Luke 4:18 and the LXX (part 1) Monday, Feb 1 2010

Perhaps no passage in Scripture presents such a problem to the KJV Only view¹, as Luke 4:16-22.  In this first post, we will offer a brief explanation of the text, an examination of the quotation in verses 18-19, and a some historical support for our position.  In future posts, we will draw out the implications from the text which impact the version debate, and provide some answers to common KJV Only counter-arguments.

Explanation of the Text

Luke 4:16 explains Christ stood to read the text in the synagogue.  This was the common practice.  Jesus will read and then expound the text.  Vs. 17 explains he will read from the scroll of Isaiah, and he opens the scroll and proceeds to read.

Bibles that provide Jesus’ words in red, do a disservice to our text.  An ESV Bible I have sitting here, has vs. 18-19 in red.  But if we examine vs. 17 more closely, we’ll see that Luke is not telling us what Jesus “said” but what was written in the book that was in Jesus’ hand.

Luke says (using the KJV text here), “when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written”.  Then follows vs. 18-19.  Luke does not say Jesus said those words.  From vs. 20, it is clear that he had read them, as he rolls the scroll back up and sits down (to begin his teaching, as the custom prescribed).  So clearly Jesus read from that passage of Scripture.  But Luke gives us what the scroll said.  He tells us what was written (or what “stood written”, to better reflect the perfect tense of the Greek words here).

Luke as the inspired author of Scripture is making a statement concerning what was written on the scroll in the Nazareth synagogue.  Now we’ll look more closely at what Luke tells us was written there.

Examination of the Quotation

Using the KJV English as a comparison, the chart below shows where the quote in Luke 4:18-19 departs from the Hebrew Original as translated by the KJV in Isaiah 61:1-2. (You may want to click on the image to enlarge it.)

You’ll notice that some of the differences are quite minor (“to”/”unto”, “poor”/”meek”, “preach deliverance”/”proclaim liberty”).  Others are more significant: “Lord GOD” (Adonai Jehovah) becomes “Lord”, “LORD” (Jehovah) becomes “he”, “bruised” becomes “bound”.  And even more problematic, an entire phrase is found in Luke that is not in Isaiah 61: “recovering of sight to the blind”.  A similar phrase is found in Isaiah 42:7, but it doesn’t match up exactly.  It was common for readers in the prophets to skip around a bit, and read portions of verses from the nearby chapters.  Even allowing for this, it does not appear that the exact wording Luke records in Luke 4 is found in the King James Version in Isaiah (and we would assume in the Hebrew Masoretic Text behind the KJV).

Now this all gets very interesting once we compare the Greek of Luke 4 with the Greek of the Septuagint Old Testament (LXX) in Isaiah 61.

Here we see the differences are much less.  The first two involve alternate spellings of the same word.  In the NA27 and the Majority Text Greek, the spelling of the LXX is followed.  The third instance of a difference, followed by the TR and MT,² and in English it amounts to “the broken of heart” vs. “the broken of hearts” (or as often translated, “brokenhearted”).  The fourth instance is similar to the English example in the KJV, “preach” vs. “declare”.

Most interesting to note here, is that the phrase above which the KJV/Hebrew does not have in Isaiah 61, “the recovering of sight to the blind” is found in the Greek LXX and matches the wording exactly in all the versions of the Greek NT (TR, MT & NA27).  There is a missing phrase found in Luke and not in Isaiah LXX, however.  “To set at liberty them that are bruised” is not in the LXX.  However an almost exact form of this phrase is found in Is. 58:6.  That form matches more perfectly than the missing English phrase does from Is. 42 (see above).  So again, if we consider the common practice of reading from nearby chapters, then we have a much clearer story of where the quotation came from that Luke says was written in the scroll at the Nazareth synagogue.

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Alexandria And Antioch/ Was Alexandria All Evil And Antioch All Pure? Saturday, Jan 23 2010

Much is often made of the text families from which Greek texts such as the Textus Receptus and NA/UBS come.  Alexandria is said to be home to heretics, while Antioch is held to be home to the lovers of truth.

This post is purposefully short, and is intended to be built upon later as time permits.  I simply want to notice two things here:

1.  If the above statements about Alexandria (from which the Alexandrian family comes) and Antioch (home of the Byzantine text family) are true does that make the claims of Byzantine superiority correct?  The answer is “no”, it does not make the claim of the superiority of the Byzantine text to be true.  Why?  Because the argument is fallacious.  The fallacy is called the “genetic fallacy”.

“Genetic Fallacy: Where someone condemns an argument because of where it began, how it began, or who began it.”

2.  The above statements about Antioch and Alexandria are not totally true.  For example, one of the great debates of early Christendom was the debate about Arianism.  Arius essentially was anti-Trinitarian.  Arius was taught by a Lucian of Antioch.  He was opposed by a Trinitarian believer named Athanasius, who was from Alexandria.

When we look at this we find that Antioch’s teaching was not as pure as the Byzantine purists would have us to believe.  Neither was Alexandria quite so heterodox as they claim.  In fact, the School of Antioch was not totally orthodox in their views, holding to adoptionism, and Nestorius (father of the Nestorian heresy) received some training there.

These brief thoughts should remind us that the answer to the textual issue simply will not be decided by the geographical origins of the Greek texts.

(Note: wiki articles accessed 01/23/2010 and are subject to change.)

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Preservation: How and What? by Aaron Blumer Thursday, Jan 14 2010

Go over and read Aaron Blumer’s new post at Sharper Iron on the preservation issue.  He does a great job of cutting to the heart of the matter.

…important foundational questions have been overlooked in a rush to get to conclusion A or B in the translation debate.

Among the neglected questions are these: (1) what process did God say He would use to preserve His word and (2) what form did He say that preserved word would take? Both of these are subsets of another neglected question: What does Scripture actually claim (and not claim) about it’s own preservation?

The questions of process (“how”) and form (“what”) are at the heart of the controversy because nobody (among fundamentalists or conservative evangelicals) denies that the word has, and will, endure. The question of what Scripture actually claims is critical as well, for multiple reasons. For one, only a clear answer to that question can put us on the right track to answering the others.

Two general schools of thought exist regarding the how and what of preservation….

Read the whole article.

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A.T. Robertson on Textual Variants Saturday, Jan 9 2010

Today it is common to speak of four hundred thousand variants to the Greek New Testament. Agnostic scholars like Bart Ehrman, like to stoke the fires of public mistrust in the Bible by pointing out the “textual corruption” of the New Testament. Closer to home, “King James Version-Only” advocates like to emphasize the differences between the Greek text behind the King James and that behind modern versions.

What are we to say to this? How shall we respond to the valid claim that there are thousands of textual variants? Indeed there are hundreds of thousands!

A.T. Robertson, a Greek scholar extraordinaire and author of a classic 1450 page advanced Greek grammar, can help us in this regard. In the introduction to his book An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (Nashville: Broadman, 1925), he clearly explains what textual criticism is and why it is needed. He then goes on to discuss the condition of the New Testament with regard to its textual purity. I offer an extended quote below, that I trust will prove useful. He is writing in 1925, so many more variants are known today, but the general principles he explains and the viability of all such variants hold true. You can read his entire book online at archive.org.

…the current New Testament text must be adjudged, in comparison with a well printed modern book, extremely corrupt.

On the other hand, if we compare the present state of the New Testament text with that of any other ancient writing, we must render the opposite verdict, and declare it to be marvelously correct. Such has been the care with which the New Testament has been copied,–a care which has doubtless grown out of a true reverence for its holy words,– such has been the providence of God in preserving for His Church in each and every age a competently exact text of the Scriptures, that not only is the New Testament unrivaled among ancient writings in the purity of its text as actually transmitted and kept in use, but also in the abundance of testimony which has come down to us for castigating its comparatively infrequent blemishes. The divergence of its current text from the autograph may shock a modern printer of modern books; its wonderful approximation to its autograph is the undisguised envy of every modern reader of ancient books.

When we attempt to state the amount of corruption which the New Testament has suffered in its transmission through two millenniums, absolutely instead of thus relatively, we reach scarcely more intelligible results. Roughly speaking, there have been counted in it some hundred and eighty or two hundred thousand “various readings”–that is, actual variations of reading in existing documents. These are, of course, the result of corruption, and hence the measure of corruption. But we must guard against being misled by this very misleading statement. It is not meant that there are nearly two hundred thousand places in the New Testament where various readings occur; but only that there are nearly two hundred thousand various readings all told; and in many cases the documents so differ among themselves that many are counted on a single word. For each document is compared in turn with the one standard, and the number of its divergences ascertained; then these sums are themselves added together, and the result given as the number of actually observed variations. It is obvious that each place where a variation occurs is counted as many times over, not only as distinct variations occur upon it, but also as the same variation occurs in different manuscripts. This sum includes, moreover, all variations of all kinds and in all sources, even those that are singular to a single document of infinitesimal weight as a witness, and even those that affect such very minor matters as the spelling of a word. Dr. Ezra Abbot was accustomed to say that about nineteen-twentieths of them have so little support that, although they are various readings, no one would think of them as rival readings; and nineteen-twentieths of the remainder are of so little importance that their adoption or rejection would cause no appreciable difference in the sense of the passages where they occur. Dr. Hort’s way of stating it is that upon about one word in every eight various readings exist supported by sufficient evidence to bid us pause and look at it; that about one word in sixty has various readings upon it supported by such evidence as to render our decision nice and difficult; but that so many of these variations are trivial that only about one word in every thousand has upon it substantial variation supported by such evidence as to call out the efforts of the critic in deciding between the readings.

The great mass of the New Testament, in other words, has been transmitted to us with no, or next to no, variation; and even in the most corrupt form in which it has ever appeared, to use the oft-quoted words of Richard Bentley, “the real text of the sacred writers is competently exact; … nor is one article of faith or moral precept either perverted or lost… choose as awkwardly as you will, choose the worst by design, cut of the whole lump of readings.” If, then, we undertake the textual criticism of the New Testament under a sense of duty, we may bring it to a conclusion under the inspiration of hope. The autographic text of the New Testament is distinctly within the reach of criticism in so immensely the greater part of the volume, that we cannot despair of restoring to ourselves and the Church of God, His Book, word for word, as He gave it by inspiration to men. [pg. 12-15, An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament] (emphasis mine)

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Preserved and Pure? Tuesday, Jan 5 2010

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.  (Ps. 12:6-7)

If Ps 12:6,7 speaks of God’s words being kept without error, and kept pure, why was there ever a “Wicked” Bible?¹

You will remember that the “Wicked” Bible had a misprint.  The misprint omitted the word “not” in the commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” (Exodus 20:14)

Thus, it read, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

It certainly makes one wonder how the preserved Word of God was allowed by God to become so very corrupt.

The point of this article? If we were to speak of God’s preserving His Word, we should speak of His keeping His Word from becoming so adulterated as to become:

1.  Lost and unrecoverable

2.  So corrupt as to encourage immorality (By the way, that is precisely why this “Wicked” Bible is a collector’s piece.  Only about eleven of one thousand copies survived.  The rest were destroyed because of the error.  One only wonders how the rest evaded destruction.  They are known to be in error, thus there is no danger of their being a danger to morality.)

3.  So corrupt as to teach anything that contradicts the essence of Christianity.

Let us honestly ask ourselves a question:  Do the modern Bible versions that are produced by honest translators and publishing houses (Watchtower, Seventh Day Adventists, and other cults’ translations are excluded from this.) actually encourage immorality, or contradict the essence of Christianity?  It is obvious that God has kept His Word.  It has not become lost.  Neither do I know of any honestly produced modern Bible translation that encourages immorality or promotes doctrines that are heterodox.

It seems that God has indeed preserved His Word, and that across a number of translations that attempt to be faithful to the original language texts.

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible Accessed 08/03/2009

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Revelation, Inscripturation, and Preservation Saturday, Dec 12 2009

Much is said these days about the preservation of Scripture logically flowing from the inspiration of Scripture. To be honest, I would not take much time to debate that particular viewpoint, and would assent to it. After all, what good is an inspired Bible that will not be preserved for all generations?

On the other hand, preservation is seen by many to be an issue of textual families (Antiochian/Byzantine) and compiled texts such as the Textus Receptus and the King James Version.

It is the latter that came to mind when I read the following:
“..God provided for its inscripturation, so that His revelation now comes to us, not in the form of deeds and events, but as a description of these. In order to guard against volatilization, corruption, and falsification, He gave it permanent form in writing.”

Berkhof, Louis Systematic Theology pg 141; Grand Rapids, MI; Eerdmans

Note what Berkhof said; not that the revelation would be preserved in a certain textual family, or version, but that the revelation would be preserved in words. In other words, a written record of Divine revelation would suffice to preserve the revelation. Spoken words, and the spoken interpretations of the deeds seen, and revelations experienced are easily corrupted. Just imagine playing the gossip game in which a message is whispered from person to person only to mangle the message terribly by the end of the game. Such is the nature of the spoken word. The written word is different. It is difficult to modify and change a written account after it has gone through multiple copies that are identical.

What is the relevance of this to the issue of preservation today? The significance is that we have the written record of revelation today. The various manuscripts that are in existence today are manifold. They also agree much more than they disagree, and where they do disagree the disagreement does not change a single important doctrine. Neither do the disagreements between manuscripts change Biblical morality. Thus it is that we contend that “ the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth … containeth the Word of God, nay, is the Word of God.” (The King James Version Translators Preface to The Reader)

Oh, I know we can get into a “jots and tittles” discussion. Honestly, that is a topic for another time. What is necessary for us to see is that we have Divine revelation preserved for us in many translations, and not in a lone English translation that is neither understood by people who can’t read English nor by many who do.

God gave us His revelation in verbal form, and we have it with us still today. That is what we must remember to be the important issue.

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The Necessity of Translation Wednesday, Nov 25 2009

Introduction: Now that we’ve established the origins of the various Greek New Testaments, the next step in the process is translation into the receptor language. Last time, we saw that there are really two streams of MSS that have basically produced about four Greek standardized texts which are very similar to each other. Two are from the Byzantine family of MSS and the other two are a combination of both the older Alexandrian MSS as well as the Byzantine texts as well. We saw that the major differences in these texts are about 17 Individual verses missing from the older MSS and about 6 larger portions that are missing.  The total difference is about 1/1000th of a percent between these two families of texts which attests to the preservation of God’s Word over the years and through out all the different parts of the world where these ancient MSS have been found.

1.            The Need for Translation

Now we come to the point of understanding how a translation is produced from these various Greek texts. The first thing I want to talk about is the need for translation. The first obvious reason for translation is that of language barriers. The original writers wrote in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. Today, the vast majority of people have no idea how to read write or speak those languages. Unlike the Koran, the Bible doesn’t claim to be the Word of God only in the original languages. If it cannot be understood, it does no good to you. Understanding the Word which has its origins in God alone, is what powerfully changes people. The Word is powerful, but it must be understood in the languages of all the different people in the world.  For over a thousand years, the Bible was only available in Latin, so that only educated people  were able to read it. The common people, for the most part during the Middle Ages were uneducated, illiterate and had no Bible whatsoever. They had to depend on the priests to explain what the Bible said and meant. You can see how this could really be used for evil. A man or a whole institution could tell people what the Bible meant and the people would have no way to verify it. And the people were taught that the Church created the Bible anyway, so it had authority to interpret it as it wished.

Let me make something else clear about languages – there are no superior languages. English is not a more holy language than German, Spanish, Tagolog ,  Chinese, etc… God created language when he made Adam, and God made diversity of languages at the tower of Babel. Language is nothing more than an arrangement of sounds that convey meaning. Language is not static, it continuously changes and evolves. Languages add new words, change the meaning of words and drop the usage of other words as time passes. So the need for translation work and continued translation work is absolutely necessary.

To complicate the matter more, languages also have differences in form, tense, voice and mood. There are tenses in biblical Greek that don’t exist in English, so that a perfect translation of the original tense cannot be communicated in English. For example :

2 Corinthians 2:15 (KJV)   For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish.

2 Corinthians 2:15 (NKJV)  For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.

The words “are saved or are being saved”  is one Greek word: “sozomenois” which is in the

Tense – Present;  Voice – Passive;  Mood – Participle

We don’t have one word for “save” that matches the Greek word, so the KJV goes with a present tense “are saved” but the problem is this – “sav-ed” in English communicates past tense, when this word in Greek has no past tense, it’s in the present and the participle means to make the word a continual process in the present tense. So, the NKJV tries to convey that idea more clearly by translating it: “are being saved”.   I actually have read and heard KJVO folks who have tried to say this verse is proof of corruption in the new versions because it perverts the doctrine of salvation. These kinds of accusations are leveled from those who are ignorant of Greek, ignorant of their own language, and ignorant of the theology in the Bible they are trying to defend since the Bible teaches that were  are saved, being saved and will be saved.

So, by this one example it’s obvious that trying to convey a perfect exact translation of a foreign language – especially a foreign language that nobody has spoken in 1000+ years – is not as simple as it seems.

2.            Methods of Translation

So, that moves me to the next section which is the method of translation. How do you make decisions to go from one language to another? Which words to you use if there isn’t an easy exact equivalent? What about word order?  If you read from the Greek or Hebrew in literal word for word order, often times you will get a sentence that is totally unintelligible. There are really two philosophies of translation today that govern the decisions of translation committees. The first one we’ll look at is called:

A.            Formal Equivalence

This is a “word for word” type of translation. This method of translation seeks to be as faithful to the original words as possible within the linguistic obstacles that different languages naturally set up.  At such points of obstacle such as an idiom, a strict wooden formal equivalence will not do. You will lose either exactness in the wording or lose the meaning and in some cases, you cannot have both. This leads us to the next philosophy of translation that is an attempt to make up for the deficiencies in formal equivalence. Here is an example of strict formal equivalence found in Young’s Literal Translation from 1898 1 Corinthians 6:7   Already, indeed, then, there is altogether a fault among you, that ye have judgments with one another; wherefore do ye not rather suffer injustice? wherefore be ye not rather defrauded?

This same verse in the KJV sounds like this:

1 Corinthians 6:7  Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?

And here is this verse in the NKJV:

1 Corinthians 6:7  Now therefore, it is already an utter failure for you that you go to law against one another. Why do you not rather accept wrong? Why do you not rather let yourselves be cheated?

B.            Dynamic Equivalence

The founder of the UBS, Eugene Nida, really coined this phrase and articulated this idea of translation in his book Toward a Science of Translating published in 1964.  Other names have been used to describe this method such as “functional equivalence” or “meaning – based translation”. The main idea here is to translate the most precise meaning of a phrase into an easy to understand meaning in the receptor language. In Nida’s book, he proposed a systematic way by which translating can be done with respect for the linguistic intricacies of the receptor language.  He developed principles to help translators handle them objectively and efficiently. The theory is basically good since it’s based on proper linguistic, grammatical principles; however as with every thing else, it has been taken to an extreme by translators. Instead of trying to be faithful to the actual words of the original text, translators have gone further by interpreting what the original says and then translating it into the receptor language based upon how they understood the original to read. The danger in this practice is that when the reader reads a verse that perhaps the translator didn’t interpret correctly, the reader could be led to believe a false idea about a passage.

Here’s an example of that found in the NLT:

Psalm 23:5 NLT  You prepare a feast for me in the presence of my enemies. You honor me by anointing my head with oil. My cup overflows with blessings.

Psalm 23:5 KJV Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

This attempt to be more understandable has actually limited the passage. The table that was set before him, doesn’t necessarily mean a table of food. It could be a table of land, a large broad open flat space for a sheep to graze on safely. The cup overflowing  or running over is now limited to “blessings” when the Psalmist could mean, happiness or something else. The danger with this kind of interpretation in translation is that the accuracy of the Bible version is greatly reduced and the mind of the translator is inserted with the mind of God and the reader can’t tell the difference.

Modern versions that take this approach to translation are the NIV, NLT, the Living Bible, the Message (which is a paraphrase).

To make things worse, there have been translations made with such a strong dynamic equivalence emphasis, that the translators of some versions have taken it to extremes such as the TNIV’s feminist accommodation by using more gender neutral prounouns, or the “Word on the Street” which is a Bible written in street slang, or the “gender neutral Bible”

Proverbs 13:1 TNIV A wise child heeds a parent’s instruction, but a mocker does not respond to rebukes.

Proverbs 13:1 KJV A wise son heareth his father’s instruction: but a scorner heareth not rebuke.

3.            The People Behind the Translations

The last thing to consider about a translation, is who are the scholars doing the translation work? What is their philosophy, what is their theological background and what do they actually believe about the Bible?  This is a little more difficult to find out. This may take some extensive research.

So, when we look back at the KJV translators in 1611, what were their credentials and theological commitments?  All of them were a part of the Church of England which makes sense since King James of England commissioned the translation. Although I don’t recommend the writings of  Dr. D.A. Wait,  he does have  a good list of 24 translators of the KJV in his book Defending the King James Bible which shows that they were able men and as far as we can tell 400 years removed, they were believers.

What about the NKJV? Two large meetings of the North American Overview Committee met at Nashville and Chicago in 1975 to assist in preparing guidelines for the NKJV. Nearly all felt that the project was worthy of the time, money, and effort that would be invested. Members of this committee included well known men like Jerry Falwell, James Kennedy, Curtis Hudson, Tim LaHaye, Henry Morris, Adrian Rogers, Dwight Pentecost, Charles Ryrie, RC Sproul, Charles Stanley, etc..

The newly translated ESV comes from the NA27 and has a good list of men on the committee such as Wayne Grudem, JI Packer, Kent Hughes, Leland Ryken and mostly reformed men.

The NIV translation committee had a large conversion of different denominations involved. Some men whom we might recognize would have been Charles Ryrie, Lewis Johnson, Edmond Heibert but the blemish on the NIV besides the dynamic equivalency, was the linguistic stylist Virginia Mollenkott  who was used as a consultant on translation. She (is/was?) an Episcopal college professor. She has come out of the closet as a lesbian and belongs to a group called “Christian Lesbians Out Together” and has even more recently written wicked books on the acceptance of homosexuals and transgender people in the church. Even though the NIV committee didn’t know she was a homosexual at the time, many believe that the NIV has watered down its language in regards to homosexuality by substituting words like “sodomite” with “shrine prostitute” or “temple prostitute”. Versions such as the NIV and TNIV are being translated to be more sensitive to feminists and homosexuals.

1 Corinthians 6:9 Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders.

Ms. Mollenkott says that this phrase is closer to the text because a homosexual offender could be speaking of a homosexual who does bad things like rape or something and the same could be said of heterosexuals.

So, in conclusion I would not personally recommend dynamic equivalent translations who had liberals and unbelievers involved in the translation decisions.  But on the other hand, if that’s all you’ve got, God is bigger than them and can even use them to communicate His Word in whatever language they are translating to.

 

 

 

 

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NC Church Burns Bibles On Halloween Friday, Nov 6 2009

A few weeks ago we posted about a North Carolina church that planned to burn Bibles and other Christian materials on Halloween.

I had hoped that the media coverage would have made them slink back into their cave like a member of  the Taliban, but it seems to truly have taken place.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about this event and has titled it Burnt Offerings.

What irony!

You see, it was on October 31, 1517 that Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg.  This act is marked as the official beginning of the Protestant  Reformation.  One of the hallmarks of the Reformation is the fact that the Scriptures were translated into the vulgar, or common, language.  No longer was it locked up in Latin and inaccessible to the common man.

While we respect and love the King James Version we must say that the burning of Bibles is more in tune with Halloween than it is with Reformation Day and Reformation faith.  There is more satanic movement behind the burning of Bibles than there is true, Biblical faith and principle.

As a Burnt Offering the burning of Bibles is more in line with the wicked act of king Jehoiakim instead of the spirit of righteous Jeremiah.

Let it thus be stated, then, that the Burnt Offering of Amazing Grace Baptist Church is unacceptable to God, and is probably akin to the strange/foreign fire of Nadab and Abihu.

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More KJVO Drivel Hot off the Press Thursday, Nov 5 2009

Joe Esposito from Pacific Baptist Church in Long Beach CA has written another rag for the inspiration and infallibility of the KJV. Here it is: http://www.pacificpublications.org/?p=339

Here’s what the book is about:

“During the past few years, an issue (for which many Fundamental Baptists seemed to be settled) has arisen that has caused a great stir within our movement. We now have Fundamental Baptist brothers claiming to be King James Only men out of of one side of their mouths while out of the other they indirectly, and in some cases directly, criticize teh very same King James Bible.  Without realizing it, they are casting a long shadow of doubt on its validity as the inerrant and infallible words of God.

This book is this authors feeble attempt to “sound the trumpet in Zion” and to herald out a warning and a call for prudence as well as a call to common sense among many Fundamental Baptist brethren.  May the Holy Spirit use this book in some small way to keep us from starting the slide down the slippery slope of compromise concerning the FINAL AUTHORITY of God’s inspired and preserved words as found in the King James Bible.”

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A Question For All Who Wish to Comment in Reply Monday, Nov 2 2009

I am looking for an interlinear NT.

I would like one that contains some manner of  justification for the reading chosen.

At this point I have two based on the TR, but would like one based on the TR with variants noted with a justification for their inclusion.  I would also like one based upon the latest UBS of Nestle that would also have the same.

Any suggestions?

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