Why People Struggle with the KJV and How to Fix It

One of the reasons Mark Ward’s false friends argument seems so persuasive is that it appears at first glance to be consistent with the personal experience of many of those who use the KJV in ministry.  I’ve had several people read my book, admit that they can’t refute my arguments, and then tell me that they still think Ward is correct because they personally know people who struggle to understand the KJV.  I’ve addressed these responses individually, but they’ve become so common that I thought it would be good to write a full-length article explaining why this line of reasoning fails to support Mark Ward’s claim.

Let’s start by defining what is meant by the term false friend.  When Mark Ward uses this term, he is referring to a word in the KJV whose older sense has become so obsolete that modern readers have no way of understanding what was originally intended by the translators.  As I pointed out in my book False Friends and True Enemies, this is not a nebulous claim about subjective personal experience.  It’s a quantifiable claim about the current state of English literature.  Ward is claiming that a specific list of words in the English language no longer mean what they meant 400 years ago.  That claim can be measured and tested just like we can measure and test the claim that the migratory pattern of a particular bird species changes over time or the claim that one part of town has a higher rate of crime than another.  These are specific quantifiable claims that can be measured and then tested to see if they are true, and that is what I did with Mark Ward’s claims in my book.
 
Now, let’s take the examples I just gave of crime statistics and migratory patterns for birds and consider what kinds of answers we might find if we did not base those answers on careful tests and measurements.  What if we based our conclusions solely on our own personal experiences?  If we did that, a man who placed a bird feeder in his yard might conclude after a few years that a bird species which used to fly south for the winter no longer does so because he now sees birds of that species in his yard all year round.  At the same time, a man without a bird feeder who lives two or three houses over might conclude that the same species of bird has changed its spring and summer habitat because he is seeing fewer and fewer of them in his yard each year.  Two men observing the effect of the first man putting out a feeder could come to opposite conclusions by relying solely on their own personal experience instead of comparing their observations to a larger body of evidence.
 
The same phenomenon can be seen in crime statistics.  A man who was robbed twice in his last ten visits to a particular city might reasonably assume the city suffers from a high rate of crime.  Another man who has lived in that city for many years without ever being robbed might reasonably assume that it has a low rate of crime.  The same men observing activity in the same city could come to opposite conclusions if relying solely on their own personal experiences.  It could be that the city has a lower than average crime rate, but the man who was robbed had angered someone who lived there.  It could also be true that the city has a higher than average crime rate, but the man who lives there is so highly respected that none of the criminals wish to harm him.  Neither man can judge which of these two possibilities is true if he only considers his own experience.
 
The truth is not subjective in either of these two examples, but the data required to learn the truth is far greater than the experience of any single individual.  The migratory pattern of an entire species of birds is often measured across thousands and thousands individual birds.  The number of birds observed in a single backyard is not sufficient evidence to generate a conclusion about the habits of the entire species.  Similarly, crime rates are generally calculated by dividing the number of reported or recorded crimes in a given area by the area’s population. The results are usually given as crimes per 100,000 residents.  The personal experience of a single individual does not provide sufficient evidence to draw conclusions about the crime rate of an entire city.
 
The same principle applies directly to claims about English vocabulary. Whether or not a particular sense of a word has become obsolete is not a matter of how many confused readers a person happens to encounter over the years. It’s a measurable fact about how a word is actually used across the full range of English speech and writing, which means it requires the same kind of aggregated evidence that ornithologists and criminologists rely on. Just as a single backyard cannot tell you how an entire species migrates, and a single traveler's experience cannot tell you the crime rate of a city, a handful of conversations with puzzled readers cannot tell you whether a given sense for a word has vanished from the English language.
 
What would the equivalent of a banding study or a crime report look like for a question about vocabulary? It would look like a search across large collections of contemporary literature, gathered from many different sources and contexts, to see whether a given sense of a word still shows up. Large literary databases like the NOW Corpus, the Internet Archives, Google Books, and Google Scholar serve this function for the English language. They aggregate usage from newspapers, court opinions, novels, magazines, and countless other sources, which allows a researcher to check whether a particular sense of a word is still active or has genuinely faded from circulation. 
 
This is exactly what I did in my book False Friends and True Enemies.  I didn’t just “ask around” as Ward claimed he did for one of his supposed false friends.  I didn’t just look up the word in a dictionary as he did for several other false friend claims, and I didn’t just rely on my own personal recollection of a word as Ward did on at least one occasion.  I compiled data from thousands of published sources to come to a proper, scientifically valid conclusion.
 
In spite of this, I still get responses from people insisting that Ward’s basic premise must be true.  For example, I’ve heard from more than one pastor who has told me that conducting Bible studies with lost individuals progresses much faster and results in better comprehension if a modern version is used instead of the KJV.  This kind of testimony feels compelling precisely because it comes from direct, repeated, personal observations. But personal observation, however often it’s repeated, still suffers from the same limitations described above with the bird feeder and the city crime rate. Bible studies conducted by one pastor with a small number of people is not a random sample of readers, and differences in comprehension during a single study session can arise from dozens of variables that have nothing to do with vocabulary, including the reader's prior familiarity with the passage, his general reading level, his comfort with the pastor leading the study, or simply the mood he happened to be in that day. None of that can be sorted out from a handful of personal observations, however consistent those observations may feel to the person making them.
 
Nonetheless, these anecdotal accounts are not just figments of the imagination.  There are real people who struggle with reading the KJV, and I’m not dismissing that fact.  What my book proves is that the cause of that confusion has nothing to do with false friends or language change.  Ward’s claims only seem to fit the evidence until the evidence is actually studied.  The condition Ward describes is real. The cause he assigns to it is not, and solutions to a mythical cause will always end up failing.  Our first priority must be identifying the true cause of the problem, and there is a known candidate with actual scientific evidence to support it.
 
For many decades, American public schools have taught reading using some version of the whole language method, an approach that trains children to recognize words as whole shapes and guess at unfamiliar words from context and pictures rather than sounding them out letter by letter. This approach, sometimes called whole word or look-say, placed the emphasis on guessing over decoding like the way the Dick and Jane readers repeated words frequently so students could memorize them by sight. Rudolf Flesch raised concerns about this approach as early as 1955 in his book Why Johnny Can't Read, arguing that a large share of American third graders couldn’t decode words in print that they already used comfortably in speech, since their instruction had trained them to guess at whole words rather than sound out unfamiliar ones. A government formed National Reading Panel concluded in 2000 that explicit phonics instruction was essential to teaching children to read, but what followed was an informal compromise known as balanced literacy that retained much of the guessing based approach alongside limited phonics instruction, and many colleges have continued preparing new teachers under that compromise model. The 2022 podcast series “Sold a Story” further documented how popular reading curricula built on these methods conflicted with decades of research on how children actually learn to read, and the resulting attention has pushed roughly two dozen states to pass laws mandating phonics based reading instruction in recent years.
 
Unfortunately, a large share of adults who came through American public schools over the last several decades were trained to guess at unfamiliar words from context rather than decode them letter by letter. That approach works reasonably well against the simple, repetitive words that the average factory worker is likely to see on the job, but any reader using this method in an unfamiliar setting will struggle to understand what he is reading no matter what vocabulary is used.
 
The word apt offers a clear illustration of how this plays out. A man taught to read using the whole language method has learned to determine a word's meaning primarily from familiarity with the subject matter surrounding it rather than from a reliable understanding of the word itself. When this man comes across the word apt in sports journalism, he finds the word surrounded by a large number of contextual clues. An ESPN article describing a player as apt to finish at the rim likely includes pictures and videos of players successfully getting the ball through the hoop.  This points the reader toward the skill-related sense of the word almost automatically. A reader can guess correctly in this setting without ever possessing a settled definition of the word apt, because the surrounding material carries him to the right conclusion.
 
When I Timothy 3:2 lists apt to teach among the qualifications of a pastor, it does so without any of the topical familiarity that modern readers have become dependent on.  The reader finds himself struggling with a passage whose subject is outside his normal, day-to-day experience.  His brain has been trained to lean on familiar subject matter to fill in gaps in his vocabulary, and when that familiar terrain is missing, the words become harder to understand.
 
Reading comprehension under the whole language method is limited by whatever material the reader happens to encounter repeatedly. A machinist who reads equipment manuals and watches football will build a different reading profile than an accountant who reads market reports and watches historical documentaries. Whole language instruction effectively outsources reading comprehension to each person's individual media diet, and that diet varies from household to household and career to career.  This naturally leads to the situation we now find ourselves in.  Two readers, each with comparable general reading ability could still respond very differently to the same KJV word depending on their familiarity with the subject matter of the passage.
 
This creates a prediction that can be checked against the data. If Ward is correct, and the difficulty of understanding the KJV is caused by false friends, then we would expect that difficulty to be uniform.  A word that is misunderstood by one person should be misunderstood by practically everyone who reads it regardless of where the word occurs and regardless of the background of the reader.  If the whole language method of reading instruction is the cause of this difficulty, then we would expect individuals to differ widely in which words they find hard to understand based on their familiarity with the subject matter in which the word is found.  I’m still compiling evidence to fully test this prediction, but the facts gathered so far are leaning heavily in favor of the second option.
 
None of this leaves a pastor without options, and the research on remediating the effects of the whole language method points toward two different solutions depending on the timeframe available. The long-term fix comes from the classroom rather than the pulpit. Over the last two decades, a large body of research has documented that explicit, systematic instruction in phonics, vocabulary, morphology, and syntax produces stronger readers than the guessing approach of the whole language method. Where schools and legislatures have adopted this approach, entire generations of readers stand to gain the capacity to read the KJV or any other demanding text without leaning heavily on contextual guesswork.
 
The scale of this problem extends well beyond American classrooms. Whole language became a dominant model for reading instruction across most of the English-speaking world during the 1980s and 1990s, taking hold in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom alike, despite lacking any scientific support. Reform is underway in several of these countries. England has moved furthest toward phonics-based instruction, and New Zealand's government withdrew funding from their whole language programs starting in 2025. Australia, Canada, Scotland, and the United States have each made partial progress toward the same goal, but none of these reforms are complete, and millions of adult readers across the globe came through schooling that trained them to guess at a word’s meaning rather than decoding it. This system did not produce readers. It produced entire generations who simply guess at a word’s meaning until they land on something that sounds right, and the only real solution to this is a return to phonics-based teaching in public schools.
 
However, that solution does nothing to help the individual sitting across the table from a pastor in a Bible study, which is why the more immediate solution runs through the same principle already noticed with ESPN’s use of the word apt. Heavy contextual scaffolding around an unfamiliar word can help a reader grasp it correctly, and a church can build that scaffolding deliberately the same way a sports article surrounds apt with pictures and highlight reels. A study Bible with brief marginal notes on words like apt, let, or convenient supplies the kind of contextual support a reader's whole language training has taught him to depend on. A pastor who spends a few minutes before a Bible study walking through the handful of words in a passage that might be less familiar to the reader accomplishes the same thing. Because the vocabulary gaps are idiosyncratic rather than uniform, this instruction works best when it responds to the specific words a given reader stumbles over. This approach mirrors what structured literacy research already recommends for closing vocabulary gaps in the classroom.
 
Replacing the KJV with a new translation will not solve the problem of poor reading comprehension.  That solution might work if the problem were something uniform like Ward’s proposed false friends, but if the problem is idiosyncratic according to the various careers and media diets of each individual reader, then using a different translation won’t really solve anything.  I mentioned in my book that “full capitulation to Ward’s position would require us to produce a new translation every few years to conform to the collective idiolect of the culture,” but using new translations to solve the problems caused by the whole language method, would require us to produce separate translations for each possible combination of an individual’s upbringing, career, and media habits. That’s even less of a workable solution. 
 
Instead of wasting time with easy “solutions” that don’t address the underlying problem, we should be focused on implementing the more difficult solution that actually works.  Yes, it takes a lot of work for believers to teach those around them how to properly read and understand the Bible, but Christians have accepted that responsibility in the past and produced some of the most biblically literate populations the world has ever known.  The only thing preventing us from doing it again is our own laziness.