Over this past weekend I had the opportunity to be on The King’s Men podcast and discuss the anatomy of Christian belief, what the Bible says about itself, and why I read the Bible I read. In this second episode we discuss how a translation can be properly understood as inspired.

Blessings.

Over this past weekend I had the opportunity to be on The King’s Men podcast and discuss the anatomy of Christian belief, what the Bible says about itself, and why I read the Bible I read. This is the first episode. Lord willing I will post the second episode tomorrow.

Blessings.

Since the Enlightenment, theologically oriented Academia’s trajectory has been to degrade the Christian sacred text through radical humanization. After demonizing the Reformation definition of inspiration described as dictation, (a word used by our Reformation era forefathers that has the explanatory scope to include holy men of God and the Holy Spirit as the creative, active agent of the Scripture), the definitions of inspiration ranged from varying degrees of inerrancy to the outright rejection of the infallibility of the Autographs.

For instance, under the heading “The Union of the Divine and Human Elements in Inspiration,” Strong’s Systematic Theology, 219, Strong gives a corrupt human element equal standing with the divine element and from this premise bifurcates the authority of the inspired word of God and the Author of the inspired word writing, “While inspiration constitutes an authority more trustworthy that are individual reason of the creeds of the church, the only ultimate authority is Christ himself,” and places Scripture on a continuum of authority with human authors. Strong, by means of a single, lofty theological pontification separates the word of Christ from the message of Christ, as if Christ did not breathe out every word of immediately inspired Scripture. This is because Strong represents all those who hold that “The Scriptures are the production equally of God and of man, and are never to be regarded as merely human or merely divine,” 212. As a conglomerate of unequal authority, for Strong and those this shared notion of inspiration, the Scripture never has been essentially God’s word.

Strong’s continuum of authority, based on the human element, is completely consistent with that of Westcott and Hort who wrote “Little is gained by speculating as to the precise point at which such corruptions came in. They may have been due to the original writer, or to his amanuensis if he wrote from dictation, or they may be due to one of the earliest transcribers.” Westcott and Hort, Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek, 1881, 208.

Once a chain of inerrancy is established, Strong and Westcott and Hort present the same case for inspiration – the inspiration the Scripture claims for itself never existed. When writing an inspired text is shared with the human writer, the entire text becomes suspect because of the writer’s own limitations. If, however, the Holy Spirit if the creative, active agent, then inspiration is entirely God’s word written by holy men with intrinsic limitations. Immediate inspiration by its very nature was designed for fallen, but holy men, chosen of God to write God’s infallible word despite their intrinsic limitations. What they wrote, was wholly and completely God’s word, in spite of who they were, because the word was divinely inspired.

Once the transition was made from immediate inspiration that uniquely produced the infallible, canonical whole, and unequivocable written word of God to varying degrees of so-called inerrancy, fluid, and questionable religious text, this novel book, traditionally called the “Holy Bible” was no longer considered hemmed in by the upper and lower exegetical limits of orthodox theology. Abram Kuyper knew too well what would happen to the sacred text when submitted to the “rational subject.” In 1898, he wrote,

“It is unfortunate, however that in the olden time so little attention was paid to the formal principium [Holy Scripture]. For now it seemed altogether as though the still darkened understanding was to investigate Scripture as its object, in an entirely similar way to that in which this same understanding threw itself on plant and animal as its object. At first this compelled the understanding to adapt and accommodate itself to the authority of the Holy Scripture, which then maintained a high position. But, in the long run, roles were to be exchanged, and the neglect of the formal principium was to bring about a revision of the Scripture in the sense of our darkened understanding, as has now actually taken place. For if faith was considered under Soteriology, and connection with faith the ‘illumination,’ what help was this, as long as theology itself was abandoned to the rational subject, in which rational subject, from the hour of his creation, no proper and separate principium of knowing God has been allowed to assert itself?” Abram Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954, 1898), 347-348.

Kuyper in this short pericope has captured the larger transgenerational deterioration of Christian Academia’s comprehension of the once standard sacred text and this theological and indeed intellectual decay quintessentially resides in rejecting the formal principium or Scripture itself. Scripture’s own self-authenticating, self-attesting and self-interpreting authority is submitted to the rational subject, that is the scholar, which as Kuyper writes “from the hour of his creation, no proper principium of knowing God has been allowed to assert itself.” It was interesting that James White had little or no idea of a theological/philosophical defense of Scripture brought by Dr. Van Kleeck, Jr., being steeped in the school of thought that rejects the formal principium as its own self-attesting, self-authenticating, self-interpreting defense.

Now normative, Academia’s rejection of the formal principium no longer allows any rhetorical or apologetic space to say that that Scripture is what it claims to be, possessing transcendent attributes unique only to the word of God, because the Scripture, for the academy,  is not essentially God-breathed. This rejection leads to evangelical critical apologists to say there are no verses in the Bible that teach providential preservation, because there is nothing unique about the Scripture that would demand such divine oversight. For them, it is merely a phenomenal book, subject to the “ravages of time” like any other book. After all, even the autograph was intrinsically flawed, as reflection of its shared human authorship.

To recognize the Holy Spirit as the creative, active agent of Scripture argues for verbal, every word, not concept, and plenary, every word possesses the full extent of inspiration – verbal, plenary inspiration. Every word of Scripture because it is the word of God is plenarily and verbally inspired because God is the creative, active agent of inspiration and therefore the primary Author, the penmen, secondary. Furthermore, as the word of God, what God breathed-out cannot be separated from the one who breathed the words. The inspired word of God cannot be separated from the God who gave the word by inspiration.

For instance, Hebrews 13:7-9 speaks to Scripture’s eschatological significance grounded on the immutability and eternality of is sole subject, the Lord Jesus Christ. The three-verse pericope flows from honoring those “who have spoken unto you the word of God” and emulating their example “considering the end of their conversation,” their lives cut short by martyrdom. With their deaths either natural or premature, a void was created in the Church to be filled by others. Verse 9 warns against following false teaching – “Be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines, and verse 8, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and forever” is the bridge between the absence of teachers of the word and the warning against following theological error. Jesus Christ is the immutable bridge to sound doctrine between the past and forever.

Verse 8 assumes that the immutable, eternal Son of God is irrevocably linked to the apostolic message and the immutable and eternal inspired word of God. It is correctly inferred that the doctrine of the unchanging, eternal Christ possesses the same characteristics as its Subject.

Keil and Delitzsch comment,

Men living in the flesh are universally impotent, perishing, limited; God, on the contrary (ch. xxxi. 3), is omnipotent, eternal, all-determining; and like Himself, so is His word, which, regarded as a vehicle and utterance of His willing and thinking, is not something separate from Himself, and therefore is the same as He.  Keil, Delitzsch, Isaiah, 144.

Philip Hughes, in his commentary on Hebrews, on this passage writes,

“if Christ is unchanging, so also is the truth concerning him, with the consequence there can be no place of differing and discordant doctrines (see next verse). In him we have the completion as well as the source of our faith (v. 2 above). The constancy of Jesus Christ, already announced in the opening section of this epistle (1:11f), implied throughout, and now affirmed here, is inseparable from the constancy of his word.” Hughes, Hebrews, 571.

That is, if the apostolic message is changed, or the written word changed, the message would not reveal the immutable and eternal son of God. The preacher would not be saying only those things that God has already said. The eternal, immutable subject of Scripture, Jesus Christ, demands an eternal, immutable Scripture to eternally and immutably reveal the eternal and immutable subject, Jesus Christ. A temporal, changing message is not preaching Christ. A message that is terminal is not preaching Christ. A message that is changing is not preaching Christ.

2 Corinthians 11:3,4, “But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him.

Ga1. 1:6,7, “I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel: Which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ.”

The the inspired written word of Christ is inseparable from the Christ of the word. 

Job 19:24, “Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever!”

Psalm 12:7, Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.

Psalm 33:11, “The counsel of the LORD standeth for ever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations.”

Psalm 105:8, “He hath remembered his covenant for ever, the word which he commanded to a thousand generations.”

Psalm 117:2, “For his merciful kindness is great toward us: and the truth of the LORD endureth for ever. Praise ye the LORD.”

Psalm 119:89, “Forever, O Lord, they word is settled in heaven.”

Psalm 119:111, “Thy testimonies have I taken as an heritage for ever: for they are the rejoicing of my heart.”

Psalm 119:152, “Concerning thy testimonies, I have known of old that thou hast founded them for ever.”

Psalm 119:160, “Thy word is true from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever.”

Ecc. 3:14, “I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him.”

Isa. 30:8, “Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever:”

Isaiah 40:8, “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.”

Isaiah 54:10, “For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the LORD that hath mercy on thee.”

Isaiah 59:21, “As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the Lord; My spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed’s seed, saith the Lord, from henceforth and for ever.”

Matthew 5:18, “For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, til all be fulfilled.”

Matthew 24:35, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”

Luke 16:17, “And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fail.”

1 Peter 1:23-25, “Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God which liveth and abideth forever. For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: But the word of the Lord endureth forever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.”

Jesus Christ, who is the subject of all Christian teaching is the same, therefore, the command to remain steadfast in the faith can be obeyed, Hebrews 13:9, “be not carried away by divers teachings.” Jesus Christ is for ever the same. Since Jesus Christ is the same, in his person, and in his teaching and preaching, he charges the Church not to be carried about with divers and strange doctrines. Jesus Christ’s immutability and eternality assures the Church of their eternal future because the inspired word is also immutable and eternal. Jesus Christ is immutable in his care and love to the Church, and throughout all times and ages, he never leaves nor forsakes them. So also, Christ’s teaching is eternal and immutable. Ephesians 4:20,21, “But ye have not so learned Christ; If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus.”

The pure, full, and entire religion of Christ is unchangeable, being simply, indivisibly, and constantly the same throughout all measures of time, because of the Subject of the inspired word of God is the eternal and unchanging Christ.

Continue reading “The Killing of Immediate Inspiration”

“Now the Church must hear Christ’s voice. Christ’s sheep will hear his voice, John 10:16. They will neither hear nor follow a stranger, ver. 5. Christ’s voice is not to be heard but in the Scriptures. Therefore other doctrine must not be received of the Church than is taught and delivered in the Scriptures. This directly impungeth the popish opinion of unwritten traditions which they bring in beside, yea contrary to the scriptures, which the they hold not to contain all things necessary to salvation. But the Apostle saith otherwise, that the Scriptures are able to make one wise unto salvation and to make the man of God perfectly prepared to every good work, 2 Timothy 3;15, 17. If perfect wisdom be found in the scriptures, what need is there of any other additions. Whatsoever is added to that which is perfect showeth a defect and is superfluous. Therefore Tertullian saith excellently, We need no curious invention after Christ, nor no inquisition after (of beside) the Gospel. If any will search further, he is like a wayfaring man without a guide in a desert country, and as a ship on the sea without a pilot. To leave the scripture is a way to error, not a stay from erring as he again worthily saith, They believe without Scripture, that they may believe against scripture.“

[Tertullian makes an interesting observation in the last quote. To believe without Scripture does not give the believer a neutral viewpoint, or an open-minded perspective, or a scholarly skeptical perspective in relation to the Scripture. Rather, to believe without Scripture sets them on a trajectory to “believe against scripture” or to oppose the content of Scripture. Again we see the Orthodox Reformation theme of the incompatibility and indeed the warfare between faith human or faith divine.]

Andrew Willet, A Treatise of Solomons Marriage (London: Imprinted by F.K. for Thomas Mann the elder and William Welby, and are to be sold at the Swanne in Pauls church-yard, 1612), 8-9.

Weiland passed away some years ago and so his YouTube channel is not being monitored/updated. Still, his content was and is in so many ways spot on. I am considering sharing all of his stuff here so that we can bring his material back into the light. In this video Weiland addresses what looks like a now old Dividing Line where James White voiced his disapproval of Theodore Letis’ Ecclesiastical Text.

I was recently invited to teach my mom’s Sunday School class while visiting her in Florida. At 67 I was the “spring chicken” Sunday, but we had a marvelous time together around the things of the Lord. As class started a young man that I learned later was 20 came in and sat down with us. It wasn’t exactly his age group for Sunday School but everyone is welcome.

Nearing the close of the Bible lesson taken from Hebrews 11;1, I was asked to say something about the Bible version issue. Not being my church, and knowing the hot button it can be, I hesitated at first and then gave a succinct overview of the current state of the debate concluding that the Church has always had a Standard Sacred Text from which to determine right and wrong and good and bad. It was a general statement, not at all, in my opinion prickly. This class wasn’t the proper venue for a longer response. Plus, it was time to depart.

Pretty sure I was in the clear, the young visitor to the class approached me to show me his brand new, still in the box with the advertising pamphlet on top, New Revised Standard Version. It wasn’t cheap. The new bible aroma wafted through the air as the top cover of the box was removed.

I was clear to say that I find value in all versions, because all the versions contain the Word of God, and to the extent that they properly translate the Hebrew and Greek apographa they have value. This of course would have included the brand spanking new NRSV. But this was not the young man’s problem with what I said. His problem was that I said the KJB was the standard by which all other English versions should be judged for accuracy. To say there was a standard that would provide a conclusion as to what is and is not God’s word was intolerable for him.

The brief exchange I had with him felt like nailing Jello to the wall. With no standard, there was no conclusive answer for anything and he liked it that way. Having gathered his elementary, eclectic apologetic from bits and pieces he discovered on the internet, it seemed his mission was to simply make sure no one had a standard for what is and is not the Bible.

I pointed to the box which said in large print New Revised Standard Version. Even the publishers that decide whether he has a bible to read based on sales figures see the importance of using the adjective “standard” for marketing purposes. What impressed me most was his unwavering, dogmatic confidence based on second-, third-, and fourth-hand online information while burying the testimony of the Holy Spirit through the word of God somewhere on the back 40. I said my confidence was in the testimony of the Holy Spirit through the word of God and that his confidence was in the mind of educated but fallen men and the ambivalence and fluidity of textual criticism; that what he was arguing would require a lifetime of study without concluding, followed by the expectation that everyone engage in this enterprise. Here at Standardsacredtext we argue that no technical training is necessary for every saint to know and understand God’s word. The alternative is claiming to reach the bottom of an abyss of changing data, thinking that you can get your arms around all the information, keep the true, discard the false, and finally decide inductively and empirically from the bottom-up what God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth has said.

It doesn’t matter if you have multiple Ph.D.’s or a sophomoric argument created by perusing online posts, to thoughtfully conceive of the notion that this so-called “science” has any intrinsic authority should immediately stop the conscientious inquirer in his or her tracks, draw them to their knees, and beg God for forgiveness of considering their ways His ways, and their thoughts His thoughts. Superbia is not the first of the seven deadly sins for no reason; it afflicts the uneducated and highly educated in the same fashion.

(Reposted with permission)

OVERVIEW

Kjvparallelbible is a website created and run by Mark Ward. The main portion of the site includes the text of the New Testament in two versions. The one on the left (or top if you are on a phone or smaller device) is the King James Version and the other is a hypothetical King James Version if it were translated from the modern Critical Text (Nestle-Aland 28th edition). There are a few other informational parts of the site, but the emphasis is on the comparison of the two texts. It should be noted that while Mark promotes and runs the site, the work of editing the KJV text (as far as I know) was not done by Mark himself and neither has he checked the work thoroughly. In the “about” section of the site a note says, “In 2021–2022, an editor was paid to go through the project looking for errors.” So while Ward didn’t do the work, he is the one promoting the site and responsible for its current state.

ITS PURPOSE

The site itself doesn’t give much information as to its purpose. The information it does give on the homepage is unclear or in some sense inaccurate.

“Among the 5,000+ Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that we still have, there are differences. But unless you read Greek, you cannot know for yourself what these differences are. You have to take someone else’s word for it. Until now.”

The first point of confusion is that the site does not attempt to translate all the variants in Greek manuscripts and neither does it translate any of the variants in the apparatus of the modern Critical Text. Therefore one still would not “know for yourself what these differences are” among the 5,000+ Greek manuscripts. Secondly, you are still taking “someone else’s word for it” by using a site prepared by someone else.

Next the homepage says, “Using the KJV Parallel Bible, English speakers can see for themselves the differences between the two major textual traditions. This site compares: Scrivener’s Textus Receptus, the Greek text underlying the KJV, and… the Critical Text, the Greek text underlying most modern Bible translations.” The site however does not seem to compare Scrivener to the Critical Text, but more the KJV to the ESV. There are places where the KJV does not read like a literal translation of Scrivener’s text and there are places where the ESV does not read like a literal translation of the NA28 Critical Text. When Scrivener assembled his text, he used Greek New Testaments which were printed previous to 1611 and the 1611 first printing of the KJV, but the KJV translators were not bound to just printed editions of the Greek New Testament. Also the modern KJV text has some variants compared to the 1611 printing. For example, at the end of Ephesians the 1611 KJV printing did not have “Amen” and so Scrivener (somewhat against his principles since it is found in all the printed Greek texts) left it out of his edition of the Textus Receptus. However KJVParallelBible keeps “Amen” like the modern form of the KJV and against Scrivener’s Textus Receptus. Another example is the word “knowing” in Matthew 9:4 where again KJVParallelBible follows the KJV against Scrivener. This contradiction can also be seen in the “about” section of the site where it says, “There are also differences between the TR and the CT that do not appear on this site because the King James supplies in italics the very word that, though absent from Scrivener’s TR, is present in the CT.” The writer there acknowledges that the KJV’s English is the basis and not Scrivener’s Greek. As for the comparison to the Critical Text, this too seems not to be entirely accurate. The translators of the ESV did not follow in every place the main text of the NA28. For instance in Mark 6:22 the ESV chose to go against the NA28 text and instead used a variant Greek reading. Mark’s site follows the ESV in the edited KJV column instead of the Critical Text (more on this later). So the site does not show “Scirvener’s Textus Receptus and… The Critical Text…” but instead seemingly attempts to compare the KJV against the ESV (something most English speakers should be able to do without taking someone else’s word for it by using this site).

Beyond just demonstrating differences or similarities between the KJV and the Critical Text, what is the principle motivation for the site? Robert Vaughn theorized “The site exists to show that there is not much difference between the texts behind the KJV and modern translations in order to lead readers to conclude they should change to a modern translation, and to show that there is enough difference between the texts in order to lead readers to conclude they should change to a modern translation.” This seems to agree with Ward’s ministry of being an apostle to the KJVO (https://youtube.com/…/Ugkx-Tc_KjjazCZhEBw_lK3HZCry…).

ERRORS

Besides the confusion in the promotional language of the site, there are clear errors in the text as it is presented. When I first saw the site I thought it might be a resource for quickly comparing modern translations which claim to have been translated from the TR. However, upon examination, I noticed that the text of what should have been Revelation 18 actually was the text of Revelation 19. In another case, Mark 5:13 was flipped; the KJV text was in the place of the Critical Text and vice versa. The same thing happened to Mark 9:33, as well as the whole chapters of Mark 13, Acts 11 and 17. I notified Mark about these errors and they have been corrected although my name doesn’t appear on the “volunteers” section of the site (all the better for the time being).

ERRORS WHICH REMAIN

While the above examples were corrected, Mark 5:42 remains flipped. The KJV reads “And they were astonished with a great astonishment” but the site adds to the KJV text “immediately” before “astonished” apparently from the Critical Text (or the ESV). I don’t know how many other examples like this might exist.

As previously mentioned, Mark 6:22 is not correct. The NA28 text reads “τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτοῦ Ἡρῳδιάδος” contrary to Scrivener’s “της θυγατρος αυτης της ηρωδιαδος”. The NET translates the critical text as, “his daughter Herodias”, but the ESV does not follow the text in the main body of the NA28 and reads more like the KJV. Luke 23:32 is another text which is not correctly notated, at least if one agrees with the translation given by Wallace’s NET Bible and the footnotes of the same “Two other criminals” (I told Mark about this latter example almost 2 years ago and it has not been changed yet, despite the site claiming, “Any errors will gladly be corrected if they are sent to the administrator, Mark Ward.”). Again the site follows the ESV instead of the NA28. Revelation 1:8 is still wrong even though Nick Sayers pointed it out on FB comments quite a while ago (“the beginning and the ending” should be removed from the Critical Text edition). There are other clear variants which are not properly marked, but it isn’t my job to edit the site.

Contrary to the normal process, in some places what should be the standard KJV text seems to have been changed to read more like a literal translation of Scrivener. In Mark 6:55 the site adds “there” to the end of the KJV text which apparently was taken from Scrivener. It also adds “her” before “hand” in Mark 1:31 like Scrivener. But in the “about” section of the site it says, “The specific edition of the KJV used on this site is the Authorized Version made available by Logos Bible Software.” Possibly those working on the text were not properly informed of the details of the project. As we noted above, the advertising is confusing and probably the creator wanted to kill two birds (the KJV and the TR) with one stone, but didn’t know how to accurately accomplish such a goal nor did he express such objectives to the editor/s.

I do not believe that Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11 (as well as Luke 22:43-44 and 23:34) are presented honestly. I understand that the Critical Text has variants even within those passages, but they are in double brackets of which the introduction to the NA28 text says that they are, “early insertions in the textual tradition”. Those entire portions should be red and the variants within it possibly noted in a different color. I understand that it makes things slightly more complicated and messy, but these are important passages which should be honestly and clearly marked.

OVERSENSITIVITY

Another problem with the site is actually opposite of what is pointed out above. In some cases it might be overly sensitive. If one were to use the site literally (that is assuming that every variant is clearly and accurately marked) they would conclude that the NKJV often follows the Critical Text. For example in Hebrews 7:16 the KJV uses the word “carnal” while the site gives a Critical Text translation as “fleshly”. What does the NKJV read at that verse – “fleshly”. The same thing happens in 2 Corinthians 7:10 with “worketh” and “produceth”; John 12:4 “Then” and “But”; John 4:9 “which am”; and many other places. I understand that the differences at times are so minute that it is hard to demonstrate the variant, but sometimes the site is too sensitive for its own good or use.

CONCLUSION

In its current condition I’m not sure what value the site has. It is not accurate enough to show all the differences between the CT and the TR or KJV (forgiving for the moment the indecisive objective of the site). Yet it is too oversensitive to be used to make a quick comparison of translations which claim to have been translated by the TR. In the end I cannot recommend this site for any accurate use. I would suggest that the creator choose a clear objective, pass that on to a qualified editor and then check the text himself before promoting it.