Going way back

Here is one of Jordan’s recent CliffsNotes versions of how the King James Bible came into being:

What was the first event that led to the discovery of America? In most old history books, the line goes, ‘In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue . . .’ But it was a whole century before that a book by Marco Polo was published, one that Columbus himself referenced as a travel guide.

Polo and his brothers had gone to China and spent two decades as an emissary of the pope. They returned from that journey with stories of wealth, intellectual knowledge, on and on. The Chinese had the most advanced civilization in the history of mankind at that time.

Indeed, there was a time in the 1400s that the Chinese ruled the earth. Of course, we’re never told that because the populace has spent the last five centuries in isolation.

In 1421, the largest fleet that had ever sailed the seas left from China, commissioned by the emperor Zhu Di to take Confucian harmony to the world. Over a hundred large vessels--beautiful vessels made of teak wood harvested from Vietnam--sailed out.

A little over two years later, when the last of these vessels finally returned home they had sailed over a 100,000 miles. They had mapped the North American coast, South American coast, Australia, New Zealand and Africa.

In the 1420s, there was a Venetian map that showed the island of the Caribbean in exactly the right position along with the coast of Florida. Columbus saw that map before he left. He even references it in his diaries.

Magellan, when he was going through the Straits of Magellan, talks about seeing a map of the passageway. Where did he get that? Well, in 1434, a Chinese fleet sailed into the Mediterranean to Italy and landed at Tuscany.

Pope Eugene IV met with Admiral Zheng He of the fleet at Florence and the Chinese admiral gave to the pope as a diplomatic gift (the Chinese always bring gifts and try to give more than they’re given so that the other always feels in their debt) great stores of knowledge.

They gave him information about geography. They gave him world maps that map the coast and the perimeters of all the continents. Antarctica, Australia, New Zealand, Greenland, north and South America, Africa.

The Chinese gave the pope information about navigation. They had developed the longitudinal navigation system. The markings on those ancient maps today turn out to be exactly precise in scientific calculation. They gave the pope information about astronomy, the stars, about math, art, printing.

At that time printing was a common everyday occurrence in China. They had information about architecture, about steel-manufacturing, about civil engineering, about military weaponry (a lot more than gunpowder), about surveying, genetics, etc., all given along with the silk and tea and all those other things Marco Polo brought back.

So when that fleet left Europe and went back home, what they found was China in mass disarray. The emperor had died, and if you know anything about the history, he had this humongous big palace that was struck by lightning and burned, and the people took that as a bad omen and that led to the fall of the emperor. His son took over and his idea was the reason the gods were mad at them was because they’d reached out to Europe and what they need to do was pull back and withdraw and that’s where their isolationism came from.

Well, we all know the Europeans are great marketers. While the Chinese were withdrawing, the Europeans loved it and embraced it and they went for it. They embraced the knowledge, the ideas, the discoveries, the inventions. And you have a period of a century or more of unparalleled advancement. It’s called the Renaissance.

When the Renaissance is blazing forth in Europe, at the same time there’s a spiritual awakening called the Reformation going on right parallel with it.

With the reformation they’re saying, ‘We don’t want to be here; we want to go over there.’ A guy by the name of Erasmus was a scholar of the (organized) Church. He had access over all these areas of places. He was a humanist in philosophy.

Now humanism at that the time wasn’t the secular humanism of our day. Humanism began with the idea of, ‘What we need to do is we need to get rid of the traditions and all of the trappings, and we need to go back to the original intent.’

So when you apply that to Scripture, what would you want to do? 'Let’s don’t go by traditions and all this baggage; let’s go back and find out what the original language said.'

And so he was very interested in reconstructing the Greek Bible. And he produced the first printed Greek text, having access to all the information; every variant that you and I hear about today: ‘The better manuscripts say it ought to read this way.’

Erasmus had access to that information; he just rejected it. Erasmus is said to have laid the egg that Luther hatched. Luther took that information, took it out of the realm of scholarship and translated Erasmus’ text. This text became known as the Textus Receptus. The ‘Critical Text’ is the text the scholars had developed.
Luther took that Greek text and translated it into 30 different European languages. The idea was, ‘We want everybody to have the Bible for themselves.’

Now, as the Reformation gets going, and Luther’s doing his thing—Luther, later on, got hooked up into politics; the Peasant Rebellion and all that stuff. It shouldn’t be called the Protestant Reformation; call it the Protestant Revolt because they really weren’t trying to reform.

They were revolting against, but when they got into politics it began to have some problems, and the spiritual life of the Reformation moved from the continent to England, but everything was moving toward England at the time.

You remember Ferdinand and Isabella? Spanish king and queen. You remember their Spanish armada? They’re going to go up and squash England. England had (Sir Francis) Drake and that was their chance, and after that battle’s over with, England ruled the sea because they destroyed the Spanish Armada and now England becomes the focus. Ferdinand and Isabella were rabid Roman Catholics.

In England, you have all this Protestant fervor and a guy by the name of William Tyndale. One hundred and fifty years before that it was a guy name Wycliffe. The first Bible translated into the English language, Wycliffe did, but the first New Testament translated out of the Greek language was by William Tyndale. About 75 to 80percent of your Bible right now is Tyndale’s translation. It was that powerful.

Tyndale was the guy who was in a debate with a papist and the papist said to him, ‘It would be better to be without God’s law than without the pope.’ Tyndale jumped up and said, ‘I defy the pope and all of his laws. Before long even the boy following the plow in the field we’ll no more of the Scripture than the pope in Rome.’ That’s why we call his Bible a ‘Ploughboy’s Bible.’

He spent his life trying to put the Bible into the English language. He lost his life because of it. He finally had to leave England; Henry VIII didn’t like him and charged him with sedition and he had to flee to the continent. Henry Phillips, one of his good buddies, was paid by the papist to betray him into their hands so they captured him and martyred him. He shed his life’s blood so you could have the Bible.
He didn’t make any money off of it.

In fact, there’s a bunch of funny things that happened. At one point he’d been revising and updating, and had a new edition to print, but didn’t have any money. What he did have was a set of a thousand of the old edition that he still had in the bookstore.

In England they had banned his translation and they were trying to get rid of them, so this merchant went to one of the bishops in London and said, ‘I know where there are all these Tyndale translations. We could buy them.’ So the guy gave the merchant the money and they burned them all and then the guy gave Tyndale the money and it was that money that financed the printing of the new edition!

After Tyndale died, there were a series of bibles. With your Bible, and the Protestant Reformation, when the Bible comes into English through the Protestant church, it starts out with Tyndale and there’s a series for almost a hundred years. There’s Tyndale’s, the Coverdale Bible, the Matthew Bible, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible and the Bishop’s Bible.

By the time the KJV is translated, not one of the translators lost his life. The climate had changed that much. In fact, you remember Bloody Mary was in there and she was a rabid Roman Catholic. After Henry VIII died, his son Edward took over and he was sort of a live-and-let-live guy, and after him was Bloody Mary. All the Protestants had to run to the continent. That’s when the Geneva Bible got done; it was done in Geneva where John Calvin, his son-in-law, helped head that up because they had to escape there to do it; it was an English Bible.

After she died, Queen Elizabeth came to the throne and she was as protestant as Mary was catholic. So now all the Catholics have to run from England. And she gave free reign, as it were, to the study of the Scripture and the Protestants. But all during this time you’ve got these people translating: ‘Let’s improve, let’s improve, let’s improve it.’ And the year before Mary died, she sent to parliament a bill and the title of it is three sentences long.

In essence, it called for one more English translation to be the standard. In other words, we’ve got all these translations; let’s do it one more time and get it finished. She died before that was passed, but after that James the VI of Scotland became James I of England, and when he came down to London to take over the throne, a thousand preachers sent him a petition and he met with them at Hampton Court and one of the things that was decided there was that what Elizabeth had wanted to do, they would do, and he commissioned them to produce another version. And the genesis of that became the translating effort of the Authorized Version.

The KJB was the process; it wasn’t just a bunch of guys sitting down just doing it out of nowhere. There’s a hundred-year refining process and they finally got it finished. And it’s the ripe fruit of the Protestant Reformation. It is in every sense a Protestant bible.

Now in that time Rome was silent. The pope woke up one day and realized in a third of a century two-thirds of Europe had become Protestant with the other third leaning that way. ‘What are we gonna do?!’ They called the Council of Trent in 1545 and denounced the Protestants, but it didn’t do much good. They kept going.

There was a fellow who was a soldier in Ferdinand Isabella’s army. A great warrior when they were trying to push the Muslims out of Spain. He was wounded and couldn’t be a soldier anymore so he turned to spiritual pursuits. His name was Ignatius Loyola.

Loyola went to the pope and said, ‘I know what we need to do to stop the Protestants. We need to establish an order whose function is to stop Protestantism.’ And Loyola founded the Jesuits. The stated charter of the Jesuits is to destroy Protestantism.