What's the Big Deal with King James Onlyism? Part 4

Claims About Manuscript Alteration and False Historical Assertions

And they made these changes, and they said that they were taking a book that was imperfect and making it better.

Dr. Gipp, who are these people? Could you give us some names? Some sources we could look up. Some names of people who said, we don't believe that the Bible is good the way it is. We are going to improve it, we're going to make changes in it, and therefore the textual variance that exists between the Antiochian manuscripts, whatever they are, I assume you mean the Byzantine manuscript tradition generally, but then you call that the Textus Receptus, which it isn't, and there were no ancient texts that actually read exactly like TR does.

But anyway, they took that, and then we made changes to these things, because we didn't believe in the Trinity, and we didn't believe in the, we're going to improve things. Who said that? When did they say it?

I mean, you're making these assertions like they're facts. So we'd like to see these facts. Well, the fact is, there's no such thing in history as someone sitting around, and Alexandria saying, you know, I don't believe in the Trinity, and so I'm going to take these pure Antioch manuscripts, and I'm going to alter them and change them, and I'm going to take the Trinity out of 1 John 5 -7, and I'm going to make these, I'm going to improve things.

No one ever said that. He can't, he can't show you anything that even begins to substantiate that. I have a book here. My edition is starting to get a little dated. I need to, I need to update this thing, actually.

But this is the list of New Testament manuscripts put out from Winstor, and, you know, it tells you, you know, it gives you where it's found, and what size it is, and how many pages, and what it contains, and the best guess we have on its, when it was written, things like that.

You know what's not listed here? I don't see names of authors. There's no column for what author believed, where author claimed to be improving Bible. That's because information like that doesn't exist.

Sam Giff might want people to think he has that information. I don't know, but he doesn't have it. And so these kinds of assertions, they sound great, but here's the problem. This is the whole reason I'm taking the time to respond to these things, is you walk into a classroom in a university, you walk into a classroom at your local community college and start spouting this stuff off, and if the professor has almost any knowledge of textual criticism, history, anything else, he's going to tear you apart, and properly so, because you're spouting foolishness.

That's the problem here, is you, I've encountered too many Christians who hear this and go, well, that sounds good, that sounds solid, that sounds Bible-believing, and they end up having to come to realize that, well, they've been deceived.

They've been led astray. The facts were different than what they had been told, and the results can be pretty ugly. So who are these guys, Dr. Giff? Give us some names, how about some quotes, something a little bit more than just your saying that they said these things, because the fact of the matter is, well, they didn't say these things, and your foundation has already been shown to be very flawed.

The King James, the New King James, and the Textus Receptus

So after they got done, okay, there it is, drink your coffee, want to drink it? No thanks. It's coffee, right? What's wrong with it? It's ruined. It's... Exactly. Well, that's the same thing about modern translations.

When you go into a Bible bookstore, if you see 25 Bibles, you're not seeing 25, you're seeing these two. You see the King James, that's Antiochian through the Texas Receptus to the King James. You see everything else, it's the Alexandrian through the critical text to New American Standard, Living Bible, Good News for Modern Man, Today's English Version, Contemporary English Version, New International Version.

Now, a couple things. We've already challenged, demonstrated the falsehood of Gipps' very simplistic and inaccurate rendition of, well, it's the Antioch manuscripts, TR, King James. That's not how it happened at all.

There's the seven editions and all the rest of that stuff. We've already documented all of that. But there's two problems that I want to address here. Evidently, Dr. Gipp doesn't want you to realize that the New King James version of the Bible is likewise based on the Texas Receptus.

Now, King James only advocates don't like the New King James. They primarily don't like it because, well, think about it. The New King James is based upon the same Hebrew text as the King James Old Testament and the same Greek text in the King James New Testament.

So if it's different at all, then what it's saying is the King James can be improved. And if the King James is your final authority, as it is for Sam Gipp and his fellow Rachmanites, you can't admit that there could be anything in the King James that could be translated better.

And so if the New King James come along and to, well, fix things in the King James, as it does, for example, in its rendering of the Granville Sharps rule at Titus 2 .13, 2 Peter 1 .1, in both places, the New King James has the deity of Christ clearly there that is not as clearly seen in the King James version of the Bible.

And Romans 9 .5, very clear testimony to the deity of Christ in the New King James, not so clear in the King James. If you do something like that, then from the King James only perspective, you're introducing all sorts of uncertainties.

And of course, another King James only advocate, D .A. Waite, has attacked the New King James vociferously for having textual notes. You can actually tell where there is a difference in the underlying text between the New King James and, say, the other translations that were just mentioned.

And so it's not just the King James. The New King James is translated from the same text. So if for some wild reason you were to accept the arguments that, well, I should use the 1525 Blomberg text and I should use the Texas Receptus as it was created from looking at the King James translator's textual choices, even if you were to be convinced of that, you wouldn't need to use the King James.

You could use the New King James and you would have a very fine, modern translation that is a more accurate translation of the Texas Receptus than the King James is. It's certainly more readable to a modern American reader, any modern English reader for that matter, but it's actually more accurate as well.

He doesn't mention that, which I find to be rather intriguing since he certainly would be aware of the base text used by the New King James translators. But hey, this is only the first edition of these.

Who knows? Maybe some more is coming out. I don't know. Secondly, you'll notice the list of translations. Now we stopped right as he said NIV because the fellow is going to bring up the question, well, you know, I was given an NIV and this person was saved with the NIV and we'll get into that in a moment.

But he lists all these translations and yet Living Bible is not even a translation of the Bible. It's a paraphrase. And so to lump formal equivalency translations together with dynamic or functional equivalency translations together with paraphrases as if they're all just one thing, again, is highly misleading.

The Living Bible is a paraphrase. It's one guy sitting back on his porch going, I think that sort of means this. It's a paraphrase. It's not a translation. And then to compare formal equivalency translations, which are translations that tend to be the more literal, hence not as easily readable in English.

The formal equivalency translations with dynamic or functional equivalency translations of contemporary English, I mean, these are much more on this side toward the paraphrase than they are toward formal equivalency, are the ones that have been so radically simplified, oversimplified.

And don't get me wrong, because I'm responding to Sam Gipp doesn't mean that I think that all Bible translations are created equal. They're not. There are some really lousy Bible translations. We have far, far too many English translations today.

There is not a single reason I can think of for another English translation. I can't think of any reason at all. And the only reason, to be honest with you, that we have as many as we have, especially major ones, is because, well, it's real simple.

It's a matter of money. Major publishing houses do not want to have to pay royalties to a competing publishing house to use their translation that they have the copyright to. And so most of the major publishing houses, if they're into publishing Bibles, have gotten their own translations.

You know, you've got Zondervan has the NIV, and Thomas Olson has the New King James, and Crossway has the ESV, and they've gotten their own translations. There is absolutely, positively no reason for any more.

I would consider the continuing investment of the funds of the people of God into producing further English translations to be a complete waste of money. We have all of them that we could need, and in fact, there are many just sitting on the shelf collecting dust because people of God have never found them to be overly useful.

If you have a good selection of modern translations, there's no reason whatsoever for anything more. There just isn't. So just because I oppose King James Onlyism, which, by the way, every single translator of the King James would have opposed King James Onlyism.

Just read their introduction to the readers. Read it. You will see that everything that King James Only folks attack, they believed. So the King James translators would never have been a part of King James Onlyism, which tells you something right there.

Be that as it may, all of this, you know, confusion that Sam Gipp has introduced by throwing all these different kinds of translations together, yeah, it's given us the opportunity of hopefully explaining some things that maybe people didn't understand.

But once again, by introducing this kind of confusion and simplifying to a level that is simply dishonest, it introduces inaccuracy. It leads people, unfortunately, to say things in the marketplace of ideas that exposes the Christian faith to ridicule and to easy refutation.

That's the big problem here. And we do need to know where our translations came from. We need to know why we can trust the manuscripts that we do have. We need to know why we can trust that there are good, excellent modern translations.

We need to know what the difference is between formal equivalency and dynamic or functional equivalency translation. These are all things that maybe, you know, maybe our grandparents didn't have to worry about as much as we do, but look, we are a small minority in Western culture today.

And because of, well, what you're using to watch me, it's called the internet, this medium can be used for good, it can also be used for evil. And so, we need to know these things. We need to be talking about it in our churches.

We need to be educating our young people about it. But we need to give them the truth, not falsehoods like this, that will put them in a position of being refuted and embarrassed when they seek to speak the truth in our culture, in our society today.

That's why we're responding to these things.