In the context of newly written work in the modern era, I would argue it's best to use grammatical constructions that are used in modern 20th/21st century English, at least most of the time. Those who wrote the KJV were trying to be expressive but the whole point was to do so in language that ordinary people would be familiar with.

> the first strikes me as being written by someone that might be smarter than I am

This is why Joseph Smith tried to imitate the language of the King James Bible in the Book of Mormon, albeit not very successfully.