Summer in the Systematics – Bibliology (Part Eight): Challenges to the Bible

Transcript

JRS 33
8/20/2023
Summer in the Systematics – Bibliology (Part Eight): Challenges To The Bible
Selected Verses
Jesse Randolph

Alright, well we are back for session number eight of Summer in the Systematics. Fall is around the corner but clearly it is still summer. Summer showed up late it appears. And as you know, this summer we’ve been studying the topic, as you see here, of Bibliology, the doctrine of Scripture. You may remember last summer, we looked at Theology proper-the doctrine of God. Next summer, for those of you who are planners, Lord willing, we will get into the doctrine of Christology-the doctrine of Christ. But we have a couple more lessons here in Bibliology, the doctrine of the Bible with installment number eight tonight.

Now, as you’re about to see we’re going to cover a hodgepodge of different topics tonight related to our broader topic of Bibliology. For you Jeopardy fans, this will be like the Potpourri category. Just a bunch of random strands we are tying together, giving you a little bit of everything. And because tonight is going to be sort of a grab bag of a bunch of different subtopics, I thought tonight would be as good a night as any to go ahead and give you a list of my recommended readings on this subject of Bibliology I haven’t done yet this summer. I’ve got a shelf in my office; I go through about 25-30 books every week in preparation for these Sunday evening lessons. And you know I’m obviously looking at certain topics within those 25-30 books, but I wanted to give you guys my top 5 out of those 25-30. We have a “General Introduction to the Bible,” these are really small, I recognize, by Geisler and Nix. We have “From God to Us,” also by Geisler and Nix. Those are sort of short surveys of really a lot of what we have covered in this summer series, really how the Bible came to be-how it was put together in various ways. Of course, the doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy and the rest are covered there. “The Word of God in English” is a wonderful way to engage with the subject of translation theories which we covered last week. “The Canon of Scripture” by F. F. Bruce is accessible and readable on that topic. And the “The Battle for the Bible” by Harold Lindsell is a great older but wonderful reminder of what we are fighting for and why this is so important to work through these topics and really stand firmly on the topic of inerrancy of Scripture, the sufficiency of Scripture, and the like. So I’m not sure how many of these are already in the bookstore in Sound Words but feel free to reach out to me if you need any pointers in how to get these into your hands.

Alright, back to the subject at hand, the study of Bibliology. As always, I’m going to give us sort of a brief reminder of where we’ve been and then I’ll give you the roadmap of where we’re going tonight. So far we have covered in this summer series, the authority of the Bible, the inspiration of the Bible, the inerrancy of the Bible, the canonicity of the Bible, the canonization of the Bible-meaning the canonization of the Old Testament, the canonization of the New Testament. Then last week, we looked at the translation of the Bible. And then tonight, we’re going to look at challenges to the Bible. That’s our topic for this evening, the challenges to the Bible. And like I said this is sort of going to be an amalgamation of various subtopics under this heading and we’re going to look tonight specifically at the challenge of false translations, the challenge of fanatical supporters, and the challenge of fictional narratives. I’ll lay those out again. These are the three points on your note sheets if you want to fill these in now. The challenge of false translations, the challenge of fanatical supporters, and the challenge of fictional narratives.

So, as I’ve already mentioned we’re going to go through several different odds and ends tonight and they’ll all be grouped loosely under this heading of “challenges” to the Bible. And each of what we’re going to be talking about tonight represents a distinct challenge. It challenges in some way the content and the message of God’s Word, the Bible. Let’s start with the first one. The challenge of false translations. We’re going to start our time tonight really by looking into two false religious systems, two cult groups actually and the false translations of the Bible and the false supplements to the Bible that these two false teaching groups have advanced. We’re going to start by looking at the writings of the Mormon church and the various bizarre events that led to that church being formed. And then we’re going to look at the made-up Bible translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The New World translation which they rely upon as their so-called Scripture.

We’ll start with the Mormons. And on this it was, the date was September 22, 1823. And on that day, a 17-year-old farm boy in upstate New York claimed that he had been visited by an angel named Moroni. Now, according to this boy, this angel, Moroni, had revealed to him the location of two golden tablets which had been buried and hidden on the side of a hill. However, Moroni did not, at this time allow this young man-who I’m holding his name just for a minute-to take the tablets with him. Instead, this young man, Joseph Smith, returned to this same site in upstate New York each year as sort of a pilgrimage, to see these tablets, to engage with these tablets. Now, during this time this area of upstate New York was a hotbed of religious revivalism. It was actually known as the “burned-over district” because of all of the religious fervor and the fire that was happening there in this period that had been known as the Second Great Awakening-not the First Great Awakening of Wesley and Whitefield-but more the Second Great Awakening of all the camp meetings and tent revivals and the like. And as the story goes, after a few years of making these pilgrimages to upstate New York, in 1827 Joseph Smith was finally, after a few years, given these golden tablets by Moroni. And Smith’s claim was that using a pair of “seer stones” he was able to read what he described as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic language on these two golden tablets. Smith then began “translating” these tablets-more on that later. And according to Smith, on these Egyptian hieroglyphic tablets there was this tale-this epic tale-of a group of Hebrews who just before the Babylonian captivity, before 600 B.C. left Jerusalem and traveled to the Americas. They were right here. And these Hebrews apparently landed on what we’d now call American soil sometime around 589 B.C. And Smith, what he said he was reading there on the tablets, is that these Hebrews that came over to the Americas in 589 B.C. were actually the forerunners to the Native Americans of our land. And these nomadic Hebrews, now in the Americas, were called “Nephites” and they established this thriving civilization in the America. They followed the law of God, and they anxiously awaited the arrival of the Messiah. Now apparently, according to what Joseph Smith translated from these golden tablets, Jesus Himself came to visit this ancient civilization here in the Americas, here on American soil. After He died and rose from the grave-apparently after His resurrection-the Lord decided He needed to see the States. I realize there weren’t any “states” yet, but you catch my drift. Well, later in the fourth century A.D. a prophet named Mormon recorded the history of this people on some golden tablets. And then it was his son, Moroni, who hid those golden tablets on the side of a hill in upstate New York. And then in 1823, Moroni returned, now as an angel, to tell Joseph Smith where he could find them. And that catches us up to the beginning of the story.

So, after Joseph Smith’s so-called “translation” of the golden tablets-which, by the way, became what we now know as the Book of Mormon-he returned those tablets to this angel Moroni.

Now, conveniently after he translated the golden tablets, the tablets were apparently lifted up to heaven so that we no longer have them and have no access to them. We can’t appeal to them to verify or refute Joseph Smith’s account. And it was around this time that Smith, according to Smith, was appointed by God as a prophet. And, with this new designation, this new title, this self-appointed designation and in a place and in a time that was already bubbling with religious zeal and excitement and fervor Smith began to attract a following.

But the thing is, Joseph Smith wasn’t liked or even loved by everyone. No, rather because his teachings were so unorthodox and so outside of the mainstream, he not only built up a group of devoted followers, but he also actually began to experience resistance and quite a bit of legal trouble. He had a lot of run-ins with the law. In New York Joseph Smith was sued for being an opportunistic treasure hunter. He claimed that he had this ability with “seer stones” to practice divination to discover lost treasure for people. He was like Indiana Jones before there was Indiana Jones, he said. And people would send him substantial sums of money to find lost treasure for them. Well, he never found the treasure for them, so then they sued him in New York State court. In Ohio, his next state, he was arrested for bank fraud because he not only started a church there in Ohio, but he started a church-run bank which somehow lost all the money of its congregants. So that led to some unhappy congregants and that led to him being prosecuted for bank fraud.

Next he moves over to Missouri, and he got into trouble there when a group of his followers attacked the Missouri state troopers. He was arrested on the charge of treason in connection with that whole affair and actually he was nearly executed down south in Missouri. Then he gets to Illinois, and he gets into a run-in with the locals there because he and his followers are proposing marriage to a bunch of married ladies. That never goes well. So, he’s arrested. And that was, of course, in keeping with his views on polygamy. He believed you could have multiple wives. But he was also arrested in Illinois because of charges that were brought against him for inciting a riot and treason. And it was actually there in Illinois, in 1844, that Joseph Smith died. He was actually being held in a jail cell, when an angry mob attacked him, and he was shot multiple times as he attempted to jump out of his jail window there. You see it depicted here. And he fell to his death, bullets riddling him at the same time, at the age of 38.

Now, after Smith died, the whole Mormon movement was fragmented and the largest group of their followers went with this man, a man named Brigham Young. And it was Brigham Young who eventually led the movement further west all the way to Utah and there in Utah the movement became known what its now known as today-the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Now, because so much of what the LDS church holds and believes and so much of what its published books and other publications represent-they are based on the life and the experiences and the theology of Joseph Smith. We do need to spend some more time evaluating his life and his ministry and his theology, because he is the founder of this movement and the books they produced which compete with the Bible-we’ll get into that in a minute-are based so much on him. First, let’s take a look at some of his prophecies, Joseph Smith’s prophecies, not Brigham Young’s. You know the Bible teaches, Deuteronomy 18:20-22 that true prophets of God will deliver divine revelation, or they will prophesy with 100% accuracy. And it is also says there if they fail to meet that 100% test they are worthy of death. So how did Joseph Smith fare in that category? Well, not great. In 1831, he predicted that Jesus Christ would return in 1891. That didn’t happen. In 1832, he claimed he said he was going to build a temple in Missouri-that was going to happen in the future. That didn’t happen. In 1836, he said he was going to find treasure in the city of Salem, MA. That didn’t happen. In 1843 he predicted the U.S. government would be totally overthrown. That didn’t happen. So none of those prophecies came true from Joseph Smith, and that means using a biblical grid and biblical framework, he was by definition a false prophet.

But there’s more. Let’s take a look now at some of his linguistic and historical work. I don’t have any slides here because they would just be a bunch of scribbles but his stories about the ancient Hebrews making their way to the Americas is entirely devoid of historical or linguistic support or archaeological for that matter. You know, all non-Mormon historians and for that matter even certain Mormon historians, reject Joseph Smith’s historical accounts. Further, and this shouldn’t be a surprise to us, modern DNA evidence completely refutes the idea that Native Americans of our land are descendants of the ancient Hebrews. Also, remember that Joseph Smith’s claim is that what became the Book of Mormon was translated from these golden plates that contained these Egyptian hieroglyphs. Well, number one, no evidence exists of those plates having ever existed because they were allegedly sky-lifted to heaven at some point. But there’s also evidence that his claim that he was translating Egyptian is totally bogus. There is evidence that Smith’s translations of other Egyptian documents, documents that we do have and can put our fingers on, were false. Trained Egyptologists have looked at his “work” in the field of Egyptian hieroglyphics and they have confirmed that this man had absolutely no idea what he was doing-had no idea what he was talking about. So, in terms of his work in both history and linguistics Joseph Smith can rightly be called a fraud. He was an immoral con artist and his greatest “con” was actually creating this false religion of Mormonism.

So, just to be clear, the Mormon religion is a cult. It’s not an “offshoot” of Christianity. It’s not a branch of Christianity. Its teachings are completely foreign to Christianity and completely antithetical to the gospel. Those teachings are captured in these three books. The book of Mormon, there’s two books in one here on your screen, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. And these three books in the Mormon faith have been elevated to a place of equal, and in reality greater authority, than the Bible. In fact, here’s the LDS church in its own words on this subject. They say, “The Book of Mormon is the Word of God, like the Bible. It is holy scripture, with form and content similar to that of the Bible.” They also say, “To establish doctrine and to understand the biblical text, Latter-day Saints,” Mormons, “turn to living prophets and to additional books of Scripture—the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price.” So, according to their own books and their own writings, those three books are considered to be authoritative inspired “scriptures”-revelation from God.

Well again, each of those books contains the teachings of Joseph Smith and, as we’ve already seen, Joseph Smith is a confirmed false prophet. Meaning, Mormonism is guilty of adding the teachings of a false prophet to the actually authoritative revelation of God in His Word. And their written materials, the Mormon materials, they detract in ways. We don’t have time to go into them tonight, from the all sufficient word of God contained in the 66 books of the Bible. So that’s our first “challenge” to the Bible. The written teachings of the Mormon “church,” which again, is no church at all. It’s a cult. We’re now going to shift gears and talk about the Jehovah’s Witness movement and their “unique” Bible translation, the New World Translation. And to get a feel for the New World Translation and why it’s so problematic and why it can rightly be called a “false” translation, we need to, like with the Mormons, go back and look at some of the history, which is what we’re going to do now.

The year was 1881. So we’re moving up the timeline a little bit. And in that year, a man named Charles Taze Russell, that’s him right there, started an organization called the “Watchtower,” “Zion’s Watchtower Tract Society.” And the Watchtower Tract Society published Russell’s writings. That’s what its purpose was. And that included his tracts and that included a six-volume publication he wrote called “Studies in the Scriptures.” And the movement Russell started was something called “The Bible Student Movement.” And despite having the word “Bible” in its name, this movement actually promoted many unbiblical teachings and ideas. For instance, Charles Taze Russell promoted the idea that Jesus Christ was going to return in 1874. Jesus didn’t come back in 1874. So to address this big issue of the obvious non-return of Jesus Christ in 1874 Russell pivoted and said it was an invisible return. He returned; we just didn’t see Him. Okay. So that was one thing.

The next thing is he stated that the beginning of World War I in 1914 marked the beginning of Armageddon and the end of the age of the Gentiles. Well again, sitting here in 2023, we can say that he was off by at least 109 years. He also advocated, Russell did, this idea of “soul sleep.” So, the idea that when we die, we are not conscious but rather we’re not aware of what’s happening; we’re ultimately annihilated as opposed to what the Bible teaches about the unbeliever experiencing eternal conscious torment in hell. Finally, Russell denied the deity of Jesus Christ. He taught that Jesus was “adopted” as the “Son of God” on the cross. He denied that Jesus had dwelt eternally with God the Father. So Russell was the “restorationist.” What that means is, his movement was committed to what he said was taking the church back to the primitive form of Christianity, the purest form of Christianity. But in reality, as I’ve just listed those false, aberrant teachings, what he was doing was leading unbelievers ultimately to hell.

When Russell died in 1916, The Watchtower Society was taken over by this man. His name was Joseph Franklin Rutherford. But he was more commonly known as “Judge Rutherford.” That was his vocation, and it was under Rutherford’s leadership that this movement founded by Russell became known as the “Jehovah’s Witnesses.” It was Rutherford’s brainchild to call it that. And like Russell before him, Rutherford was obsessed with the date of the end of the world and kept changing his date whenever the events failed to culminate in the way he said they would. He did this at least ten times. Predicted the end of things and Christ’s return ten different times, zero for ten on those predictions.

In fact, that’s really been a mark of the whole Jehovah’s Witness movement, is this imbalanced obsession with date setting and predicting the date of the Lord’s return. As of right now, they have it set at-the last time I checked-2033. Ten years from now, which means you can put it in your calendar that that’s NOT the day of the Lord’s return, based on all the evidence that they laid out thus far. After Rutherford came Nathan Knorr. Rutherford died in 1942 and Knorr took over then. And under his leadership, and why he’s significant, is that during his rule or time in office as the president, the leader of the Jehovah’s Witness movement, that’s when the New World Translation was created, getting it back to our topic of Bibliology. The New Testament edition of the New World translation came out in 1950 and then the Old Testament was published in 1961. That means that the New World Translation, if you do the math right, is not even seventy-five years old. It is a very new translation and as we’re going to see it intentionally modifies what is found in the Hebrew and Greek underlying manuscripts to support Watchtower Society teaching. There are so many problems with the New World Translation we don’t have time to go into all of them tonight, at least comprehensively, but I do want to go through at least a few of them to give you all a flavor of just how bad this translation is. And the assault that it makes on the actual text of Scripture.

Let’s start with one that I’m sure that you’ve heard about at some point, that being what they do with John 1:1. Here’s the NASB ’95 version. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” referring of course to Jesus being co-eternal with and eternally dwelling with the Father. Here’s how the New World Translation renders it. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.” So they go to great lengths as you can see here to twist the Scripture to support their belief that Jesus Christ, though He may be “godlike, or divine, or a lower case “g” god,” is not co-equal and co-eternal with the Father. Charles L. Feinberg said of that translation, “I can assure you that the rendering which the Jehovah’s Witnesses give John 1:1 is not held by any reputable Greek scholar.” That’s right. It can’t be, because it’s not in the Greek text.

Let’s look at one more in John. John 8:58, here’s the NAS translation, “Jesus said to them,” His encounter with the religious rulers of the day, “‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am.’” And we know that’s a clear statement of deity by our Lord when He uses that reference of “I AM” to refer to Himself. He’s harkening back to that scene in Exodus 3 where God reveals Himself to Moses in the burning bush scene as “I AM.” And now Jesus here is applying those words “I AM” to Himself as He’s being confronted by the religious leaders of His day. And so crystal clear, by the way, was Jesus when He used this language in John 8:58 that the very next verse, John 8:59, says that the rulers picked up their stones to stone Him. They got the point. This was blasphemy to a first-century Jew to equate oneself with Yahweh so they tried to kill Him. Well, the New World Translation takes some of the sting out of that. This is how they translate it, “Most truly I say to you, before Abraham came into existence, I have been.’” So they take out the “I AM” statement entirely and intentionally to disassociate Christ with God the Father and to strip Him of His deity, as though they could do such a thing.

Well, they deny not only the deity of Jesus Christ through their translation methods, but in keeping with really good Arians, the Jehovah’s Witnesses also deny the deity of the Holy Spirit.
To show you what I mean, let’s consider what they do with Genesis 1. Here’s the NAS translation. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” Then here’s the New World Translation. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and desolate, and there was darkness upon the surface of the watery deep, and God’s active force was moving about over the surface of the waters.” The Holy Spirit is not God to them. He’s not a “He” at all. Rather, the Spirit is an “it,” an “active force.”

These are just a handful of examples. I could give you many more. But the point we see here, over and over, is that the text of the New World Translation is repeatedly being bent and twisted to match the doctrine of the Jehovah’s Witness’ movement. Not only that, though it has been shown and proven time and time again, that those who worked on the New World Translation back in the 1950s and 1960s were demonstrably incompetent to be spending any time coming up with a new Bible translation. Of the five individuals that were on the translation committee for this version, four had no Hebrew, no Greek training whatsoever. Not minimal. Not elementary. Zero. None. They didn’t have the slightest familiarity with either Hebrew or Greek. Well, what about the fifth you might ask. Well, the fifth claimed to be competent in Hebrew at least, and then when he took a comprehensive Hebrew exam he failed it. He bombed it. He completely failed. This was not like a “hey I had a bad day” and “I’m a bad test-taker” type of thing. He just totally zeroed it. So this whole thing, this process of creating really the New World Translation, was a mess. And that’s led many commentators and theologians and scholars to call it out for what it is. Ron Rhodes says it’s an “an incredibly biased translation”. H. H. Rowley says it’s “a shining example of how the Bible should not be translated,” “an insult to the Word of God.” William Barclay said “The deliberate distortion of truth by this sect is seen in the New Testament translation. It is abundantly clear that a sect which can translate the New Testament like that is intellectually dishonest.” Then Bruce Metzger, highly regarded New Testament scholar, says it is a “frightful mistranslation,” and then he uses these words of it. It’s “pernicious,” and “reprehensible.”

So that’s a bit for our first main topic for tonight. That’s our first heading, the challenge of false translations. Now let’s turn to our second topic for this evening which is the challenge of fanatical supporters. And by that, I’m referring to the King James Only movement. I warned you that we’re going to be covering a lot of odds and ends tonight, so I hope I’m not giving you whiplash as we move from one topic to the next. You know last week we looked at the history of the King James Bible meaning, the circumstances surrounding its translation, the creation, the publication of this new version. But tonight, we’re going to go a little bit deeper and a little bit darker with this topic as we explore what’s known as the “King James Only” movement.

Now, we have to be careful not to paint with too broad a brush when use that terminology, “King James Only,” because within that camp, there’s actually a great deal of variety. Not all King James only folks are King James only for the exact same reasons. You know, like one group of King James Only folks is the “I prefer the King James” camp. “I like the King James best” camp. I like the way it reads. I like the way it sounds. I like its rhythmic beauty, so I prefer it. And they might have some history with that translation, or that was Grandma’s translation, or they are familiar with it. That’s how they memorized the scripture, so they stick with it. It’s their Bible of choice. They are not combative. They are not obnoxious. They are not militant. They just prefer the KJV.

Then there’s a second group of KJV-only people and these would be what I would call the “textual people.” These are the more scholarly KJV-onlyists. They’re interested in getting into the weeds of the underlying Greek and Hebrew scriptures, the texts. They are adept at textual criticism-that field of study where you compare various ancient manuscripts to get back to what the original autographs must have said. They believe that the underlying Greek text of the KJV which goes back to the early 1600s, as we’re going to see in a little bit, is superior to the Greek manuscripts of what we would have underlying our NAS translations. And many in this group would even say that the Textus Receptus-and hold that thought for a second, we’ll get into what that is later-is the underlying Greek text for the Greek New Testament of the KJV. They would say that that itself, though it’s not an original autograph, is inspired by God.
So, this collection of Greek manuscripts, the Textus Receptus which is from the 1500’s, is inspired. That’s the second group, the scholarly crowd.

The third group is the “KJV itself is inspired” crowd. The Inspired KJV crowd. And really most KJV-only advocates land here, and this is the distinction. This third group believes that the KJV itself, as an English language translation, is inspired and therefore inerrant. And they are adamant about their motto, which we’re going to see right here on the screen, that the King James Bible alone is the Word of God alone. And the KJV according to this group is the only translation that was truly inspired by God. It’s the only true translation. It’s the only real translation. It is the standard by which all other Bible translations must be judged and evaluated. But get this, according to this camp, this third camp-the Inspired KJV camp-the King James Bible should not only be used to correct other corrupted English versions of the Bible like our NASB, they would also say that the King James Version of 1611 even trumps the early Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. You heard that right. A 1611 English version Bible is viewed by this group as being superior to the underlying Greek and Hebrew manuscripts.

Here’s Peter Ruckman, standing on this argument. This is a KJV-only inspired KJV guy. He’s from Pensacola Bible Institute and he says, “Where the perverse Greek reads one way and the A.V.” Authorized Version, King James version, “reads the other, rest assured that God will judge you at the Judgment on what you know. Since you don’t know the Greek (and those who knew it, altered it to suit themselves), you’d better go by the A.V. 1611 text.” In other words, Ruckman here is saying, “You don’t know Greek.” And even if you did know Greek, you would have an axe to grind.” Unlike me, Peter Ruckman, I don’t have an axe to grind- obviously sarcasm. So just stick with the KJV. Just trust me on this. That’s his entire argument.

Now, we’re not going to engage with the first group I mentioned. The nice, friendly people who simply prefer the KJV. They’re too nice and kind and reasonable, so I’m not going to go after them tonight. But I would like to drill down on those latter two groups. The textual people and the inspired KJV people, those who believe the underlying Greek and Hebrew text of the KJV are better and those, who like Ruckman, say the KJV in English is itself, inspired by God. We’re going to engage with both of those.

Let’s start with the textual argument. Meaning, let’s talk about manuscript evidence first. And to do so we need to bring back in what I mentioned earlier, this thing called, this body of manuscripts called the Textus Receptus. The Textus Receptus serves as the base text for the King James Bible’s New Testament translation. And we need to get a little bit more familiar with the history of that so we go back to the mid-1400s. There was a convergence of things happening at this time. First Gutenberg invented the printing press. Second there’s this recovery of the ancient Greek language, which had been lost for hundreds of years by then in academic settings. And there were various scholars living who were influenced by the Renaissance who had this renewed interest in learning New Testament Greek and printing the New Testament in Greek. One of them we’ve mentioned a couple of times already was Erasmus of Rotterdam who lived in the late 1400s and early 1500s. And what happened with Erasmus was he caught wind of there being this new Greek New Testament translation that was being created in Spain. And this Spanish scholar was working faster than Erasmus, so Erasmus got to work quickly, worked night and day and hurriedly began working on a Greek New Testament of his own. And to get started he found five or six Greek manuscripts. They were kind of stray manuscripts laying around where he was from and these manuscripts that he was looking at were from the twelfth century, so from the 1100’s. And he started working as fast as he could to put together a comprehensive Greek New Testament. He cobbled together quickly and because of how fast he working on this project his initial compilation was riddled with errors- all kinds of trouble. And there were all kinds of edits and revisions to his work that went on through the 1500s when he was still living and even into the 1600s when he was long dead. And then in the 1633 edition, the edited version of his Greek New Testament, the following words were printed in the Preface, “Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum” which means “the reader now has the text that is received by all.” And it was from that preface, from that revision to Erasmus’ Greek New Testament that this idea of the received text, the Textus Receptus, came about. And this text, Erasmus’ text, the received text, was the dominant text of this day when the King James Bible was being translated. So the King James editors, the translators, were relying upon Erasmus’ text. That was the Textus Receptus.

So, file that important fact away, that as they were working on the King James Version in the 1600s they were relying on Erasmus’s Textus Receptus translation from the 1500s which itself was compiled from manuscripts from the 1100s. So these documents weren’t exactly ancient at the time. Well, a couple of major events happened along the way, one of which was the discovery in 1844 of Codex Sinaiticus. We looked at that a few lessons ago. And as we saw in an earlier lesson Codex Sinaiticus was a compilation of New Testament Greek manuscripts that were from the fourth century. So these were way more old than what Erasmus was working with and it was a very old and complete set of Greek manuscripts.

And less than a decade after these manuscripts were found, in 1853 these two men, B.F. Westcott and F.J.A. Hort began working on a New Testament translation that was relying on the Codex, the Sinaiticus that had recently been discovered. These recently discovered manuscripts were actually much older than what was underlying the KJV. And Westcott and Hort worked for 28 years on a new Greek New Testament and it was published in 1881 as The New Testament in the Original Greek. And their translation which was based on these older fourth century manuscripts from Codex Sinaiticus, closer in time to the original autographs, became the foundational Greek text. This became the foundational Greek text, even the foundational text that students in Greek classes and seminaries everywhere use today. So to anyone who is serious about Greek scholarship, to anyone who is serious about textual criticism including that principle of getting back as close as possible to the text of the original autographs, what was in those original autographs, Westcott and Hort’s Greek New Testament, was objectively superior to the Textus Receptus that Erasmus had put together which formed the basis for the 1611 KJV.

Now here’s Metzger, renowned New Testament scholar. He’s talking about Wescott and Hort here, he speaks to “the general validity of their critical principles and procedures is widely acknowledged by scholars today.” Meaning 28 years of research that Wescott and Hort did in looking through the older manuscripts was valid. It was the right way to go about textual criticism and translation. Philip Comfort says something very similar. “The text produced by Westcott and Hort is still to this day, even with so many more manuscript discoveries,” meaning since 1881, “a very close reproduction of the primitive text of the New Testament... the Westcott and Hort text is extremely reliable...Of course, the manuscript discoveries of the past one hundred years have changed things, but it is remarkable how often they have affirmed the decisions of Westcott and Hort.” So the Textus Receptus underlying the KJV is not a “bad” or misleading text either theologically or practically, but it is very far removed time-wise from the original text, because again, it is based on the manuscripts from the 1100s. Westcott and Hort were relying upon much older transcripts, much older manuscripts, bringing us closer to the original New Testament autographs.

Well, anybody who is a KJV-onlyist does not like what I just said. And they will dig in their heels and because they can’t say that their texts are older and closer to the originals, they’ll raise a bunch of other arguments to say why our translation is bad and the KJV is the only valid translation. I’ll cover just a few of their arguments. First, they’ll argue that the longevity of the usage of the KJV in English Bible history speaks to God’s special favor toward that translation and ultimately they will say, His inspiration of that translation is proven by the fact that He preserved it. Well, the mere fact that it was embraced for multiple centuries, doesn’t tell us that it is inspired certainly and it doesn’t tell us even that it’s the best. D.A. Carson challenges that argument. He says, “such an argument, I suspect, would justify infant baptism, Arminianism (if not semi-Pelagianism) and other viewpoints to which at least some Christian readers would not likely give assent. Since when has majority opinion defined what is true, even majority evangelical opinion? Logically speaking, a proposition is either true (that is, it accords with reality and is held true by omniscience), or it is not, even if not one person believes it. Of course, one should be very careful and humble before disagreeing dogmatically with what the majority of believers (whoever they are) have held to be true; but the fact that they believe it does not make it true, nor does it entail the falsity of any counter belief.” So that’s one argument, that the KJV was used for a long time therefore it’s the best therefore it’s inerrant.

Here’s another argument that they’ll lodge. They’ll start-because they don’t have the date argument, they don’t have the oldest manuscripts-they’ll start attacking theological arguments or they will start making theological arguments. They will start making theological objections to what’s not in our translations. For instance, they’ll say that in the other translations “Christ” and “Lord” are not used as often with reference to Jesus as is true in the KJV, which they will say undermines His deity. But that completely ignores the reality that His deity is actually mentioned in various passages more in translations like ours-words like “Christ” and “Lord” are used to refer to Him-than in certain KJV translations. So it’s not a one-way street is the point.

The third thing is they’ll claim that the non-KJV translations delete verses from the Bible. That things are missing that should be in there, to which any faithful scholar would reply, "Well, fine but do you have the oldest, most reliable manuscripts?” What do the oldest, most reliable manuscripts reveal? And do those oldest manuscripts reveal what you say ought to be there? If not, then the word shouldn’t be there. If the word is there in the old manuscripts then it should be there. The point is that the modern translations, they seek to reflect, as faithfully as possible, what was in the original manuscripts. Those committees worked diligently and faithfully in the field of textual criticism and translation to find the oldest rendering of anything that’s in the translations that we hold. The problem is not that a word that appears in the KJV that is suddenly dropped in the NASB. The problem with KJV-onlyism is its circular reasoning. Its advocates on the one hand will unbendingly wish to show that the KJV translation is the translation before which all other translations must bow, but on the other hand they will insist that the only way a person can know if they are holding a legitimate translation of the Bible in their hands is if by, they measure it by the KJV. So you can’t win if you’re not a KJV-onlyist. They assume, in other words, the position they are trying to prove. And they are unable to see any other position as possibly being correct. Here’s Fred Butler who is a former KJV-onlyist. He says, “When I sought out the proof for my King James Only beliefs, I discovered there was none. What I found out was startling for me. KJV-onlyism begins with the conclusion that the King James Version is the Word of God, and then re-interprets the historical evidence supporting that conclusion.”

So that’s a bit on the textual argument. Who’s got the best manuscripts, in other words. That leads then to this other argument that I wanted to make sure we go after, which is the idea that the KJV itself, as an English translation, is itself divinely inspired and therefore inerrant. Now, going back to what we’ve learned all summer, are the English translations that we hold in our hands-the NASB, the ESV, the LSB-are they divinely inspired? No. Only the original autographs in the Hebrew and the Greek, sometimes Aramaic, were divinely inspired. Now our English Bibles are accurate representations and translations of what the original autographs contained thanks to the hard work and painstaking work of translators and textual critics, but God did not breathe out the NASB, or the ESV, or the LSB, or the NIV, or the KJV. Well, there are some KJV-only folks who, knowing that they can’t win on the other arguments will buckle down and say they don’t care that the English text of the KJV, notwithstanding what the Hebrew and the Greek says, is superior to all of it. Superior even to the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. Some will go so far as to say that they don’t care what the Greek or Hebrew says. They only care about what the KJV says because the KJV, in their world, is divinely inspired. And that is obviously a backwards way of thinking-obviously a completely biased way of thinking. The KJV is only useful and only valuable to the extent it agrees with the underlying Greek and Hebrew, not the other way around. Not to mention, this whole “God inspired the KJV only argument,” in addition to being patently ludicrous on its face, it makes one wonder. What if a person isn’t an English speaker, or has no facility with or familiarity with the English language? Are they simply resigned to the fate that God only breathed out the English KJV Bible? Again, here’s Fred Butler. He says, “The idea of God’s Word only contained in the KJV limits the Bible’s availability to the world. If the main tenet of KJV-onlyism is true, then all non-English speaking Christians are required to learn English to have a copy of God’s revelation.”

One other thing on this topic because I can’t help myself, is this whole idea of the KJV only being “inspired in 1611,” is completely undermined by the fact that anybody who reads the
1611 today is not reading the KJV of 1611. Everyone who reads the KJV today is actually reading the KJV revision of 1769 which has thousands of differences from the so-called inspired version of 1611. Which makes one wonder if it is truly divinely inspired, if the 1611 version was divinely inspired, why did they have to make thousands of changes to it in the next 150 years? Makes one wonder. Another thing they’ll do, is they will go after the integrity, the morals, and the motivations of modern translators. B.F. Westcott is a favorite target. I’ve done some research into Westcott. He didn’t live a perfect life. His theology wasn’t perfect. But we look at his writings and we see some, some faithful statements that he made. Like “In the case of the unbeliever, the judgment is completed; he is separated from Christ, because he hath not believed on the revelation made in the person of Him who alone can save.” Or “No good is apart from Christ; and in Him alone is life.” Or “Christ the Incarnate Word is the perfect revelation of the Father: as God, He reveals God.” Those sound like orthodox statements to me.
It doesn’t matter to the rabid KJV-only crowd. So committed are they to their push for convincing others that only their translation, their translation alone is inspired they resort to this, to basically theological tarring-and-feathering of those who disagree with them. Many will engage in very vicious and childish antics. I pulled up a “poem” actually, I don’t have it on the screen for you, that was written by a KJV-only advocate named Gail Riplinger. She says, “Blind mice and ‘scribes’ will never see their names in Matthew 23, the word slips from their NIV! Blind guides would rather strain for lice than search within their own vice. Their caravan of camels served with humps and truth severely curved. Woe to these scribes, who having swerved, have turned aside from God’s pure word.” Speaking of the KJV of course. And sadly it’s that type of cantankerous spirit which marks the KJV-Only crowd. They’ve been really given a bad name and it’s a cancer in a lot of churches. I have a super long quote here from James White that I’m not going to read for the sake of time but it’s on this point of how combative this movement can be. You can read it later when we post this on line.

But we’re going to move into our third point now. We’ve looked at the challenge of false translations. We’ve looked at the challenge of fanatical supporters. Now we’re going to look at the challenge of fictional narratives. And this is our third and final heading for our “potpourri” edition of Summer in the Systematics. What we’re really going to be doing here is zeroing in on this field of “higher criticism.” “Higher criticism” which is developed really in the last two hundred or so years. And to set the stage for this part our discussion we need to go back to the Renaissance and the Reformation. To the days of Erasmus and Luther and Wycliffe and Tyndale. And in those days, those early days, the average worldview of the person was radically different than it is today. Before the rise of critical methods, methodologies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Bible was read literally and historically as a true and accurate account of God’s acts in history. The assumption was that the biblical authors were divinely inspired and they were recording historical events as happened exactly. It was taken, in other words, the Bible was, at face value. But over the last two-plus centuries that precritical understanding of Scripture has eroded and receded and given way to a more historical and critical evaluation of the Scriptures. And the idea is because we are so intelligent now and so advanced now and so evolved now, the Bible can’t mean what it says anymore. God couldn’t have meant what is revealed here. It can’t be depicting what it says it’s depicting. And really the intellectual hubris behind it all is just staggering.

How did we get here? I’m going to give you a real quick flyover of some participants and some contributors. We start with Baruch Spinoza. He lived from 1632-1677. He was a Jewish-Dutch theologian and philosopher who just rejected the biblical concept of God. Instead, he taught that god-lower case “g”-was an impersonal and abstract force, similar to “nature.” And of course, because he rejected the biblical concept of God he rejected the concept of biblical inspiration and inerrancy. According to Spinoza the Bible was to be evaluated like any other document, any other literary document, not what the Church believed it to be, not what God’s people believed it to be-the inspired inerrant word of God. So he began early on to question divine authorship and inerrancy.

Next we get to Johann Eichhorn. He was an early German critic, who lived from 1753-1827. He is called the father of Old Testament criticism. Like Spinoza, he denied that the Bible is what it claims to be. He began to challenge the authorship of a number of Old Testament books. He was a product of his time, the “Enlightenment,” which is a really poorly named era of history. Next we have Friedrich Schleiermacher. He’s known as “The Father of Liberal Theology.” His father was a Lutheran chaplain and then he went off, Friedrich did, to go study theology and in his university studies he began to encounter higher criticism and skepticism and he found himself becoming just increasingly unable to defend biblical truth against the attacks of the skeptics. Nevertheless, get this, he actually went on to become a theology professor, though he couldn’t defend it, couldn’t believe it, he became a theology professor. What else? His thoughts were anchored in another movement kind of born of the enlightenment called romanticism, which is really anchored in feelings and experiences. He ended up contending that Christianity could not be based on the trustworthiness of God’s revelation in the Bible, but instead Christianity ought to be based on one’s subjective feelings of being totally dependent upon God. I just believe that God “is there.” It’s like the modern mentality, right? So that must be enough for me to be in His good standing.

Next we have David F. Strauss. He lived from 1808-1874. He’s known as the father of the “quest for the historical Jesus” movement. The basic premise of which is that the Jesus recorded on the pages of New Testament is the Jesus of faith, but that’s really masking who Jesus truly was. It’s a different account of who Jesus truly was-the Jesus of history. And so what Strauss was all about was the skeptical quest to find the real Jesus, the Jesus who is sort of lurking behind the pages of Scripture. Importantly, like many of his peers of the time, he denied that the miraculous could ever occur in the New Testament. He denied the virgin birth of Christ.

Next we have Albrecht Ritschl who is known as being an early pioneer of the social gospel. A lot of the “woke” churches of our day have this man to thank for their perspective. He said that Christianity is rooted in social action, being good citizens, promoting justice in the world around us, rather than being rooted in the propositional truths of God’s Word, the Bible. He drastically underemphasized doctrine and radically overemphasized social action.

Next is Julius Wellhausen who looks like he’d be fun at a party. He was inventor of the “documentary hypothesis.” And basically the premise of that is he denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch-denied that Moses was the human author of the first five books of the Old Testament. Instead he argued that there were these four different authors of what we know of as the books of Moses and he assigned a letter to each one of them-J E D and P.
J is like German and it’s hard to explain it here, but it’s Jahwist. E is Elohist, D is Deuteronomist, P is Priestly. These are these four hypothetical authors, he said, of the Pentateuch who actually wrote many centuries after Moses and then later some redactor-unknown, unidentified-about a thousand years after Moses lived, took these four authors writings and cobbled them together and created the Pentateuch. There’s absolutely no proof of this, of course, other than the fact that Wellhausen said so. But that’s what German liberal theologians did back in these days. They theorized, they created a new storyline, and they threw a bunch of ideas at the wall and saw which one would stick. Sadly, many did. Which is why we are where we are today.

Now I do want to mention, these guys are all famous “higher critics.” That in mentioning the names of these dead German liberals, I’m highlighting one form of criticism, what’s called “higher criticism” that has really infected the field of biblical studies for many years now. But I think it's important to clarify that not all forms of criticism are bad. You’ve heard me talk about textual criticism several times now in this series which is known as “lower criticism.” And that seeks, “lower criticism” or “textual criticism” to study the various existing manuscripts of the Bible in order to come to a right understanding of what the original autographs must have contained. To subject yourself to those manuscripts, to make sure you get to the right understanding of God’s timeless word. That’s “lower criticism.” Here’s Harold Greenlee describing it as, “the study of copies of any written work of which the autograph (the original) is unknown, with the purpose of ascertaining the original text.” That’s a good thing. That’s a worthy exercise when approached in a right and a reverent way textual criticism is a field of study which honors the Bible as it seeks to help believers even boost their confidence and their understanding of what God’s Word truly says. Like Paul Wegner here says, "Careful examination of these manuscripts has served to strengthen our assurance that our modern Greek and Hebrew critical texts are very close to the original autographs, even though we do not have those autographs.” So, major point here, lower criticism has a noble aim. Higher criticism is different. That’s what men like Wellhausen and Strauss and others were engaged in. The aim of higher criticism is not to better understand the text. Rather, it’s to put the text under your judgment so you can say what you think it’s supposed to say.

That really is the world that we live in today, isn’t it? A world that’s shaped anymore by a biblical worldview, a world that is not motivated to engage in faithful lower or textual criticism to come to a clear understanding of what God has timelessly revealed in His Word, but instead we live in a world that is completely given over to higher criticism. A world that is given over really to the world’s first higher critic who long ago appeared in the garden in the form of a serpent and said what? “Has God said?” That’s the world we live in. The world of higher criticism given over to critiquing, challenging, thinking that we know better than what God has timelessly revealed in His Word. So what’s our response to be? To bite our fingernails and to pace the floor because there are these really smart liberal critics who are questioning the accuracy and the integrity and the veracity of the Scripture? Or do we take God at His Word as we study His Word and delight in His Word and are conformed and transformed by His Word.

Our answer is found in the final two verses from our Scripture reading earlier this evening. Psalm 119:15-16, “I will meditate on your precepts and regard your ways. I shall delight in your statutes; I shall not forget your word.” Amen? Thanks for sitting with me for a long and winding jet tour of challenges to the Bible.

Let’s pray. Lord, thank you for Your mercy and Your grace. Thank you for being God who is high and exalted and almighty but a God who at the same time has communicated to us though we don’t deserve it. You would be equally just in never to communicate a word to us as You are having done so. So we thank You that You sent Your Son into the world to live, to die, to suffer, on our behalf. We thank You that the Gospel message is so clear, so simple, so true, and that through it we have the hope of eternal life. We thank You that grace upon grace You have communicated Your plans and Your purposes to us, to the world through Your Word and thank You because of the Spirit who lives in us, we have the ability to study it, come to a right understanding of it and then to live in light of it. God thank You for the warnings from tonight in these various groups and individuals and schools of thought which go astray from what Your Word clearly teaches. I do pray that we as a body of believers would be faithful to stay on track, to stay true to what Your timeless Word declares, not to be swayed, not to be taken aside, not to be following the popularity of the masses or what is passing as orthodox in seminaries today, but instead to hold true and faithful to the Word. May we be a church through our leaders, our pastors, our elders, our deacons, everyone around this church, may we be true to and faithful to Your timeless Word. Thank You for this day. Thank You for the privilege to worship with these dear people throughout the day. May You be glorified in the rest of this evening. In Jesus’ name, Amen.