DEBATE: The LSB is superior to the KJV; James White vs. Thomas Ross

Covenant Reformed Baptist Church

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So, as I typically would, as I enter any pulpit, I just would like to start us off with a quick prayer before I introduce what's going on today, so let's pray.

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Lord God, I do just thank you for the privilege it is to come together with fellow believers, to sit down and to discuss, to disagree, to banter and have fellowship, and all these things that we've done today in these last few days,

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Lord. It's a privilege to talk about you crucified, and Lord, I pray that today, through the earnest thought and debate from these two gentlemen,

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Lord, that you would bless the time, that you would bless the hearer's ears to learn new information and to be able to consider these things with a biblical mind.

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And Lord, it is upon the name of Jesus Christ, the substance upon which we've been preaching throughout these days, we say these things, and I say that in the holiest name,

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Jesus Christ, amen. So, again, I just want to thank Jeff Rice and Covenant Reform Baptist Church for opening up their doors to this debate.

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The debate topic, if you don't already know, it is the Legacy Standard Bible as a representative of modern

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English translations based upon the UBSNA text, is superior to the

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King James Version as a representative of the TR -based Bible translation. I dare you to try to say that 10 times fast.

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Taking the affirmative on that is Dr. James White, as he will be representing the

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Legacy Standard Bible. The denial of the debate topic is going to be represented by Thomas Ross, representing the

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King James Version of the Bible. I'm going to go ahead and introduce both of our speakers today, as with a little bit of information about who they are.

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Dr. James White is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries. He is a professor of church history and apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary, and has taught

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Greek, Hebrew, systematic theology, textual criticism, church history, and various topics in the field of apologetics for numerous other schools of which

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I participate in. He has authored or contributed to more than 24 books, including the

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King James Version Only Controversy, The Forgotten Trinity, The Potter's Freedom, The God Who Justifies, and What Every Christian Needs to Know About the

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Quran. He is an accomplished debater, having engaged in more than 175 moderated public debates with leading proponents of the

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Roman Catholic Church, Islam, Jehovah Witnesses, and Mormonism. He is a pastor slash elder of Apologia Church in Arizona.

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He has been married to his wife, Kelly, for more than 40 years, and has two children and five living grandchildren.

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Please give a round of applause for Dr. James White. Then here on my left,

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I would love to introduce the one that is taking the denial position of the King James Version, Thomas Ross.

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Thomas Ross here grew up doubting the existence of God, but through God's grace turned to the Lord Jesus Christ in repentant faith shortly after entering college at the age of 15 and was born again.

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He earned a BA from the University of California at Berkeley, an MA from Fairhaven Baptist College, and an

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MDiv from the Great Plains Baptist Divinity School. A Master of Theological Studies from Anchor Baptist Theological Seminary, and should complete and submit his

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PhD dissertation this year at Great Plains Baptist Divinity School. He has taught systematic theology,

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Greek, Hebrew, apologetics, textual criticism, and other courses with a variety of church -authorized

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Bible institutes, colleges, and theological seminaries in the United States and in foreign countries.

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Thomas Ross serves the Lord at Bethel Baptist Church in, I cannot pronounce where that is in California, El Sobrante, right there.

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Thomas Ross has engaged in public moderated debates both in the United States and internationally with leading representatives of non -Christian worldviews and with representatives of pseudo -Christian cults and religious organizations.

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He loves to read and study his Greek, Hebrew, and English Bible with the intention of obeying them.

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He has also translated the Aramaic portions of scripture, and he has written several books.

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So I would love for you to please give a round of applause for Thomas Ross. So I will go ahead and just cover in what this debate format is going to consist of, the times and the order of events right now.

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So for the debate format itself, we're going to have opening presentations from both gentlemen.

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These are going to consist of two 25 -minute opening arguments or presentations in that way. It's going to start off with James White followed by Thomas Ross, and that format has been agreed upon by both men as the consistent way that these things are going to flow.

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So James White will start, Thomas Ross will go second following him. So after the opening presentations, which are 25 minutes each, there will be a second presentation consisting of a rebuttal for 12 minutes each for both opponents on this.

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Following this, we'll have cross -examinations, 10 minutes to 10 minutes on both sides, followed by another cross -examination of 10 minutes to 10 minutes on both sides.

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Then we're going to have a third presentation slash a rebuttal for eight minutes for both opponents, again, following that same format,

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Dr. James White going first, followed by Dr. Thomas Ross. After this, we will have concluding statements, five minutes given both.

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And then after this, we will then have a short break, which I will just announce this now. If you look at the end of your pews, you should see some of these note cards that are around.

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We would ask that this is how you're going to be turning in questions for the Q &A moment. You will write down your question on it, rip it out, and then you will give it to Pastor Jeff Rice.

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Please raise your hand, Brother Jeff. Please get them to him, and we will start immediately sorting those questions as fast as we can so that we can get right into the very short, after the short break, going into the questions and answers.

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Just to give you just some miscellaneous details, some rules of order of how this is going to be taking place, questions from the audience should be submitted during that short break that was just mentioned.

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Those questions, please, again, give it to Jeff Rice. One thing I would ask that you would abstain from is expressions of approval or disapproval during this debate.

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This would include clapping, facial looks, anything that would insinuate that approval or disapproval.

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You should stay quiet until the break, please. When these questions get asked, each person here is going to have one minute to respond to these questions that are directly asked to them.

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The opponent will have 30 seconds to respond to these questions if he would like to do so.

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He has the option of refusing this. During the cross -examination, the person answering questions will take no more than 30 seconds again to answer a question.

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I would ask you guys today to please show me a little bit of grace. I am the moderator for this.

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The moderators, to do things like passively make sure people stay on time but is not the active role of determining the validity of arguments made or even if presentators are staying on topic.

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The speakers can do this for themselves and point out if the other party is failing to do what he needs to do with the audience as the judge of these matters.

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Presentators are allowed to use visual aids, as you can see on the TVs on both sides of this room, and a speaker's time clock begins immediately when the speaker begins to talk.

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This will, again, be done with as much grace as possible as I will be the timekeeper. On that note, we will go ahead and turn the time over to Dr.

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James White, and I will get down from up here. All right.

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Well, good afternoon. I think this may be one of the earliest debates I've done in the day, and in fact, congratulations, you all are in attendance at my 180th moderated public debate.

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I had no idea in 1990 when I started debating gerrymatitics at a large Catholic church in Long Beach, California, that that was going to lead me to Tullahoma, yes,

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God's providence. It is good to be here.

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Thanks to Brother Ross for being here as well. It's going to freak me out because the doctor who did my cardiac ablation in 2011 was

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Thomas Ross, so if you start touching my heart, I'm running, so this is all there is to it. But it's great to be with you.

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I actually have more time. I thought we only had 20 minutes, so my prepared material is only for 20 minutes, so let's tell some jokes.

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No, let's just, we can get to talk a little bit more slowly than I would otherwise, so that'll be very, very, very useful.

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Now why are we here? Well, we have an important subject to discuss, and I'm looking forward to this particular perspective.

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I've debated the issue of the King James Only movement for a long time, but this is going to allow me to,

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I think this is going to allow us to shed a little different light on the subject, because I'm defending the idea that not only is this the best -looking

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Legacy Standard Bible in existence in the world, oh, I'm sorry, dude, no, uh -uh,

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I'm sorry, but that the Legacy Standard Bible is superior to the King James Version, and I believe very, very firmly that the

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King James translators would be on my side in this debate. I believe that they would definitely support the thesis that I am putting forward, and I want you to understand that, and hopefully that will lead us to some very interesting conversation.

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I'm going to give you three reasons why the thesis needs to be supported and affirmed.

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First, the LSB is textually superior to the KJV, that is, the text upon which it is based is superior to the text that was available to the

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King James translators. That was all they had, and we'll discuss that a little bit more at that particular point in time in the debate, but today the

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LSB has a superior text that is translating and providing to us in English than was available to the

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King James translators. We have found far more manuscripts and have much more knowledge of the manuscripts than they had at that particular time in history.

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Secondly, the LSB is lexically superior to the KJV. I will not spend a lot of time on this, but the fact of the matter is we have learned much about the languages, both

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Hebrew and Greek, that was unknown at the beginning of the 17th century, between 1604 and 1611, when the

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King James was being translated. We have learned much more about the relationship of those languages to other languages, and so our understanding of the lexical backgrounds has improved greatly, and the

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King James translators would be very, very appreciative and would expect us to utilize that information to improve our

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Bible translations today. Finally, the LSB is translationally superior to the

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KJV, that is, we have learned more about those languages, not just as to the meanings of words, but we have learned more about those languages as to the grammar and syntax of those languages, so that we can translate them more accurately today than we could in 1611.

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Now, first, I want to just throw this out here, and hopefully it will help us to,

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I think, have a sort of a foundation to stand on. I wish to point out a startling reality.

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I believe firmly that the King James translators would be completely on my side in the debate today.

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Their preface to the reader, which unfortunately is not published in most King James Bibles today, if you have a

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Cambridge or something like that, you might have the preface to the reader in there. It's not a short piece of material.

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It was written by the translators, and it gives their translational methodology and a defense of a new translation, because theirs was the new kid on the block when it came out.

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That preface to the reader makes this very, very clear. The King James translators believe that translations should be in the common language, understandable and accessible, just as the original preaching was in ancient days.

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And so the idea of having a translation that is not in the language of the people, that is difficult to understand, that requires them to carry a dictionary with them to figure things out, is the exact opposite of the perspective that they had.

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They believe that translations should be in the common language, and understandable and accessible to people.

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They also believe that translations must differ from one another, and as long as the intention of the original authors is sought, even the meanest or the least fancy translation is the

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Word of God. In fact, they even defend themselves, because they knew that there would be people who would say, well, the

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Catholics are better at doing stuff like that, just leave it to the Catholics. And they said no. Even the meanest translation that honestly seeks to render the meaning of the original is to be called the

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Word of God. And so they were in no way, shape, or form saying that the translations that came before theirs were inferior, weren't the

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Word of God, were being replaced, anything like that at all. That's just not what they believed.

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They believed that difficult texts should have notes providing alternate translations and possibilities.

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And they provided that, and again, it's a shame that a lot of the King James printings today do not include the many, many, many marginal notes that the

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King James translators themselves provided. So they were not saying that this text that we're putting in the text is the final word.

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Because if you translate in one way and then put a little star, it says, or it could be this, obviously you're not saying that what you put in the text is the only way it can be translated, only way it can be understood.

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And yet they did that. That's a very important thing to keep in mind. Their new translation, they knew, would be opposed by those preferring older translations.

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Hence, there would be other translations in the future they never envisioned the KJV as the final word.

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And in fact, I think they would be stunned to find out that 400 years down the road, there would be anybody that would be defending their translation as the only translation you should use.

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They would be absolutely beyond comment amazed that anyone could actually come up with that perspective.

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They would expect that there would be many translations that would have long eclipsed theirs by the time four centuries had passed by.

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That is truly where they're coming from. So let's look at the three points that I want to present, and hopefully we'll do so with clarity.

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The LSB utilizes far, far more manuscript evidence than was even dreamed of by the

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KJV translators, who would have loved to have had access to what we have today. While they used printed text based upon a handful of manuscripts, the

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LSB has access to manuscripts a solid 1 ,800 to 1 ,200 years older than those used by Erasmus, for example, for the

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New Testament. Now, in regards to the Old Testament, not so much. The 1525 Blomberg was used there, and the current

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Bibli Hebraicus Ducartensia, they're very, very similar. There's very few differences between them as far as the

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Hebrew text is concerned. But as far as the New Testament is concerned, we have so much more access to so many more manuscripts today than they had at that time, and you must understand that the ability to know which manuscripts were which, to have a number designated to them, to know what they contain, where they are stored, that is very much a modern convenience that we have only had for a very short period of time.

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They did not have access to that kind of information that we have access to today, and that the

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LSB translators certainly had access to as well. So as a result, the

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LSB represents more closely the words of the Apostles themselves in many places, and for the sake of time, we'll look at only three of these examples, but I think if you write them down,

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I think they'll end up being a part of the conversation later on during the cross -examination. In Ephesians 3 .9,

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the KJV follows Erasmus, so the King James translators had the five editions of Erasmus, they had

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Stephanus, especially the 1550, and they primarily relied especially upon Bases' 1598 versions.

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They were not examining manuscripts, they were examining printed editions of the Greek New Testament. Now, there were differences between all of those, and they made decisions between them, but they were primarily translating from printed editions of the

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Greek New Testament at that particular point in time. And Erasmus, Desiderius Erasmus, the

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Dutch humanist scholar, he was the first one to print and publish a

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Greek New Testament, it was actually a diglot, Latin Greek, and he had had a very small number of manuscripts available to him, and he had access to a single one -off manuscript from around the 12th century, number 2817, that's its designation today, that stands opposed to nearly the entire manuscript tradition of the

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Greek New Testament. So in Ephesians 3 .9, the KJV reads

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Fellowship, while the Greek manuscripts, Latin manuscripts, Coptic, Sahitic, Boheric, all other versions and all of the patristic citations read

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Administration. That is, the one manuscript, 2817, that Erasmus had, had

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Koinonia, whereas everybody else has Oikonomia. Now you say, well they sound similar, yeah, but they're very different words, very different meanings between the two of them.

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Now this is a simple scribal error in a 12th century manuscript that, due to its use by Erasmus, became the textual reading of what is today called the

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Textus Receptus, the TR. But remember, that Textus Receptus that people have today, the small little blue case -bound edition published by the

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Trinitarian Bible Society, for example, that Textus Receptus was actually created in the late 19th century by Scrivener, and how he did it is he looked at the

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King James, so he took all of Erasmus and Stephanus and Beza, and when they differed, he looked at the

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King James translation to make a Greek New Testament. So it's a Greek New Testament based upon an

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English translation. That's what we're talking about when we talk about the Textus Receptus.

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So one manuscript has a reading in it, and it goes against all the other manuscripts that were much, much older, and the sermons and the translations and everything.

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And yet that ended up, because Erasmus was doing what he was doing, that ended up in the

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Textus Receptus, and that is the basis of the King James translation today. And so I think someone who has, and this is very, very important, we have to ask the question, what do you want?

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What do you want? I want to know what Paul wrote. When Paul wrote that letter to the church at Ephesus, what did he want to communicate back then?

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Not what the described 1 ,200 years later think he should have said. What did he want to communicate at that time?

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That has to be our standard. That has to be our goal. If we have anything other than that, then we're not really doing textual critical work any longer.

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I think it's very, very important. This is a simple error that is very clear and very easy to fix as well in light of the manuscript evidence.

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Then we have another text, Revelation 16 .5. The reading of all known

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Greek manuscripts at Revelation 16 .5 is Hoseos, which means the

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Holy One, while the KJV following Baze's emendation from 1598, going against Erasmus and Stephanos, has and shall be from Esamonos.

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Now what are we talking about here? Well, the Greek manuscripts are united in saying that what is in Revelation 16 .5

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should be the one who is and who was the Holy One. Every Christian that we can see for the first 1 ,600 years of this era read

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Revelation 16 .5 the same way. But Baze, Calvin's successor at Geneva, in putting together his 1598 felt that the phrase who was and is should be finished off with what?

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And is to come. And looking at the term Esamonos thought that it was close enough in form to be the proper reading rather than Hoseos, which means the

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Holy One. And there's a Latin comment that he made that some people understand to be saying that he had a manuscript or something that read that way.

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We don't have any today that have that reading. Revelation, by the way, is the book that has the fewest manuscripts of any

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New Testament book, probably because it fought for inclusion in the canon. And there's lots of problems in the

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King James and the Texas Receptus in the book of Revelation because Erasmus didn't have a manuscript for Revelation.

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He had a commentary in Latin with the Greek text embedded in the

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Latin, and he had to extract it out of the commentary. It's all he had. You might say, why didn't he fix it?

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I mean, if he was rushing in his first edition, which he was, why didn't he fix it later on? I wondered about that myself.

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Two reasons. First of all, Erasmus had a very low view of the book of Revelation. He didn't really think it was scripture.

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And secondly, he thought he did fix it. When he did his second edition, he told his printer, he said, you know, others have put out a

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Greek New Testament since then. There were some brothers who had put one out. Go get theirs and use their copy of Revelation and fix mine.

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There was only one problem. They had used Erasmus's for the book of Revelation. So it was the same thing, and so it didn't get fixed.

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And there are numerous errors in Revelation, this just being one of them, that we can point to where the

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King James reads very, very differently than the Greek manuscripts themselves did. Famously, the

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LSV contains the text of 1 John 5 as it was transmitted in the

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Greek manuscript tradition all the way to just before the Reformation itself, while the

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KJV has the famous edition utterly unknown in the Greek manuscripts and clearly imported around the 6th century into the

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Latin tradition called the Commiohonium, for there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the

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Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one. Now, this is probably one of the most famous of the texts that we would deal with at this point, but I will simply make a rather bold statement at this point.

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If 1 John 5 -7 is found in the King James version of the Bible, is the original reading, then we have very little reason to believe that we can know with any certainty what the

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New Testament ever read from the start. The reason being, that text, if it's original, disappeared in toto from the

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Greek manuscript tradition until it was restored via reference to the

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Latin in the third decade of the 16th century.

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That means for 1 ,500 years, the original language of 1

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John was corrupted, and the proper reading and a vitally important theological reading was missing.

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I don't believe that. I believe God has preserved His text, and if you believe 1

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John 5 -7 should be there, then He didn't. He may have had to re -inspire it, but He didn't preserve it for century after century after century of Christians.

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Vitally important text, theologically speaking. The LSV recognizes that and has the text as the

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Greek manuscript tradition would present it, not as it would be corrupted by an insertion, which was probably a marginal note, from the

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Latin, which eventually came in to the Textus Receptus. Erasmus did not have it in his first two editions.

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He included it in his third, along with a lengthy note as to why he felt it was not original.

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But that's still what is in the basis of the King James Version of the Bible. So as I said, that's the first textually, so there's three references.

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At least we can look at them. There are hundreds of others that we can look at. So lexically superior,

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I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. The KJV was translated prior to the discovery of the vast majority of ancient texts in Ugaritic, Aramaic, Coptic, ancient

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Babylonian, etc. As a result, they struggled with many terms, and they mention this in the preface, by the way.

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Especially in the Hebrew text, relating to flora, fauna, mineralogy, etc. Today, we have cognate language texts that cast vast light upon these words that the translators themselves admitted were difficult.

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They talked about this in the preface, and would frequently put a note saying we're not sure what this is making reference to.

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Well, we have found all sorts of things since then, which now help us to go, oh, it's talking about that particular kind of a gem, or that kind of a fish, or that kind of a bird, etc.

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They did not have access to so much of what has been discovered since the beginning of the 17th century.

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And so, our lexicons today, whether we're talking about Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek, have much broader, fuller foundations than they had at that particular point in time.

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And so, the LSB is able to utilize that material and provide us with a better translation as a result.

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And finally, translationally superior. Starting a century ago, we began unearthing papyri texts that have provided us with the extra -biblical context of the

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New Testament in particular. We have discovered that the Greek in the New Testament was not some holy ghost Greek, as some people thought it was, but the common

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Koine Greek of the first century. As a result, we are able to produce significantly more accurate translations of Koine Greek today, since we have so many more examples of how it functioned at that time.

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There are hundreds of examples that could be given. The KJV uses a ton of archaic language that the KJV translators themselves would never think should be enforced upon people centuries later.

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Look at these terms from Jack Lewis's book, just a few of them that we have here in the

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KJV. Almug, Algum, Chod, Charashim, Chapt, Earing, Gat, Habergion, Hosen, Kab, Nob, Ligur, Lizing, well,

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Maranatha, we all know what that one means, Nard, Nesid, Pate, Pild, Rabonai, Raca, Ringstrait, Stakta, Strake, and you can read the rest of them yourself.

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In other words, there are all sorts of terms. Even my old Schofield, my new

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Schofield reference Bible changed all these and provided us with, well, it does say mufflers too, but I can guarantee you that's not the mufflers we have in our cars or anything like that today.

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Massive numbers of terms that we would not utilize today. One of my favorites is,

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I think it's 1 Kings 11 .1, when it says, Solomon married many strange women. Now, I'm sure he probably did, but that wasn't what

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I was referring to, it was referring to foreign women. It was explaining why his heart was dragged away into idolatry, because he married foreign women.

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The King James says he married strange women. Well, that's not what it means anymore, and so the LSB is superior in its translation at that time.

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Now, one simple error in translation that is easily recognized but very hard to explain away is Acts 5 .30.

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The King James version says, the God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom ye slew and hanged on a tree.

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Think about what that's actually saying. Look at the LSB. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom you put to death by hanging him on a tree.

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The participle there is the means by which he was slain was by being hung upon a tree. They didn't kill him and then hang his body on a tree.

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The King James simply missed the translation of the participle. And so you have to be able to admit, yep, they missed a translation.

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The LSB is superior there, very clearly. One clear and compelling example is we found in Titus 2 .13,

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and this one's theologically important. Looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great

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God and Savior, Jesus Christ, LSB. Both terms, God and Savior, applying to the one person,

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Jesus Christ, is called the Granville Sharp construction. The KJV has looking for the blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great

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God and our Savior, Jesus Christ. That distinguishes between our great

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God and our Savior. It does not clearly communicate the fact that the underlying text is applying both

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God and Savior to Jesus. Now there's a reason for this. Granville Sharp didn't discover that rule until long after the

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King James was translated. That's where we've advanced in our understanding. So the

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LSB has a more accurate translation because of the continuation of our understanding of the underlying languages themselves.

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Another is found in Romans 9 .5. The LSB says, whose are the fathers, and from whom is the

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Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever, amen. The King James says, whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh

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Christ came, who is over all God blessed forever, amen. That's different.

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That's saying Jesus is blessed by God. LSB is saying Jesus is God. Now I've heard lots of King James onlyists, you know, really go crazy on passages like that.

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Oh, those modern translators are trying to deny the deity of Christ. You can do the same thing in the King James here. We won't because they weren't, but you could do that kind of thing at this point.

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So why this debate? Well, the reality is the KJV -only movement is rooted in two equally dangerous mindsets.

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One, a commitment to a traditional position and a modernistic idea of certainty. So you go back in the past, you will see situations where, for example,

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Jerome and Augustine argued about how to translate things, and when Jerome put out the Vulgate, people rioted in the streets because he changed what the

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Greek Septuagint said. They had a traditional text, and even when he was accurate, they rebelled against that.

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But then the Vulgate became the traditional text for 1 ,100 years. And so when Erasmus comes along and dares to challenge that, he's attacked.

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But now you have the King James Version versus all modern translations, and that causes the same kind of thing where you have a traditional position.

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Christians recognize the existence of copyist errors in manuscripts, as all people did from the beginning. Perfection of copying did not exist until 1949.

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We invented the photocopier. It's very, very important that in this debate we must come to the conclusion that we must never trade truth for a false sense of certainty.

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Don't trade the truth for a false sense of certainty. We need to recognize with the

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King James translators that the process of translation is something that will continue on as long as the

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Church is here on this earth. Thank you very much for your attention. Wonderful.

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Thank you, James White. We will now have Thomas Ross giving his opening presentation.

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I would like to remind everybody, as I did not open in this introduction with, please abstain from any recording equipment.

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Pictures are fine, but please abstain from recording. I'd like to begin this debate by thanking the one

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God, the Eternal Father, who adopted me in His everlasting love, His eternally begotten

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Son, who loved me and gave Himself for me, and the Holy Spirit who eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son, and who inspired, preserved, and led me to receive

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His self -attesting Word in His free and glorious grace. To Him alone be the glory. I'd also like to thank this

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Baptist Church and its pastor for sponsoring this discussion with James, and I'd like to thank

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James here for taking the time to debate this important topic. He's a great debater, and I'm confident that he will do a great job presenting as strong a case as can be made for his position as he's already started to do.

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I appreciate a great deal in many of James' books and debates, and they've been helpful to me in my Gospel preaching, in my personal apologetics, and in several of the other public debates

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I've been privileged to do to the glory of the Triune God. So thank you, Church. Thank you,

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Pastor. Thank you, James. Thank you, audience, for coming here to consider this topic at hand with,

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I trust, open Bibles, open minds, and open hearts. Our topic today is whether the

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Legacy Standard Bible as representative of modern English translations based upon the UBS NA text is superior to the

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KJV as representative of TR -based translations. James in the affirmative must prove the

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LSB and other modern English UBS -based Bibles are superior to the King James as representative of other

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TR -based Bibles. So he has the burden of proof. So if you were to sum that up, it would mean that this is a

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King James only debate. I'm King James only. What does that mean? Well, James, in his book, The King James Only Controversy, Can You Trust Modern Translations, creates a

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KJVO spectrum encompassing those who believe the King James version is the best single English translation available today, those who believe that the underlying

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Hebrew and Greek texts used by the King James translators are superior to those used by modern translators, encompassing both majority -text advocates and those who believe the printed editions of the

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TR should be preferred in some or all of the approximately 1 % of instances where printed

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TR editions differ from what we believe is the currently excellent majority of Greek manuscripts, and those who believe that the text is receptus or received text has been supernaturally preserved and is inerrant, demonstrating the validity of any of the positions on that spectrum would validate my position in the negative of the debate topic tonight.

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Unfortunately, James' book goes on to claim that most King James only believers fall into the inspired

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KJV group who James alleges in all bold letters make the association King James Bible alone equals the word of God alone.

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This allegedly the largest group of KJVO believers bleeds into his next category, those who he says believes

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God re -inspired the Bible in 1611, rendering it in the English language a position he says predominates in many areas.

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James says that one might well say such people worship the King James version. He then proceeds to claim that there are groups who claim that the

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KJV was written in eternity and Abraham, Moses, and the prophets all read the 1611 KJV, including the

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New Testament. These individuals believe that Hebrew is actually English. James provides no sources or any evidence or sources whatsoever on the alleged size of his

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KJVO extremist categories. No sources are provided to prove that people who think the Holy Spirit re -inspired the

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Bible in 1611 quote predominate in quote many areas or the movement or that quote most KJVO people think that the

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King James is the word of God alone in the sense that you would need to translate the Bible from English into other languages and I didn't see any source for people who believe that Abraham and Moses spoke 1611

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King James English that even existing. I didn't see any evidence there unfortunately that unabashedly

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King James only Bible colleges, seminaries, and institutes that reject these positions vastly outnumber those that even arguably take them, such as those on my slide there.

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Those are some good ones that I think are worth checking out. So in any case, neither

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I nor any other King James only Baptist with whom my church is in fellowship believes that God re -inspired the Bible in 1611 or that original languages should be rejected or that you should translate the

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Bibles into other languages from English or such foolishness that Abraham spoke King James English. I hope that when

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James' book rightly points out that some outlandish claims are made by people like Peter Ruckman or Gail Ripplinger that he also considers whether some of these are maybe unintentionally outlandish claims.

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So setting aside the small extremist minority in the King James only movement who James claims think the Bible was re -inspired in 1611, any position along the spectrum that he sets forth in his book would be sufficient to establish the negative that I'm defending in our debate today.

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Anywhere within that spectrum will prove the superiority of the King James to what James calls such fine translations as the

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English Standard Version and New International Version. Now what does scripture teach about its own preservation? This is absolutely crucial to this debate, absolutely crucial.

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By far the most important source of information of what has happened to the text of scripture is what God himself promises that he would do in preserving and protecting the canonical words and books that the

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Father gave his people through the Son by the Holy Spirit. I'm going to spend some time on this because it is absolutely crucial for our debate topic tonight.

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Once we believe what scripture teaches on its own preservation, the application of scripture's teaching to the issue of Bible texts and versions is clear.

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James' position is wrong because it violates what scripture teaches on its own preservation.

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We're going to discover that the Nestle -Amelot UBS -type Greek text from which the LSB and practically all other modern

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English versions are translated is wrong, most fundamentally, because it does not fit what scripture teaches about its own preservation.

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Note that unfortunately nowhere in White's King James -only controversy, in his books, or in any of King James -only debates, at least as far as I'm able to locate, does

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James carefully expose it and draw out the good and necessary consequences of scripture's teaching on its own preservation.

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Even in our opening statement tonight, James did mention certain passages, but he didn't expose what scripture taught in its own preservation.

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Now, what does scripture teach about its own preservation? Well, scripture infallibly teaches that in the words of—this is not infallible—in words of the 1689

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Baptist Confession of Faith, that the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, being immediately inspired by God and by singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical.

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That is an accurate representation of the teaching of scripture on its own preservation.

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The Bible affirms the verbal plenary preservation of the inspired words originally dictated by the

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Holy Spirit through the agency of holy men. So the Bible teaches that God's inspired and preserved words would be available to the people of God in all ages, and the

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Church is the institution appointed by God to receive, guard, and propagate those inspired and preserved words until the return of Christ.

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That is, scripture teaches the following. One, it teaches that God revealed the scriptures so that men could know his will both in the

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Old and New Testaments and in the future, as all those verses indicate. The Bible is clear that no scripture was intended for only the original recipient.

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Bunch of verses. God intended for his word to be recognized and received by the

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Churches as a whole. References. The inspired text of scripture is to be guarded as a former pattern of sound words for the

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Church and used to instruct all future Churches. That's number one. Number two, the

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Bible promises that God will preserve every one of his words forever down to the very jot and tittle, the smallest letter.

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Many, many verses of the Bible teach that. Three, the Bible assures us that God's words are perfect and pure.

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Four, the Bible promises that God would make his words generally available to every generation of believers.

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Five, the Bible promises that there will be certainty as to the words of God. Many, many verses of the

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Bible promise this. Number six, the Bible promises that God would lead his saints into all truth and that the word, all of his words are truth.

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Believers are not to set themselves above the word, but to receive it with the faith of a little child, rejecting secular and worldly wisdom.

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Seven, God states that the Bible will be settled to the extent that someone could not add to or effectually take away from his words and effectually corrupt them.

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Eight, the Bible shows that the true churches of Christ would receive and guard those words.

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Number nine, the Bible presents as a pattern that believers would receive these words from other believers.

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Many references. Number 10, the Bible shows that God's promises may appear to contradict science and reason.

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In Genesis 2, we see a newly created world that may look ancient, but the scriptures remind us that it is better to put our trust in the

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Lord than to put confidence in man, Psalm 118. I believe so that I may understand is a great dictum of how we come to the truth on this topic.

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Summarizing this, well, not quite the summary yet. So Christ taught the preservation of his very words since they will be the standard in the day of future judgment,

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John 12, 48, and men will be accountable to obey all of them. He also warned of the vanity of ignoring his actual words,

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Matthew 7, 26. Christ emphatically declared the scripture cannot be broken, John 10, 35.

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In Matthew 22, 29, Jesus rebuked men for saying you do err not knowing the scriptures. If scriptures were only accessible in long lost autographs, why would the

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Lord chide people for being ignorant of words that are not available? Believers are commanded to contend for the faith,

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Jude 3, and this faith is based upon the words of God, Romans 10, 17, and even in the book of Jude, Jude 10, 17.

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So what, summing that up, what does the Bible teach? In summary, the just shall live by faith, Romans 1, 17,

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Habakkuk 2, 4, and we walk by faith and not by sight, 2 Corinthians 5, 7. So scripture and faith in the promises of scripture must be the glasses through which we evaluate historical data about the preservation of the

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Bible. Scripture teaches the verbal plenary preservation of the verbally plenarily inspired autographs, the original manuscripts, that the preserved words would be perpetually available to God's people,

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Isaiah 59, 21, and that the church would be, that Israel was the guardian of scripture in the Mosaic dispensation, and the church the guardian in the

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New Testament period. The Holy Spirit would lead the saints to accept the words the Father gave to the

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Son to give to his people. Believers can know with certainty where the canonical words of God are because they are to live by every one of them and are going to be judged by them in the last day.

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For more on the biblical doctrine of preservation, a good book is Thou Shalt Keep Them, edited by Kent Brandenburg and some others. The list of presuppositions is in a great article by King James' only

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Presbyterian seminary actually in Asia. So the textus receptus fits what scripture teaches about its own preservation.

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So I'm in the negative, not in the positive, in this debate. My main point will be to show the text underneath modern Bible versions does not fit what scripture says, but by way of contrast, does the

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TR fit these presuppositions? Will historians recognize that the received text was identified with the autographs by both

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Baptists and even the general body of Protestantism? So for example, Kurt Alland, editor of the critical Greek New Testament that James is defending, says, it is undisputed that Luther used the

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Greek textus receptus for his translation of the German New Testament in 1522 in all its later editions. So did all the translators of the

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New Testament in the 16th century. All the translations of the 17th century, including the King James Version, were based on this text.

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Thus, the New Testament of the Church in the period of the Reformation was based on the textus receptus.

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It is equally undisputed that in the 16th or 17th century, and for that matter, well into the 18th century, anyone with a

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Greek New Testament would have had a copy of the textus receptus. Finally, it is undisputed that from the 16th to the 18th century, the orthodox doctrine of verbal inspiration assumed this textus receptus, which was regarded as the text of the

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Church from the 4th century. It is therefore not surprising that throughout

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Baptist and Protestant Christendom in the Reformation and post -Reformation era, the textus receptus was regarded as preserving even to the last detail the inspired and infallible word of God himself.

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That's according to one of the editors of the text James is defending. Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman write, having secured preeminence, what came to be called the textus receptus of the

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New Testament resisted for 400 years, all scholarly effort to displace it. The textus receptus, or commonly received standard text, makes the boast that the reader now has the text received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted.

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This form of Greek text succeeded in establishing itself as the only true text of the New Testament, and was, he thinks, slavishly repented in hundreds of subsequent editions.

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It lies at the basis of the King James and all of the principal Protestant translations in the languages of Europe prior to 1881.

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So allegedly, superstitious has been the reverence accorded the textus receptus that in some cases attempts to criticize or amend it have been regarded as centuries.

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For centuries, the editors of the New Testament kept reprinting it, textual groupings were made against the

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TR, and variations from it were considered to be agreements in error.

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So to cite one of many examples of how this works, the Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, which has been said that no confession of faith has had so formative an influence in Baptist life, as we already mentioned, says that the

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Bible has, by God's singular care and providence, been kept pure in all ages, and is therefore authentical.

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What text did this Baptist Confession refer to? This Confession of Faith is full of uniquely

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TR readings. It references the long ending of Mark three times, supports the TR reading only begotten

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Son in John 118, not the Arian corruption only begotten God, supports the glorious doctrine of Christ's two natures in one person, using only the

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TR readings, Church of God which he has purchased with his own blood, and Son of Man which is in heaven, Acts 20, 28,

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John 3, 13. It supports the necessity of a profession of conversion before baptism using only the

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TR verses Mark 16, 16, and Acts 37. It employs the language of, and references 1st

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John 5, 7, to prove Trinitarianism. Since this Confession states that care has been taken, quote, to affix texts of scripture in the margin for the confirmation of each article in our confession, which are the most clear and pertinent for the proof of what is asserted by us, we can see that they had no doubt whatsoever about peculiarly

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TR readings. They could be the most clear and pertinent verses for a doctrine, and they were part of that, quote, holy scripture to which nothing is at any time to be added or taken away.

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The distinctive received text is quoted not only in the 1689 Baptist Confession, but also in the

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New Hampshire Baptist Confession of Faith of 1833. It was accepted by groups such as the

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General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, the Landmark Baptist Movement's American Baptist Association, and others.

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So scripture promises the verbal plenary preservation of the autographic words, that those words would be in the mouths of God's people from generation to generation, and that those words would be received by true churches, so that saints could have certainty about the word of God.

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The TR claims and does meet those criteria. In contrast, the UBS Nessel -Allen text does not fit what scripture teaches about its own preservation.

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It was not in use for over a thousand years. It doesn't even claim to give people certainty, so that they can live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God, and avoid the curse on those who add or take away from even one word of scripture.

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So likewise, modern, so Westcott and Hort, for example, whose Greek New Testament is very similar to the modern

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Nessel -Allen text, was very clear that on their principles, certainty about the words of scripture is impossible.

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So they said that there are places where we are constrained to recognize the existence of textual error in all extant documents, and they say there are other places where we can't even tell.

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There may be lots of places where the Bible is corrupt, we can't tell where they are, but they're somewhere, and you don't have all the words of God.

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That was Westcott and Hort's view. Likewise, modern textual critics, defenders, and authors of the Nessel -Allen critical texts are clear that certainty about the

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New Testament text is impossible on their presuppositions. So the text suggests many emendations where supposedly every single

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Greek manuscript is corrupt. So the Nessel -Allen 26th edition contains about 130 conjectures in its apparatus.

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The Nessel -Allen 27th edition, the base text for the LSB, lists over 100 explicit conjectural emendations.

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The text contains conjectural emendations in Acts 16 .12. The Nessel -Allen 28th edition has a conjectural emendation in 2

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Peter 3 .10. So their text suggests many emendations, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

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This is difficult to ascertain from the UBS apparatus, but the UBS Nessel -Allen text is full of readings with no manuscript evidence at all, readings in which, or readings have been selected and substituted based upon an inadequate representation of the evidence, and the readings in their support are often misleading or in error.

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So it's been stated by textual scholars that there are lines of text in the UBS and in Westcott and Horth that have no manuscript support.

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Just in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, there are lots of these. They're well into the triple digits.

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There's way over 100 instances where no manuscript on earth has simple, small phrases of words, that are in the printed

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UBS Nessel text. In the vast majority of these, there's no footnote in the LSB warning the readers about this, that these readings have no manuscript evidence on earth, and it's difficult or impossible to discern this from the

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UBS apparatus. Now here we're talking about simply individual lines of text, parts of verses, not whole verses even, parts of verses consisting of handfuls of words.

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As for whole verses, groups of verses, or larger sections of text, the portion of the

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UBS Nessel -Allen text that looks like exactly zero manuscripts on earth grows exponentially.

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And the TR has manuscript support, by the way, in 100 % of these passages where the UBS Nessel text has zero manuscript supporting its reading.

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So for example, here's several texts, Matthew 17 .4, Matthew 17 .24,

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Matthew 17 .27, Matthew 20 and verse 30, Matthew 27 verse 46, the cry of Christ on the cross in the

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UBS, Mark 127, Mark 212, Mark 335, Mark 48, Mark 623,

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Mark 912, many more examples. There's certainly more significant variants than some of these.

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I'm not saying that these are the most earth -shattering variants in every instance, but right here, and there's more on the screen there, there are 41 examples right there just from Matthew and Mark where simple lines of the

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UBS text have no support from any known manuscript in the world. So that's not a certain text.

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Now what did the Nessel -Allen editor Kurt Allen say? Well, he said that well into the second century,

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Christians still regarded themselves as possessing inspiration equal to that of the New Testament writings, which they read in their worship services.

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Until the fourth century, there are many different forms of New Testament text. There are many places where there's an insoluble tie between two or more alternative readings, so you just, if this is the right reading, that's the reading we just get to pick, it's no problem, you know, no certainty.

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That isn't what the Bible teaches about its own preservation. Similarly, Nessel -Allen Greek New Testament editor

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Bruce Metzger was clear that on his presuppositions, certainty about the text of the New Testament is impossible.

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So he already recognized, he said that the TR was regarded as the autographs for a very long time.

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Modern textual criticism proceeds upon a rejection of the TR and the presupposition that the

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Bible was corrupted for a long time and then partially restored by modern critics, but certainty is impossible and will never again be restored.

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Now this quote here is from Karl Lachman, this is quoting Metzger on these people. So Metzger said that Karl Lachman was the first one to break with the

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TR, and his aim wasn't even to attempt to reproduce the original text, which he thought was an impossible task.

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So he thought, this is impossible. Westcott and Hort, we already mentioned, they had about 60 passages that they said involved primitive error, where you just have to guess, make a conjectural emendation.

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In dissent from this, Dean Burgon said that he defended the traditional text of scripture because he said that he couldn't imagine that if the words of scripture had been dictated by the inspiration of the

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Holy Spirit, God would not have providentially preserved them. And therefore the text that was in use by the church for centuries could not be in need of the drastic revision that Westcott and Hort had administered to it.

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Metzger goes on to say that textual criticism is not an exact science at all. He says it's possible that after the original is placed in circulation, it became lost or destroyed, all extant copies may have derived from some single error -prone copy.

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How did Mark's gospel end? With verses 9 through 20, we don't know. We don't know how Mark's gospel ended. Among the endings that are current in the manuscripts, probably none of them represented what

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Mark intended. The possible that there are non -Pauli interpolations that occurred before any surviving manuscripts, well, that could have happened too.

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So it's impossible, or difficult, or maybe even impossible to even talk about an original text of Paul's letters.

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There are one or more passages that were interpolated as letters, and so he says it's an impossible task to restore the allegedly lost text of scripture.

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And this is not what the Bible teaches about its own preservation. He says that it's not the sovereignty of God, but chance that entered into the survival or loss of manuscript evidence from previous centuries.

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There are many places where textual critics just say we don't know what happened, and occasionally none of the variant readings will commend itself as original.

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We simply do not know what the original author wrote. That's what Metzger said. That's what

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Bart Ehrman said. That's what the editors of the Lester Allen UBS text think, and that's not what scripture teaches about its own preservation.

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When James himself debated Douglas Wilson on the text of scripture, Wilson asked

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James, if you agree that we are capable of finally studying on the text of all books, would you agree that this final ecclesiastical text would have to be generated in some kind of artificial way, kind of like the scripture 1881 was formed, or as a correlation from original languages?

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James replied, I would assume that over time, the further discovery of older texts will help us get further along here, but even then, he says,

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I cannot see unanimity being achieved. So James himself has said, we're not going to get unanimity in what the text of scripture says.

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We don't have it now, and we're never going to get it, for sure. But that's not what the Bible teaches about its own preservation.

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So scripture teaches that believers in every age can be certain about what the pure words of God are. So they can, in the words of Matthew 4 -4, love and live by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, and avoid those curses on those that add or take away from any of his words.

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But James says we never have and never will get certainty about what every one of those words is. James' position and the

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NAUBS text he's defending violate scripture's promises. They are wrong.

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What about the Old Testament? Tetracritical views of the Old Testament likewise utterly reject certainty in providential preservation.

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So Immanuel Tov, standard introduction to the Old Testament, he says a critically reconstructed original text does not exist for the complete

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Hebrew Bible. For most of human history, they just thought the Masoretic text was the same thing as the original text, but now we know that it's not.

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Most of the biblical books weren't even written by one person. They're compositional layers for many centuries. There never was a single original text.

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Reconstruction of the original text is almost impossible. We can—a textual theory which can explain the development of the biblical text in its entirety doesn't exist.

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He says we've got the random preservation of evidence for all these different books. Tetracriticism of the

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Hebrew Bible does not even aim at the compositions written by the biblical authors, and most scholars affirm the books of the

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Hebrew Bible never existed in one original written form. He says there's no unanimous view on any reading that in modern times, scholars are often reluctant to admit the subjective nature of textual variation.

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Scholars realize that sometimes even conjectural emendation is not acceptable, and then you just say, well, the text is corrupt.

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He says many readings have been lost. He says—this is a fun one—a critical edition is the most inappropriate of all names for the thing to which custom applies it, an edition in which the editor is allowed to fling his opinions in the reader's face without being called to account and asked for his reasons.

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Well, is that what the Bible teaches about its own preservation? No, it's not. Now, note that Tove, after all this talk about critical editions, also says it's not easy to provide convincing evidence of proof of errors in the

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Masoretic text. So he says all this, but why does he say all that stuff in his presuppositions that are not what the scripture teaches?

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So the teaching of scripture on its own perfect inspiration, preservation, and availability is utterly inconsistent with the ungodly presuppositions and product of the biblical texts underlined in LSB and modern versions.

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Scripture models the receipt of the text of scripture from other true believers. Scripture indicates God's sheep hear his voice.

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Not one of the editors of the critical reading of the New Testament believed in the infallible inspiration of scripture. Neither Westcott nor Hort believed in the infallible inspiration of scripture.

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Do we get our Bible from the sheep, or do we get them from the goats? Is that who we want editing our

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New Testament text? So the most important thing in this debate is what does scripture teach about its own preservation?

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The TR fits that. The UBS text does not fit what scripture teaches on its own preservation.

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Thank you very much. Thank you, Thomas Ross. So we will now be rolling into second presentation slash rebuttals.

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I'll turn the time over for James White for 12 minutes. Well, I need to take a breath.

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That was so fast, I don't think anyone could follow the vast majority. It was a massive amount of material on the screen.

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I couldn't even take notes for all of that. So I'll be honest with you, I'm not even certain everything that was just said. All I know is one thing.

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What you just heard was a blast of quotes without connection to reality.

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And I was very disappointed in that. I really was. You take people who don't even claim to be

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Christians and assume that what they're saying about the Old Testament text is what the LSB translators believed about the

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Old Testament text, it's untrue. I've debated Bart Ehrman.

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I've identified him as the leading English -speaking critic of the New Testament.

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Watch my debate with him, and I will press him on any type of conjectural inundation.

01:00:06

I pressed the fact that the New Testament has tenacity, that all the original readings are still a part of the manuscript tradition.

01:00:13

And he laughed at that. But you just had all these—we're just going to take a quote here, a quote here, we're going to throw it all at you and hope something sticks.

01:00:22

That's not how you do Bible translation. That's not how you engage this subject in a meaningful fashion. Let's slow it down, and let's get back to what the debate is about.

01:00:31

It wasn't about theories of preservation. I believe God has preserved His Word, and every

01:00:36

LSB translator does too. Every single one of them. How'd he do it? He didn't do it through a

01:00:43

Roman Catholic priest who had half a dozen manuscripts and was trying to get his text to print early.

01:00:49

That's what the TR is. He did it through all the manuscripts, through all the ages.

01:00:56

He was just as concerned about the people in the 4th century having the Bible as the 16th century. You'll notice that when he started talking about his theory of preservation, all the

01:01:04

TR was this, the TR was that. What about before 1516? What about the Council of Nicaea?

01:01:10

What text did they have there? They didn't have the TR. What about the Council of Constantinople?

01:01:16

Chalcedon. They didn't have the TR. What about the people who defended the deity of Christ, like Athanasius?

01:01:22

He has all sorts of readings that go against the TR. There's so many holes when you try to take the

01:01:29

TR, which is a cobbled together text that represents, at best, the 12th to 14th century

01:01:34

Byzantine manuscripts. Has a number of readings in it that Rastas brought in from the Latin Vulgate. To try to take that and make it the standard that was in the

01:01:44

Church all the way up to that period. There are so many holes in that, it is unbelievable.

01:01:51

But I believe in preservation. I simply believe that God has preserved all the readings in the entire manuscript tradition.

01:02:01

I do not believe that the TR represents that by any stretch of the imagination. I've given you an example. Ephesians 3 .9.

01:02:07

There is no way around the fact that TR contains an error at Ephesians 3 .9.

01:02:13

Is that what God preserved for his people? I would like to also make sure, before we get too far away from it.

01:02:23

It was said, well, if you hold the 1689, they used the TR. Can I point something out? This really, really bothers me.

01:02:29

It really does. It's all they had. The idea was presented, oh, they knew about these other texts, and they rejected those texts, and they chose the

01:02:38

TR. No. It is all they had. They had no idea of the earlier manuscripts that have been discovered since then.

01:02:47

They had no access to the papyri, which were only discovered over the past 100 years. So it really has always bothered me, as a

01:02:56

Reformed Baptist elder, when people quote the 1689 and say, see, this is supporting the

01:03:03

TR. It's all they had. To try to drag them into this conversation and say, they made a choice against these manuscripts and for these manuscripts, they didn't know about manuscripts.

01:03:18

Even Francis Turretin, brilliant theologian that he was, said that the majority of Greek manuscripts contained the

01:03:25

Kamiohanium. He was completely wrong, 100 % wrong.

01:03:32

Does that mean you throw him out? No. But the point is, you have to recognize the historical realities behind those time periods.

01:03:43

And yes, the TR was accepted. But may I point something out? The Latin Vulgate was accepted for 1 ,100 years by godly people like Wycliffe and Hus, right?

01:03:55

Even Tyndale used it. Even the King James translators loved the Latin Vulgate. Does the fact that it was used for 1 ,100 years make it the standard?

01:04:04

Rome thought so. Popes taught that the Vulgate was infallible. Thankfully, they don't teach that anymore.

01:04:11

But if you're going to do the, oh, this text has been viewed as authoritative by this group, and that means we should stick with it idea, then there's only one text you should be using, and it's the

01:04:22

Latin Vulgate, not the Texas Receptus, if you're going to be consistent. But there's no consistency here.

01:04:29

If you apply the arguments that were just presented, the only consistent result would be

01:04:38

Latin Vulgate -onlyism. But we're not going to get that, because that's not what the foundation here is.

01:04:45

There were a bunch of assertions made, and this truly concerned me, of saying that text after text after text in the modern eclectic text, whether it be the

01:04:56

United Bible Society's fifth edition, and that's y 'all on 28th, 29th, it'll be coming out fairly soon, where no manuscript contains a reading.

01:05:02

That is just simply false. F -A -L -S -E with a capital F. That is untrue. And I can prove it, and every one of you can too.

01:05:11

All you've got to do if you want is get out your phone, you go to the CSNTM, well, you can go to CSNTM too, they've got all sorts of manuscript things there, but to the

01:05:20

CBGM databases and pull up, they've got MARC, they've got

01:05:25

AXE, they've got the General Epistles done, we're hoping for John real soon to come out, and you will be able to follow every line of text, and you will be able to link from that directly to the manuscripts that contain that text.

01:05:42

CBGM is so wonderful because we can demonstrate now the tremendous consistency of the manuscript tradition as to what the

01:05:51

New Testament originally said. We don't simply have to go on some scholar saying this or that, we can now literally give you the numbers as to the consistency between manuscripts.

01:06:00

It is simply untrue that when you're reading a modern translation, you are reading texts that have no underlying manuscript support.

01:06:10

That is not true. And I challenge my opponent to bring up those texts.

01:06:16

He threw them up there so fast you couldn't even write them down. Throw them up there, let's get out the text, and let's look at which manuscripts contain it.

01:06:23

Because you're going to find that that's going to be the case in each one of those instances.

01:06:29

Now, as I said, there is one place, one place where the

01:06:37

Nessie Olin text has put a conjectural emendation as the main text. It's the same text that I brought up with Bart Ehrman in 2009, we debated.

01:06:46

One. Just one. And I reject that. I do not believe there is any need for conjectural emendation.

01:06:52

What's a conjectural emendation? A conjectural emendation is where you put a reading into your text that is not found in any of the underlying manuscripts.

01:07:01

In other words, you're saying the original reading's been lost, and we conjecture that it's this.

01:07:07

I reject that there is no place where that's needed. And it's fascinating, when I challenged

01:07:13

Bart Ehrman on this very issue, go watch the debate yourself, I said, is there any place in the

01:07:19

New Testament you believe the original has been lost? He could give us only that one place that has next to zero theological meaning as far as any type of application is concerned.

01:07:29

One place. The leading critic. That tells you that in fact, if you take the

01:07:35

Textus Receptus, and I didn't mention this before, but I think it's important. If you take the Textus Receptus, and you take the

01:07:41

Nessie Olin 28th edition, and you apply the same standards of exegesis and interpretation to each one of these, you will not get any different message.

01:07:54

You will not. You might say, well then why are we having this debate? Well, because there are some folks that have a tradition, and they want to drag us back before God gave to His Church some of the greatest treasures we possess to defend the accuracy of the

01:08:10

New Testament. The papyri that we have today, that they did not have between 1604 and 1611, the papyri we have today go back to the very earliest portion of the second century.

01:08:23

They take us so much closer. Even Bart Ehrman had to admit in our debate, and I didn't expect that I would get him to do this, but I asked him a question, and he said in our debate, the

01:08:33

New Testament has far earlier attestation than any other work of antiquity.

01:08:40

And he's right. It does. And all of that has come since the

01:08:46

Textus Receptus was published. And so those who promote Textus Receptus -only -ism are basically telling us that everything

01:08:53

God has given to us, all our advances and understanding of manuscripts and everything else since 1611 is irrelevant.

01:09:01

Who cares about the papyri? Who cares about the fact that we are now, you can now access so many of these manuscripts for yourself in high quality digital images?

01:09:10

Who cares? It was all finished in 1611. All the rest of it is smoke and mirrors.

01:09:15

Doesn't matter anymore. That's what that position presents. So this is not about preservation in any way, shape, or form.

01:09:25

And the men who translated this believe in inerrancy, believe in preservation, but they don't believe that we're stuck in the 17th century as far as what

01:09:35

God has given to us. So let's get back to what the debate is actually about. Does Brother Ross believe there is any place where the

01:09:46

LSB translates the underlying Greek text better than the

01:09:51

King James did? How about Acts 5? How did Jesus die? Was he slain and then hung on a tree?

01:09:58

Or is he slain by being hung upon a tree? And what about Ephesians 3 .9?

01:10:04

Is there any place where the Textus Receptus is not perfect? Because he started off going after me.

01:10:12

Oh, nobody believes in that second inspiration stuff. If you don't already have a list of places where the

01:10:21

King James could be translated better than you do believe in a second inspiration, don't you?

01:10:27

Because you're saying it's perfect. Well, how'd it get to be perfect? The King James translators didn't claim it was perfect. So how did it get to be perfect?

01:10:35

Well, that would be a second inspiration theory. So those are the questions. Let's get to the real issue here.

01:10:42

And not all this stuff about, well, there's a bunch of liberals out there. Yeah, we know that. We deal with them all the time.

01:10:48

We're well aware of that. Let's stick to the issue. Did the King James translators agree that the

01:10:55

LSB and modern translations would come into existence and they would need to by believing men?

01:11:01

The LSB is that. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you, James White.

01:11:06

We will now have Thomas Ross respond with another rebuttal of 12 minutes.

01:11:12

You will be hearing my voice above on just different minute markers just to help remind the men of their time restraints.

01:11:22

Thank you, James, for that presentation. I appreciate that. I'm going to quickly hit some of the things that he said in order of the time he tried to hit them.

01:11:31

So I try not to forget them. So he said that King James leaving out the preface of the King James or leaving out the marginal notes.

01:11:37

The King James published by the TR Trinitarian Bible Society has the notes, has the preface. So preface is great.

01:11:44

I love the preface. It's wonderful. So they would be ashamed that anyone would be using it. I'll deal with that one later. I'll skip to that one.

01:11:49

He said that the USB has manuscripts that are 1 ,800 years older than any manuscript that the

01:11:56

King James had. Some of the manuscripts Stephanus used. He used at least one 8th century minuscule.

01:12:01

He used some 10th century minuscule. So that would make some of the manuscripts underneath the modern version state about 200

01:12:07

BC. I don't think there are any New Testament Greek manuscripts in 200 BC. So that's unfortunately not quite accurate on James' part, but we can all make mistakes sometimes.

01:12:16

I'm sure that I do many times. So Ephesians 3 .9, fellowship versus ministration.

01:12:22

So there actually is some manuscript support for it in my thing over there, the

01:12:28

Pickering's Family 35. I want to know what Paul wrote. Of course, we want to know what Paul wrote.

01:12:33

The question is, how do we know? And the way we know is by believing what God says about his own words' preservation.

01:12:39

We know that God promised to preserve every word that he inspired. He promised those words would be available to every generation of believers.

01:12:45

He promised that the church would be the institution through which that preservation would take place. So we believe what God says, and those are the glasses which we use to evaluate textual data.

01:12:54

And notice he didn't give any citations from someone who says, oh, we don't care what papyri say. We're against papyri.

01:13:01

Well, I mean, it's a debate. Maybe he has quotes for people who say that. I've never seen them, but maybe he has some.

01:13:06

Revelation 16 .5, holy one versus shall be. The Stefanus 15 .50 had holy one.

01:13:12

The Elzevir 16 .24 had holy one. Basically, James is trying to argue about certain positions on his spectrum, but I don't need to prove anything specific in my spectrum.

01:13:23

Anything from the majority text to TR preferred to TR perfect all proves my position.

01:13:28

So once he comes over to my site and becomes at least majority text, we can have another debate about different editions of the

01:13:34

TR and stuff like that. It'll be great. But until that time, I just need to prove anything on my spectrum here. Okay, let's see here.

01:13:43

Different things with jewels. He said that's lexically superior. I just looked in my Hebrew concordance, the modern

01:13:50

Hebrew lexicon, and they still have question marks by some of the terms for jewels. So they're not that easy to figure out.

01:13:55

I'm certainly glad. More evidence we have, fantastic. Granville Sharpe rule. I love the Granville Sharpe rule.

01:14:01

It's fantastic. Jude 4 has a Granville Sharpe rule in the TR that's not in the critical text. There's actually at least one more text with a

01:14:08

Granville Sharpe rule in the TR than there are in the UBS text. So the TR actually has more

01:14:14

Granville Sharpe constructions proving the deity of Christ than the critical text does. Granville Sharpe is wonderful. Romans 9 .5

01:14:20

is not a mistranslation. It teaches that Jesus is God in the King James Version.

01:14:25

So he said that I gave a blast of quotes who are not connected to reality. Now, I agree with him that what the

01:14:32

Nestle -Allen editors said about their own text is not connected to reality. I agree. But he's defending the text by the people who said these things.

01:14:40

I'm not talking about the individuals who translated the LSB into English. They are probably much more similar to our beliefs, and we're very thankful for that.

01:14:49

But the people who made the Greek New Testament that he's defending said those things. So do I agree that what the people who made the

01:14:55

Greek New Testament he's defending said and the Old Testament he's defending, that those principles are not connected to reality?

01:15:01

I do. Because what God says is reality, not what they said. But he has to defend those are not just random liberals out there.

01:15:09

Those are the editors of his text. So he says that the

01:15:15

TR was all that they had in 1689. Well, that means that it has to be right.

01:15:20

Because then if that's all they had, then his text was not preserved pure in all ages.

01:15:26

So if it's all they had for several centuries, it must be the right text. Because God promises that every single one of the words that he inspired would be preserved.

01:15:36

And those words would be received by the churches. So whether or not they had access to some specific reading out there or not, if it was all they had, that means that was the text of the church.

01:15:45

And God promised to preserve the text of the church. He says that if you're going to be this, you have to go with a

01:15:51

Latin Vulgate because that was used for a long time. No, because Matthew 5, 18 and 19 says that God would preserve,

01:15:57

Jesus said, not one jot or tittle. He's talking about original language words. Original language words would be perfectly reserved.

01:16:04

That's what God said. He didn't promise that words in a translation would be perfectly preserved. So that's why his position is wrong.

01:16:10

So that's why it's not the Latin Vulgate, because of what the Bible says. Did you notice that James still didn't exegete any passage on what scripture taught about separation?

01:16:19

Oh, separation. We didn't do that either. About preservation of scripture, okay? And if you watch his debate with Ehrman, he doesn't exegete what scripture says about preservation.

01:16:28

I'm glad he debated Bart Ehrman. It's great. When Ehrman asked him why he believed that there were no readings lost, he didn't say because God said he'd preserve his words.

01:16:36

He said because Kurt Allen said something about tenacity. Well, I'm glad Kurt Allen said something about tenacity. Kurt Allen also edited the text that he's using, and that text has conjectural emendations.

01:16:47

So did Kurt Allen actually mean what James says? Do we believe that God preserved his words because of Kurt Allen, or do we believe it because God said that he would do it?

01:16:56

Okay, so those are some objections. I'm glad that James rejects conjectural emendation contrary to the editors of the text he's defending.

01:17:04

That's fantastic. Maybe he's part of the way to my position already, okay? He said that these are irrelevant quotes.

01:17:10

Is it irrelevant what the people who edited his own text thought? Is that irrelevant? I don't think that's irrelevant, okay?

01:17:16

It's not irrelevant. So, since the textus receptus was received by God's people, the, oh, oh, he said there's no, he said, give me some examples of where there's no text.

01:17:29

So even, you can even see from this, the UBS text he's defending, he isn't even aware of this. You get, this is a very critical text person.

01:17:36

This is a preface written by Bruce Metzger. You can get Ruben Swanson, New Testament Greek manuscripts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

01:17:42

He gives the lines of the manuscripts. Whether you know Greek or not, look at the lines. There's lots of lines where there's a

01:17:48

U with nothing next to it. That means there's no manuscript that reads just like that line.

01:17:54

There's lines with a W with nothing next to it, lines with a U, nothing next to it. This isn't some King James only fanatic.

01:17:59

This is actually a critical text person book endorsed by Bruce Metzger. But notice James wasn't aware of that because it's not easy to find out in the

01:18:07

UBS text, okay? That may not be his fault. He didn't realize that it's okay, okay? But there are hundreds of places where the

01:18:14

UBS text in just groups of words has no manuscript evidence at all behind it.

01:18:21

And so let's say, let's concede for the sake of argument that there's a few places like that in the TR and he's got hundreds of texts in his text with no manuscript support.

01:18:30

I win the debate. My text is better than his. Maybe you don't become TR perfect. You become TR preferred.

01:18:35

Well, that's fine. I still win the topic of this debate. So since the people of God rejected the

01:18:41

Nestle -Allen text for centuries, one might highlight, to highlight its antithesis with the Old Received Bible, you might call it the

01:18:47

Textus Reactus. Or if you're going to speak in modern way, you could call it the Textus Rejectus. So this is a

01:18:53

Textus Receptus versus a Textus Rejectus debate, okay? Now, it's not just that we have readings with no manuscript evidence at all.

01:19:00

There's also many, many readings in the Nestle -Allen text that have a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, one manuscript with nothing else.

01:19:08

So Matthew 4 .23, John 4 .27, John 9 .22, John 14 .7,

01:19:14

1 Peter 2 .25. There's readings where they follow only one manuscript against all others.

01:19:21

There are many readings where the Nestle -Allen text rejects around 99 .9 % of the manuscript evidence.

01:19:27

So for example, Luke 2 .52. It's not the most significant reading in the world, but just to give one example. It follows 0 .1

01:19:34

% of the manuscript evidence. You can go to Wilbur Pickering's site. He gives, unlike the UBS, his apparatus gives you the percentages of Greek manuscripts that support different readings.

01:19:43

Search for 0 .1, search for 0 .2, search for 0 .3. You'll find tons of places where way over 99 % of the manuscript evidence is rejected.

01:19:52

Now, that's according to the presuppositions of the UBS editors, that makes sense because God didn't preserve his word according to the text that he's defending, the people that made it.

01:20:00

So we can see that James is indeed defending a Textus Rejectus instead of a Textus Receptus.

01:20:06

The Nestle -Allen text also fails to meet the model of scripture because it's a patchwork. It doesn't resemble any actual manuscript that exists on the face of the earth in significant portions of it, in larger sections of its text.

01:20:20

So modern eclectic practice, you just take individual readings that try to find a support for this one and for that one, but there's no proven existence in transmissional history of this type of text.

01:20:32

The idea is you pick a text here, pick a text there, but in terms of an actual manuscript that looks like this text over a longer passage, there aren't any passages like that.

01:20:42

So this is an impossible burden upon textual restoration since not only is the original text no longer extant in any known manuscript or text type, but no manuscript or group of manuscripts reflects this view, this text and its overall pattern of readings.

01:20:59

And there's very little attempt to defend the resultant sequential text as a transmissional entity.

01:21:05

In other words, not just this reading and that reading, but the actual passages as a whole, it doesn't look like anything that we actually have that exists.

01:21:14

So modern eclectic theory underneath this text fails a probability test. It doesn't exist as a connected sequence of texts.

01:21:22

It's transmissionally unlikely that a short sequence of variants would leave no supporting witness within the manuscript tradition.

01:21:28

The probability that such would occur over and over and over and over again in the large majority of the text we're going to choose is essentially zero.

01:21:38

So for example, in Matthew 20, 23, you've got seven variant units, and the actual text of Matthew 20, 23, as you have it in the

01:21:46

Nestle -Allen has no support, all the actual verse itself. Luke 6, 26, five variants together as a whole, just that one verse, no support.

01:21:55

Mark 11, 3, only two variant units, and the witnesses to each one that the Nestle chooses are mutually exclusive.

01:22:01

So the text as a whole, just that one verse, no support. Mark 4, 27, same thing.

01:22:07

Acts 17, 26. Mark 7, 24. Mark 14, 72. Lots of texts in the

01:22:13

Nestle that have no support as a whole. When you get more than one verse, it's even worse.

01:22:19

You have quickly, quickly get to a place where there's no support for it at all. In contrast to that, the texts that underlie the

01:22:27

Textus Receptus type of text actually is in actual, you know, consecutive passages in manuscripts.

01:22:34

You have a lot of things like that. If you were to open the opening pages of Mark in NA 27, pages 106 to 110, there are no

01:22:43

Greek manuscripts that look like those pages, no actually extant manuscript that we have that looks like those consecutive pages.

01:22:50

The texts that he thinks are the best are full of errors. Now you can contrast that with TR manuscripts.

01:22:56

So for example, I have some pictures, if you can get to them, pictures of manuscripts from different centuries that are copied in different locations, that the whole book, this is the whole book of Titus, the whole book of Titus is exactly identical in these copies.

01:23:10

And this is because the TR is copied in such a way that it looks like an actual text that's preserved.

01:23:16

So Manuscript 2028 from St. John in the Isle of Patmos, Manuscript 2723 from Greece.

01:23:24

We've got a bunch of manuscripts that are exactly the same for whole books in the TR in contrast to the critical text.

01:23:30

Thank you. Absolutely brilliant.

01:23:45

So we're going to now go ahead and take a 10 -minute break. Again, write your questions on the

01:23:51

Dead Man's Walking podcast notebooks that are on the ends of the pews.

01:23:56

Get those questions into Pastor Jeff Rice, and we'll start sorting through those questions.

01:24:03

10 minutes. See you back here in 10 minutes. It's a blessing to have everyone here.

01:24:11

I just want to again thank both James and Thomas for participating in this debate. We're going to begin on our cross -examination portion of today's debate.

01:24:20

We will start with Brother James asking Thomas, cross -examining him, asking him questions and whatnot.

01:24:26

So I would ask that the questions be stuck on point, and that God would be glorified through the pursuing of truth.

01:24:37

All right. Thank you very much. Brother Ross, is there any rendering in the

01:24:44

King James Version of the Bible that can be improved? There's no verse in Scripture that promises that God would perfectly translate the

01:24:55

Bible into English. I personally, more as a matter of pastoral concern, prefer to say if I think there's a translation, you question or translate it more than one way.

01:25:04

I personally say this could also be rendered as, versus this would be better rendered as. But that's, I don't have a verse that says that.

01:25:11

And if you want to say that, whatever you think about that, it doesn't deal with the fundamental question of this debate, which is any part of that King James -only spectrum in his book,

01:25:20

I still win the debate. Is the Legacy Standard Bible's translation of Acts 5 .30

01:25:29

superior to that of the King James Version of Acts 5 .30? Let me go to, before you start my answer time,

01:25:36

I'd like to look at Acts 5 .30. Where is Acts 5 .30? Okay, now I'm going to answer. So it is true that they both, that they raised up Jesus by hanging him on a tree, and it's also true that they slew

01:25:47

Jesus and hanged him on a tree. I would actually say that if that's, you know, your key debate example of a mistranslation,

01:25:54

I think the King James is going to do really, really well, because they did slay him, and they did hang him on a tree, and that's true.

01:26:01

Again, if you prefer they slew him by hanging on a tree, it doesn't fundamentally change the question, which is, you know, how did

01:26:08

God preserve his Word? So the participle there is translated by every

01:26:14

English translation that I'm aware of. The New King James translates it by hanging him on a tree.

01:26:21

The King James is the only one that does it. Are you literally saying that that is equally valid a translation as saying whom you put to death by hanging him on a tree?

01:26:30

I think that, you know, anyone who studied Greek grammar says, hey, you've read Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the

01:26:37

Basics. There's lots of categories of participle. I am not saying this participle isn't a participle of means.

01:26:43

It could be a participle of means, but you've got temporal manner, means, cause, condition, concession, purpose, result. You've got a lot of different categories of participle.

01:26:51

They did slay him, and they also hanged him on a tree, and they'd also slew him by hanging him on a tree. It's fine, but go ahead.

01:26:58

If that's the best you've got, I think we're going to be doing okay. Okay, Ephesians 3 .9.

01:27:09

Since you have said over and over again that every generation has to have the text for that to be the

01:27:21

Word of God, then can you show me anyone before the year 1200 that read

01:27:28

Ephesians 3 .9 the way you do in the King James Version of the Bible? So that question would be answered several different ways.

01:27:35

So anyone on the majority text, the TR -perfect position, I would still win this debate.

01:27:41

If somebody is saying this reading is wrong because it's not in the vast majority of manuscript, it's a minority reading, then

01:27:48

I win the debate because there's so many more of those in James. Then you become TR -preferred, you become majority text, but then

01:27:54

I still have a better translation than James does. So that's how a TR -preferred person, TR -preferred person or majority text person would say it's administration.

01:28:02

A TR -perfect person might point out that, say, in Pickering's Greek New Testament according to Family 35, he says in his footnote there's 10 % support for the

01:28:13

TR reading. Maybe it's lower than that, but we haven't classified all the miniscules yet, so no one's actually collated them all.

01:28:20

But let's say it's lower than that. Well, okay, then you don't become TR -perfect, you become TR -preferred. But TR -perfect people, their answer would say we should, in this case, accept a minority reading.

01:28:29

It is very different to accept a minority reading and say 1 % of the time and accept a minority reading 99 % of the time like James does.

01:28:38

So back to Ephesians 3 .9, who in the first four centuries, since you were talking about every generation, had that reading?

01:28:49

Well, look, I can't see what every single person in the fourth century had. I can't interview them,

01:28:55

I can't go back and, you know, talk to them and take a video and see, hey, what one New Testament did you have? But since God promises in his word that we would have a perfect, that the words of God, not manuscripts, that the words that God inspired would be available to every generation, since that's what he promised, we have an infallible reason to conclude that he did that.

01:29:15

So we know that he did it just the same way we know that Abraham existed, even if we don't have contemporary archaeological evidence for Abraham.

01:29:22

So whatever is in the King James Version, because of the promise of God, even if there is no evidence in history whatsoever, your belief is every generation had that reading even over against, even though you can't provide any evidence for it.

01:29:38

James, whether somebody's majority text or TR Preferred or TR Perfect, anywhere on that spectrum, it still is a better position for me.

01:29:48

So if you decide, you know what, based on, if someone says, based on the Bible's promises of preservation,

01:29:55

Ephesians 3 .9 should have the reading administration, I could see somebody arguing for that. I could see why someone would say that, okay?

01:30:01

Then you're TR Preferred instead of TR Perfect. But James's text has hundreds of texts that have no support in just short phrases.

01:30:10

So the argument he's making, he can't consistently make his argument against Ephesians 3 .9 and support his text.

01:30:16

Now, if he becomes business priority, he can't. Okay, so we're running into, you specifically made, well, let me put it this way.

01:30:27

Can you show me a manuscript, since you're going this direction, can you show me a manuscript from the 5th century that is identical to the

01:30:37

TR and say, you brought up Titus, in all of Titus? In all of Titus, we don't have that many manuscripts from the 5th century.

01:30:47

My point isn't that, you know, there's tons and tons and tons of manuscripts where the scribe never got sleepy, but the

01:30:53

TR type text is a continual text. There are manuscripts that look very much like it.

01:30:59

Manuscript, it's a text you can see that exists through history. The Nestle -Allen text is chopped up into little bits, and there's no manuscript that has anything close to the book of Titus for any long portion of it.

01:31:12

Now, there's no way for me to know he'd ask me about a manuscript from the 5th century from, you know, for that Titus, so no, of course

01:31:18

I can't, I don't have them with me. Is it your position that they exist, or that you just not are familiar with them?

01:31:25

My position is that God promised that he'd preserve all the words that he inspired, and those words would be available to the churches.

01:31:33

It's not my responsibility to show how every single Christian throughout history was able to do that.

01:31:40

I know that it was possible because God said it. I know that we have an actual literal descent from Adam because the

01:31:46

Bible says so, but I can't prove that I'm descended from Adam, so I don't have the text of every single person who lived, you know, and can prove it all the way through, but since God said it, therefore those words were available.

01:31:58

So you think that your understanding, your particular definition of preservation, and your particular understanding of inspiration gives you the right to make a parallel between biblical teachings about our descent from Adam and the specific readings that Erasmus came up with while extracting the

01:32:22

Greek text from a Latin commentary in 1516? Are they really connected in that way?

01:32:28

The Bible says, in Isaiah 59 -21, as for me, this is my covenant with him, saith the

01:32:33

Lord, my spirit that is upon me, and my words which I have put in my mouth shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed -seed, saith the

01:32:43

Lord from henceforth and forever. So the Bible clearly says that all of God's words would be available to every generation of believers.

01:32:49

Now, we can talk about the specifics of how we apply that, and maybe James thinks that he would apply it a little differently than me, okay?

01:32:58

But the Nestle -Allen text doesn't even try to obey what this verse says, but there's a lot within the spectrum that I'm defending.

01:33:05

There's a lot of ways you can at least be honest with Isaiah 59 -21. So it's really hard to follow this.

01:33:14

So you threw out Luke 2 -52, and you made the assertion that I think it was less than 1 % or something in regards to Luke 2 -52.

01:33:31

What specific variant are you making a claim about there? Because the

01:33:36

LSB says, and Jesus was advancing in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and men, which is pretty much what the

01:33:43

King James Version says, too. So over and over again, you keep saying there's no manuscript evidence.

01:33:48

There's no manuscript evidence. Isn't it true that what you're saying is that when you talk about manuscript evidence, you're not saying that there are not manuscripts that contain all those words.

01:33:58

What you're saying is that to make the textual decisions at various variant points, you're looking for a manuscript that somebody else made all those exact same decisions in antiquity.

01:34:10

Isn't that what you're actually saying? Well, specifically for Luke 2 -52, we're talking about the words ente, where the

01:34:16

Nestle -Allen follows only aleph. So only aleph has the right reading. So every manuscript in the world other than aleph doesn't have ente.

01:34:24

So that's the answer to Luke 2 -52. Now, does that fit what Scripture teaches about preservation? Not very well. And some of the arguments

01:34:29

James is making against me actually redound to his text a bazillion times more.

01:34:35

And it is true that now there's those specific problems, but it is true. His text doesn't have those specific readings, even for a verse or two verses or a paragraph.

01:34:45

No text looks like your printed Nestle -Allen text for any significant length of the

01:34:51

Bible in many, many, many passages. All right. Do you... Well, I didn't stop my timer for that when he was looking that up.

01:34:59

Do you want... You should get time for... Yeah, would you mind? We'll do 30, 45 seconds additional.

01:35:04

Okay, so let me just follow up on that. So the actual data shows that Sinaiticus W579, what

01:35:12

W is a Byzantine manuscript, has te. Sinaiticus and L have ente.

01:35:22

And none of that has anything to do with the actual translation itself. So is that really your assertion that these

01:35:30

Greek texts are somehow violating a view of preservation because it's putting forward the reality that there's a variant in regards to an article?

01:35:42

Seriously? N is a preposition, not an article, but the... Ente, ente, okay.

01:35:47

Ente is what I'm referring to. Notice here that that was one of many examples, but what we are saying is that even for small groups of words, something like Jesus' words on the cross,

01:35:57

Eli, Eli, Lama, Sabachthani, even those handful of words, there's no manuscript that has the

01:36:04

Nestle -Allen reading in just those words. This is not a text that exists in any actual manuscript for large sections of text, while the

01:36:12

TR type text does. There's whole books that are exactly identical and many other texts that are very, very similar because they were copying them like they're the

01:36:21

Word of God. Wonderful, all right. So we will now switch these rules, and we're going to have

01:36:27

Thomas now ask James for 10 minutes doing a cross examination.

01:36:32

So I'll turn the time over to Thomas to do the exact same thing that we just saw for White. Thank you for those questions,

01:36:43

James. Matthew 4 .4 says, but he answered and said, it is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

01:36:51

Based on the presuppositions of the Nestle -Allen editors, how can a person live by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God?

01:36:59

How can they know those for sure? Well, my friend, your entire presentation has been based upon a just massive error, and that is that if you're using the

01:37:09

Nestle -Allen text, that you agree with all the editors, and of course the editors come from many different perspectives, in regards to alleged presuppositions regarding the nature of Scripture.

01:37:19

The reality is what's wonderful about a critical text is that the critical text gives you the opportunity of looking at the manuscripts and making decisions for yourself.

01:37:30

So I'm not going to answer for some, whoever you think an editor is, because they had lots of different perspectives.

01:37:36

That's not what the debate is about. That's not what the debate is about. The debate is about, is the LSB superior to the

01:37:42

King James Version in giving us the words that were written by the apostles? That's a completely different issue.

01:37:51

So maybe I'll ask this one too, maybe it'll help. So Matthew 5, 18, 19,

01:37:56

Christ says, "'Till heaven and earth pass, not one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled.

01:38:03

Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments and shall teach men so shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whosoever shall do and teach them the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.'"

01:38:12

So there the Bible says we're able to be certain about even every single

01:38:18

Hebrew letter of Scripture so that we can obey them all. How can you, from your presuppositions, be certain about every single letter of the

01:38:28

Bible? Well, again, the issue is not, I don't believe that's an accurate understanding of what

01:38:33

Jesus is talking about. He's not talking about textual transmission and translations of English translations in 17th century.

01:38:40

What he is saying is that his word will remain valid.

01:38:45

The law actually remains valid. Nothing is taken away. And anyway, it teaches anyone to break even the least of these things will be least in the kingdom of heaven.

01:38:53

That's his point. His point has nothing to do with the transmission of the text of Scripture or scribes down the way.

01:39:01

So why do I have confidence in the transmission of the text of Scripture? Because the Bible itself says that God gives the

01:39:08

Scripture as a guidance for the church. And God is going to put just as much effort into the preservation of the text as he did the inspiration of the text.

01:39:18

The issue is the mechanism whereby he does this. The mechanism is the entire manuscript tradition over time, not a

01:39:28

Roman Catholic priest in 1516 rushing to get something to print and using half a dozen manuscripts.

01:39:37

So in the Great Commission in Matthew 28, 19, and 20, Christ told his church to be able, that they would make disciples, baptize them, and teach them to observe all things whatsoever.

01:39:49

How can the church observe all things whatsoever God commands, even jots and tittles of it?

01:39:57

Was that something that was possible for churches through all ages, or are there significant numbers of words that were buried in the sands of Egypt and unavailable for century after century?

01:40:06

Okay, so I reject the buried in the sands of Egypt. I would simply point out that I was just asking you to provide evidence from the early centuries of manuscripts that give

01:40:15

TR readings and you demurred to do so. You just simply said, well, I believe God promised, and so I'm going to do that.

01:40:21

The reality is that even with the discovery of the papyri manuscripts, the variants that are contained in them were already known from the manuscripts that were known from the medieval period and from the periods after that.

01:40:34

So it's not a matter of being buried in the sands of Egypt, but it does point one thing out.

01:40:40

There is a key text promoting the deity of Christ in John 1, 18 that you identified as an

01:40:47

Arian text. It is not. And it wasn't just buried in the sands of Egypt.

01:40:52

It's found in the earliest manuscripts of John. But then when we find the papyri, they substantiate what was already known in those later manuscripts that goes against the majority reading.

01:41:04

And so that's something that we should rejoice in, not something that we should attack. Is that text you say is a key deity of Christ text?

01:41:13

Is it in the absolutely awful New World Translation? And if it's so, how come the

01:41:18

JWs, when they corrupt their Bible so many times, didn't realize that they were actually supporting the deity of Christ in John 1, 18?

01:41:24

That is a completely fallacious question because it's based upon the genetic fallacy. I think it's pretty obvious to everybody.

01:41:30

Just because it's in the New World Translation, it must be bad. They used the Westcott and Hort 1881, for crying out loud.

01:41:35

And they didn't even translate that correctly. They even skipped words at John 14, 14 when you have prayer to Jesus.

01:41:42

They don't believe that Jesus is the monogamous theos, the unique God who exegetes the

01:41:47

Father. But that's what the four earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John actually state.

01:41:53

And I want to know what John wrote, not what someone later thought he should write.

01:42:00

And so John 1, 18 is a key text. And to simply dismiss it in that fashion because, well, they used the

01:42:07

Westcott and Hort text, is a genetic fallacy with a capital genetic. So speaking of John and Jesus is only begotten, doesn't the 1689

01:42:18

Baptist Confession and also actual, you know, plenty of good manuscript sources show that only begotten is actually a better translation than unique?

01:42:27

Isn't that actually pretty well established? The 1689 is not a foundation for translating monogamies.

01:42:36

And no one claims that it is. So I'm not even sure what the question here. Does that have to do with John 1, 18? Or does that have to do with...

01:42:42

– That was a translation question. Only begotten would seem to be a much better support for the eternal procession, eternal generation of the

01:42:49

Son. – I disagree. – All right. Proverbs 35 and 6 says, every word of God is pure.

01:42:56

He is a shield of them that put their trust in him. Add thou not into his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.

01:43:02

Is it a sin to preach and teach and love and receive even one word other than what

01:43:09

God wrote in the original autographs? The Proverbs is not referring people to original manuscripts and talking about textual transmission at that point in time.

01:43:18

And I think the application of that is really, really, really straining things. This is, if you want to apply it to someone who is purposefully changing, if you want to apply that to the

01:43:28

Jehovah's Witnesses who specifically do hide texts, words in their text, hid references to Jesus' Yahweh or something like that, great, fine, wonderful.

01:43:37

But the actual application is believe everything that God has said, practice Tota Scriptura and Sola Scriptura, and live out the counsel of God.

01:43:47

It's not telling people who can't read Greek that they need to access the original manuscripts themselves.

01:43:52

Or Hebrew for that matter. Something that we see that all through the canon, Deuteronomy 12, whatsoever things

01:43:58

I command you observe, do it, you shall not add or take away from it. Proverbs 30, Revelation 22. So all those texts where it says not to add or take away from even one word of scripture, that's only if it's intentional.

01:44:10

You can't disobey those commands unintentionally. Well, again, you're mixing so many different categories here.

01:44:16

We are to believe everything that God has commanded and we are to obey everything that God has commanded.

01:44:22

So when I find Desiderius Erasmus importing texts into the TR from the

01:44:28

Latin Vulgate, what am I going to do? It's in the King James. That's not what those texts are about.

01:44:35

That's not what they're, it's not talking about doing textual criticism. To try to apply it to those things is to miss the actual application that it's making that all of us can live out and all of us should live out.

01:44:47

We should ask questions. What about 1 John 3, 1 and the fact that the

01:44:53

TR is missing an affirmation of our sonship of Christ? But we should look at that as an issue of examination of manuscripts, not, oh, wow, if you lived in a century when the majority of manuscripts didn't have that, you must have been sinning against God.

01:45:09

No, you weren't. You weren't. Well, I think that the Bible teaches that there were no centuries when the words of God weren't available.

01:45:16

So even like Revelation 22, 18 and 19, where it says not to add or take away from the words of this book, that isn't actually talking about it being a terrible sin to add or take away from the actual words.

01:45:27

It's just talking about the teachings, which you can obey the teachings without having the words. It's talking about the book of Revelation and it's talking about, it's not, again, it's not, if you want to say, well, they're warning people to not make specific changes to the text.

01:45:40

Fine, that's not what we're talking about. None of these are specific changes to the text where people were trying to hide something or change something.

01:45:47

Just like 1 John 3, 1. My Legacy Standard Bible says, 1 John 3, 1 says, we are the children of God.

01:45:54

Your King James does not say that. That was what was understood historically. I can take that all the way back, but there are people who had

01:46:02

Byzantine manuscripts. They don't have that. So what does that mean? Were they missing part of the word of God?

01:46:09

You say the promise of God was, that would never be not there. I say the promise of God is that it's found in the entirety of the manuscript tradition.

01:46:19

And there were times where people were in certain areas where they didn't have that affirmation, 1

01:46:24

John 3, 1. That is historical reality. So in Revelation 20, so let's say it's just the book of Revelation.

01:46:30

We can know for sure where all the, wherever, whatever we conclude, you know, Nestle, Allen, UBS, you know, majority text,

01:46:38

TR preferred, TR perfect. We can know for sure where every single one of those words are. How can, on your position, how can somebody know for sure where the words of the book of Revelation are?

01:46:48

Be certain. I know we're out of time. That is time. But yeah, you guys, I think that's permissible right now. You really don't want to go to the book of Revelation for that because it is the

01:46:54

TR that is an absolute mess in the book of Revelation and demonstrates that the text it presents was not known in the early church and was not available to every generation.

01:47:05

You don't want to go there because that is your weakest area is the actual text of the book of Revelation.

01:47:14

Do I still have more time? Nope. That is the time right there. So we'll now turn the mic back over to James White to continue in this cross -examination.

01:47:22

James, you have another 10 minutes. And go ahead whenever you are ready. Okay, I need to focus.

01:47:35

We've looked at a number of different texts. So I need to understand what it is you are actually trying to assert.

01:47:45

When you looked at Revelation 16 .5 and you have a reading there that goes against every citation of the book of Revelation in history up until the time of Beza, basically.

01:48:01

You referred to your spectrum would allow you to still, quote -unquote, win the debate.

01:48:09

I guess that's the most important thing. What do you mean by that? Isn't it important that we know whether John wrote hosios rather than osaminos?

01:48:18

Isn't that the most important thing? It is important to know what the correct words in that verse of Revelation and in every other verse of Revelation are.

01:48:26

And on my position, I think we can know for sure where those words are. Now, I personally would answer that question one way.

01:48:35

Somebody who is slightly different on the TR perspective might answer it a slightly different way. Like, so a

01:48:41

Byzantine priority person would say, yep, it's definitely Holy One. TR preferred person will probably say it's

01:48:47

Holy One. And we can even see that in the TRs that are before and after the King James. It's in the

01:48:53

Stephanos TR has Holy One. The Elsevier 16 .24 has Holy One. A TR perfect person would say that Beza said he had a manuscript and you can even see

01:49:02

Curt Allen and Barbara Allen in their text in the New Testament say that there's many manuscripts that have been lost and so Beza did have a manuscript and there might've been numbers of manuscripts that were available to him that we don't have anymore.

01:49:13

So, but if you don't like that answer and you become a TR preferred person instead of being a Nassau Allen person after this debate,

01:49:19

I'll be very happy for you because at least you're taking the word seriously. But in regards to our debate, is the

01:49:27

LSB reading of Revelation 16 .5 more representative of the entire history of the

01:49:36

Christian faith's understanding of Revelation 16 .5 than the

01:49:41

King James? Yes or no? So the majority text person who would say that the

01:49:48

TR is better would say the LSB is better in Revelation 16 .5 and it's worse in a thousand other places where it falls.

01:49:55

Okay, how about Thomas Ross? I'm not worried about those other people. They're not up here debating. For Thomas Ross, does the

01:50:01

LSB represent the historical reading from generation to generation of Revelation 16 .5

01:50:09

or does the King James? So in Revelation 16 .5, let me finish what

01:50:14

I was gonna say, if you don't mind. So there's multiple answers that people who take my position could give to that and if you want to conclude that the

01:50:24

Stephanus and the Elsevier reading is better in Revelation 16 .5 for the words holy one because of what scripture teaches about its own preservation, that I totally can understand that.

01:50:35

Revelation 16 .5 is holy one is not in, or Esamonos is not in any Baptist confession of faith unlike many, many other

01:50:42

TR readings. If we're gonna say that, you know, because Esamonos is wrong,

01:50:48

I can see a good case for why somebody would argue that and many people on my side would agree and some of them wouldn't.

01:50:54

But whatever you conclude for that, James's argument undermines his own text the thousand times more as he's making it against Esamonos in Revelation 16 .5.

01:51:04

I'm gonna keep asking until you answer the question. Thomas Ross, forget about majority text people, forget about TR perfect people.

01:51:11

I don't care about any of those categories. I'm asking you a question. Does the legacy standard

01:51:18

Bible give you what was known throughout the history of the church as the reading at Revelation 16 .5

01:51:29

or does the King James version do that? I don't wanna hear about anybody else. Please answer the question.

01:51:35

Sure, so I think it's interesting that James doesn't wanna hear about the King James only perspectives in his own book that are on my position.

01:51:43

What do I personally, and what I personally think about it is actually not crucial to this debate topic.

01:51:51

I am sympathetic personally to the view that Esamonos was in a text that Beza had.

01:51:58

Beza referred to numbers of manuscripts that we may not have anymore. But if somebody says Esamonos is wrong and it's

01:52:05

Hoseos, we can see the Hoseos in other TR editions and somebody argues for Hoseos saying that Esamonos doesn't fit what scripture teaches

01:52:13

I can respect that. He's arguing scripturally. He's trying to say we believe what God promises about preserving his own word.

01:52:19

That's great. I appreciate those presuppositions. Those presuppositions will not get you to James's text.

01:52:25

It'll get you to somewhere on my spectrum. Okay, I tried. I tried.

01:52:31

Can you give me anyone in any source in the second century that has Esamonos? No. Third century.

01:52:38

Well, do we have any manuscripts of Revelation 16 in the second century at all? Okay, third century.

01:52:44

So tell me the earliest manuscript of Revelation 16. Well, we have two papyri manuscripts that are in the third century where they contain 16 .5.

01:52:52

I don't remember. I remember they contained 13. I'm asking, I'm trying to get an answer to a question because this is the difference between us.

01:52:59

You have a theological paradigm you have created with your understanding of preservation, all right?

01:53:06

And I am simply saying to you, I'm asking a simple question. There is a reading in the

01:53:12

Legacy Standard Bible that says the Holy One. There is a reading in the King James Version that says Esamonos and shall be.

01:53:20

Every historical source that is known to us today prior to Beza says what the

01:53:28

Legacy Standard Bible says. None say what the King James Version says. I'm asking

01:53:33

Thomas Ross, is the Legacy Standard Bible superior to the

01:53:39

King James at that point? And what I'm saying, James, is that I can concede everything that you just said and agree with you 100 % and say that shows that the

01:53:52

TR is a superior text because in so many other passages, it's better than the Legacy Standard Bible.

01:53:58

So it doesn't actually get you to a Nestle -Allen position. Whatever I say about it, I can make the most ridiculous answer.

01:54:04

I can make the best answer. It's not gonna get you to a Nestle -Allen text. And that's the debate topic. So it does not matter.

01:54:12

I could grab Swanson there, which of course I have in my library. I've had it for years. And by the way, it does not say what you said.

01:54:18

What it does is it lists manuscripts. It gives the variants and it lists the manuscripts that have the various readings to it.

01:54:25

So I could take that and we could look at any text, any text whatsoever. It would not matter because all you have to do is say, well,

01:54:36

I believe God's promises that every generation is gonna have it. And even if I can't find any evidence, then it's still okay because that's my conclusion.

01:54:47

Is there any reason to even continue having the conversation right now?

01:54:53

There certainly is because first of all, we should believe whatever God says about his own preservation, even if we don't have current evidence for it.

01:55:00

That's biblical. We do not get our conclusion about any biblical doctrine from evidence.

01:55:06

We get it from what scripture teaches and we use those presuppositions to look at evidence. Evidence is very good. I'm not against evidence.

01:55:12

Evidence is fantastic, but we do need to first exegete what scripture says. And once we see what scripture says, we look and see how

01:55:18

God fulfilled that. Now in Revelation 16, five, so Pickering says, we know for sure where God's words are.

01:55:27

He would take a somewhat different position on where those words are than a TR preferred person or a

01:55:32

TR perfect person. But at least he says we can know for sure. The Nestle -Allen position is all based upon rejecting what

01:55:39

God says about scripture's own preservation, which is why in James' book, King James' only controversy in his debates, he never gives anywhere close to those verses that I probably spoke too fast about, but that I gave in the first part of my presentation.

01:55:52

Sir, did you listen to the debate that I just did recently with the TR only advocate in Pennsylvania this past summer? Because it demonstrates what you just said is 1 ,000 % false.

01:56:02

What's the name of the person you're talking about? Oh, what was his name? Anybody remember? Van Cleef.

01:56:10

You exposited scripture in context in that debate. Yes, and in fact, well, I can't ask questions, but let me just put it this way.

01:56:17

If you actually just said to our audience that I have never presented a doctrine of preservation or exposited these texts, upon what basis would you dare to say so given

01:56:28

I've spent hours going through Psalm 12 and all of these texts on the dividing line and in other contexts demonstrating my position?

01:56:38

What I would say about that is at least in your... Obviously, I can't speak for every single thing. If you've preached through those books of the

01:56:44

Bible, I'm very thankful for that. But in your book on the King James' only controversy, if you just look at the index, text after text after text, it's crucial.

01:56:51

Isaiah 59, 21 isn't mentioned anywhere in the book. Matthew 28, 19 to 20 isn't exposited.

01:56:56

Matthew 5, 18, 19 is not exposited. Text after text, it's crucial on this topic, isn't anywhere in this book.

01:57:02

Then what did I say about preservation in the book? What you said in the book about preservation is that you think that the words are out there somewhere and hopefully we can recover them.

01:57:14

Out there somewhere. Okay, all right. We've gotten to a point.

01:57:19

I'll just stop there. Copy that. Okay, that's fine. Thank you, James. We will now do the same for Thomas Ross.

01:57:26

Whenever you are ready, I have my timer ready for you to start your 10 -minute cross -examination. Okay, thank you for that,

01:57:38

James. So in Reuben Swanson on page 12 of the introduction of his edition on Matthew, when he says there are, quote, lines of text in the

01:57:48

UBS 4 and in Westcott -Horth that have no manuscript support, unquote. And you go through that book and you find over 40,

01:57:55

Justin, Matthew, and Mark, and you keep going with Luke and John. What does he mean when he says that there are lines of text in the

01:58:02

UBS 4 and in Westcott -Horth that have no manuscript support when he says on page 12 of his introduction? Well, what he's not saying is that manuscripts do not contain those words.

01:58:10

What he's saying is that when we do textual analysis, if you're looking at a line of text and there are two variants in that line, and we just looked at one, at Luke 2 .52,

01:58:24

where the variant is whether you have an article or not. There are lots of variants in the New Testament in regards to articles, because the

01:58:31

Greek article is very difficult for people to understand. It was very easy to be lost because the form they would have would be similar to the endings of the words around it.

01:58:39

So this is well known to scholars. And so when you're looking at a line of text, if you have two places, there's two variants regarding articles.

01:58:50

What Swanson is saying is, well, the decisions of the editors can produce a text where, let's say, they included both articles, but the

01:59:00

Byzantine manuscripts didn't have it. Because remember, the Byzantine manuscripts are the majority text. We don't have time.

01:59:07

I would like to have time, but don't have time right now to go into why it's the majority text and the historical issues that brought that about, especially the rise of Islam and things like that.

01:59:17

But he's not saying that what's in that line that actually communicates the meaning of that line is not found in manuscripts.

01:59:26

What he's saying is in that exact form with those articles in those exact places is what he's referring to.

01:59:33

And obviously the Byzantine manuscripts and the TR is a later Byzantine text. It's a long answer. Well, you're asking, you threw out so many assertions, sir, that demonstrate that you don't do textual criticism, that it's hard to respond to them without providing the background information that someone like Dr.

01:59:55

Swanson would want to be put into the context of what he was saying. We'll go ahead and start with the next question.

02:00:01

Yeah, that's fine. And if you don't mind, I'll give you 30 seconds. But that's fine. Thank you for that,

02:00:06

James. So the words, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, those four words, according to Swanson, there's no manuscript that has those four words like there are in the

02:00:17

UBS. Is that the case? That even those four words, as they are - I have Swanson in front of me.

02:00:23

If you want to hand it to me, I'll take a look at it. Well, I've got Luke and John with me. I don't have Matthew and Mark. I can't comment on what

02:00:29

Swanson says in a book that I don't have with me. OK, fair enough, fair enough. In 1 Samuel - I mean, if you want to give me the reference, if you -

02:00:35

Eli, Eli, lama - That's OK. Reference, reference, please. No, you brought it up. Matthew 2746, I think. I'll get it for you.

02:00:43

But please don't use my time up for - Yeah, we'll go ahead and get the full minute. All right. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.

02:00:49

And so you are saying that - Oh, OK. And here's why.

02:00:55

I love it. Here's what the difference is. The Nestle All in 28th edition spells

02:01:03

Eli as Eli, Eda, lambda, Yoda. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.

02:01:11

So this is how you transliterate Aramaic into Greek, OK, which scribes would have no clue about.

02:01:20

The variant is, instead of using an Eda, it uses epsilon and an omega.

02:01:29

So Eloi, Eloi. So it's all of it. All of this is how you transliterate an

02:01:35

Aramaic phrase, Eli, Eli, into Greek. That's all it is. Has nothing to do with the meaning, has nothing to do with anything whatsoever.

02:01:44

And I can give you all the manuscripts that have the different readings right here. Sinaiticus, Vaticanus 33,

02:01:51

Vulgate, the Coptic, et cetera, et cetera. It's simply wrong to say there's no manuscripts that have these things.

02:01:58

These are understandable variants that are dealt with all the time. Yeah, I appreciate your pointing out that that variant isn't the most significant one, and that those four words aren't in any specific text as they are.

02:02:10

But in 1 Samuel 13 .1 and Judges 16 and 13, the LSB rejects the

02:02:15

Hebrew text as corrupt and follows the LXX against all excellent Hebrew manuscripts. How do you reconcile this with Christ's promise that they'll heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall know wise paths from the law to all be fulfilled?

02:02:26

Okay, gotcha. Sorry, this one's straightforward. Because the

02:02:31

Hebrew in Jeremiah chapter 31 says, though I was, in talking about the new covenant says, though I was a husband to them.

02:02:44

Look at the quotation in Hebrews chapter eight. It doesn't say though I was a husband to them.

02:02:49

It says, I did not care for them. Now that means that the writer to the book of Hebrews, the writer to the

02:02:55

Hebrews, is quoting from the Greek septuagint. Now the difference in Hebrew is just ga 'al and ba 'al.

02:03:02

So it's a small difference. But the point is, the writer to the Hebrews cites a textual variant, not only in Hebrews eight, but in Hebrews 10, when he says, a body you've prepared for me.

02:03:12

He uses the Greek septuagint. So the question you now have to ask yourself is, if you are interpreting the jot and tittle passage correctly, the

02:03:20

New Testament apostles did not do what you do. So your argument here is that we don't have all the words in the

02:03:27

Hebrew text, but it's okay, because that's what happens in the book of Hebrews. My argument here is that textual variation took place down through history.

02:03:35

The apostles of Jesus knew it, and they utilized the text that was available to them in the same way that the apostle

02:03:41

John, in John 12, 41, made his entire point in identifying Jesus as Yahweh, based upon the textual variant in the

02:03:49

Greek septuagint You've got to deal with the history, and I think the apostles understood those texts better than we do today.

02:03:56

– So it's fine to have readings in the Old Testament with no Hebrew manuscript support, because in your view, that's what the

02:04:02

New Testament apostles also did. And so therefore, Matthew 5, 18 can't mean what it looks like it means, just if you just read it.

02:04:08

– Brother Ross, to even ask a question, it's fine to have... I'm not in charge of that, okay?

02:04:15

And I've said nothing about readings that have no Hebrew manuscript support. I specifically said, in the example that I gave, that there was a variant in the

02:04:28

Hebrew between Baal and Gaal. – Well, I asked you about 1 Samuel 13. – Okay, and if they believe that the

02:04:35

Hebrew text, and I'm assuming, is that... – In 1 Samuel 13, the

02:04:41

LSB says the Hebrew text... Basically, it says the Hebrew text is errant, because it claims, erroneously, that the

02:04:47

Hebrew should be translated that Saul was one year old when he became king. And so therefore, they reject all known

02:04:52

Hebrew manuscripts to follow the LXX. – Okay, there are, I don't know, at least a dozen places in the

02:05:00

Old Testament where we have clear differences between Kings and Chronicles as to specific starting dates in regards to reigns and ages of individuals.

02:05:15

This goes back to the fact that in Hebrew, you did not have numbers. You used letters to represent numbers.

02:05:24

And therefore, there are variants that have to do with the numbers that were involved in very, very ancient texts.

02:05:31

And so everybody, including the King James translators, had to deal with those realities.

02:05:39

We have to do that today. And if you close your eyes to those realities, based upon some theory you've come up with as to what it must be to believe jots and tittles, you're going to end up having to create a fiction as to what those texts actually read.

02:05:55

There are issues in regards to how those numbers were transmitted in the Hebrew language, and so they chose to go with the

02:06:01

Greek Septuagint. – Okay, thank you, James. In John 17, 8, the Bible, Christ is speaking about the words that, well, let's read the verse.

02:06:09

For I've given unto them the words that thou gavest me, and they have received them, and have known surely that it came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me.

02:06:18

Passage never cited in your book on the King James only controversy. Now, the father gave the specific words of scripture to the son that he might give them to his elect people by his spirit, and his people would receive them.

02:06:27

We can see in Acts and Thessalonians, they would consistently receive the word, receive the word. Would that passage indicate that Christ, would

02:06:36

Christ's high priestly intercession guarantee that his people would have a received text mindset where instead of a restoring a lost text mindset, and do we know that, and this, let me just finish, sorry.

02:06:49

So would that also show that we have the right books of the canon because Christ prayed that his people would have the right words?

02:06:54

Do we know that we have the right books because we know we have the right words based on John 17? – No.

02:07:00

For the words which you gave me, I have given them. That's Jesus' teaching. So he has revealed to his disciples his teaching.

02:07:08

This has nothing to do with Romans. It has nothing to do with Galatians. It has nothing to do with Revelation. It has nothing to do with any of that stuff.

02:07:15

The words which you gave me, because Jesus says, my words, I hear, I've heard the Father speak, and as he speaks,

02:07:21

I speak. The words which you gave me, past tense, has nothing to do with future tense. There's nothing here about what's coming down the line.

02:07:28

I have given them, and they received them, and truly understood that I came forth from you, and they believed that you sent me.

02:07:35

So this is all talking about the relationship of Jesus to the disciples, and the fact that they have believed what he has given to them.

02:07:44

– Okay, thank you for that. In your debate with D .A. Waite, an hour and 21 minutes in, you said,

02:07:50

I believe that God preserved the text of Scripture in the same way that he determined– – I'm sorry, I'm sorry, wait a minute. Do you mean the radio program?

02:07:56

– Yeah, the radio program with D .A. Waite. You said, I believe that– – It wasn't a debate. – Okay, whatever it was, an hour and 21 minutes in, you said,

02:08:03

I believe that God preserved the text of Scripture in the same way that he determined the canon of Scripture. He led his church, he led his people, that's the way he preserved the text.

02:08:12

Do you still agree with what you said then about the canon and the preservation of Scripture being the same way?

02:08:17

Him leading his church, leading his people? Because I agree with your statement there 100%. It was great. – Well, and it's a shame that you don't realize that what

02:08:26

I said there is exactly why I believe that the preservation took place through the entire manuscript tradition, and didn't have to wait for Desiderius Erasmus in the 16th century.

02:08:36

– Thank you guys for the cross -examination portion. We are now going to proceed into the third presentation for today's evening.

02:08:47

Thank you, appreciate it. These are going to consist of eight -minute presentations from each one of the speakers here today.

02:08:55

Again, we will continue on with that format that we've had. James Waite will go first, followed by Thomas Ross.

02:09:01

And so, James, you are up. Keep it up there so everybody can see it.

02:09:20

Eight minutes, right? – Yes, sir. – All right. Okay, I begin with some apologies.

02:09:31

I had hoped, I really, really had hoped that we'd be able to focus upon the fundamental issue, but what this has turned into is a debate about theories of preservation.

02:09:44

And if you accept a particular theory of preservation, and you take certain texts of Scripture like Psalm 12, which hasn't come up, but that very frequently does come up, and apply it to the

02:09:56

King James Version of the Bible, I've not heard any evidence, any exegesis that would explain to us how you can take texts of Scripture and apply them to the

02:10:06

Anglican translation of the Bible between 1604 and 1611, as if that's what preservation is referring to.

02:10:15

But my concern is that so much stuff has just been thrown out that I've had to try to correct.

02:10:23

For example, statements that were saying, well, there's hundreds of lines where there's absolutely no manuscript evidence. Hopefully, I hope you've all heard, that wasn't true.

02:10:32

What was being said was the later manuscripts, the

02:10:38

Byzantine manuscripts, are very uniform because of certain historical realities.

02:10:45

For example, all of North Africa stopped making biblical manuscripts for some reason.

02:10:53

You know why? It's called Islam. And many of the earlier forms of the text were not preserved because there was only one area left after the rise of Islam that was still producing

02:11:09

Greek manuscripts. You know where it was? Byzantium. And then when what modern day

02:11:15

Istanbul fell, Constantinople fell, those scholars fled west and brought their manuscripts with them, and that's how you get even some of the manuscripts of the foundation of the

02:11:24

TR. There's all sorts of history to get into, and there's all sorts of textual critical material to get into to understand what was actually asserted.

02:11:33

This was the most important thing that I heard. The most important thing that was said was, well, if you're reading this, there's all sorts of text where there's no manuscript that has those readings.

02:11:43

That is an unfair analysis, an unfair conclusion to come to. But what's more important is you need to understand that when you hear, well, this person over here, he said bad stuff and he had something to do with Nessie Olin.

02:12:00

Folks, these texts are wide open to all of us. I am so thankful, for example, the

02:12:06

CBGM analysis is being done today. You can go online. I can send you the URLs and you can utilize these materials for yourself.

02:12:14

It is wide open to everyone. I am not dependent upon Kurt Olin or anyone else for the reading.

02:12:23

I can look at the manuscripts myself. You can't do that with a TR because there is no critical edition of it.

02:12:29

There are no notes at the bottom to tell you. And so there are people that think that's the best way to go.

02:12:36

You shouldn't have notes because we need to be certain. You know who those people are? They're called Muslims. And that's what they have in the

02:12:44

Quran. Even though the Quran contains textual variants in the manuscripts, they don't know it. And they think that makes the

02:12:51

Quran superior to the Bible because the Bible has those little notes in it. But they just don't know the variants that their manuscript, their book has.

02:12:59

The reality is any book that is transmitted prior to 1949 is going to have variants in it.

02:13:07

That's what happened. We can either close our eyes and ears or we can deal with the reality.

02:13:14

And I am not under the command and control of the editors of any particular text.

02:13:22

I can examine those things and I can examine the manuscripts and I can see that when you say, well, look, there's only, you know, like 1 % in support of Luke 12 to 2.

02:13:33

It had to do with one article. It had to do with a single article. And I didn't have time to actually analyze it.

02:13:39

But in all probability, that particular reading was because of how manuscripts look in what's called unseal or magistrial text and how easy it is for an article to be deleted.

02:13:52

No one is sitting around trying to change the Bible and trying to change its message.

02:13:57

The Jehovah's Witnesses, okay, they do that. But the people that are dealing with these things, if the folks in Munster, which is where all this work is being done, and I've been there and I've talked to these people, if the folks in Munster decide to try and change things, we would all see it and we would raise a hue and cry.

02:14:17

But that's not the case. And I am so thankful that in our day, when serious attacks are being made against the text of scripture, that we don't have to go back to a 16th century text and say, well, just believe what we say.

02:14:32

We can provide even earlier manuscript evidence demonstrating that God has preserved

02:14:38

His word. And so, for example, when Athanasius is standing against the entire church in supporting the deity of Christ and he's arguing against the

02:14:51

Arians, you know one thing we absolutely know? We can look at his biblical citations.

02:14:57

He was not quoting from the TR. He was not quoting from the Textus Receptus. And yet he was there defending the deity of Christ and that is the key issue.

02:15:09

If you take a later manuscript tradition and turn it into the standard, you will turn church history on its head.

02:15:18

That's why I can ask this gentleman, what about this particular? Well, you know, if you're this, you might do this, you might do this.

02:15:25

No, what is the evidence of the reading at Revelation 16?

02:15:30

Well, maybe he had a manuscript. We don't know. It may have disappeared. I don't know. You can't do that with Bart Ehrman.

02:15:38

Trust me, I've debated him. You can't do that with Bart Ehrman. You can't do that with the Muslim apologists out there that I've debated.

02:15:47

Adopting this type of abandonment of what God has given us in the gifts he's given to us in the manuscript tradition is the end of Christian apologetics, not the beginning.

02:16:00

And the certainty that is promised is not a certainty at all. Because as I said, there are numerous texts in the

02:16:09

Book of Revelation. I only looked at one. There are many others. The last six verses of the

02:16:15

Book of Revelation in the TR, Erasmus translated from his own Latin version. There are all sorts of words in there that no

02:16:21

Christian had ever seen in the Book of Revelation before. But once you say, well, we've got God's promise, then now you have to answer that question.

02:16:30

And that's why I deal with this issue and have to address these things because we want to bring a meaningful defense of the

02:16:37

New Testament text to all people, not just within the context of fundamentalism or Christian Facebook groups.

02:16:47

We want to be able to take it outside of that to everybody. And to do that, you have to deal with the fact that God has transmitted this text to us in a way that simply doesn't fit with this theory that is being presented.

02:17:00

And so the Legacy Standard Bible clearly at those texts is superior to the King James. And if you cannot admit that, then that means you have a tradition that is determining what you can see historically or what you can see right in the page in front of you.

02:17:14

And that's very troubling. Thank you. Thank you,

02:17:20

James. We will now have the third argument done by Thomas.

02:17:26

Again, this is going to be eight minutes. Following this, we will have our concluding statements.

02:17:32

Following that, a short break followed by questions and answers. So Thomas, it is your turn for this eight -minute presentation.

02:17:40

Thank you for that, James. Just quickly, God promised to preserve words, not individual manuscripts. The folks at Munster never said the church is involved in scriptures preservation at all.

02:17:50

I wanted to hit this earlier, ran out of time for it. But the reading Yahweh, which is all over the

02:17:56

Hebrew Old Testament of the LSB, there's no Hebrew manuscript in existence that has the vowel pointing for Yahweh.

02:18:01

So if you read the text as it actually stands and all the names that are Jehovah names in the

02:18:07

Bible, it's always Yehoah, Jehovah. Let's talk about how this affects apologetics.

02:18:13

The Nestle -Allen text, the tax inerrancy in Matthew 1, 7, and 10, it puts Asaph the scribe into the genealogy of the

02:18:21

Messiah instead of King Asa. It puts Amos into it instead of Amon in Matthew 1, 10.

02:18:27

In Mark 6, 22, it has a clear error where it says that Herodias is actually descended from Herod.

02:18:36

It's a clear error. And if you read Metzger's textual commentary, the UBS editors are perfectly willing to deny inerrancy in these passages.

02:18:44

Luke 3, 33, the Nestle -Allen text invents two fictional people that it puts into scripture.

02:18:50

Luke 23, 45, it puts in a tax inerrancy by saying the sun was eclipsed.

02:18:55

And that word for eclipse with the word for sun or moon is always used for an eclipse. Even if the word eclipse on its own can be used in different ways.

02:19:03

In 1 Corinthians 5, 1, the Nestle -Allen text says that there's a type of sin that doesn't even exist among the

02:19:11

Gentiles. So there's another attack on inerrancy in 1 Corinthians 5, 1. So I don't actually think that we'd have a better, more apologetics going on here when we take a text where the editor has denied inerrancy and where there's clear examples of readings that are errant in the text.

02:19:28

Let's talk about the Texas Receptus text type in Revelation. Hoskier, who actually collated all the manuscripts of Revelation, and if I'm supposedly against textual criticism, somebody who takes my position actually is the only one who collated all the manuscripts of Revelation.

02:19:43

He said, if Erasmus had striven to found a text on the largest number of existing manuscripts in the world of one type, he could not have succeeded better that his family manuscripts occupy the first rank in the point of actual numbers.

02:19:55

That's what he said about the TR text of Revelation. The Texas Receptus text type of Revelation is old.

02:20:01

It's a cursive screen that originates back, far back in the fourth century. Most respected manuscripts available to him would have been used.

02:20:08

It could go back into the second century easily. According to the preface to the reading of the Testament, according to the majority text by Hodges and Forstad, they actually take a slightly different text of Revelation, but they admit that the

02:20:18

TR type of text is very old in the book of Revelation. So in the book of Revelation, the TR type text follows a very large family that is associated with a commentary that was a very widely used commentary, indicating that the

02:20:30

TR type of text in Revelation is in use. Now, the Nestle -Allen text, the one that he's defending, is full of...

02:20:37

There's categories of grammar that are invented in Daniel Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the

02:20:43

Basics to explain the grammatical absurdities in the Nestle -Allen text. Like in Revelation 1 -4, it has an object of a preposition in the nominative, which is impossible in the

02:20:54

Greek language. That text is full of it. It's full of grammatical absurdities. The TR text of Revelation actually is superior because it isn't full of grammatical absurdities, like in Revelation 1 -4 and in many other passages.

02:21:07

The Greek grammar in the Nestle -Allen text is called bizarre by Wallace, who's hardly somebody on my side.

02:21:14

James said that his position is validated in my view of Matthew 5, 18 and 19, which is the plain meaning of the passage that God would preserve all the

02:21:21

Hebrew words is wrong because the New Testament quotes the LXS as authoritative, where it differs from the perceived

02:21:27

Hebrew text. First, that's not what Matthew 5, 19 and 20 says. Second, that false idea proves too much.

02:21:32

The book of Jeremiah differs from the Hebrew text of approximately 2 ,700 words shorter.

02:21:38

It moves whole chapters around. If he's going to go with that argument, he proves too much. That would get you to a text that you can move whole chapters around back and forth here and there.

02:21:47

It undermines the inerrancy of scripture. A much better explanation for why the readings he's talking about is the one that John Owen gave in his commentary and the one that's actually in the standard introduction to Septuagint by Job and Sylvain, which is that scribes of the

02:22:04

LXS often conform their quotations to the New Testament. He didn't give us any examples where we have extant

02:22:10

New Testament manuscripts of the LXS that predate those quotations. Most manuscripts of the

02:22:16

LXS are with New Testament. Actually, those quotations that he says prove that Matthew 5, 18 and 19 don't mean what they obviously mean in their context.

02:22:24

Those are actually situations where the LXS was conformed to the New Testament, not the other way around.

02:22:30

And you can see that this is something that is recognized as happening in the standard introduction to Septuagint.

02:22:36

This happens. John Owen's commentary on Hebrews. So instead of us saying that all the Hebrew texts are wrong and we need to reject what

02:22:43

Matthew 5, 18 and 19 says, he wouldn't put it quite like that, but that's what we're doing. It'd be much better to adopt the explanation of John Owen and recognize that this actually takes place.

02:22:51

The New Testament papyri prove the sole existence and the superiority of the Alexandrian text type. In his book,

02:22:57

Cain James' Only Controversy, he made the astonishing statement that every papyrus manuscript we've discovered has been a representative of the

02:23:04

Alexandrian text type. But if you look at Allen and Allen's book, there's actually most papyri aren't in category one, which would be where he would put the

02:23:13

Alexandrian text. There's some that are classified as Byzantine, P63, P73, P84, even according to Allen and Allen.

02:23:20

So his statement is simply not accurate. There are hundreds of readings in the papyri that are

02:23:25

Byzantine, hundreds of readings to say that all papyri are Alexandrian is not accurate. Furthermore, there's a bias in these classifications.

02:23:33

We have to recognize that according to standard liberal textual criticism, there are no text types before the fourth century.

02:23:40

So actually, they would say we have nothing but readings. And so he would say, they would say, you can find quotes that say there's no

02:23:46

Byzantine papyri. But those people would also say there's no Alexandrian text that exists before the fourth century either.

02:23:52

All we have is a motley group of stuff that's together. We should also recognize that the papyri, we're very thankful for the papyri, but we need to recognize they're from small portions of Upper Egypt, where it happens to be very dry.

02:24:03

Can we prove that the text that's in a small number of places in Upper Egypt that are very dry are representative of the text in everywhere from Asia Minor, where the autographs actually came from, to Britain, to Africa?

02:24:17

Can we prove that? We can't prove that. So we're very thankful that papyri have been discovered. Another illustration of the bias here in the papyri is, if you look at the oldest papyrus that we have,

02:24:26

P52. P52, if you look at that, it's not a very big papyrus. But if you look at it, P52, the text that we can see on that papyrus is exactly identical to what you would have in a printed

02:24:37

TR text. It's exactly identical text, including a variant where the Nestle -Allen varies from the text of the

02:24:44

TR, varies from the TR. So the very oldest manuscript that we have of the Gospel of John is identical to the

02:24:51

TR and differs from the Nestle -Allen text in a variant. It's not a very big papyrus. But Allen and Allent have said we can just judge the categorization of a whole document from even the parts of it.

02:25:01

So why don't we say that this is a TR -type papyrus? Why would we say it's Alexandrian? Simply because of presuppositions.

02:25:07

We say there is no Alexandrian text, or excuse me, there's no Byzantine text back then. Therefore, in the parts we don't have, it must have read something else.

02:25:15

Well, so we're very thankful for the papyri. The papyri do not establish James's position.

02:25:21

The most important thing in this debate is what does Scripture teach about its own preservation? Scripture teaches that God would preserve every one of his words.

02:25:29

Scripture teaches those words would be available to every generation of believers. And Scripture teaches that it would be the church that was the institution for the receipt of those words.

02:25:37

If you believe those presuppositions, we can talk about where on the spectrum of King James's only positions in James's book that gets you, but it doesn't get you to the

02:25:44

Nestle -Allen text. Thank you. Thank you, Thomas. We will now be rolling right into our final concluding statements.

02:25:54

These are going to consist of five minutes each. And again, we're going to start with James and finish with Thomas.

02:26:00

After this, we will do our break and then following that, our Q &A. So please go ahead, Dr. James White.

02:26:07

I'm going to try to take as little time as I can. I just wanted to correct one, just a couple of things real quickly.

02:26:16

The fact that the Book of Jeremiah has a very, very different text between the Greek and the Hebrew, which was just brought up, is quite true.

02:26:23

The story of Jeremiah gives that, gives us the reason for that. Remember, the king took his scroll and cut it up, and that meant there were different versions of Jeremiah's prophecy that would exist at even that time.

02:26:34

So it makes perfect sense that's the case. It is not the scholarly consensus in any sense that the

02:26:41

Greek Septuagint, it comes about after the New Testament. It clearly pre -existed the New Testament.

02:26:46

It would completely destroy John's argument in John 12, 41 if, in fact, it was reversed.

02:26:52

But King James -only folks are always trying to do something with the Greek Septuagint because it's very much against their perspective.

02:26:59

When he says that there are papyri that contain Byzantine readings, of course there are. The point is, if you contain readings that doesn't make you part of that particular family.

02:27:09

The issue is we don't have papyri that where you have variants that divide the families.

02:27:15

They are specifically in the Byzantine versus the Alexandrian, and all that terminology is being changed due to CBGM right now.

02:27:25

But there was one other thing that I just want to do. Well, Piv II, by the way, contains all of John 18, 31 -34, and 37 -38.

02:27:32

So it's like, what, four verses? Something along those lines. It's a fascinating manuscript. I think it's great. Take a look at it. I actually have a picture of it behind me when

02:27:40

I'm doing the dividing line when I'm in the fifth wheel. But I did want to just one last thing, just in correction, what was just said.

02:27:50

Yahweh is unquestionably the best pronunciation of the divine name.

02:27:57

Jehovah's not even possible. But did you hear what was said? Again, it probably flew by you so fast, nobody caught it.

02:28:04

But what was said was, well, all through the Legacy Standard Bible, you have Yahweh, and there's no

02:28:11

Hebrew manuscript that has those vowel points. This is what troubles me a little bit about rapid fire type stuff, where you don't explain it to people so they can understand what you're saying.

02:28:25

There were no vowel points in the Hebrew manuscripts until the Masoretes introduced them at the end of the first millennium.

02:28:33

There were no vowel points. So they were introduced by Jews long after the days of Jesus.

02:28:41

So why would we be concerned? Again, we want to know, how was it pronounced?

02:28:47

What is the best way of pronouncing? What they did is when they had the Tetragrammaton, they introduced the vowel pointing for Adonai.

02:28:55

So the vowel pointing under every one of the Tetragrammatons in the

02:29:01

Old Testament is meant as a warning, don't pronounce this word. Because the

02:29:07

Jews would not pronounce the name Yahweh. So when a Jew reads that, he either says Hashem, the name, or he says

02:29:14

Adonai. He does not say Yahweh. So of course, all the Hebrew manuscripts have different vowel pointing because that's what they were doing.

02:29:22

They were warning you off. Why should we then not render it properly?

02:29:28

How is that even relevant? It's not. And that's my concern, is you can just throw so much stuff out there and it sounds like, well, look, like it's a standard, messed all that up.

02:29:38

It didn't mess anything up. You just have to think about it slowly enough to realize that's not really a good argument.

02:29:46

And it wasn't. So I wish that we had done a debate on theories of preservation because that's what it ended up, all the answers to the questions ended up being that.

02:30:00

Well, as long as you have my theory, then you're going to answer this, you're going to do it this way, you're going to do it that way. Rather than, hey, let's look at specifics and reason from there.

02:30:13

If anyone has any questions about what I believe about the preservation of scripture, just read the book,

02:30:18

Scripture Alone. It was clear. It was obvious. And I've defended debate over and over and over again, and will continue to do so.

02:30:27

Thank you very much for your attention this afternoon. Thank you, James. We will now do our five minute concluding statement from Thomas Ross.

02:30:38

Just to just notice, I will be throwing a finger up, not the middle one, of course, it's the first one.

02:30:44

When there's one minute left, just to not interrupt you in your concluding statement. So whenever you start.

02:30:54

I don't want to introduce too much new material in the last because it's just the concluding statement. Thank you very much, James, for the debate.

02:30:59

I appreciate it. But since he brought those things up right at the end, underneath the word Jehovah, the vowel pointing is actually not identical to the word

02:31:08

Adonai. Underneath the first consonant, it's got a pathak instead of a hataf pathak. You also have all the Jehovah names,

02:31:14

Jehovah, Johoash, every name where has Jehovah and it has the vowel of Jehovah. And if you look at the standard

02:31:20

Hebrew syntax by Waltke and O 'Connor, it talks about people who say we should just disregard the vowel points.

02:31:26

And it says in there, well, if we're going to do that, maybe we should all, maybe the Masorites must have read

02:31:31

Karl Brockelman's comparative Semitic grammar because they have all these forms that are so accurate. They're so ancient.

02:31:36

So we can't just disregard the vowel points. And he did, he admitted that Yahweh is not in any

02:31:43

Hebrew manuscript that we have. So we have to conclude that, that we do not, that the pronunciation of God's name was lost, which

02:31:48

I don't think is a good thing to conclude. So I also, I never said that manuscript, I never said the

02:31:53

LXX didn't exist before the New Testament. I said that in those passages, scribes of the

02:31:59

LXX conformed their copies to the New Testament, which is what a standard introduction to Septuagint says happens at different times.

02:32:06

So that would be better to recognize that. This topic is, what scripture teaches about its own preservation is absolutely crucial for this topic.

02:32:15

That is crucial for this issue. If James were able to demonstrate that the Bible did not teach that God preserve every one of his words, that those words would be available to every generation of believers and that those words would be received by the churches, my position would really be demolished.

02:32:31

Okay. If scripture doesn't teach those things, that is a crucial thing. If scripture does teach those things, it's not the

02:32:38

Nestle -Allen. It can't be the Nestle -Allen. The people who made the Nestle -Allen didn't believe what scripture teaches about its own preservation.

02:32:45

You read their introductions, they say absolutely nothing about the text that the churches receive. They say nothing about recognizing what the canonical words of God are received by the churches.

02:32:55

They say nothing about God's words being in the mouths of his people from generation to generation. They say nothing about God's word being preserved pure in all ages.

02:33:03

So if we recognize what scripture teaches about its own preservation, it can't be the Nestle -Allen text.

02:33:09

There are words in there that that type of text was not in use for well over a thousand years.

02:33:15

James himself admitted that type of text was not available when the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689 was made.

02:33:22

That was all they knew. The only text that was available as far as when we can see clearly what was available is the received text.

02:33:29

The further back you go in history, the harder it is to figure out what was going on. For example, in the area where the autographs came from, the

02:33:35

Asia Minor, as soon as we have evidence, it looks like they're Byzantine people in the area where the autographs came from.

02:33:44

The environment there is not such that papyri are going to survive. So we have to recognize that we need to believe what scripture says as far back as we can go.

02:33:54

And then when we can't see any further evidence, we still need to believe what God says. We have to approach this issue with scriptural presuppositions.

02:34:01

The Bible teaches that God would preserve every one of his words. Those words would be available to every generation of believers.

02:34:08

Those preserved words would be received by the churches. They're canonical words. Jesus prayed this.

02:34:14

Jesus' high priestly intercession guarantees that true churches would receive his words. That means that the words are not going to be lost.

02:34:21

Jesus said that every jot and tittle would be preserved. That means the first Samuel 13 one cannot have had the true words disappear and we have to restore them from the

02:34:31

LXX. It means that in the book of Judges, where the LSB note says that the true readings are gone in the

02:34:37

Hebrew text and we have to restore it from the LXX, that's not possible. When we recognize that God promised to infallibly inspire his word, we need to recognize that that's something that none of the editors of the

02:34:48

Nestle -Allen text believed. And that's why they are willing to introduce errors into their text, like in Luke 23, 45, the sun being eclipsed, things like that.

02:34:56

We need to recognize that they didn't think that it was inerrant and they introduced errors of errancy into their text.

02:35:02

They did not approach it with biblical presuppositions. And I'm thankful that James says certain things that he believes in certain things about tenacity.

02:35:09

That's just wonderful. But we don't see a careful exegesis of scripture in his book showing how the principles that the editors of the

02:35:17

Nestle -Allen text use are developed based on what scripture teaches. You can see that in the textual criticism of scholars like Edward F.

02:35:25

Hills, who has a PhD in textual criticism from Harvard. We can see in writings like his or other

02:35:32

TR scholars that they first looked at what scripture taught about its own preservation. And from that basis, they evaluated the data in light of scripture's teaching.

02:35:40

That is what we must do. And if we evaluate textual data in the light of what scripture teaches about its own preservation, we will not believe in the

02:35:50

NA text. We will believe in the TR as God's preserved word. Thank you very much.

02:35:59

Let's go ahead and give these guys a round of applause for all that they had to say. So, everybody, we will now take a five -minute short break.

02:36:13

Please be back here to then open up for some questions and answers. We'll now begin our

02:36:20

Q &A moment. Again, it's such a blessing to have two studious men that are presenting their different positions here today.

02:36:27

And I, again, thank everybody for being here. How this is going to happen, and I'll be just honest with you, so I'm a bivocational pastor, so you think

02:36:34

I would be well -read, but I work as a firefighter as my main job, I have a hard time reading. So I'm just going to, as it is for all firemen, that's why we're firemen, we like to break down doors rather than read books.

02:36:45

So you have a stogie in your pocket because you're a fireman? I'm reformed, that's why. You're trying to start a fire.

02:36:52

Maybe, maybe. So how this is going to work is that we have four questions for each individual.

02:36:58

The question's going to be directly asked to the individual that it was written for. That individual is going to have one minute to respond.

02:37:05

After that one minute, the opposing person that the question was not asked towards is going to have 30 minutes to respond to that.

02:37:11

30 seconds. 30 seconds. Did I say 30 minutes? Firemen can't talk either. So you would think that being a moderator,

02:37:18

I would figure this stuff out, but 30 seconds. Thank you. That would be quite the response right there. It would be a long one. I don't think anybody here would want that at this point.

02:37:27

Anyway, so we will go ahead and start off, and my first question is going to be for Thomas Ross. The first question that we have here is do you think the

02:37:38

King James Version or the New King James Version translation of servant and bond servant respectively is more accurate than slave found in the

02:37:50

LSB? Thanks for the question. If you don't mind, I'm just going to take a second. I wanted to give a present to James.

02:37:58

It's Thou Shall Keep Them a Biblical Theology the Perfect Preservation of Scripture. I have it. You have it? Okay, well, this is a really good book.

02:38:04

I thought he might have it already, so I appreciate he prepares. Then I'm going to give him instead a copy of A Pure Church, a

02:38:10

Biblical Theology of Ecclesiastical Separation, which is published by her, because I thought he might. He prepares, which is really good.

02:38:15

So thank you, James. Present for you. And I have a copy of this that I'll give to the pastor of the church as well. So a little present for you.

02:38:23

And so anyway, so back to the question, servant versus slave. I don't have a problem with the translation slave.

02:38:30

I don't think it's inaccurate, but we do actually see that the Greek and Hebrew words can be used for someone who wasn't always just a slave.

02:38:39

It can be used for servants as well. So for example, in Kings, I don't remember exactly where, Solomon says that he wouldn't make the children of Israel into his slaves like the heathen people, but they would be his servants.

02:38:52

But it's exactly the same Hebrew word. So since we can see that the Hebrew word is used for people who weren't slaves, as well as for people who were slaves,

02:38:59

I think that servant is a preferable translation. But it's certainly, I don't have a problem with slave.

02:39:06

I might even say you're a servant when you belong to Jesus Christ. You're as much submissive to him as if you were a slave.

02:39:12

And I don't have a problem with that. It's a strong term. We are Jesus' slaves in a good sense, and that's really wonderful.

02:39:19

All right. 30 seconds for White. I'll just simply comment that I appreciate that the LSB was willing to go against the current flow of culture to recognize the strength of that word and to render it the way they did.

02:39:35

So the next question for James is in John 3, 16. Whosoever versus whoever.

02:39:42

The so is removed. Is the so inspired? And are small differences an area of debate or unity between both sides?

02:39:54

I guess the assertion being made is whosoever versus whoever. That's simply how you render an

02:40:02

English word. It's not removing something. I think we need to be very, very careful when we use that kind of language. And in reality, that is a term that is the actual

02:40:13

Greek is all the ones believing. So that is almost interpretational in of itself to put in either whosoever or whoever.

02:40:21

It simply says all the believing ones. And so in English, we have to, that's meant to be somewhat generic and wide.

02:40:30

And so we use terms like whoever or however as many, so on and so forth. But that's not a matter of removing something.

02:40:36

We have to be very, very careful. We're careful when we use that kind of language. The reality is John 3, 16 has limitation in it.

02:40:43

It's the ones believing that will receive eternal life, not just whoever.

02:40:50

Thomas, how would you answer that question? Sure, whoever versus whosoever.

02:40:56

I don't think that wouldn't be my main argument. I don't have a problem with either whoever or whosoever.

02:41:02

I think a much bigger issue in the LN, well, actually the LSB. I appreciate that they translate only begotten for monogamies because as Charles Lee Irons demonstrates in his lexical defense of the

02:41:13

Johannine only begotten in the book Retrieving Eternal Generation, only begotten is the correct translation and unique is an incorrect translation for that passage.

02:41:21

And I appreciate that in this verse, at least contrary to James's position in his book, both the

02:41:28

King James and the LSB accurately renders a text that would defend the glorious doctrine of the son's eternal generation.

02:41:34

OK, and just a heads up. So I'm not just so that I can have my hands free. I have Jeff here doing the time.

02:41:39

So if you do hear a little bit quieter, that's why right now. So next question for Thomas.

02:41:46

Do you believe the LSB or any other major modern translation changes the gospel message?

02:41:54

And does it change the gospel message? Well, you can certainly find the gospel message in the LSB in many places, and I'm very thankful for that.

02:42:02

You can even find the gospel message in the horrible New World Translation of the Jehovah's False Witnesses in the grace and mercy of God.

02:42:08

I actually trusted Christ and was born again by God's grace reading Galatians 2 .16 in the

02:42:13

New World Translation. So the gospel is even in the New World Translation. Now they do a horrible job in many places, but the gospel is in there.

02:42:21

That doesn't mean that I don't, that it doesn't matter that the New World Translation is such a terrible translation, and it also doesn't mean that the differences between the

02:42:28

LSB and the King James are insignificant. But is the gospel in the LSB? It certainly is in the LSB, though I wish that in texts like 1

02:42:35

Peter 2 .2 it didn't say that that we obey to be saved. There's some issues with some of those things.

02:42:44

Okay, and James negate on that or don't answer that one. Okay. We will now go ahead and ask

02:42:50

James the next question on this one. This has got some big words in it, so I apologize right now in advance.

02:42:56

If we reject conjectural emendations... Emendation. Look at that. That was so close.

02:43:02

I might need you to read it, actually. Here, I'm just going to add it to you. How about that? If we reject conjectural emendations like the TR reading of Revelation 16 .5,

02:43:08

then why do the modern Greek texts like the Nestle and UBS, looks like VBS, Vacation Bible School.

02:43:14

No, UBS, Greek texts, contain their own conjectural emendations found in zero manuscripts. So, well, again, there is only one conjectural emendation that I'm aware of that is actually adopted as the text reading, and I reject that.

02:43:31

I do not believe there's... I believe in the tenacity of the text. We have all the original readings. And that's the wonderful thing is

02:43:38

I don't have to accept that. I can reject the reasoning that's used for it and reject the text reading.

02:43:44

I'm not a slave to any of these editors or anything like that. And so all the time, and it was the majority of the time, it was spent attacking those individuals, utterly irrelevant to either me or the editors of the

02:43:55

LSB because they have the exact same freedom to make those types of decisions themselves.

02:44:01

And so I think that's key. So I think you need to look at Revelation 16 .5. You need to look at all of them and ask it within the parameters of what did the apostles write?

02:44:11

What did they intend to communicate? That's the only thing that matters. Can you repeat the question again? Oh, I'm just going to hand it to you.

02:44:16

How about that? All right. I almost made the mistake earlier and I got out of it. Okay, yeah, it's a good question.

02:44:25

I have difficulty thinking that the beliefs of the people who actually edited the Nassau Island text are irrelevant.

02:44:31

That does seem very surprising to me. I think that James's argument against the word asominos in Revelation 16 .5

02:44:37

does redound against him hundreds of times more when there's even just lines of text, small lines of text that aren't in any excellent manuscript.

02:44:46

The text that he's supporting is a patchwork text that isn't something you see with a transmissional history.

02:44:52

I appreciate he says there are no conjectural emendations, but notice even there, he didn't give any verses for it.

02:44:58

Copy that. All right. So, Thomas, this is the next question for yourself. Based on your definition of biblical preservation, thank you.

02:45:10

I apologize, guys. If it could be demonstrated that a single -believing church in history had a text other than the

02:45:16

TR, would that invalidate your position? If not, why not? Sure. Thank you for that question.

02:45:22

The promises of God aren't that every single Christian everywhere will always have a perfect Bible. The promises are that God says that the words would be available generally to believers.

02:45:32

So if you study hard enough, you'll be able to find out where the words are. And those words would be canonically received by the churches.

02:45:38

And furthermore, nothing in history, because this is God's world, nothing in history will invalidate anything that God promises.

02:45:46

And we don't change or exegesis a scripture based on what we can see or can't see. We should certainly consider mainstream evidence and all those things.

02:45:55

But what's most important is what scripture teaches. We believe in creation because God said so. We believe that certain things in Genesis happened because God said so, even if we don't have any current evidence for it.

02:46:05

So evidence is fantastic. But God didn't promise that every church would always have, you know, right in their hand a perfect copy.

02:46:12

But those words would be available to God's people. And since he said that would happen, it did happen. James, you're 30 seconds on that.

02:46:20

Remember that Rome argued against the reformers by saying that God had promised to give his church and to give the keys to Peter.

02:46:30

And therefore the Latin Vulgate was the standard. And they actually burned people for promulgating the

02:46:38

Greek text and things like that. So this argument from tradition saying, well, God told us has been used before and it didn't turn out too well.

02:46:48

James White, the next question is for yourself. Of the 5 ,000 plus Greek manuscripts available, how many manuscripts is the

02:46:55

NA28 based on? Well, again, the NA28 will use all of them, but the issue is not...

02:47:04

See, the issue in understanding how the editors look at a text has to do with many things, but specifically internal and external issues.

02:47:14

So you have the external issues are the simple manuscripts, when they're dated, how consistent they are.

02:47:20

Internally is what was the probability when you're reading a line of unsealed text, what is the probability that, for example, in the passage we look at in Luke, that an article would get lost in the transcription process.

02:47:32

And so there's multiple layers going on there. And now with CBGM looking at how these manuscripts relate to other manuscripts, we can now bring that in as well.

02:47:41

I can't even start to get into that. So it is a complex process, and it is a real gift to the

02:47:50

Church today to have all that kind of information to be able to bring to bear on these variants. Thomas, how would you answer on that one?

02:47:59

Well, they don't use all the manuscripts, first of all, because no one's even bothered to collate them all.

02:48:04

Because critical text people, like in Allen Elm, they say that the vast majority of Byzantine manuscripts are useless.

02:48:09

So they don't use all 5 ,000 of them because they say the vast majority of them are useless. The only person who's actually done a complete collation of any biblical book, at least until relatively recently, was a

02:48:19

TR person, was Hoskia for the Book of Revelation because he cared about what all the manuscripts said. We care.

02:48:24

TR people care about all the evidence. We care about what Paul said. We care about what the apostles said. Thomas, your next question.

02:48:33

This is the final question for yourself is as far as the question being asked directly to you.

02:48:39

You said that God would not hold people accountable for words they did not have.

02:48:45

And so God's word would be perpetually available to God's people. If this is the case, shouldn't you accept that the

02:48:53

King James reading at 1 John 5 -7 is not correct since it contains a reading absent from the

02:48:59

Greek for over a thousand years? I wish

02:49:05

I'd had more time to address 1 John 5 -7. At least if somebody recognizes what scripture teaches about his own preservation, he's going to come to something like my position.

02:49:13

The way a TR perfect person would answer first about that question about 1 John 5 -7 is he'd point out there's a grammatical error if you take out the, if you do not have the comma ionium.

02:49:22

He'd point out that one of the minuscules that does have 1 John 5 -7 is actually listed as a very important one in Alland and Alland in his book.

02:49:31

Alland actually says that the correct reading can be in late minuscules. And that actually, that's a theoretical and a practical possibility.

02:49:39

So it's one thing to say that a correct reading is in a small minority of manuscripts once in a while, a very small percentage of the time.

02:49:48

And it's another thing to say that the correct reading is in a minority of manuscripts the overwhelming majority of time, like on the NA position.

02:49:54

But that would just be a TR. Once James comes over and becomes byzantine priority, then we can have another debate about different editions of the

02:50:00

TR versus that. And James, how would you respond to that question? The comma ionium came into the

02:50:06

Greek manuscript tradition from the Latin. It only appears in Latin in the fifth and sixth centuries. It has no probability whatsoever of being original.

02:50:13

And therefore the defendant is to fundamentally say that the Greek manuscript tradition can be overthrown and entire passages disappear and have to be restored from something outside of the

02:50:23

Greek manuscript tradition. It is a destruction of the apologetic defense of the New Testament. And as such, we dare not go that direction.

02:50:33

For the final question today to James White, is the LSB superior to all other

02:50:40

American translations? Oh, goodness, no. And they would never claim that. The issue is, as I tried to point out, we didn't really touch on it.

02:50:49

I think I made, I think it wasn't refuted. The LSB continues the translational process and philosophy of the

02:50:57

King James translators. King James translators would never adopt the perspective that has been presented this evening.

02:51:04

And they would recognize in the LSB, in its lexical studies, in its syntactical studies and everything else, the continued progress.

02:51:13

They would be so bitterly disappointed if after 400 years we had not improved our understanding of the manuscripts, the lexical meanings, and the grammar of the text.

02:51:25

And so, yes, they would have promoted exactly that. But that doesn't mean that other translations are somehow inferior or something like that.

02:51:33

They take different perspectives on how to render particular clauses in Hebrew or things like that. But it's definitely one of the best ones that's out there.

02:51:42

Thomas, how would you respond to that question? Well, the LSB isn't the best one because the King James is the best one. Leland Ryken, in ten fallacies about the

02:51:49

King James version, said the King James version is demonstrably the greatest English Bible ever. No one's saying that about the

02:51:55

LSB. Bart Ehrman said in his What Kind of a Text of the King James Bible, he said the

02:52:01

King James translators were all skilled, highly skilled in Greek and Hebrew. Today, when someone is skilled in Greek, highly skilled in Greek, that means we can kind of slosh our way through a

02:52:08

Greek text if we have a dictionary. These guys could speak Greek and did speak Greek to each other when they felt like it, and they could read

02:52:13

Hebrew like the newspaper. They were serious, serious scholars and studied Greek and Latin Hebrew. Wonderful. This concludes the questions that we have for the debate today.