Kent Hovind on the KJV: Reply Part 1

The Problem With Kent Hovind’s History of the New Testament

Someone came in the channel and asked if I would comment upon a particular video. I generally wouldn't do that, but as I began watching the video I was distressed yet once again for it was put out by Kent Hovind and I'm ignoring all the other issues in regards to Kent Hovind and taxes and so on and so forth.

But this has been placed on YouTube, and it's another one of those situations. Where?

Someone.

With credibility in the minds of some. Makes a presentation about the history of the text of the New Testament. That is simply fictional. I mean it's made up and Yet, it's presented in such a way that many people go.

Oh, so that's how it worked and And that's not how it worked. And it's an error and if we're going to be consistent and point out the errors in someone like Abdullah a Muslims misrepresentations of the history of the New Testament.

Well need to be consistent and point out the misrepresentations by other people as well and so I'd like to look at this presentation by Hovind and Demonstrate that it just simply is factually untrue and not reliable.

Early Christian Manuscripts Were Not Copied Like the Masoretes

Why do you use the King James version of the Bible. Why not other versions well? I've been a Christian since 1969. I was raised all kinds of different churches and when after I got saved my parents started giving me just about every kind of Bible version there was and I have a collection of quite a few different Bible versions.

I'm not afraid of them, but let me give you a quick history of the different Bible versions. And maybe this will put it in perspective. I have slowly over 30 some years come to the position of the King James.

Now I don't fight Christians to use other versions. Use whatever you want, okay? But I think if you're really going to be a Bible student you're gonna have to get a King James. Here's the story. New Testament books were written shortly after the time of Christ.

They had to make copies. Takes about 10 months to write out a copy of the Bible. So they had to write out the whole copy of the Bible by hand. They had no Gazette near no printing press. No, you know Gutenberg hadn't been born yet, so it took a long time to make a copy of the Bible.

They make their copies that they either both books and scrolls both were in use all through Scripture and They make a copy and then they check it very carefully. If you find a mistake you're gonna burn it.

So they were very careful to get it right.

Okay, we need to stop right there because In essence what Hovind is doing is he's taking the later Masoretic? Mechanism of copying Old Testament manuscripts about 900 years after Christ. And he's reading it back into the entirety of the biblical context.

He's not taking into consideration that the early Christians he mentions there in the persecution business seemed to connect that up with anything and Recognized the early Christians were not scribes in general.

They were not professionals. That the earliest manuscripts we have are not the entire Bible. They're of a particular book. That collections only began to be made over time. And that in essence you don't have a system where you have Complete Bibles being carefully copied over ten months.

And if a mistake is made then the results burn. There's just there's no evidence of this pure fiction. But that's what's being presented with with such a Cavalier attitude I can certainly see how people go.

Oh, that's nice. No, but there's just no evidence of this. It simply wasn't a possibility given the context in which the early Christians found themselves and it involves reading back. A methodology used for the Old Testament.

Almost a millennium later in the Masoretic copying into how the New Testament's copy but the New Testament manuscripts do not give any evidence of this whatsoever, so He simply could not document any of this from meaningful sources even if he tried.

They had a checking system. That was really pretty goof proof. They made all these copies and they spread out around the world because this was a time of great persecution. Christians are getting persecuted.

So they spread out to different countries and they bring their copies of Bibles with them.

Again notice copies of Bibles. It really sounds like he thinks that these Early Christians had entire Bibles sort of like he has you know bound together Greek and Hebrew or or something like that and that these are entire Bibles rather than individual books or.

Starting fairly early on you start getting collections. But their collections of Paul's epistles or the Gospels or something like that. You see this in p46 p66 p72 P75 things like that they start collecting portions of it, but it's not till later that you get the the entire collection of Bibles together and Rare was the was the Christian who had all of that the Christians had to Share that which without they had local churches, for example be a focus of where these these precious texts would be kept and So the idea that that they were, you know running around with complete Bibles.

Sort of like we have available to us today. And that they were being copied very very carefully in scriptoriums or something like that Using Masoretic methodology. There just simply isn't any evidence of this at all.

So you got somebody in India who's copying the Bible and somebody in France who's copying the Bible and pretty soon these the copy wears Out. Let's just pick a few numbers here. This is a book from the early 1900s.

It's a very beautiful book and it's beginning to get worn out. If this book was an active use if I opened it and closed it and read from it every single day. It would shorten the life of it if it just simply sits on the shelf.

Of course it lasts longer. But a book in active use is going to quickly fall apart as this one has already begun to fall apart and it's not in active use believe me. The scrolls that are in active use are not going to last more than maybe 200 years.

Let's be generous here. Let's say let's say a book lasts 200 years if you use it every day. So they use these scrolls or Bibles and they're copying from it every day at the end of day. They roll it up and they put it away.

Within 200 years. It's worn out. It's rags you throw it away. But it doesn't matter because by then you have you know, 50 copies you've made off of this thing.

Now just a couple corrections in passing the vast majority of Christian manuscripts are codices. They're books not scrolls. They're very very few scrolls of the New Testament at all. Secondly the idea that every Manuscript is being copied.

And that the reason that a certain text type does not exist in the manuscripts have been found. Because they've worn out. Is a popular argument, but it's not a very good argument. We know of books that very clearly were in use for a very long period of time to go all the way back to that point in time and and it is not a Appropriate assumption to just say that well if you find it in the ancient world that means because it was it was trash.

Actually, he was saying you throw them out. So I suppose that would explain that would you know cause a kink the argument there. Some people say well if we find them that that's because they weren't actually used and they were discarded and so on so forth.

These are all gratuitous assumptions that are being made that would require much further evidence within the context archaeological context to actually bear that out but the point being that the idea that every Christian was a scribe and Every Christian was using a Masoretic text Transmission style to make 50 copies of his own Bible.

Where is the evidence of this? It just doesn't exist. I mean after the piece of church in 313 then you could have Scriptoriums and you could have copying of manuscripts that way but the idea that every single Christian was Doing this kind, you know making 50 copies or at least four or five copies himself.

There just isn't any evidence that this is how the actual transmission methodology took place.

Wycliffe, Erasmus, and the First English Bible Claims

Or maybe a hundred copies. They've made copy after copy after copy of these scrolls or books. So you have exact copies of the original. The original is junk by now. So you throw it away. It doesn't matter.

You take those 50 copies and you begin making copies off of those and again a very careful copying process. But after you know a few hundred years, they are junk. So you throw them away. This goes on, you know several generations and now you're on the fourth or fifth or sixth generation from the original and Now you have thousands of exact copies of the original which is long gone.

It's been thrown away, you know years and years ago. Okay. About the early 1500s. They decided to put the Bible into English.

That's definitely something that Wycliffe would be somewhat upset to discover. That his initial translation in English, which is completed before his death before the end of the 14th century in the 1370s and the Lawlords who gave their lives memorizing that and They'd all be pretty bummed out to discover that it was Erasmus who was involved in putting the Bible in English.

A little bit of a Misunderstanding here and some mixing up of really what's going on on Kent Hovind's part.

And so Erasmus and Luther and Tyndale and you know The Geneva Bible and all this was made in the 1450 early 1500s and they're off to 1500s. They're making copies of the Bible. They're translating it to English.

They gathered around they went around and gathered up old scrolls that they could find and copies of the Bible and they found about 5 ,000 copies of Scripture from countries all over the world.

That's just simply untrue. I Think he's confusing the number of manuscripts. We have today of the Greek New Testament 5 ,400 -5 ,500 with what they had back then. Erasmus had half a dozen to a dozen manuscripts to work from.

It sounds to me like in his thinking they had complete Bibles rather than individual manuscripts. He clearly has not done any original reading in these fields himself. He's just borrowing this from others and Unfortunately as a result, it's highly inaccurate.

We'll continue to look at this in the next video.