IT fair takes your breath away. The Archbishop of Canterbury in his New Year message said we should read The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible (1611). This from a man who has for decades held high position in the church and presided over the sidelining of the KJV and The Book of Common Prayer.

This year’s commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the KJV will throw up some contradictions.

For instance at St Paul’s Cathedral I believe a great service of thanksgiving is planned. This at a place where they never use the KJV. I am fortunate. When I arrived at St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in 1998, I found we did not have a lectern Bible. I asked St Paul’s if I might borrow one of theirs. They were most generous: “Oh yes, keep it as long as you like. We never use it, except when royalty come – awkward people like that.”

That the KJV is almost universally neglected by the dumbed down modern Church of England should come as no surprise. It is a scandal nonetheless. For the KJV is the hallmark of religious English. The modern versions are illiterate and theologically inferior because the tawdry verbiage in which they are expressed cannot bear the weight of what scripture is actually saying.

The KJV tells us what is going on plainly and directly, without evasion or the desire for delicacy. So in describing bodily parts and functions it says: “They may eat their own dung and drink their own piss” (2 Kings 18: 27).

This is too much for the euphemistic New English Bible which turns “piss” into “urine”. But that word “urine” does not fit, because it has modern clinical-medical connotations: we think of taking samples of urine in sterilised small bottles to the doctor’s surgery, but pissdrinking is an unmistakably unpleasant prospect.

In Yorkshire I have heard men describe a poor pint of bitter as “weasel piss”.

Modern translations such as the Revised Standard Version love to parade the translators’ acquaintance with the slightest nuances in the ancient languages but their utter ignorance of what will go into ordinary English.

The RSV renders the “giants” of Genesis as “nephilim” – to the confusion, one supposes, of elderly ladies everywhere. And the “two pence” which the Good Samaritan gave to the innkeeper as “two denarii” – lest we should imagine that the currency of the Roman Empire was the same as that of England, pre-decimalisation.

In the same way (in case we should think of brass bands in the park), St Paul’s “sounding brass and tinkling cymbal” (I Corinthians 13: 1) is given as “noisy gong or a clanging cymbal”.

This busy-bodying and tinkering with what has always been understood, utterly spoils the effect because it destroys both image and rhythm.

The RSV makes a habit of iconoclasm, as for instance in its destruction of that familiar phrase from St Mark 2: 12: “Arise, take up thy bed and walk.”

The drama, the imagery and therefore all the immediacy of Christ’s command is absent from the RSV’s version which reads: “Take up your pallet and go home.” Because we must on no account be allowed to imagine that the poor paralytic slunk off carrying his four-poster, we have forced upon us the literalism “pallet”

– which merely sounds like instructions to a sloppy painter.

What then is to be done?

Ask the churchwardens to chuck out the illiterate modern stuff, dust off the old lectern Bible and put it in its rightful place again.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.