. Because that's where the king sleeps. So the guards are around it. They have walls around it. It has to be the most secure place. If you kill the king, you can take over the kingdom. So when they had business affairs of state that were so important that other people could not be around, that's where they held them. [See 2 Kings 6:12.]
Second of all, he had a couple of physical problems that happened to him, causing him to lean on people and stuff, that's one, that this guy made up to say, "Oh, he's all-into these guys," or whatever.
And third, there are vocabulary, ways of talking about things, about loving a person or being close to somebody, that were reinterpreted and made into something sexual, which is really filthy. And filthy-minded people love that kind of stuff.
But it wasn't James. He was a very happily married man, who loved his wife. In fact, he even, at the conference that created the King James, talked about how he thought it was perfectly okay to say he "worshipped" his wife --he lifted up the worth-- of his wife.
Jack: Interesting.
David: Yeah. So he really loved his wife and his kids. (See David Cloud's "Was King James a Homosexual?")
No, he was not a homosexual. But let's take it one step further.
Who cares? At this one level.
If you get to this issue and somebody tries to yell at you and berate you for "being so stupid as to believe he wasn't a homosexual," let's pretend the worst of the worst, and that he was just a devil.
Okay, guess what? He had nothing to with the King James Bible. They gave that name, "King James's Bible," in the early 1800s, when they started contemplating making other Bibles. And then later they called it "the King James Bible," as they published different Bibles.
It wasn't King James' Bible. In fact, it was one of the most open processes of translating known to mankind. It has been talked about for centuries. In fact, the NIV people tried to make themselves sound like they had done the same thing for their 2011, which they did not.
It was an open process. Anybody could have seen all these scholars. The scholars were brought from all over the place. The churches brought the people in. And the process was open to be examined. There were over 54 people involved. This was not a closed-door, closed-session thing.
And the king had nothing to do with it. Except he wanted it done by these people, set apart, and that it would be the version used in the church, and no other. Sounds pretty "authorized," to me.
Jack: Which is what it was known as, the Authorized Version, and it still is.
David: Or the Common Bible, or the English Bible. It was just "the" Bible.