5/9/2001
Contents
Introduction
Foundation of the KJV
History of the KJV
Translators of the KJV
Techniques of the KJV
Language of the KJV
Foundation of the KJV
Doctrine of the KJV
Reverence of the KJV
History of the KJV
Fruits of the KJV
The foundation of the English Authorised Version (KJV) of the Holy Bible is unsurpassably pre-eminent in the underlying texts upon which it rests
My Plea for the Old Sword
Dr. Ian R.K. Paisley
The foundation texts upon which any translation rests are all-important. If the foundation is false the translation will be false. If the foundation is corrupt the translation will be corrupt. If the foundation is erroneous the translation will be erroneous. The texts upon which the modern English perversions of the Holy Scripture are founded are neither reliable nor accurate. Their high claims rest upon the infidel textual theories of the leaders of religious apostasy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Like produces like and one has only to glance at the unfolding of the unbelieving "Higher Textual Criticism" to be struck by the unbelief of the textual theorists, the textual editors and the textual transmitters. Overwhelmingly they are found in the camp of the enemy who rejects that God ever gave to the world an Infallible Bible. No Bible believer should be deceived by the parading of great names in the field of Biblical "scholarship", when these very men are but the parrots of the rationalists of another century. The case they present is not their own but a modem presentation of an ancient heresy. By lowering the Bible from the heaven of its divinity to depraved earth they declare it to be but an ordinary book of mere human production. Robert L Dabney, the great Presbyterian scholar, was right when he castigated the modern texts upon which the English perversions of his day were based as coming from "the mind of infidel rationalism". The theory of the producers and users of modern English perversions of Holy Scripture is that the Church of the Reformation, the Church of 1611 when the Authorized Version was published, and the church of the Great Evangelical Awakening, had not a true Bible. The foundation of their Bible, according to these critics, was not infallible. These great movements of God rest, according to modem translators, on a faulty and erroneous Bible. It was only when Tischendorf discovered a manuscript in a trash-can, (used to hold papers to kindle the fire), in a cell of the Convent of St Catherine in Mt Sinai that at long last we had, according to them, a true text of the New Testament. This manuscript of the New Testament was bound with portions of the Old Testament, the spurious Epistle of Barnabas and the spurious Epistle of the Shepherd of Hermas. Think of it, the Almighty God who had promised to preserve His own Holy Word, allowed the majority of the copies to be destroyed until there were only two or three left. One of these was known to the monks as valueless, hence it was not in the library but in a trash-can - a reject indeed, being bound up with other spurious scriptures. "The words of the Lord are pure words tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, Thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever." (Psalm 12:6-7) While this imperfect and rejected copy was gathering dust, the Church of Christ was preaching out of copies of the true preserved Word of God. Souls were being gloriously saved and churches gloriously established, with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon them, the same Holy Spirit who divinely authored the Book. The famous Dr F.H.A. Scrivener, the author of A Full Collation of the Codex Sinaiticus states: "The text is covered with alterations of an obviously correctional character- brought in by at least ten different revisers, some of them systematically spread over every page by at least ten different revisers." So much for this so-called authoritative manuscript. Its imperfections and falsehoods are poxed on its very face. The fact of such correction proves beyond doubt that the copy was always known to be erroneous. These modem perversions all claim to rest partly upon this blighted and flawed manuscript. Evidently another such copy left is, according to the modern text theorists and defenders, the Codex Vaticanus. This manuscript was discovered gathering dust in the Pope's library. Erasmus knew about this manuscript but although he was much nearer to the time of its production, he rejected it. Rome set great obstacles against allowing the manuscript to be seen or copied. Rome always hated the Scriptures and while she was carefully concealing a mutilated text the true Church was preaching and proclaiming the preserved Word of God, and the kingdom of God was advancing among men. Those who claimed they had found the true Word of God in the Antichrist's bookshelves in the 19th century, and set out to doctor all the Bibles in the world to conform them to the Roman imposture, only demonstrate their total ignorance of God's precious Word. From the Devil's bookstore they took the Devil's product and as sons of the father of lies they marketed its lie as truth. In fact they were peddling the Devil's lie. God sent them a strong delusion that they should believe a lie that they all might be damned who believed not the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness (II Thessalonians 1:11-12). The manuscript deletes among other Scriptures the last verses of Mark 16:920, All the attacks on that portion of Scripture are based on that deletion. The basis of such rejection is without foundation, even with the Codex Vaticanus before us. One of the foremost Biblical scholars of his day, John William Burgon (1813-1888) Dean of Chichester and champion in maintaining inviolate the inspiration and preservation of the Holy Scripture, brought to the attention of the whole world this fact about the Codex Vaticanus: "To say that in the Vatican Codex (B), which is unquestionably the oldest we possess, St Mark's Gospel ends abruptly at the eighth verse of the sixteenth chapter, and that the customary subscription (Kata Mapkon) follows, is true; but it is far from being the whole truth. It requires to be stated in addition that the scribe, whose plan is found to have been to begin every fresh book of the Bible at the top of the next ensuing column to that which contained the concluding words of the preceding book, has at the close of St Mark's Gospel deviated from his else invariable practice. He has left in this place one column entirely vacant. It is the only vacant column in the whole manuscript, a blank space abundantly sufficient to contain the twelve verses which he nevertheless withheld. Why did he leave that column vacant? What can have induced the scribe on this solitary occasion to depart from his established rule? The phenomenon (I believe I was the first to call distinct attention to it) is in the highest degree significant, and admits only one interpretation. The older manuscript from which Codex B was copied must have infallibly contained the twelve verses in dispute. The copyist was instructed to leave them out- and he obeyed; but he prudently left a blank space in memoriam rei. Never was blank more intelligible! Never was silence more eloquent! By this simple expedient; strange to relate, the Vatican Codex is made to refute itself even while it seems to be bearing testimony against the concluding verses of St Mark's Gospel, by withholding them; for it forbids the inference which, under ordinary circumstances, must have been drawn from that omission. It does more. By leaving room for the verses it omits, it brings into prominent notice at the end of fifteen centuries and a half, a more ancient witness than itself. Revision Revised Edition: The last twelve verses of the Gospel of St. Mark- (pp. 86, 87) John Burgon's testimony was absolutely unambiguous and crystal clear. "Either, with the best and wisest of all ages, you must believe the whole of Holy Scripture or with the narrow-minded infidel you must disbelieve the whole. There is no middle course" Yes, let me emphasise that- there is no middle ground. We either have a reliable Bible in our mother tongue or we have not. What is the use of God verbally inspiring the Bible if He did not preserve it verbally for all generations? Between a verbally inspired Bible and a verbally preserved Bible there is no middle ground. You cannot have the one without the other. The Authorized Version rests on the foundation of the Received Traditional Text, the text of the centuries. The false foundation of the modem perversions is but the text of yesterday. The oldest is the best. It is the Ancient Text. It is the text found in the great majority of the manuscript copies and the text read in the Greek church for over 1000 years. Even Bishop Hort had to concede that the Received Text was "Quite as old as 350AD or older". Bishop Chades Ellicott, the Head of the New Testament Revision Commission, stated: "'The manuscripts which Erasmus used differ, for the most part, only in small and insignificant details from the bulk of the cursive manuscripts. The general character of their text is the same. By this observation the pedigree of the Received Text is carried up beyond the individual manuscripts used by Erasmus... That pedigree stretches back to a remote antiquity. The first ancestor of the Received Text was at least contemporary with the oldest of our extant manuscripts, if not older than any one of them.' - Charles John Ellicott, (The Revisers and the Greek Text of the New Testament, by Two Members of the New Testament Company, 1882, pp. 11, 12.) Contrast this with the testimony of Robert Lewis Dabney, the outstanding Presbyterian leader of the Southern Presbyterians in the United States 1820-1898: "The Vatican, the Alexandrine, and now the Sinai. It is expressly admitted that neither of these has an extant history. No documentary external evidence exists as to the names of the copyists who transcribed them, the date, or the place of their writing. Nobody knows whence the Vatican MS came to the pope's library, or how long it has been there ... Tischendorf himself was unable to trace the presence of his favourite codex, in the monastery of St Catherine on Mt Horeb, by external witnesses higher than the twelfth century. THEIR EARLY DATE IS CONFESSEDLY ASSIGNED THEM BY CONJECTURE (conjectura: a casting together) of internal marks. It may be rightly assigned, yet by conjecture... The following list [of doctrinal corruptions in the critical Greek text] is not presented as complete, but as containing the most notable of these points.., the Sinai and the Vatican MSS, concur in omitting, in Matthew vi. 13, the closing doxology of our Lord's prayer, In John viii, 1-11, they and the Alexandrine omit the whole narrative of Christ's interview with the woman taken in adultery and her accusers. The first two omit the whole of Mark xvi., from the ninth verse to the end Acts viii 37, in which Philip is represented as propounding to the eunuch faith as the qualification for baptism, is omitted by all three ... in Acts ix. 5, 6... the Sinai, Vatican and Alexandrine MSS all concur in omitting "Who are thou, Lord? and the Lord said..." from the passage. In I Tim. iii. 16... the Sinai, Codex Ephremi, and probably the Alexandrine, ... In I John v. 7... all the old MSS concur in omitting the heavenly witnesses... In Jude 4.., the MSS omit God. In Rev. i. 11 ... all three MSS under remark concur in omitting the Messiah's eternal titles... If now the reader will glance back upon this latter list of variations, he will find that in every case, the doctrinal effect of the departure from the received text is to obscure or suppress some testimony for the divinity of the Saviour. The significant fact to which we wish especially to call attention is this: that all the variations proposed on the faith of these manuscripts which have any doctrinal importance, should attack the one doctrine of the Trinity; nay, we may say even more specifically, the one doctrine of Christ's deity ... Their admirers [of the favoured manuscripts supporting the critical text] claim for them an origin in the fourth or fifth century. The Sabellian and Arian controversies raged in the third and fourth. Is there no coincidence here? Things do not happen again and again regularly without a cause... And when we remember the date of the great Trinitarian contest, and compare it with the supposed date of these exemplars of the sacred text, the ground of suspicion becomes violent ... THESE VARIATIONS ARE TOO NUMERABLE, AND TOO SIGNIFICANT IN THEIR EFFECT UPON THE ONE DOCTRINE, TO BE ASCRIBED TO CHANCE. ... SOMEBODY HAS PLAYED THE KNAVE WITH THE TEXT... We think that [the reader] will conclude with us that the weight of probability is greatly in favour of this theory that the anti-Trinitarians, finding certain codices in which these doctrinal readings had been already lost through the licentious criticism of Origen and his school, industrously diffuse them. While they also did what they dared to add to the omissions of similar readings. - R L Dabney, "The Doctrinal Various Readings of the New Testament Greek," Southern Presbyterian Review, April 1871, reprinted in Discussions Evangelical and Theological, 1890, pp. 350-389 David Cloud in his well researched book The Battle for the King James Version and the Received Text from 1800 to the Present states six facts. These facts, which are stubborn things, have never budged in the hottest fire of this controversy.
Of Bishops Westcott and Hort, who sold the view of the unreliability of the Traditional Received Text and thus the Authorized Version, Zane Hodges notes, are easily found guilty of the charge of rationalism by the opening statements found in their introduction to The New Testament In Original Greek:
"To begin with, Westcott and Hort are clearly unwilling to commit themselves to the inerrancy of the original Scriptures"- Hodges.
It was the conspiracy of Westcott and Hort to force secretly upon the Revised Version translators their new Greek Text which put the Revised Version off the rails and commenced the rash of English perversions of the Holy Scripture.
So dishonest was their behaviour that Charles Wordsworth, Bishop of St. Andrews, refused to sign his name to a testimonial of thanks to the Chairman because he was so discouraged by "the number of minute and unnecessary changes made in direct violation of the instruction under which the work was undertaken."
Looking back on the translation, the Bishop called it "a deplorable failure".
It was however, more. It was a damnable conspiracy to set up false Bibles seeking to usurp the place of the one and only true Bible.
There exists no reason for supposing that the Divine Agent, who in the first instance thus gave to mankind the Scriptures of Truth, straightway abdicated His office; took no further care of His work; abandoned those precious writings to their fate. That a perpetual miracle was wrought for their preservation - that copyists were protected against the risk of error, or evil men prevented from altering shamefully, copies of the Deposit- no one, it is presumed, is so weak as to suppose. But it is quite a different thing to claim that ALL DOWN THE AGES THE SACRED WRITINGS MUST NEEDS HAVE BEEN GOD'S PECULIAR CARE; THAT THE CHURCH UNDER HIM HAS WATCHED OVER THEM WITH INTELLIGENCE AND SKILL; has recognised which copies exhibit a fabricated, which an honestly transcribed text; has generally sanctioned the one, and generally disallowed the other. I am utterly disinclined to believe, so grossly improbable does it seem - that at the end of 1800 years 995 copies out of every thousand, suppose, will prove untrustworthy; and that the one, two, three, four or five which remain, whose contents were till yesterday as good as unknown, will be found to have retained the secret of what the Holy Spirit originally inspired. I am utterly unable to believe, in short, that God's promise has so entirely failed, that at the end of 1800 years much of the text of the Gospel has in point of fact to be picked by a German critic out of a waste paper basket in the convent of St Catherine; and that the entire text had to be remodelled after the pattern set by a couple of copies which had remained in neglect during fifteen centuries, and had probably owed their survival to that neglect; whilst hundreds of others had been thumbed to pieces, and had bequeathed their witness to copies made from them.
-John Burgon, The Traditional Text, pp. 11, 12
"Strange as it may appear, it is undeniably true, that the whole of the controversy may be reduced to the following narrow issue: Does the truth of the Text of Scripture dwell with the vast multitude of copies, uncial and cursive, concerning which nothing is more remarkable than the marvellous agreement which subsists between them? Or is it rather to be supposed that the truth abides exclusively with a very little handful of manuscripts, which at once differ from the great bulk of the witnesses, and- strange to say- also amongst themselves?" (ibid., p. 16)
The unfolding of time has demonstrated this more and more.
CALL THIS TEXT ERASMIAN OR COMPLUTENSIAN - THE TEXT OF STEPHENS, OR OF BEZA, OR OF THE ELZEVIRS - CALL IT THE "RECEIVED'', OR THE "TRADITIONAL GREEK TEXT", OR WHATEVER OTHER NAME YOU PLEASE - THE FACT REMAINS, THAT A TEXT HAS COME DOWN TO US WHICH IS ATTESTED BY A GENERAL CONSENSUS OF ANCIENT COPIES, ANCIENT VERSIONS, ANCIENT FATHERS.
-John Burgon, Revision Revised
OUR AUTHORIZED VERSION IS FOUNDED ON THAT ROCK.
THE FACT IS THAT THE FOUNDATION OF THE ENGLISH AUTHORIZED VERSION (KJV) OF THE HOLY BIBLE IS UNSURPASSABLY PRE-EMINENT IN THE UNDERLYING TEXTS UPON WHICH IT RESTS.
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