Imperishable Inheritance

On the list of issues that really frost me, KJV Only­ism is mak­ing a good case for inclu­sion. I remem­ber that day when my KJV Only pas­tor handed me a track with a list of 200 verses “miss­ing” from the mod­ern trans­la­tions, and then I got another one which had an image of a steam­roller run­ning over new trans­la­tions enti­tled “the trans­la­tion trap.” I was con­cerned, as any Chris­t­ian would be, if some­one told them they weren’t read­ing the Word of God, so I set out to find the truth.

My pas­tor gave me Riplinger’s “New Age Bible Ver­sions;” I couldn’t even make it through the book it was so awful. I started to read arti­cles by KJV Only­ers, and I was really start­ing to get wor­ried that I wasn’t read­ing the Word. This cul­mi­nated with a Bible study where we stum­bled on the Johan­nine Comma.

Thank God for writ­ers such as James White who put rea­son back into faith and the­o­log­i­cal study. His book: “The King James Only Con­tro­versy” shed some light on the issue. He gave a an argu­ment for the expan­sion of titles (such as “Jesus” to the “Lord Jesus Christ”) he dubbed “expan­sion of piety.” In this, he said the scribes “expanded” the names in the Byzan­tine scripts to increase the rev­er­ence. It is an inter­est­ing argu­ment, and is valid to con­sider as the Tex­tus Recep­tus (TR) was in the Byzan­tine fam­ily (as opposed to the Alexan­drian) about 1,600 years after Jesus walked the earth, and the ear­lier man­u­scripts (Alexan­drian) didn’t have the longer titles. So, there does seem to be some level of “pro­gres­sion” in the man­u­scripts, but I ques­tion the valid­ity of the argu­ment as all encom­pass­ing. None-the-less, it is an inter­est­ing argu­ment to ratio­nal­ize the dif­fer­ences between the TR and the Major­ity Text (MT).

He also uti­lized the phrase “par­al­lel influ­ence” to ratio­nal­ize why the TR would have addi­tional texts. This hap­pens when the scribes heard some­thing from a liturgy or mem­o­riz­ing from another part of scrip­ture and when it sounded famil­iar they just wrote what they had mem­o­rized else­where. It also refers to “har­mo­niz­ing” pas­sages such as 1 John 4:2–3 KJV.

Good points include that fact that the TR wasn’t actu­ally fin­ished by Eras­mus but by Theodore Beza (and Stephanus worked on it as well). He also pointed out his­tory on how the Sep­tu­agint was blas­phemed, then the TR was blas­phemed, and now the new trans­la­tions are being blas­phemed. It just shows a his­tory in the devel­op­ment of Bible man­u­scripts. Note what the orig­i­nal trans­la­tors of the 1611 KJV wrote in “The Trans­la­tors to the Reader” on this topic:

“It [new Bible trans­la­tion] is wel­comed with sus­pi­cion instead of love, and with emu­la­tion instead of thanks: and if there be any hole left for cavil to enter, (and cavil, if it does not find a hole, will make one) it is sure to be mis­con­strued, and in dan­ger to be con­demned.“
Trans­la­tors to the Reader, 1611 KJV

James also showed how Eras­mus used the “dreaded” tex­tual crit­i­cism him­self, except he only had 7 man­u­scripts! The dou­ble stan­dard of KJV Only­ism frosts me more and more. I clench up when some­one even men­tions the issue, but I truly believe this move­ment, much like those in the past, will die off.

LOOK, LOOK AT THE HORRIBLE NIV!

For he has res­cued us from the domin­ion of dark­ness and brought us into the king­dom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemp­tion, the for­give­ness of sins.
Colos­sians 1:13–14 (NIV)

Why would any read a “blood­less” Bible? Oh the humanity!