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Pastor David Mitchell
Went down to Constantine, didn't we? And I think we stopped with the Latin Vulgate. All right, let's pray. Father, we ask you to guide us as we go through this study and every study that we do together in this church.
And may your Holy Spirit be the one who is our great teacher who moves us in the right directions, who puts up red flags when we're going the wrong direction and that we might be a church which truly does guard the truth and until your son comes back and we ask it in his name, amen.
I think this Latin Vulgate is real important to remember that there's, I think for our studies, we'll just call it the ancient Latin Vulgate, which is the one before Jerome got to it. But he did make some corrective, they always call them corrections.
Actually, some of them are mutilations, but he did put his hands on it at that point in time, which was, let me think about the time period. You know, I apologize, but I don't have a date for that, but I'll get one for you.
But I know that it was after, it was, I think it was after the Vaticanus and Sinaticus manuscripts were made. In other words, it was after Eusebius made the 50 copies for Constantine. In fact, it's believed that those influenced some of Jerome's changes that he made on the Latin Vulgate.
So the truth is the Latin Vulgate was actually a reliable manuscript, whereas now if you talk about the Latin Vulgate, it is not because it's been changed by Jerome. The common language of the people in that part of the world was Latin early on because of the influence of the Roman Empire.
And so there were Latin versions that were good. It does not, just because we tend to think of the Roman Catholic Church and the perversions that can come into play there. Sometimes when we think Latin, we're thinking Roman Catholic, but that's another thing I'll provide for you.
During this study, I'm gonna provide for you a sheet that has dates on it, about 25 or 30 dates that show you where the different perversions came into the Catholic Church and what time year they came in.
And you'll see it didn't happen overnight. You have to remember that the Roman Catholic Church quite likely can be traced all the way back to the church that Paul wrote the Book of Romans to, I suppose, it was in Rome.
It's just that over time, it was perverted. And so back, if you go far enough back in what we might call the Roman Catholic Church, you can find some scholars that certainly saw some tremendous light.
Augustine did. And in fact, if it weren't for Augustine, Martin Luther may have never come out of the Catholic Church. So it didn't happen overnight, but just because it says Latin does not mean it's a Catholic Bible, especially if you go back to the ancient Latin Vulgate.
Okay, Vulgate just means the Book of the People, the popular accepted book is what that word means. Okay, on May the 3rd, 1870, let's come forward in time now. The Southern Canterbury Convocation met, and it was probably a mistake that they did, but they met.
And their purpose was for Bible revision. What's interesting about the history of that is if you read what they stated their purpose was and what they full well intended to do, they probably would not have done any damage to the Word of God if they had followed their guidelines.
But there were two men named Westcott and Hort who were a part of this group who were very, very influential, who already had their theories and their scholarly works done, and they presented these works little by little to these committees and sort of gained control of the entire process.
And so they promoted what they called their neutral text. Their neutral text was in fact the Vatican text that was found earlier in the Vatican library. And this became what they called the neutral text.
They went by the Vatican text, it became predominant, and one person who wrote in that time, there was a man named Kenyon who wrote a work called Recent Discoveries, and he claimed that Westcott and Hort made the Vatican text become the, quote, chair of authority over all the other texts.
So it became the one they compared everything to, and if there was a difference, they went with the Vatican text, and it's called the Vaticanus. The revisers of 1881 followed the guidance of these two Cambridge editors, Westcott and Hort, who were constantly at their elbows, I'm reading a quote at this point to you about this time period, and whose radical, now this is kind of interesting because what I'm giving you here, this was written by Kenyon, and then there was another man named Samuel Hemphill who wrote a book called The History of the Revised Version.
And so you get the viewpoint of godly men who lived at the same time this was happening and how they felt about it, and this is what one of them said, that these two men were constantly at their elbows whose radical Greek text, now that's the way, the people who lived in that time considered this text to be radical because it was not the same words as the received text.
Their radical Greek New Testament deviated the farthest from the received text is to all intents and purposes, the Greek New Testament followed by the revision committee. And this Greek text in the main follows the Vatican and Sinaiticus manuscripts.
Hort's partiality for the Vatican manuscript was practically absolute. One can almost hear him say, quote, the Vaticanus have I loved, but the Textus Receptus have I hated. And that's written by one of the scholars who opposed their work in their day.
When Dr. Elliott, who was the leader of the committee, the revision committee, submitted the Revised Version. Now this goes back to the Revised Standard Version and you can get those today. I have one at home.
And where's Katie, if something happens to me, or Paul, something happens to me and you go through my library and you see one called Revised Standard Version, it's not a good one, okay? Just because I had it doesn't mean it's good.
But I have one so that I can read and verify some of the things that I read in my studies. I want to look at it myself. And sure enough, these things are true. But it never was a highly popular Bible except among very highly liberal theologians today.
And some of them do use it today and preach from it. But most of the conservatives didn't go quite that far and they'll use more like the New American Standard or NIV, but they came from the same Greek line is what we're going to show.
But this was the first of these Westcott-Hort versions. And when Dr. Elliott submitted the Revised Version, he declared that they had made between eight and nine changes in every five verses. Bill, I got my numbers a little wrong back there, but that's amazing.
This was not just changing a few little these and thous. And I'll tell you something else, a little rabbit trail here while I'm thinking about it. We've always been under the impression that the problem that we have with the King James Bible is the archaic language because of the these and the thous and all that.
Well, I found in my reading just this week, and I don't remember this, having ever found this before, and I've studied this in depth years ago, about 1981 or two. I've studied on and off for the better part of a year and a half or so on this topic.
But I didn't come across this until this time. The King James, when it was written in the English form, our King James Bible, that language has been proven by a couple of scholars in the last century that the language of the King James never was the common language of the English-speaking people, certainly not at the time when it was translated.
They didn't, even as late as that time, they used you instead of thou. Like, you go to the store. They didn't say thou goest to the storist. So they were not using that language like some people think.
In fact, the translators chose that language in reverence to God. Do you understand what I'm saying? They didn't want it to be just everyday slang language. They chose it, especially when referring to God, to be a higher way of speaking.
And so that language never has really changed, which is contradictory to what a lot of people think. Well, the language has changed so much because that's the old King James and people used to talk that way.
No, they didn't. They really didn't talk that way. It was just that it was translated as such an exact translation of the original Hebrew and Greek that that's why it sounds the way it does. And I found that to be very interesting information.
Well, anyway, when Eliot stood up and spoke when the finished product was done, and I assume with pride because he probably thought this was a good thing, he declared that between eight and nine changes had occurred in every five verses and about every 10 verses, three of these changes were made for critical purposes, which means they decided that's just not supposed to be in there.
And that's what we call higher criticism. The Vatican Codex, sometimes alone, sometimes in accord with the synodic, is responsible for nine-tenths of the most striking innovations in the Revised Version.
And I read this in a book called The Revised Version by a man named Cook. So we see now that nine out of the 10 changes in the modern Bibles, especially the Revised Version, came from this Vatican manuscript of Westcott and Hort.
There's a great scholar that if you're gonna choose a few interesting books to read, you might look into this man. His name is Scrivener. He points out that there are 2 ,864 cursive and unsealed manuscripts of the New Testament in whole or part.
Now, there are more than that, but these are actual manuscripts that he's talking about. If you consider fragments and things they call lectionaries or lectionnaires, there are over 5 ,000 ancient manuscripts that we have of our New Testament.
But there are 2 ,864 of these manuscripts. 19 twentieths of these manuscripts are in accord with the received text, Scrivener says. 19 twentieths of all the information we have on ancient manuscripts agrees with the received text.
Yet, Westcott and Hort turned away all of this weight of evidence in favor of the Vatican manuscript, which contains 5 ,337 changes from the reading of the Greek Textus Receptus. Now, it's amazing if you think about what these men did.
They took almost 3 ,000 manuscripts that agreed with one another in 19 twentieths of every word on the page, and they threw all that weight away and used the one Vatican manuscript as the neutral. And when they used that and compared everything to it, they had to change 5 ,337 places to make it fit their theory.
So therefore, if their theory is right, then the church from the foundation of the church up until Westcott and Hort's time in the 1800s had a corrupt Bible that had 5 ,337 incorrect places all through church history until they came on the scene and they fixed it.
Now, I find that hard to believe, but I'm telling you, every Bible scholar, every seminary, except maybe some I don't know about, I know one or two Bible colleges that I'd have to remove from the group, but just across the board, even the ones you would think are good, believe the Westcott-Hort theory.
Most of your friends believe it, most pastors you've ever known in your life believe it, and very few will hold to men like Scrivener and Burgin, some of these great older scholars, Miller and people like that.
Burgin, Miller, and Scrivener and others held that the Textus Receptus with its enormous number of manuscripts in agreement with it was God's word. They felt that the Vaticanus and Sinaticus, which disagree with the received text in thousands of places and disagree with each other in hundreds of places were scanty survivals of a corrupt tradition and that they probably survived because of their corruption.
Their theory was no one used them. That's how they lasted for almost 2 ,000 years, and it's kind of like the church. The Vaticanus manuscript itself was almost in pristine condition, but it was on a shelf in the back of the Vatican library and went 1 ,500 years without being seen.
So no one obviously used it as a Bible. And as I said, the Sinaticus was found out in the dump heap of a monastery. And on the basis of these two documents, they've changed our whole Bible. It's not our Bible, but the new versions.
So men like Burgeon, Miller, and Scribner rejected these theories and strongly said that it is not only unscholarly, but illogical to throw aside the weight of 19 20ths of all the manuscripts in favor of two manuscripts that probably were still in existence because no one ever used them because they knew they were corrupt.
In 1914, a man named Hoskier wrote, Burgeon's position remains absolutely unshaken. He maintained that Aleph, the Sinaticus, and B, which is the Vaticanus, were corrupted manuscripts, and he proved it in his book, Cause of Corruption.
The material discovered since Burgeon's day has not shaken his position at all. Scribner says, Dr. Hort's system, therefore, is entirely destitute of historical foundation. His neutral text is not so neutral after all.
Griesbach, Lachman, Tischendorf, Tregellus, Wordsworth, and Alford. Remember those names because any Greek text that you find that were edited by those men are the bad line. But a lot of these texts are used in our seminaries today, especially Alford, you'll hear Alford used a lot.
Not Alfred, Alford. But Griesbach, Lachman, Tischendorf, Tregellus, Wordsworth, and Alford followed the, well, some of them came before Westcott and Hort, but all of their work follows the same theory, and they have followed these same corrupt lines of manuscripts.
So if you go to the bookstore and you see a Greek-English interlinear and it's by someone named Alford or Lachman, don't buy that one. If you're looking for a good Greek-English interlinear, buy one by a man named Berry, B-E-R-R-Y.
It's the received text. Okay, now let me give you some background about the men themselves, Westcott and Hort. These are the men that all the modern versions came from and nobody dares to look into their own personal lives.
Are these Bible believers? Are these men born again men of God who God used to, quote, correct a Bible that had been wrong for 1 ,500 years or more, 1 ,800 years, and now all of a sudden they're gonna make it right because they're so godly and going to be used of God?
Well, let me tell you a little bit about Westcott. Here is a letter that was found that was written by him to his fiancee in the year 1847. And we'll quote from the letter. After leaving the monastery, we found a little room and we found the door open.
It was very small with one kneeling place and behind a screen was a piata the size of life. Now that's a Roman Catholic statue of Mother Mary holding the dead Jesus. And they're all over Italy, they're all over Europe.
But he found one of these the size of life. He said, had I been alone, I could have knelt there for hours. And then later Hort writes a letter to Westcott on October 17th, 1865, and he says, I have been persuaded for many years that Mary worship and Jesus worship have very much in common in their causes and their results.
So you get the same result if you worship Mary as you do if you worship Jesus. Westcott went on to form a group called the Hermes Club that met weekly for three years between the year 1845 and 1848, discussing such topics as, quote, funeral ceremonies of the Romans.
Hermes was the entry point of scholars and philosophers into the occult. Hermes was the original hermaphrodite, the fusion of sexes into one person. 35 years later, Westcott wrote, there are differences between male and female character under which we divine that there lies a real identity and consequent tendency to fusion in the ultimate ideal.
What does that mean? Well, one historian later cites letters between members of Westcott's clubs that refer to the intensity of a homosexual relationship between its members. Another letter was found where he wrote, and he is speaking of another person who happened to be a scholar of his day that was in this Hermes Club, which is an occult type club, and Westcott is the man who formed the club.
He says, quote, he certainly carried you off in a fairy-like fashion, talking about another man. I am not quite sure that I will pardon you, till I have a full account of the, quote, supernatural phenomenon, which must have accompanied your ebanishment.
It is but to say that I did not smell the odor of hemp seed in the house. That's marijuana. So these are the men that were responsible for every modern version that you have in the English language. No one ever goes back, tries to find out if they're godly.
No one ever goes back, tries to find anything about them. They just blindly accept as scholarly work because if you read their books, they can wow you with the language and technical terms. They invented literally hundreds of new technical terms that had never been used before, and put them in their writings to describe how this was removed from this manuscript, and these were added in here, and this came out of the margin of this one, and they invented all these terms so that by the time you get through reading their stuff, you're just mind boggled.
You have to learn their entire technical jargon to understand it, and so it gave the appearance of a very, very high intellect and scholarly work, and everybody just fell for it, and yet these men were heathen.
They were in the occult, and they were Mary worshipers, and the Bible that they used predominantly was found in the Vatican library where it had been hidden for 1 ,500 years, and so there's a little bit of history about who the people were behind the modern versions.
I think we'll stop at that point, and next time, we're gonna start asking the question, is oldest always best, and we're gonna get into a very interesting study of a couple of verses. There's one in particular that I know that Brother Otis had told me he had studied before in John chapter five, verse eight, where it uses the word Bethesda.
You might, next week, take your Bible home and look up John five, two, and see if Bethesda is spelled Bethesda, or if it's spelled Bethesda, and if it's Bethesda, B-E-T-H-E-S-D-A, it came from the received text.
If it's Bethsaida, it comes from the Vatican text, so check your Bibles out when you get home on that verse, but that's what we'll talk about next time. Let's have a word of prayer, and we'll stop, have a little business meeting.
Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for how you've guarded it and protected it and actively kept your hand on it through the years, and how you've used your blood-bought church to protect it and to keep it and to witness to it, and we ask that you would help us do the same in our generation, and Father, help us to take stands that may not be popular, but that we must take because we're following the Lord Jesus, and help us be strong in these types of stands in the last days.
We ask you to go with us into our business meetings and bless them, and we ask it in Jesus' name, amen.