Royal Deceptions: Exposing the King James Only Conspiracies

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Justin Peters. I hope that you and your family are doing well today.

I wanna thank you very much for joining me to this program. And I am interviewing Fred Butler.

Fred is a friend of mine, and Fred and I have known each other for 10, 11 years now or so.

Fred has written a book entitled, Royal Deceptions, Exposing the

King James Only Conspiracies Against God's Word. Fred, thank you very much for joining me and tell us a little bit about yourself, brother.

Oh, hey, it is a pleasure and an honor to be here. And you're right, we've known each other,

I guess it is about 2010 ish or so, I think when I first started seeing you coming to church or whatever, at least seeing one of your talks that you do.

Well, basically my primary duties include, if I'm not raising kids with my wife,

Brenda, I am involved with Grace to You Radio Ministries. I work with John MacArthur's radio ministry that's all throughout the

United States, throughout the world. My primary job is organizing and pulling together all of the free resources and materials that we offer through our ministry on a monthly basis.

And I organize a team of volunteers who come out and they basically package all of that stuff and send it out in the mail.

Those volunteers are primarily individuals who have been at Grace for years and years and years, they're retired senior saints, and they come out every

Tuesday and Thursday for maybe four or five hours, depending on what we're mailing.

And they package CDs and books. And for the longest time, we also package tapes, but we have since shut that down.

So we no longer offer cassette tapes, but CDs and booklets and books, and then all the paperwork like receipts and introduction letters for people to receive and that sort of thing.

They pull it all together for me and put it together. And then I take it on the back end when they're not there on the days that they are away and mail it and get it prepared for mail and that sort of thing.

And that's what I normally do. And then on top of that, I get opportunities to teach them and preach to them when

I can. And then I've done a few funerals, get to shepherd them, all of that sort of stuff that kind of comes along with managing,

I think it was maybe 120 folks that maybe come on a regular, semi -regular basis.

Yeah, it's a blessing to be there and to enjoy those dear saints like that.

Indeed, indeed. Well, thank you, Fred. So getting to the subject matter at hand, you've written this book,

Royal Deceptions, Exposing the King James Only Conspiracies Against God's Word. And as soon as I saw that you were coming out with this book,

I was really excited about it because I am not infrequently accused of various things because I'm not a

King James only guy. I am anywhere from being well -intentioned but misguided at best to being a all out false teacher and deceiver at worst because I'm not

King James only. Yes, welcome to the club. I'm the same way. Yeah, and I know that this would reflect your heart as well as we kind of begin here, that one of the things

I appreciated about your book is that you're not against the King James translation at all, but just against the position that says it is, if you're not reading the

King James, you're not reading God's word and you're deceiving people.

You're probably a heretic, maybe not even be saved. And so that's what you're coming against.

So tell us a little bit about your progression in this, Fred, because you began as I did.

Back in my much younger days, I was King James only as well. What I've been taught was true and you held that position.

So tell us, how did you go from being King James only to being not convinced of those arguments to writing a book against that position?

Right, well, it is a long and arduous journey to be honest with you. No, I think when

I was a brand new believer, I'm trying to remember back, oh gosh, it's been over 30 years now, back in the late eighties, brand new believer is a very young man.

I had a extreme love for God's word. And I think I am like a lot of men, a lot of women who get saved, you have this desire to want to just consume scripture.

And at that time, the Southern Baptists were going through a massive upheaval over the doctrine of inerrancy and the infallibility of scripture.

And those who may be watching this, who might remember that, the whole issue was whether or not, can we trust scripture and is it inerrant in all that it touches on and talks about?

And there was actually talk about the convention, the Southern Baptist convention splitting and all that sort of thing.

And I had a buddy of mine who went to my church, Southern Baptist church, and he was like, well, everybody would be, we would all be on board the same view of inerrancy if we read the

King James. And I'm like, what is this? And he had happened to come across this book written by a pastor in Oklahoma named

Gary Flint. And I recently found out that he's now in Florida. If it's the same

Gary Flint that I remember back in those, that time, several years ago, he's, it's the same guy, pastors and independent fundamental

Baptist church. But he had written a book on that topic of why the King James Bible is

God's word. And basically criticizing modern versions, all of that sort of thing.

And I grabbed his book from my friend who gave it me a copy, well, actually he sold me a copy, but I got his book and I was reading through it and I was becoming convinced by what this guy was arguing.

And one of the things that really struck me is he had some articles written by a fella who is in New Zealand.

And this guy is a medical doctor by profession, but at the time had written these articles explaining

Bible contradictions and all of this sort of thing, difficult passages that in my

Ryrie study Bible in the footnotes, it would say, hey, this is a copyist error, or this is, you know, we don't really know how to reconcile this here, some solutions.

But this guy was saying, if you go to the text, there are no copyist errors. And I'll show you how.

And he uses a King James Bible to demonstrate that. And I was just blown away by that.

Oh man, that's, you know, he's using God's word to explain God's word. So from the very beginning, that position of King James only -ism presents itself as being a position that wants to honor

God's word, that wants to take God's word seriously as without error, that sort of thing.

And I was, and I gravitated toward that because that's my convictions about God's word as well.

So at the front end, it comes across as a very noble view of scripture.

But the problem is that it is narrowly confined to one English translation for whatever reason.

And, you know, well, they have their reasons, but it's just one narrow translation that you can't get away from it.

You have to always use this particular translation if you're gonna have that pure, unadulterated, inerrant word of God.

And as I grew in my faith and grew in my understanding of scripture, two things happened to me.

And I outlined this in the chapter of my, first chapter of my book, again, my little journey. Number one,

I was introduced to the book, New Age Bible Versions by Gail Ripplinger. And if you're familiar with Gail Ripplinger, I mean, she's like the

Sid Roth of King James only, wild conspiracy theory kind of stuff.

And her view is the idea that the King James Bible, well,

I guess you could say that the modern versions depart from the King James because it is the intent of the new age to be introduced by these modern versions into the church so that Christians will be readily acceptable to the

Antichrist who was supposed to be coming, right? That's sort of the gist of her book. But she goes through six or 700 pages of all of this strained, arcane,

I mean, just bizarre argumentation to get to that point. And when

I read through that, I was like, huh, I didn't really know what to make of it because I couldn't believe the conspiracy theories really that she was throwing my way.

She had one section in there particular that was dealing with Westcott and Hort who were two 19th century textual critics,

Greek professors who gave us sort of a new working apparatus that departed from the

Texas Receptus from which the King James is translated from. And she had this whole two or three sections, chapters about these guys and how they were, these men who were into the new age, they were into the theophany society, all of this sort of strange satanic stuff.

And I was like, okay, well, I should be able to document whether or not she's saying this is true or not.

She had footnotes where she got these comments. So I went and actually found their writings where she's quoted from.

And then I started looking at that. I'm like, this is not saying what she's claiming. They're not saying that at all.

She's totally taking this out of context. So you would think at that moment,

I would have this sort of dawning clarity. And I would be like, I can't believe King James only is them anymore, but that didn't happen.

So I was, there were actual King James only us who were critical of her sort of what she was doing and sort of her approach.

And so they were like, critical of the book. And so I would read their reviews and their critiques and that sort of gave me comfort though.

Okay, well, maybe I'm not, maybe she's just a lunatic fringe person and I don't need to deal with her and go back to the real

King James only as I'm like Peter Ruckman, who's also kind of a lunatic fringe guy too, but it is what it is.

The second thing that really got me though, and this is what really, I think God began to really use in my life is that I was becoming more and more convinced of the doctrines of grace.

And so I was, I saw Calvinism as the doctrines of grace called Calvinism. I saw that just as it's unfolded in scripture as the

Bible teaches that. I saw God's electing grace and his unconditional election as it's taught in scripture, that the atonement of Christ, actually saving people, that sort of thing.

And all of those points are there taught in the Bible. And I was like, yes,

I agree with this. But at the same time, I discovered that pretty much all of my

King James only writers and authors that I appealed to and that I read and were feeding my soul, they hated

Calvinism. They hated Calvinism. Oh my goodness. They hated it as much as they hated modern versions, if not more so.

And they had some of the loopy, crazy conspiracy theories about John Calvin and about the development of Calvin and all of that stuff.

And I was like, this can't be, this can't be right. There's, there's, this is just, this is not right.

And so I began to like begin to expose myself to other things that were outside of King James only literature.

And some of the writings that kind of helped me was like James White, you might not be familiar with his ministry.

He wrote one of the first popular treatments critical of King James only is called

King James only controversy. And the first time I read that book, I was absolutely a critic of it.

And I'm totally marked it up and had my mean spirited comments and everything in it.

But then as I was maturing and I went back and gave it a second read. And that's when

I think God began to turn on the lights about just showing me how God's word was really preserved.

It wasn't preserved the way the King James only as we're telling me, but it was preserved because you could see how he works through these various manuscripts, these groups of Christians and how they spirit of God worked in these people to copy the scriptures and goes down through time that give us our

Bibles in our hands today. So through just that agony of working my way through the

King James only literature against Calvinism and other things like that, I think

God eventually weaned me away from this and from that position and began to see other, other seeing the scriptures in a new light that what

I had been previously taught. And it's just something that really just clicked and turned on a light for me when

I began to consider these truths anew. I eventually found myself as the internet began to grow and become more stable in the 2000s,

I was a part of a lot of discussion groups and a little email forums and that sort of thing. And I was on some that were dedicated to King James onlyism.

And I began to sort of interact with these guys. And I discovered that there was this sort of quiet majority of people who didn't really interact or just lurkers are reading the comments, reading the emails and stuff.

And they would contact me away from the group, direct message me saying, I don't really believe in this

King James stuff anymore. Could you help me understand this? And I began to like answer these people and respond to them and write to them and stuff.

And eventually all of this material found its way in a series of blog articles that I wrote, gosh, like 2006, maybe.

So you're looking over 15 years ago that I began to write this stuff out. And on a blog is that, blogging was the brand new hobby everybody was doing.

And you always wanna find some fodder in order to fill your blog with. So I began to write on this topic and I organized it around what

I thought were the main points or the main key apologetic points that King James only is use, or at least how

I kind of thought about King James onlyism. And I answers those various points. So the chapters in my book are centered around those various points that I had written out in my blog articles.

When I go back and put it through. Well, let's, I don't wanna, we can't go as in -depth to these as your book obviously does but yeah, you broke this down in the six most common arguments that we hear from those who advocate the

King James only position. The exclusivity argument, promise, textual, the argument that heretics corrupted the

Bible, the purity argument, scholarship, and then historical. So just in a few minutes, can you give us the cliff note version of these six arguments?

I most certainly can. Okay. Just sort of - What's that? Say it again?

Well, I was gonna say, in my book, I have the first chapter or the second little chapter kind of that will outline this as I go through and I'll just kind of highlight this as I read through this here.

But basically the exclusivity argument is just, it comes from the idea that when you argue or discuss

King James onlyism with a King James onlyist, they assume that the word of God, the inspired inerrance, infallible word of God alone is the

King James Bible. So any departure from the

King James text, whether clarifying it or retranslating it or whatever that might be, is then going to be tampering with the word of God alone.

That's kind of how they argue and they think through that. So I talk about that argument. Then talk about the promise argument, which is based on out of Psalm chapter 12, verse seven, where it talks about the whole idea that God has promised to preserve his word, it's purified in the fire seven times.

And they'll use that passage to describe how, well, this is the word of God being preserved and it's preserved seven times.

And that's the seven translations or the six translations before the King James. And it's the final purified word of God.

But the problem is, is Psalm 12, seven is not talking about physical manuscripts.

It's talking about God preserving his people against the enemies that were rising up to try to destroy them.

It has nothing to do with the Bible. Then thirdly is the textual argument, which has the idea that in the, it's interestingly

King James only is don't really have a whole lot of material apologetic work in the

Old Testament. The one guy who sort of did is D .A. Waite, who argued that there was this one edition of the

Hebrew text that the King James used that he claims is the pure textual

Hebrew texts of the Bible that God preserved. And then the Greek text, which is the

Texas Receptus or the TR. And so they'll claim that those two texts are what we need to translate from.

Some King James only has go as far as to say, there's no longer a need to translate from the

Hebrew and the Greek. The King James is completely sufficient. It's done its best. It's the best translation of those texts.

So it's not even necessary to learn the original languages, but they'll go through that and they'll claim that any manuscripts that kind of come from North Africa and Alexandria are suspect and they've been tainted by heretics and so forth.

And they'll claim that you see God's hand of providence directing these texts over time, the

TR and this Hebrew text that Daniel Waite identifies.

The purity argument goes back to the whole idea of how the various translations that came before the

King James where you see God burning off the dross, that there's this line of good

Bibles that you can find and that you can see God's hand. I talk about how that's just cannot be the case.

There's many additions and translations between Whitcliffe's first translation that they usually identify to the

King James. It's more than seven. Right. And then the last, well, that's the last one.

The scholarship argument just talks about how the King James scholars, men who translated the

King James were the greatest textual scholars the world has ever known. They'll even put them on an apostolic or near apostolic level.

They were receiving divine revelation or something, but that's not the case either. You go through and look at their lives.

They were good men, great guys, but they were fallible and had problems just like everybody else.

And then the last point is the historical argument, which just talks about how the

King, you see God's hand on the King James because you see how it's gone around the world and it has this great history connected to it and all that sort of thing.

But when you kind of go back and you evaluate those stories and those claims, that's not entirely accurate.

The King James is not what was really the catalyst behind the great awakening, but it was really what

I believe to be the preaching of God's word, the exposition of scripture, and I would say the proclamation of the doctrines of grace.

Those were the things that God used during the great awakenings to bring revival. It wasn't tied to one particular translation, so to speak.

So those are my main chapters. I have some appendices in there. I talk about Chris Pinto's "'Terrors

Among the Wheat' video that a lot of people have been referencing in recent years.

I do a book review of the Walmart version, the Walmart, actually

I have it here, the Walmart King James that you could have gotten in 2011 celebrating the 400th anniversary of the

King James. They had it for five bucks at Walmart, so I grabbed this, grabbed up a copy.

So you can kind of look at the original King James text. They don't have the apocryphal in it, though. That's what was kind of a bummer because the original

King James had the apocryphal, but. Right, and speaking of the original King James, oh my goodness,

I mean, this takes me back to my college days when I was going to a King James only church and what's so funny is that all these men and women who argue so strongly for the

King James that it is the only reliable translation. It is the word of God. Nothing else is.

If they actually had an original 1611, they wouldn't even be able to read it.

Exactly, and you look, and I was reading through this one here. It has that, not only does it have the strange font that we're not really familiar with, it's kind of flowery and all that, but it's just the way that they have different letters.

I think it's the F shape is supposed to be pronounced with an S sound and I is a

J sound and so forth, so it's I -O -B for Job rather than J -O -B. I mean, it's just, you're exactly right, and I think it's our friend

Andrew Rappaport was telling me the story about one of the times when someone talks about being a

King James guy coming to his church, he said, "'Here, take my King James Bible.

"'Let me have yours. "'I want you to use that tonight "'to listen to the sermon with, read through it.'"

And the guy that he did that with was like couldn't get his normal King James back because it's not a 1611 edition.

I mean, it's like a 1789 or something like that. I don't even know where they kind of ended it, but it has gone through multiple, multiple revisions over the years, changing words and phrasing and that sort of thing, and yeah.

Yeah, it is ironic, and what many people, many of these

King James only advocates are thinking is the 1611 King James. It's not the 1611

King James at all. They wouldn't be able to read it. I wanna kind of circle back to what you were talking about earlier, and this,

I guess, would be under the textual argument because we hear this a lot, and oh, it's only the textus receptus, the

TR that is reliable, and all the other manuscripts that serve as the foundation for like the

RSV or the New American Standard, those use corrupted manuscripts, and they're not reliable.

They've been corrupted, and so why is that not a valid argument?

Because most people, quite honestly, when they hear textus receptus or Masoretic text or Alexandrian manuscript, they don't know what in the world that's talking.

Those things are, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what's the layman's argument or response,

I suppose, when someone is confronted with that argument from a KJV -only person?

You're using corrupted manuscripts. Yeah, okay, so King James only, and I'm trying to think back when

I was a King James only, and how I would sort of lay this out. So basically, it's the idea that modern versions are based upon ancient biblical manuscripts, particularly in the

Greek. There's not a whole lot of discussion and debate about the Hebrew, because that's a different language altogether, and there's a whole lot of, well, one, there's some consistency.

There's more consistency with those texts than there are with New Testament texts, and they're not as many.

So they tend to ignore the problems found in the Old Testament. But the idea is that in the

New Testament, modern versions utilize what are considered older and best manuscripts, meaning that they were manuscripts that, for the most part, circulated around Alexandria, Egypt, and North Africa, throughout that region of the world at the time, and in the

Levant, where Israel and that area is. Whereas the Masoretic text, or the, well, not the

Masoretic, that's the Hebrew, the majority text, it's circulated around Asia Minor.

The reason why they don't like the Alexandrian text is several reasons, but one, the primary reason is there's not a whole lot of those available for us to utilize, and they sort of, they seem to give the appearance that Christians stopped using them, and they dropped off out of history, and no one really used them.

But that's not necessarily the case. When you study the history of the early church, where was the early church primarily located in the world?

Well, it was in North Africa, and it was around Alexandria, Egypt. So there would be a whole lot of circulation of those texts,

I believe, at that time, up to about maybe 400 or 500 years after. But around 650, 700s in that timeframe, there was a major cataclysmic event that took place, which is the coming of Islam.

And so Islam basically destroyed all those churches there in North Africa. Everybody had to go back over to Asia Minor.

They took those manuscripts with them, I believe, in some cases. But during the time that the

North African colonies and Christians were thriving, you did have Christians in Asia Minor who were copying texts and making their own manuscripts and all that sort of thing.

But when Islam came in, they basically wiped out that ability for them to maintain their texts, okay?

So they're not gonna be there. So they're there. We have copies of those, and they do exist.

But the majority of them are gonna be found in and around Asia Minor.

And over time, what we kind of see is, if you're a smart -thinking textual critic, you're gonna kind of note these little additions and flourishes and extra things that come, that have kind of accumulated in the texts that are in the majority family.

And the problem with that is they may not necessarily be what the original said, because they've added extra stuff to them.

And I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that Christians were copying this, and they were like, well,

I don't know if this was originally what John said, but I'm gonna maintain it, and I will note it in the footnote, or as a footnote or inside margin or whatever, that this other text over here says this or whatever.

And so they were very meticulous about tracking all of that kind of stuff. So King James only will say that, because modern translations, after the fall of the

Ottoman Empire in 17, 1800s, people started going back in there and finding these older manuscripts that had pretty much fallen out of use because they just were not circulated, because Muslims wouldn't allowing them to.

And so they will begin to put together a working translatable apparatus, as it were, that was going to be used to translate into English.

And they were utilizing readings that were found in these families that were in Alexandria.

And so they'll claim that, well, King James only will claim, well, those aren't really reliable.

There's not that many of them. They weren't in circulation. They tend to ignore all the part about the

Muslims coming in there and wiping out the Christian communities there. But they'll claim that origin and all of these various Christians there in North Africa had weird loopy ideas about spiritualizing the text, which is true, but they didn't mess up the actual physical text.

They weren't messing that up. They were just interpreting it kind of in a loopy way.

We have that today. And when you talk to somebody who has like a literal hermeneutic, as opposed to someone who has a spiritualized hermeneutic, some of our

Reformed brethren who might think like that, that's not them messing with the actual physical text.

It's just the way that they sort of approach reading the Bible. And so they'll conflate those two things.

Not to interrupt, but that's an important point. There's a big difference between intentionally changing the text, copying it wrongly and interpreting what is written wrongly.

So their problem was in their theology, not in the manuscripts themselves or the way they copied it.

It was just the way they interpreted what they copied. And that's exactly right. And most heretics, the good vast majority of them, weren't physically altering the manuscripts to make them say that Jesus was a created being or something like that.

They just interpreted the text that was there that was preserved in a wrong way.

They were theologically wrong in the way that they approached the

Bible. And that's the teaching that they kind of promoted. The people who did mess up the text and begin to alter it, were usually immediately identified and were marked out as heretical and told to be avoided.

I think it was a monist. I always get him and Marcy messed up. But early on, he was taking out all of the, pretty much got rid of the

Old Testament. And it was just, is it Marcy? I think it was Marcy. Montanus was a charismatic guy.

Yeah, right. Marcy, yeah. My church history guy. Marcy basically got, he basically was saying, hey, just these gospels were legitimate and Paul's writings were legitimate and everything else was a suspect.

And so he was creating his own phony canon. And within that first couple of hundred years when he was there disturbing the peace of the church,

Christians recognized that he was teaching heresy and they threw out his stuff.

But you didn't see them doing that with the origin stuff or with people who were down in North Africa.

You know, there were, were there heretical men? Oh yeah, most definitely. I always find it interesting and amusing that when you look at the whole, the first major church controversy, the

Arian controversy, where they confirmed the deity of Christ, the guy who was the most vociferous and was like a bulldog on a bone was

Athanasius, who was from Alexandria, Egypt. He was the guy who was like absolutely determined to defend that doctrine.

Whereas everybody in Asia minor where the majority text was, you know, they were basically becoming

Arians in their theology. And it wasn't for him standing and holding that line.

You know, it would have probably ruined the church from that point onward, but God raised him up and made him who he was as a man of God to defend that doctrine.

And eventually it righted its ship and, you know, people rejected Arianism as heresy, like they should have the first time, you know, when they did the first time around, but they don't tend to recognize

Athanasius. What manuscripts would he have been using? Well, probably the Alexandrian manuscripts.

So are we going to say that he's a heretic because he's using manuscripts that don't have, you know, the whole title of Jesus's name in them and just Jesus Christ or the

Lord Jesus, rather than the Lord Jesus Christ or whatever. Right. You know, it's just, it's those sorts of things that are a problem.

And, you know, and as the subtitle of my book kind of suggests,

I think that because King James only is really drinking these conspiracies, they do more harm and damage to what the word of God is and to our convictions about what we should believe about the word of God than they are doing good.

And that's what I'm wanting to try to nail and try to expose as a problem and people need to turn away from.

That's the point of it. That's what my thesis of my book kind of aims at. Yeah, absolutely.

And Fred, another argument I hear from people, well, the translators of the

NIV and I'm full disclosure, I'm not a fan of the NIV. It's too - I'm not either.

Too paraphrastic for me. Yep, yep. But anyway, that's the argument that the translators of the

NIV and the translators of the numeric standard, which I do use going to the legacy standard now, but that's not the conversation.

That's another conversation. But anyway, that these were liberal translators and some of them had a homosexual agenda and they are, you know, what, so what would you say to that argument?

So this is not really a manuscript per se, but the trans - Right, right, it's the translators. Okay, well, there is,

I think in the original, really good English translations, like the

ESV and the NASB and even the New King James, which is sort of a redo of the

King James, a little bit different from the text that they utilize in the original translation.

You do have solid men who are translating those Bibles. You can trust them.

Are there translators who do have, and publishers of English Bibles that have something of an agenda?

Well, I think in some respects they do, but again, we're able to identify that. What the

King James heretic argument is going to try to say is that somehow it's clandestine, it's unknowable, it's just a little bit of leaven that's introduced and somehow that's supposed to totally lead you into being a raving, progressive, magenta -haired screeching woman, you know, screaming about abortion rights or something.

That's not happening. The reality is that they'll usually publish their agenda.

I think the NIV went through a revision, was it in 2011, if I'm not mistaken, where they were gonna, they said, yeah, we want to try to throw in gender -neutral words.

Yeah, they were very upfront about what they were doing. Well, that immediately alarms me to say,

I don't want to have anything to do with your Bible and I'm gonna tell people to stay away from it because these other translations don't do that.

I think with the homosexual, now there's probably in our modern day here, there probably are,

I could see there being some gay -oriented translators that want to try to throw out some new version that will try to either downplay or make homosexuality not a sin.

I could see that happening. The message by Eugene Peterson does that, even though he was not himself homosexual, but in fact,

I've been planning on doing a program on this, but the message version by Eugene Peterson does exactly what you're talking about.

Right, and you can definitely have that happening, but we recognize that.

I think usually the King James only, this is Gail Ripplinger's big thing, was Virginia Mellincott, who was one of the stylists on the

NIV. She didn't have anything to do, as far as I recall, with any of the wording of the

NIV. And again, I don't like the NIV like what you're saying. It's too much of a paraphrase.

They're going too much thought for thought, big dynamic equivalent stuff that I don't really care for.

But she was on the back end after all that work was completed, doing, if anybody knows anything about style and editorial work, all you're doing is just making sure all the commas are inserted correctly and you have the various air quotes and all that stuff around the words, question mark where there's supposed to be a question mark.

She's not injecting her gay stuff, at least not in the original NIV. So it's just a bogus argument to falsely claim this woman had this influence when it didn't, when she did not.

I believe Christians, I mean, all of the major evangelical conservative Bibles we can trust.

And I would even argue, read the King James. I'm not against Christians grabbing a

King James, use it as your devotional at night before you go to bed or whenever you do your devotional, read a chapter, go through the

Proverbs and the King James. I believe it is one of the greatest literary works in English that we have in our possession.

And it is the work of William Tyndale because the King James only guys or the

King James translators utilized his work. They were pulling from his, when he was translating into English, they were taking a lot of his wording, a lot of his phrasing, and they were putting it into the

King James. And so we have that wonderful legacy from the Reformation, even though King James did not intend for it to be a

Reformation Bible. He was looking for it to be a counter Reformation Bible, but that's another discussion.

That's another discussion, yeah. Yeah. And another thing too, Fred, is the fact that I agree with you,

I'm not against the King James either. And I read it. I don't preach from it. I might cite it.

I might cite the King James translation from time to time, but I don't preach from it. For one reason, not the least of which is the fact that English has evolved in the last few hundred years.

And in one well -known verse, probably almost everyone watching us right now knows 1

Corinthians 13, 13. Now these three things remain faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.

We all know that verse. But the King James, and I've got it in front of me, says, and now this 1

Corinthians 13, 13, and now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three, but the greatest of these is charity.

Now, charity today has a very different connotation, a very different usage than it did three or 400 years ago.

Right, right. Yeah, because their whole thing of charity is they're gonna say, if I remember my smart thinking,

King James only, it's like, well, charity brings out that word agape, which

I think is what that's translated there, if I'm not mistaken. And it's talking about giving to others and all that sort of thing.

But I'm not thinking that whenever I think of charity, I'm thinking about a women's crisis pregnancy center or something like that, or some goodwill or something.

I'm not thinking unconditional love. And I can see love and part of preaching the text is explaining the meaning of that word and how it's nuanced and what

Paul meant by it. You don't have to have charity. There's lots of words like that too,

I think, if I'm, that have all kinds of little problems. I think it talks about fetching a compass, when it meant that, and we circled back around when

Paul, or when Luke was kind of describing Paul's journeys on the sea. So when he fetched a compass around the island, it's like, okay, well, what?

I kind of understand what that means. I'm guessing it means he went around to the North. I don't know.

Right, right, yeah. Well, Fred, I found your book very, very helpful.

It's very readable, it's immensely readable and it's got scholarly things in it, academic things in it.

You do a really good job with the history and the textual arguments and all that, but it's very readable.

You don't have to have a seminary degree to read the book. You don't have to have a seminary degree.

You don't have to know Greek and Hebrew to benefit from it. And so I'm really appreciative, really appreciative of your work.

Yeah, I designed it and wrote it out. Really, what sort of triggered me putting it in print, all this work, is

I had a friend, one of my, actually my boss at work was like, hey,

I've got this lady who's just this church -going woman who's been given this

King James only book. Do you have anything that you could give to her that would respond to some of his arguments?

Because she was troubled by what this guy was saying and I didn't really have anything.

I mean, I had my articles online, but I said, I don't really have any document I could give her.

I mean, give her James White's book, but James White, which is readable and it's a good book and I highly recommend it.

It's a little daunting because it's almost 400 pages and it's, he transliterates the

Greek language in there and all that sort of stuff. So you have to sort of know what he's talking about in order to get a hold of it.

So my goal in putting this together was really to kind of have like an introduction to this issue.

And I list some other sources in the back so you can cite my, or look at my bibliography and kind of go through my sources.

I put a little asterisk next to the ones that I think are recommended for further study. And it's designed to somebody, you got that Sunday school teacher that's struggling with this.

It's got some disruptive troll in his Sunday school class. He can give him this book and he can kind of read through the arguments and get an anchor points on what, yeah, he should answer this guy and some other references that he can maybe appeal to and look at and provide something of a arsenal for him to pull from.

That was my whole point in writing that. Hopefully it'll have that impact in people's lives. Yeah. I believe it will.

I believe it will. And as both of us, having come from that KJV only background and we both held to that, there's a lot of people who are, who may be watching us right now and they are

King James only, but they are so not because they know better, but because that's what they've been taught.

And now some people do know better and they still hold to it. And those kinds of folks, you really can't, it's hard to deal with them.

There's a lot, I would say most of the King James only people watching us right now, maybe you've, what would you say to those who, hey, you've been taught this.

I know it's what you believe. What is your appeal to them?

Well, my, really, I would just encourage them as a believer, you need to exercise, that's where you have to exercise the discernment.

You've got other believers out there who are solid individuals who are not King James only.

Are you going to condemn them because they're not reading your preferred translation of the

Bible? I mean, I've, I had a guy email me last week, just basically,

I can't, but this is from the pit of hell kind of stuff. I'm like, really? I mean, I'm very much a likable guy and I love the

Lord and I love his word. And I mean, I don't know how much more inerrant you can get.

I mean, golly, I'm a six day creationist for crying out loud. I mean, what more could I say? What can you do? I just would encourage those folks, get this book, find or other like -minded resources and look at it.

I think you are, what we think about God's word and how we understand scripture and how it should shape, how we understand his history and it's how

God brought it down to us and preserved it really in throughout church history is vitally important.

And we need to have kind of a handle on those truths so that we can talk with our, you got that college age student that comes back from Harvard or wherever and they've been radicalized into their progressive nonsense that's going on now and they're gonna be anti -homeschool and I can't believe

I was raised in this terrible concentration camp of a family going to church every day.

You know how they are. You're able to answer their objections and talk with them. And what

King James only us have done is created this alternative history about God's word that is not sustainable by the facts of history.

And we need to be aware of that because if you go out there with those arguments as a

King James only us and you begin to engage people who know what they're talking about, you're going to be smashed and regrettably it could cause a lot of people to lose their faith and it becomes earth shaking for them because this guy knew what to say and this is not true about King James or whatever it might be.

And my book is designed to kind of help you see those conspiracies to look at them and to reevaluate them because you don't want that to be shaping what you think about God's word.

You want the truth about what God says about his word and how he has demonstrated how he has preserved it throughout history.

You want that shaping your thinking, not these loopy ideas and conspiracy stuff that comes from this narrow camp of individuals.

It's just not sustainable in reality. Right, right. There is a real danger that underlies the

KJV only position. It's very dangerous. It has a potential of shaking people's faith, shipwrecking their faith and when the arguments fall apart as they do.

And I often tell people, well, what do you do with people who don't speak English from your

KJV only position? What about the guy in the

Philippines who speaks, what is it, Tagalog? Tagalog. Tagalog, Tagalog, Tagalog, Tagalog.

Tagalog or Mandarin. They're not reading the King James version.

What about that? It's just, this logic breaks down so quickly.

Well, I'll tell you a story. I had a volunteer come to me and she told me, hey, she asked about my book and she said, well, her brother, he's a

King James onlyist. He comes from a Methodist background. He had a very weak view of the word of God. Found this

King James only church and he likes it because they have a very high view of scripture. It's all commendable and everything.

And he's a King James onlyist. And I said, well, I wrote this book and I'd be happy to send him a copy.

And she's like, well, I don't think he would understand it. I'm like, why is that? Well, he doesn't speak English.

I don't know why. Well, he's only really speaks Korean as his first language. I'm like, how does he become a

Korean King James onlyist? And he's like, you have to translate the

King James into Korean. I mean, I don't get how it works, but I'm like, this poor guy is in this terrible bondage to this one

Elizabethan era translation. He's not going to be able to understand God's word because he's committed to this point of view.

I mean, seriously. I mean, it was really kind of sad in some ways.

And now he's telling me that story. And I was like, man, that's what I'm hoping to kind of dispel.

I want to help people overcome that. Yeah, it's just loony. And another verse, kind of like the first Corinthians 13, 13th.

This is, my friends and I used to laugh at this, actually, in Matthew 25, 25, part

B, the second part of Matthew 25, 25 in the King James, it says, lo, there thou hast that is thine.

Who even knows what that means? Lo, there thou hast that is thine. I guarantee you, if you walked up to a hundred people,

English speaking people as primary language and said, lo, there thou hast that is thine, they wouldn't have the first clue as to what you're talking about.

And there's all kinds of interesting things like that. I'm sure we could find the time to look at it.

I can't believe this, but God's words have been to be clear.

And Tyndale, who gave us kind of the background and the underpinnings of the King James, wanted the word of God to continue to be clear.

I mean, he would want just to be revised and updated and put to the new, and if there's newer manuscripts than what he had available,

I guarantee you would have used them, would have looked at them and considered them. You know what I'm saying? I mean, that was his life goal.

That's what he gave his blood for so that we can have the word of God and it can be clear. Yeah, exactly.

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, Fred, thank you very much, brother. I appreciate you joining me for this program.

As we wrap up here, where can people get your book? Okay, well, go to Amazon.

I know Amazon's got all these issues with it right now, but go to Amazon and just type in Royal Deceptions, Fred Butler, it should pop right up.

There is a Kindle version as well as a paperback. I thought the paperback that my friend who created the cover did a wonderful job and it's the

King James with the little tinfoil hat on his head. And yeah, so he's, you can find it there.

If you like it, please leave me a positive review. Apparently that supposedly does wonders about getting it, pushed up to the front.

And I'm hoping this will be a blessing to the church. That's my main goal.

Wanna really encourage folks with it and just think right about the word of God. Yeah, well,

I think it'll do just that. And as I said, I'm really excited about it. I've read it, so it's a great book.

And dear ones, again, neither Fred nor I is against the King James.

We both appreciate the King James. It's just, it's not the only reliable translation out there.

And to hold to that position, the King James version only position, there's a lot of danger in that.

It hurts a lot of people. It breaks down logically very quickly. And there are good translations out there.

Stick with the, you and I would both say, stick with the literal translation, which would be the King James, but also the

English standard version, the New American Standard Bible, and of course now the Legacy Study.

That's not to say Legacy Study Bible, but it's the Legacy Standard Bible. That's coming out in its full,

I think Old Testament and New Testament in October, I think, maybe November, so right before Christmas.

And that's sort of a, and there's a video online of those men talking about why they put that Bible together.

And it really had to do with the fact that they wanted to sort of preserve the text of the Nasby, which they all agreed was probably the best

English because the Nasby was sort of a redo of the American Standard version back in 1901.

And they wanted to kind of recapture it. And some changes in it is they wanted to really emphasize the name of God, which is

Yahweh in the Bible. That's gonna be hard for me to kind of get used to because when I think of the

Lord, I mean, I use the Lord all the time, but the capital L -O -R -D is

Yahweh. That's his covenant name. And so they've redone all of those instances where you had the capital

L -O -R -D, the unpronounceable tetragrammaton, as seminary students call it.

They put, write it out as Yahweh. And yeah.

Do us a slave. A slave instead of servant, which is, you know, it's what it should be, slave.

So it's the legacy stand. In fact, I've got a copy of it right now, if y 'all can see that.

That's the New Testament in the Proverbs and Psalms, right? Psalms, Proverbs, and the New Testament.

That's all that's out thus far. But as you said, the entire thing will be out, Lord willing, later this year, later in 2021.

So, yeah. But Fred, brother, thank you very much.

Thank you for your work in this. I'm excited about it. And folks, pick up a copy of Royal Deceptions.

It'll be a really good read and very helpful for your friends and family members who may be caught up in this deception, hence the title.

All right. Thanks, Justin. I appreciate it, man. Thanks, Fred. All right, brother. God bless you. And dear ones, thank you for joining me very much.

Until our next time together, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of His Holy Spirit be with you all.