Honestly as a Southern Baptist, I think the idea that the King James Bible is the perfect and one true Bible weird, because the Bible's original languages being Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, and the King James Bible, while a good translation, is a seventeenth century translation into English.
English is known to be a complicated, hybrid amalgamation of the Celtic languages, the Germanic languages, Latin, Norman French, Greek, and loanwords from several other languages (I've taken two History of the English Language classes in college). So while translations, even back then, could get the original words and contexts right 98-99% of the time, some things are certain to get lost or confused in translation. That's why I can't understand the logic that the KJV somehow improved on the original Greek. An interesting fact as well, is that the original 1611 KJV Bible included the Apocrypha, which most Protestant denominations, including the Baptist denomination, do not consider canon.
Not to mention, there have been multiple English translations of the Bible before the KJV, several from which the KJV took inspiration and copied, for example:
- The Tyndale Bible (1534; the first complete printed Bible translated into English),
- The Coverdale Bible (1535),
- The Matthew Bible (1537),
- The Great Bible (1539),
- Taverner's Bible (1539),
- The Geneva Bible (1560),
- The Bishop's Bible (initially produced in 1568, then revised in 1572 and 1602),
- and, for Catholic English-speakers, because most of these ones above were Protestant Bibles, The Douay-Rheims Bible (DRV) (the New Testament for this version was published in 1582, but the Old Testament in this version was published in 1609-1610).
That being said, I think the KJV is a good and poetic translation. I just think it's odd that people think it's the One and Only Bible that English speakers, or anyone else, should use and that not using the KJV reflects badly on one's faith. Feel free to correct me if I made any errors.