"Just a Few Little Words" (04/08/2001)

be turning in your Bibles to Isaiah 52, and we'll start with about verse 13.

While you're turning, I wanna read a quote to you. A man named

Streeter who wrote a book called The Four Gospels, where he's studying the, he was also commenting on manuscript evidence behind the versions and so forth.

And he's quoting Westcott, of the infamous Westcott and Hort team who came up with all of our, or behind all of our modern revisions, especially in the

English Bibles. And he's quoting Westcott here and making a point, so listen with me if you would.

Westcott says this, "'The value of the revision is most clearly seen.'"

Now, he's talking about revising the King James Version. That's exactly the topic. This is what this was all about.

This revision committee was elected to make certain small changes in the

King James Version. If they saw fit, that's what they were commissioned to do. And as you know, historically, when

Westcott and Hort got control of the committee, they totally went around what the committee had been asked to do, and they did a major revision with multiplied thousands of changes, and even went away from the received text that had been used through the years and created an entirely new

Greek text. And yet this is what Mr. Westcott, by the way, Westcott and Hort were merry worshipers, and also

Hort was into witchcraft. We've proven this in early messages.

We have copies of letters that they wrote back and forth, and you can get hold of those and read them.

But this is what Westcott said about revising the Bible. The value of the revision is most clearly seen when the student considers together, when the student considers together a considerable group of passages which bear upon some article of faith.

That means to us like a doctrine. The accumulation of small details then produces its full effect.

Ponder this, now Mr. Streeter quoted that, and then Streeter says, ponder this, weigh every word carefully of what

Westcott himself said. Westcott himself let, quote, the cat out of the bag.

Do you see what Streeter is pointing out? Westcott himself said it is the accumulation of small details that produces its full effect on your doctrinal beliefs.

And you will recall all the little verses we've read where they've changed a little word here, a little word there.

Most of them have to do with the deity of Christ. They have to do with salvation by grace. They have to do with the lordship of Jesus Christ, and those kinds of things.

There are places where they have added. There are places where they've subtracted. I would say most of the time they subtract.

In fact, a couple of examples we've had, in case you weren't here last time,

I remember we talked one about Joseph and Mary in the book of Luke where the new versions called

Joseph and Mary the parents, and then when it comes down to the verse where it's supposed to say

Joseph and his mother Mary, which distinguishes the fact that Joseph is not the blood parent of Jesus, that verse is removed, or it is changed where it calls

Joseph his father and his mother. Well, that comes all the way back from Origen who was an

Arian, who was the first Bible corrector, who did not believe

Jesus was God nor the son of God, and so therefore he wanted Joseph to be his father.

That's just one example. We've done many, many examples, and we've taken two full services reading

Bible verses in the different versions. But I want you to, oh,

I lost my page, oh no. Okay, turn to Isaiah 52, and let's see.

Brother Russell, let me pick on you one more time. Would you read Isaiah 52 starting with verse 13 through 15?

Everyone listen very carefully because what I'm about to do is I'm going, I have a book here.

I've surely been blessed by the Lord to have a pretty extensive library, and even more blessed in recent days.

But years ago I had a friend who was in seminary, Dallas Theological Seminary, which at that time was perhaps the best conservative seminary in the world.

And he quit and went to law school shortly before graduating, and I got all of his books for a dime on the dollar.

That was a blessing. This is one of those books. But if you can see this picture on my left, this is a picture of a targum.

And what a targum was, in the years before Jesus Christ was born into this world, the

Jewish people had ceased to study from the Bible. Now they had the Bible, and I'll tell you, one of the reasons we're not studying the

Old Testament when we deal with manuscript evidence is because they were so careful with the copying of the

Old Testament that there's no debate on it. We know that the Masoretic Text is the word of God, and we know that it is extremely, the copies we have today are minutely accurate.

And so they had the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament just as you have it today.

The only difference was the books were not in the same exact order. They were all there, but they were in a little different order than ours.

But they were exactly the same books, and they had the Old Testament, but they didn't study from it.

And the teachers did not teach from it. What they taught from were these books called targums.

This is actually a picture of Isaiah chapter 52 and 53 in the targum.

And they were, for all practical purposes, what we would call today a paraphrase.

Now, who can tell me, who can name a modern paraphrase under the name of one?

Some people think it's a Bible version, but it's actually, it's a paraphrase. The Living Bible is an excellent example.

There's one other one, can you think of it? No, no,

Ryrie does pretty good work. He has, of course, he's got New American Standard, he puts it in, but he also does the

King James. But it's the name of a Bible. Which one? Well, we learned on our trip, as a matter of fact, that it is, in effect, a type of a paraphrase.

I never considered it, I thought it was a translation, but apparently it is a type of a paraphrase.

But there's one other one I'm looking for. No? Anybody, you don't hear about it as much, but back when

I first got saved, there was one called The Good News for Modern Man. You remember that one? Did anybody ever read from it in here?

You did? It reads kind of like a funny book, doesn't it? Okay, well,

I'm a little distracted here, folks. I've lost my page here.

When I turned over to show you that picture, I took my hand out of there. Let me find it just a second, because I've got a quote

I want to read to you from this very Targum.

Just a second, I know where it is. I just got to find it.

Apologize for this. Okay, here we are. I'm gonna put a marker in it this time. Okay, anyway, a paraphrase, like Good News for Modern Man, The Living Bible, they are not actually translations of the

Bible. What they are is they're one man's idea of what the Bible says, and that we call a paraphrase.

Do you get the difference? A translation, it's very fascinating to study translation, too.

I've done that before, but I don't really believe it would interest you a whole lot, so I'm not getting into that in this study, but translation is a science that is very fascinating.

We got some interesting information on that when we were out there with Dr. MacArthur, too. They had a class on how to pick a good

Bible version for your church, and the man who taught it was one of the men who edited the

New American Standard Bible, so naturally, his view was a little different than what I believe the truth is on the manuscripts, but he was an authority, and it was interesting that he had one chart where he showed a graph that listed all of the

English versions and showed which ones are the most accurate translations as far as bringing it into the English exactly from the

Greek and the Hebrew and the Old Testament. The King James was at the top of the list.

It is the most accurate English translation, and even those who don't ascribe to the manuscripts behind the

King James, which we think are the preserved manuscripts, not everyone believes that.

In fact, as I told you when we started, there aren't many living scholars who would agree with me, but there are many who have passed on to the

Lord. If you read their books, I think they blow away, these modern guys. I mean, that's just my humble opinion, and in fact,

I don't argue the case. I let them argue it, and I'm gonna give you a bibliography when the whole thing is over, and you can go get these books, read them for yourself.

Now, what's interesting about this book, this is written by the other camp. I got as many of those as I do the other.

I like to read them both, but eventually you've gotta come to a place where you decide because the Bibles don't match.

They don't say the same things, and if God has preserved the word of God to us to this generation, then it's somewhere, and it's not enough for us to say, well, it all has 90 % of the truth in it.

I don't believe God would expect us to defend that. To a new believer, you take a new believer and say, well, we don't really have the

Bible. What we have is, it's mostly in there, and I can show you where it is, and he's thinking, how are you smart enough to know which is which?

That's what he's thinking, and that's what I think every time I find a scholar who says, well,

I can correct this and make it better. I'm thinking, well, how do I trust him? For one thing, he's a

Mary worshiper, and he's into witchcraft, and he says he has found the Bible after 1 ,800 years.

It's bizarre to me, but I have read The Other View and given it a fair chance. I promise I have. I am not trying to win an argument.

I stopped doing that when I was about 39 years old. The last one I lost was with my wife, and she won, and I said, you know what?

I'm not always right, and I learned at that time to listen to my wife.

That's a great revelation to me because it then opened the door for me to listen to others and to care, and not just to be sitting there thinking what

I'm gonna say back when they're talking. I'm listening to what they're saying because they might be right.

I've learned probably, I've learned an awful lot from Russ Houck in working with him.

He came from a Pentecostal background. Now, he believes most of that's hokey pokey, hocus pocus, and fake stuff, but I'll promise you that his view of scriptures comes at it a different direction than if you grew up in a

Baptist church, so I've learned a lot of interesting things that my eyes never would have been open to just because he has a different approach, and I dare say he's learned a few things from me if you're listening to this tape,

Brother Russ. He learned something today, too, but anyway. He likes it because I get the pulpit and he doesn't, so when we have arguments, if they ever come into preaching,

I always win because I get the pulpit, so that's good. But anyway, my point is,

I'm not trying to win an argument here. I wanna see the truth, I wanna find the truth the best we can find it.

I happen to believe that this particular concept does fall a little bit in the area of what we talked about in Sunday school because if you remember our key verse in the

Psalms where it says that God's given it down to us through earthen vessels and so forth, that's a mystery. I mean, that's an amazing thing that God has chosen to use men, imperfect men, to give us the written word, all from the beginning, all the way from Moses, all the way down to today, to those scribes that copied it, to the guys that first got into the printing presses.

Every one of them were just like you and me, they're imperfect, they're wrong sometimes, and yet he said he would preserve his word to each generation and he's done it through imperfect vessels.

That is amazing, that's a big God. That is a God who can control everything and still you are used with your personality, your vocabulary, everything about you he uses in his work and he uses you as much as he does these people.

It's just in different ways. But the great miracle about it is we will not fully ever, I don't think, understand how he preserved his word for us.

We just know that he did. And I do think we have to take it as far as we can to know which

Bible we ought to teach our children, which in the English version, which one should we use? Is there a better one? And I think we should answer those questions, but I don't think we'll ever get to the bottom of how he did it till we get to heaven and maybe he'll show it to us, maybe he won't.

But to make a point, once again, this morning, I love the quote from Mr. Westcott. He said, it's the little changes that make a difference.

See, that violates what so many wanna say, they say, well, it doesn't really matter, all the Bibles have the doctrinal truths in them.

Westcott didn't believe that. Westcott believed that little changes here and there are what, over a period of years of reading it, is what formulates your

Bible doctrines. It's interesting to me that where we have changes, there are nearly always removals of information, removing information, because once it's removed, you can't have it.

If it's not there, you can't have it. And they accuse someone that they can't name somewhere in the past of adding to the received text is why it has the verses that the other doesn't, so they turn it around the other way.

Now you're confused, aren't you? Who's the author of that? Satan is, so he's been at work.

Brother Russell mentioned an interesting thing coming out when we prayed before church this morning. He said, isn't it wonderful how

God has given us men like John Burgin and some of these great men who gave their entire life to study the manuscript evidence because they were fighting a battle against liberal lost people who were studying like crazy.

And I'll tell you this, folks, if you study this and you read the books on this subject, you will find that those who propagate the

Westcott theory and all the modern Bibles and all of that, they are very akin to the same battle that happened about the same time period between evolution and creation.

The same line of scientific method is used to try to change the Bible that Darwin used when he tried to change the whole worldview of where we came from.

It is very similar, it's the same mindset, and that Westcott and Horton, men like that, some of the

German theologians, which is where most of this comes from, even Aland, the more modern book I've been studying from that Russ gave me, he's

German. All of his works are written in German, have to be translated into English. There's been a real attack by Satan on the

German -speaking world from the, and I'll tell you why, I mean, this is theory, so this is not Bible here. My opinion is because God shined the light through Martin Luther and Calvin in that part of the world, and Satan came back and said, well,

I'm gonna bring some darkness from that part of the world, too, and he began to attack immediately. But Russell's comment was, isn't it wonderful that some men like Burgin and Hills and Scrivener and some of these men, born -again believers have given their life to study this, to fight this battle, and I said, it is wonderful, but isn't it frightening to think that just as God has raised them up and called them to that work,

Satan has raised up his emissaries and called them to a lifetime of work to correct a

Bible when they don't even believe the thing they're reading anyway, so why are they doing it? Pride and money, they sell

Bibles. The bestseller of all time is the Bible. Always has been and still is.

And I was sorry to find that even with the study of Aland, which I was beginning to think was a little more neutral,

I get to the middle of the book, I find out that his name is on the most modern Nestle -Aland

Greek New Testament, so he's selling his Bible. And so it takes away a little bit of my confidence in his ability to be neutral, because now what

I liked about him was he was blowing away the Westcott -Horthy, and I loved the first half of the book, I'm saying, man, this guy, he sees it.

And then he comes in, he blows away the received text. So he blows everything away except the

Nestle -Aland text, which sells for quite a,

I don't know what that book would sell for if you bought it, probably 30 bucks a piece. Millions of them sell.

I don't know, it just, to me, it's kind of like being in a court of law and all we have is evidence. You know, in the

O .J. Simpson case, how much evidence did the prosecutors really have?

I mean, you looked at it and you thought they had a lot, didn't you? They had bloody gloves.

You've tried to put most of this out of your mind, I'll bring it all back up, but they had footprints, they had, wouldn't you say they had a lot of evidence?

Did they win the case? No, they didn't. You know why? Because all they had was scraps and pieces of evidence.

And that's what we have, believe it or not, that's what we have when we study this manuscript evidence.

We have bits and pieces of evidence, and I'm asking you to look at this like you would if you were on a jury, and you just take the facts that are there, and you weigh the facts, and forget all the terminology, forget the emotional part, forget what

Bible you like and read you like. I started out when I was saved, New American Standard was my Bible. In fact, the one

Bill is holding, if you look at the front part and through it, you'll see it's marked up. I love that Bible, and I studied it.

Probably the most Bible study I ever did was the first year of my Christianity, and it was in that Bible. But I gave it up as soon as I started finding some of this information out.

And so, let that go, and just be a jury in a court. Take the evidence as it is, be honest with it, weigh it, and then make a conclusion.

Now, let me take you into Isaiah 52 with Russell here for a minute to read this.

I wanna take you back and show you that Westcott was right when he said if you just change a few little words, it's the little details that add the whole picture.

And I wanna show you what the Jews were studying the year Jesus Christ was born.

And if you ever ask yourself the question, maybe as a new Christian, you said, well, one thing that's a little unbelievable about this

Christianity stuff to me is why did, if Jesus is Jewish, why did the Jews miss their Messiah? That doesn't quite add up to me.

And I thought through that when I was first saved. It bothered me, I said, you know, you got all the apostles were

Jewish. The early Christians, first 5 ,000 of them saved, probably mostly Jewish. Jesus was a Jew.

How could the Jews miss this? If he truly was the Messiah, how could they miss, they'd been watching for him, their whole lineage forever and ever.

Well, one day I got the answer in this book right here. And I praised the Lord for weeks after I saw this because I got the answer and the answer's right here.

He's gonna read from the Masoretic text which has been translated into our King James Bible. Then I'm gonna read from the

Targum that the Jewish people were studying from the year Jesus was born. You read first. Behold, I am a sign, as these, as this, those heavenly pringles be made, that which is not in the soul of him shall he see, that which he has not heard shall he hear.

Okay, now, in the Targum, in verse 13, or verse 14, as many were astonished at thee, his visage was so marred more than any man, his form more than the sons of men.

Who is this speaking of? It's the Lord Jesus. And if you were ever gonna witness to a

Jewish person, this is the Roman's road for him. It's the Isaiah, the Isaiah road, because he doesn't believe your

New Testament in any way if he's Jewish. So you take them into Isaiah 52 and 53, and you reveal the suffering servant to them in the word of God.

Let me read to you what the Targum that they were studying from. Now, you follow along your Bible, and you watch the words while I read these words that had been dealt with in their paraphrase, and this is what the people were being taught.

I'm gonna start with verse 13 of chapter 52. Behold, my servant Messiah will prosper.

So it does mention that there will be a Messiah. He will be high and will flourish and be very powerful.

Now, what part of a Messiah does that speak to? His suffering or his reign in the millennial period?

All right. Verse 14, as the house of Israel hoped for him many days when their appearance was diminished among the nations and their countenance more than the sons of men.

So whose countenance was marred in that verse? The nation.

Well, in my Bible and in their Bible, the same one they had at the time, it says his visage was marred.

They simply changed one word. They changed his to our. Now, Brother Russell, read on.

Go down to 53 and read verse two and verse three.

Chapter 53, verses two and three.

Who is the despised one? Jesus Christ, our

Lord. Let me read it to you in the Targum. And see, the righteous one will grow up before him.

See how some of the truth is left in it? Always, you leave, if you're Satan, you leave most of the truth there to dress it up or it's not a

Bible anymore. And see, the righteous one will grow up before him like blossoming shoots and like a tree which sends forth its roots by streams of water.

So will the holy generation flourish in the land which was in need of him.

His appearance is not that of any common man, nor is his all the awe inspired by any ordinary person.

And a countenance of holiness is his countenance, which all who see him will look earnestly upon.

Then the glory of the kingdoms will be an object of contempt and will be cut off.

See, they will be weak and sad like a man suffering pain and appointed to afflictions, condemned and disregarded as though the face of the

Shekinah had departed from us. What happened? All of a sudden, it's back to the kingdoms which have the contempt, not the

Messiah. Subtle little changes. And all the way through this passage, and I could read on and on, it's amazing to see it.

But all the way through the passage, every time you see the Messiah suffering, it is not the

Messiah, it is the Jewish nation. The Messiah never suffers in the Targums.

So why is it that when Jesus came and told them, you can destroy this temple, but in three days,

I'll raise it up again, why do they have problems? And what do you mean destroy? You're not gonna die. Why is it that Peter himself came to Jesus and said, we will not let you die, you can't die.

Why did he think he should do? Exactly.

Why do you think Judas took the money and went and cut a deal? Wanted to force it to a head.

Well, surely, they come to take him. Judas is thinking they come to take him, he'll have to show his strength and power, and I'll be sitting right next to him in the kingdom.

Why did they all think that way? They had never, ever their whole life been exposed to a suffering servant, why?

The Bible had been changed. Now, that is a little subtle change, like one word.

One word in the verse has changed. And this has been going on since that time to the present day, and it goes on.

And God's people yet, as we read in one of our verses in Sunday school this morning, the

Apostle Paul said, yeah, but our hearts, you know, our heart,

I don't remember how he phrased it, but he said, our hearts can tell the difference on what's the truth and what's not.

And if you're born again and you're in the word and you're walking with the Lord, and all of a sudden you've got a version where it removes the deity of Christ and tries to make

Joseph be his father, you go, nope, red flag, red flag, something's wrong here.

And so you start looking at all of these things in more and more detail. Well, I'd like to get into a little bit more of the technical aspects for a few minutes this morning, give you some more things to be thinking about.

Remember last time at the end, I told you that there are basically three suppositions that the

Westcott -Hort theory stand upon. Number one, that the existing text can be categorized according to families and that there are at least three to four different families.

Westcott had four families because he created a fourth one called the neutral text, which was the Vaticanus, the

Roman Catholic manuscript that he had gotten. He never saw it, he just saw copies of it, by the way.

He may have seen it though, because he was Catholic, I take that back. No Protestant scholar has ever actually seen it, has been allowed to see it.

But to him, that was the neutral text. Now, he divided all the other copies into families.

He used the same line of argument that was used in the theory of evolution, this idea of families and that one thing comes from another.

And the interesting thing about Westcott -Hort theory, same thing that's true of evolution, there are no missing links that have ever been found.

It's totally fabricated, there are no missing links that take you and where you can take all of this vast number of manuscripts and take them all the way back here and they go to a single corrupted copy that supposedly happened in Syria sometime before the year 400.

That's never been proven, it's all theory and they invented this whole thing in their mind.

This idea that you can assume that it goes back to a single corrupted Bible in all the modern, in other words, the received text goes back to a place where it was corrected.

Well, it's funny because the King James people do the opposite, they take all the modern texts and say they go back but the nice thing is they say we think, they don't say it happened, they say we think that there's a strong possibility it goes back to origin.

And there is a strong possibility that it does. And so what Westcott and Hort did was they took some of the same ideas, just turned it on its head and the day that they lived, no one agreed with them.

None of the Bible believing people that you would walk with in church like we're sitting in this church with us today, nobody like that agreed with that theory when it happened and I'm gonna read some of the comments that were made back in the 1800s when this first happened because it was a battle and unfortunately, the born again people walking with God are always caught a little bit behind.

It's just kind of like the United States at the beginning of World War II. Well, I mean, we didn't have enough ships, we didn't have enough anything.

The enemy attacks, it took us a while to catch up but we caught up and it's always that way. It was that way in evolution when

Schofield and all of those good men came up with these ideas like the gap theory to try to cover their bases because they were so afraid that Darwin had proven the

Bible's not accurate in the early portions of Genesis. They said, well, it's accurate if you put a gap between verse one and two of Genesis one.

We know now that the gap theory is hogwash but they were scrambling and the same thing has happened with this when

Westcott and Hort came out with their ideas. They said, wow, look at all these big words they're using. Look at all these scientific methods they're using and really they created the thing, they made it up.

It was new, just like all of Darwin's jargon. He invented it but he used such large words and big ideas and put it together so eloquently and beautifully that the world goes, wow, look at this and the whole

Christian world did that when Westcott and Hort and the revision committee came but a few born again believers said they're wrong.

I'm not sure I know how yet but I'm gonna figure it out and you go read their books, they finally figured it out.

It's amazing. So the first presupposition is this idea of the families. The second idea is that the

Byzantine text is late and corrupt. Now that's the received text. It's called, one reason this is a little confusing, it's called several things.

It can be called the Byzantine text, the Syrian text, the traditional text, which I love that phrase for it, the traditional text is what

Virgin called it, the Byzantine text but that's all the received text that your English King James Version came from, it's behind it and that Martin Luther's German version, all of the

Protestant Reformation people used it which speaks for itself as far as what they believed was the right line because they had access to Jerome's Bible which is very similar to the

Westcott -Hort text. They had access to those but they threw them out and disregarded them. The third presupposition is that the oldest

Greek manuscript are always the best. So you have these three, the existing text can be categorized into families accurately.

Number two, the Byzantine text which is one we believe in is late which means it's not old enough to be accurate and it's corrupt and number three, the oldest

Greek manuscripts are the best. If we could take any one of those three and disprove it, we've destroyed

Hort's theory but let's look at the three theories. First, let's talk about the one about all of these that you can take the lines and take them back into families and it is all clear cut and simple and it's very obvious that the

West, that the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus are the neutral text and all these others go back to a single corruption somewhere, let's see if it's really that clear.

Modern textual criticism since before Westcott and Hort has been based upon the premise that the same methods used in profane writing would work with the

Bible. In other words, if you take Homer or you take even Shakespeare or something like that and you're gonna go back and take the text that we still have and try to prove they're accurate, well they've developed scientific methods for that.

The Westcott and Hort theory and even a couple of guys before them that perhaps they learned it from such as Tischendorf, they used that same scientific method and criticized the

Bible with it. Well, the problem with that is that those books don't have religious people trying to prove their doctrine and changing it on purpose but the

Bible does and so that is not a safe premise to use for looking at the

Bible evidence but that is what they base theirs on. Now Hort, I'm gonna quote

Hort and here's part of his whole premise is based on this statement and you decide if you think this statement is true because if it's true, maybe he's right.

If he's true and this is right, then the modern versions may be accurate but you tell me if you think this is right.

This is quoting Hort, it will not be out of place to add here a distinct expression of our belief that even among the numerous, unquestionably spurious readings of the

New Testament, there are no signs of deliberate falsification of the text for dogmatic purposes.

He's saying I can't find in any, even the ones I disagree with, I don't see anywhere where anybody ever changed one for a doctrinal reason.

Now based upon that, if you accept his premise, it's so easy to read a scholar and just go with him and say you get down, you have his same conclusion because you skipped over his premises too quickly and you didn't think about them.

See, they lay the premise out at the first of the book and they're going fast and they're giving you a lot of information and they lay the premise out and if you swallow that like a big old bass does this time of the year, he's gonna reel you right into that boat and put you in the cooler because if you accept the premise which is the first thought this is the truth, then this is true, then this leads to this, this is connected to this, this comes over here and this comes around under here and over here and here's the solution.

My version is better than the one all the saints have had going all the way back to 400 AD. My solution is better.

Well, his first premise is that you can't find anywhere where anybody ever deliberately changed the

New Testament for dogmatic purposes. He goes on and he follows this with another premise then, the principles of criticism explained in the foregoing section which means the modern critical methods of looking at profane literature like Chaucer or just people that wrote poetry or literature, the principles of criticism explained in the foregoing section hold good for all ancient text preserved in a plurality of documents.

Now that's true maybe if you're talking about profane literature but he's gonna tie it in and say so therefore in dealing with the text of the

New Testament, no new principle whatever is needed or legitimate.

Now you've got to understand that to understand where all the new Bibles came from. He laid out two premises, if you accept them then you're gonna follow his conclusion and most of the seminaries today have.

One of the only ones I know of that didn't is the Pensacola Baptist Seminary there in Florida and they are strong King James and they fight the whole religious world over it which is sad but they at least take a stand on it.

But the first premise is that first of all, none of the ancient documents have ever been corrupted for doctrinal reasons to prove a doctrine so they changed it kind of like the

Jews did on the Targums there where you change a word because you don't want to believe he's a suffering servant.

So you just change one or two words. He said that's never happened. He says therefore the modern ideas of how you criticize an old document that applies to Shakespeare, Chaucer and going on back as far as you can go, those same ideas will work with the

Bible. Now if that's true, his conclusion is therefore we need no other principle to use to do this which means we don't have to even consider the group of people that the documents came from were they like from Antioch where they were first called

Christians and the missionaries were sent out from there and I've found three scholars that say that they believe when

John, before he died that John compiled the New Testament into a group, put some of it together and that it was in that part of the world is where it was when the copies started being made.

We don't consider any of that. All we consider is modern textual criticism theory and methods and he not only says that that will work but he says it is the only one that's legitimate.

Now that's where your scientists really come in and make you feel really ignorant. They don't make it, you know when they write about Burgin today, they say well he was ignorant.

He didn't understand the idea of families of lines of manuscripts. They're lying to you because if you read

Burgin's writings he says I understand the families of lines of manuscripts. Problem is I can't find one. They don't exist.

He says they're like magic. They've just created them out of a hat. So he did understand it, he just disagreed with it and so he's branded as ignorant and yet he's a scholar who taught in seminaries and so forth.

Now so Hort gives us this idea of the families. Now do modern scholars still believe or does anybody believe that his statement is true that no one ever corrupted the

Bible for dogmatic reasons? Well let me give you a quote from Metzger who writes on the early church fathers and he makes the point that the early church fathers that we can read of in their writings disagreed with Westcott's theory and Hort's theory that no one ever corrupted it.

The early church fathers, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Yesubius and many other church fathers accused the heretics of corrupting the scriptures in order to have support of their special views.

This is what Hort and Westcott said never happened but the evidence is that it did.

So they knew this evidence. Westcott and Hort knew this evidence but they withheld it from you thinking you won't go find it and all you do is read their book it says this evidence, this never happened and you never go look to see then you accept their false premise.

Do you see how this works? You have to watch scholars all the time because they're gonna prove their point and they leave out vital information.

Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and all these fathers said that scriptures were changed in order to support these heretical views.

In the mid second century, Marcion expunged his copies of the gospel according to Luke of all references to the

Jewish background of Jesus. Did you hear that? We know that Marcion removed any mention of the

Jewishness of Jesus from his copy of the book of Luke. Now what if several copies, hundred copies were made of Marcion's Greek Luke passage and they come down to today, what do you have?

All of a sudden, Jesus is not a Jew, he's a blonde headed German and there are people who believe that.

So now there's a Bible out there that proves that and we know we can trace that back to Marcion.

Tatian's Harmony of the Gospels contained several textual alterations which lent support to ascetic or encratite views.

Now these views are views of practicing strict self -denial as a measure of personal and especially spiritual discipline.

So these were, they believed in asceticism, cut yourself, whip yourself, crawl up a mountain on glass on your knees and that's how you please

God. And it's very clear here that Tatian changed his Bible to reflect those kinds of views.

All this was done back before 300 AD. Most of it done the first 100 years after Christ died.

Gaius who wrote between 175 and 200 AD said, quote, now remember this was written about 175

AD, John died 100 AD, this is 75 years after the apostle John went to heaven.

Gaius wrote this, the divine scriptures, these heretics have audaciously corrupted, laying violent hands upon them under the pretense of correcting them.

It is interesting to see how Gaius then went on to prove his accusations. Now follow me, this is very,

I know this is not exciting, this can be dry because it's information, but you need this because if you don't have truth, you can't conquer error.

Gaius went on to prove this. Now remember Westcott and Hort just stated very clearly at the first of their work that this never happened.

No one has ever corrupted any Greek New Testament for religious reasons, never happened.

And we have here a man in 175 AD saying that it happened and that he saw it happening.

And he says that I bring no false accusation. Now look, Gaius here in 175 AD is arguing that some copies of his

Bible have been tampered with and he's having to defend it. People don't want to believe him. So look how he proves it.

I bring no false accusation, anyone who is disposed may easily convince himself.

He has but to collect the copies belonging to these persons, these heretics, collect the several copies of the scriptures that they have, then to compare one with another.

And he will discover that their discrepancy is extraordinary. What does that tell you that Gaius knew 175?

He knew that the line of manuscripts that were of God agreed with each other. And that these disagreed even with each other.

They not only agreed with the line that he considered to be the true line of manuscripts, but they disagreed with each other.

Those of Asclepiodes at all events will be found discordant from those of Theodotus.

It's like you take the Vaticanus that Westcott Horton loved and the Sinaiticus that they loved.

If you look at them together, they disagree with each other in thousands of places. So how can they both be the word of God?

At least one of them's wrong. And this man back in 175 AD is using the same logic.

Now, plenty of specimens of either sort are obtainable. And as much as these men's disciplines have industriously multiplied the so -called corrected copies of their respective teachers, which are in reality nothing else but corrupted copies.

With the foregoing copies again, those of Haemophilus will be found entirely at variance.

So now he's named a third one. And he said, no three of these agree. As for the copies of Apollonides, they even contradict one another.

Now, this is the same kind of reasoning that John Burgin used in the 1800s to fight this battle against the

Westcott Horton theory. He said, the ones that you erased, the received text has gone all the way back as far as we can look in history.

And you're changing it based on two copies that disagree with each other. Same argument.

So Burgin was therefore correct in recognizing that the New Testament was not to be approached in the same way as the

Greek classics. Does that make sense to everybody? You can't use the same scientific method of textual criticism to examine the

Bible because the Bible has been changed by corruptors who did it on purpose. So it's not enough to say, well,

I found the oldest version over here in this, out in the desert here, in the Sinai Desert, and I found it over here, and it's old, and so therefore, it's got to be the most accurate because it's older than anything we can find the received text written on.

That's not always true. Hort's mistaken perspective led him to bring over into the textual criticism of the

New Testament the family tree method of genealogy as developed by students of the classics.

Bruce Metzger said this about Burgin. He mentions Burgin. What Burgin was apparently unable to comprehend, now listen, this is how the enemies attack

Burgin. What Burgin was apparently unable to comprehend was the force of the genealogical method by which the later conflated text, that's supposed to be the one we have, conflated means you took a bunch of different things and added them together and you got more words in it.

Kind of like the passage where you asked the question birds last week where you got one that talks about parents and two verses later, you got one that said

Joseph and his mother Mary, and what we didn't notice, I went home and looked, but in that same chapter, there's another place identical, only it's talking about different information.

The context is different, but it's identical in the fact that it mentions parents again, and two verses later, it comes back and says

Joseph and his mother, both places in the same chapter. So they say that's conflated, that they took one version over here that had parents, another version over here that said

Joseph and his mother, they put it all together and conflated it, and that's where the received text comes from.

That's what the modern critics say. People like Burgin say, no, that's not right.

The originals were this way, and then the Western critics like Origen removed this verse, and then the,

I'm sorry, the Alexandrian like Origen removed this verse, and the Western Roman Catholics added this verse, removed this verse, and he looks at it the other way, so they've turned it all upside down.

Now, they say that Burgin didn't understand the family tree. The fact is, let me read you a quote from Burgin and see if you think he understood the family tree.

I think he understood it, he just disagreed with it. Burgin says this, and I quote, high time, however, is it to declare that in strictness, all this talk about genealogical evidence when applied to manuscripts is moonshine.

Now, remember, this man lived in a time when this whole battle's already taken place. We don't even have to debate it today.

It's already taken place, it's all there to read. All we need to do is examine it like a court of jurors does, but then it happens, unfortunately, that we are unacquainted with one single instance of a known manuscript copied from another known manuscript.

Not one example, there's no missing link where you can prove one was copied from a more ancient one that was corrupted.

And perforce, all talk about genealogical evidence where no single step in the descent can be produced, in other words, where no genealogical evidence exists is absurd.

Now, they come back years later and they say this man didn't understand the family tree method, is that true? Shake something.

Is it lunchtime? Not quite. Okay, so they lied, would you agree?

You're the juror now, the opposing lawyer gets up, Metzger gets up on the chair,

Bill goes over and interrogates him, you look kinda like a lawyer. I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that.

But he goes over and interrogates, he looks at his watch. When's he gonna quit? He goes over and interrogates him.

One time, somebody did that when Rocky was preaching, there was a big clock on, no, no, some guy looked at his watch when he was preaching and he saw him and he looked over and said, my soul, why'd you even come here?

And then he went right back in, just kept preaching. I'm preaching the word of God.

Well, you're okay, because I'm reading from books. That's different. But you're gonna go interrogate, you're gonna go interrogate this guy and he says that Bergen is simply ignorant.

And then you come and you produce a quote that Bergen has signed that says, I understand all this stuff, but I don't agree with it.

What's the jury gonna find when you bring this out? You bring this out of this liar, he's lying. Let me give you another quote.

E .C. Caldwell wrote this in a book called What is the Best New Testament? He said, where are the charts which start with the majority of the late manuscripts and climb back through diminishing generations of ancestors to the neutral and Eastern texts?

See, neutral is one of Westcott's favorite ideas. He's saying, produce these for me.

You talk about them in your work, your scholarly works, you use all these big words, show me one. The answer is that they are nowhere.

All the manuscripts referred to are imaginary manuscripts.

The second limitation upon the application of the genealogical method to the manuscripts of the

New Testament springs from the almost universal presence of mixture in these manuscripts.

Where there is mixture, then the genealogical method as applied to manuscripts is useless.

Yet Westcott and Hort's genealogical method slew the textus receptus. And it did in the seminaries today.

No one believes in it anymore. So that carries it to the next generations of preachers. It carries it to the next generation of the pew.

And everybody's got every different version reads every different which way. And no one has in the mindset of the church, there are no word formulas that are dear to the heart anymore.

And I can get up and preach and I'll give you messages from the King James, which I've studied ever since I laid my new

American aside and give you those beautiful phrases. I don't ever remember the whole verse. I'll give you just a part of one.

And some of you that have studied from that Bible and it goes back for 400 years now, as far as the received text being used among the

Protestants and you go, wow, yes, amen. I know that phrase. That phrase means something in my heart because you've studied it in your closet.

But if I get up and I start preaching from a new American standard or the living Bible or any of the new versions,

I can read the same verse and it doesn't sing in your heart because you haven't been studying that version. And neither did your mother and your grandmother and your grandfather and your great -grandparents.

It's not in, it's not there. It's not, it doesn't ring the bell. So what does it do?

It cools off the church services. You don't have anybody saying much amen anymore. You don't have people, yes, preacher,

I know that one. I know that truth, I've been there. Word formulas are very important.

Burgin made the statement that if a people use the same translation, we're talking about from the Greek into your language, which if they use the same translation for three generations and then you try to change the translation, you destroy a work that's been accomplished by God through the preaching of the word in these word formulas and you have to rebuild the whole thing and start over.

It's amazing to think about. Even if we couldn't prove the manuscripts were best, we might still stay with the

King James because it's in our hearts. But that wouldn't be enough for me because if we could prove that it wasn't accurate, that wouldn't be enough, we'd have to change.

But the best minds that have fought this battle say that it's the most accurate and even the man

I met three weeks ago or heard speak anyway who was on the board that edited the New American Standard puts the

King James up there as the most accurate translation into the English of any of them. If I remember, was it number one, y 'all, or number two?

I remember it was, I think it was number one. All right, another quote from Matthew Black about this idea of the family lines.

The difference between sacred writings is constant, popular, and ecclesiastical use.

And the work of a classical author has never been sufficiently emphasized in the textual criticism of the

New Testament. He's saying there's a difference between examining sacred writings and classical writings.

And he said, people don't talk about this enough. They try to treat it like it's the same. It hasn't been sufficiently emphasized in the textual criticism of the

New Testament. Principles valid for the textual restoration of Plato or Aristotle cannot be applied to sacred texts such as the

Gospels or the Pauline Epistles. We cannot assume that it is possible by a sifting of, quote, scribal errors to arrive at a prototype or autographed text of the

Bible writer. He's saying Wes Cottenhort used the wrong method.

Kurt Allen wrote this in 1965, and he's the one that I spoke of earlier in the message.

Look what he says. He's very honest about this. It is true and generally known that the principles of stigmatology, which means like stems on a tree, like a family generation method, cannot be applied to the

New Testament. At least the scholars who have attempted to do so have been unable to state their case convincingly.

That's a knock at Wes Cottenhort. Allen comes back and says in another quote, and I want you to listen to it because he speaks with the mind of a young man fresh out of seminary.

Look what he says. And he's done this great study of the papyri, the paper, old ancient documents, many of which have been found since Wes Cottenhort's theory.

And he studied them and he's going back and he's showing with this new evidence we have, the Wes Cottenhort theory has been tanked.

Well, he says P66 confirmed. Now P66, remember when we studied the manuscripts, those are papyrus writings when it has like a capital

P in front of it. P66 confirmed the observations already made in connection with the

Chester Beatty papyri. With P75, new ground has been opened to us.

Earlier, we all shared. Now listen, think of this man, this scholar speaking as a young man out of college having listened to his professors.

We all shared the opinion in agreement with our professors. That's an honesty you will never, hardly ever find among scholars to say they were actually kids who were students one day who were drooling while the professor spoke.

Oh, this man's God. But that's how it works in it, Brother Bill, when you're in your 20s, your early 20s.

And so he says, we all were in agreement with our professors and in accord with New Testament scholarship before and since Wes Cottenhort, this modern textual criticism, we were in agreement with it.

That in various places during the fourth century, recensions of the New Testament were made.

A recension is when you take a text that is established by critical revision.

So we all believe that these critically revised texts of the

New Testament existed and the text had been made from which the main text types then developed.

So we have then families of lines that come up that go back to this one that was rescinded or changed and now the others came from it, so they're all corrupted.

We spoke of recensions and text types. And if you read Wes Cottenhort, you get all these big words and all these big theories.

And if this was not enough, we referred to pre -Caesarean and other text types.

We referred to mixed texts and so on. I too have spoken of mixed texts in connection with the form of the

New Testament texts in the second and third centuries, but I have always done so with a guilty conscience because he knew the facts.

But he was still parroting what his professors wanted to hear. But now he's admitting it, he's coming clean.

He says, for according to the rules of linguistic philology, which that word means a historical and comparative approach to linguistics, comparing one old manuscript with another to find out where the accuracy is.

He says, for according to these rules, it is impossible to speak of mixed texts before recensions have been made.

They only can follow them. Whereas the New Testament manuscripts of the second and third centuries, which have a, quote, mixed text, clearly existed before the recensions were supposed to have been made.

It is impossible to fit the papyri from the time prior to the fourth century into these two text types, to say nothing of trying to fit them into other types as frequently happens by the scholars.

The simple fact that all these papyri, with their various distinctive characteristics, did exist side by side in the same ecclesiastical province that is in Egypt, where they were found, is the best argument against the existence of any text types, including the

Alexandrian and the Antiochian. We still live in the world of Westcott and Hort with our conception of different recensions and text types.

Although this conception has lost its raison d 'etre, which means reason of existence, or it needs at least to be newly and convincingly demonstrated.

For the increase of documentary evidence and the entirely new areas of research, which were open to us in the discovery of the papyri, mean the end of Westcott and Hort's conception.

And yet it's like still we study chemistry that we know is not right anymore, we're still studying the same. If you want to defend the new versions, you go back to Westcott and Hort.

And they've already been proven wrong by modern scholarship and by the find of these old papyrus manuscripts, which don't support them any more than they support the received text.

They support the received text too. But Westcott and Hort said they never do. The ancient ones never do, they were wrong.

Now, that's about all the time you can stand. We just got one point out of the three.

So I don't know what to do with this. I know there are folks, or I perceive, and I don't know this to be true, but I perceive there are folks that are ready to move on to something else.

One of them's my wife. She thinks that the people want to move on to something else.

When I was 39, I started listening to her. When I turned 46 this year, I stopped again.

And I keep saying, we'll finish this next week or the week after. I really know we're close.

I mean, I got it all right here. And it is finished, my study is finished. I'm just gonna be praying about whether just to give you the rest of it in manuscript form down here at the front and move on or what.

I know I'm gonna preach one more, and that's the conclusion with the Bible. It's a Bible message. You'll think, finally, we're back to the

Bible. It's a Bible message on this whole thing. But I hate to skip point two and three, some beautiful quotes.

I wanted to give you a lot of quotes from Burgin. Just amazing how he blows this away.

How many of you would read it if I just gave it to you in print? I'm asking right before the chicken's ready because if you're not gonna read it,

I'm gonna finish. How many of you would read this, would read every word of it if I gave it to you? Okay, all right, well, we'll pray about that then.

But let me, I tell you, at least let me do this. Let me read the one that I wanted to conclude with today.

Will you give, just give me 10 more minutes, and if you do, I'll promise to stop this and go on and move on. Can you give me 10 more?

Okay, it'll save you two more Sundays. All right, what

I want you to do is turn to 2 Samuel 2 .21, and I'm gonna need my two gentlemen to do that in these

Bibles. I'll hand it out if you would. 2 Samuel 2 .21. Burgin is not the only one who's written.

It's just we have so little time in the pulpit. I mean, I probably will write a book on this. I probably won't because I just, to write a book, you have to do nothing but write a book, and that's just not what my life is about right now.

Maybe someday the Lord would allow me. It's hard to fit it into messages, but it's probably the most important subject you or a new

Christian can study because if you don't know which Bible to read, how do you know what to do? If you don't know which one to trust, how do you know you can trust

John 3 .16 as being a true verse? And there's a man named

Benjamin G. Wilkinson who wrote a book called Our Authorized Bible Vindicated, obviously supporting the

King James, but more than that, most of these guys are supporting the received text, the

Greek behind it. But I wanna quote a little bit, and he's gonna refer to 2

Samuel 2 .21. And he asked the question, who killed Goliath?

There is the idea in the minds of some people that scholarship demands the laying aside of the authorized version of the

Bible and taking up the latest revised version. This is an idea, however, without any proper basis.

The revised version is in large part in line with what is known as modernism and is peculiarly acceptable to those who think that any change anywhere or in anything is progress.

Those who have really investigated the matter and are in hearty sympathy with what is evangelical realize that this revised version is a part of the movement to quote, modernize

Christian thought and faith and do away with the established truth. Now, that was a quote from the

Herald and Presbyter, which is a Presbyterian journal in July 16th, 1924.

In one of our prominent publications, there appeared in the winter of 1928, an article entitled,

Who Killed Goliath? And in the spring of 1929, an article named,

The Dispute About Goliath. Attention was called to the fact that in the American revised version, which is the same as the

American standard version, 2 Samuel 21, 19, we read that Elhanan killed

Goliath, not David. A special cablegram from the quote, most learned and devout scholars of the

Church of England who was behind the revised version and also which came some of the text, of course,

Westcott or text came into the new American standard later. This scholar said in substance that the revised version was correct, that Elhanan and not

David killed Goliath. That there were many other things in the

Bible, which were the product of exaggeration, which is what they say about the received text, such as the story of Noah and the

Ark, the story of Jonah and the whale, of the Garden of Eden and the longevity of Methuselah.

You see, liberals always think this way. I sat under them at Baylor University and they taught me that all of the miracles in the

Bible can be explained through natural phenomenon and I ceased to be a Southern Baptist a few years later because I didn't want my tithe money paying that man's salary.

These are the men that are behind the modern versions, folks. Study it, read it for yourselves. Compare the scholars, compare the men who support the received text with the men who don't.

The men who don't are not the ones you'd wanna have preaching to you. They're not the ones you'd wanna have sitting next to you in the pew.

They're the ones who don't believe in Noah's Ark, they don't believe in Jonah and the whale. They don't believe that David killed

Goliath, so they're happy with a Bible that says it didn't. Now, I'd like for you to read 2

Samuel 2 .21, brother. Is it? It probably is.

20, okay, let me see. It's right here. I'm sure you're right. 2 Samuel 21 .19

is exactly what I'm looking for. Yes.

Again, Bethlehem killed

Goliath and Gittin and Shep. All right, so who killed

Goliath? All right, Elhanan killed him.

Now, brother, Russell, read yours in the King James. Your 2

Samuel 21 .19. I got, I misread mine. Now, who killed

Goliath in this one? Or it doesn't actually say who killed Goliath, but who was killed in that verse?

The brother of Goliath. So does that then leave the possibility that David may have killed Goliath?

It does, doesn't it? Well, if you're looking at your King James Bible, you might notice that that's in italics, however.

So what would that make you think? What does that normally mean when in the

English it's in italics? It means it was added in English to make the

Hebrew make sense in English. Sometimes that's bad, sometimes that's good.

Sometimes you'd rather read it without it. Sometimes you'd rather read it with it. But what's interesting, in the

Hebrew language, you cannot make a word -for -word translation into English because of the differences in the language.

Sometimes you have to add English words to make it read right. But if you study, and we won't take the time this morning, but if you were to go back up to chapter 21, verse 15, and read all the way down through verse 22, then 22 makes sense where it says, these four were born to the giant of Gath and fell by the hand of David and by the hand of his servants.

It would indicate that these were killed by David and his servants, but it also leaves the possibility that Goliath was not one of those four, that he was a previous in the family line with these giants and that David had killed him previously.

It leaves that possibility and it certainly inserts the idea that this other man killed the brother of Goliath.

So that it leaves open the fact that David killed Goliath. And you say, well, I don't like the italics. Well, what's interesting, if you go to 1

Chronicles chapter 20 in verse five, where the same story is told, let me read it to you. 1

Chronicles 25, and there was a war again with the Philistines and Elhanan, that's our gentleman that supposedly killed

Goliath in the new versions. Elhanan, the son of Jair, slew Lami, the brother of Goliath the

Gittite, whose spear staff was like a weaver's beam. And there are no italics in that verse.

So the Hebrew clearly says in the parallel passage that he killed the brother of Goliath, which the

King James brings through very clearly in all the modern versions leave out. Why?

Because the Hebrew behind the modern versions leaves it out. And the translators were liberal and they don't care, and they left it out.

So tell me which Bible reads the clearest, who killed Goliath? What do you want to teach your children? How would you like to be teaching them,

Ms. Mitchell, in your Sunday school class? And you read that verse, and you think you know what you want to teach, and you read that and you say,

Elhanan, one of the little hands goes up, Ms. Mitchell, I thought David killed

Goliath. What are you gonna tell him?

You're gonna say, well, he did, and you're gonna go home and figure out why. You know, you had the new

American standard, perhaps, or whatever. So there are so many examples of this.

Obviously, time gets away from us. And yet,

Mr. Wilkerson in his book discusses this in detail, and I'm gonna close with a quote from this same gentleman,

Benjamin Wilkerson, in his book. He says, fundamentally, there are only two streams of Bibles.

Now, this'll help melt it all down to a simple conclusion. They talk about all these different families, these possible families, and so forth.

I think we quoted at least three people who have now proven that all that stuff about the families, you can't rely upon it because there are too many texts that are mixed and have some of that, what you think is a family, and some of that family in it.

So we've disproven that, and so this gentleman says, basically, you boil it down, there are two streams of Bibles.

Anyone who is interested enough to read the vast volume of literature on this subject will agree that down through the centuries, there were only two streams of manuscripts.

The first stream, which carried the received text in Hebrew and Greek, began with the apostolic churches and reappeared at intervals down the

Christian era among enlightened believers, was protected by the wisdom and scholarship of the pure church in her different phases.

Precious manuscripts were preserved by such as the church at Pella in Palestine, where Christians fled when in 70

AD the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. They were preserved by the Syrian church of Antioch, which produced eminent scholarship.

They were preserved by the Italic church in Northern Italy, and also, at the same time, by the

Gallic church in Southern France and by the Celtic church in Great Britain, by the pre -Waldensian, the

Waldensian, and the churches of the Reformation, which includes Calvin. I'll tell you an interesting bit of information.

John Calvin himself said, I believe that I am kin to the

Calvins of the Waldensians who lived in the Alps. So there you have a stretch of that same

Bible manuscript that the Waldensians used, which fits the received text, not the modern text, reaches up to Calvin, who,

Calvin and Beza, the man that took over his ministry after he passed away. Beza is one of the most common names you'll hear in connection with the received text, and made many translations, and they all were the received text, which became known as the

Textus Receptus. So it brings it all the way from the apostles to the churches of the Reformation.

This first stream appears with very little change in the Protestant Bibles of many languages, and in English in the

Bible known as the King James Version, the one which has been in use for 300 years at the time of this writing in the

English -speaking world. These manuscripts have in agreement with them, by far, the vast majority of copies of the original text.

So vast is this majority that even the enemies of the received text admit that 19 20th of all

Greek manuscripts are of this class. And he concludes this way.

So the present controversy between the King James Bible in English and the modern versions is the same old contest fought out between the early church and the rival sects, and later between the

Waldenses and the Papists, that means the Roman Catholics who were killing them because their Bible version was different, was one of the reasons.

From the fourth to the 13th centuries, and later still between the Reformers and the

Jesuits in the 16th century, the Jesuits were zealous Roman Catholics who went about killing all manner of Protestants and Baptists and one of the reasons they did so was because they would not use the

Jerome Latin Vulgate, which matches the modern versions. They used the received text, which matches your

King James Bible, and they were killed for it. Now, folks, that's the history. It's not a new battle.

That man said it so succinctly in his conclusion, he says it's the same old battle, goes all the way back to the apostles and the sects of their day, the heretical sects, and it can be followed all the way down to the

Waldenses, to John Calvin, and all the way to our time when Burgin was fighting the battle against Titchendorf and Westcott Hort.

You gotta pick a side, I'm afraid. Now, I will tell you this, and I know that you that have been around me for a long time know that I'm not a preacher that's gonna tell you you gotta dress a certain way, you gotta wear your hair a certain way, you gotta walk a certain way, you can or cannot go to this place or that or watch this or that or listen to this or that.

I'm relying on the Holy Spirit to deal in your hearts. I think he'll deal more when

I am able to preach the Bible message to conclude this, which will probably be Sunday after next, because I'm gonna preach the message on the resurrection, the resurrected life next

Sunday, Lord willing. But I think, you know, I'm perfectly confident to let you take the same journey that I've taken, and I feel you'll come with the same conclusion if you examine the evidence faithfully and without bias.

The first time I studied this, I didn't do it, I was biased. I wanted the King James Version to win.

Funny thing was, at that time, I was reading the New American Standard Bible. But I read one, the first book

I read, I believe it just sounded so great to me, I said, man, these guys are right. And that whole first time back in the early 80s when

I studied it, I was biased. This time when I studied it, I wasn't. For one reason,

Russ had brought up some interesting questions. He had a book by Allen he had read. He said, I want you to read this book.

It doesn't seem to agree with everything you're saying. And so I just wanted to know the truth.

That's all I wanna know at this point in my life. And so let's just take the facts, examine them in an unbiased way.

Take what the Bible teaches, that God has preserved his word to each generation, and that's the written word.

It's not the living word. The living word doesn't have to be preserved, does he? You can't preserve something that's perfect like he is.

But the written word came through earthen vessels, so it had to be preserved. But he promised he would give it to each generation.

What text has each generation had, going back through the whole time, all the way back to the

Waldenses of 400 AD and back beyond that? It wasn't the West Codhort text.

None of the believers in the 1800s went with it. They rejected it and spoke of it as heretical and pointed out they were merry worshipers, this, they attacked them.

They attacked West Codhort, they tried to blow them out of the saddle. But you know what? In these end days, guess which one was accepted by the seminaries?

In a day where God says there will be a great falling away, guess what the scholars say is the right one?

Just weigh the evidence. Now let's stand and get lighter and pray and have lunch and fellowship together.

Thanks to my wife, you won't have to endure any more of this except for a Bible message on it to conclude it.

Father, thank you so much for these men who did give their whole life to the study of Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic and who ruined their eyesight by going over old documents and collating them and comparing them and matching them all for the purpose of defending a line of manuscripts that was purchased by the blood of people who believe like we do.

And Father, we thank you for these people, some who gave their lives for a different reading in a manuscript, some who the

Catholics killed because they wouldn't read like Jerome's Bible. Father, we thank you for these people for without the little shreds that they left us, the writings that they left us, we would be at the mercy of the modern scholars.

We thank you for these men. We thank you most of all though, Father, for your word, which gave us the promise that you'd preserve your word to each generation, seven times purified, preserved and kept for each generation of your children.

Thank you that we have the Bible, that we can trust it, that it is what you've given us and it's perfect and that we can teach it to our children and our grandchildren without worry of them finding something wrong like the wrong person killed

Goliath. Father, lead us in the right direction. May we keep and maintain unity with one another.

That's the most important thing in our church is that we walk as one and that we follow our head, the

Lord Jesus Christ. But help us to not put our heads in the ground like an ostrich sometimes, but to search truth when we need to.

Help us to take a stand when we need to. Help us to study and to prove that which is true and to try the spirits.

Because we live in a day of mediocrity when folks don't wanna do these things anymore.

Help us not to go according to that mindset. Help us to follow our Lord Jesus Christ until he comes back.

Father, bless our meal together and our fellowship time and put our spirits together as one with the

Holy Spirit of God today and bless our Bible study this afternoon and we ask it in Jesus' name, amen.