King James Onlyism with Fred Butler

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

Feel confident in your pet's safety while experiencing the convenience of Invisible Fence brand. Customized for your needs, our patented containment technology is the most advanced on the market.

00:09

No costly subscription fees to keep your system active and actual hands -on training from certified pet trainers sets

00:15

Invisible Fence brand apart from the rest. We're so confident in our product that we even offer a one -year money -back performance guarantee.

00:21

So not only is your pet safe, so is your investment. Get started today and save $150 on your system by visiting

00:28

InvisibleFence .com. Pride is a blinding thing and we can be blinded by it.

00:34

And one of the things that pride does is when we have an argument that's wrong, it doesn't listen. Look, if you believe your argument is good, you should be able to listen to Fred and hear him, hear his arguments and counter them.

00:47

Not just reject them out of hand because if you reject it out of hand, it could be your pride speaking, not the truth speaking.

00:54

Just a thought for you. One, two, three. Welcome to The Rap Report with your host,

01:02

Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the

01:09

Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

01:17

All right, well, welcome back. This is another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, with my trusty colleague,

01:27

Bud. Greetings! Bud, do you want to explain...

01:33

Grace to you. Yeah, grace to you. That's appropriate for today. Very good. Do you want to explain why, for those that might be watching on Patreon, we are wearing fedoras?

01:44

It's a special day because of a special guest that we have who is occasionally known, well, for a number of things, but as Fedora Fred, of grace to you,

01:57

Fred Butler. Hi. Salutations to you. How are you?

02:03

Good. Well, Fred, we're glad to have you with us. This is not unusual for you and I to be recording. We actually just recorded, you and I annually record with Echo Zoe, Andy Olson, and we do his final

02:16

December show every year. It's become a three -year tradition of ours. So folks may know your voice.

02:25

We'll get to giving you a more formal introduction in a moment, but you know what, Bud? I haven't done this in a while, so we got some reviews that we should go over.

02:35

I actually got a new tool that gives me all the different reviews from different, you know, wherever people are, you know, whether it's iTunes, we can't call it iTunes,

02:46

Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts, or whichever, and we actually did create, we do have a way that people can give a review.

02:54

We at least have a, they have a new thing, it's lovethepodcast .com slash rap report.

03:02

That's rap with two P's. So we got some reviews, though, Jada30 says, great information, tons of great content on a variety of Christian topics.

03:18

TNN15 just says, good word, good biblical, short encouragements.

03:24

This is, I think that was probably meant for my daily one, but they put it on the weekly because this one's not so short.

03:33

But both five stars. We got a five star from Growing in Truth.

03:38

They say, excellent, understandable, exegetical. One of the many things

03:43

I appreciate about this podcast is its exegetical and easy to understand approach to whatever is being spoken of.

03:51

Andrew is very humble in his speaking and always brings the gospel to the glory of God.

03:58

I was glad, Bud, that he put humble in his speaking, not just humble, you know, because that would be a lie.

04:05

Right, Fred? Yes. No, do you ever get hate mail? You should have one that has hate mail.

04:12

This is the worst podcast ever, it was a waste of an hour of my time. My wife sends those comments in, that's what.

04:20

Yeah, and that's why I didn't want to read it. Oh, thanks, thanks, bro. No, actually, I get the actual hate mail, not just the, you know,

04:30

Fred, I don't know if you, you probably get this with the ministry that you're involved with, but I get strange things.

04:37

I have, I got a binder. It was a two -inch binder that was a guy claiming that this was his revelations from God.

04:48

And it was just condemning everybody. Everyone was on the list of, I forget which episode we,

04:54

I just read different clippings from it. And he was, you know, he was passing judgments on everyone,

05:00

Hillary Clinton, Trump, and just, and Yeah, I haven't seen those in a while.

05:06

I used to go, I used to get the mail a long time ago, and I would pick it up for Grace to You and do the inner office stuff from the church or the college to the ministry.

05:18

And there was one guy every month, he would send a big package to Pastor John McCarty.

05:26

And so Pastor John McCarty needed to look at this stuff because Charles of England, he was never probably going to be king because his mother never dies, but he was the

05:38

Antichrist. He had all these elaborate schemes.

05:44

And I haven't seen anything from him in like a long time. So I don't know if he's died or whatever happened.

05:51

I always remember that my first pastor, when he was at Master's Seminary, he used to have the job of cleaning

05:59

Pastor John's office. And he would tell me every day he would see a new stack of hate mail that was like one foot tall, and a fan mail that was like one or two inches tall.

06:14

And he told me that Pastor John would read every one of those, every hate mail, he would read every one of them every day.

06:23

And it was like, man. I don't know if he still does that this day. He just doesn't have time. He may not have time anymore.

06:29

I mean, this was back in the 80s. So, well, let's get to introducing Fred here. And Fred Butler works at Grace to You.

06:38

He's written a new book that we're going to discuss today, The Royal Deceptions, Exposing the King James Controversies Against God's Word, is the title of his…

06:48

Fred Butler Conspiracies. What did I say? James White Conspiracies. It's controversies. Oh, well. Okay.

06:54

You're confusing it with James White's book. Yeah. All right. There you go. Read it again. Yeah. Read this again.

07:01

I'll edit that out. No, don't edit that. That makes for good broadcast listening.

07:06

Yes, that's banter. Yeah. That's good banter. You want that. They're going to have to go to the Patreon to hear the banter.

07:12

So Fred Butler's new book, Royal Deceptions, Exposing the King James Only Conspiracies.

07:20

Did I just do it again? No. You did it right. Oh, I said it right that time. Okay. Yeah, no, no. Keep this in there.

07:26

Don't edit this out now. Royal Deception, Exposing the King James Only Conspiracies Against God's Word.

07:32

That's correct. You did that and it sounded humbly presented too. All right.

07:39

Well, Fred, for the record, for folks that don't know, and you'll confirm this is true,

07:46

I'm sure, but I don't know if you know this, bud, but Fred Butler actually has the largest office in all of grace to you, even larger than John MacArthur.

07:55

He does. Yes, I do. He's let me in there once. Yeah. Lots of tables. Yeah. He has.

08:02

Did you get to come? Did I take you on a tour of grace to you when you came? I can't remember. Actually, bud, you went on the tour,

08:11

I think, even with us when we did the Truth Matters. Yeah.

08:16

Yeah, we did. And then we snuck away and got some private access. Yeah, maybe.

08:22

Yes. Well, I cannot confirm or deny, even though there is video on Facebook somewhere of a

08:29

Fred giving us a private tour through there when I think there was like,

08:35

I think Jay was the only one we saw in the whole building. I thought we were completely alone, if I remember.

08:42

Yeah, I think we ran into one person in the middle of the night or something. Yeah, it was. There was no one there, but Fred does have, when he has a meeting, there's so many people there, they need multiple tables, and that's why he needs that very, very large office.

08:57

Yes. So, but, Fred, let's deal with this topic, the

09:02

King James Bible. You have written on this, and actually, this isn't the first time you're writing on this.

09:11

This is, really, this book you have is from blog articles you wrote years ago.

09:16

That's correct. This was, I believe, it was on what, Hip and Thigh, right? That's correct.

09:23

So, it was originally on my blog. When I started writing my blog, you need to have blog material to write about in order to have a blog.

09:32

You do. But at the time, I was teaching my volunteers, the people who fill up my office at Grace to You, on just various topics, and that was one of them.

09:44

And I would, obviously, write out my scrawl notes to teach them, and I just started turning those into articles.

09:53

And a lot of it also kind of came from my interactions with, on various discussion forums and email subscription groups with King James onlyists who were just insistent that I was heretical for my views and all that sort of thing.

10:10

So, I would interact with them and sort of cut my teeth on their arguments and kind of get the feel of how they were arguing at that time.

10:19

That was probably in the mid -2000s, so it's like almost 20 years ago.

10:25

And then, so I would write these articles out, and I just did a series on, okay, these are the,

10:32

I remember how I used to argue, and I just sort of wrote each article kind of as a chapter, or maybe two or three articles would be sort of on one subject, like on textual criticism of the

10:45

Old Testament or New Testament or whatever. And eventually, what happened, really, with this book, why it, you know, what triggered me to put this in print was

10:55

I had my boss, not Phil, but my direct manager had a lady who is a supporter of Grace to You, and she had written to him.

11:07

I think he knows her, interacts with her or something on, through the ministry website or whatever, and she had gotten a hold of,

11:17

I think it was David Daniels, or I can't remember who it is, a guy that is sort of now overseeing

11:23

Jack Chick's ministries after Jack Chick died. And that guy had put together a

11:28

King James defense book, you know, just talking about the Bible, and she had written it and did not, you know, and didn't really have an answer for it.

11:38

And so my manager asked me, hey, do you have any material, or do we know of any material we can get in her hands?

11:44

And the only thing I could think of in book form, really, was the stuff by James White, which is, if you're not really clued in to textual criticism, and I think his book is more of a primer on just general textual criticism of the

12:00

Bible rather than just Bible version per se. I mean, it's a fantastic book, but it is a little daunting for someone who's not really familiar with the terminology.

12:13

And as I just, I didn't have anything to really give, and I felt kind of bad about that. And I wanted to just put together maybe a

12:19

PDF that I could print out or email to somebody or something, and I think through just my contact with Gabe Hughes and some other folks that I knew, they were like, why don't you, you know, you can put this stuff into a book format and have, you know,

12:40

I think Nate Pickowitz was another one, just so you can have Amazon will, you know, print as you go sort of thing, and it's free,

12:49

I mean, you know, they even give you a little bit of a royalty whenever they sell a book. And so I started compiling those messages and those articles into chapters in this book, it became sort of this book, and I added some appendices and so forth.

13:07

And so that's really the stated goal of my book is just to have a quick, short, concise sort of reference to put in the hand of that Sunday school teacher, or that youth director, or that associate pastor who has some disruptive, belligerent,

13:27

King James only person who is, you know, making a nuisance of themselves in their church or giving material to people and just to have a way to answer them and to put confidence in our in the

13:41

Word of God. Well, and you even say in there that it's not just for that, but it's also for someone like where you were, that you had come out of this.

13:51

So let's start with what is the King James only kind of view, because there's people who,

14:00

I think a lot of people probably aren't familiar. Now some that are in more of the independent fundamentals Baptist churches are going to know this topic, this debate, but not everyone knows the debate.

14:10

And just for, you know, here I have my 1611. Yeah, there you go.

14:15

I'm glad that you and I have both matured. Okay? Because I remember...

14:22

Who would like a fake that, huh? Yeah, but, you know, we have. And here I have my Star Wars shirt on, you know.

14:28

That may be, but, you know, I remember... Andrew's fedora. I remember having a guy that came to church

14:38

Sunday morning. He was promoting King James only. He said, 1611 is the only version we should use.

14:46

It's the inspired version. And he came, I said, but why don't you use it? I said, you know, he said he's coming back for, he's going to come back

14:53

Sunday evening. So Sunday evening I brought my trusty 1611, and I asked,

15:00

I said to him, I said, I said, let me see your Bible. I said, that's not a 1611. That's not your inspired

15:05

Bible. That's an authorized Bible from the 1700s. I took his Bible and I handed him this.

15:11

And I made him sit through service with an actual 1611. And he could not get his

15:18

Bible back fast enough because he couldn't read the English in this. Because the

15:23

English has changed over the 100 years of 1611 to the 1780s.

15:28

We have a response to that claim of yours. So there is a...

15:33

I think it's, you know, look, at the very start, and I mentioned this in the preface of my book.

15:42

I am a huge fan of the King James Bible. I think it is one of the, if not the greatest literary work in English that we have in our possession.

15:52

And in my opinion, more Americans, more youth need to be familiar with the language of the

15:59

King James Bible. And the reason why I say that is because that translation is a good portion of it, at least 80 % of it, is the work of William Tyndale, especially in the

16:12

New Testament. And William Tyndale was the guy who is the cornerstone of the

16:17

Reformation. No one else, Calvin, all of these men who followed or we sort of look at as heroes, would not have really good ministries if it weren't for the work that Tyndale gave his life for.

16:31

In getting the Bible into English and presiding, just sort of a way to a model.

16:39

Hey, you can translate this. He was the inspiration for Luther, translating his Bible into German, getting it into the hands of the

16:46

German people. And the man gave us wonderful theological terms like mercy seat and Passover.

16:53

I mean, we still use those terms today. All of these, all of these terminologies in the King James. And I mean, in this, he gave his life, you know, so that we could have a

17:04

Bible in our hands that would communicate God's revelation to us. And, but at the same time, you know, just like any other man -made production, it doesn't have, you know, it's not going to be absolutely perfect.

17:19

And the thing with the King James only is, is they're going to take that fact about it being this sort of cornerstone work of the

17:27

Reformation. And they're going to say, look, this is the only Bible that you can, that you should read because it's the only

17:34

Bible that really has the accurate word of God in it. And so if you have a modern version, or if you have any other translation, other than the

17:44

King James, even a new King James, well, then you have an adulterated Bible. You have some sort of modern perversion.

17:51

It's not a version, it's a perversion. And again, this is sort of something that does swirl in the circles of, you know, the independent fundamental

18:02

Baptists, but there are reformed guys that'll argue this way. You know, I come across them all the time,

18:09

Puritan, these Puritan lynch mob types who are against Christmas and any images of Jesus, you know what

18:16

I'm talking about. And they're going to be saying that this is

18:21

God's word, and we need to be reading the King James or some derivative. There are some that would say, well, maybe we can do a little bit of a modernization of the language, but you need to keep the base text of the received text in the

18:37

New Testament, the Bomberg manuscript from the

18:42

Old Testament and so forth. And that's the Bible. And if you depart from that, well, then you're sliding into heresy.

18:50

And so— I mean, one of the things that you brought up, I mean, most people don't even know when you talked earlier about the

18:58

King James. There was actually not a standard English until the

19:03

King James, and it's like 75 % of what they did in the King James translation came from Tyndale, but you had lots of different spellings for words and things like that.

19:13

The King James actually became that standardized English for us.

19:19

And that's because King James made it that way. Yeah. It wasn't because, you know, everybody got all of a sudden inspired and the

19:27

Holy Spirit was moving or anything like that. It was because the political forces made that the way it was.

19:34

And of course, you had William Shakespeare at the same time. His plays helped standardize a lot of that language as well.

19:42

Let's get into what you just said there, because a lot of people don't understand that about the Bible.

19:47

In the historical setting, there was lots of debate between the

19:53

Catholic Church, the Protestant Church, fighting back and forth, and the Bible version, the state

19:59

Bible, the Bible that England would use was being a battle back and forth.

20:06

You're talking Queen Mary, Elizabeth, King James. There was battling back and forth.

20:14

Why was the King James Bible initially written? Why did King James authorize that or commission that?

20:23

Okay, so it was in England. Remember, England had broken away from the

20:28

Catholic Church because Henry VIII wanted to get a divorce. He really wanted to get married again.

20:36

He wanted to get a male heir, and he couldn't get his first wife. No, he couldn't get it from her.

20:42

So he wanted to divorce her and get a new wife. He didn't give it to her either, I don't think. But because of that, as Protestantism developed in England, you had within the

20:55

Anglican Church, because Anglican Church kind of came out of Henry VIII's departure from Rome, you had within the

21:03

Anglican Church, the Puritan movement. So we're all familiar with the Puritans. Puritans were a movement within Anglicanism to try to get

21:10

Anglicanism away from Roman Catholicism, because they thought Anglicans were still too

21:17

Catholic. They wanted to change the Book of Common Prayer. They wanted to get rid of the vestments, all of that stuff that was part of the

21:24

Anglican culture. Because Anglicanism was just sort of Roman Catholicism, but your priest could marry.

21:30

I mean, that was what it was. And so they wanted to see some reform, as the

21:36

Reformation continued to sweep across Europe, and at that time was starting to go to the colonies and so forth.

21:45

They wanted there to be reform, but there was a big battle, like you're saying, politically between the high churchmen in the

21:54

Church of England, Anglicans, and the Puritan pastors who were in England. So when

21:59

King James ascended the throne after Elizabeth's death, the

22:05

Puritans thought, okay, well, this will be an opportunity to try to get some reforms that we were wanting to push for, because he was seen as sort of friendly towards the

22:14

Puritans because of his upbringing and kind of where he came from in Scotland and so forth. But that was not the case.

22:22

He wanted to be the head of the church. He did not like the Geneva Bible that everybody sort of used anyway, because it was against the divine right of kings, in his opinion, at least the study notes were.

22:35

Yeah, so when he first became, I think within a year after he ascended the throne, there was a get together of all of the various heads of the various institutions there, including the

22:47

Church of England and some Puritan representatives, and neither one of them, he really was placating, you know, but he liked one of the suggestions that John Reynolds, who was a

22:59

Puritan, who was there in attendance at this meeting in Hampton Court, he liked his idea of, hey, let's get a new translation of the

23:06

Bible, a new English translation. They had about five or six before that, and they were all sort of stuck on the

23:12

Geneva Bible and King James hated it. But he loved the idea, okay, we can do that, because that way he could control what the

23:21

Bible would say and how it would be presented to the people and how it would be used in churches, because he was considered the head of the church, like the

23:29

Pope was the head of the Catholic Church. He was the king of England, the head of the defender of the faith of the

23:35

English people, and so that's what they did. It's how it kind of emerged from that, and they pulled together a group of scholars and took them,

23:43

I think it started in 1604, if I remember right, 1603, 1604, around in that time, and got done in 1611, that's when they first went to print with the

23:54

Bible. So you're looking at what, what is that, about eight or nine years or so of work that they did on the

24:00

Old Testament, getting a new translation, the Apocrypha, most people don't realize that the original

24:06

King James had the Apocrypha in it. Yeah, and that's something that I bring up all the time with them, because when they say, like, that's the thing when

24:13

I ask someone if they think that the KJV 1611 was inspired, then they have a real problem, because then you're saying that the

24:22

Catholic Church is right, because you're saying the Apocrypha is inspired. It's amazing how many of them don't know, and don't know that it was put in there because King James was trying to satisfy this rift between, he put it in there to appease

24:36

Catholics. He wrote it in English to appease Protestants. So the argument about it being inspired,

24:45

I mean, clearly history shows this is not a Holy Spirit revival motivation to do this.

24:51

This was a political compromise to bring two differing parties together under James, who, as you said, is the head of the church.

24:59

This is political maneuvering, and it's not revivalistic at all. Yeah, it's not a religious reason for doing it, is your point.

25:08

Exactly, and so the problem with the King James only is they're going to say, they try to revise, that's part of the part of my subtitle there with conspiracies, is then they create sort of this historical revisionist approach, saying, well, in that God was using this, and God was moving.

25:27

Well, he might have been, but that was not the point of the Bible. Did God use the

25:33

King James Bible? Well, of course, I'm not, no one's debating that that's God using his revelation, not

25:39

God using a particular favored translation that reads a certain way, and it just, they'll create a whole alternative history of how we got our

25:51

Bible, because, you know, they have problems like that.

25:57

You know, they have the English, we were talking earlier about the standardized language. Well, the standardized

26:02

English didn't come around until another hundred years or so after the

26:07

King James was published, so they started changing the letter shapes and the spelling of words, and that was beginning to become standardized spelling and all that sort of stuff, and they saw the, you know, when they started doing that, well, the

26:22

King James only will say, well, here you see God working through and, you know, purifying the language so that we could have this.

26:32

It doesn't change the meaning of the text or anything like that. So they'll find excuses in order to explain away some of these problems that we're talking about here and create an entirely different, you know, history of our

26:48

Bible that's just not factual. That's the problem. Well, let me see if we could,

26:54

I want to play a video clip. You mentioned Gabe Hughes, and this is, you know, basically setting the scene for us in really a minute and 30 seconds.

27:04

So let me just play this, and this was, you know, Bud sent this to me to play, so, and he's got one other that we'll play later, and I'm sorry,

27:12

I just apologize now for it, for what we'll play later. But here's Gabe Hughes on King James onlyism.

27:20

King James onlyism is the belief that the 1611 King James version of the Bible is the only divinely authorized

27:27

English translation, while modern translations corrupt the Bible. It's not just a deception. It's a satanic conspiracy against the word of God.

27:35

The most glaring flaw with this doctrine is not one verse in the Bible supports it. And that's pretty much it.

27:41

It's a false doctrine. Now, if someone wants to use the King James Bible, that's fine, if you can understand it.

27:46

But to say it's the only translation God approved is a lie. King James onlyists argue the KJV is translated from the majority text, while modern versions are from corrupt

27:55

Alexandrian texts. But the Byzantine texts used by King James translators were no older than the 11th century.

28:01

We now have access to older and more reliable texts, closer to the originals. King James onlyists say modern translations removed references to Christ's Lordship and deleted entire

28:10

Bible verses. But the Byzantine texts added these verses to the original text and the extra references to Christ's Lordship.

28:17

It's just extra pious language from some overly ambitious scribes. King James onlyists say the 1611 authorized version is the only true

28:25

Bible. Unless you have a King James Bible, you don't have a Bible. You need a King James 1611 authorized version.

28:31

Actually, no one uses the 1611, which also included the Apocrypha. Today's King James Bible is the 1769 revision.

28:39

God has preserved His word, which we have in some very good translations of the Bible. Jesus said, heaven and earth will pass away.

28:46

But my word will never pass away when we understand the text. Okay, so that is, was provided with Gabe Hughes.

28:55

I mean, his what videos are great. I mean, it just, yeah, that's right. Hammers it home pretty quickly. But that sets the stage for us, right?

29:03

I mean, that tells us what these issues are. Right. Because we're, you know, this is, for some may think,

29:11

Fred, that this is not a big deal. They, because they're not, they haven't been dealing with this controversy.

29:20

So you have dealt with it. You talk about your confession. Just briefly, could you give your background before we get into the arguments?

29:29

And for folks who want to get a copy of your book, Royal Deceptions, I have a link in the show notes, so just look there.

29:36

But for folks that want to understand you and why you're speaking to it, can you give a little bit of your background?

29:43

Okay, so yeah, when I was first brand new believer, I was a part of a solid church, and they had a high view of the

29:53

Bible, of course. And in fact, it was a Southern Baptist church. And at the time, it's going through this, its own turmoil, much more, not as much as it is today.

30:03

But at the time, there was a whole inerrancy debate. So it's like, okay, you know, is the scriptures inerrant?

30:10

Are they trustworthy? That sort of thing. Well, I was obviously on the inerrant, trustworthy side.

30:15

And so I had a friend that would get us all together on the weekends or whenever it was convenient.

30:22

And being a single, young college kid, I didn't have,

30:27

I was always looking for something to do on a weekend. And I got saved, and I was excited about my faith and all that. I would go over to his house.

30:34

We'd have Bible studies. We'd pray. We'd do some street evangelism. We probably were terrible at it.

30:40

But, you know, we had a lot of zealous desire. Like all of us when we started out doing that.

30:46

Yes, exactly. Thou shalt repent, thou. Yes, that's what I know. And so we would, when we met together, my friend would oftentimes have books that he would hand out.

30:59

Well, really, he would sell them to us. So I'd have to pay five bucks for a book. But he had a book this one time from this guy.

31:07

He was a pastor in Oklahoma. So the guy's name, Gary Flint, was a pastor. I don't even know if he's still alive today.

31:13

But he had written a book, probably self -published like myself, on defending the

31:20

King James. And when I read it, I thought it was brilliant. I mean, I just like, he was showing me comparisons with other

31:28

Bibles. And I'm like, yeah, I could definitely see how the enemy would want to distort God's word and all that sort of thing.

31:34

He had, if I'm not mistaken, yeah, he had a couple chapters written by talking about problem passages.

31:43

And the one guy he used was a guy who's a physician in New Zealand.

31:49

And he was giving solutions to problem passages, which I think are legit in some cases.

31:55

But it was using the King James instead of using the King James text instead of going and appealing to the whole idea of copyist errors and all that sort of thing.

32:05

Well, these number discrepancies in these two similar passages is caused by copyist errors or something is what my

32:15

Ryrie Study Bible would say. And this guy would give solutions to these numbers that I thought were brilliant.

32:21

I was like, wow, that's great. I never thought about it that way. So I was so moved by this fella that I went to,

32:30

I called him up and I found his number and everything and talked with him and he gave me some more resources.

32:37

So then I went to the various catalogs, trying to find phone numbers.

32:44

At that time, we didn't have an internet, you know, to search this stuff. And so I found like David Cloud's, you know, ministry contact information or I would find from the various libraries that I could find this stuff from,

32:59

Peter Ruckman stuff. And I would subscribe to their magazines or I would get their books or whatever, studying on this whole topic of King James only.

33:08

So I had individuals like Ruckman and D .A. Waite and David Cloud and Edward Hills, all of these various people give me information about how to defend the

33:22

King James. And that's what I grew up on. That's what really got me thinking about the word of God.

33:29

It was this King James only stuff. I had no real, you know, anyone really pouring their life into me in any meaningful fashion.

33:39

I had sweet pastors that were at my church, but I just don't think they really had the sophistication, as I mentioned in my book, to deal with my arguments.

33:51

In fact, there was one time we had I was I became such a belligerent pest at my church, you know, in my in my college department over this issue, because I was like, look, guys, we need to be reading the word of God, not these trashy

34:06

Bibles that have corrupted scripture and all this other stuff, you know. And they allowed us to have a debate.

34:14

So it was me and another guy who was a King James only is that one of my one of my disciples,

34:20

I guess, and a couple of other guys who knew that I was wrong, but they couldn't really argue against me.

34:26

They were not prepared. So even when you're wrong, you're an excellent debater and apologist.

34:31

I know. I know. I know. Isn't that great? That could work against you big time.

34:38

And we should lack those guys. I mean, when it caused even more confusion in my youth group, in my college department, because now you have people coming to me going,

34:49

I never saw this before. So I had everybody running to their King James to use their King James Bibles and throwing away their

34:55

NIVs and all this other stuff. So I'm basically causing this disruptive rift in my

35:01

Sunday school class. And, you know, and my pastors, because they're these squishy Southern Baptist guys, want to be nice all the time.

35:08

They wouldn't call me out on it. They should. I mean, if it was going on right now in my church, if I was a pastor,

35:14

I'd shut it down. It's like, we're not good. This is not what we believe about Scripture. You need to stop.

35:20

They didn't do that. I think that's what you just said there is important for us, because you put this in your book is you wished that they would have.

35:28

And this is why we should correct error instead of being squishy about things, because people end up going astray.

35:36

So, you know, there is a reason for that. Now, before we get into you, you have six arguments that I want to get you to go through.

35:43

But before we do, and I'm just going to let you know, this is Bud's fault. Okay. I'm just saying,

35:52

I'm sorry, after this about two and a half minutes, you can't get these two and a half minutes back.

36:00

But this two and a half minutes is for you,

36:06

Fred, but really what it is, this sets the stage of what it is you're actually arguing against.

36:11

And this is someone that is going to sing the King James Bible song, right?

36:18

He looks like he's a reformed guy. Yeah, with the beard. You'd think that this is going to be, you know, like in church, we sing songs to God.

36:30

Well, okay, in modern churches, we sing songs to self or to God about ourselves.

36:36

But this is a song about a Bible. And this really, it is two and a half minutes, but it does lay out the view that these people have and a view you used to hold.

36:46

So give a listen. Hope I can do it justice. I went down to the bookstore just the other day.

36:56

I went to buy a Bible for I had just been saved. When I asked to see a

37:02

Bible, I could not understand. They had a shelf full, 10 foot long, each one a different brand.

37:10

They had the ASV, the RSV, good news for modern man.

37:15

And every other version that's made to just please man.

37:21

They had the living Bible and the brand new NIV. And I soon found out the devil is the one who started these.

37:31

I took an ASV to church. The preacher preached from Psalms. When he started reading,

37:38

I knew something was wrong. I knew my preacher could read. I knew he was not blind.

37:45

But I soon found out that the Bible he had was a different kind. I went back to the bookstore to get my money back.

37:54

When I told him of my problem, he just slapped me on the back. He said, son, some of these

38:01

Bibles are too hard to understand. I suggest that you should try good news for modern man.

38:09

I took the second version home. I said, well, I'll give it a try. When I showed it to my pastor, he said it was a lie.

38:18

They'd taken the blood of Jesus out. They denied he was God on earth. They even put some cuss words in and denied the virgin birth.

38:28

He told all about how these versions had come along. He took his King James Bible and he showed me where they were wrong.

38:37

He said, you're just a newborn babe in Christ. You did not know, my son, that the

38:43

King James Version 1611 is the only one. Amen. I went back a third time.

38:50

I was starting to get mad. I asked him if perversions were the only thing he had.

38:57

He reached below the counter and what he showed me was a shame. Had to blow the dust away to read the name

39:05

King James. So if you buy a Bible, please take my advice.

39:12

Only buy a King James, though others may sound nice. Don't buy a living

39:18

Bible or a brand new NIV, because you'll soon find out the devil is the one who started these.

39:27

Amen. How true. Wow. I got goosebumps. It was a toe -tapper.

39:35

Yeah, I mean, it was. Too bad he didn't have a band. Well, the thing that's interesting with it is,

39:41

I mean, we might agree that some of those translations are not great translations. I would agree with some of his sentiments.

39:48

Most translations, modern translations, are published by various book publishers because they want to have their own translation on which to—they don't have to pay the copyrights to the other translations or whatever.

40:01

They can produce their own Bibles. And I think that, you know, well, your church is going to go under a change where you're going to have to—you're going to change to the new, you know,

40:10

Legacy Standard Bible. The Legacy Standard Bible. I have to say that because I can't say the

40:17

LSB is just going to sound like, you know, the LSD Bible. I just—I see that coming.

40:23

I know. But the thing that—I mean, there are some valid points. However, one of the things

40:29

I think interesting with it is you listen to that, and this is a common argument that people make. Well, they've taken out the deity of Christ.

40:36

You heard that even in the Gabe Hughes video. And really what it is, they've added— They've added the deity of Christ.

40:43

Well, they—no, they didn't add the deity—like this thing. They've added clarification. We can clarify that.

40:49

They added clarification on passages. Yes. But the thing is that with all of the passages, you take the

40:57

NIV even, or any of these other translations that he say are demonic perversions, we could find the deity of Christ very clearly.

41:08

We could find all these doctrines that he says that these versions deny. They're there.

41:15

They're just not there in the verses that the King James added it to. Right. Well, we should say that the—it kind of goes back to the history of translations and the transmission of the text, but early scribes would copy manuscripts that they would get, and they would begin to see, wait a minute, this passage in Mark sounds familiar to that passage in Matthew, but it's—the one in Matthew is different than the one in Mark.

41:46

And so they would try to harmonize the two by adding a word or so.

41:52

But usually the way that would be handled is that they would put it in the margin of the manuscript. Sometimes copyists would get it, and then it would come into the actual body of the manuscript that they're copying, and eventually these various harmonizations and so forth would come in and would become part of the text.

42:12

So you have the King James, which is translated because all of these begin to branch out, all of these various copies and manuscript families and stuff.

42:21

And you have the King James based upon what became known as the majority text, which is really the received text of the

42:28

New Testament based upon the majority text of the New Testament. Because you had—and a lot of this is history, it's—I go into it in my book,

42:38

I got a big long chapter on this, probably the longest chapter in the book. But you basically had the

42:45

Eastern Church, which was one of the last places that was able to withstand

42:51

Islam because they were fortressed up in Constantinople at the time, and Muslim hordes couldn't breach the walls of that place.

43:02

It didn't happen until much later in history. But there the scribes and the monks just kept copying the same majority text manuscripts over and over and over again.

43:12

So what are called the Byzantium or Byzantine text or whatever is because that's where they originated from.

43:18

And eventually when the Muslim hordes took over that place, all of those scribes left and they took those manuscripts away and took them to the

43:26

West as they fled from the Muslim advance. And they became part of the, you know,

43:32

Roman Catholic, the Western Church, I guess you could say. But they would take those manuscripts and they were trying to protect the word of God by, you know, making sure the integrity is preserved.

43:46

I mean, that was their goal. That's why they wanted to do what they were doing. They weren't. Earlier manuscripts aren't taking away.

43:53

It's the later manuscripts are adding to in order to clarify like what you're saying to make it look like it's, okay, well, here, this is what

44:00

God is meaning to say. I want to help God. Yeah. Bud and I talked about this in the episode about two weeks ago when we talked about textual criticism and can you trust your

44:11

Bible is that often what happens is that you have writers that they would write something and the people that were making the copies would try to make it easier to understand sometimes.

44:24

Sometimes they would write something in the margin, but they didn't always know if that thing in the margin was a note to self or if it was that the guys forgot to put something in and was like, oh,

44:36

I forgot that I skipped a line. Let me draw a line over here and write it in the margin. They didn't know.

44:41

So, let's deal with, you have six arguments in your book, the exclusivity argument, the promise argument, the textual argument, the purity argument, well, you have heretics corrupted our

44:58

Bibles argument, I guess, the purity argument, the scholarship argument, historical argument.

45:05

So, let's go through each of those briefly in the 20 minutes that we have, and again,

45:10

I want to encourage you guys to get the book Royal Deceptions by Fred Butler. It's available on Amazon.

45:15

The link is in the show notes. It's available both in print and in the

45:21

Kindle version, and I will say this to encourage Phil to buy it right now.

45:27

Those who are Patreons that you got to watch the video with the little, the 20 minutes of banter that we did before we started recording, you'll know if you watch that that Fred is coming out with a new version, a second edition to fix things.

45:41

And so, if you want a collector's edition of this book, you want to go get the print copy now so you have, and then what you want to do is...

45:49

It's like the King, original King James. It has the first edition typos in it that I need to correct.

45:54

Yeah, yeah, and you know that... It's going to be a collective edition. That's something people don't even think about. Like, I bring this up, one of the reasons

46:00

I got a 1611 is so that I could get the prefix in the 1611, because in the prefix to the 1611, it actually states that there will be later editions and edits to it, and it's like, if it was inspired, then why did...

46:19

Why does it have that in it? Yeah. I mean, that's something that when I get someone that, you know, where I can, you know, obviously not if I'm online or something, but if I have someone that's at church or asking about it,

46:31

I bring my 1611 out, and I just show them, here is what it says in the prefix, that there would be future updates to this.

46:40

Like, okay, they knew it wasn't inspired. Why do you think it is? If the guys that translated it don't believe it, then we shouldn't, but let's start with each one.

46:51

Exclusivity argument. What's the argument that is made for King James? What's the response?

46:56

Okay, so the exclusivity argument, as I kind of put it here in my... I'm trying to remember all of my arguments here.

47:02

You guys are... You're killing me here. Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that Bud and I, who prepped for this show, are better prepared than the author?

47:10

I would write a book. You'd think I would know all of my stuff by heart. You know, basically what it's saying is that King James alone is the

47:19

Word of God alone. So the idea is that if you would, just like in that little song, if you're going to have a

47:26

Bible that's really the Word of God, well, then you'll read a King James. And that's kind of their starting premise.

47:32

So that means that the only Bible... That's Sola KJV. Yeah, Sola KJV.

47:38

So that means that the Word of God is a King James only alone. That's the way they kind of argue. Well, and I've heard it this way,

47:45

Fred. The way I actually heard this from a pastor who told me that, you know, that God has to keep his

47:52

Word, and therefore he did it in English, because English is the international language.

48:00

Greek was back then. And I asked him, I said, so what about before there was English? I mean, was the

48:05

Latin inspired? Right? Because then he has a problem, because that would be the Catholic Church's version.

48:11

And Vulgate only. Yeah, and there was some of that, by the way. But one of the things that is interesting is he actually said, if you're going to go...

48:21

I asked him, what about in foreign fields? If you go somewhere where they don't know English, he actually argued that you teach them

48:27

English so that they could read the King James Bible. And he said...

48:33

That's Sam Gipps' argument. Sam Gipps, the big

48:38

King James only guy, that's his argument. Exactly. And there's those that argue that the English King James Bible...

48:45

And folks, I'm saying King James Bible, not King James version, because people that hold to this will call it the

48:50

King James Bible. They don't think of it as a version. This is the Bible. But those that hold to this will say that the

48:58

King James Bible should be used to interpret the Greek and Hebrew, the original language.

49:04

Yep, yep. Some of them will do that as well. That was Peter Ruckman's kind of position too. So what's the argument against this then,

49:11

Fred? Well, honestly, as I kind of go, as I broke this all down, you can look at a few things.

49:18

Number one, the whole idea of the King James only, the King James alone,

49:24

King James Bible alone is the word of God alone. Well, that's a circular argument because you have to sort of assume that to be the case.

49:33

So that means that if there's anything else that comes along that challenges that premise, or if you find an error or something that cuts against what you think is the word of God, well, then you've got a problem because immediately it's going to wreck your premise.

49:49

Correct. So it's already falsified. Well, it's two fallacies there. Begging the question where you're starting with your conclusion, and then confirmation bias where you only accept information that supports your conclusion.

50:05

And then I talked about how you don't really see this taught anywhere, number one, in Scripture, but practiced in the rest of church history.

50:17

No one thought like that, that they believe that the Bible is God's word, but was it compiled and only in one translation that came 1 ,600 years after the founding of the church or when

50:33

God's people were, you know, Christianity started flourishing? So that means that any translation before 1611 was not

50:42

God's word. And then any translation obviously that deviates or departs from King James translation is not

50:51

God's word because it's corrupting it. So there you have a dilemma. So you're arguing, and it's almost sort of the same way that Mormons argue with regards to the restoration.

51:02

If they're going to say that there was no word of God before 1611, you know, if the King James is the only

51:08

Bible, there was no word of God. It was 1611 was a restoration of God's word because it wasn't in existence or it was only in existence in piecemeal fashion or just bits and pieces of it.

51:22

Now, King James only, and I think that's why I go on, I think in the line of good Bibles or something like that later on in my other chapter, they try to trace this, you know, series of Bibles kind of connect them together like a little trail all the way back to,

51:39

I guess, John the Baptist or Jesus or whatever. But again, there's just no historical proof of that.

51:48

I mean, you don't see Christians thinking in those terms. They saw that they had the word of God, and there was a

51:54

Holy Spirit was obviously working within his church in order to help them identify or identifying the words of, you know, the scriptures and the books that they were going to preserve, but they're not, like, you know, formulating it in one translation saying this is never to be revised or this is never to be changed.

52:13

So this is very much like Islam, where they would say you have one copy in Arabic, that manuscript is the only one.

52:22

They ignore all the textual criticism that's being done in Islam to show that there's variances, but they're saying that this is the preserved one.

52:32

You go on from there, and I will state this with this exclusive argument that you're making, there is a difference between King James only and only

52:42

King James. In other words, there are people who prefer the King James. As Fred, you said earlier, the

52:47

King James is a more precise language. These and thou, people don't understand today with the use of thee and thou, but there's a proper use of those.

52:58

It's, you know, now in the modern translations that we'll probably have, you probably can't even say he and she because we don't know if they identify as a he and she, right?

53:07

But you end up having more precise language. Language has deteriorated, but King James is more precise in the language.

53:17

So some people prefer it for that reason. We're not talking about people that prefer King James. These are people that are saying the

53:23

King James is the only Bible used because it's the inspired one. Right, right.

53:29

That's the key right there. So what's the promise argument? And then what is the way we respond?

53:36

The promise argument is the idea that they will claim throughout the Bible, and you'll notice that I quote from D .A.

53:44

Waite in this, that he will say that God has specifically promised to preserve his word in the

53:54

Old and New Testaments. So when you look at Scripture, there is a promise from God that he's going to preserve his words.

54:02

And they'll even make a very, they'll go into this. How would you say this argument that it's not just the word of God, but it's the very words, plural of God.

54:16

So meaning that as you read Scripture, every word that is in Scripture is to be preserved.

54:23

So if you lose a word, well, you're losing the word of God. And so they'll go to various passages to prove this.

54:31

But when you look at those passages in context, God's not talking about the preservation of texts of Scripture as much as he's talking about his promise to preserve his people, or to keep his covenant with his people, or to do what he's told them that he was going to do.

54:50

He's not talking about physical manuscripts that record, you know, his revelation as he is my promises to look after you, my character.

54:59

It's grounded in his character, not a objective physical manuscript. So the one that they always go to is in Psalm 12, verses 7 and 8, where it talks about,

55:12

I will, you know, my word, I don't have this text. And you have the Scripture. It's actually starts in verse 6.

55:20

I think the words of the Lord are pure words as silver tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times.

55:27

You, O Lord, will keep them. You will preserve him from this generation forever.

55:32

The wicked strut about on every side when vileness is exalted among the sons of men. So they're going to take that whole thing where it talks about the words of the

55:41

Lord are pure words tried in the furnace of fire, like silver purified seven times.

55:47

And they'll say that that's talking about the manuscript of the Old and New Testament, the translation of God's word.

55:53

But when you look at that text, and particularly this comes clear as you get into the

55:59

Hebrew and granted, probably what, 95 % of the people listening to this podcast and going to be reading my book are not going to be familiar with Hebrew.

56:10

We're in an age when we can become familiar with it because of the resources that we've accumulated.

56:16

But the idea there is that he's talking about a specific group of people. It starts back in verse six, about five and six, where it talks about these people.

56:26

You are being surrounded by the wicked. Well, the opening verse of the psalm sets the context for what

56:33

David's talking about. Help, Lord, for the godly man ceases to be, for the faithful disappear from among the sons of men.

56:41

It does. He's talking about men who are committed to scripture, the men and women of God who love

56:48

God while they're being surrounded by the wicked. This is like really a promise for our day and age when we see the wicked coming in to take our rights away and to, you know, mess with our freedoms in America.

57:03

All of these, I don't want to turn that into a pro -Trump thing, but there's some truth to that.

57:11

The men and women of this church are failing and falling and are giving in to compromise to this insidious, you know, critical race theory and all of the other things coming in.

57:23

Well, God says, look, my words are true words. I have promised to preserve them.

57:29

He's going to preserve a remnant. That's the point of the passage. Exactly. I'm going to protect them and keep them from the wicked who strut about.

57:36

It has nothing to do with him preserving the text of scripture. Manuscripts.

57:42

You know, I was talking with Mike Riddle, if you know him from Creation Training Institute. Yep, I'm familiar with him, yep.

57:49

We were talking, you know, so many of these issues we have today are answered just with hermeneutics. I mean, this is the reason that Striving for Training focuses so much on that with our

57:57

Bible Interpretation Made Easy seminar and all the stuff on hermeneutics, because that's all you have to do a lot of these times is read in context.

58:04

Let's move on to the textual argument. That's my longest, most convoluted...

58:11

Yeah, and that's the one where you have this thing of have the heretics corrupted the Bible, and with this...

58:16

I added that. I added that as an excursus, I guess, as an additional chapter.

58:22

Because this is an argument that so many make, and I look at this, and when I was reading this, it's like this is the

58:28

Latter -day Saint argument. I mean, it really is. The Bible has been corrupted. You have to interpret it, and Islam says the same thing.

58:38

The Bible was corrupted, and that's why we have the Quran. Latter -day Saints, the Bible was corrupted.

58:44

It's not translated properly. That's why we have the Book of Mormon. They always add to it and say it's been corrupted, but the thing is this is the

58:52

Bible has been corrupted, so we have the KJV, but we have the

58:58

Greek and Hebrew, and some, not all KJV -onlys will say even the

59:03

Greek and Hebrew you can't trust. Right. Yeah, I know, and there may be some truth to that if we look at some

59:13

Jewish groups who tried to change the Septuagint, or they didn't like the

59:18

Septuagint, so they tried to adjust the vowel pointings to try to take away the prophecies about Christ.

59:24

But I mean, honestly, there's not enough of that to diminish the fact that God preserved

59:30

His Word. You can see that. You can discover those problems. So the textual argument basically is saying the

59:36

KJV -onlys claim that only the manuscripts from which the translation of the

59:43

KJV came are the preserved Word of God. So in the Old Testament, I can't remember the exacts.

59:51

It's the Bomberg 2nd edition Masoretic text, I believe it was. That's the one that D .A.

59:57

Wade, in particular, has identified as the true

01:00:02

Old Testament that we need to translate from, because that's the one that the King James used.

01:00:09

And it is the received text. Of course, the received text went through many editions, but it's the one that...

01:00:20

hold on, let me turn off my phone. You can edit this part out. And for folks who are watching on Patreon, they recognize that your dedication, this is clearly...

01:00:30

Fred is up early. It is oh -dark -thirty where he's at, and he's so excited about his new book coming out that he was like, hey,

01:00:39

I will record with you guys at six in the morning, my time. Yeah, the sun is just now coming through the windows.

01:00:47

Boosters are growing outside. But yeah, the textual argument, he's arguing that the

01:00:55

Old Testament and the New Testament text, the received text in the New Testament that Desiderius Erasmus, again,

01:01:04

I'm butchering his first name, Erasmus basically put together for his work, is the text that preserved the

01:01:16

Word of God, because that's the base text that the King James used, the King James translators used to give us the

01:01:22

King James. That's not entirely true. They did use previous English editions in order to help with their translation process, as we were mentioning earlier about William Tyndale, it's the same thing.

01:01:36

But I think the key really to all of this, and I go into a lot of detail about how we got our

01:01:44

Bible, I highlight some resources that people can do some further study on if they want to get some more info on that.

01:01:52

But I think what's really important is what you just mentioned a little bit before that, and we've talked some, is the whole concept of that what we see with the other texts from which modern versions sort of rely upon, which is another family of manuscripts that are older in age and circulation as the manuscripts that gave us the

01:02:16

Old Testament and New Testament for the King James. I hope people are following this. Those they claim that have been corrupted by heretics, and usually the argument goes along the lines of, well, those, nobody used those texts until the 1800s, and that's when they started translating.

01:02:38

That's when all the liberals in Germany started translating from them and creating our new versions and all that sort of thing.

01:02:46

And because if they had been really God's preserved word, well, those Christians would have kept them in circulation, and they would have used them and utilized them.

01:02:58

Well, that's not the case at all. I mean, most of those manuscripts were in North Africa, and what happened to North Africa in 6 or 780?

01:03:07

You had the Muslims come in there and kill all the Christians. You know, one of the things a lot of people don't even know, there's a great book,

01:03:14

I think it's titled How the Irish Saved Civilization, I think. Yeah, I've heard about that, yes.

01:03:21

And it's like how all these early manuscripts from the early Church Fathers were there in Ireland, and when the

01:03:30

Reformation came, the Catholic Church so corrupted stuff that they went to Ireland and saw the older manuscripts.

01:03:36

Right, and it didn't say what people who were currently handling those things were saying about them.

01:03:43

But if people don't have all the history, I mean, it could be a lot to go through understanding all what you're going through.

01:03:51

What would be a good argument? How do we respond to the textual argument? Well, if you're going to say that heretics corrupted your

01:03:59

Bible, you can just simply say, number one, are you telling me that God is going to allow

01:04:08

His word to become so corrupted that it's going to be lost so that it has to be rediscovered?

01:04:15

I mean, it's like what you're saying. It's the same argument that every major cult usually tries to argue.

01:04:23

And I point out in that chapter on the heretics is that when you have critics of Scripture, all of them, without fail, argue that we can't know what the

01:04:38

Bible says because it's been lost to time, it's been corrupted, that everyone says that.

01:04:45

That's what Bar Ehrman is saying these days, is that you can't know what the Bible says. But when you go and evaluate their arguments for that, it's not true.

01:04:54

A lot of it comes back to what you were saying. If you just read the Bible in its context, there's not corruption there.

01:05:02

There's probably just some other misunderstanding of the text, or they just don't want to believe it. There's no corruption with regards to the creation week or Jesus being born in Bethlehem or whatever it is.

01:05:17

It's just that they're claiming that because they want to strip it of its supernatural elements, that God does do miracles, that He does bring prophecy to come to pass.

01:05:31

And you just need to begin by just showing how in history that's never been the case.

01:05:39

Just having a surface level understanding of how the early apologists dealt with all of these critics.

01:05:45

I mean, these critics have been around since before the second century of the church.

01:05:51

You had apologists arguing with Jews and other critics of Scripture saying, well, the

01:05:57

Bible's been corrupted, or the Scriptures have been twisted. So this isn't a new argument, then, you're saying.

01:06:03

This is an old argument. It's not a new argument. It's an old argument. King James Onlyists only apply it to their

01:06:10

Bible, and then they'll show you a big list of comparison passages. Well, see right here? This verse reads this in this

01:06:17

Bible, and... Well, that gets into the purity argument, then. Some of that gets into the purity argument.

01:06:24

Yeah, they'll claim that... Let's look at that argument that you have, the purity argument, the line of good Bibles. So what they're going to say is that when it comes to the

01:06:32

English, well, I should start by saying that different King James Onlyists will have different Bibles that come into their line of good

01:06:44

Bibles. So what they'll claim is that you can trace back the development of textual criticism through the

01:06:54

Bible translations that have existed right after the church, prior to the apostolic age or so forth.

01:07:05

So they'll talk about the Peshetta and the Vulgate and all of these Bibles, and they'll say that with each subsequent translation from the original languages,

01:07:14

God was purifying and preserving His Word. You can trace back sort of this hand of God guiding and directing through these lines of Bibles so that we eventually come to the capstone, which is the

01:07:29

King James Bible. But the problem with that, again, is that the list is not consistent.

01:07:38

There's sometimes you have to sort of do some overreach with regards to, I guess you could say, you know, which translation is going to fit into which line or whatever.

01:07:51

So for instance, somebody will get the Latin Vulgate, but the Latin Vulgate was Roman Catholic, you know,

01:07:57

Catholics had that. Well, why are you going to put the Latin Vulgate in your... And then they'll say, well, it's the old

01:08:03

Latin Vulgate. Okay, well, I mean, the old Latin Vulgate and the Latin Vulgate are kind of similar. So and then the

01:08:11

Catholics are the ones who handled that. So how exactly is that? Are you saying that we had to burn that Catholic dross off with all the new

01:08:19

English translations? I also asked them, will it include any kind of revision?

01:08:27

So, for example, the Geneva translation went through multiple revisions in between its initial translation and eventually it's being displaced really by the use of the

01:08:41

King James among the English people. Do any of those revisions, there's like 125 of them,

01:08:47

I believe, from 1550s until the late 1600s, do any of those count to your line?

01:08:55

Because that's 125 instead of seven, because they're putting that, remember that passage in Psalm 12, where it talks about being purified by silver seven times or whatever, they'll claim that that's a promise that you can identify these seven steps to get to the

01:09:12

King James. Well, you make the point. One of the other things that you've, to quote you on the purity argument, these guys that will start with the quote, good line, beginning with William Tyndale's translations.

01:09:27

And you say if the good line begins with William Tyndale's translations, there are roughly 31 various translations published in English before King James.

01:09:37

Yeah, that's correct. Which one of these are you talking about? And they'll take the ones that were the most popular and probably used in churches, like the

01:09:46

Bishop's Bible and the Nathan's Bible, you know, all of these other little minor translations that kind of fell out of use or didn't get much circulation because of the authorities clamping down and keeping them from being circulated.

01:10:00

The German Bible, you know, Luther's Bible, I mean, why are those not? And that's exactly what you have in Islam, though, right?

01:10:06

You had all these, you had these different, these different translations of the Quran, and they clamped down and burned all the other ones and said, nope, this is the only one.

01:10:15

The Uthman or Uthman or whatever his name was. Uthman. Uthman, yep. And he's like, look, we're going to do these translations.

01:10:23

And when you're in control, when you run, when the church runs the government or the government runs the church, you can do those sort of things.

01:10:30

There's two more arguments that we have. You know, the scholarship argument, historical argument.

01:10:37

So let's start with scholarship. What is that argument? How do we respond to it? The scholarship one? Well, the scholarship argument is that the guys who translated the

01:10:46

Bible were the greatest translators that ever lived. That's kind of how they, yeah, every King James only book will have some chapter where just heaps, all of this gushing praise on the greatness of these translators, which

01:11:00

I'm not going to fault them. They were great translators, but they had their faults, just like every other human being who's ever existed.

01:11:09

They had their problems. And there's, and even though they might have a, you know, might be great scholars, they're no more better than any other scholar who's come along and try to offer up a translation of scripture.

01:11:23

It's almost, it's almost as if no one has ever done this work afterwards.

01:11:29

Like no one did it before, and no one's done it after. Like this is the only time in history. I know.

01:11:35

And it's like, well, these guys were, they had some kind, they were endued with some kind of, you know, special anointing from God.

01:11:42

I mean, they almost put them into an apostolic sort of framework where it's like these guys are inspired to do what they did.

01:11:51

But they were political animals, just like King James was giving them the, you know, kind of shaping that for them.

01:11:59

The, I mentioned in my book how Andrew, Bishop Andrews, I believe it were,

01:12:05

Lancelot Andrews is the one who was sort of behind having some heretics burned because, you know,

01:12:11

King James only has always go after Calvinists because Calvin has Cervetus burned, or, you know, that's kind of what they argue.

01:12:17

And, but these guys were involved in similar kind of instances. It was when one case was a

01:12:24

Baptist guy who was teaching heresy. And I think the guy was legitimately teaching heresy, but they were behind him getting burned at the stake.

01:12:32

I mean, they had character flaws just like everybody else had character flaws. And this is,

01:12:38

I think one guy was, I can't remember which translator it was, but he was constantly in debt because he would buy stuff that he couldn't, you know, couldn't afford.

01:12:48

And he eventually had to like sell off his entire library in order to pay off all of his debts and everything.

01:12:55

I mean, they had all these problems just like everyone else. It doesn't disqualify them from giving us a great translation, but to see them as some sort of, you know, link to this is why we should read the

01:13:09

King James, because these are the greatest scholars ever. That's just fundamentally flawed.

01:13:15

And it's the same with the historical argument. We mentioned this a little bit too previously is that the

01:13:22

King James was primarily a political work. It was designed and meant to give us a, you know, to placate these various groups in Anglicanism to keep them from fighting and to give

01:13:39

King James is, you know, the authority that he needs to sort of oversee his church that he claimed he had this idea that the

01:13:47

Bible was carried to the Americas and around the world with the King James. Well, that was true after the, you know, the great missionary thrust in the 1700s.

01:13:58

But early on when the pilgrims and appeared and started coming to America at the because King James was persecuting them, they would come across the

01:14:07

United States to the United States. They brought with them the Geneva Bible. They didn't like the

01:14:13

King James. I mean, even if you go, I mean, you're up you're over there in Pennsylvania. Have you ever been in one of those little colonial reenactment places?

01:14:22

They'll use the Geneva Bible as their base text because they're trying to play like their original colonists.

01:14:29

And I don't think the King James really came into use in the in until like the 1700s in the colonies, like the time around when

01:14:36

George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards were here. And that's a good hundred years or so because all the

01:14:42

Puritans hated the King James because it's connected to King James. The reason why they got ran out of their country.

01:14:48

I mean, this is this is where history helps, right? I mean, it really is important for people to understand history.

01:14:57

And it's always amazing to me that people don't quite recognize that, you know, everything has a historical setting and these things play into it.

01:15:11

Right. You know. And when you understand it, when you just, you know, people,

01:15:20

I just want to encourage folks, you know, stop being lazy, honestly.

01:15:26

Read some stuff, do some research, get away, get some trusted people that you can listen to.

01:15:34

He's going to tell you something different than what, you know, these King James only apologists you've, you know, you've gathered around yourself because they've they're not telling you the honest stuff.

01:15:47

Get folks who have, you know, actually kind of dug into this and, you know, look at what they have to say.

01:15:54

Look at what how God has really preserved his word, because I think ultimately, as I mentioned in my conclusion, if we're going to say that God's word is only contained in one translation, then

01:16:06

God's a very weak and limited God. We just don't see that. We see

01:16:11

God providing. I think the church, you know, because he spread the manuscripts, particularly of the

01:16:19

New Testament far and wide, it preserves his word because you don't have that one

01:16:25

Uthman guy be able to gather up all the texts and to control what the

01:16:30

Bible says. Exactly. And, you know, it's probably was good that King James didn't know about their earlier manuscripts because he probably would have squashed them or they would have something would have happened where they couldn't have access to them.

01:16:45

And the reason why we got access to them after, you know, during the fall of the Ottoman Empire and Europeans were able to get into North Africa and start digging through some of these old monasteries and find these texts is because, you know, they just had a totally different.

01:17:02

Hey, we want to find a way to answer these heretics that are coming up and are criticizing the

01:17:09

Bible. I mean, again, it was that that was their motivation. You had higher critics saying that scriptures was corrupted and we need to reread it a certain way.

01:17:19

Well, they were like, well, that's not what the Bible says. We got to find earlier manuscripts and what we got. And so when they were able to, like, scour the monasteries and the previously strongholds of the

01:17:31

Muslim Empire, they were finding these manuscripts that contradicted what was coming out of Germany and out of these, you know, demonic birdhouses of, you know, liberal higher criticism.

01:17:47

You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Well, and this is the thing, I mean, for folks who are struggling with this, because there are some, and, you know, we're aware of that.

01:18:00

You would have said how you struggled with this, you know, when you were in seminary. This is something where what

01:18:07

I find is there are a lot of people who are involved in this, they are struggling with it.

01:18:15

And a lot of it, I'm hesitating because I know if there's someone listening, they take it the wrong way, but it is prideful.

01:18:24

And I'm not trying to be mean with it. It's just when, and Fred, maybe you could talk to this as a wrap up, but when you are studying this, and I don't care if it's flat earth,

01:18:35

King James -only -ism, charismatic Calvinism, whatever your ilk might be, there is a pride that Christians can have where they study something and they act as if, well,

01:18:44

I know something more than the next guy. There's something where I'm more spiritual because I know this, whatever this is.

01:18:51

In this case, it would be the King James Bible as being inspired. But there's a pride that I see often with this, with many people.

01:19:00

And if you could speak to that. It's like a, well, yeah, because you have this, you get into this mindset that I know something that no one else knows, and I am become the messenger.

01:19:12

I am the oracle that now must proclaim the truth to those people who do not have ears to hear.

01:19:20

And I need to be prepared to go forth and to present to them the truth.

01:19:25

And I mean, it's almost a Gnostic sort of heresy in some ways. I've got something that you don't know and I want to tell you, you know, and you're right.

01:19:35

Exactly what you're saying. And that's how I behaved is like I had some kind of higher knowledge.

01:19:42

And if you don't have the higher knowledge like me, well, then you're going to be, you know, somehow crippled or, you know, stunted in your growth.

01:19:50

If you didn't have God's, we don't have, you don't really have God's word. You have one of these modern perversions that's, you know, telling you something that's wrong about Jesus, not like my

01:20:01

Bible. But that's not the case. I mean, when you look at the facts, your secret knowledge is really kind of bogus.

01:20:08

That's the problem. But you're right. It had, it could be found in anything, even though I believe

01:20:14

Calvinism is the truth. Yeah, we call it cage stage, right? What's that?

01:20:19

We call it cage stage. And that's, that's the same thing. That's that pride. And with Calvin is

01:20:25

I was the same way when I became the person, when I saw the truth of limited atonement and that Christ was dying for a people and rescuing them and all the extent of the atonement or whatever.

01:20:36

And I nailed that doctrine down in my head. I mean, I was, I want to argue with everyone about it.

01:20:41

Well, that's just, you don't want to argue with people about, I mean, scripture is very clear that, you know, these things you need to teach with patience and admonishing error, but lovingly, you know, leading someone through the truth basically is what you do.

01:20:57

It's not a matter of trying to bludgeon them over the head with what you think is right until they submit.

01:21:03

Okay. Okay. I'll be a Calvinist or whatever. It's like, no, you want them to, you want the Holy spirit to work in their lives because he worked in your life.

01:21:11

So we're not trying to convert people to Calvinism. We're trying to convert people to Christ. Yes, that's exactly.

01:21:17

We want to say that you'll be a Calvinist. That is the thing that you see with Calvinism.

01:21:23

You see it with charismatics. You see it in this case with King James only is, you know, the charismatics is called a second blessing.

01:21:29

You get saved and then when you get more spiritual, you get the second blessing. In Calvinism, we hear it called as this cage stage.

01:21:36

You get saved and then you learn about the doctrines of grace and you got to tell everyone. It's the same thing with KJV.

01:21:42

You get saved and then you find out the King James Bible is like the only one you should have and people study that and get all into making an argument for the

01:21:50

KJV instead of making an argument for Christ. No different than making an argument for Calvinism rather than making the argument for Christ.

01:21:59

Same thing with tongues. And I think it's a distraction. I think it ends up feeding our pride and if, you know, one of the ways people can recognize it is you've laid out here in this podcast and in your book, which

01:22:15

I encourage everyone to get, go get a copy of Royal Deceptions by Fred Butler. But actually, in fact, get a couple because you're probably going to have some friends that need it and you want to get it right away to get the, you know, classic edition, the one with the typos in it so you can say you have one.

01:22:32

I got to correct this next week. So next week, so, you know, actually it may be too late.

01:22:37

The Patreons will have it. But the thing is, get this book, you do run into people that believe this, but if you're a person here listening to this and you're just gritting your teeth at everything that's been said, you're upset with what you're hearing, it could be that you're the one that needs to hear it the most because a lot of times pride is a blinding thing and we can be blinded by it.

01:23:03

And one of the things that pride does is when we have an argument that's wrong, it doesn't listen. Look, if you believe your argument is good, you should be able to listen to Fred and hear him, hear his arguments and counter them, not just reject them out of hand because if you reject it out of hand, it could be your pride speaking, not the truth speaking.

01:23:24

Just a thought for you. Well, there are some King James only, so I know they're out there and they're going to watch this.

01:23:30

I have answered him. I've been on these discussion groups with him and I gave him tons of articles and he didn't want to listen to them.

01:23:38

And now I'm like, okay, whatever, dude. And I'm proud that they're there. Yeah, so you're right.

01:23:44

So Fred, any last things you want to say other than encouraging everybody to go and get a copy of your book?

01:23:50

I mean, obviously that would be wonderful if you would. It would be encouraging to me. I want it to be a tool that you can be useful in your hands and just to make you think rightly about God's revelation.

01:24:05

He has given us a revelation. He's given it to us. It has been preserved. It's been preserved accurately.

01:24:12

And he has used the Holy Spirit to work in the hearts of his redeemed people throughout the history of the

01:24:19

Old Testament and the New Testament to give us his word. And it's canonized and you can hold it in our hands.

01:24:26

And he has allowed us to translate it and to disseminate it across the world. So the

01:24:32

Bible you hold in your hands, even if it is one of these paltry sort of bad translations that I don't necessarily recommend,

01:24:40

God's word is there. It speaks and it convicts hearts. And that's what we use to bring people to the saving knowledge of Christ is

01:24:50

God's word. And he has seen fit that English people and Spanish speaking people, everyone has a copy of his revelation.

01:24:58

And he has access to that information. It's not hidden. It's not any heretics trying to hide it from you in some clandestine way that you can't find.

01:25:08

It's not trying to sneak in error that you're going to be, you know, confused by or, you know, unwittingly discover.

01:25:16

I mean, that's never happened. But God's word is there. It's true.

01:25:21

You can trust it and you need to believe it. That's really the battle really is not on so much the inerrancy of scripture today.

01:25:29

Is this sufficient? And I believe it is. And we can hold it in our hands and we can believe it and proclaim it.

01:25:37

Yeah. And, you know, for folks, I mean, I encourage you again, get the book Real Deceptions by Fred Butler on Amazon .com.

01:25:45

It's available in Kindle and print version. For folks who are watching on the Patreon, if you go to the very back of the book about the author, you'll see

01:25:52

Fred in his fedora, which is why we're wearing our fedoras. Yeah. I would have gotten mine, but my wife is still asleep.

01:26:00

Yes. So, but Fred, it's always a joy getting together with you in person or this way on podcasts.

01:26:07

For folks who don't know, Fred has a great sense of humor, full of knowledge.

01:26:12

You know, I was talking to someone this morning, a mutual friend that we have, Fred, and because at our church, the elders get together at 600, you know, oh, dark 30 where you're at.

01:26:23

Well, when that was our time, we get up for prayer in the morning on Saturday morning. So, we were praying and we're talking and I had mentioned that I was going to be, you know, interviewing you and your new book.

01:26:34

And it was funny because, you know, one of the guys was like, you know, just don't picture Fred writing books.

01:26:39

You know, it's like, you know, you're this, you're this, and you may not be from the

01:26:45

South, but, you know, it's like I said, yeah, Fred's like this guy that just, he seems like he's from the

01:26:51

South, just laid back, kind of hillbilly kind of sounding guy. And then he starts talking.

01:26:57

Yeah. And then he starts talking or you start reading his writing and it's like, dude has some information.

01:27:03

I mean, like there's just, it's brilliance that comes out of you. And when people talk to you, it's like, you're like this laid back kind of guy, like easy going.

01:27:12

And yet you have your finger on like everything. Like if there's a problem, if there's like someone that is going awry in Christianity, it's like Fred knows.

01:27:22

Fred's up on it. After reading this, how is Fred not writing more books?

01:27:28

Okay. Well, that's the question. My next project, and this is... Here we go. An exclusive here on the

01:27:34

Wrapper Fort. My next project is supposed to be on Ezekiel's temple.

01:27:43

Is it literal or is it spiritual? The reason why I say that, I did write some articles on that.

01:27:48

So at my blog, I would like to go in some more detail about that, but it's Mike Riccardi saw me at work and he was asking me about my book.

01:27:58

And he said, well, you know what you need to do is you need to do that stuff on the Ezekiel's temple, put that in print. I'm like, really?

01:28:04

He goes, oh man, every time someone asked me about that, I send them to your blog articles because you're the only one who's really written on that.

01:28:09

Well, I noticed some other people have written on that topic, but I try to make the information accessible and try to work through the problem.

01:28:17

So that's my next year. I'm going to be trying to go through that material and I've got to get some material on Ezekiel, some commentaries, start revisiting that a little bit because I'd like to punch that stuff up.

01:28:32

Because I believe it's a real temple. It's not some kind of weird vision about the church or whatever.

01:28:41

I would like to just sort of go into that. So we'll see how that goes. We can do another rap report about that.

01:28:48

Well, that would be good. Okay. So to wrap up, though, just to let folks know, if you are in the

01:28:57

Jacksonville area, I will be speaking in Jacksonville, I guess, actually,

01:29:02

I think by the time this drops, but I may be at Jacksonville, so it may be too late to mention that, but I'll be in Jacksonville at Christ Reformed Community Church on December 13th.

01:29:16

December 19th and 20th, I will be in Orlando area, and that is going to be doing the social justice seminar at Bethula Baptist Church, and so you can check that out.

01:29:32

And if you're in that area, please let us know. Again, if you wouldn't mind writing a review, there is a link in the show notes to write us a review.

01:29:40

Let us know what you enjoy, don't enjoy. We want to hear from you. We speak into a microphone,

01:29:47

Bud and I, each week, and Bud and I get to see each other, but we don't get to see you. We don't get to hear your story. We do respond to feedback, and I will say that we did a couple episodes on wearing masks or not wearing masks.

01:29:59

We got feedback. It's not that I'm ignoring it. We want to get Andrew Smith back on.

01:30:05

We want to respond with him to some questions that got asked about wearing masks.

01:30:11

So, we may or may not do a whole other episode on that, but we're going to at least respond to that.

01:30:17

We may do just a response episode where we respond to several questions that we get in.

01:30:23

We may get some questions in for Fred, so we may have to have him in to answer. Oh, I'd be happy to do that. That'd be great.

01:30:29

So, if you have questions for him, you could always contact us at info at strivingforeternity .org.

01:30:36

Info at strivingforeternity .org is the website, so we're glad that you listen.

01:30:44

Hope this has been helpful to you. If you have found value in this, if these podcasts are helpful, would you do a couple of things?

01:30:51

We already asked, would you write us a review, but would you consider sharing it? The best way to get others to know about it is when people share it.

01:30:59

Reviews actually don't help in getting yourself out there as a podcaster. It's actually people sharing it and subscribing.

01:31:07

The other thing that we would ask, if you find value in this, if you wouldn't mind supporting us, go to strivingforeternity .org

01:31:14

slash donate. You can do a one -time donation or help us out with monthly donations. We are looking to try, because of COVID, we had to cancel some of our international trips.

01:31:25

We're starting up again, but we're looking to get to India this year. We are still looking to try to get to, well,

01:31:35

I guess we're flying into Mexico, but going to be going south to Guatemala. So we're trying to get to Guatemala.

01:31:41

That is, Guatemala is going to be more focused toward training pastors. That'll be Justin Peters and I trying to get there.

01:31:48

India is going to be, I think there's 75 churches that are trying to work together that we're working with out there.

01:31:54

Justin Peters and I are doing that. We're also looking to try to get to Japan to lead a team for the

01:32:00

Olympics. So if you could help with that support, all those things, by the way, none of those, whether we're going to Guatemala or to India or to Japan, none of that is being covered by the churches that are there.

01:32:14

We are paying our own way out there. This is some of what we do. So if you want to help us get to these places, we're going to try to bring a team of people to the

01:32:23

Olympics in Japan to evangelize during that time. It's where the entire world comes to one place.

01:32:31

It is a great opportunity to get the gospel out, and we've done this in different places in the

01:32:36

UK and others. So if you want to help us get there, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to strivingforeternity .org

01:32:42

slash donate. And you know what, bud? What? That's a wrap.

01:32:49

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

01:33:21

today at unbound .org slash walk. Okay, round two.

01:33:29

Name something that's not boring. A laundry? Oh, a book club. Computer solitaire, huh?

01:33:38

Oh, sorry. We were looking for Chumba Casino. That's right.

01:33:44

ChumbaCasino .com has over 100 casino -style games. Join today and play for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes.

01:33:50

Ch -ch -ch -ch -chumba. ChumbaCasino .com. No purchase necessary. Full worth. Related by law. 18 plus.