The Conclusion #1

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Re: The Conclusion #2

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Re: The Conclusion #6

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Re: The Conclusion #6A

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From:	admin
Subject:	The Conclusion #1
Date:	Tue, 23 Nov 2004 00:07:45 GMT

This a continuing post from the Book "Which Version is the
Bible" by Floyd Nolen Jones. Chapter 9, pages 121-134
Which Version is the Bible?
Copyright 1995 · Floyd Jones Ministries, Inc.

All Rights Reserved. This book may be freely reproduced in any form as long
as it is not distributed for any material gain or profit.

IX. THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER

TECHNICAL OVERVIEW

For nearly two hundred years, the history of textual criticism in the
modern period has been the account of the breaking away from what the
liberals and apostates have called the "bondage" or "tyranny" of the Textus
Receptus. These men have asserted that it is as foolish to reject Westcott
and Hort's theories (and retain the Textus Receptus) as it is to reject the
law of gravity. Conversely, conservative fundamentalists have been accused
of worshipping the King James Bible. Such an act would, of course, be a sin
were anyone actually to do so, but is it not a far greater sin to worship
Westcott and Hort? In reality, the liberals and apostates have brought us
from the "bondage of the Textus Receptus and King James translation" to the
bondage of Vaticanus B. All they have done is exchange one for the other,
the latter being an untrue, unfaithful witness.

The problem with Hort's work is that the student is never taken with him
along the path which he followed but has to start with the acceptance of
Hort's final result. The hostile critics have to explain how Vaticanus B
comes to oppose the sub-apostolic Fathers deliberately in many places if we
are going to accept anyone's assurance, especially Hort's, about B's being
"neutral". The truth is that the maligned Textus Receptus has been the base
with which B tampered and changed; the church at large recognized this until
the year 1881 when Hortism was allowed free play. Those who accept the
W-Hort text, or its modern counterpart, are placing their faith upon an
Egyptian revision which occurred somewhere from 200 to 450 A.D. and was
abandoned by Bible believers all over the civilized world between 500 to
1881 A.D. After the true Church buried B and its allies through disuse,
these Egyptian "mummies" were "resurrected" in recent times and restamped as
"genuine". Thus, the modern Church has accepted as authentic that which the
early Church rejected. Such are the ways of present day Laodicea
(Rev.3:14-22).

It must be kept in mind that when God promised to preserve the text against
permanent destruction, He did not guarantee within that promise the accuracy
of each and every manuscript. Although this certainly could have been done,
it would have necessitated a continuing miracle. Moreover, God's promise did
not include the threat of His immediate execution of the person causing an
error or corruption in the copying or production of a manuscript, whether
deliberate or accidential. His promise merely guarantees the preservation of
the text.

The excuse that we needed a revision because we found older manuscripts has
been exposed as unfounded and untrue. Beyond all question the fact is that
the Textus Receptus is the dominant Greeco-Syrian text from 350 to 450 A.D.
Since these dates go back to the time of the production of Vaticanus B and
Sinaiticus A, why is the authority of these two spurious MSS always being
flaunted by reason of their supposed superior age?

Again, Hort's problem was that he had to account not only for the agreement
of the majority but also for the deviations in the other manuscripts, as
well as their departures from the old versions and the voice of the Fathers.
We have already disclosed that there is no historical proof of the revisions
which Westcott and Hort allege. Thus, if Westcott and Hort were wrong in
their basic premise, it is necessary that we go back prior to W-H to take up
the study afresh for if the direction were wrong then, further supposed
progress would only lead us farther from the truth.

If there were no official Syrian text (and there could not be one without a
revision as Hort imagines) then there is no Westcott-Hort theory. There is a
traditional text, but it is not the result of an official ecclesiastical
Syrian revision. Indeed, if the theory of Syrian recensions of official text
were true, there would not be so much variety in the cursive manuscripts.
Their differences indicate that they have been copied from different
ancestors, as pointed out, and therefore they are all orphans.

Therefore, the Traditional Text and Vaticanus B cannot BOTH be the Word of
God! If the Traditional Text is as ancient as Vaticanus B, and Hort admitted
that it was when he and Westcott wrote:

"The fundamental text of late extant Greek MSS generally is beyond all
question identical with the dominant Antiochian or Graeco-Syrian text of the
second half of the fourth century." (author's emphasis)

why should the authority of one manuscript be acknowledged against a host of
manuscripts, versions, and "Fathers" which support the Textus Receptus?
Bishop C. J. Ellicott, chairman of the 1881 Revision Committee, issued a
pamphlet that same year in which he likewise admitted that the Traditional
or Received Text was as ancient as Vaticanus B:

"The manuscripts which Erasmus used differ, for the most part, only in small
and insignificant details from the bulk of the cursive (Byzantine)
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 (i.e., Codices B,
Aleph, A, C, and D), if not older that any one of them." (author's
parenthesis)

As we have learned, age alone cannot prove that a manuscript is correct! In
fact, the main reasons Vaticanus B is still preserved is that it was written
on very expensive vellum (animal skins) whereas most other documents of the
period were written on papyrus and, having been rejected by the Church as
spurious, it was not read or copied but lay relatively undisturbed on the
library shelves of ancient monasteries. Sinaiticus A even shows clearly the
marks of ten different correctors who wrote upon it down through the
centuries.

As Burgon observed, it seems too improbable to believe that in the last
nineteen hundred years out of every thousand copies of the Greek New
Testament, we are to suppose that nine hundred and ninety-five have proven
to

From:	admin
Subject:	Re: The Conclusion #2
Date:	Wed, 24 Nov 2004 01:31:04 GMT

THE CONCLUSION #2
This a continuing post from the Book "Which Version is the Bible" by Floyd
Nolen Jones. Chapter 9, pages 121-134
Which Version is the Bible? Copyright 1995 · Floyd Jones Ministries, Inc.All
Rights Reserved. This book may be freely reproduced in any form as long
as it is not distributed for any material gain or profit.

be untrustworthy. Moreover, that the four or five which have remained, whose
contents were unknown until as good as yesterday, are supposed to have
retained the secret which the Holy Spirit originally inspired. Furthermore,
is it not incredulous that we are expected to accept that much of the
gospel, lost to the world for nineteen centuries, had to be "rescued" from a
wastebasket to be "saved" from the consuming fire - by a German text critic?
How fortuitous.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW We have shown a brief history portraying the struggle
between the Church and the Biblical critics as to what constitutes a final
form of the New Testament text. An irreconcilable difference exists between
the Church and the text-critics/University with respect to the frame of
reference that each takes with regard to the "Written Word".

The Church (in its broadest sense which includes the O.T. faithful) has
historically viewed the Written Word as a "sacred" book. By sacred we mean
that the text of the Book is viewed by its followers as being that of final
authority. The status of the sacred text is fixed and absolute - one does
not add to or subtract from it. It is seen as sacred because the entire
content is accepted as having been given to the people as a deposit by the
Deity. Until the time of the Reformation, the Bible was safely lodged within
the confines of church use and thus retained its status as "sacred".

When the Church divided into the Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin-Rome)
provinces, the time honored "specialness" that the Bible had held as
"sacred" text began to change. The Christian community had divided into two
very distinct entities. A Greek Vulgate (the TR) became the standard in the
Eastern Church whereas the Western branch held to the Latin Vulgate of
Jerome.

Eventually the animosity which developed between the Eastern and Western
Church grew beyond mere doctrinal disputes. Each became convinced that the
manuscripts used by the other had become corrupted. That is, as they did not
always read the same, the Greeks came to distrust the Latin Bible and the
Latins were equally certain that the Greeks had altered their texts. Each
"Bible" continued to be authoritative for each given community, both
affirming that theirs was the true original sacred text. Thus two distinct
"sacred books" emerged - yet God had given only one text.

This enmity continued and heightened until the 5th century A.D. when the
papacy restricted the flow of Greek language and literature into Western
Europe as a method of keeping its dominion and distinctiveness. For nearly
one thousand years (c.476-1453) all the treasures of the East's classical
past - its records, history, archaeology, literature, and its science -
remained untranslated and unavailable to the West. The Greek language became
a stranger to the western part of Europe as the priests declared the study
of Greek to be that of the devil, persecuting all who promoted it. For the
most part, the West became exclusively Latin, estranged from the East. It
was this persistent opposition to the achievements of the past that
contributed immensely in causing a veil to fall over the West, plunging it
into the Dark Ages (A.D. 476-1453). The spurious books of the Latin Vulgate
opened the door for the mysterious and for the dark doctrines which had
confused the thinking of the ancients. The corrupt readings of the authentic
text decreased the confidence of the people in inspiration and increased the
power of the priests. This darkness prevailed until the half century
preceding 1453 A.D. when refugees fleeing the Greek world from the flood of
the Turkish invaders came west bringing with them their language,
literature, and culture.

During this period of separation, division and isolation, the "Bible" was
interpreted, copied and distributed as the unique possession of the Church
by churchmen (monks, priests, bishops) within each of the two communities -
with the firm resolve that each was working with sacred text. Although this
continued into the 18th century until the time when the Enlightenment ripped
("liberated" from their perspective) the Biblical texts from the domain of
the Church, it was in the 16th century that the Christian humanist,
Desiderius Erasmus - himself a disaffected priest, decisively disrupted the
canon and text of the Western Church. Erasmus replaced it with the Greek
N.T. canon and text of the Eastern Church, thus setting in motion a process
that by the nineteenth century culminated in the loss of the Bible as a
sacred text in the Roman-Latin West. The end result was that the Bible came
to be viewed merely as a "religious" book.

By "religious book" we mean a book which still retains a "traditional
specialness", but it has lost its status as sacred. The reason this has
happened is that the text has been removed from the ecclesiastical matrix.
Its interpretations and dimensions (the canon) are no longer determined
exclusively by churchmen and theologians. Having been removed from its
natural home and haven within the confines of the Church, its interpretation
now becomes subject to the critics/University rather than the Church. In
this new matrix, the Bible text is seen as merely that of a piece of world
literature - nothing more. Here, it is no longer viewed by its reader as
decisively authoritative and sacred text. In capsule, this is the entire
problem before the Church.

This tension, between the Bible as ecclesiastical text and as the text of
the University, cries out back to the words of Tertullian (160-230 A.D.),
"What indeed hath Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between
the Academy and the Church?" Tertullian would surely dismay to learn that
since the nineteenth century the Academy has completely prevailed over the
Church with regard to the Biblical text. The result has been an eclipse of
Biblical narrative and the arrival of a strange bizarre silence of the Bible
in the Church.

From:	admin
Subject:	Re: The Conclusion #6
Date:	Sun, 28 Nov 2004 06:07:54 GMT

From:	admin
Subject:	Re: The Conclusion #6A
Date:	Sun, 28 Nov 2004 06:08:10 GMT

Conclusion 6 A of 7

Yet despite the efforts on behalf of the Church by Burgon, Scrivener,
Hoskier, and - in the twentieth century - Hills, recently we have been
placed in the bizarre situation of noting that whereas our opponents
blasphemously assert that the TR/KJB New Testament is wrong in at least

5,300 instances - many of our Christian friends now say, "No, it errs only
about 1,500 times." Thus many good brothers in Christ Jesus have been
seduced into siding with the liberals and/or apostates as both positions
embrace "restoration" rather than "preservation". Truly, such is a
deplorable state! Worthy of the most deliberate consideration is the
proposition that anytime the entire world system agrees with the Christian
about any matter which is spiritual or has spiritual overtones - not only
are we wrong - the error is nearly always 180 degrees out of phase with
God's truth.

Moreover, the single greatest move of the hand of God since the time of the
Lord Jesus and the Apostles as recorded in the Book of Acts was that of the
Reformation. This great move must be recognized as the direct result of the
historical restoration by Erasmus of the true text that the Apostles lived
and wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The reader must then
confront himself with the question: "If the Reformation were the fruit of
restoring to the people the text known today as the Textus Receptus, where
is the great revival that should have accompanied the labor of the past 100
years of text-critically editing and correcting that document?" The "Great
Awakening" of the 1700's as well as the revivals of the late 1800's and
early part of the 1900's under men such as Wesley, Whitefield, Finney,
Spurgeon, Moody, R.A. Torrey, and Billy Sunday were all preached from the
King James text.

To the contrary, we know of no revival that resulted from using the critical
text. Thus we see that the fruit of the TR/KJB has been the harvest of
millions of souls. In stark contrast, the fruit of the critical text and its
offspring has been doubt, division, endless debate, wasted time and energy
that could have been spent in worship or evangelical effort, and the
destruction of the faith at most seminaries and many pastors along with the
sheep who feed at their feet. If the critical text is the better text, where
are the great revivals that should have followed this enterprise? Does not
this hard historical truth bear irrefutable testimony as to which text the
Spirit of God has endorsed and stamped genuine - to that which He breathed
man-ward?

Patient reader, in the previous pages we have declared and proclaimed that
the defense of the King James Bible and its Greek foundation, the Textus
Receptus, has been the very least of concern within the realm and scope of
Textual Criticism. Almost all its energy has been directed toward
"reconstructing" the text on the basis of a few old uncials, and ferreting
out what little support can be gleaned for these MSS. It is not intended by
the author to imply that the theological views of Burgon or Hills
automatically make their text critical views correct or that those of
Origen, Westcott, Hort, etc. necessarily make them wrong. Nevertheless up to
the time of Westcott and Hort, the unyielding uniform Protestant consensus
(of course, among so many there were some dissenters) can be summed by
Quenstedt who, in the 1600's stated:"We believe, as is our duty, that the
providential care of God has always watched over the original and primitive
texts of the canonical Scriptures in such a way that we can be certain that
the sacred codices which we now have in our hands are those which existed at
the time of Jerome and Augustine, nay at the time of Christ Himself and His
apostles." (author's italics) Moreover, before the time of W-H: "the 'lower
criticism' had kept itself quite apart from the so-called dangerous 'higher
criticism'. Since the publication of Hort's text, however, and that of the
Revisers, much of the heresy of our time has fallen back upon the supposed
results acquired by the 'lower criticism' to bolster up their views."

It cannot be over stressed that just as the LORD used the Hebrew community
to preserve the Old Testament Scriptures as He had originally given to them
in that selfsame language (i.e., the Hebrew Masoretic text), even so the
instrument by which GOD has preserved the New Testament text has been that
community through which the Greek tongue has been continued. The Textus
Receptus is the official text of the Greek Orthodox Church to this very day.

We purport that the various editions of the Textus Receptus are the overall
framework within which providential preservation has operated. We affirm
that all the words of the inspired New Testament Scriptures are to be found
within this framework. We proclaim that the work of the various editors -
Erasmus, Stephens, Beza and the Elizevirs - was the result of God's
providence in stabilizing the TR as a settled entity. Hence, no further
revision