KJV Onlyism Followup

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Our Father and our God, we thank you for the opportunity to come into this comfortable room and to be taught about your Word.
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And today, Lord, as we look at the history of the transmission of the Word and we follow up the sermon from last week, Lord, we just ask that you would give us clarity of thought.
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I pray that you would give me clarity as I seek to teach, keep me from error, O God, as I am certainly susceptible to teaching error and preaching error.
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And Lord, as we look again at a subject that is so rife with emotional content, I pray that you would just drive us back to the truth, for your Word is the truth, and we have confidence that when we are seeking out the truth, that you, O Lord, by your Spirit will reveal it to us.
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We thank you, Lord, for all these things, in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen.
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Well, as I said, in the month to come, I'm not going to be teaching this class.
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During March, Mr.
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Lee Frazier is going to be teaching for me, so I did not want to start another section of the book that we're studying, only to stop halfway through the lesson and then have to pick up a month from now, because that would be not advantageous for everyone in the learning atmosphere.
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So what I said last week was, because I sort of had a Sunday in limbo, which is today, last Sunday in February, I wanted to follow up my sermon from last week, and I'm going to give you opportunities to ask questions, but before we ask the questions, let me just sort of remind you of what we talked about in my message last week.
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We talked last week about the subject of King James-only-ism.
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Now by show of hands, and this certainly won't be interesting for anyone on the recording because no one's going to be able to see your hands over the audio, by show of hands, how many of you have ever personally had to deal with someone who took an extreme King James-only position? I mean, it was a big lengthy debate or anything, but...
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That you've had to deal with that? Well, I've heard someone say, well, I only believe in King James, and that was as far as it went.
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That was as far as it went.
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Okay, how about you? You said you've dealt with it? To what length have you? My mom didn't want me to read anything else.
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Okay.
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But then she bought like different versions.
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It was like certain versions I couldn't read, but King James was the best.
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Okay.
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That's how she like determined her belief at that time was she's the King James Christian.
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Basically, King James is the standard everything else must measure up to.
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If there was ever a difference, King James took priority.
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Makes sense.
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My mom was, during a Wednesday night lesson, I mentioned it in there about this idea, you know, that, you know, why that's a problem for so many people.
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It just touched on a few things, but it wasn't the focus of the thing.
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It was just in passing and talking about some other issues at the same time, and so that was where...
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And someone challenged you? Well, they didn't challenge me, but I knew that if I, I knew that it would probably ruffle a few feathers because there were those King James-only people in our, in our assembly there, you know? Gotcha.
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I also had it when I worked at Lifeway in Kentucky, I had to know somebody that pretty much believed Jesus spoke King James.
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Okay, that's funny.
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That's, that's, that's an interesting, that's one of the, yeah, I would say it's extreme, but it's extremely silly at that point.
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Because, but there are, I remember the guy very specifically saying, if it was good enough for Paul and Silas, it's good enough for me.
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It's like...
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I don't think they read that one.
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Huh? I don't think they read that one.
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Of course they don't.
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You know, I know, I know, but that's the, but that's the, I remember in my mind going, what you talking about, Willis? I mean, I looked at him like, is that what? Because, because I didn't realize if he even realized what he was saying.
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Yeah.
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The assumption he was making was that King James just is the Bible, and that is what Paul has, what Silas had, and it's what we're supposed to have, and that's a, that's a pretty extreme position.
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So you've never dealt with this at all, even in your school situation? I guess you're at Episcopal, so probably don't have too many independent fundamentalist Baptists at Episcopal.
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You might.
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I don't know.
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I don't even know.
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Okay.
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The kids have to have a Bible for Bible class, but that's middle school, and I don't teach middle school, so I don't know.
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Sure.
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Sure.
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And Miss Ruthie, you never dealt with it at all, huh? Well, I guess this lesson would be pretty boring for you guys, then.
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I'm sorry.
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I'm sorry.
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Well, it's funny.
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I guess part of the reason why it's such an issue for me is, one, I have literally been called a false teacher, because I don't preach out of the King James Bible.
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I've been, you know, I've had, I've had names, very serious accusations and names thrown at me, which have been, you know, discouraging, to say the least, to have someone call you a false teacher or a heretic or anything else.
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But the other side is knowing that there are people who would not even step foot into our church because of this issue, and it really is an issue that I think is so steeped in ignorance.
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It's an issue that is so steeped in a lack of understanding of basic history and how the text of the Bible has been preserved that, for me, it is a primary issue that we understand, even if it's something that we haven't necessarily dealt with on an individual level.
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It's an issue that the church has had to deal with, and particularly in the South, and I mentioned this, I think, in the sermon, was that, you know, particularly in the South, we have people who tend to hold on to certain traditions very strongly that aren't necessarily traditions anywhere else in the country, but the South tend to hold them a little bit more strongly.
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You know, we have our sweet tea, and we have our...
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You ever go anywhere else and order sweet tea, and they look at you like you're crazy? That's amazing.
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I don't understand why.
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Sweet tea's the best thing in the world, but that's...
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And then, see? And you make the face.
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But King James Onlyism, like I said, I have friends, and when I say friends, I mean I have people that I know that I believe are brothers in Christ, and they're good men, who would hold to a King James priority position.
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I don't think that any of those men would say that you can't be saved unless that you use the King James.
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The only ones that I know that are there are guys like I mentioned in my sermon, Stephen Anderson out in Arizona, Peter Ruckman, who is out in Pensacola.
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Are you familiar with him? Ruckman's my maiden name.
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I was like, what? Maybe.
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Hey, you might be related.
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He's off the chain, if you are.
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Tex Mars, I don't know if you've ever heard of him.
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He is a rabid King James Only cultist.
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I would call him a cultist.
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Even Kent Hovind, who has somewhat had a large bit of notoriety because of his creation science debates and things that he had, has recently come out as a very strong advocate for King James Onlyism, to the point that he's supporting Gail Ripplinger.
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And Gail Ripplinger wrote the book New Age Bible Versions, which is filled with errors, it's filled with all kinds of nonsense, and yet he comes out in absolute support of her.
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So it's funny how it sort of creates sort of a cultic mindset where we just sort of just grab a hold of anything.
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Yes? Do you actually see people that grew up using the American Standard and versions like that and then actually convert to King James Onlyism, even after knowing the history of the Bible and the way things go? Or mostly that doesn't happen? No, it can.
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Just like with anything, if you get the right person with the right words at the right time, people can be convinced of just about anything.
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And that's the scary part.
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It's just like I was preaching Wednesday night.
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We were in the book of James, and it talks about the power of the tongue, and that not everyone should be teachers, so teachers should be held to a stricter standard, and that the yet it has the power to do so much, just like a bit in the mouth of a horse can move the whole horse, and a rudder on the back of a ship can move the whole ship.
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The tongue has this great power within the body to do so much.
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And there are guys who have such a charismatic presence that when they teach on a subject like this and propose things that are, if you know the history behind them, you realize very quickly that it's not correct, but who knows their history? I mean, so few people know their history, and they've been using the New America Standard Bible or NIV for a long time, and somebody comes along and says, hey, you realize there's verses that are in the King James that are not in the NASB? And they say, oh, I didn't know that.
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Well, open it up to this verse, and they'll go there, and they'll see the whole verse is missing, or half a verse is not there that was in the King James.
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And they're making the assumption that the King James is right and everything else is wrong, which we talked about in the sermon last week.
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They're assuming from the beginning the priority of the King James without proving it.
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They're assuming it.
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So they come up, and they say, look, here, your Bible's missing this.
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In fact, the NIV is called by the King James only as the bloodless Bible, because there's a part where it talks about the blood of Jesus in the King James version.
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Well, the word blood is not in the NIV, so they call it the bloodless Bible.
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Well, it's only in one verse, and it's only in one verse where there's a textual variant as to whether or not the word blood is supposed to be there.
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It's not as if the NIV went through and cut out all references to blood of Jesus, but because of that one verse, they call it the bloodless Bible.
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And if you've never heard that, as I said to everyone last week, if you've never heard this stuff, and somebody comes to you with an argument that you can't refute because you've never even thought through it, it can be very easy to be led away or led astray.
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So have people been converted to KJV-onlyism? I would say yes.
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It's not necessarily a common thing, but it is something that...
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You know, you go out to Pensacola Christian College.
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They are all King James only.
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I remember I went out there for a Bible conference.
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It was not really a Bible conference.
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It was about how to create a private school.
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It was a private school conference that I went to, and while I was out there...
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It was with James, actually.
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James and I drove out there together, and while we were out there, we saw several bumper stickers.
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KJV 1611 only, and that was the bumper sticker.
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And it was more than once that we saw these cars driving around, and that was the position.
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That's the whole school's position.
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This is the Rachmanite campus, essentially.
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This is what they're teaching.
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So, like I said, it is a...
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And primitive Baptists tend to be hyper-Calvinists, too.
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They tend to be...
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They don't believe in evangelism and things like that, that God's going to save who He's going to save.
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So there's no...
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We really don't have any active participation in it.
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So, wow, yeah.
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What Mike said about the way that people are different, when did all the different translations start? It began in the 1800s.
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It began based on the work of Westcott and Hort, who were scholars who began to look at the manuscripts that predated the work of the King James Bible and began to work on more of an eclectic reading of the text.
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And that's really where it sort of started.
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And then from there, you start seeing newer versions start coming out in the mid-1900s.
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So the movement is a movement.
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It's less than 100 years old.
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It's very recent, though.
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Sure, it's less than 100 years old.
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King James...
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My grandmother, the first Bible she gave me was the King James Bible.
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And I didn't understand it.
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It didn't make any sense to me.
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But I think it makes more sense that people might be raised on the King James and then find another version that is a little easier to understand.
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Well, the way that people are converted the other way...
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Because it's easy.
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I imagine that that's easier.
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I agree with you.
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That a person might be raised on the King James and then later say, hey, the NIV is easier to read, the NASB is easier to read.
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For me, I would be easier to read this and be more likely to come out of King James-only-ism.
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But yet, the way people are brought into it and the way people are kept in it is with the rhetoric of, unless you're reading from the King James, you're not reading what God really said.
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And here's a good point that I think we should keep in mind.
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Translations of the Bible come in different types.
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And there aren't just categories, but there's a spectrum of categories as to how words are translated.
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So I usually draw it sort of like a speedometer, like this.
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And you think about how a speedometer in your car has a little arrow that moves back and forth.
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Well, on this side, you have what we would call the EL.
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EL would stand for Essentially Literal.
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On this side, far extreme the other way, you would have the P, which stands for Paraphrase.
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Now, in the middle, you would have something called the DE.
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The DE stands for Dynamic Equivalent.
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So you have Essentially Literal, Dynamic Equivalent, Paraphrase.
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Now, let me put a text to give you an idea.
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Under Essentially Literal, the KJV, the ESV, the NASB would all be Essentially Literal translations.
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Under Dynamic Equivalent, you have NIV, NLT, and a few others.
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But the two most popular that I know of are the NIV and the NLT.
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And I actually don't hate either one of those, by the way.
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There are some people who really hate on the New Living Translation.
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Yeah, sorry about that.
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Paraphrase, yep.
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You've got Living Bible, Message.
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There's one called Good News for Modern Man, but I think it's more of a Dynamic Equivalent.
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New American Standards over here.
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It's Essentially Literal.
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All right, so that's sort of the...
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But here's the thing.
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None of the Essentially Literal are without some Dynamic Equivalent, even the King James.
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I'm going to explain what that means in a few moments.
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But none of these are without some of this, and none of these are without some of this.
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So herein is a...
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there really is a fading spectrum.
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Paraphrases, I tend to be less...
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I don't use paraphrases at all.
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I'm just going to tell you.
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I don't use paraphrases at all.
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I don't find them to be helpful for me.
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The Living Bible does have some of the best Calvinistic wording in all the translations, though.
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It's not a translation, it's a paraphrase.
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If you read Romans 9 in the Living Bible, you're going to come away Calvinist if you've never read anywhere else.
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It's just, it's very Calvinistic language.
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I mean, they use words that are more typical to...
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But that proves the point, though, the paraphrase.
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It almost overly bends in that direction to the point where it's not the way it's supposed to be.
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The Message Bible is the Bible with the toothbrush, I think, has in it.
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One of the texts that says, you know, where Jesus says, take up your cloak or whatever and say, don't forget your toothbrush.
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It's really a silly paraphrase, almost, to the point of over-paraphrasing.
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Yeah, I look at paraphrases almost like commentaries.
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And they're typically not done by committee.
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And that's another thing that I think is very important for this.
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Your essentially literal translations are normally translated by a committee of translators.
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Your dynamic equivalent are normally done by a committee of translators.
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Your paraphrases are normally individual, you know.
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But that's not always the case.
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And I'll show you one specific.
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Go ahead, yeah.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So that's kind of, you know, that's kind of the way it goes.
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Very conversational.
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Very, very.
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But there's one called the Young's Literal Translation.
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It literally takes a word-for-word translation from the Greek.
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It's very difficult to read because Greek doesn't translate directly to English very well.
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But if you kind of want to know exactly what the words are in almost the exact order, it's not always in the right order, but pretty much.
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But that's, again, a single person's translation.
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It's not a committee.
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So anytime there's a time.
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See, with a committee, anytime there's a discrepancy, you can feel more confident that no one person's individual bias is going to be used to determine what word is translated at any point.
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Isn't it true also that there are certain words that don't really have an exact match in English? Yep.
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And there are words that are specifically transliterated.
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They are not translated.
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The word baptizo is not translated as wash or dip or immerse as it means.
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It's translated baptize.
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Baptize is not an English word.
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Baptize is a transliteration of a Greek word.
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Ekklesia is not translated assembly.
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It's translated church in most Bibles.
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And again, why? Because the tradition is that the ekklesia is the church.
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But the ekklesia means assembly.
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So it's interesting.
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So you could put down here Young's literal, but really Young's literal even goes further than the essentially literal to an almost fully literal, unreadable point.
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So it's not as good as these, I would say.
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Amplified Bible I would put in the paraphrase or at least around here because it adds words to try to add meaning.
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And while it's not always bad, it is somewhat dangerous in my mind because I've heard people like Joyce Meyer specifically uses it to try to make her point sometimes.
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In the Amplified it says this, and it's like, yeah, but that's not what it means.
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At least it's one of the most truly meaningful.
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Yeah, yeah, it's added too, of course.
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But the best example, I wish we still had the German young lady from, remind me? Lorena.
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I wish she was still here because she could remind me of this phrase.
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But there's a German phrase that helps me explain how this works.
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I don't remember the phrase in German, but in English it is directly translated, literally, morning hours have gold in their mouths.
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That's the phrase.
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Morning hours have gold in their mouths.
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What does that mean? Well, it's got to do with the morning, obviously.
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And morning hours have gold in their mouths is the direct translation of what the German phrase is.
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But what it means is the early bird catches the worm.
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So if I were translating that, I would have two choices.
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If I translated it essentially literally, I would translate it, morning hours have gold in their mouths, and it would be up to you to determine, well, what did I mean by that? Because the colloquial phrase is not normal here, so you would have to study the phrase to find out what it meant.
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Or if I translated it as a dynamic equivalent, I would translate it as the early bird catches the worm.
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Now you see how that could become dangerous.
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I prefer the essentially literal.
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If there's going to be a colloquial phrase, I'll figure out what it means.
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I'll study it, I'll look up the history of it, but I want to know what the original words were.
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I don't want to know what the original intent was, I want to know what the original words were, because this is where the NIV and NLT take liberties with translating not word for word, but what they call thought for thought.
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So they're not translating words, they're translating thoughts, and that's not really possible to do without any bias.
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So I don't think that for Bible study, the best translations are dynamic equivalent or paraphrase.
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I think the best translations for study are the essentially literal translations, but these can help.
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As I said, that would provide a commentary on this.
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So there are Bibles that you can buy that have different versions together, parallel Bibles, where it has the King James, the New American Standard Bible, the ESV, and they're all there.
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And if you want something like that, if you think that would help you, they're available.
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I think it's too much to carry.
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It sure is a lot.
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But again, most of you have cell phones now, so you're able to kind of jump back and forth between translations and look at them.
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But the King James onlyists, getting back to our original conversation, argue that the King James Bible is the only Bible, and it's the truest Bible, that none of the others are correct, and they make arguments.
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Oftentimes, they mark arguments against the NIV because this is going back to what you asked, when did all this start? Really, the NIV was the really emphasis.
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That's the one that's really hated so much is the NIV.
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The NRSV and the NASB also get a lot of hatred, but the NIV is like the one.
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In fact, Gail Rippinger does a thing with what she calls acrostic algebra, which she believes that God gave her, where she takes the NIV and the NASV, she changes it to NASV, in her book, instead of calling it the NASV, which she calls it everywhere else.
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At this point, she calls it the NASV, because it wouldn't work without it.
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And she takes AV for authorized version, and through a process called acrostic algebra, where you take out the A, and you take out the V, she gets SIN.
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So, how dumb is that? I love the face you just...
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But that's, again, she calls that acrostic algebra.
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It's not acrostic algebra.
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Yeah, I would just ask her, is it your sin by doing that? Yeah, it's sin that anybody even believes that.
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It's foolish, foolishness.
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But that's the kind of...
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But again, she was asked directly, well, why do you call it NASV here, but you call it NASB everywhere else? And she said, well, that's what God calls it.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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But you were saying? Well, I said that why is that held to such a high standard? It's almost like they consider them prophets.
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I would disagree with something you said, and not that I want to challenge you necessarily.
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When you said we have greater scholars than the past, based on what? Well, I would say this on that.
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I would say there are men from the past who have no equals.
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John Calvin wrote more lengthy and powerful writing than anyone of his day, and almost anyone since, as far as just the depth and weight and power of his writing.
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Men like Charles Spurgeon, Prince of Preachers, all of these men.
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But there are men today who are sound scholars, who are fine men, and who are, I would go as far as to say, more knowledgeable because they are standing on the shoulders of these giants.
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These men who have been so instrumental in paving the way have made it to where these men can rise up another level because of all the foundation work that was created for them.
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So to say that we had better scholars than the past, to say we maybe had more faithful men, but the guys who translated the King James Bible were working on manuscripts that were very few in number compared to guys like today, like Dr.
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Metzger and people like that, who are working with thousands of manuscripts, who have so much more information, so much more understanding of the Greek language.
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Archeology and all of these things have produced so much more information out of which to draw that we certainly cannot say that the people in the 1600s had as much information.
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Now, faithfulness, we don't doubt.
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Their fidelity to God and to the text, certainly.
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But as far as scholarship goes, we're at a point where there's so much information available.
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For instance, all of you today could go home.
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You could open up your computer and you could look at the Bible.
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You could look at Codex Sinaiticus for yourself.
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It's online.
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You can go and look at high-resolution photos of Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest handwritten manuscripts of the Bible.
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And you could look at it in high-resolution pictures.
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And guys who do study, who at the time of the 1600s couldn't have access because they were in different parts of the world.
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Some of them were locked away in monasteries.
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Some of them were not able to be seen.
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Now they're able to be seen by everyone.
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So we are in a different place that way.
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The Dead Sea Scrolls? No, no, no.
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The Dead Sea Scrolls were much later.
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So all of these things have been used.
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Like I said, there are guys like Dr.
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White, Dr.
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Metzger, and others who just have felt comfort, wrote a tremendous commentary on all the...
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In fact, if you want to know about any particular textual variant in the Bible, there's a book on my shelf by Philip Comfort.
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It's the textual commentary of the New Testament.
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It's this thick.
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Every text of the New Testament that has a variant, it will give you which manuscripts have it, which manuscripts don't, which manuscripts vary it this way, which manuscripts vary it that way.
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Verse by verse, every verse of the New Testament is in this book.
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So when I'm studying, if I come to a text that I know is a major textual variant, because there's a lot of textual variants that don't matter, by the way.
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And I really don't have the time I wish I could devote to this, but let me just say this.
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There are thousands of textual variants, but the vast majority of them, when I say vast majority, I mean like 99% of them.
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I'll be more conservative.
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Maybe like 90 to 95% of them have absolutely no meaning at all.
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Some of them can't even be translated into English is how they're variant because some of them are simply different spellings.
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Some of them are word order.
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Like is he Jesus Christ or is he Christ Jesus? Well, or the Lord.
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All of these things are textual variant.
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If you have one that says Christ Jesus, another that says Jesus Christ.
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If you have one that says Simon Peter, another one that just says Peter.
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These are all textual variants.
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So you see how quickly you get to thousands upon thousands of textual variants.
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But the ones that matter, the ones that actually change either a meaning or change the length or breadth of a text, those are the ones that when I come to them in my preaching, I stop and I go to that, I pull that commentary off my shelf or I actually have it on my computer too.
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I have Dr.
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Metzger's commentaries on it.
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I go and I pull those out and I say, okay, what is the variation? What are the differences? And what do the scholars believe? Or whether it's the internal evidence, external evidence? Because here's the thing too.
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When the Bible was written, it was almost immediately translated into other languages.
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So let's say we have the Greek that was written in the first century.
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Well, by the time you get to the second century, you have Syriac, Coptic, and all these other languages that are beginning to be translated.
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So I would ask the question, well, what does the Syriac say? What does the Coptic say? Not because they're correcting the Greek, but they're immediate responses to what was originally written.
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So if they're all saying one thing, it gives more weight to what that particular variant might be and which way to go with that variant.
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These are things that we really only recently, within relatively recent times, been able to examine all of that to see.
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They didn't all say the same exact thing every single time.
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It's not like they had their script.
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So even different languages could have gotten a different, a roundabout way to get a message.
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You know what I'm saying? Like the wording that they might have used in one place might have been not the exact same wording in another place, but it's all the same meaning.
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Yeah, and when we talk about the text versus verbal transmission, which verbal transmission is important too, we talk about the text, we know that Paul wrote Ephesians, for instance.
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And when he wrote Ephesians, it immediately begins to be copied.
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People begin to copy what he wrote.
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And then they begin to translate off that copy.
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And we don't believe anything was lost, but we do know that in handwritten translations there are variations, and so those variations have a source, and we find out what that source is.
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For instance, if I were to write a two-paragraph-like statement, and I were to take Jason and Mar- I'm looking at you, and I'm saying Jason.
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If I was looking at Mike and Jason, and Nishim, and I said, okay, you three guys are coming with me.
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I'm going to give you all this one copy, and all three of you are going to copy from it.
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All right? Is there a chance that one of them might make a mistake? Sure.
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Now let's say my original gets taken away, and you guys now have to give your copies out to them, and now they make copies.
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And now we take those copies, not your originals.
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You don't mean photocopies.
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Handwritten copies.
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Now we're going to go hand it to Jack Bunning's class, and he's going to take, and they're going to copy what you guys, the outside ring, wrote.
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Well, it's not the telephone game.
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Don't consider it the same, because here's the thing.
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Because it is written, we are able to trace variation.
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Because you can't do that with the telephone game.
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It's not the same, and I want to make sure this is clear.
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Because what's going to happen when you get to the last group of people that's copying over here? You're going to pick up theirs, and none of them are going to be exactly the same, but you will be able to reconstruct the original, because none of them are going to have the same variations, because where you varied, you didn't.
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And where he varied, you didn't.
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And because we have copious copies, we're able to reconstruct the original based on the copies.
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We have 5,700 handwritten manuscripts of various size and length that still exist today, written from the 1st century, well, the 2nd century, all the way to the 16th century.
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So why I say it's not the phone game, is only this, is because in the phone game, once the word is spoken, it's vanished.
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But now we can't, because they're dead.
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But what I'm saying is, when it's written, it produces, and this is the way I believe God has preserved His Word, because this is the biggest argument from the King James.
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The biggest argument from the King James, only guy, is God has to have preserved His Word in the King James Version, because if He didn't preserve it in the King James Version, where in did He preserve it? And my answer is simply this, He preserved it in the manuscript tradition.
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It is still there.
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And here is how it is, and if you don't like this as an answer, I can't give you a better one, so take it for what it's worth.
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It's not as if we have a thousand-piece puzzle, and we only have 900 pieces.
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We have a thousand-piece puzzle, and we have 1,100 pieces.
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There are parts that shouldn't be in there, because they weren't part of the original.
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Our job, not our specific, but the job of the scholar, is to determine what has been interpolated or extracted over time.
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So here is an example.
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Now I want to look at the verse of the Bible.
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What time is it? 1016.
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Never mind.
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We're out of time.
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1 John 5, 7 talks about three bearing witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one.
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1 John 5, 7 would be the greatest argument for the Trinity, because it says there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Spirit, or the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one.
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The problem is, 1 John 5, 7, that phrase does not show up in any Greek manuscript until the 13th, I think the 13th century, possibly the 16th century, depending, does not show up in any Greek manuscript.
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It's in the Latin, but it's not in any Greek manuscript.
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So there's no reason, that's why it's not, if you turn to the ESV, it's not there.
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If you go to the NIV, it's not there.
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The NASVV, because all of these other modern translations have looked at the scholarship and said it doesn't belong there.
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It was a textual emendation or a scribal edition.
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It's in the King James Version because it was in Erasmus' edition of the Greek New Testament and even Erasmus didn't think that it should have been there.
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It wasn't in his first edition.
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It was in later editions because it was demanded, because it was in the Latin.
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So, just to point out why it's important.
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Morgan Stone have gold in moon.
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Morning hours have gold in their mouths.
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There you go.
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I hope this was helpful.
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I know that we never have time to really get through all the stuff I want to get through and I could keep you all day, but I look forward to seeing you all in worship.
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God bless you.