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(This is the second part of a Paper read at the Youth Conference in April 1994. The first part of the Paper appeared in the July issue of the Magazine.)
New Testament
The inspired writings of the Old Testament had foretold the coming of the Deliverer from sin and misery, and when He at length came, He proved to be the Son of God in man’s nature. Having performed his redemptive work, He ascended again to heaven, to bring about by His almighty power the salvation of all His people. His office as Mediator is three-fold. The kingly part which He now exercises is the reward of the sacrificial part now past. His priestly intercession is forever ongoing, as is His prophetic work of revealing to His people by His Word and spirit, the will of God for their salvation. It is with His prophetic office we now have to do in this paper, as we continue what we have to say on the “sure word of prophecy”.
With Malachi the Old Testament was complete. What was next required was inspired Scripture to relate the coming and work of Christ, the fulfilment of what the Old Testament had foretold. And after that, there had to be Scriptures which would describe the early fruits of the Gospel, as by it the New Testament church was built up, and its doctrine, worship, practice, government and discipline set out as the pattern for the remainder of time.
Just as the writers of the Old Testament books can be thought of, and in fact are called “God’s spokesmen” (same as prophets), the Saviour assured his disciples that they, too, would be God’s spokesmen. When enemies would arrest and charge them, it would be given to them, what to say, “For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you,” (Matthew 10: 19). The same men were promised similar divine help in teaching and writing; “He, (the Holy Spirit) shall teach you all things, and bring all things, to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14: 26). “The Spirit shall receive of mine and shall show it unto you” (John 16: 13,14). Thus we find Paul telling that what he as an apostle learned and taught was given by the Holy Spirit. In 1st Corinthians 2, he says that what he was given to proclaim could not spring from any human mind, but was revealed to the apostles by the Spirit. And the same Spirit enabled them to give correct expression to them, “not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth” (1 Corinthians 2: 13).
So much were prophets and apostles conscious of being God’s spokesmen, that they knew that they must not add, subtract, or mix words of their own. For example, Balaam: “If Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I cannot go beyond the commandment of the Lord, to do either good or bad of mine own mind; but what the Lord saith, that will I speak” (Numbers 24: 13). And four times he did just that. It is very significant that almost the last words of the Bible warn against adding to or taking from the Word of God (Rev 22: 18, 19).
And so, I repeat what I said at the close of the Old Testament part of the paper. The warning in Revelation 22 has the clear implication that what God had caused to be written was so completely his own Word, that it was not to be violated by adding or subtracting. The Bible is unique, given for the specific purpose of saving those who believe it, and leaving inexcusable those who do not. It is all needed for these purposes, and no more is needed; therefore do not add to it, nor take from it. There is only one Word of God.
Yet men have done those very things, showing that they do not understand the nature of the Bible. Rome has added the Apocrypha and Tradition. Modern sects make additions. Mormons add three other books, and Jehovah’s Witnesses produce their own corrupt version. Jews refuse the New Testament, and modernists have completely undermined the authority of the Book.
I now just want to say a little about the formation of the New Testament, and by that, the completion of the “more sure word of prophecy”. At intervals following Christ’s ascension, the Gospels and other books were written. Once again, it was saved sinners who recognised the fact of divine origin. That recognition was definitely not by any ecclesiastical authority. Other writings besides the inspired ones appeared, but they were set aside. The early Church were helped in their identification of the inspired books by two criteria, their authorship and subject matter. The authors had to be apostles (referred to earlier), or men approved by apostles eg Mark and Luke. The contents of the books had to be in accord with known apostolic teaching, oral and written.
There was no doubting the inspiration of the majority of the books, so that the doctrines they taught could be sought in the few books about which some doubt remained. These were James, 2nd Peter, 3rd John and Jude, and it was some time in the fourth century that these were accepted by all. So we see, that it pleased God to form the Old and New Testaments in the same way. Inspired books were given to the Church, and the Church was given the discernment to identify these and reject purely human writings. And again I stress, that the whole was one Word of God, for the early New Testament Church was as careful in their copying of the originals as the Jews had been with the Hebrew books.
From the Early Church to the First English Bibles
As we see in the Acts, the Gospel spread from Jerusalem throughout Palestine and then into Asia Minor, parts of North Africa, Europe and eastwards in Asia. In due course apostolic teaching was supplemented by copies of the inspired Scriptures, and then translations of these into other languages. In the second century, the century after the apostles, two broad movements were at work in the reproduction of New Testament Scriptures.
There was what one would expect, where Christians by the New Birth based their hope of salvation on God’s special revelation of his grace through Christ as that was found in the words of Holy Scripture. To them this divine truth was their most prized possession, and they cherished their copies of it and commissioned exact copies of it. Worn copies were not laid up like precious relics, but were destroyed. Alongside this perfectly normal movement, there was another on the part of heretics like Marcion whose New Testament omitted a number of books and shortened others. No fewer than eighty heretical parties were described as tampering with the Scriptures to make them fit their own views. So that, alongside faithful copies of the Word of God, there were at this early stage others that were corrupt. These could, of course, be recognised by the errors they contained, but they did much mischief nevertheless.
My purpose today now necessitates a leap over the centuries to the year 1604, when it was proposed by a thousand ministers led by Dr Reynolds, that King James VI and I should authorise a new translation of the Bible without note or comment. This appeared in 1611 as the King James, or Authorised version, and remained the English Bible for over two hundred and seventy years, displacing the eight versions that preceded it. The first of these was Wycliffe’s, translated from the Latin Vulgate and produced by handwriting prior to 1384. Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament from the Greek appeared in 1525 and affected others that followed, of which the Geneva Bible of 1560 was the best until the Authorised Version appeared.
From the Authorised Version to the Revised Version
The translators of the Authorised Version had a choice of two Greek texts. There was a third, but at that time it was of lesser importance. There was the Traditional or Byzantine Text, used in the Greek Church between 312 and 1453 and also elsewhere. The other text was the Alexandrian. The translators judged it inferior, and chose the Byzantine text as that which gave full evidence of being the Scripture that God had inspired, “and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, and one therefore authentical,” (Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter one, Section eight).
The text used by the translators became known as the Received Text. Today there are about four and a half thousand Greek manuscripts, and also many parts of ancient translations. The weight of support given by those to the Received Text is overwhelming.
For two and a half centuries, the King James Bible (Authorised Version) was the Bible of the English-speaking peoples. Then in the 1860s two manuscripts, one recovered out of the obscurity of a monastery on Mount Sinai, and the other from the Vatican Library, brought about a tremendous change in the sphere of textual criticism. Very soon the English scholars, Westcott and Hort, decided that these two fourth century manuscripts contained the true Greek text, and that these “wonderful” finds belonged to the small Alexandrian text group which the King James scholars had rejected. When it was decided to revise the English Bible, the work was dominated by Westcott and Hort (principally Hort), and the Sinaitic and Vatican manuscripts decided the Greek text on which the revised English was based. Nearly six thousand changes were made in the Greek, and thirty-six thousand in the English. Liberal theology and rationalistic principles played a large part; fondness of ritualism and for Rome were in the minds of most of the revisers. The revised version appeared in 1881, and failed to meet the approval of ordinary Christians, although it set off a craving for revision that has continued to the present.
There were now two English Bibles, the Authorised Version and the Revised Version and its successors in this country and America. The differences between the Authorised Version and those of the other class were not slight; those belonging to the latter class, taken collectively, were seriously different.
- The text they were based on was corrupt. Hort, the dominant member of the Revision Committee, a man who years previously had spoken of the “vile Textus Receptus”, regarded the Vatican, Sinai and D manuscripts as, beyond doubt, the true New Testament text. Their antiquity proved that, or so he thought. Other gracious and more discerning scholars thought otherwise.
They concluded that these manuscripts had survived because the Church of the fourth and fifth centuries had rejected them on account of the errors they contained. They bore so many marks of Origen’s influence, and of Arian doctrine that they had been discarded, and had therefore remained in existence when genuine Scriptures had become worn out and replaced by new copies which in time had also needed replacement. Origen (185-253 A.D.) had many erroneous notions. He believed in the eternal existence of each soul before joined to a body. He believed that devils would be saved, and that stars had souls. He had no place for substitutionary atonement etc. Arius (320 A.D.) denied the deity of Christ; simply the greatest of creatures. The “oldest manuscripts” contain passages which weaken Christ’s deity, and strengthen a “humanitarian” view of the Saviour. The Revised Version, following the Hort text, has many omissions, doubtful readings, and notes with such readings in the margin.
- There were Higher Critics in the Revision Committee, and even a Unitarian. So that between a bad text and spiritually unqualified translators, the resultant Bible could not avoid being seriously faulty, and not worthy of acceptance. And, in fact, it did not displace the Authorised Version.
In the century since the Revised Version, more than a hundred new English translations have appeared. Some are better than others, but as almost all of them use the faulty Westcott and Hort Text or the Nestle/Aland text, very similar, they reproduce the errors of that text. That is the first thing that detracts from their claim to be the Word of God. Some of them made a very brief appearance, and their names are well-nigh forgotten. Better known are the Revised Standard Version 1952 (Revision of 1901 American Standard Version); the Good News Bible 1976, popularised by Billy Graham, etc; The Living Bible 1971; New American Standard Version, 1971; New International Version, 1978; The new English Bible, 1970; The Philips New Testament and The Amplified New Testament. Also the Jerusalem Bible and the Roman Catholic Revised Standard Version. The last two aimed to help ecumenism and are definitely Romeward oriented.
The questions, “Who among the translators were regenerate, and who among them were orthodox in their doctrine, and who among them believed in verbal inspiration and rejected Higher Criticism, would if known and considered, leave one with the impression that they were unfit for the holy task of Bible Translation.
Some of the Bibles, like The Living Bible and The Amplified Version, employ paraphrase and commentary, the former being almost entirely a paraphrase, and is notorious for crude colloquialisms. Inappropriate language mars many of the versions. Common to all these forms of the Bible is the omission of verses and inclusion of notes which question portions. Another feature is disagreements with each other. In fact, in reminding ourselves of the sub-title of this paper, “Only one Word of God”, the spate of new versions is marked not only by very frequent disagreement with the Authorised Version, but with one another. They glaringly say to us, as it were, “There is not only one Word of God.” Where then is “truth”, God-given religious truth? “Thy word is truth.” Before I finish I must mention a recent new version which in some respects differs from the faulty ones just referred to. The New King James Version was published by Thomas Nelson in 1982. Its translators pledged belief in Inspiration, and professed to follow a method of translation which made the translation completely equivalent to the wording of the texts. The translators, supposed to be representative of “evangelical Christendom”, included some with “liberal” views of Scripture doctrines.
Since the New Testament in 1979, editions have been revised and thousands of changes made. Nine of the scholars worked on the New International Version before this version, and seemed to have no difficulty about that. Had they any real conviction about the text? Profit-making was certainly an aim on Nelson’s part. The New King James Version does not distinguish between “you” singular, and “you” plural as the Authorised Version does. In both Testaments many changes have been made in the wording. Interpretive headings are used which mislead and confuse. Footnotes in the New Testament are taken from the majority Text, (a text which has never been used in translation), and from the Nestle/Aland Bible Society’s text, both which clash with the Received Text. These question many Authorised Version statements, and affect doctrines concerning the Saviour. The theological bias of the New King James Version is late twentieth century American — Fundamentalist — Baptist — Evangelical, and differs from that of the Protestant, Puritan translators of the Authorised Version. This fact along with all the other defects just referred to, makes the New King James Version a new translation, and not the desirable revision it is claimed to be. It is far from being an improvement on the Authorised Version.
Finally, returning to the point made in the sub-title of the paper, that there is but one Word of God. From the time that God began to give Scripture, the written Word was regarded as sacred, to be kept inviolate, not to be tampered with. The Old Testament copyists were careful to do their work accurately, and the New Testament ones did the same. The reason was clear. God was revealing his salvation; eternal life or eternal death hung upon the reception or rejection of the facts made known. The revelation therefore had to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Inspiration saw to that. The Authorised Version translators were fully aware of the need for truth and accuracy, and therefore chose what they considered to be the true text, and translated it faithfully.
When two and a half centuries later, scholars who gave evidence of lacking the very first qualification as translators, namely, saving grace, chose a text which because of its many obvious defects had lain unused for one thousand five hundred years, they set on foot a movement which has continued until the present. Bent on producing a better Bible than the Authorised Version, individuals, groups, societies, churches, publishing houses have turned out new and better Bibles, as they claim and no two the same. What then has become of the unique, true, accurate, verbally inspired word of God? But what could be expected of translations done from a bad text; or translators, many, probably most of them, lacking the spiritual mind; or men who did not believe in verbal inspiration; or higher critics and evolutionists; or rejectors of Reformed Doctrine; or men who held bad translation principles?
No translation fit to replace the Authorised Version has yet appeared. In opposition to its well founded claim to be the very Word of God, a whole collection of competing, differently-worded versions has appeared, creating confusion, and all of them objectionable for one reason or another. Their variety and faults exclude them from entitlement to regard as God’s true and faithful Word. That position is held only by the Authorised Version. When better days come, it may well be that a worthy revision of that will be done, but at present it has no peer.