“Mr. Mike, 'seeing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you, and to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power; when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be admired in all them that believe (because our testimony among you was believed) in that day.' That’s in 2 Thessalonians , chapter 1, verses 6 through 10.” (MAAS ch. 3)
I stumbled over the meaning of 2 Thessalonians 1:7 where the King James Version (KJV) reads, “And to you who are troubled rest with us,…”
I did not understand "troubled rest with us" --- the rest of who? Is this a sentence? Is "rest" a verb? Troubled rest? Is there a comma missing? What does this even mean? Although the context helps to determine the meaning, it could have been clearer with more punctuation. If you translate the Greek into the same word order and throw in some punctuation, it might have said: “Seeing [it is] just(right) that God render: to them that trouble you, trouble; and to you, the troubled, rest, with us when shall be revealed the Lord Jesus…” So punctuation makes a big difference in our ability to understand what the meaning might be.
But even though the King James version is sometimes hard to understand, not everything about the KJV is bad. Yes, it’s full of thees and thous, but every one of those thees and thous is singular. It's the yous that are plural. We don’t have that kind of clarity in modern English which uses "you" for both singular and plural. And occasionally the punctuation in the KJV is better than more modern versions. For example, reading on in verses 7b-8a, the KJV says: “…when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, 8 In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God,…” But there is a wide variety of differences in both punctuation and verse placement in other versions ---
KJV: “…with his mighty angels, 8 In flaming fire taking vengeance…
NASU: “…with His mighty angels in flaming fire, 8 dealing out retribution…”
ASV: “…with the angels of his power in flaming fire, 8 rendering vengeance…”
BBE: “…with the angels of his power in flames of fire, 8 To give punishment
Douay-Rheims: “…with the angels of his power: 8 In a flame of fire, giving vengeance…”
ESV: “…with his mighty angels 8 in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance…”
NIV: “…in blazing fire with his powerful angels. 8 He will punish…”
[Note: KJV=King James Version, NASU=New American Standard Updated, ASV=American Standard Version, BBE=Bible in Basic English, ESV=English Standard Version, NIV=New International Version]
So, it looks like the more modern versions have placed both Jesus and his mighty angels in flaming fire. Only the KJV and Douay-Rheims (a Catholic version) use both punctuation and verse placement to put the flames of fire onto those receiving the vengeance from God.
But what does the Greek say? A word for word translation in the order of the Greek words, without punctuation, might look like this: “... the Lord Jesus from heaven with angels mighty his in fire flaming taking vengeance on-they not that-know God…”. So where would you put the “in flaming fire”? It falls in between "his mighty angels" and "taking vengeance". It is up to the translators where to put the comma. Should the punctuation be "his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance..." or should it be "His mighty angels in flaming fire, taking vengeance..."? I would side with the KJV on this.
The point is that, while the King James Version is awkward and sometimes hard to understand, even using more modern versions we still have to use our brains and whatever other tools are at our disposal to interpret the meaning of the Bible for ourselves. Which is one of the main points in the book, Muscle and a Shovel --- Read it yourself. We cannot always trust the translators to get the words right, or the printers to get the punctuation right, or the preachers to interpret it correctly all of the time. But thanks be to God, He does not save us based on the perfection of our own knowledge and understanding of everything in the Bible.
The book Muscle and a Shovel, however, appears to disagree with this --- it incorrectly assumes that all anyone has to do is simply read the Bible to come to the same interpretations that they have come to. The apostle Paul, in chapter 14 of Romans, would beg to differ.
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