King James Onlyism

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I want to invite you to remain standing and take out your Bibles and open them to Acts chapter 15.
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For those of you who have been with us the last few weeks, you know that we have been doing a study entitled Modern Judaizers.
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For those of you who haven't been here, just a quick, very quick explanation what that means.
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A Judaizer was a person in the first century who taught that unless you are circumcised, you cannot be saved because they believed that you had to first become a Jew before you could become a Christian.
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And the principle that surrounds and undergirds this series is that there are people today who have added to the Gospel.
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There are people today who have added false teachings to the Gospel very similar to the Judaizers of the first century.
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Thus we call them Modern Judaizers.
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So we're going to look first at Acts 15.1 and then over to Galatians 1 verses 6-9.
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So let's look first at Acts 15.1.
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But some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.
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Now turn over to Galatians chapter 1.
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Paul dealing with the same issue in the region of Galatia.
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He writes his letter beginning in verse 6.
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I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different Gospel.
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Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the Gospel of Christ.
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But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a Gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be accursed.
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As we have said before, now I say again.
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If anyone is preaching to you a Gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.
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Pray with me.
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Father in heaven, I thank you for your Word.
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I thank you for the truth.
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I pray Lord that as we examine a subject today which is so fraught with emotionalism, so steeped in cultic behavior, God I pray that you would allow the scales to fall off the eyes of those who are trapped in this system of man-made tradition and that they would submit to you and ultimately to your Scriptures.
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Not a 17th century Anglican translation of the Scriptures, but to what the Scriptures say as they were given to us in their original languages.
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Father we thank you for the Word of God.
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May we be ever faithful to it.
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And I pray oh God that you would in this time keep me from error.
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Keep me tied to the post of your Word.
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Do not let me deviate from the left or to the right.
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And Father, focus my attention on the task at hand.
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And Lord, by your Spirit, speak through me to your people.
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For those who have already come to know Christ, I pray that this would be a moment of encouragement and challenge to them.
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And for those who do not know Christ, I pray they will hear the Gospel clearly.
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Though we speak of a subject, Father, which is somewhat scholastic in nature, may it never be that we abandon the preaching of the Gospel in the pursuit of scholasticism, but that we always focus on Christ in everything that we preach.
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This is our prayer now in Jesus' name.
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Amen.
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I will never forget years ago a lady visited my Sunday school class.
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At the time I was teaching in the class that Jack is now in.
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And I was teaching Sunday school class there.
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And she caused quite a stir.
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I was reading from a text in the Bible.
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I don't remember what translation, but at the time I believe I was using the New American Standard Bible.
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And as I was reading, she stopped me.
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She stopped the class.
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And she said very confidently, Stop right there.
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Your Bible is wrong.
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I was somewhat unclear as to what was her meaning.
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So I asked her to what she was referring.
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She said, My Bible, this Bible, the Bible says this, and your Bible says that, and your Bible is wrong.
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I said, well, there is obviously a difference here in the translations at this point.
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We would need to consult the original languages to see which one is rendering the Greek correctly at this point.
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To which she replied, No, we don't.
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This is the Bible holding up her King James Bible.
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And she said, That disagrees with this, and so that is wrong.
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Well, there is really no better example, at least in my experience, of someone who is in what we call King James-only-ism.
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This is the belief that the King James Version of the Bible is the standard version against which all other versions must be measured.
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Perhaps some of you have even seen recently there is an internet picture.
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They call them a meme, I think is how you pronounce it.
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These pictures that have words on them and they send them out on social media.
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Well, there is a picture going about that shows a comparison between the King James Version and the New International Version.
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And it says, Look what the NIV is missing.
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And it shows a few verses here and a few verses there.
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And it says the NIV misses this, the NIV misses that, the NIV misses this.
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And so it is intended to say, and it does so clearly say, that the King James Version is right and these other translations have intentionally left things out.
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They are missing words or phrases.
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Well, when we say something is missing, what is the assumption that is in that statement? When you say something is missing, your assumption is that it was supposed to be there.
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Right? That is the assumption.
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If I say this is missing, that means it was supposed to be there.
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How do they determine that it was supposed to be there? Well, it was in the King James, thus it is supposed to be there.
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They hold the King James as the standard.
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They measure all things against it.
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In doing so, they are making a claim without proving their claim.
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You haven't proved the King James as the standard.
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You have assumed the King James as the standard.
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And that is the basis of circular reasoning.
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Circular reasoning is the logical fallacy of beginning with what you are trying to prove.
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It is also known as begging the question.
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People often say, I want to beg the question.
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Most people mean they want to raise the question.
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That is not what begging the question is.
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Begging the question is assuming your result from the beginning, or assuming your conclusion from the beginning.
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For instance, I will give you an example from atheism.
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An atheist will often say, God doesn't exist.
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And you say, why not? There is no evidence for God.
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You will say, well, what about this evidence? They will say, that can't be evidence for God.
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Why not? Because God doesn't exist.
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That is circular reasoning, right? They say, God doesn't exist.
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Well, what about this evidence? That evidence can't be for God.
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Why? Because God doesn't exist.
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You see, they assume the conclusion from the beginning, and thus anything has to be based, their result has to be based on the preconceived conclusion.
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Well, the same thing happens in King James only-ism.
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In King James only-ism, they say King James is the standard.
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Everything else must be weighed against that.
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Anything that is different from the King James is wrong.
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And so, they have not proven anything.
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They have simply made an assumption.
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Now, I want to say from the beginning, because I sort of jumped in with two feet.
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I didn't give you much of an introduction, and I certainly didn't give you much of a warning.
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So now let me step back and give you a bit of a warning.
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What I am teaching on today is an issue, is a subject that is rife with emotionalism.
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It is one that causes division in the churches, especially here in the South.
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I don't know really if Florida is the South anymore.
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Florida is sort of like, you know, North 2.0.
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I see you Floridians getting mad at me now.
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I'm just teasing.
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But the further south you get, it does seem like the further north you get.
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Anyway, but that's another story.
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But here in the South, the Bible Belt, the King James Bible, is held by many as to be the standard.
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And thus, this becomes a very emotional issue.
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And I want to say from the beginning, because we're going to have people who listen to this online.
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We're going to have people who listen to this all around the world.
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We have people who listen to us.
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You probably wouldn't believe it, but we get the records approved.
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We have people who listen to us in China.
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People who listen to us in Africa.
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We have people, we don't even think they have Internet in some of these places, and yet they do.
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And they're able to hear our messages.
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And I intend that I'm probably going to hear some responses to this.
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So let me say from the beginning, I am not preaching against the King James Version of the Bible today.
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I am preaching against a very small group who identify themselves as the King James only movement who believe that unless you use the King James Version of the Bible, you cannot be saved.
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And if you don't think they exist, I'll be giving you some quotes in a little while that prove to you they actually do.
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And they exist in larger numbers than you might want to believe.
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So I'm not preaching against the King James.
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I'm preaching against those who hold a cultic allegiance to a 17th century Anglican translation of the Bible.
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That is what I'm preaching.
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Just to be clear.
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Years ago, a man walked into this very church, walked into the narthex, the foyer, or whatever you want to call it.
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He walked into that room out there.
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And he walked up to one of our ladies who was graciously handing out the bulletins.
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And he walked up and he says, what translation of the Bible does your pastor preach from? She was a little dumbfounded and she said, I don't know.
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She just didn't, it was, you know, most of us aren't equipped to be interrogated immediately, especially on questions like that.
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And sometimes I do change.
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So in fairness to her, she was being honest.
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I don't know what.
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Usually the ESV, sometimes the NASV.
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And he did an about-face.
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If it's not the King James, it's not the Bible.
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And he darted to his car.
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So again, I understand this is a serious issue.
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I wouldn't be surprised if some of you got up and left today.
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And I would be disappointed though.
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Because I'd hope you at least would want to hear what I have to say.
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People who are willing to even discuss this issue are called by those in the cultic King James movement, Bible haters, godless, and devils.
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I'll quote from New Age Bible Versions by Gail Riplinger, one of the books that is very popular among the cultic King James only-ists.
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This is what she says in her book.
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She advocates for King James Version only by making the claim that all other translations are being used by Satan to usher in the age of the Antichrist.
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And this is the full title of the book.
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New Age Bible Versions, colon, an exhaustive documentation of the message, men, and manuscripts moving mankind to the Antichrist one world religion, end quote.
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That's the title of the book.
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Years ago, I was invited to a church to teach on textual history, transmission, and modern textual criticism.
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It is a subject of which I've given a lot of study.
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It's a subject of which I would be able to provide much information on.
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And so a church invited me to come and teach on the subject.
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As I was there teaching on the subject, I could tell that the man in the front row was becoming very agitated about what I was saying, which normally wouldn't bother me so much except this was the worship leader of the church.
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And I knew that he was going to get up and talk after I did.
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And I'm giving the textual history, the transmission of the text of the Bible, how the Bible went from the hands of the Apostle Paul to your hands today, what happened in the interim and how that happened, and why do we believe that what we have is in fact the Word of God.
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And I gave the explanations, and I gave the understanding of textual variations and things like that and what we have in our 5,700 Greek manuscripts, handwritten manuscripts that still exist today, all the way back dating to the 2nd century, all the way to about the 16th century.
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And he got up after I was done.
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He walked right to the pulpit.
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I prayed, finished, and went and sat down.
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He got up and he walked up and he looked at everybody just as stone-faced I've ever seen anyone.
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And he goes, well, that was something.
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I tell you what you need to do.
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And he said it just like this.
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He said, you need to go home and you need to look up everything that man just said and see if he was right.
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Now for that I applaud him.
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At least he didn't just come up and blatantly call me a heretic.
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But it was just interesting the way he worded it.
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That was something.
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And he was very, very displeased I could tell by what I had to say.
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So having used all that as an introduction, I simply want to say if what I say is challenging to you, go look it up.
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Come and spend some time with me.
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We'll look it up together.
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This is a subject which deserves your attention because here's what's happening in the church today, folks.
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We are sending our children off to universities.
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We're giving them bad information about how they got their Bibles.
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And when they get to the universities, men who have studied history will challenge them.
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Men like Bart Ehrman and others will challenge them about what they've been taught.
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And if they have not been equipped by the church, they will quickly fall away because they have been given bad information.
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You need to tell your children the truth.
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And you need to explain it in such a way that they can understand it and defend it.
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So that being said, let's address the topic today.
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I want to point out, beginning, three things.
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There are different kinds of people in the world who would identify themselves as King James only-ists.
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And if you want to write them down, I want to give you three categories.
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The first is what we would call King James preferred.
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The King James preferred.
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These are people who like the familiarity of the King James text.
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They like the cadence and the language of the King James Bible.
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The poetic nature of 17th century English.
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And so they prefer it.
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In fact, I remember years ago a man telling me, I like the King James because that's the way I think God talks.
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That's fine.
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If that's how you like to hear God speak, no problem.
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And if that's encouraging to your devotions, and that's something that God uses in your life, amen.
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I have no issue with that whatsoever, if that's what you prefer.
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Romans 14 tells us that we can have different preferences on issues like that, and it's not a problem.
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The second one is what I call King James version best.
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You have first King James version preferred, second is King James version best.
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This is the argument normally based on the manuscripts that underlie the King James version of the Bible.
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D.A.
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Waite, if you want to look up this particular position, I would encourage you to get D.A.
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Waite's writings.
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D.A.
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Waite makes a fourfold argument for the superiority of the King James Bible based on the texts, the translators, the techniques, and the theology.
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Four Ts.
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Everybody loves alliteration.
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He says King James Bible has better texts, better translators, better techniques, better theology.
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And while I would disagree with every one of those arguments, at least they're debatable.
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At least that's something that we can challenge.
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At least we can discuss that.
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You're saying it's the best.
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I don't necessarily agree.
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But hey, again, I don't have a problem with that.
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If that's what you believe and you believe it's the best, fine.
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We can discuss it.
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We can debate it.
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You've given me something to hold on to that you are saying.
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But the third one is where the danger comes.
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Again, I have no problem with King James preferred.
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I have no problem with King James best, except that I would disagree.
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But I don't have a problem if that's the position a person holds.
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That's fine.
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The third one is the issue, and it is King James Version only.
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This argument says that the King James Version is the only Bible which is completely inerrant.
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Often proponents will ignore the original languages altogether or use the King James Version to correct the original languages.
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Yes, that does happen.
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There are times where they'll say, well, if you have a discrepancy in the original languages, go to the King James.
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Allow it to be the standard against which you measured the original languages.
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That's reading backwards, folks.
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That ain't the way it's supposed to work.
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Some even go as far as to say that, and this is really the issue of today, that if you don't read from a King James Bible, you can't be saved.
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Now, you say, nobody believes that.
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I want to just share with you a few.
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Stephen Anderson is a pastor in Arizona, very prominent proponent of the King James Version of the Bible.
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He was made famous because he was tased on television disobeying police.
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Sorry, that shouldn't have left.
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But he was made famous because of an issue that he had with the police.
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But he's very prominent for being a proponent of the King James Version of the Bible, and he said in an interview with Dr.
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James White that a person cannot be saved without having heard the Word of God.
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And he quotes Romans 10.
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Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the Word of Christ.
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So he says a person can't be saved unless they hear the Word of God.
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Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the Word of Christ.
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And the King James Version is the Word of God.
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So the logical syllogism is, if you can't be saved without hearing the Word of God, and the King James Version is the Word of God, then you can't be saved unless you've heard the Word of God, which is the King James.
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Now while that is a proper logical syllogism, it's faulty logic.
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The syllogism is correct, but the logic is faulty.
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Jack Hiles wrote this, I have a conviction as deep as my soul that every English speaking person who has ever been born again was born of incorruptible seed, that is the King James Bible.
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If all a person has ever read is the RSV, the Revised Standard Version, he cannot be born again because corruptible seed is used.
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The King James Bible is necessary for anybody to be saved in the English language.
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That's pretty straight forward.
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Gail Ripplinger, again, writer of the New Age Bible Version, said this, The new birth occurs from the KJV seed.
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William Byer says, I have never heard of a sound conversion coming from a modern translation.
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Raymond Blanton wrote this, No one is saved through counterfeit Bibles.
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The New American Standard Version, the Revised Standard Version, Good News for Modern Man, Amplified New Testament, NIV, etc., are dead imitations and corruptions and no one is saved through them.
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You see why this is so important? This is cultic thinking.
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This is cultic behavior.
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This is heresy.
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This is dangerous thinking.
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And one of the less extreme KJV publications, called Revival Fires Evangelist Bill Bradley, claimed that Satan wrote the NIV.
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He said you can't use the NIV to defeat Satan because he wrote that one.
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And Wally Beebe acknowledged the claim that no one can be saved without the KJV being used, said, Would automatically preclude all foreign language editions of the Bible and cancel all conversions obtained under the preaching of Christ where the KJV was misquoted.
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So here's the argument.
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Either a person who speaks another language needs to learn English, or you need to translate from the KJV into their language.
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Both of those are scary bad.
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But that's the fault.
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You either say they need to learn English.
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And one of the arguments I've heard used, I've actually heard this argument used, and I think it was used by Sam Gipp, who was a strong King James fundamentalist.
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He said this.
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He said, The language of modern air traffic control is English.
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So English is the new universal language of mankind.
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And thus the King James Bible is the universal Bible of mankind.
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I can't even begin to wrap my head around the kind of logic that would produce such a statement.
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But that's the issue that I want to refute today.
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That's the concern.
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Again, we're on modern Judaizers.
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The Judaizers went to Paul and said, Unless you be circumcised, you can't be saved.
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Paul said, That's not true and we will take it to the elders in Jerusalem.
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We will hash this out and we will prove you're not true.
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And Paul gave us an example.
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When someone comes up with a false gospel, you are to challenge it and refute it.
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You don't just sit there and go, Oh, you have your truth and I have my truth, and we're all going to hold hands and sing kumbaya.
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Ain't no kumbaya.
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You stand for truth.
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There's the quote for the day.
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Ain't no kumbaya.
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Alright.
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So let's look at the actual refutation that we're going to refute.
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Let's give a little history lesson.
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Brief history of the King James Bible.
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In 1604, King James I summoned a meeting of representatives from diverse religious groups to discuss the issue of religious toleration.
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At this meeting, known as the Hampton Court Conference, Dr.
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John Reynolds of Oxford discussed the desirability of having an authorized version of the English Bible that would be acceptable to all parties within the church.
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James agreed with Reynolds and called for a version that could be used for both public and private use.
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That's how it began in 1604.
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Here's the thing, though.
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It wasn't the first English Bible.
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The first English Bible goes back to Wycliffe in the 1300s.
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He translated the Bible into English first.
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Later, Tyndale would come along, and he would translate the Bible.
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What was the difference between Wycliffe and Tyndale? Wycliffe translated out of Latin, because that's the language that the Bible was in at the time.
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But it was Tyndale who went back to the original languages of Hebrew and Greek.
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So Tyndale's translation would have been more accurate, in a sense, than was Wycliffe's, but Wycliffe's was very good.
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There were also other English Bibles, such as the Bishop's Bible and the Geneva Bible.
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But here's what the problem was.
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The Geneva Bible had textual notes at the bottom, which gave interpretation of the text at the top, somewhat similar to a modern study Bible.
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And you can still buy Geneva Bibles today.
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This was the Bible of the Puritans.
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This was the Bible that came over on the Mayflower.
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It was not the King James.
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It was the Geneva Bible.
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And the interpretations of the text were there.
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Well, when a state Bible became the desire of the day, no one wanted to publish a state Bible that had notes in it, especially when those notes agreed with the teachings of the Reformers like Calvin and Luther and Zwingli.
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They didn't want to have those interpretive notes in the Bible.
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So the state produces a Bible that is to be authorized by the King to be used in public and private worship and devotion.
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Now, just for a moment, I want you to consider this thought.
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At the time, the King James Version of the Bible was not readily received by all people.
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In fact, several had big issues with the King James Bible because it was a state-sanctioned Bible.
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Imagine if today we came out with the U.S.
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Government Edition or the Obama Standard Version.
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I mean, seriously, any president.
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The Bush Standard Version.
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Anybody.
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You would have issue with that, right? You would have issue with anything that was coming out of the hands of the government that said, this is the Word of God.
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And there were major translational issues.
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There were rules that the translators had to follow.
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They were not allowed to translate certain phrases, like ecclesia could not be translated as assembly.
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It had to be translated as church, even though the word church is not really the translation of ecclesia.
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Ecclesia is assembly.
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Church is a modern take on the use of the word.
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Words like baptism could not be translated immerse or wash.
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They had to be translated as baptize because that was the language that had been transliterated.
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Baptizo is a Greek word.
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It's not English.
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It's transliterated into English.
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You can look at the introduction of the King James Bible in the 1611, and you can actually see the rules that they had to go by.
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So having said all that, I want to say this.
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The King James Bible was mightily used of God.
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I'm not denying anything that I just said.
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What I am saying is this.
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In the midst of all of that, I think the King James Version of the Bible was an answer to prayer because William Tyndale, remember the guy I said translated the Bible into English? When he was being burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English, he prayed out to God, he cried out to God, and he said, God, open the King of England's eyes.
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He was being burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English.
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In less than a hundred years, the authorized King James Version was produced.
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So I believe it was an answer to the prayer of William Tyndale.
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So I see it as a valuable piece of Christian scholarship and a valuable piece of the puzzle that God has put together in formulating His plan of bringing the Gospel to the world.
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So again, I'm not preaching against the King James Bible.
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I just think if you understand something, you need to understand it all.
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Understand it in its whole, not just in the pieces.
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Proponents of the King James Version of the Bible argue that the Bible must be perfectly preserved because God promised to preserve His Word.
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As such, they believe that the preservation of the Bible has been held intact in the version called the King James Version.
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Some believe that it was supernaturally overseen.
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Some believe that it is actually new revelation.
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There are people who believe the King James Version is the final revelation of God and that God actually used the King James translators essentially as having apostolic authority to write Scripture.
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The argument often goes like this.
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Well, God has used the King James Version for 400 years and He saved so many souls through it.
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Why in the world would they need another translation? God has used this one so strongly.
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It must be the Word of God because it saved so many souls.
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And they would argue at times that those manuscripts which have been discovered since the King James Version was translated are all corrupted.
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So these are the arguments that we have to deal with.
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They say first, the King James Bible is God's perfect preservation of His Word.
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Every other translation that disagrees with it is the perversion of it.
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This is the argument that they make.
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Essentially, the King James Version is the Bible, is God's Word.
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Everything else is not.
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So I want to offer a brief rebuttal to that.
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Well, first of all, number one argument.
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People claim that the 1611 King James Version of the Bible is God's Word perfect in English.
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First rebuttal.
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Since 1611, there have been several revisions of the King James Version.
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The first was in 1613, not two years after it was written.
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It received its first major edition.
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It contained more than 400 variations from the 1611.
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Other revisions, 1615, 1629, 1638, 1762, and 1769.
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In fact, most people that hold up a King James Bible and say this is a 1611 King James Bible are not holding up a 1611 King James Bible.
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They're holding up a 1769 Blaney revision that has several hundred variations from the 1611 King James Version.
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It's either absolutely perfect or it ain't.
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And you don't have additions of things that are perfect.
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While most Christians appreciate the value of the King James Version, we must realize that it has weaknesses and that there is a need for modern translations.
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There is a need for that.
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Now, I do think that we have overdone the need.
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I don't think that we need 50 different variations.
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And in fact, I'm going to tell you something.
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And I agree with the King James guys on this.
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Do you know why there are so many translations today? Money.
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Here's why.
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If I want to write a study Bible and I don't want to pay you for your translation, I'll have it translated by my publishing company and we'll call it the blank standard Bible and we'll put our name on it so we don't have to pay you royalties.
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Yeah, that's a problem.
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And that's why there are so many different translations.
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You have a plethora of modern translations.
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So there is a problem there too.
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I'm not denying that there is an issue.
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But it's important that we take a balanced look at the King James Version of the Bible.
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The King James Version of the Bible does have weaknesses.
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In fact, Underwood said this.
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He said, The King James Version of the Bible was based on the best Greek and Hebrew text available.
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This contributed measurably to its worth, for most English Bibles had been translated from a Latin translation.
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Thus, the King James took English readers a full step closer to the original message.
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But this was over 350 years ago.
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Archaeology has contributed much to Biblical study since that time and textual criticism has made some significant advances since then.
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The text that underlies the King James Version of the Bible is called the Textus Receptus.
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Now I'm going to ask you not to go to sleep.
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I'm not here to bore you, I'm here to teach you.
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You say, this isn't a sermon, it's a lesson.
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It's a sermon and I'll explain why in a little while.
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It's still a sermon.
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It's a sermon filled with information.
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The Textus Receptus was based on the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament which was compiled and edited by a man named Desiderius Erasmus, a Catholic priest.
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Not that that's the issue, but he was.
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He was called the Prince of the Humanists, the King of the Humanists.
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He and humanists back then wasn't what we think of today.
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Humanists back then regarded more scholarship and things like that.
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And he was a very scholarly man, but he was working from a very small group of manuscripts.
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He was working from a set of manuscripts around a dozen or so.
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When he put together his edition of the Greek New Testament, he had certain portions of the book of Revelation that he did not have the Greek for.
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And he had to translate back into Greek from Latin because all he had was the Latin.
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And that is why to this day there are readings in the King James Version of the Bible and the book of Revelation which are not found in any other translation because they come out of the translating back into Greek from Latin that Erasmus did.
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Now Erasmus' published Greek New Testament becomes the foundation that was used by the translators of the King James Bible and it became known as the TR, the Textus Receptus, which was a Latin phrase.
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And that was actually a selling point.
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They began to sell the published Greek New Testament and they called it the Received Text.
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This is the text that God has given us and it became a selling point and thus the TR, even to this day you can buy the TR, the Textus Receptus, that was the one that was produced by Erasmus.
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Here's the issue.
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He was working off 12 or so manuscripts.
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We now have 5,700 handwritten manuscripts which some are pieces of manuscripts because they're papyri that go all the way back to the 2nd century.
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That's 2,000 years ago.
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And some of them are not even bigger than a credit card because it's not a manuscript, it's just a piece of one but you can still read what was written on it and tell where it came from.
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He didn't have any of that.
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He didn't have any of the papyri.
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As far as I know, he didn't have access to the vellum manuscripts.
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There's Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, Codex...
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There's Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and I can't think of the other one at this moment, but these manuscripts that go back to the 3rd and 4th century.
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He didn't have access to those.
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We do now.
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We can compare now what they had then.
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The beauty of it is this.
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The beauty is we can see in this glorious textual tradition that the Bible has not been corrupted or changed for 2,000 years.
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Even though there are textual variations, the original still lasts and you say, well, how do you know what the original is? That's what textual criticism is all about.
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Textual criticism is the process whereby you search for where variations happen and you find families of variants which evolve out of these mistakes.
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And you're able to trace back the original based on these variations.
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It's really kind of difficult to explain.
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I want to maybe try to give you a picture of how this works.
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When the Apostle Paul wrote the letter to the church at Ephesus, that letter was not copied by professional scribes.
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Christians did not have scriptoriums for hundreds of years.
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Instead, those letters were copied by people like you.
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But here's the beauty of that.
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So many of them were copied and so many of them were spread so quickly that it would have been impossible to gather them all up and change them all.
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You understand? They disseminated so quickly that you couldn't get them all back.
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And this actually preserves God's Word.
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Even though it allows for minor textual variation, it preserves the tenacity of the text because it's different than what happened in Islam.
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You see, the Quran did undergo a tremendous wholesale revision under Uthman because it did not have the proliferation of people writing it and sending it out and immediately translating it.
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We have Latin, Syriac, Coptic translations of the Bible that go all the way back to the second century.
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This is amazing! There is no work of history.
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There's no piece of literature that even comes close to the amount of attestation that we have for the New Testament.
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But with that many people writing, you're going to have textual variation.
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Because these were not professional scribes.
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They were not writing in a scriptorium for the most part.
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And you're going to see this happen.
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You know what one of the most common is? It's called homo etelhutam.
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Homo etelhutam means similar endings.
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And what happens is you ever get to the end of a...
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Like you're reading a book and you get to the end of a word and then you go to the next line and the next line has the same ending and you skip that whole line because they both look like the same line? In your mind you see the same ending or a similar ending and so you skip a whole line and then you realize you go back up oh wait, I missed a whole line.
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Well if you're copying, that's very easy to do.
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So we can see manuscripts where whole lines are missing and you can tell why it was missing.
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There's one that's funny.
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There's one translation of the Bible, or rather writing, where you had two columns of text.
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The guy started at this side and wrote all the way across.
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He didn't realize there was a gap between and so when you read it you can tell that he wrote all the...
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He didn't speak the language.
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All he was doing was copying the letters and he didn't realize there was a gap in between.
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We can see that and we can find that.
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Alright, that's another lesson entirely.
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I totally abandoned my notes.
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But I'm just saying textual criticism and textual variations are not something we should be afraid of and we shouldn't send our kids away to school not knowing these things.
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Because the first guy who stands up and tells your kid there's 5700 manuscripts and none of them agree, your child says, oh my, I was never told this.
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They need to be told.
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They need to know.
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Somebody says, oh yeah, that makes the Bible untrue.
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No, it actually proves the tenacity of the text because even with all that, the truth of the Word is still in there.
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Even Bart Ehrman, one of the most anti-Bible people in the world in the sense that he doesn't believe that the Scripture is the Word of God, he doesn't believe in its truth, but he is a scholar and he attacks the Bible.
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I've actually met him, got my picture taken with him because he did a debate with Dr.
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White a few years ago and I was there.
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In his discussions, he was asked by an atheist one time, hey man, it was on a radio show so the guy was sort of hip and happening, he said, hey man, what do you think the Bible would say if we were able to get rid of all those variations and go back to what it originally said? What do you think, Bart? What do you think it would say? And he said, the same thing it says now.
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That was his answer and that guy's wind was all the way sucked out of his balloon.
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Because he thought he was going to come up with some random wild thing.
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He said, this is...
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So much time and effort and so much scholarship has gone into the translation of the text that we have that we can have the confidence to say this is the Word of God.
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But we do not have to rely on a 17th century Anglican translation to make that argument.
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They say God has promised to preserve His Word.
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If the King James is not the Word of God, what is it? I say it is held within the manuscript tradition.
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That's my answer.
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It is there.
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And any time we have translations that agree, we should go back and look at the relevant data and find out why they disagree.
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I have a book on my shelf.
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I showed it to the dads and dudes.
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It's this thick.
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It's every single textual variation of the Bible and what it means and where it comes from and why it was introduced and what happened and how it got there.
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If you want to know why the end of Mark is longer in the King James Bible than it is in some others and why the King James Bible has an ending of Mark that is not in the ESV or other translations, I will show you why.
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They say the King James Bible has converted people for 400 years.
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How can you question 400 years of tenacity and use? Here is my response.
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The Latin Vulgate was used for over a thousand years.
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And the same people who argued against the King James Bible for the Latin argued with the same reasoning.
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They said we've had the same Bible for a thousand years.
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Why do we need a new one? Ultimately, I think the best refutation...
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I'm going to end with this.
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I know I've kept you here quite a long time and there's a lot more I could say.
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But ultimately, I think the best refutation of this whole argument comes from the translators of the King James Version themselves.
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The men who translated the King James Version of the Bible wrote a foreword to the King James Version which is no longer printed in the modern King James Version Bibles, but you can still find it.
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And this is what they wrote.
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This is their words about their writing.
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And I invite you to listen.
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We do not deny, nay, we affirm and avow that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English set forth by men of our profession, for we have seen none of theirs of the whole Bible as yet, containeth the Word of God, nay, is the Word of God.
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I really read that badly.
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Let me try it again.
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We do not deny, nay, we affirm and avow that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English set forth by men of our profession, for we have seen none of theirs of the whole Bible as yet, containeth the Word of God, nay, is the Word of God.
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What does that say? That even the weakest translation of the text, if it is a true translation of the text, is the Word of God.
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And they go on to say this, As the King's speech, which he utters in Parliament, being translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and Latin, is still the King's speech, though it may not be interpreted by every translator with the same grace, nor peradventure so fitly for phrase, nor so expressly for sense, is still the King's speech.
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Isn't that amazing? The King James translators believed that a translation of the Word of God was the Word of God, even if it be an imperfect one, because they didn't consider their work to be imperfect, or to be perfect.
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They considered their work to be imperfect.
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If they considered it to be perfect, there wouldn't have been a 1613 edition, there wouldn't have been a 1615 edition, there wouldn't have been any more of the editions, and there certainly wouldn't have been a 1769 Blaney revision.
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The biggest problem with King James-only-ism is this.
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They have substituted truth for certainty.
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You cannot substitute truth for certainty.
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Think of the atheist.
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I'm certain that God doesn't exist.
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That don't make it true.
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We are to be seekers of the truth, not just certainty to placate our own hearts.
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The truth is that we are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone.
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We know that because the Scripture, which came to us not in 1611, but through the original writers in Greek and Hebrew, of which now we have good solid translations that anyone can read, tell us that we are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone.
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And here's the sermon.
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If you believe that the King James Version of the Bible helps you in your devotions and you learn from it, and that's the best translation for you to use, God be with you as you study.
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Amen.
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But if you believe that a person cannot be saved without a 16th century Anglican translation, you are robbing the blood of Christ of its power, because you are encapsulating it into something it never, ever was meant to be encapsulated in.
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The blood of Jesus Christ is for all who call upon Him by grace through faith alone, and faith in Him alone.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I pray that this message has been encouraging to Your people.
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I pray that You'll use it to further their study.
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I pray that this hasn't caused people to call into question the Word of God, but rather that it would cause them to want to study even with more fervor how they got their Bible, where it came from, and why they should trust what it says.
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Father, for those who are trapped in the cultish movement of the King James Only, who have so divided themselves from Christianity, who have so divided themselves from other believers over this issue, I pray that You would, Lord, give them a spirit of repentance, that they might see that Your Word is not housed only in one translation, but that Your Word is contained in a manuscript tradition which is vast and tenacious, and has to this day been unable to be conquered even by the most erudite of scholastic minds.
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For the Word of God is wiser than even the wisest of men.
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We thank You, Lord, in Jesus' name.
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Amen.