Its not that I don’t appreciate the flow and language, in fact I do, but its a translation, and what I have found with many ministers and lay people is a near obsession with the KJV as though other translations are Hersey.....At least here in the South. I honestly can’t say that I have traveled the nation or the world conducting a survey, but here in the deep south, the KJV has a very shall we say devoted following.
From Joel Beeke's site (post:
King James Version Study Bible):
Amid the vast array of study Bibles written in the past century, there has not been a single Study Bible using the beloved and trusted King James Version written from a sound Reformed perspective. The KJV Study Bible for Personal and Family Worship (KJVSB) will promote the preservation and use of the KJV while leading the reader into a deeper and richer understanding of the Word of God.
The widespread devotion to the King James Version among Christians who affirm inerrancy, especially in the South, is an important point.
I hope those who prepared this new study Bible recognize that there is real potential for marketing this new study Bible far outside the Reformed world. There are many, many, many people in fundamentalist churches who are King James readers and are not necessarily opposed to the Reformed faith (at least in a Reformed Baptist version) who could be potential customers for a study Bible which works with a position of inerrancy and six-day creation.
The lack of marginal notes in the King James Version was, of course, deliberate on the part of King James who saw the "problems" being caused for Anglicanism by the marginal notes of the Geneva Bible. Unfortunately, that meant that the English-speaking church world, right from the days of Puritanism, didn't have access to the same sort of resources that the Statenvertaling provided to the Dutch laymen.
A good case could be made that the lack of marginal notes in English was a major contributor to the collapse of the Reformed faith in the late 1700s and early 1800s among people in North America who took the Bible seriously, compared to the experience of the Netherlands (or, for that matter, in confessional Lutheran circles in Germany where Lutheranism persisted much longer among pious laypeople).
A couple of generations later, things like the Scofield Reference Bible become popular in American evangelicalism less because of their content and more because they provided simple and easy-to-use marginal notes to the King James Version, and the consequences in spreading bad doctrine are obvious. A good set of Reformed marginal notes could be very useful to a lot of people who consider non-KJV translations to be suspect, thus spreading good doctrine instead of bad in church circles which use the KJV.
I'm not going to make the argument for the KJV. I think we all know the issues for and against it. I don't agree with KJV-onlyism, but I don't have a problem with the KJV, either. My personal position is that the KJV isn't a bad Bible, the underlying manuscripts are at least arguably better than the ones used by the RSV/ESV, and the literal-whenever-possible translation principles of the KJV are much better than the dynamic equivalence principles of the NIV. I think the archaic language presents a real problem for comprehension, but for a lot of Southern fundamentalists who grew up with the KJV, that's not a problem in the same way it would be trying to give the KJV to an unchurched kid on the streets of Seattle or New York City.
I do, however, believe that the lack of any other good study Bible using the KJV provides an opportunity to spread the Reformed faith in a large part of the fundamentalist world. We might as well use that opportunity, and our Reformed Baptist friends could be helpful in that regard. At the very least, the spread of this study Bible may make it a lot easier to talk to our fundamentalist brothers and sisters for whom our use of the NIV and ESV is a serious barrier since they've been taught that people who don't use the KJV have a low view of Scripture.
If the end result is a bunch of fundamental Baptists start becoming four- and five-point Calvinistic Baptists, that would be a very good thing.