The New Testament contains 263 direct quotes from the Old Testament and 370 allusions to the Old Testament. Though some have claimed for the Apocrypha several vague "allusions" in the New Testament, these are nebulous mirages. Not one time did anyone in the New Testament refer to or quote the Old Testament Apocrypha. Jesus never referred to the Apocrypha. Had these books belonged in the Old Testament, why did the Lord not say so? The Old Testament had been canonized long before Jesus was born.
Yet Origen's fifth column includes the Old Testament Apocrypha. Vaticanus B and Sinaiticus include the Apocrypha as part of the text of the Old Testament.1 We are being told that Vaticanus is the most accurate Greek text which we have but it includes the Apocrypha and Apocryphal books - none of which were canonized. Yet we are expected to accept Vaticanus B's testimony as authoritative over hundreds of other Greek manuscripts.
Remember, Vaticanus B leaves out of the Book of Revelation "Mystery Babylon the Great", "the seven heads are seven mountains upon which the woman (harlot) sits", and "the woman is that great city which reigns over the kings of the earth". What organized religious group would like to have such telling passages left out? It is not surprising that the book which so definitively and powerfully speaks of Christ Jesus' Second Coming and Satan's defeat should itself be the chief object of Satan's attack.
The "official" church was slow in accepting the Revelation as canonical, especially the Greek speaking eastern portion.2 The rebukes to the seven churches in Asia Minor cut too close to the bone in the "organized" early church. The rebukes of Laodicea (Rev.3) may well have been the reason why the Council of Laodicea (4th century) chose to omit Revelation from its list of books to be read publicly. There was also a strong bias against the book's millennial doctrine, which is the case even today.3 As a result, the Revelation is not found in nearly as many manuscripts as is the rest of the New Testament. Only about one in fifty contains it.4
Thus in Revelation, and to a lesser extent in the rest of the New Testament, we must occasionally turn to the Latin West for confirmation on a disputed reading.5 The Latin Christians who opposed Rome were more deeply committed in their faith than those who were in the Greek East. They were an important channel through which God preserved the text of His Word. Though the primary source was the Greek speaking East, the foregoing enables us to see why there would be a sprinkling of Latin readings in the Authorized Version. Many of the great doctrinal words in the English Bible are based on a Latin derivative, not upon the Greek. The result is that we encounter some occasional refinement and verification from the Latin and Syriac regions.6
2 Moorman, When The KJV Departs From The "Majority" Text, op. cit., p. 17.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 27.
5 Ibid.
6 Hills, The King James Version Defended, op. cit., pp. 193-213. Dr. Hills argues with convincing force and plausibility that these readings, which include the last six verses of the 22nd chapter of Revelation, may well represent a slight smattering of original readings that fell out of the text of the Eastern Church over the years but had been retained in the Western version and were subsequently and providentially restored by Erasmus.
