THE SCHOLARS VERSUS JESUS - THE BATTLE CONTINUES

Mark 12:37 relates that the "common people" heard Jesus gladly. With the exception of a few like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, it was the scholars and religious leaders of His own day who rejected and resisted Him most vehemently. Nothing has changed for the great majority of modern scholarship rejects both God's promise that His Word would be preserved as well as the deity of Jesus Christ. It is still the common people who keep holding on to the true God-given, God-preserved Text upon which the King James was based.

The new translations profess to be revisions of the 1611 King James. They are not for they are not even from the same Greek text. A radically different Greek New Testament was produced and has been used as the foundation for the new translations. We have had a new "bible" foisted upon us which is not a Bible at all for God authored only ONE Bible.

Equally distressing is that the numerous modern translations are being sponsored and/or produced by publishing companies and by individuals who answer to no ecclesiastical arm of the Church. There is no one to whom they are accountable. Thus faithfulness to accurate translation is of little consequence to most of them. The criteria has become readability rather than correctness, and after a Madison Avenue sales promotion advertising the product as "easy to understand" or "reads just like today's newspaper", the final criteria and motive become that of profit.

The Westcott-Hort Greek text contains about 5,788 departures from the Greek text of the Textus Receptus.1 There are about 40 major omissions. These omissions deal with the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, the deity of Jesus, and Jesus' authority. The readings of the 1611 King James translation are supported by third and fourth century Western and Byzantine manuscripts which are of the same age as Vaticanus B and Aleph. The Textus Receptus exalts Jesus in about ten passages in which the others tend to disparage and detract from Him. Out of the nearly 8,000 verses in the New Testament, 152 contain doctrinal corruptions in the W-H text.

THE NESTLE GREEK TEXT

Based upon the Westcott and Hort N.T., the text of Eberhard Nestle (or the Aland-Nestle26 or the third edition of the United Bible Society [UBS3], both of which are founded on the Nestle text and are almost identical to it), is being used today as the Greek New Testament in most of the seminaries. It contains about four changes per verse when compared to the Textus Receptus. Incredibly, we are told this does not affect a single Christian doctrine. But it does - it creates doubt in the minds of even the most devout that they really have an infallible Bible in their hands. It devastates the Christian's faith that the Bible is really the Word of God.

Eberhard Nestle's Greek text has 36,191 changes in the New Testament from the Textus Receptus. The resulting text would hardly read as the same book! Yet, it has to do so up to a point. The new translations read differently in some places but not everywhere. What if someone found an ancient Greek text out in the woods or in a cave? Would it be accepted as a genuine New Testament manuscript? What would be the hallmark, the criterion, the standard against which it would be measured? Believe it or not, after all we have said concerning the textual critics' negative views of the TR - it is nevertheless the standard by which all other manuscripts are measured. The new-found ms would have to agree 90% with the Textus Receptus to be considered legitimate.

However, all Satan has ever needed is 10%. If we selectively alter God's Word 10%, we can remove a significant amount of the verses dealing with blood atonement and with Jesus' deity thus casting doubt in the minds of young men and women as to whether they have available to them the Word of God. Or, as the devil said, "Yea, did God really say that? Is that really God's Word? You can't

1 Kenyon, Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, op. cit., pp. 312-313.

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