In this series, I examine Wes Huff’s main arguments on the YouTube podcast “Cultish” against King James Onlyism. Huff takes a neutral stance on Bible translations, favoring evidence and textual criticism. Without careful analysis, a believer might be swayed by Huff’s calm, professional demeanor, which hides a flawed worldview that rejects Divine revelation in Scripture.
False Friends
Wes Huff borrows from fellow Bible Agnostic, Mark Ward, to develop this next argument against God’s preserved words in the English language. Mark Ward’s argument against the KJV focuses on readability and linguistic shift. He claims 400 years of English evolution have produced “false friends”, words that deceive modern readers who mistakenly think they understand them.
Citing 1 Corinthians 14, Ward argues that spiritual edification requires intelligibility. Consequently, he concludes that willfully giving an unintelligible KJV to a child—when clear modern translations are readily available—is a refusal to do good, ultimately making it a sin.
Here’s Huff’s Argument
Taking his cue, Wes Huff argues that the natural evolution of English and the presence of “false friends” (words with shifted meanings) obscure God’s word, necessitating modern translations for intelligibility. In other words, because language inevitably changes, modern readers navigating archaic 17th-century vocabulary will misunderstand, thereby violating the biblical principle that the text must be clearly understood to be obeyed.
The Problem With This Logic
Huff assumes the authority of God’s word is subject to the unstable, shifting sands of modern conversational English, rather than elevating the reader to a stable “Biblical English”. Purely relying on human reading competence while ignoring the Holy Spirit as the active Author and interpreter is a fundamental category mistake.
Huff commits some rather glaring fallacies in his reasoning:
1. The Epistemological Fallacy (Autonomous Humanism)
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The Error: Assuming biblical understanding relies on modern linguistic ease rather than the Holy Spirit’s illumination.
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The Breakdown: Huff conflates intellectual readability with spiritual discernment. He assumes modernizing the vernacular automatically guarantees comprehension. This ignores biblical epistemology (1 Corinthians 2:14), which teaches that the things of God are “spiritually discerned.” The true prerequisite for understanding Scripture is the Holy Spirit dwelling in the believer, not a 21st-century reading level.
2. The Fallacy of Equivocation (Misusing “False Friends”)
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The Error: Inappropriately applying a concept meant for foreign language translation to historical English.
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The Breakdown: A “false friend” is a term used when translating between two distinct languages. Huff falsely equates this with the natural historical progression of English. Older KJV usages (like “study” in 2 Timothy 2:15) aren’t deceptive tricks; they are simply historical words requiring a dictionary and contextual study.
3. The Homo Mensura Fallacy (Man as the Measure of Truth)
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The Error: Replacing Scripture’s self-defining authority with modern, secular dictionaries as the ultimate standard.
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The Breakdown: Huff makes shifting cultural vernacular the judge over God’s word. Instead of letting the Bible act as its own built-in dictionary, he demands it bow to modern lexicographers. This creates an “Authority Vacuum,” reducing absolute truth to whatever contemporary dictionaries dictate.
4. The Red Herring Fallacy
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The Error: Using “readability” to distract from underlying manuscript corruptions in modern versions.
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The Breakdown: Huff’s hyper-focus on archaic words distracts from the core issue: the underlying Greek manuscripts. By arguing over whether a child understands specific words, one avoids defending why modern Bibles delete entire verses (like Acts 8:37). The readability argument acts as a smokescreen to justify replacing the pure Received Text with the corrupted Alexandrian Critical Text.
The Analysis – A Bad Argument
What sounds like a powerfully persuasive argument is unsound because it falsely equates effortless reading with true comprehension, dismissing the divine requirement for spiritual discernment and rigorous study.
Biblical & Logical Deconstruction:
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The King James Bible utilizes “Linguistic Submission,” molding the English language to precisely map the concrete, formal structure of Hebrew and Greek, rather than paraphrasing to fit modern cultural flow.
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God’s truth is fixed at the word level (Ps. 12:6,7; Prov. 30:5); updating the Bible to match fluid modern definitions replaces translation with subjective human interpretation (Dynamic Equivalence).
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Doctrinal intelligibility should be the metric, not readability. (2 Tim. 3:16, 4:2; Titus 1:9, 2:1)
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Because the Holy Spirit is the Author and interpreter of Scripture (Gen. 40:8; 2Pet. 1:21), understanding comes through spiritual illumination (1Cor. 2:13) and comparing Scripture with Scripture, not mere natural reading competence.
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When a word’s modern meaning diverges from the biblical text, the believer must submit to and learn the biblical definition, rather than rewriting the word of God (2 Tim. 2:15).
Scriptural Authority:
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“Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” (2 Timothy 2:15).
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“Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.” (1 Corinthians 2:13).
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“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” (1 Corinthians 2:14).
How Do We Respond?
Here are some responses a believer might use to address this Biblical and logical mistake:
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We do not downgrade the pure word of God to match our decaying modern vocabulary; we elevate our vocabulary to match the pure word of God.
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The King James Bible is not written in 17th-century street slang, but in a precise, formal “Biblical English” designed to perfectly mirror the underlying biblical languages.
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Relying solely on modern reading comprehension without trusting the Holy Spirit to interpret His own word is a category mistake of the highest order.
Challenging Questions:
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If a medical or legal textbook contains difficult terminology, do you rewrite the science, or do you expect the student to learn the vocabulary?
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By what objective standard do you decide which words have evolved “too much” and need changing, and which should remain?
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If we must constantly update the Bible to match fluid modern culture, doesn’t that make the culture the final authority over what God is allowed to say?
“For the Scriptures are understood by the same means that other human writings are understood… except in this: that there is a singular light of the Spirit that is always to be sought by the godly in the Scriptures.” – William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (Chapter 34, Thesis 26)
“There is a blindness, a darkness, upon the minds of men… that not only disenables them from discerning the things of God, in their certainty, evidence, necessity, and beauty… but also causes them to judge amiss of them… This darkness then must be removed by the communication of light by the Holy Ghost.” – John Owen, The Divine Original of the Scriptures
“Fifthly, and most important of all, we must earnestly ask God in prayer to open our blind eyes to the meaning of the Scriptures: ‘Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things from Your law’.” attributed to – William Ames & William Whitaker (commentary of Psalm 119)