The words of the King James Version can bring you remarkably close to the original text of the Bible—if you use all your resources. If you've ever studied Latin, for example, you could start with that. Or you could remember the Latin roots you've met in English, with help perhaps from other languages, like French or Spanish. Sometimes we forget how much closer English people of King James's time were to Latin—partly through church Latin and the Vulgate (the famous old Latin translation of the Bible used all through the Middle Ages), but partly too through the Norman French of their own country's background.

Latin won't take you all the way, of course, to the meaning of a Bible word (you'd need Hebrew or Greek for that) but it can often steer you in the right direction.

It's well to remember that many words in the KJV have moved a long way since the seventeenth century. Often they've evolved from a general meaning—close to their Latin root—to something much more specific. A specific modern meaning may take you off on a sidetrack, away from what the Bible is actually saying. On the other hand, sticking with the Latin root—and you'll find you know more of these roots than you think, even if English is your only language— may bring you very close to the underlying Hebrew or Greek word.

Take "mansions," for example. We've all loved that saying of Christ Jesus to his disciples when he knew he had to leave them: "In my Father's house are many mansions.... I go to prepare a place for you" (John 14:2). Was he picturing big, sumptuous buildings?

Jesus' image is actually less grand, and less materially formulated. "Mansion," like "manor" and "manse" (and maison in French), comes from the Latin verb maneo, meaning "stay or remain"—just that. So these "mansions" in the Gospel were still quite intelligible to seventeenth-century people as "places where one stays." That's why there can be mansions in the Father's house.

So far we've been looking at the English word the King James translators decided to use. What was the Greek word they had before them in the original text? They made a neat choice, because the Greek word is also from a verbal root meaning "stay or remain." It is the noun monè, meaning basically "staying-or abiding-place, abode."

This Greek word is used just one other time in the Bible—in verse 23 of the same chapter of John—where it records another of Jesus' great promises: "If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode [monè] with him." Putting these two passages together, we can learn something quite significant about our mansion and about how to be there and stay there.

How could you find all this out for yourself? You might look up John 14:2 in other English translations. The Revised Standard Version, for example, exchanges "mansions" for "rooms," taking its cue from the fact that these abiding-places are in the Father's house. Though correct, that's already a little more specific than it needs to be. The New English Bible preserves the broader range of meaning, in this instance, with its translation: "dwelling-places."

Or you could go deeper and use Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, which is available in many Christian Science Reading Rooms. ^{James Strong, The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (New York: Abingdon).} If you look up "mansions" in Strong's, you will find a number that keys in with the Greek dictionary at the back. And after the meaning of the Greek word given there, you will also discover—following a colon and dash—a list of the English words the KJV uses to translate it. There you will see not only "mansion" but "abode," leading you to John 14:23. This is one way you can learn how the Bible uses any Greek or Hebrew word and begin to get a feeling for its meaning.

In the next article, we'll be looking at the word "prevent" in the KJV. You know what it means—or do you really? You might like to look up some passages where it occurs and judge for yourself.