Kent Hovind on the KJV: Reply Part 1

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Kent Hovind on the KJV: Reply Part 2

00:08

Someone came in the channel and asked if I would comment on a particular video. I generally wouldn't do that.

00:15

But as I began watching the video, I was distressed yet once again.

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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.

00:31

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

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New Testament that is simply fictional. I mean, it's made up.

00:54

And yet, it's presented in such a way that many people go, oh, so that's how it works.

01:00

And that's not how it works. And it's an error. And if we're going to be consistent and point out the errors in someone like Abdullah, a

01:08

Muslim's misrepresentations of the history of the New Testament, well, we need to be consistent and point out the misrepresentations by other people as well.

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And so I'd like to look at this presentation by Hovind and demonstrate that it just simply is factually untrue and not reliable.

01:29

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 in all kinds of different churches.

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And right 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.

01:42

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.

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I have slowly, over 30 -some years, come to the position of the King James. Now, I don't fight

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Christians who use other versions. Use whatever you want. But I think if you're really going to be a Bible student, you're going to have to get a

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King James. Here's the story. New Testament books were written shortly after the time of Christ.

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They had to make copies. It takes about 10 months to write out a copy of the Bible. So they had to write out the whole copy of the

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Bible by hand. They had no Gazetner, no printing press, no, you know, Gutenberg hadn't been born yet. So it took a long time to make a copy of the

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Bible. They make their copies. They had either both books and scrolls. Both were in use all through Scripture. And they make a copy, and then they check it very carefully.

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If they find a mistake, they're going to burn it. So they were very careful to get it right. Okay, we need to stop right there.

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Because, in essence, what Hovind is doing is he's taking the later

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Masoretic mechanism of copying Old Testament manuscripts about 900 years after Christ.

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And he's reading it back into the entirety of the biblical context. He's not taking into consideration that the early

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Christians, he mentions they're into persecution, but doesn't seem to connect that up with anything. And recognize that the early

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Christians were not scribes in general. They were not professionals. That the earliest manuscripts we have are not of the entire

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Bible. They're of a particular book. That collections only began to be made over time.

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And that, in essence, you don't have a system where you have complete

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Bibles being carefully copied over ten months. And if a mistake is made, then the result is burned.

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There's no evidence of this. It's pure fiction. But that's what's being presented with such a cavalier attitude.

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I can certainly see how people go, oh, that's nice to know. But there's just no evidence of this. It simply wasn't a possibility given the context in which the early

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Christians found themselves. And it involves reading back a methodology used for the

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Old Testament almost a millennium later in the Masoretic copying into how the

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New Testament is copied. 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.

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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.

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Christians were getting persecuted, so they spread out to different countries and they bring their copies of Bibles with them. Again, notice, copies of Bibles.

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It really sounds like he thinks that these early Christians had entire

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Bibles, sort of like he has, bound together, Greek and Hebrew or something like that, and that these are entire

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Bibles rather than individual books. Starting fairly early on, you start getting collections, but they're collections of Paul's epistles or the

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Gospels or something like that. You see this in P46, P66, P72, P75, things like that.

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They start collecting portions of it. But it's not until later that you get the entire collection of Bibles together, and rare was the

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Christian who had all of that. The Christians had to share that which they had.

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Local churches, for example, would be a focus of where these precious texts would be kept.

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So the idea that they were 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

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Masoretic methodology, there just simply isn't any evidence of this at all. So you've got somebody in India who's copying the

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Bible and somebody in France who's copying the Bible, and pretty soon the copy wears out. Let's just pick a few numbers here.

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This is a book from the early 1900s. It's a very beautiful book, and it's beginning to get worn out.

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If this book was in active use, if I opened it and closed it and read from it every single day, it would shorten the life of it.

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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.

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Believe me. The scrolls that are in active use are not going to last more than maybe 200 years.

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Let's be generous here. 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.

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At the end of the day, they roll it up and they put it away. Within 200 years, it's worn out. It's rags.

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You throw it away. But it doesn't matter, because by then you have 50 copies you've made off of this thing.

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Now, just a couple of corrections in passing. The vast majority of Christian manuscripts are codices.

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They are books, not scrolls. There are very, very few scrolls in 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 that have been found because they've worn out is a popular argument, but it's not a very good argument.

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We know of books that very clearly were in use for a very long period of time that go all the way back to that point in time, and it is not an appropriate assumption to just say that, well, if you find it in the ancient world, that means because it was trashed.

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Actually, he was saying you could throw them out, so I suppose that would cause a kink in the argument there.

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But some people say, well, if we find them, that's because they weren't actually used and they were discarded and so on and so forth.

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These are all gratuitous assumptions that are being made that would require much further evidence within the context, the archaeological context, to actually bear that out.

07:47

But the point being that the idea that every Christian was a scribe and every

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Christian was using a Masoretic text transmission style to make 50 copies of his own

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Bible, where is the evidence of this? It just doesn't exist.

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I mean, after the Peace of the Church in 313, then you could have scriptoriums and you could have copying of manuscripts that way, but the idea that every single

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Christian was doing this kind, making 50 copies or at least 4 or 5 copies himself, there just isn't any evidence that this is how the actual transmissional methodology took place.

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Or maybe 100 copies. They made copy after copy after copy of these scrolls or books.

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So you have exact copies of the original. The original is junk by now, so you throw it away, it doesn't matter.

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You take those 50 copies and you begin making copies off of those. And again, very careful copying process, but after a few hundred years they are junk, so you throw them away.

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This goes on several generations, and now you're on the 4th or 5th or 6th generation from the original, and now you have thousands of exact copies of the original, which is long gone.

09:00

It's been thrown away years and years ago. About the early 1500s, they decided to put the

09:07

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

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Lawlords who gave their lives memorizing that, they'd all be pretty bummed out to discover that it was

09:32

Erasmus who was involved in putting the Bible into English. A little bit of a misunderstanding here, and some mixing up of really what's going on, on Kent Hovind's part.

09:45

And so Erasmus and Luther and Tyndale and the Geneva Bible, and all this was made in the early 1500s, and throughout the 1500s, they're making copies of the

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Bible, they're translating it to English. They went around and gathered up old scrolls that they could find, and copies of the

10:00

Bible, and they found about 5 ,000 copies of Scripture, from countries all over the world.

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That's just simply untrue. I think he's confusing the number of manuscripts we have today, of the

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Greek New Testament, 5 ,400, 5 ,500, with what they had back then.

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Erasmus had half a dozen to a dozen manuscripts to work from. It sounds to me like in his thinking, they had complete

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Bibles rather than individual manuscripts. He clearly has not done any original reading in these fields himself.

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He's just borrowing this from others, and unfortunately as a result, it's highly inaccurate.