Yesterday,
in a sermon about “bible agnostics” who prefer the New King James Version over
the King James Bible and see both bibles as equally good translations of the
same bible texts, Jordan reminded the congregation about how the NJKV changes
the word “corrupt” in II Corinthians 2:17 to the word “peddle.”
The
King James Bible reads, “For
we are not as many, which corrupt the word of God: but as of sincerity,
but as of God, in the sight of God speak we in Christ.”
The NKJV, as wells as the New International Version and
the New American Standard Bible, reads, “For we are not, as so many, PEDDLING
the word of God..."
Isn’t it ironic that the word “peddle,” not a
negative word, means to hawk or sell for a profit (think of the Yankee
Peddler), which is precisely the intent behind the “modern version” of the KJB.
The marketing idea was and is, “Make it newer and they will buy anew.”
******
A January, 2007 issue of the Berean Searchlight, a publication of the Berean Bible Society, Germantown, Wis., emphasizes in italics this passage from a reprinted old article by Bible scholar C.R. Stam:
“Sinaiticus
and Vaticanus have by now been thoroughly exposed as two of the most corrupt
manuscripts in existence.”
Now
the last time I checked, the Berean Bible Society supports ministries of
various men (including Pastor Dennis Kiszonas in New York City) who not only
preach and teach out of corrupt modern bible versions (derived from Sinaiticus
and Vaticanus), but encourage their flock not to be “duped” into a
“King James Only” mentality.
I
actually attended Kiszonas’ Brooklyn congregation for a brief period in 2003
but was quickly turned off by his preferred usage of the New King James
Version.
I
also attended a women’s bible study at the church in which versions being
read from around the table included the King James, the New King James, the New
International Version and the Life Application Bible.
One
of the things that really struck me is that when Kiszonas gave an
introductory study on dispensationalism in a Saturday class he purposely got
out his King James Bible to read this very famous verse: “Study to shew thyself approved unto
God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of
truth.” (II Tim. 2:15)
Of
course, no other version outside of the King James uses the word “study.” The
New King James says, “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker
who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”
The
New International verse reads, “Do your best to present yourself to God as one
approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles
the word of truth.”
*****
In
expressing my concern to Kiszonas over his endorsement of corrupt Bibles, he
told me the King James Bible had mistakes in it that related even to a person’s
salvation and pointed me to I Cor. 9:27. In this verse, Paul writes, “But I
keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when
I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”
Kiszonas
argued that the “incorrect” usage of the word “castaway” made the verse say a
person could be damned, losing their salvation. In the New King James, the
verse reads, “But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when
I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified.”
As Jordan explains, “If you’re knee-high to a grasshopper
to an old codger, you know what a castaway is because you’re familiar with the
seven stranded castaways there on Gilligan’s Isle. A castaway is someone
who is still alive; they’re not dead, they’re not lost—they’ve simply made
‘shipwreck of the faith.’ (I Tim. 1:19)
“When
you make ‘shipwreck of the faith’ you can either be drowned, as in I Tim. 6:9
where some people were caught in snares, or you can be shipwrecked.
"That is,
you’ll be like the Captain, Gilligan, Ginger, Maryanne, the professor and Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell III and all that business. You
can still be alive but you’re just stranded out there, out of commission and
useless—out of circulation. Of no value to anyone in life.
*****
“People talk about how, ‘Well, the King
James Bible is hard to understand.’ Aghh, it’s not hard to understand! People
find it hard to understand because they don’t want to understand it. They’ve
got some ulterior motive where they want to do something else.”
"By
Paul’s reference to 'nor by letter as from us,' we know there were people
sending bogus epistles to the Thessalonians pretending they came from Paul.
“That’s
how you corrupt the Bible. You produce versions and texts that
claim to be the Word of God and aren’t. If you insert into the Bible, what did
you do? You corrupted it.”
*****
Kiszonas,
by his own admission, follows a neo-orthodoxy-style line of reasoning that says
it’s the message that matters, not the exact words on the page.
Jordan
says, “Do you understand you can call the Bible the Word of God but what’s the
Word made up of? Words. And when you say words, you’re talking about the
individual words on the page that make up the message.
“So
there’s more than just the message; it’s the means of communicating the
message. The words. John 12:48 says, ‘He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my
words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the
same shall judge him in the last day.’
“Notice
the contrast? The word; that’s the Book with all of them in it. That’s the
singular thing: ‘Here’s the Word of God.’ But what’s the Word of God made of?
Words.
“So
when we’re talking about what doesn’t pass away (Jesus Christ says in Matt.
24:35, ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’),
it isn’t simply enough to say the message doesn’t pass away.
“After
the Millennial Kingdom, the earth is going to be dissolved and done away and
reconstituted but ‘my words shall not pass away.’ That’s a great verse on what
we call the ‘preservation of the Bible.’ You see it doesn’t say my word
singular, it says my words plural?
“What
is generally assumed (by theologians) is that what Christ’s saying is, ‘The
message I’m preaching—the truth I’m proclaiming—won’t pass away.’ These are the
people who believe that that’s what preservation of the Word of God is; it’s that
the message God proclaims, and the Good News God preaches, won’t ever pass
away.
“If
it said my word singular you might have a case, but when it says my
words plural, that’s more than the message; those are the vehicles
communicating the message.
*****
Jordan
continues, “There’s a lot of different ways to understand inspiration. One of
the popular ways in the last century is what’s called neo-orthodoxy. It used to
be you had the modernists who believed the Bible was full of errors and was
never right, and then you had the fundamentalists who believed it was the
inerrant Word of God.
“Then,
in the late 1800s-early 1900s, the fundamentalists got fighting with the
modernists and made a big mistake: They abandoned the statement of faith
that had carried the Protestant church for 400 years; they abandoned the issue
of preservation and went to a doctrinal statement that said something like
this—‘The Word of God is inerrant and infallible in the original manuscripts.’
“Now,
if you don’t have the original manuscripts, which you don’t, and that’s the
only place you believe the Bible’s inerrant, so what? If that inerrancy doesn’t
exist anymore, why would you argue about it?
“And
it’s interesting, because the fundamentalists (the modernists mocked them,
calling them ‘funnymentalists’), in order to avoid the stigma of being less
‘intelligized’ than the elitists, they made a couple of real concessions that
have frankly been the downfall and ruin of fundamentalism.
“One
of them is this idea, ‘Well, it’s only in the originals.’ So, I don’t know why
anybody would want to argue about the point if that’s all there was. Just
concede it and go on because what you have now isn’t the original, so you’re
acknowledging that it’s impossible to have the Word of God in its inerrancy
today.
“If
you believe it isn’t inerrant and has errors in it, who cares what you believe
about one you don’t have? So, what the fundamentalists did is they maintained
an orthodox statement, but in practice weren’t any different than the Catholics
and the modernists and so forth.”
*****
What
should be common knowledge anymore, especially with books like Gail Riplinger’s
exhaustive expose in 1993, New Age Bible Versions, is that the Vaticanus
and Sinaiticus manuscripts used for the modern versions represent the
corrupted copies of the Bible known as the Alexandrian Manuscripts.
Riplinger
writes, “The Septuagint (LXX), a Greek translation of the Old Testament, is
used today by textual critics, in many instances, to determine the wording of
new versions. It appears that Origen was the author of this A.D. document. The
NIV translators admit they use the O.T. text which was ‘standardized early in
the third century by Origen. . .
“Origen
has provided through his Septuagint Old Testament and New Testament documents,
a vehicle for the propagation of the ‘East meets West’ religion for the ‘New’
Age. . . This corrupt ‘tree of knowledge’ is rooted in Platonism and
branched out to reach Philo, then Clement and finally Origen. Its twisted
branches cast a century’s long shadow over today’s new versions and ‘New’ Age
Movement.”
As
an article posted to the website Chick.com (entitled “Where Did the King James
Bible Come From?” and adapted from the book Let’s Weigh the Evidence by
Barry Burton) accurately reports, “The Sinaiticus is a manuscript that
was found in 1844 in a trash pile in St.Catherine’s Monastery near Mt. Sinai,
by a man named Tischendorf. It contains nearly all of the New Testament plus it
adds the ‘Shepherd of Hermes’ and the ‘Epistle of Barnabas’ to
the New Testament.
“The
Sinaiticus is extremely unreliable, proven by examining the manuscript
itself. John Burgeon spent years examining every available manuscript of the
New Testament. He writes about the Sinaiticus:
“
‘On many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40 words are dropped through carelessness.
Letters, words or even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or
begun and immediately canceled; while that gross blunder, whereby a clause is
omitted because it happens to end in the same words as the clause preceding,
occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament.’ ”
*****
Acts
8:37, which reads, “And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart,
thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son
of God,” is purposely left out of every modern bible translation on the market
today.
As
Jordan says, “They either leave it out completely or they put it in brackets,
meaning they don’t think it ought to be there but they don’t have the courage
of their convictions, so they put it in with brackets around it just to make
sure you know they don’t think it ought to really be there! The verse is
attacked simply on the basis of the fact that the faith of the man (in the
passage) was generated by a copy of Scripture; he was reading a copy of the
book of Isaiah.”
*****
In
Acts 8, there are actually two different instances of a copy of Isaiah being
used.
“Go
to Acts 8:26 and you see this bird’s got another copy of Isaiah,” says Jordan.
“What’d he do, go up to Nazareth and steal one from up there?! You know better
than that; he had his own copy of the thing. That’s at least two copies.
There’s one in Nazareth and then this guy’s got one.”
From
verse 29, we even see that the Holy Spirit, talking about a copy of Isaiah,
calls it Scripture.
Jordan
says, “Obviously the accuracy and authority of the Bible extends far past the
originals but goes into generations of copies. Christ could hold it and call it
Scripture.
“When
Jesus said, ‘It is written that man shall not live by bread alone but by every
word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” that expression ‘it is written,’
if you want to learn something from the Greek language, that’s in the
perfect tense, which is a tense that means it’s accomplished in the past but
the results continue on into the present. He’s saying, ‘It stands written right
this minute! What God wrote down in the past continues to exist into the very
present!’
*****
II
Timothy 3:15 reads, “And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures,
which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in
Christ Jesus.”
The
word holy means “set apart”; in other words, the Scriptures God has set
apart for Himself. Obviously, Timothy knew them by a copy of the Bible!
Jordan
says, “God says in Psalm 60 that ‘these are the words I have spoken in my
holiness.’ That’s why you call it a Holy Bible! They’re the holy words of God
and these Scriptures God has set apart for Himself!
When
II Timothy 3:16 says, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God,” we know
simply by the context it’s a reference to copies and not the original
manuscripts.
Jordan
reasons, “That’s a rough verse, folks, if you’ve got an unscriptural definition
of inspiration or preservation! You can’t believe what that verse says! If you
believe inspiration is just what happens to the writer when he writes some
things down, and you don’t understand that inspiration has to do with the
w-o-r-d-s God puts on a page . . .that’s the whole issue in inspiration, isn’t
it?!
“The
scholars and all the commentaries say the Septuagint (the corrupt translation
used for the modern versions) is written in 250 A.D. and that Christ, Peter,
Philip, Paul and Timothy—that everybody was not using a Hebrew Bible; they were
using a Greek translation. So, if that’s true, that makes (II Tim. 3) even
worse because there you’ve got a translation called Scripture! And they get mad
at you if you say you believe your English translation is inspired!
“There,
by their own standards, they have Paul saying that Timothy’s Greek translation
is inspired! See, if a fellow will tell you he believes that’s a Septuagint,
then you’ve really got him over a barrel! The Septuagint is a hoax and not a
reliable thing to trust in, but if a man thought it was, you’d really have him!
*****
All
down through the ages, religious-types have wanted people to believe that
unless they can read and understand Greek they can’t study the Bible. Theology
schools have routinely taught this same hooey.
“The
idea is if I can read it and you can’t, but you really want to know what it
says, where do you have to go? You have to come to me, don'tcha?” says Jordan. “Isn’t
that what Rome’s been saying for 1,500 years? So, it’s really just another
sneaky Protestant popery idea but it isn’t what the Scripture gives you to
understand.
“When
Moses wrote down Exodus 5:1 in Hebrew, reporting, ‘I told Pharaoh to let my
people go,’ you know he said that in Egyptian even though he wrote it in
Hebrew, so you call that a translation.
“From
these types of passages, I know you can translate from one language to another
and it still be God’s Word. Now, that’s considered heresy if you say it that
way, but I’m saying it that way because I’m reading a verse (that proves it)!
“So
my faith isn’t in the ability to understand the language limitations and the
linguistic techniques of making the transfer. I understand the difficulty of
all that. I’ve studied Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish. I studied Latin.
“I
freely confess I’m not a linguist, but I am familiar with some of what it takes
to transfer from one language to another—the difficulties and so forth of all
that. But I can also read my Bible, and my Bible tells me that when something
is properly translated from one language to another, God considers it still His
Word.”
*****
As Psalm 12:6-7 verifies, “The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.”
Jordan
explains, “If it’s pure it means it’s clean; it doesn’t have mistakes, doesn’t
have errors, doesn’t have deficiencies in it.
“Not
only did He make them and give them pure, clean, right, true and sure but then
He says, ‘I’m going to preserve them.’ You see it isn’t enough to say, ‘God
wrote a book over there and we’re over here.’ I need it now! So, God didn’t
just write His Book and forget about it. He preserved that word so that you can
have in your hands a final authority that you can depend on because it’s God’s
Word.
“If
God says His Word is perfect (Psalm 19:7) and He’s going to preserve it, what
does He have to preserve it as? He’s got to preserve it as perfect. Because
when He’s preserved it, if it isn’t what He started out with, then it isn’t the
same thing!
“It
can’t be almost perfect, almost pure, almost sure, almost
clean. . . It either is or it isn’t.
If you believe in an ‘almost bible’ then you can only almost trust in it. And
you’re in trouble because you don’t have an absolute, final authority.”
“God’s
design is to preserve His Word through a multiplicity of accurate, reliable
copies that are available to all Believers and which are as authoritative as
the originals. Therefore, you don’t have to go out and restore the original
manuscripts; you don’t need the textual critics and their philosophy—their
human viewpoint—of restoration.”
*****
Here’s
a great passage from grace preacher D. Kuepper, taken from a study he gave at
Shorewood Bible Church’s 1999 summer conference:
“What
people do today, and what they’ll do in the last days of prophecy, is express
ridicule and mockery in a language of contempt. Notice as we saw in II Timothy,
though, it’s done in the midst of a ‘form of godliness.’ In the form of
religion.
“Religious
people will be the most guilty as to what’s happening here. And that’s why as
we look at the perils of the times of the last days described in II Timothy 3,
we need to remember that the Apostle Paul’s inspired words—you notice they
don’t refer to economic problems, or riots, or war or even natural disasters?
“As
we look at this passage dealing with the last days of the mystery—literally our
last days of the Body of Christ as we wait for the Rapture—the real peril
here is not inflation, it’s not depression, it’s not a third world war, it’s
not an earthquake or hurricane…the real peril lies in the heart of man.”
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