Texe Marrs: Part III

Texe Marrs’ Claims About the Ankerberg Show

Okay, so we've established that Tex Mars is not real reliable in the factual area. If you look him up these days, he's gone off into so much wild and wacky stuff that it's absolutely positively amazing, but still, the accusations he made back in the 90s, a decade ago, about the John Ankerberg show are still floating around.

Like I mentioned, this fellow by the name of Calcium Boy posted a video where he again reiterates these accusations that Dr. Don Wilkin from the New American Standard Bible Translation Committee was struck dumb, lost his voice during the taping of the John Ankerberg show.

Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take some screenshots from Calcium Boy's video and lay out the accusations that are made, and then we will take a look at the actual video, some actual video from the Ankerberg series, it was an eight-part series, and I'll respond to what Calcium Boy and Tex Mars have to say.

And I do so from the position of expertise, because I was there. Looked a lot different, but I was there. So let's take a look at what Calcium Boy put up. Now, here's an overhead shot from one of the video clips.

You can see John Ankerberg, and then to his right, three King James Only advocates, Joseph Chambers, Sam Gipp, and Thomas Strauss. And then down in the foreground, you see the back of Don Wilkin's head, next to him is Art Farstein from the New King James, and then Ken Barker is sitting right next to John Ankerberg.

Now, the two folks you can't see real well, well, that's Dan Wallace over on the King James Only side, though he's not a King James Onlyist. And then you see, well, my knees. I'm between Art Farstein and Ken Barker, directly across from Sam Gipp.

Whether Ankerberg Stacked the Deck

Now, it is then said that Ankerberg invited five New Version scholars, but only three King James advocates. The problem with that assertion is fairly obvious, and that is Ripplinger had been invited, she declined.

Ruckman had been invited, he declined. D. A. Waite had been invited, he declined. It's difficult to get King James Only people to do debates. Believe me, I've tried. They all have standing challenges for me, and none of them will so much as even return an email, let alone anything else.

So it's unfair to accuse Ankerberg of having tried to stack the deck. Then he starts the story, however, on one of these shows, Ankerberg and the New Bible Version people were forced to call an abrupt halt right in the midst of taping.

Actually, that's not the case. Obviously there are eight segments to this program. They're recorded as eight distinct programs, and a break would be taken between each one, obviously. And this incident took place at the beginning of the fourth program.

And it's my recollection that already at this point, Dr. Ankerberg had somewhat chided us all, instructing us to be more brief and concise in our responses. Obviously television, radio, you can't do what a scholar can do in a seminary setting or something like that.

You've got to keep things moving along. And so this was, and I know this because I started off the second segment, and I was asked to, in essence, summarize the entire history of the Bible and its transmission.

And I went on for quite some time, but he could tell I was covering a lot of ground very, very quickly. My recollection is, at the beginning of the fourth program, Dr. Ankerberg said, OK, Don Wilkins, I'm going to come to you.

And the question was, talk to me about the errors in Gail Riplinger's book. It wasn't anything about voices being lost or people being struck dumb or anything like that. It was, talk to me about the errors in Gail Riplinger's book.

So Mars is just wrong when he asserts that the question had something to do with losing voices and so on and so forth. Now my recollection is that this fourth program was being recorded right after lunch.

Dr. Wilkins had flown in from Athens, Greece to be a part of the program. He told me later he takes prescription medications for migraines that frequently cause dehydration, things like that. And so Ankerberg does his introduction.

He goes to Wilkins. Wilkins begins to speak, and he gets a frog in his throat. His voice was not taken away from him. He choked. He was dehydrated. And since it was the beginning of the program, Ankerberg said, uh-uh, don't want to start that way, hold on.

And then we just moved on from there. Dr. Wilkins took a sip of water. Now if just taking a sip of water is enough to overturn the very judgment of God, well, that's very, very odd. We are told that Ankerberg and the other New Version scholars were visibly startled.

No. Dr. Wilkins was embarrassed, but nobody was startled. And then it says that he was able to screech out in a crackling, almost inaudible manner, I've lost my voice. That just didn't happen. He got a frog in his throat, and as soon as it was very clear that this particular session was starting off on the wrong foot, Ankerberg said, well, let's stop there, roll the tape back, and get a drink of water, let's try it again.

Ankerberg was not shocked in any way, shape, or form. This is all just stuff made up by the King James Only advocates. I do not remember Joseph Chambers ever saying anything about the cameras should record exactly what happened here.

And I would have remembered that, especially because at some point, either right before we started again, or after that fourth program, I leaned over to Art Farstad, who was sitting to my right. And I said to him, you just watch, these King James Only guys are going to make something out of that little incident.

And he looked at me like I was nuts. He couldn't believe any rational person would ever do that. Well, just a few months later, TexMars came out October of 1995 with this story. Don Wilkin took a drink of water.

They used the same introduction that Ankerberg had already done. They just said, three, two, one, go. And Don Wilkin went into the errors in Gail Riplinger's book. I picked up from there. In fact, here is the actual beginning of that fourth program.

And you can see exactly where the incident would have taken place and what the result was.

Riplinger’s Claims and the Westcott and Hort Example

Don Wilkins, you're representing the New American Standard Bible. And Gail, in her book, she groups all of you together and she says that the new translations, NAS, NIV, New King James, have an occult bent to them.

They introduce New Age philosophies into the church. They spread mysticism and liberalism. And line by line, they are changing the face of Jesus Christ and Christianity. Now, the people that read this book, it appears to them that she has a mountain of documentation to back up what she has said.

What do you think about the evidence and the documentation in this book?

I think it's ridiculous. It's careless. It is full of holes. Everything I've seen in Riplinger's book, virtually everything she says is either a misquotation or misleading of the truth, people. And I'll give you a good example.

She focuses in on, among other things, on Wescott and Hort. These were fine men of the church, fine Christian men, who together put together the text that, as it's evolved in our use of it, has become the text that most of us use and we think it's the best manuscripts.

She says, she quotes his son, who wrote a biography about Wescott, as saying, Wescott's son writes of his father's lifelong faith in what, for lack of a better name, one must call spiritualism. And this is page 407 of New Age.

Now I looked at the books, I looked at the actual biographies that the sons wrote for each of their fathers, and what he actually said is, what happened to this guild, he's talking about a club that his father was in, in the end, I have not discovered.

My father ceased to interest himself in these matters, not altogether, I believe, from want of faith in what, for lack of a better name, one must call spiritualism, but because he was seriously convinced that such investigations led to no good.

And what he actually said was that his father dropped out of it because, in large part, of his lack of faith in spiritualism. Ripplinger completely leaves that out and makes it say that he had a lifelong faith in spiritualism.

That's just the opposite of what was true, and it's a deliberate misstatement of the facts.

Misquotation, “Acrostic Algebra,” and the Closing Challenge

I think we need to point out the fact that a lot of the type of complete misrepresentation we have here, I think part of the reason that we see it, is not so much a specific desire maybe to twist something, but there are things in New Age Bible versions that Mrs. Ripplinger claims God gave her.

For example, on page 149, we have something called acrostic algebra, and you take the NASV and the NIV, and by some mathematical process, you take out the AV, and the last letters left is SIN. And this somehow is supposed to demonstrate that these modern translations have something wrong with them.

Well, I asked Mrs. Ripplinger in a radio debate, first of all, why did you call it NASV throughout the rest of your book? You called it NASB. She said, that's what God calls it. Even all through the rest of the book, she said NASB instead of NASV.

And when I asked her, where did you get acrostic algebra? Well, God gave it to me. Now, as you can see, I didn't have any problem documenting the errors in Gail Ripplinger's book, neither did Dr. Wilkin, after taking a little sip of water.

In the next video, I want to give you a brief clip from another portion of this particular program just to illustrate something and to close out our examination of Texmar's dishonesty about what happened in the Ankerberg show.