KJVO: A PNG Perspective

One of the major languages in Papua New Guinea is Melanesian Pidgin, and although there is a movement in portions of the country for people to learn English this is not always the case…especially in the Highlands area and wasn’t always that way in the early days of missionary work.

When I was a teenager, I learned to speak the language, read it and write it too. I communicated with some of the brethren in PNG on a regular basis and even did some translation work for our home church. My grandfather, Pastor James Hobbs gave me a copy of the Bible on the left (“Buk Baibel”). It was the one he had used in Papua New Guinea when he visited there on several occasions. The one on the right (“King Jems Pisin Baibel”) is one that Missionary Peter Halliman gifted to me recently when he came visited our church.

Is there a difference? Yes there is, and here in the States it would be the subject of a big controversy in some circles..

From the 1950s until the year 2014 the only Bible available in Pidgin was the Buk Baibel, and it is equivalent of our Modern English text, complete with the so-called “missing verses.” And yet as Missionaries like Fred T. Halliman ministered there, and later his son Peter A. Halliman (and others) there were people saved and churches being organized as they preached from that Bible…a Bible that here in the States some would call a “perversion.”

Did you get that?

People were saved.

Baptized.

Churches were organized.

Sound Baptist Churches.

Sovereign Grace Missionary Landmark Baptist Churches.

If the “King James Version Only” (KJVO) position is true, none of that could have been possible until 2014. The reality is, the KJVO position is a made up tradition of men that really makes no logical, Biblical or historical sense! Think about it!