“How can I avoid the appearance of evil?”
Let me take a wild guess here: you read from the King James
Version of the Bible.
Actually, it’s not really that wild a guess. If we use the
very convenient BibleHub website to take a
look at a broad
spectrum of English translations of 1 Thessalonians 5:22 (which
is where the phrase “the appearance of evil” originates), we find only six of the
28 versions listed there translate it that way, and three of those are King
James variants. Of those six, the KJV is by far the most widely read, so this
rendering of the verse is still very common today despite being more than a
little misleading to modern readers.
