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Conclusion
Westcott and Hort came along in 1875 and they took these Alexandrian manuscripts, of which I think about 15 or 17 of them were found, I don't know, and they said these are old manuscripts, therefore they're better.
Well now hold on a minute, yes they're older but that doesn't mean they're better, they're older because they're worse, the people didn't use them, they didn't wear them out. But they made a modern Greek version of the Bible from this ancient one, they put it on new paper, new ink, and made a new Greek edition in 1875.
This was then translated into English, at least the New Testament in Greek, and so the English translations of the Westcott and Hort text include the Revised Version done in 1881, the American Standard Version done in 1901, the Revived Standard done in 1946, and that's the Bible I got saved from, the New World Translation, Jehovah's Witness Bible made in 1950, the New American Standard Bible made in 1960, the Good News Bible, the Amplified Bible, the Living Bible, and the NIV.
All of those are good translations of the wrong manuscript. So I don't fault the translators, I think they're probably sincere men, probably intelligent men, but they're translating the wrong book, they need to get the right Bible.
Well once again, I'm certain that Kent Hovind was probably quite sincere in putting together this video, but again, if you don't look at all the facts, if you don't do a little more reading, and if you tend to maybe embrace conspiracy theories a little bit too easily, that's where this kind of stuff comes from.
There's just so much information that is there that he's ignoring, that would completely change the character of this discussion. There's so much more information about the text, the backgrounds of the text, and things like that, that he's just not including.
And the modern translations are not done from the Westcott and Hort text, the New American Standard and the NIV are done from the Nessie-Allen text, and the Nessie-Allen text is not simply a slavish reproduction of the Westcott and Hort text at all.
And so, on every level, this presentation is flawed, and is a person, and the reason I address this, other than obviously my interest in the King James Only issue, and the interest in consistency, is that a person who believes this could never defend this against a knowledgeable opponent to Christianity, a Bart Ehrman, would feast on this kind of really bad information, as would a Shabbir Ali.
Muslims and secularists, we can't be producing this kind of bad apologetic and putting it out there. Can you imagine a young person, and this is all they have, and they go into a secular situation, they are going to be destroyed, because they were not given the right information, and that's what makes it really important.
The first mention of Alexandria is in Acts chapter 9, when they were disputing with Stephen, arguing with the Christians, and we've still got the same thing today, with these different versions of the Bible, arguing with the real Bible.
My Jehovah's Witness Bible on my shelf will probably never get worn out. That doesn't mean it's better, it just means I'm not going to use it. I have one, I have a Mormon Bible, I'm just not going to use it.
Well, so there were people from Alexandria who argued, and that means the Alexandrian manuscripts are somehow corrupt. Not really good reasoning there. That doesn't really follow too well, because Paul had to stand up to Peter in Antioch, that means the manuscripts come from Antioch or something.
This kind of thinking, endemic amongst King James onlyists, again, is just, it can never stand up to any serious scrutiny. It just doesn't make any sense. And his Jehovah's Witness Bible will never wear out.
Well, a Jehovah's Witness wears out their Bible, does that mean something? Of course it means nothing at all. And you can't have your cake and eat it too. Look at the Sinaiticus, they love the Sinaiticus, because look at all the changes in Sinaiticus, all these scribbles.
That's because it was in use for over a thousand years, even more than that, almost like 1500 years. So it was in use, but it's corrupt, but the ones that were in use supposedly wore out, and that's why they weren't there, and the special pleading really after a while becomes really obvious, and it's not a good argumentation.
So that's the story. There are more manuscripts of the Bible than any other book ever written in ancient times. Homer's Iliad, for instance, there are only 643 manuscripts known today. By 1946, they discovered 24 ,000 manuscripts of the Bible.
Then when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947, they now have 40 ,000 new manuscripts to work from. So the Dead Sea Scrolls made it up to the total now, 64 ,000 manuscripts of scripture. The Isaiah Scroll is a thousand years older than any known manuscript anywhere in the world, and it matches exactly the Texas Receptus, the King James.
I recommend you get the book, New Age Bible Versions. You can order it from my ministry, or go to avpublications .com if this topic interests you about studying different Bible versions, and we could spend hours about that one.
Aha, lovely, Gail Ripplinger, great. 64 ,000 biblical manuscripts, not quite. Not everything found in Qumran were biblical manuscripts. Yes, the Isaiah Scroll is identical to the Masoretic Text. The Texas Receptus is Greek, the Masoretic Text is Hebrew, they're not of the same books.
If you don't realize that, then I'm sorry, you really don't know a lot about this particular subject, and should not be speaking as an expert on that particular subject. And what you need to be careful of, there is a, I might as well take a few moments to address this, there is a danger that a lot of Christian apologists fall into when they mention the Isaiah Scroll.
Yes, the Isaiah Scroll demonstrates that that stream of textual transmission from the Book of Isaiah from the time of Qumran to the Masoretic Text is linear, very straightforward. But be very careful when you throw that out there, because, for example, Jeremiah found when Qumran is about one-third shorter than the Masoretic Text, the reason being it comes from the stream that the Septuagint actually is a translation of.
And while there are reasons for that, and I think the Book of Jeremiah even suggests what some of those reasons are, that's there, and so you need to be careful. Again, you need to do a little more study in the background of these things before you make these kinds of comments.
It's obvious that once you recommend a book like New Age Bible Versions, which is the single most error-ridden book I've ever read in English, no cult group I've ever, ever studied managed to get as many just complete errors onto each page of a text as Gail Ripplinger did.
Nobody. I've never seen anything like it. To recommend stuff like that pretty well ends all the credibility of a presentation. But this kind of stuff's out there, and it keeps resurfacing, and it confuses people because they haven't gone back and done this type of study for themselves.
And let's face it, you walk into a Christian bookstore today, this is not the first thing they're going to be discussing. But the information is out there if a person will patiently persevere and look for it.
And it's important to get it right, because this is the focus of the attack of the enemy is attacking the validity of Scripture and the transmission of Scripture over time. That's why I wrote the King James Only Controversy.
That's why we do what we're doing. That's why I'm going to be debating Bart Ehrman on this very subject in January. And so we keep trying to help believers to understand the methodology that God used to transmit the Scriptures to us.
This kind of stuff is not helpful whatsoever. And so to be consistent, we need to refute it when it is posted out there and help Christians understand and stay away from that which might deceive them.
Thanks for watching.
