What's the Big Deal with King James Onlyism? Part 1

A video featuring the words and presentation of a radical King James Only advocate by the name of Sam Gipp is making the rounds around the internet. It's very well made. It was shot with very high quality standards.

In fact, better than I'm doing in my office today, I will admit. But unfortunately, this kind of presentation continues to demonstrate that the King James Only movement is bereft of any meaningful foundation in history, fact, or even in the.

Bible.

The King James Only Movement and Biblical Apologetics

And my concern about the King James Only movement, well, it's lasted for a long time. I've been convinced for quite some time, for 30 years, that the King James Only movement undercuts serious biblical apologetics.

That is, a person who will believe what Sam Gipp has to say and will take that type of thought into the public arena, into the battle place of ideas, will find himself completely outgunned and eventually, if he is a truthful person at all, will be refuted because King James Onlyism is factually and historically false.

It's wrong. It cannot stand scrutiny, which is why you rarely find King James Only folks putting themselves in that position. In fact, just a review of the encounter that we had in 1995 on the John Ankerberg Show, which is now available on YouTube, by the way, a review of the eight programs we did makes it very clear that the King James Only side simply cannot withstand meaningful scrutiny and cannot defend its position in any meaningful fashion.

And so, my big concern is that anyone who would listen to what Sam Gipp says in this video and would take it into a classroom at the University of North Carolina and encounter Bart Ehrman will find themselves not only laughingstock, that's just how the world is with Christianity in general, but on any truthful and factual level will be refuted because the statements that Sam Gipp makes are simply false.

They're easy to refute. You can take books off of my shelves here and open them up and say, here, here's a documentation. This shows that it's untrue to say that there are only two lines of manuscripts.

It's untrue to say that the Textus Receptus represents the majority text and all the rest of these things. These are untruths that can be very easily documented. And therefore, to send believers into that situation, I can't tell you how many times I've talked to people who claim to be former believers and they believe this stuff.

They go into the realm of battle in the culture and they got torn up. And since it's all they knew, since they didn't realize that there is a solid, sound Christian defense of biblical inerrancy, of biblical inspiration that does not partake of going, well, it's the King James Bible and the King James alone.

Since they didn't know that, they ended up walking away from the faith. This is something that is very, very important. I want to take the time to respond to some of the things that Sam Gipp says. Now, here is the first Bible I remember.

I looked inside it this morning. It was given to me on my seventh birthday in 1969. And it's a children's version, but it is, of course, it is the King James version of.

The Bible.

And that's what I was raised on. And my memory verses frequently still come out in the King James version of the Bible. And when I became a teenager and got myself a job, I didn't ask the government to do this for me, I went out and I used my own money and I bought this.

And this is still one of the best Bibles I've ever owned. You can't really tell, it just hangs in your hand. Oh, it's an Oxford, the cow is still mooing, let's just put it that way, a wonderful Bible.

And it is the King James version, and it is all nice and marked up. And when I first read through the Bible on my own, I read through it in the King James version of the Bible, and I still treasure that recollection.

Now, it would seem that if we listened to what Sam Gipp has to say, this, which is now my nicest Bible, this is an Allen Rebind, a good friend gave it to me recently. You can tell an Allen, if you don't know anything about high-end Bibles, this is the Cadillac.

Talk about hanging in your hand, it's gorgeous. But it's not a King James. And from listening to what Sam Gipp has to say, this isn't a Bible. At least not truly a Bible, it's a perversion of the Bible, because it's the ESV, it's not the King James version.

And so, there's a lot of people that go, well, but my pastor preaches from this. If I believe what Sam Gipp has to say, then that's not really a Bible. I have another one here. This is one that I had, again, a friend had rebound for me by Ace Bookbinding, which is a great place, by the way, if you want to get a Bible rebound.

This is actually both the Hebrew text and in the front, here is the Greek. It's a reader's Greek-Hebrew Bible. But Sam Gipp wouldn't say this is a Bible either, because, well, while the Old Testament text, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, and the 1525 Bomberg text, which the King James translators used, have almost no differences between them, the New Testament manuscripts upon which this is based would be the critical text, which, interestingly enough, Sam Gipp thinks that the very word critical means that's bad, even though, of course, when Erasmus created the Textus Receptus, or the first editions of what became the Textus Receptus, he was engaging in critical scholarship.

He compared manuscripts, and so it's an oxymoron, it's an anachronistic dislike of the term.

Critical.

Very common amongst fundamentalists that don't know their own history, but the term critical does not mean that you are standing over the text and you think you're greater than God. What the term critical means is that you're actually examining manuscripts and examining readings and allowing the manuscript tradition, rather than just tradition.

You see, the Latin Vulgate that the Roman Catholic Church used at the time of the Reformation, that wouldn't be considered a critical text at that time because it had just been received by tradition. Now, we have critical editions of the Latin Vulgate today, but the Reformers felt it was much more important to examine these things and to examine them carefully.

And so to be critical in that sense simply means I want to know what the Holy Spirit actually inspired, not what a scribe a thousand years later thought the Holy Spirit should have said. So the very fact that Gip takes a shot at the term critical in this video is truly an amazing thing.

So it's an important issue, and I've addressed this issue for many, many years. And since this video is making rounds in the internet, let's take a look at some of the things that Sam Gip has to say and demonstrate that when it comes to truth content, the video that Sam Gip has put out is truly without any truth content at all.

Doc, you got a couple seconds?

Yeah.

You've been telling us that the final authority is the Bible, but I mean, there's like 300.

Of them out there.

I mean, which one are you talking about?

Let me tell you, there's not 300. There's not 200. There's not 50. There's not 25. There's not 10. There's not 5. There's not even 3 Bibles. There's just 1. No, there's not 1.

There's 2.

2 Bibles.

2 Bibles.

What do you mean there's only 2 Bibles?

Well, listen, there's another class coming in here, so we can't hang around here. You got time for a cup of coffee?

Sure. Sure. Okay.

Well, let's go get a cup of coffee and we'll talk about this.

Okay.

And when I say there's 2 Bibles, you go into a bookstore.

I know.

Hello, guys.

Thank you.

Oh, thank you very much. And you see a bunch of them on the shelf, and you go, well, no, there's got to be more.

Than 2.

But the fact is that every Bible that you can buy today comes from only one of 2 locations. There's a line of manuscripts that come from Antioch and Syria. There's another line of manuscripts that come from Alexandria in Egypt.

Okay, that's the first error we encounter in Dr. Gipps' presentation. It's untrue because it's so simplistic. You can simplify things and say, well, there's a major difference between what scholars call the Alexandrian text and what scholars would call the Byzantine text.

But that is so simplistic that it leads to gross inconsistency and error. Let me illustrate. First of all, everybody knows, in fact, it's interesting, Sam Gipp and King James Only Advocates are very quick to point out that Alexandrian manuscripts have thousands of differences between them.

And that is true. That's because it's not all just one line of manuscripts. You see, the Alexandrian manuscripts, which are the oldest manuscripts we have, and as we find older and older texts, they all are Alexandrian in form.

These manuscripts are not just one line where they're all copies of each other. It is an entire series of lines. Because remember, in the early church, you had tremendous persecution against Christians.

And there was often persecution against Christians in Egypt, just as in other parts of the Roman Empire at that point in time. In fact, we need to remember that while Egypt has always had wild and crazy religion in it, some of the greatest Christians who defended the Christian faith, especially Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, who defended the deity of Christ against the Arians in the fourth century, was from Alexandria, Egypt.

And he used the Alexandrian text to defend the deity of Christ against the Arians who denied the deity of Christ, who were primarily located, happened to be up in Syria, around Antioch and places like that.

You can't just look at an area and go, well, we found bad teachers there, and therefore the text must be bad. Because bad teachers are everywhere. And good teachers are everywhere as well. You can't just make that kind of simplistic analysis.

But the point is, there are thousands of differences between the Alexandrian manuscripts, even between comparing Vaticanus with P72 or Vaticanus with Sinaiticus, whatever else it might be, you will find differences.

Just as you will find 1 ,800 differences between the Textus Receptus, that Sam Gip seems to believe is the final authority in all things, and the majority text, the majority of the Byzantine manuscripts.

In fact, when you go to the Book of Revelation, you can't find just one Syrian or Antioch or Byzantine set of readings, especially in the Book of Revelation. It divides all over the place. That one particular book, Revelation, has all these different kinds of readings in it.

And so, it's simply untrue, because it's so simplistic to say there are only two Bibles. There are all sorts of manuscripts that have to be examined, and again, you may not like that, you may wish that there was just one version, but if you wish there was just one version, keep something in mind, if there was just one version, then you have to trust that whoever it was that produced that, a group of men, an individual person, got it exactly right.

There is a major religion in the world that has just one version, they're called the Muslims, and they have one version of the Qur 'an called the Uthmanic revision of the Qur 'an. The problem is, there were other versions of the Qur 'an that existed in antiquity.

Abdullah ibn Masud had his readings, and Uba ibn Ka 'b had his, but eventually Uthman forced his readings, or really the Islamic state forced Uthman's readings on everybody. Now that gives you a very consistent manuscript tradition for the Qur 'an, but now Muslims have to trust that Uthman got it right.

That's not what we want, and that's not, as Christians, what we have. We don't have any Christian Uthman who created a final version and edited it and said, here.

It is.

You see, the first 300 years of the Christian faith involved a tremendous amount of persecution. Thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament, or New Testament books, were destroyed by the Romans during persecution, burned.

So they had to be doing a lot of copying, and the New Testament text had to go a lot of different places, and that means there's all sorts of different lines. We generally put them into the Alexandrian, Western, and Byzantine camps, but anyone who studies textual criticism knows that those are rather arbitrary divisions, and that you'll find a manuscript that'll have Byzantine readings and Western readings and Alexandrian readings in it, and there's all sorts of, well, stuff that fundamentalists like Sam Gipp don't like, gray areas.

But that's the fact. That's the reality. That's the truth. And if Christianity is a religion of truth, then we should, well, want the truth, right? And so it is untrue that you have just two Bibles. What is true is that when it comes to modern New Testament translations, you primarily have a few translations of the Textus Receptus, the King James and the New King James.

Then you have pretty much all other translations, or either translations of older critical texts, texts like Westcott and Hort, or most are translations of the Nessie Island 26th, 27th editions, and the United Bible Society's text called the Critical Text, or the text that's used by the vast majority of believing biblical scholars.

And so you can make divisions along those lines, but even at this point, what you need to recognize is that the King James version is not a translation of a monolithic text. That's just not the case. The King James translators had in front of them different versions.

For example, let me just grab from my shelf over here. This is what's called the Textus Receptus today, Blue Case-Bound Trinitarian Bible Society edition. And this is the Textus Receptus that most people would look at and say, yeah, here's the basis, here's the final authority for the New Testament.

The problem was this did not exist until 1633, okay? There is no manuscript in the world that reads identically to this, not one, none, zero. The reason is that this Greek text is based upon an English text, which was based upon about seven Greek texts.

Confused? Well, here's what happened. The first printed and published edition of the Greek New Testament, notice I said both printed and published, was by Desiderius Rasmus in 1516. There was actually one printed before that, but they were waiting for papal approval before it could be published.

That was Cardinal Jimenez's Completentiam Polyglot, a multi-volume set. And so, Rasmus beat him to the punch by avoiding getting papal approval by dedicating that volume to the Pope. So, the first edition of what becomes the Textus Receptus was dedicated to Pope Leo X.

There were five editions from Rasmus, and they differ from one another. They're not identical. For example, the first two editions of Rasmus did not have 1 John 5 -7, the Kamiohania Minute. It wasn't there.

And even when he inserted it in the third edition, probably forced to by the writing of Codex Monfortianus in 1520, he included in his annotations a long note explaining why he felt he had been deceived on the matter.

But there are five editions of Rasmus. And then you have the 1550 Stephanus Greek text. And then you have Beza's 1598 edition. Now, there are others along the way, but those are the primary printed editions that the King James translators then used to produce the King James New Testament.

Then, people took that, and in 1633, the Elsevier brothers were selling something pretty much similar to this. And in, heck, in those days, you actually advertised in Latin. Wouldn't work too well today, but you advertised in Latin.

And so they called it the received text, the text that's been received, or in Latin, the Textus Receptus. Then, in the 19th century, a scholar by the name of Scrivener went back. He went to the King James, and he said, OK, since there are differences between all five of Rasmus and Stephanus and Beza, then, well, we need to find out what the King James translators chose between those editions.

And let's create a text that reflects the textual choices of the King James version. And that's where this came from. He created a Greek text that is actually based upon the textual choices of an English translation, which was based upon seven printed Greek texts, which actually all went back to less than a dozen Greek manuscripts themselves.

Because when Erasmus created his Greek text, he had about half a dozen manuscripts, the oldest of which was a thousand years after the birth of Christ. And they differed from one another. And Erasmus had to look at them and compare them and choose one reading over another.

Erasmus engaged in textual criticism. And may I remind you, Erasmus was a Roman Catholic priest. Just in case those who follow Sam Gipp want to argue, oh, well, your modern text is infected with Romanism and so on and so forth.

Well, keep in mind, church history has a way of coming back and reminding you of things. And so, even the one text that he's going to point you to as the foundation of the King James, and by the way, for Sam Gipp, this isn't the final authority.

It's the English translation of this. It's the English translation of this. So, even this is secondary in the original language to, in essence, the inspired version, which is the King James version of the Bible.

And so, just from this brief history, you can see that Sam Gipp hasn't given you the full story. He's giving you a very simplified version that is so simplistic, it's untrue. Because it does not give you all the facts of the matter.

Now, I want to make sure that you understand what I'm saying when I say there were differences, even between the editions that the King James translators used to produce the New Testament of the King James version.

For example, this is Erasmus's third edition. This is a photocopy of Erasmus's third edition, 1522. This is the first edition to contain the Kamiohanium. His first two editions, starting in 1516, did not contain it.

Now, that's one of the five editions of Erasmus. This is not a photocopy. This is a genuine 1550 Stephanus Greek text. This is the last edition of the Greek New Testament to be published without the verse divisions.

That's chapter divisions, but does not have verse divisions in it. The very next year after Stephanus, Robert Estienne, moved to Geneva from Paris, then he introduced the verse divisions into the Greek New Testament.

But this was a widely used edition of the Greek New Testament. However, it does not agree word for word with the King James version of the Bible. In fact, this edition in Revelation 16 .5 reads differently than the King James version of the Bible because the King James translators chose to follow Baez's 1598 edition of the New Testament at that point, where Baez had introduced a conjectural emendation where he had no Greek manuscript support, and we've never found Greek manuscript support that supports the King James at this point.

But he changed the reading in Revelation 16 .5 from the Holy One to and shall be, the future participial form, Esamenos. That edition of the Greek New Testament does not have it. So again, to say there's just only two Bibles when there's all this history is to mislead the unsuspecting.

We'll continue examining Sam Gipps' assertions in the next edition of our response to his.

Video.

Thanks for watching.