In Matthew 16:13, the King James Version reads:
13 When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?
This is clearly different from other English translations, such as the NIV:
13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
The major difference is that the KJV uses the word “whom”, while every other English translation (including the New King James Version) uses “who”.
Who vs. Whom
Now, if you’re like most people, you’ve got no clue when to actually use “whom” in a sentence, and you probably don’t really care.
So, to give you a really easy way to figure it out, there’s one quick little test you can use.
If you can restructure the question as a statement, using the word “he”, then the correct word is “who”. And if you can use the word “him”, then “whom” is correct.
As an example:
You can look at the sentence “Who said that?”. We can rephrase it as a statement: “He said that.”, so the word “who” is correct in that sentence.
Then, we can look at the sentence “Whom did he hit?”. We can rephrase that as “He hit him.”, so the word “whom” is correct.
If you want to get into the fancy grammar terminology, this is because “who” is in the subjective case, and “whom” is in the objective case.
Whom in the KJV
So, back to the KJV.
Let’s apply this quick test we just learned to the translation of Jesus’ question in the KJV.
“Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?”
First, let’s just drop out the appositive, “Son of man”, to make this sentence a bit easier to handle:
“Whom do men say that I am?”
We can restructure this sentence as “Men say that I am he.” (If you’re confused about why it’s correct to say “I am he” but not “I am him”, just trust me on it. It’s due to something called a “predicate adjective”, which has to match the subject in case.)
Well, according to our test, since “he” works in the sentence but not “him”, we should use the word “who”.
So, why does the KJV say “whom” when that’s grammatically incorrect?
Pretty much, in some other languages, including Greek and Latin, there’s something called the “accusative plus the infinitive”. This is a grammar rule that sounds very foreign in English but is entirely normal in Latin and Greek.
To give you an example of how the “accusative plus the infinitive” works, look at the two following English sentences:
(normal sentence) “Who do men say that I am?”
(accusative plus the infinitive) “Whom do men say me to be?”
In the original Greek, a literal translation would look closer to the second option. And, this would fit with our rule from before because we could reword it as “Men say him to be…” It sounds really weird in English, but it technically is grammatically correct.
So, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “whom” could sometimes be used in the way that the KJV uses it, because of influence from both Latin and Greek. Specifically, it says that the use of whom is a “partial imitation of the accusative [plus the] infinitive construction in the biblical source”.
And Matthew 16:13 is not the only place that the King James Version uses whom like this. You can also find it in places like Mark 8:27 and Luke 9:20.
In the end, it is technically a grammar error to use whom in the way shown in the KJV. But, it seems like it was an intentional error, where they just wanted to give a weird sounding, somewhat literal translation.