Keep sharing good news without ads.
No description available
Comments are turned off for this media
So I'm not sure whether it's on or off. I'm assuming that it's on, but I am. Oh, good. Thank you. Well, some of you have had the opportunity of at least hearing this presentation, sort of following along with most of it anyways on your computers, because we recently sent this file out, or at least I tried to.
It was somewhat of a disaster, and I think my internet service provider now has me on a blacklist for sending too many copies of large files out or something. I'm not sure. But I put this presentation together about a year and a half ago, because the subject of Bible translations, and especially the claims of King James Only advocates, is a very difficult subject to address.
And I've discovered that doing it visually has been extremely helpful. The issue of the transmission of the text to scripture over time, the issue of translations, is becoming more and more prominent, mainly because people keep producing new translations.
I mean, there's a new Brodman-Holman translation. The new ESV just came out. Is it Crossway that's behind the ESV? I think it's Crossway that's behind the ESV. And in essence, every publisher is coming up with its own Bible translation for economic reasons.
Once you have your own Bible translation, then all the study Bibles and everything you do, you put them in that translation. You don't have to pay royalties. And so everybody's coming out with Bible translations.
And the ESV is a new one. A while ago, somebody spent $2 million promoting the New Living translation, which I'm not really certain you can use the word translation for the NLT. But anyways, they're just cranking them out right and left.
And unfortunately, there is not a commensurate amount of discussion and study on the issue of where the Bible came from, how it came to us. I grew up in a Christian home. And I still remember as a teenager at North Phoenix Baptist Church, I very distinctly remember one day up in the balcony of a very large church.
And the pastor said, now, the Greek for this word is such and so. And I remember sitting there going, why should I care what the Greeks say about this? I mean, all that really matters is what it says in English, right?
I honestly did not know that the New Testament had been written in Greek. And I had never sat back and gone, hmm, I wonder where this came from. How did this get to me? What was the process? And I had not heard any discussions of it either.
So if that can happen growing up in a Christian family, it's understandable that there's a large amount of confusion that exists concerning exactly how the New Testament text came to us. What's the difference between the New Testament text in Greek, the Old Testament text in Hebrew, so on and so forth?
And since it's right around the holidays, this particular presentation I have starts off with a nice snowy scene, which doesn't have anything to do with us around here these days, that's for sure. But just an example of a verse that most of us would be, I think all of us, would probably have memorized.
Glory to God in the highest and on earth. Peace, goodwill toward men. Luke 2 .14, the King James Version of the Bible. And we all know the passage. We're hearing it all the time. You'll hear it in songs and Christmas carols and things like that.
And yet, if anyone has something other than the King James Version of the Bible with them, they might be reading along in the Christmas story and get to this verse. And all of a sudden, things aren't quite as simple as you thought they were back in second grade when you quoted this in the Christmas pageant.
Because in the New American Standard Bible, it says, glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace among men with whom He is pleased. You read that and you go, that doesn't sound exactly the same as it did in the King James Version of the Bible.
In fact, when you think about it, peace on earth, goodwill toward men is a little bit different than peace among men with whom He is pleased. That's a different concept. One is generic and universal. Peace on earth, goodwill toward men.
And that's, I was, where was I sitting? I was sitting at a restaurant somewhere. Oh no, it was on the flight out here. Continental, the little square napkins they give you to put your drinks on. I happened to be sitting there.
Actually, it was more like this. And I looked down and moved the cup out of the way and it said, peace on earth. And so there's a little quote from, well, from the King James Version of the Bible, but not from the New American Standard Version of the Bible.
Very generic and universal. One, however, is very specific. And speaking of peace, those who enjoy God's favor. So which is it? And can we know which it is? And why is there a difference? All the way through this discussion, there's two ways of discussing a difference in a translation.
You can either say, why is there a difference? Is it a difference in the underlying text? Is it a difference in the translational methodology? That is, some translations have a certain goal they're going for in readability, others in formality and literalness, so on and so forth.
Or you can put it into very emotional terms. Why did someone alter the word of God? Who's trying to hide divine truth? One inflames the emotions. One allows us to discuss things on an even keel. Sadly, most of the discussions that we have on this subject do not partake of the even keel part.
It's the inflamed emotions part, as I will show you in just a moment. So what about the King James Only controversy? I'd like to separate some fact from fiction, give you some things to think about, and hopefully actually increase your trust in the trustworthiness of the scriptures.
Now, speaking of the emotional level, Tex Marr is one of the leading biblical theologians of our time. Says, how many of you know Tex Marr? Only one? Tex Marr is, anything that has a barcode on it is a mark of the beast.
Okay, Tex is into all of the conspiracies that you could possibly name. And he said, James White, a boastful King James Bible opponent, continues on his baseless crusade to bash King James Only believers.
It makes for a rather sad spectacle to observe critics of the King James Bible, like Mr. White, humiliate themselves and show disrespect for servants of God. I am praying that he will be given a repentant heart and know the grave damage he is doing to the kingdom of our Savior.
Elsewhere, Marr calls me a servant of Satan and a devil. And Mr. Marr lives down in Austin, Texas. And if you're ever interested, you can get onto our website. There is a page called The View from Marr's.
And he was promoting the idea that during the Ankerberg program back in 1995, that God had struck one of the non-King James Only fellows dumb. That was actually Don Wilkins, who at the beginning of one of the segments coughed.
And so Ankerberg said, let's start from the top on that one. And that was being struck dumb. But he also called into a radio program that was on once and the sound clip is on there. And I just refer you to it for an interesting experience in listening to someone, or we could go with Gail Riplinger.
Anyone ever read New Age Bible versions? Anyone ever heard of New Age Bible versions? Okay. She is the author of New Age Bible versions and she calls me a rude, crude heretic and a serial soul killer, which I had never even thought of the terminology serial soul killer before.
But I have with me today, this is the first time I've done this, except we did play this clip on the air. It's hard to explain the nature of some King James Only material. Gail, Tex, Pete Ruckman represent the most vocal, hence the most widely represented, but also the most weird side of things.
And it's hard to explain her book. People look at you and they simply don't believe you when you say you've never seen more errors per page than Gail Riplinger puts into a 700 page book. But just to give you an idea of what she is promoting and what she's putting out, I have now attached to this presentation, a discussion that was recorded in January of 1999, wherein Gail Riplinger explains, I think, I'll let you figure it out, the relationship between the NIV, Rupert Murdoch, who if you don't know, Rupert Murdoch owns Fox Television and his media conglomerate purchased Zondervan, which owns the copyright to the NIV.
So King James Only folks are really excited about the fact that the same guy who owns Bart Simpson owns the NIV as if that somehow means something. And then the sinking of the Titanic. So it's the relationship of the NIV, Rupert Murdoch, and the sinking of the Titanic.
I'll just let you listen for yourself. Stop it right there. I think, I'm not certain, but I think if you missed it, six small slits, 64 ,000 words, 16 verses, there's a six in each one, six, six, six.
I think that was the connection. And Murdoch is the name of the guy who owns Fox and Murdoch was also the name of the guy who was in charge of the Titanic at the time. There you go. That's why the NIV will sink into the flames of fire.
Well, you might say, oh, come on. No one takes those folks seriously. Sadly, Jack Heil's school gave Gail Ripplinger a honorary doctorate for her book. And of course, Jack Heil's school also gave one fellow's horse a doctorate once and it was a literal horse.
I'm not sure that I'd want a doctorate from a school that gave doctorates to horses. But anyways, she travels all over the place. She speaks in pulpits in many churches all the time. And I've known of entire churches that have had NIV burning parties as a result of the pastor buying into Gail Ripplinger's stuff but don't they have a point?
Can't you make an argument? For example, compare these passages. 1 Timothy 3 .16, the King James Version of the Bible says, without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness. God was manifest in the flesh.
Of course, compare that then with the New American Standard Bible. By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness. He who was revealed in the flesh. Now, obviously the terms God and he who are not the same thing.
And this is something you can preach. If you want to really preach the perspective that the New American Standard and other modern translations are in some way, shape, or form seeking to denigrate the deity of Christ, you can go to a passage like this and really push the issue if you seek to do so.
But certainly those look like, that looks like a very major difference. And we will, of course, look very closely at what the actual difference is, but you can see how if a person does not have access to the background issues, this would look like a tremendous difference.
And then compare these. Most of the books that are available out there provide page after page after page of charts that look just like this. And this chart could be extended almost indefinitely in comparing modern versions versus the King James Version.
Now, those of you who are familiar actually with the technical terminology would know we're talking here, comparing the modern text with what's called the Byzantine text. And the modern version, for example, in Matthew 4 .18, he, in the King James, is Jesus.
But if you want to go the other direction, Jesus becomes he in the modern translations. The Lord Jesus becomes the Lord in Acts 19 .10. Jesus Christ becomes just Jesus in 1 Corinthians 9 .1. The reverse in 2 Corinthians 5 .18.
Lord Jesus Christ becomes Lord Jesus in Acts 16 .31. And the Lord Jesus Christ just becomes Jesus Christ in 2 John 3. I just use these as illustrations of how in the King James Version, the titles of deity are more extensive.
They're longer, they're fuller than is what is frequently found in the modern versions. And of course the argument is made, why make this change? Why delete titles of Jesus? You're not, the modern versions are not as respectful, et cetera, et cetera.
But you can go beyond that. Now, what I've done in the past is I have, in a role-playing situation, I'm role-playing a Mormon. We'll ask somebody, if you have an NIV, and someone's reaching down there, which probably tells me it's an NIV, right?
Would you like to read John 5, 4 for us? Anyone who has an NIV, if you'd like to look at John 5, verse 4. Oh, well, that's now the shortest verse in the Bible. Oh, well, there is no John 5, 4 in the NIV.
It goes from John 5, 3 to 5, 5. And there is a little teeny tiny footnote at the bottom in micro print that's certainly too small for folks over 40 to read. It's down there, but it is very, very difficult to find.
There is no John 5, 4. Well, if you're sitting there with a Mormon missionary who's talking about how all Bibles are different and stuff like that, how are you going to respond to what he has to say? I've done that.
That's just so much fun with college groups and stuff like that. They just all sit there going, especially when they think you're really a Mormon. That's when it's really fun. But, of course, defenders of the modern translations are not without their arguments as well.
You can bring up many issues regarding the King James Version. For example, if someone wants to say, well, the modern versions get rid of the deity of Christ or try to get rid of the deity of Christ at 1 Timothy 3, 16, well, we can respond by looking at passages such as John 1, 18.
In the King James Version of the Bible, it says, no man has seen God any time. The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared Him. But the NRSV reads, no one has ever seen God.
It is God, the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made Him known. So in 1, you have the only begotten Son, but the NRSV says God, the only Son, or the unique God, I believe, or the one and only God in the NIV is the rendering there using the specific word God of Jesus.
And so in 1 Timothy 3, in the King James, you have God used of Jesus, but not in the main text, the NASB. You may notice that there is a footnote in the NASB noting that. But here you have the reverse.
So if it's a conspiracy over in John 1, in 1 Timothy 3, isn't it a conspiracy over in John 1? Or maybe there's not really a conspiracy going on here at all, as we will see. In the same way, King James-only folks love to point out parallels between the New World Translation of Jehovah's Witnesses and any modern translations that would read the same way.
Guilt by association. Well, you can turn that around. In John 14, 14, modern translations agree that here the Lord speaks of prayer to himself. He's talking about after he goes back to heaven and asking him something in his name.
But in the King James version, it doesn't have, if you ask me anything in my name, it simply says, if you ask anything in my name. No direct reference of prayer to him, just simply asking for something in his name.
Now, the New World Translation does the exact same thing. Does that somehow indicate a connection or a conspiracy? Well, we'll find out that it doesn't, but if we're consistent, we would have to argue that it would.
Look at Revelation 1 .8. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty, in the King James. But the New American Standard says, I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.
And if these are the words of Jesus, as many people feel that they are, here's another reference to the deity of Christ, found in the modern translations that is not found in the King James Version of the Bible.
And how is this for a conspiracy? New American Standard, 1 John 3 .1. See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us that we should be called the children of God, and such we are. That last phrase is an affirmation of our adoption as sons into the family of God.
But look at the King James Version of the Bible, which says, behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God. That's it. The entire phrase, and such we are, is not found anywhere in the King James Version of the Bible.
So are we to assume that maybe the high church Anglicans who were involved in the production of this translation had something against adoption as sonship or something? I don't know. Or is there a more simple reason, which in fact, there is a more simple reason.
There's no conspiracy on either side. There are simple, basic reasons why there are differences in translations. Differences always will come down to one of two things. The differences will come down to either a difference in the underlying text that is being translated, whether it be in the Hebrew or the Greek, or differences in the methodology you use of translating languages.
But given the fact that we don't discuss those issues in the church very much, this is an area where there's a tremendous amount of possibility of misleading people and giving only partial bits of information rather than the whole, which leads to all sorts of endless difficulties as my files have proven over the years how many people have written me letters about church splits and missionaries coming back from the missions field because of the controversy and all the rest of that stuff.
So let's look at the passages we've looked at. And to do that, we're gonna have to do a little history. There's nothing you can do about it. If we're gonna find out why translations differ, we need to know something about where the Bible came from.
And as I mentioned last night, we live in a day where because of the internet and because of the ready availability of communication and information, false information can be communicated just as fast as the truth can be.
And there's a whole lot more people who wanna communicate false information than true information. And so given that, and especially since 9 -1 -1 with the focus upon Islam and her apologists, her apologists focus upon attacking, excuse me, attacking the veracity and validity of the Bible and its text.
So this is not just something that's relevant anymore to just the King James Only controversy, but many of the things we'll be talking about as to where our modern texts came from are extremely relevant to responding to the current situation with Islam as well.
So keep that in mind. If you've not run into King James Onlyism, though I would imagine in this area that you have, I know folks up, for example, at Bethany House up in Minneapolis had never heard of it when we first started working on the King James Only controversy.
They didn't even know there was a controversy, but it is larger in some parts of the nation than in others. Using 1 Timothy 3 .16 is sort of the touchstone. Why would one translation say God was manifest in the flesh and the other would say he who was manifest in the flesh?
We need to understand why modern translations differ. The King James and the New King James, and how many New King Jameses do we have hiding out there? A number of New King Jameses back there. Even our cameraman is using the New King James version of the Bible, but in micro print.
The smallest version of the New King James ever produced on microfiche. We need to know something about the text from which these translations came. The King James and the New King James version of the Bible are based upon a 16th century Greek text that is loosely known as the Textus Receptus or the TR.
So you'll hear me refer to the Textus Receptus or the TR. Now, there isn't any one single TR. In fact, as another slide will mention, there were at least seven different printed Greek texts available to King James translators and there have been more since then.
But just generally, we use it as a general term and we'll get a little bit more specific later on, called the Textus Receptus or the Received Text. Modern translations are based upon the Nestle-Aland Greek text of this century.
The current edition, the Nestle-Aland text is the 27th edition. Most of the more modern translations will be based upon the 26th or the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland text. Now, the TR represents what's called the Byzantine family of manuscripts.
And these manuscripts constitute about four fifths of all the extant Greek texts that we have in our possession. So when I refer to a Greek text, I'm referring to a handwritten Greek text. And of course, handwriting was the way in which texts were transmitted all the way up into the very beginning of the 16th century.
Now, printing is invented in the middle of the 15th, but the first printed and published edition of the Greek New Testament does not appear until 1516. And so there's a period of time between the invention of printing and the actual production of the first Greek New Testament.
And so up until that time, if you had a Greek, if you wanted to have access to the Greek language of the New Testament, yours would be a handwritten manuscript. And about four fifths of all of them that we have, and we have around 5 ,400 of them, about 5 ,400 manuscripts of the Greek New Testament in handwriting, about four fifths of those come from what's called the Byzantine manuscript tradition.
They are all similar to one another. And where there are variations in the text, they will sort of stick together and have pretty much the same reading. However, the vast majority of those Byzantine texts come from the 10th to the 15th centuries.
So we're talking 1 ,000 years after Christ to 1 ,500 years after Christ is the timeframe on the vast majority of the Byzantine manuscripts. They represent what is in fact a later, what might be called ecclesiastical text rather than the more primitive texts of the first centuries.
This is the majority text, though the TR differs in over 1 ,800 places from the majority text type. But what do I mean there? Well, you can sort of guess what a majority text methodology is. When you have a variant, that is where you have, let's say in the Gospel of Mark, there are many variants, for example, of the spelling of various place names.
And so let's say you have Caesarea Philippi and one spells it one way and one spells it another way. Well, the majority text approach would be, well, if there are 1 ,500 manuscripts that contain Mark approximately and 1 ,100 of them read one way and 400 of them read the other way, well, the 1 ,100 win.
It's a simple vote count. The majority wins. Now, there are just a few passages where that sort of gets a little bit more difficult to do, but in general, he who has the most manuscript votes wins as far as the majority text methodology goes.
We'll talk a little bit more about that when we look at some of the specific references. Now, what I'm saying here at the bottom of the screen is the TR and the majority text are actually two different texts.
They're both Byzantine in flavor, but there are about 1 ,800 places where the majority text and the TR would differ from one another. And we'll see the reasons for that in just a moment. Now, here's a little graph.
Down here along the bottom, you have centuries, 2nd century, 3rd century, 4th century, so on and so forth. The white boxes represent the Alexandrian manuscripts and the black boxes represent the Byzantine manuscripts.
Alexandrian is another family of manuscripts. Now, when I say a family of manuscripts, a lot of people get a little bit confused as to what in the world we're talking about. Generally, manuscripts are placed into families based upon their characteristics.
There are certain variations where Alexandrian manuscripts will read the same and Byzantine manuscripts will read the same. It's not like the Alexandrian manuscripts are totally different than the Byzantine manuscripts.
They all are of the same text. And I have said many times that if you take the most Alexandrian manuscript there is and the most Byzantine manuscript there is, interpret them the same way, you get the same result.
And again, we're talking about anywhere from as far as serious textual variation goes, two to 3 of the text. So the vast majority of it is not even involved in this issue whatsoever, as we'll see when we get into some of those specific variations.
But the Alexandrian manuscripts are the ones that are vilified most by King James Only advocates. You'll find all sorts of stuff about how Alexandria, Egypt is an evil place. And Egypt is always representative of evil in the Bible.
And so if they're called Alexandrian manuscripts, that must mean they came from Egypt, which actually we don't know where they came from, but the text type was found around that area. And there's all sorts of vilification of the Alexandrian manuscripts, but in reality, they're the oldest ones that we have.
And they're also the ones that have references to the deity of Christ at such places as John 118 as well. People always say, oh, well, these are connected with origin and he was a heretic. No one's ever been able to connect an Alexandrian manuscript with a heretic.
In fact, the earliest manuscript that we can trace to anyone that we could actually identify as a heretic by name is a Byzantine manuscript traced to an Arian who denied the deity of Christ. So I'm not sure exactly what that means.
Anyways, as you can see, looking at these, and I normally bring my little laser, it really makes it very high tech and stuff like that, but all I've got is a pen, so it's not really high tech. But anyhow, if you look at the relative numbers of manuscripts, I asked the question, what was the majority text during the first millennium?
In the year 1000, if you used the majority text methodology of just counting up manuscripts and so on and so forth, the majority text in the year 1000 would have obviously been an Alexandrian text. But then over the next number of centuries, the Byzantine becomes predominant.
And so by the year 2000 or 2001, you have a different result from using majority text methodology than you do if you did it in the year 1000. And I would submit that if your methodology results in a different reading over time constantly, that that might cause a little bit of question as to the validity of that particular form of argumentation.
And here's the reason. Here's the second century, all the way up through the 16th century. But this instead of, this gives you a relative number of manuscripts. And the little white boxes now, instead of being Alexandrian, are called papyri.
And papyri manuscripts, that refers to the form of the manuscript is made of papyri, which is a rather perishable material, sort of a cheap writing surface that was made by taking leaves and laying them across from one another.
And generally one side would be fairly smooth and the other side wouldn't be fairly smooth. Christians seemingly use both sides of papyri, maybe because they were so stinking poor. Many of them were slaves.
And obviously in the first few centuries, the persecution of the church, so on and so forth, it wasn't like you could, as a Christian, be really open about copying manuscripts and things like that. It also seems that Christians did not write their manuscripts in scroll form.
On a scroll, you just write on one side of the substance as you think about it. Christians always used the codex or book form. And so even with papyri, they'd use both sides of the sheet. Well, these little white ones here represent papyri.
The green ones represent unseals. Now, an unseal refers to the form of writing. And then the black ones refer to the minuscules, which is also a different form of writing. Now, I'll illustrate what the form of writing looks like right here.
This is unseal text. And you will notice it is all written in capital letters with no punctuation, no space between the words. And that is how the earliest manuscripts up through the eighth century of the Greek language, whether it's secular documents or New Testament documents, that's the form in which Greek was written at that time.
And this actually is the beginning of Romans chapter five. Some of you who read Greek are seeing it going de kaiothentes, ah, yes, yes. Therefore, I haven't been justified. And then around the ninth century, the minuscule text became predominant.
And that looks more like what we have today where you have a mixture of large type and small type, capital letters and non-capital letters. And then you have accenting and spaces between words and various forms of punctuation and things like that.
So keeping that in mind, then we go back to this and you'll see that the vast majority of all manuscripts, grand total, come from the 11th through the 16th centuries. We, you know, that makes sense when you think about it.
The more recent you come to modern times, the more likely you're going to have those manuscripts that survive. By the way, many of these unsealed texts I forgot to mention are written on vellum, which is leather.
Leather obviously lasts a whole lot longer than papyri does as far as over the centuries go. And many of the greatest manuscripts we have come from that unsealed format on leather. But the vast majority of your manuscripts come from here and these are in the main Byzantine texts.
Now there's also another reason for this. Let's think about our world history for a moment. Somewhere right around in here, a little thing happens down in Mecca, remember? And we have the rise of a religion that we're all hearing about all the time now called Islam.
And Islam sweeps across North Africa, moves up through Palestine, into Asia Minor. It comes across North Africa, up into Spain, up into France and is finally halted in 732 by Charles the Hammer, Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours.
And, but basically you have all the areas that had been, had had at least nominal Christianity in it down in North Africa and places like that basically disappear. And what area is left to the active production of biblical texts?
Well, you have Europe and what's Europe primarily speaking at this point, but Latin. And then you have the area around Byzantium which continues to speak and utilize the Greek language. And so many of these manuscripts, especially in this time period, are produced around the Byzantine area.
And hence the manuscripts that would have had the most circulation there become the ones that are copied over and over and over again as the language continues in use. Now, Egypt is under the control of Islam.
And so a manuscript tradition that was predominant in that area or in North Africa or any place else simply wouldn't have the same kind of reproduction being, taking place. And in those areas where Latin has become the primary language, the reproduction of manuscripts there, while it would continue at least, because of the monasteries would not be nearly as great as it once was.
Now, the TR, fascinating stories here, lots of neat church history stories. I have to try to avoid telling you or it goes on forever and ever. And you already discovered I could go on forever and ever last night.
The TR was created by the work of a Roman Catholic priest and scholar. He was called the Prince of the Humanists, a fascinating fellow by the name of Desiderius Erasmus. And reading Erasmus is always interesting.
I can't help but think of the term erasable when I think of Erasmus because he was a fighter. He loved to debate and debate back then was, well, let's put it this way. If any of you have heard the debates that I've had with Tim Staples, either on the Bible Answer Man broadcast or in person, you know that those are normally quite simply nasty.
That they're in your face, back and forth, who cares about the rules, at least from Mr. Staple's perspective. And they can be pretty, I don't know, harsh situations. That ain't nothing compared to what things were like back then.
If you read, for example, Erasmus' letters to certain people who were criticizing him for this, that, or the other thing, it makes anything that has been said in almost any one of my debates, with the possible exception of the debate with Art Sippo, look like absolute child's play.
They went tooth and fang back then, and that's what was expected. And when you read Erasmus, he certainly did that. Now, amongst other things, for example, he loved to mock and ridicule the indulgence trade and the trade in relics in the church.
He was a real thorn in the side of the established church, but he never left it. Even though the Reformation began during his life, and many people thought that he might leave, he never did leave the established church of his day.
In fact, he is the same one who wrote the first written debate of the Reformation against Martin Luther on the subject of the bondage of the will. That was Erasmus versus Luther, same fellow. Now, he printed and published.
Now, you say, well, why are you repeating yourself there? I'm not. He printed and published the first edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516. It was not the first printed edition. It was the first printed and published edition.
And the difference is that Cardinal Jimenez had already printed an edition of the Greek New Testament. But back in those days, publication was just as complex as it is today, more so in many ways. And one of the reasons was you had to gain papal approval to publish a book.
And you can imagine what the, shall we say, the red tape was like, trying to get a book through the Vatican and through all the processes in Rome of gaining papal approval before you could publish it.
So Jimenez's New Testament, which was in many ways far superior to Erasmus's, beautifully printed, he had a lot more money behind him, was sitting in a warehouse waiting for the approval of the Roman Curia before it could be published.
Well, John Froben was Erasmus's publisher slash printer in Basel, Switzerland. And I know a little bit something about publishers and the pressures they put upon you when you're behind deadline, and which I am anymore all the time.
And he was putting a lot of pressure upon Erasmus, get this done, get this done, get this done. Jimenez is already in print, we're never gonna get this done. If he comes out, well, we're still printing, we're dead.
No one's gonna want ours when this is available. Move, move, move, move, move. And so Erasmus himself described that first edition as precipitated rather than published. No, precipitated rather than edited is how he put it in his own words.
And as he was rushing to put it out, one of the things that happened was he gets the Book of Revelation and discovers that he has no manuscripts of it. And he couldn't find any in the library there at Basel.
And so he borrowed a manuscript from a friend of his by the name of Johannes Reuchlin. And Johannes Reuchlin, any of you who have studied Hebrew, I noticed that Colin was showing me a new Hebrew text that he had picked up, a Hebrew grammar.
The first Hebrew grammar to be written for Christians was written by Johannes Reuchlin, but it had to be done anonymously because in those days, the only way to learn Hebrew was to sneak off at night to visit with your local rabbi.
Well, in those days, that was a very dangerous thing to do. You'd get caught cavorting with a heretic, which is what a rabbi would be considered, and you would find yourself receiving the warm blessings of the church, that is the flames, as you were burned at the stake as a heretic.
And so Reuchlin had to sneak off by night to get this type of work done, but he felt that it was necessary. We needed to be able to read the original languages, and Hebrew was a bit of a difficulty at that point.
Well, he borrowed Reuchlin's manuscript of the Book of Revelation, and he had some folks helping him to transcribe it and to write it out in the form that Froben would be able to use to do typesetting.
They made a number of mistakes in the process, but then they get to chapter 22, and lo and behold, the last six verses were missing because the last page had fallen off of Reuchlin's manuscript. And this was the last thing to be done.
It's only six verses. You can just understand the frustration you must have felt. And so Erasmus did something that makes us chuckle today. He took the Latin Vulgate, and he translated from Latin back into Greek for the last six verses of the Book of Revelation.
And that's not a very scholarly thing to do. The scholarly thing to do is to go find the manuscripts you need and all the rest of that stuff, but publishers and scholarship are not always on the same page.
And so this he did, and so they went into print with it. Just for your information, for some reason, don't ask me why, even though his work went through, as you can see here, five editions during his lifetime, he never went back and fixed the problems in Revelation.
Even though Jimenez's work came out and was much better in Revelation, didn't have his problems, he never went back and fixed Revelation. In the process of translating from the Vulgate into Greek, he did a great job.
I mean, you gotta admit, it'd be really hard to do that. It'd be really hard to take a Latin text and render it in Greek and come out anywhere near it. But still, in the process, he created readings, he made up words that had never appeared in a Greek manuscript in the history of the church, and yet they're in the King James Version of the Bible today because it was those readings that are in the TR that was used by the King James, and the King James and the New King James in the last six verses of Revelation have entire words in them that came into existence because John Froben was pushing Desiderius Erasmus to hurry up and finish his work on the book of Revelation so he'd get it into print.
And they're still there today, amazingly enough, even though it went through Stephanus and Beza. I guess they didn't consider the book of Revelation overly interesting as far as their textual studies were concerned.
Now, you might ask a question, well, how did he get into print before Jimenez? Because Jimenez had the head start as far as submitting this stuff to the Pope to be approved and all the rest of that stuff.
They took a gamble, they took a little gamble. They decided, you know, if we do it the regular way, Jimenez is gonna beat us. So what we'll do is we'll dedicate this edition, and it was actually, it was a Greek New Testament in a Latin translation, a fresh Latin translation on parallel pages, Erasmus' own Latin translation and the Greek version next to it.
They dedicated the work, which is called the Novum Instrumentum, the new instrument. They dedicated, Erasmus dedicated it to the Pope, who happened to be Pope Leo X. And so the first edition of the TR is dedicated to Pope Leo X.
Does anyone remember something about Pope Leo X? He was the same Pope that excommunicated Martin Luther. He was the same Pope that wrote, exerge domine, arise, O Lord, a wild boar has broken out in your vineyard.
So the irony, of course, is that here you have a Roman Catholic priest dedicating the first edition of the TR to the Pope that excommunicated Martin Luther. And yet the vast majority of King James Only advocates who tout this as being the final word are always saying that modern translations are Romanist and that I'm a secret Jesuit.
I've always found that just something of something that makes you sort of twitch just a little bit as it goes by. Now, again, the King James translators then had five editions of Erasmus, Stephanus, and Basis.
They had seven editions, but none of those all read exactly the same from one another. Erasmus made little changes in each one. For example, the third edition of his text, he reinserted what's called 1 John 5, 7, the Comma Johannium.
The first two editions of Erasmus did not have what is in the King James Version, 1 John 5, 7, because Erasmus had never seen a Greek text that contained it. And in fact, the Greek texts do not contain the Comma Johannium.
The one text that was finally shown to him was probably written just simply to confuse him. But that became the most particularly influential text, and hence that's also in the King James Version of the Bible as well.
Now, modern texts are based on a more eclectic text that draws from a wider variety of sources than the TR, including manuscripts unknown in the days of Erasmus. Erasmus had between six and 12 manuscripts, grand total.
As I mentioned, we have 5 ,300 in Greek, about 20 ,000 in other languages. Some of the papyri manuscript used in the modern text date to as early as AD 125, probably P52, dating that early. But these sources, being more primitive, do not show the effect of the long-term transcription seen in the Byzantine texts, and hence are not as full as the TR.
What do I mean by that? Well, those titles. The tendency of scribes over the years, and especially in the Byzantine texts, was to expand titles of divinity. It was called the expansion of piety. I remember very clearly back when I started doing some of my very first radio programs on the subject of Mormonism long, long ago in Phoenix.
I remember very clearly a very elderly lady calling in one day while we were discussing, I think, the identification of Christ as Jehovah in the New Testament. And she said, now, young man, I appreciate what you're saying, and I appreciate what you're doing, but I heard you say that Christ is identified as Jehovah.
And you need to remember, it's the Lord Jesus Christ. You should never say Jesus, you should never say Lord. You should always say the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, we can all appreciate the respect that is there.
The problem is that's not biblical. There are times when Mark says, and he said. There are times when John says, and the Lord said. There are times when Matthew says, and Jesus said. So the Holy Spirit of God has not given us an apostolic example.
In fact, the phrase the Lord Jesus Christ does not appear in the Gospels. It only appears in the later books of the New Testament. It does not appear in the Gospels anywhere. And so it's normally Lord Jesus or something like that is the longest that you'll find in the Gospel accounts.
And it's interesting, the King James itself will have places where it's just he, or Lord, or Jesus. So if you follow the argument that the longer the title, the more respect you're showing, isn't the King James lacking as well?
I've never quite followed the consistency of that. That point either. Now, this is the text. This is the page. I noticed the little thingies here cutting off the bottom of my screen a little bit. But this is the assertion that many King James only advocates really have a problem with.
When we speak of textual differences between the TR and the modern texts, we need to immediately emphasize something that is often lost in the debate. There is no doctrine of the Christian faith that is based upon any single text and no doctrine of the faith is changed or altered by any variation of the text.
If one applies the same rules of exegesis to the TR and the NA 27th edition, the results will be the same. The variations do not change the message. Now that is the one thing that I just get raked over the coals constantly.
I mean, if you've seen the King James only controversy, if you've seen the book, which is very nicely displayed. Someone did put a lot of effort into doing the retail marketing over there to make it appealing to you, so on and so forth.
Right, Colin? Anyways, if you've looked at that, you know there aren't a lot of books out that take my position, even though the vast majority of scholars would agree with it. D .A. Carson had put a book out in 1979 and I have always chuckled just a little bit that within about six months to a year of mine coming out, he pulled his from print.
And he just refers him to mine because I know why he did that. He got sick and tired of being the main person that these people were shooting at. If you do a search on my name in the internet and believed one-tenth of what you found, you would not be here this morning.
Or you'd be here with a net to catch me and drag me away and put me away because folks just respond in a violent way, shall we say, to this particular issue. And primarily for this reason. Because the main grabber that they use is, look, Christians respond with tremendous amount of vim, vigor, and vitality when someone attacks our Lord, when someone denies the resurrection.
I mean, all I have to do is say, John Shelby Spong, and half of you go, because you all know that John Shelby Spong is the Episcopalian cleric who runs around saying that Paul was a homosexual. And basically, if there's any element of the Christian faith to be denied, he, being a member of the Jesus Seminar, denies it.
Well, the King James Only advocate knows that people really respond viscerally to an attack on the deity of Christ, the resurrection, the virgin birth, or whatever. And so the whole power of their argument is wrapped up in asserting that the entirety of the faith itself is at stake as to what Bible we use.
And that by holding to the King James, you're gonna hold to the true faith. And you're gonna defend the true faith. And here's the reasons why, because, well, because this thing over here in 1 Timothy, or you look over here in modern translations, do this, that, and the other thing, and so on and so forth.
Problem is, when you demonstrate that, A, there's no conspiracy involved, and B, in point of fact, if you would simply be consistent in applying the same standards as the King James, that you apply to the New American Standard, the NIV, or whatever, that these arguments are not, in any way, shape, or form, compelling, then the whole system comes apart.
So this is the one thing they have to argue about. It's one thing to argue this text versus that text, but if you can demonstrate that the faith is communicated in the NASB, with just as much clarity as the King James version, their whole position is lost.
And so this is the one thing that they have focused upon, most often, in their criticisms of my work. Now here's a little graphic just to show you, in essence, the genealogy of the various, and I'm only using the big translations that are available today, there are, as I said, more and more come out all the time.
But so far, the big four remain the King James, New King James, NASB, and NIV. The King James and New King James come from the Textus Receptus, which is very much from the Byzantine tradition. Erasmus inserted entire sections of text.
For example, in Acts chapter eight, where the Ethiopian eunuch asks, what hinders me from being baptized? You may, if you believe with all your heart. That section in Acts chapter eight, there is an entire sentence that is inserted there in the King James from the Latin Vulgate, doesn't appear in the Greek text.
And it isn't even found in most Latin Vulgate texts, too, but it was in one of them that Erasmus had, and so it was inserted in there. King James translators, for some reason, don't know why, picked up a number of, well, a number in the sense of six, seven, eight, very strange readings from the Latin Vulgate in the Old Testament, where the Vulgate is just miles from the Hebrew text, but they went with the Vulgate instead of the Hebrew at that point for some strange reason as well.
But that becomes the background of the King James and New King James. The NASB and NIV, however, primarily come from the Alexandrian tradition. However, and this is one of the differences, there are Byzantine readings in the Nesiolan text.
There are places where the Nesiolan text will take a Byzantine reading over against an Alexandrian. Why? Because the fundamental concept in modern textual criticism is you examine every variant on its own merits.
You don't just say, well, we're gonna make this a standard and go from there. You look at every single one, and there are places where it's clear that the earliest Alexandrian texts came from a text where there had been a scribal error, and the Byzantine texts are not.
So you don't just simply go, well, if it's Alexandrian, we accept it, and if it's Byzantine, we don't. That's not how it's done at all. And so the Byzantine tradition and the Alexandrian tradition, look at the Latin Vulgate, all of it is examined in the Nesiolan text, and that becomes the basis of the NASB and NIV translations as well.
Well, all the history being done, you're all being now comatose, the poor kids are ready to beat mom and dad silly for bringing them to listen to the funny bald man talk about Greek. What does all of this have to do with 1 Timothy 3 .16?
Well, we're finally sort of in a position to answer some of those questions. Here are the, here in the unseal text is the two texts. This would be what underlies the King James, this would be what underlies the New American Standard.
As you can notice, it's sort of hard to see what the difference is. So we will use the wonders of modern technology to show you there's a difference between the two, or let's blow it up so you can see it a little bit better.
How's that? You see, back in the days of the unseal text, you're writing on leather or you're writing on papyri, and there weren't any office maxes. You know, there was no office max of Alexandria. You know, you'd go running down and grab some more paper.
Papyri took time to be made. As I said, most Christians weren't exactly the richest people on the planet. And especially when you got into using leather, you know, that leather you're using to write the book of Titus may have been the family pet only a few days earlier back in the backyard.
And so hadn't thought about that one before, had you? You know, it's just Titus, he's on the spot. There you go. And so you had to be somewhat careful in your use of your writing materials. And this will come up a little bit later on too in another context.
And so certain words like God, Jesus, Savior were called nomina sacra. And the nomina sacra were words that were contracted or abbreviated because of their repetitive use in the text. So it wouldn't take up as much space, almost a form of shorthand.
And the nomina sacra for theos was a theta and a sigma with a line over top. The word for hos translated he who is omicron sigma. There's no line across there or across here either. Now you can see that in general, these two words look almost identical.
The only difference is a line here and a line here. But think with me for just a moment. If you have a Bible with you and it's made of leather, what is a constituent part of the cover of your Bible? Lines.
Leather naturally has lines within it. And if you're writing on papyri, remember what papyri is? It is leaves that have veins in them, crossways with one another pressed together. It has lines as well.
So put yourself in a situation of an ancient scribe for a moment. You are, let's go back to the previous screen here so we can see what it really looked like. You are writing, you're copying along, and this is what you're copying.
And you do not have a fluorescent light over your head. You are not in an air-conditioned situation. It may be very hot, it may be very cold, who knows? There wasn't much that human beings could do for the first number of thousands of years of our history concerning issues like that.
You don't have a spell checker, which all of us have become very, very dependent upon to cover over the fact that none of us can really spell very well anymore. And you're writing along, and what's worse is, you're copying someone else's handwriting.
Now, I've ever tried to read someone else's handwriting? I have the finals for my Greek class in my bag over there. I was trying to grade them on the plane, which may not be the best place to grade. Thankfully, it was mainly objective, not subjective.
And sometimes I was sitting there holding up the light and doing this number, that number, trying to figure out what someone had written as their translation. Well, you're reading someone else's handwriting, and let's say you're reading a manuscript and you don't even know who wrote it.
You can't pick up your Motorola cell phone and call the guy up and say, your handwriting stinks, what were you saying here? They may be dead for all you know. So you're reading someone else's handwriting, you're going along, and it's written on papyri, or maybe it's written on leather, either one.
And let's say you came across this. And you look at it and you go, now, is that line a part of the paper? Or is that line written there? Maybe the person hurried there because they dipped ink in a well.
You know that as you get toward the end of the amount of ink you have on your quill, it starts getting fainter. It doesn't stay the same thickness. Not only that, but in the earliest period, and this is a very primitive variant, this is in the very first couple of centuries.
Back in 1993, the Pope came to Denver. And I went up to Denver, Rich Pearson and I went up to Denver, we passed out tracks and witnessed to folks, there were two of us and 250 ,000 of them. And I could tell you some fun stories about during World Youth Day, when Rich and I are standing there passing out tracks, and I've just got to throw this in, I'm sorry, Colin, I have to do it.
There was a group from the University of Steubenville that came by. Now, some of you know the University of Steubenville is where Scott Hahn is. And so these brilliant college students go walking by, and we hand them a track.
Well, I can still see this in my mind. They walk about over to about where the sink is there, and they all gather together. Fundamentalists, let's go get them. And they come over and start throwing all their little, doing their little geriatrics impersonations with us.
And they hadn't looked at the track very well, because the back of the track was all sorts of patristic citations and the sufficiency of scripture and all the rest of stuff. And so they had their lead man, who obviously thought he was really cool.
And so he was throwing stuff out, and I'm just responding to it, responding to it, responding to it. And he's starting to get frustrated, because fundamentalists aren't supposed to know anything about church history.
And so his friends are starting to get a little antsy, because this was supposed to be fun. Watch the fundy spin type of a situation. And so finally, the guy all of a sudden gets this look on his face, and he goes, he goes, do you know James White?
And I go, I am James White. Oh, the look on that guy's face was, I wish I had a camera. I wish I had a camera, because all of a sudden, his deep desire to share with me evaporated, just disappeared all over the place.
Well, we did two debates on the papacy there in Denver. And then we tracted the pilgrimage. They walked like four miles to Cherry Creek State Park for the mass. And Rich and I are staying on, the trail was only about yay wide.
And I'm on one side, Rich is on the other side, and we've got this track. And these people come along, and it's a long hike, and it was warm. And they're starting to fade a little bit. And so by the time they get to us, it was like, oh, I don't want anything.
So we had to come up with imaginative ways of tracting. So you can just imagine Rich and I next to all these thousands of pilgrims walking to the papal mass. And we'd hand out a tract for them, we'd smile and all, and they'd, you could tell they're gonna go, here we go, special lightweight tracts, one third the calories.
And they would laugh, because they needed to laugh about that point, because they're about to faint and die. And we got a bunch of them out, that was so much fun to, anyways. While we were up there, it has nothing to do with the King James Line controversy, but it was just one of those fun recollections of things you do back when you're younger.
Anyways, I was sitting at a donut shop, actually, and I was reading the paper, and they were talking about the Papal Treasures Exhibit. And all of a sudden I said, oh Rich, we have got to go here. What, the Papal Treasures, why?
Look, they have a section of P72 there. Manuscript P72, the earliest manuscript of 1st and 2nd Peter and Jude, known to exist anywhere. And they have a section of it on display. So you had to go buy the tickets, and then it would tell you what day to come back, and the whole nine yards.
So we go walking into this place, and I'm gonna tell you, there were tiaras, and diamonds, and gold, and papal robes, and all of it was so gaudy and disgusting, I could care less about it. There was only one reason I was there.
And right at the beginning of the exhibit, over in this hermetically sealed case, with special lights and so on and so forth, is P72. And so I go walking up to that thing, and I'm like, oh, cool! And I just kick in myself that I didn't bring my Greek text with me.
I just sit there and go, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. But it didn't matter. So I'm just sitting there, and I'm just, oh, look, there's a gnome and a sacred. In fact, they had, there was an exact example just like that right there in front of me.
And this is from around 200, okay? So I'm looking at something that's about 1 ,800 years old here, okay? You know, I'm just sitting here looking at it, and every once in a while, people would walk up, and they'd look up at the description.
They'd look in the case. They'd look up at me. They'd look over at Rich, and they'd go, is he reading that? Yeah, oh, you know. And most people just sort of walk in, because after a while, I just stood there, stood there, stood there, and the guards are like, so Rich sort of dragged me off.
I go look at a tiara for a while. Is he gone? Yeah, okay, whew, right back to it. And while I'm away, people sort of walk up to it, and just, they had no idea what treasure is sitting here. Well, anyways, to make a long story short, this guy's handwriting's stunk.
I mean, I could read it, but this was not a professional scribe. And it was so neat to think about what probably happened here. You've got a Christian. Maybe he's a business person, a trader, and maybe a Roman soldier, for all we know, who comes into a Christian fellowship, and they have these epistles from Peter and Jude that they don't have back in his own home church.
And he goes, oh, can I please make a copy of this and take it back to my fellow believers where I live? Sure, go ahead. This guy's not professionally trained. He doesn't go out and get the best piece of papyri that exists anywhere.
He gets what he can, and he copies it down. And in the process, his handwriting isn't the best. And there were a couple things I really struggled to make out, and that was under perfect lighting. So when you look at a difference like this, you don't need to come up with a conspiracy.
It's really simple to understand why those two readings exist. No one's trying to change anything. And most scholars would say, well, if this is what was written, given the form of papyri or leather, it's easy to see how someone could read it as this because of the existence of lines.
It would be more easy to understand why it would go from this to this than from this to this. But modern texts will have little notes. If you look at the New American Standard, it will tell you certain ancient manuscripts read God.
If you look at the Nestle Island 27th edition, big old note down at the bottom, here's all the manuscripts that read God. When you read the TR and the King James, nothing. Nothing. Which one allows you to know what the facts are?
Well, that sort of answers for itself. Problem is, you can show this information to folks. I've explained this information to folks and Colin's been in channel. I'm not sure if you've been in channel when we've had a King James only person come in.
When I speak of in channel, I'm referring to our IRC chat channel, which is how Colin and I even met, you know. And when he was talking about things I do, I thought he was gonna start off by saying, well, first and foremost, he's a channel manager for us all again.
I've got to say that or it'll kick me out. And we've had King James only folks come in and you can sit there and you can walk through an issue, you can show them documentation and the result will normally be, quite honestly, in my experience, the result has normally been, why do you hate the Bible so?
Why are you trying to destroy my faith in scripture? I'm not. Oh, you're a God hater. It immediately goes ad hominem. It immediately goes ad hominem because why? Well, because I think I'm very right to say here that you need to understand that for many of those folks, the King James Bible alone equals the word of God alone.
And so if you demonstrate that, for example, Romans 9 .5 is better translated in the New King James than it is in the King James, what are you doing? You're actually attacking the word of God. No, you're not.
You're demonstrating that the Anglican translators, the beginning of the 17th century, were not perfect. That's right, that's what I'm thinking, but that's not what they're thinking. They're thinking you're attacking the word of God.
You're wiping away all sure foundations. And so that's where the ad hominem part comes in and you need to be aware of that. I'll try to speed up a little bit here because I know that I'm, this is normally about an hour 45 when I go slow, so I'm doing my best here.
When we talk about the debate, the question should be, what did John or Paul or Peter originally write? That's what I want to know. I don't want to know what some scribe thought he should have written 1 ,000 years later.
But instead, what we hear about is how modern translations have removed or deleted or added or changed. All these loaded words assumed that the King James is the standard by which all is to be judged.
And it wasn't even, I can't tell you how many King James only advocates I've met who told me, well, it's the first translation in English. No, it wasn't. Poor Wycliffe, poor Tyndale, the Bishop's Bible, the Geneva Bible.
There were lots of translations in English. The Puritans and the Pilgrims didn't even like the King James version. It was the modernist translation. It was the King's translation. It was the church translation.
They didn't even want to use it. They used the Geneva Bible. Why not make the Geneva Bible a standard and then charge the King James of changing everything? Well, you can get away with that if you don't know history.
Some King James version only folks honestly go so far as to say the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts themselves must be judged by comparison with the King James version. In fact, when we did the John Ankerberg show in 1995, Dr. Sam Gipp, a student of Peter Ruckman, in the very first program, John Ankerberg looked at him and said, Sam, if I lived in Russia and I spoke Russian, are you telling me that to have the word of God, I would have to learn English?
And he looked right at John Ankerberg, right into that camera and said, yes, John, God has promised to give us only one inspired and inerrant translation, one language at one time, and right now it's the King James version of the Bible.
And so all, if you find any place where the Greek manuscripts, the Hebrew manuscripts would indicate a different translation throughout the Greek and Hebrew. Between 1604 and 1611, something happened, God in essence, re-inspired the scriptures.
Now, there is another fellow sitting there who represents D .A. Waite's perspective, his name is Tom Strauss, Tom Strauss? Is that correct? Thomas Strauss? And you could just see him fidgeting because that's not what he believes.
However, I would submit to you that even folks like D .A. Waite, which take more of a moderate perspective, functionally cannot get around this problem because from their perspective, there is no place where the King James can be translated better.
So if the King James is a perfect translation, then what's the difference between saying it was inspired and saying it's absolutely perfect? I mean, the King James translators didn't claim to be perfect.
That means they somehow exactly picked the right variants, they exactly picked the right grammatical form, if that's not inspiration, I don't know what is. It's at least divine guidance. And that is what the claim that is made.
How about John 5 .4, which seemingly is missing from someone's Bible over here? Well, actually this passage is not only emitted by P66 and P75, two of the earliest papyri manuscripts, by Olive and B, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, but even in the manuscripts where it does appear, there are a number of variants within the text and some even mark the passage with asterisks or obeli.
Most likely this was a marginal note, an explanation written in an early manuscript and accidentally inserted into a later copy by a copyist who thought it was part of the original text. And here's where, again, I mentioned the family pet situation.
If you're writing along on a piece of leather and do what we all do, especially if you're copying out of a book, sometimes you'll look back at your keyboard or the screen or whatever, and when you look back, your eye will catch the next line or down the line from where you were.
Sometimes it's because, and we'll see an example of this in a moment, you'll see, you just typed a word ending in I-N-G, and when your eye goes back to the original, you catch another I-N-G that's one line down or it's farther down the line or whatever it is, and you accidentally, without even knowing it, skip the intervening material.
Then later on you realize, what? And then, oh. Now, today it's easy. You go up, you put your cursor there, you insert. Not quite so easy when you're writing on leather. And so what did you do? Well, scribes back then, when they made that mistake, and they made it often, they would write what they had skipped in smaller print in the margin of the manuscript, then with a line showing where it was to be inserted.
Well, that works okay if you're the one that did the writing, but how many of you make notes in your Bible? A couple of you do. What if you're going along, and I know this happens all the time here with Pastor Smith.
Pastor Smith gives you some brilliant exegetical insight into the background of a passage that you'd never heard before. You've studied this passage for 20 years, but no, Colin comes up with some background you'd never heard of before, and you're afraid you're gonna forget it, and so you put it into the margin of your Bible.
Remember this historical fact that only my pastor seems to know anything about. In fact, if your pastor's the only one that does know anything about it, you might wanna look into it a little bit closer, but anyways, you might wanna ask him, well, where did you get that?
The Lord gave it to me. You know, that's always a dangerous thing. Anyways, the problem is, that's one thing to write it, and when it's a written thing in the margin of a printed text, duh, but what if it's a written thing in the margin of a written text, and you're copying that manuscript years later, and again, the author has already gone bye-bye?
You look at it and go, is that a note, or did he skip that? How do you find out? The universal tendency, for which we should be thankful, of scribes was, include it. Don't skip it. And that's probably where John 5, 4 came from, was it was a, remember what John 5, 4 is about?
It's about the angel stirring the waters. You can imagine preaching this passage outside of Palestine, people who knew nothing about the traditions of Jerusalem. Why in the world is this guy laying around this pool in the first place?
Well, an ancient version of Colin Smith was preaching on that passage, and goes, now, you need to realize that they believed that an angel of the Lord would come down, stir the waters, and the first one in the water would be healed.
Oh, I've always wondered about that. Scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch. That poor person gets run over by a chariot three days later, somebody takes their manuscripts, they're copying it.
Is that a note, or was that included to be there? I'll include it. Voila, it's included, and especially if that then becomes a manuscript that is widely copied later on, that's how that takes place. How about John 1, 18?
Well, the earliest manuscripts of John, P666 to P75, two of the earliest unsealed manuscripts, Sinaiticus to Vaticanus, all read Monogenes theos, literally unique God, or the only son who is God. The bulk of later manuscripts read Monogenes huios, the only begotten son, the King James following the TR reads son.
So the four earliest manuscripts that we have of John all have the term theos as the reading at this passage. Now, just briefly, you may have heard of both Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus being greatly reviled in King James only material.
These are corrupt manuscripts, and these are manuscripts that the King James only folks love to hate. The reason being that Westcott and Hort based their revision of the text and their production of their Greek text on these two manuscripts primarily.
Modern texts are not slavish reproductions of olive and beet in any way, shape or form. And those who say, well, Sinaiticus has got thousands of changes in it, it's a corrupt manuscript. The thing was used for 1500 years.
And at one point, about 400 years after its production, well, between four and 700 years after its production, someone decided to try to amend it to make it look like a Byzantine text when it wasn't. So you can imagine taking your new American standard and trying to scratch out all the words and make it read like your new King James.
That doesn't make the original readings corrupt in any way, shape or form. In fact, Sinaiticus remains one of the greatest biblical treasures that we have. And someday I'm going to pack up Colin, we'll go over to England and look at it, because it's in London at the British Museum.
And the only reason I'd ever want to go to the British Museum is to see Codex Sinaiticus. Sorry about that, sir, but you all have got a good thing there and I'd like to go see it. I could go into the history of Sinaiticus and how it was found and all sorts of neat, fun stuff like that, but time doth be passing us.
Let me just move on here to 1 John 3 .1. This is an excellent example of a simple scribal error, an error of sight that's common to us all. Here's the passage in Greek, but you don't have to know Greek to see how an error could be made here.
Look at the last three words. Klaithomen chi esmen. Now, let me blow that up just a little bit so you can see that the last three letters of Klaithomen and of esmen are the same. And remember, these little marks weren't around initially.
Those were added in much later. Now, just as we often inadvertently skip something when our eyes come back to what we are copying because two words end in a similar ending, this is called homoiteleuton, such as I-N-G or T-I-O-N.
So, too, an ancient scribe, upon writing Klaithomen, then returned the text, and instead of starting there, saw esmen and inadvertently skipped the phrase. There's no conspiracy. It wasn't that Anglicans don't like adoption and sonship or anything like that at all.
It's just by deleting chi esmen and such we are, it wasn't purposeful. It was just can be very easily explained as a scribal omission. Nothing more than that. In the same way, there's no conspiracy at John 14, 14.
Here, the Alexandrian text joined with a large portion of the Byzantine text and containing the word me. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. But a part of the Byzantine tradition does not contain the word, and this part underlies the T-R.
The majority text contains the reading me at this point, demonstrating the T-R is not identical to the majority text. So, if a person's a majority text advocate, they would have to disagree with the King James at this point because the King James actually follows a very minority text at this particular instance.
Same thing in Revelation 1 .8. It's another example where the T-R even departs from the entirety of the Byzantine manuscript tradition. The vast majority of texts, including the later ones, contain the readings in the new American standard, not the King James.
In fact, the T-R in the book of Revelation is particularly suspect, as I mentioned earlier when I told you that story. Here's one of the big ones. In fact, you heard Gail Ripplinger mention this. She said the NIV's taken it out at Colossians 1 .14, washed in the blood.
Well, actually, washed in the blood doesn't appear, even in the King James version of the Bible, that matters. But look at this one. Colossians 1 .14, in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins, over against the NIV, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
That looks like a pretty major difference. It's on the basis of passages such as this that King James-only folks have identified the NIV as the bloodless Bible. I had a big old tall guy approach me once in Salt Lake City while we were passing out tracts, and he was passing out some tracts, too.
But he was King James-only, and he said to us, so what translation do you use? I said, well, we use various translations, Wellroker. Well, you don't use the bloodless Bible, do you? I immediately knew exactly what he was talking about.
He was talking about Colossians 1 .14. However, any person studying the passage might note that Ephesians and Colossians contain parallel passages. The parallel to Colossians 1 .14 in Ephesians is found in Ephesians 1 .7, and look at what it says.
The King James, in whom we have redemption through his blood, the NIV, in whom we have redemption through his blood. Now, if you're trying to get rid of the idea of redemption through his blood, why leave it in here when you took it out, allegedly, at Colossians 1 .14?
Well, it's because no one's trying to hide anything. King James here contains a reading that goes against not only the ancient manuscripts, but against the vast majority of all manuscripts, including the Byzantine.
The earliest manuscript to contain the added phrase is from the ninth century. All of four manuscripts, all dating long after the original writing, contain the reading. If King James only advocates were consistent with their arguments, they would reject this reading, but since they do not, they prove that they are, in fact, arguing in circles.
Then, very briefly, it's fascinating to note that there are some readings in the King James that are actually textual emendations. Revelation 16 .5, in the NASB we read, and I heard the angel of the waters saying, righteous are you who are and who were a holy one because you judged these things.
The key phrase is, oh, holy one. Compare the King James version, which says, and I heard the angel of the waters say, thou art righteous, O Lord, which art and wast and shalt be because thou hast judged thus.
Now, Theodore Beza, who was Calvin's successor at Geneva, made a conjectural emendation at this point. That's a change in the text that has no manuscript support. He felt that the text made more sense if it read, and shalt be, rather than, oh, holy one, and he thought the Greek words were similar enough in form to explain it.
That is, he felt these two Greek words were close enough in form to allow him to change the text. Hasios means, oh, holy one, and esaminos means, shall be, the future form by me in the participial form.
So, against all manuscript evidence, this reading persists in the TR today, and we even sing the song, who wert and art and evermore shalt be, without knowing our debt to Theodore Beza, who inserted this, and no Christian before had ever seen it.
What about Luke 2 .14, we started out with? The difference in the Greek amounts to one single letter. The top is the King James reading. Notice, eudaikia at the end, and then the bottom is the New American Standard reading, eudaikias.
It's a difference between the nominative and the genitive form, and if you're familiar with, I should probably add this in, but if you wrote this in unsealed text, final form sigmas, which is this final form S, was a very small little C-shaped letter in unsealed text, very easily skipped, especially if it was at the end of a line, and that is why there is a difference between those two readings as well.
Now, as we're wrapping up here, trying to wrap up here, which King James version do you have? Which one should be the standard that we are to use? Almost all the King James versions are actually the 1769 Blaney revision of the authorized version, not the 1611, but there are two, there are different kinds of King James versions.
The two most prevalent are the Oxford and Cambridge types. See, the Brits are at us again. How can you tell which one you have? Well, look at Jeremiah 34, 16, and you'll see in the Oxford edition, the reading is whom he had set at liberty.
It's a singular pronoun. The Cambridge edition has a plural pronoun, whom ye had set at liberty. That will tell you which edition of the King James version you're carrying. Now, I have a question. If we're to make the King James standard of all things, how do we determine differences between King James versions?
Well, it's simple for most of us. You look back at the Hebrew, right? But that's not really a viable answer for a King James only advocate, because if his printed edition of the King James version is correctable on the basis of the Hebrew text here, well, then it needs to be every place else, right?
The only way to find out is to go back to the Hebrew, and in point of fact, ye is correct. The Cambridge is correct, not the Oxford at this point. Now, has God preserved his word then? All the time, the big objection I hear is you don't believe God's preserved his word.
I want to know where God's word is, as if I want an English translation that's perfect, assuming that somehow English existed in the days of Paul, maybe. Well, it didn't. English didn't come into existence.
Sorry to quash your viewpoint here, but English didn't come into existence until 1 ,000 years at the earliest, and has gone through a tremendous amount of change since then, so when someone says, I want one translation today, I want a perfect Bible, what they're saying is I want a perfect translation.
They're doing the exact same thing that some people did with the Greek Septuagint. There were Christians especially who believed the Greek Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, was inspired.
They told a story that 70 Jewish scholars went into caves and over 70 days translated the entire Old Testament. When they got back together again, everybody had word for word the exact same translation.
Must have been superintended by God. That was the story everybody told. I don't want any gray areas. I don't want any textual variance. I don't want anything like that. Well, the problem is there's all sorts of textual variance in the Septuagint too, and that happens to be the translation the New Testament writers themselves used when they quoted from the Old Testament.
In fact, if you want to stick this in your pipe and smoke it, there are places where the New Testament writers quoted textual variance in the Septuagint to make their point. You may not like that, but the apostles did it.
And when folks want to try to do something different than the apostles did, well, I have a little bit of a problem with that. So the issue is not, do you believe God's preserved His word? The issue is, how did He do it?
That's the question. Has God preserved His word? That's the question King James-only folks always come back to. Unfortunately, they always seem to assume unless you have a perfect English translation, you don't have a perfect Bible.
Well, think of it this way. Let's say the Constitution of the US was translated into the language of a small island in the Pacific. Let's say it was translated into Tongan. How much sense would it be, how much sense would it make for someone on that island to take one particular translation of the Constitution, insist that this one translation is the standard, and then proclaim that unless this translation is perfect, then no perfect Constitution exists anywhere?
That's exactly what King James-only advocates are in fact doing when they argue this way. It obviously does not follow that if there are variances in translations in Tongan, that the Constitution in English does not exist.
But that's what's being argued by many when they make that kind of an argumentation. But that still doesn't answer the question, how has God preserved His word? I assert that He has done so by making sure the New Testament was so quickly distributed all over the known world that there was never a time when any one man, any one group, any one church could gather up all the copies and make wholesale changes in those copies.
How many times have you heard New Agers and Shirley MacLaine running around going, oh, they used to believe, the Bible used to teach reincarnation, but they took it out of the Fifth Ecumenical Council.
And I debated Hamza Abdul-Malik, a Muslim apologist in 1999, and every single reference in the New Testament teaches the deity of Christ. Oh, that was added in later. That was added in later. Well, can you show me a manuscript that doesn't have it?
No, they're out there though. Well, can you name a name? No, no, but they're there. Couldn't give me any backup for it all, but deity of Christ had to have been inserted at a later point. The problem is that could not possibly be the case.
By the third century, entire manuscripts were already buried. If major changes were made after that time, they would be easily detectable by comparison with those earlier manuscripts. In other words, the process we're going through right now as we find more and more manuscripts, that process would show us a more and more corrupt New Testament because we would find an earlier manuscript, we found these little papyri manuscripts that are ancient, ancient, ancient.
And if the older vellum manuscripts had all been changed, then you put them together and compare them with one another, there'd be huge changes, but there aren't. That's the whole point. The earlier manuscripts we find, the more the text we've always had becomes established.
So we can disprove without question the assertions of those who say the Bible has undergone wholesale editing, Mormons, Muslims, atheists, New Agers, Jesus Seminar, so on and so forth. The problem is King James Only-ism undercuts the most foundational elements of our defense of the veracity and accuracy of the scriptures, all in an attempt to establish a final authority in an English translation.
In fact, it's fascinating as I've been starting to do some study in Islam. If you know the history of the Quran, you know that there was something called the Uthmanian revision, where a man named Uthman, one of the caliphs, gathered all the manuscripts of the Quran that were in existence in his day and came up with a final version of his own.
The problem is that's now as far back as we can go. We can only trace the Quran to Uthman. And you may recall that Salman Rushdie, when he wrote that book, The Satanic Verses, that Khomeini put a death sentence out on him for.
The Satanic Verses, he's going the wrong way. We don't want anybody lost. Actually, it's over there. There you go. The Satanic Verses refer to verses that probably existed in manuscripts prior to Uthman that referred to the propriety of praying to other gods, which is why they're called Satanic.
Because in Islam, you know, that would be a no-no. Well, Uthman then becomes the final authority as far as the Quran goes. We cannot trace it earlier than Uthman. We can't take it back to Muhammad. Well, if God had to retranslate the Bible, re-inspire the Bible between 1604 and 1611, then that's as far back as you can take it.
The entire history of the text prior to that becomes irrelevant. And for someone like Sam Gipp and Pete Ruckman and Gale Rippling, that's the case. What happened before 1604 becomes irrelevant. And the King James translators who had to make choices between Erasmus and Beza and so on and so forth, they all of a sudden have to be inspired because they had to come up with the exact right readings.
That obviously leaves us in the same position as the Muslims at that point. So what are we to conclude? First and foremost, you don't need conspiracy theories complicating your life. There is no reason to embrace KJV-only-ism for it is a system, a tradition that must assume its conclusion to prove its conclusion, hence its circular reasoning.
As such, it is not something that Christians who love the truth should wish to embrace because we do not think in that fashion. Next, we recognize the Lord has indeed preserved his word, but he has done so in a way other than that assumed by King James-only advocates.
Because you see, by getting his word out, that could never be changed. Now, what's the result? Well, some of those people that helped get the word out didn't spell so well, all right? So we have a small percentage of the text where we have textual variance.
But remember one thing, even the most liberal, and I mean liberal in the sense they're still scholars, not the Jesus Seminar folks that go off into the NaNa land, but textual scholars recognize something called the tenacity of the text.
Remember I said that the scribal tendency was you found a note in the margin, you include it. When scribes would copy, they were conservative. That is, they kept what was in front of them. Even when they had two manuscripts and they were comparing them, what they'd do is they'd conflate readings.
If one said this and the other said this, they'd put the two of them together. This is called the tenacity of the text. If a reading appears in a text, it stays there. Why is that important? That means that when someone such as myself, one of my jobs that Colin didn't mention, one of my jobs is as a, I do textual work on the New American Standard Bible.
That's my area of, I love studying textual variance. And when I study a textual variant, one of the neat things to remember is that one of these readings, and normally it's just two variants. Sometimes there's a couple other opportunities.
There is no question that one of them is the original and they're all sitting at the bottom of my page. You know what that means? I can absolutely promise without question is that when I hold this text in my hand, and this is the Nessie Olin text here.
When I hold this in my hand, I have everything the apostles ever wrote. There's nothing missing. Say, oh, but there's some variations you have to look at. Yeah, but the original's in there. The original's there.
There's no question of it. Nothing's, there haven't been wholesale doctrines added. There haven't been wholesale doctrines deleted. It's all there. And I didn't have to have Anglican translators to re-translate or re-inspire the whole thing.
And finally, that while there are modern translations that we can never recommend, sorry, almost anything from Europe stinks. I'm not holding you accountable for all of Europe, son. It does not follow that we must go back to a venerable translation that exists in a language no one has spoken for hundreds of years.
If we follow the apostolic example, we will give the word of God to people in a language they can understand, not one that leaves them bewildered. The apostles could have written in a more formal form of Greek.
They didn't. They wrote in the language of the people to whom they were ministering. And so I say, follow the apostolic example. And as such, we conclude the presentation. Now, quickly, do we have some questions?
Yes, ma 'am. Where to get the graph that's somewhere down here? Like that one? There we go. Actually, I pulled that from Dan Wallace's article on majority text theory. There were some charts in there giving a breakdown on century by century.
I also have a book in my library edited by Ahland that is a predominantly totally complete catalog. The folks in Germany are working on cataloging everything. And this text was $165, and it's in German, but it has everything in there.
And so you have dates given for each of the manuscripts. And once you collate them, they're putting it all on computer now, too. I'm hoping, I don't know when, but I'm hoping that in the not-too-distant future, you'll be able to throw maybe a CD-ROM collection into your computer and create graphs like that for yourself and then pull up pictures of each of the manuscripts as well.
Oh, we do. This is based on extant manuscripts. This is not based on, and see, that's one of the arguments of majority text advocates. Majority text advocates will say, well, that may be true about what we still have, but the reason for that is the majority text, the Byzantine texts were so used, they wore out.
I have some major problems with that kind of a theory, especially since we have a bunch of, like Sinaiticus was used for 1 ,500 years. Somehow it didn't wear out. Why would the other ones wear out and that one didn't?
It's not like people had pocket New Testaments back then. Can you imagine the size of a pocket New Testament? Yes, sir. Variation is between. Well, variations are between Greek manuscripts. You said translations, which would be like comparing the NASB and the NIV or something like that, and they vary from one another because of the methodology of the translation.
The NASB is a formal equivalency translation. The NIV is dynamic, and that creates all sorts, that's a whole other issue I didn't even get into here. I'll get back to your question in a moment, but let me just mention, you can always tell what kind of a translation you have.
It's real simple. I always use Luke 944 as my example. If you look at Luke 944 in your Bible, and I will cause some of you to experience techno-lust now by bringing up BibleWorks 5 .0, which is available at the aomin .org website.
For the lowest price, you can get it anywhere. That's pretty good marketing, huh? That's not bad. And let me bring up the NIV so you can compare the two of them. I have so many translations to choose from.
There we go. New American Standard. Now, let these words sink into your ears. NIV, listen carefully to what I'm about to tell you. Now, if you look at the Greek text, literally it is to sink into your ears these sayings.
But we generally don't speak of things sinking into people's ears. And so a formal equivalency translation like the NAS, New King James Version, King James Version, is going to try to stick as close to the original wording as possible.
So they say things like, let these words sink into your ears. The NIV is a dynamic equivalency, and the idea is to translate for meaning rather than words, and therefore it says, listen carefully to what I'm about to tell you.
Now, that's not formal equivalency, but that's meaning. There's an extra step of interpretation involved in a dynamic translation such as the NIV. Now, if you go back to the Greek manuscripts, textual scholars of other works, of secular works, laugh at New Testament textual scholars because we have not only the purest text, but we have the most textual evidence of anything.
And so if you talk about really difficult textual variants, like 1 John 3 ,1 is not considered a difficult textual variant. It's very easy to see the scribal error that resulted in it. Hence, it's very easy to determine the original text.
When you boil it down to the really difficult ones where there's a lot of trouble determining which of the variant readings, and there's a few places, not many, where you have four or five, you're talking 1 .5 of text at most.
Very small, very small amount. They would be the same thing. There is no such thing, of course, as a fully literal translation. In fact, every translation is a mixture of formal and dynamic. There are dynamic readings in the King James Version that sometimes take my breath away.
That, again, a lot of King James Advocates will just slash on dynamic equivalency. But I provide some examples in the King James Only controversy of renderings the King James made that are thoroughly dynamic.
Not literal at all. But that would be inconsistent for the King James. And remember, the King James is translated by different groups and different people. At different schools. And that's good. I think that's a good thing to have multiple people working on, I think committee translations are by far the best.
Single translations by an individual always be colored by their theology and their own personal beliefs. But in modern times, when you have different groups working on that, then it comes into a whole committee that then evens things out and tries to use the same standards.
That's where there's a problem with King James. For example, I had an atheist, Dennis McKenzie, a long time ago, some of you may have heard of him. And he accused the Bible of contradiction because in Matthew, in the King James Version, Jesus says, you shall not kill.
And then in Paul, it says, you shall not murder. So see, the Bible can't even figure out which one's which. Well, actually, the Greek is euphoniosis in both. The King James, one part of the King James New Testament was translated at one school, and then the Pauline epistles someplace else.
And when they put it all together, they didn't harmonize. And so one group might translate it with one word and the other group with another word. And so the result is an inconsistency in the rendering.
And there are a number of places in the King James where if you look at the Greek Septuagint quote that they're quoting, it's absolutely identical, and they render it completely differently. So modern translations, at least, due to communication, cell phones, fax machines, typewriters, fluorescent lights, and computers, generally are more consistent on that level than something that was produced 400 years ago, okay?
All righty, well, thank you very much for your attention. I hope that is useful to you. And as I said, when we're dealing with Islam and things like that, these issues concerning the manuscript tradition, I hope will be very useful to you as you give an answer for those things as well.
Thank you.