Hey, everybody. Pastor Steven Anderson here from Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona.
This is the second video in a series
responding to the King James only controversy by Dr. James White. In this video, I'm going to be talking about chapter 2.
It's a fairly short chapter. It's called, If It Ain't Broke.
So he starts out this chapter talking about how some people are
trendy and just want to change for the sake of changing and how that's bad.
And then there are other people who don't want to change. Even when they're wrong, they refuse to change.
So he says on page 30, change for the simple sake of change is not a Christian virtue. Of course, he's right about that.
The Bible says meddle not with them that are given to change. Then at the top of page 31,
it says, in religious matters, the two extremes are always present.
There are always those who seek novelties in religious experience. At the same time,
there are always those who resist any change, all change at all costs. And of course,
that's true. You know, there are people on those two wrong extremes.
Some people are just ready to change at the drop of a hat and that's bad. And then other people, even when they're proven
wrong, just refuse to change. This is the way we've always done it and we're not going to change.
So obviously, he's right about that. Okay. Down at the bottom of page 31, he then says,
KJV only individuals generally are not interested in church history as a subject. Now, he's right about that too.
In general, KJV onlyists are not really interested in church history as a subject.
But let me explain why that is. Now, I personally love history and I've studied a lot of history, including church history.
Although, I must admit that church history is not my favorite history. I've studied a lot of it, but I prefer
pretty much every other kind of history to church history. And the reason why that we feel that way is
that church history, more often than not, just ends up being a study in false religion.
Why? Because it's going to emphasize
the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, and these mainstream
Protestant government churches.
That's what's going to be emphasized in your so-called church history. The church fathers and the early church
from the history books is
basically
what would become Roman Catholicism and the East Orthodox Church and just a bunch of false doctrine.
So why would we want to learn
a lot about this broad way that leads to destruction?
You know, these
billion Catholics today in 2019 on their way to hell
and just all the other hundreds of millions of East Orthodox believers that are on their way to hell with their pagan
idolatrous
apostate Christianity. You know, why would we want to just sit and read up on that and learn all about that?
And then there's this false left-right paradigm between the the Catholics and the Protestants because, you know, the Protestants are just
Catholicism-lite. It's not even that different
what they believe. And so we're not really interested in studying a
lot about these false religions. We'd rather study the Bible and base everything that we believe on that.
Okay. Now just think about it this way. If a history were being written about
Christianity in the 21st century or the 20th century,
who would they be emphasizing in that history book?
They're not going to talk about all the faithful local churches, Bible-believing churches, Baptist churches,
just, you know, good solid Christian churches where you got a preacher,
believe in the Bible, evangelize. No, no, no, they're gonna, you know who they'd emphasize? Billy Graham, T.D.
Jakes, Joel Osteen,
Benny Hinn, right? Rick Warren, Bill Hybels. I mean, these would be the people getting emphasis. John MacArthur, you know, all these
phony TV preachers and
televangelists and the people who are putting out all their books for filthy lucre's sake, teaching lies.
That's who they would emphasize. Okay, they're not going to emphasize
the narrow way that leads unto life.
The righteous
preaching from churches all over America and all over the world that are just Bible-believing Christians.
Okay, it's gonna be these these phonies that they would emphasize. You know, and just to use our church as an example,
we're a young church. We've only been around for 13 years, Faith Forward Baptist Church, but in that time we've accomplished a lot.
We've literally knocked the doors of well over a million people in our area here.
We've knocked the doors of about 80% of
the Native Americans who live in our state. We're gonna, God willing,
we're gonna finish this year knocking every door of every Indian tribe in the state of Arizona.
So, I mean, you know, we're doing missions trips. We're holding soul-winning events all over America.
We're going to South America, Africa, and doing huge
amounts of evangelism, you know.
We're obviously reaching a lot of people with the gospel. We're just one church. We're just one of many, many churches
that are serving the Lord. But I guarantee you that if a history were being written of
Christianity in Arizona or Christianity in the United States for the 21st century,
our church wouldn't even be mentioned. And if we were mentioned, it would be to just, oh, this horrible hate group, you know.
They were against the LGBT or, you know, that's what they'd write. One sentence about how
wicked and hateful they think we are. Okay.
So, you know, the history books are not going to praise God's people.
They are going to just, you know, talk all about all these state-sponsored churches and big-name preachers of
the Catholic and Orthodox and
mainline Protestant or whatever. And then they'll talk about other weirdos and heretics or whatever. And so, you know, yeah,
that's why church history isn't something that we want to emphasize. So he says, you know,
KJV only us aren't really interested in church history and, you know, I don't blame them. Okay.
So then he goes on to talk about church history.
That's, you know, he's saying that to set up his discussion of church history and he talks about Jerome and Augustine.
He says in this paragraph that he starts with, many Christians believed the Septuagint to be an inspired
translation.
So he's talking about the Greek Septuagint. Now, what is this? Well,
in the days of Jerome and Augustine,
late 4th century AD,
there is a Greek
translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint. Okay, and Augustine
believed that this Greek translation of the Old Testament that was available to him in the 4th century
called the Septuagint, that that is the Word of God. It's inspired translation.
That's the Old Testament that we ought to be using and we don't need the Hebrew at all.
We need to just forget about the Hebrew Bible and just make this Septuagint our final authority.
Okay. On the other side of this argument is Jerome who believed that we should go back to the original language.
He says, well, no, you know, we need to actually go back to the original Hebrew and,
you know, if we're gonna translate into Latin, we need to translate from the Hebrew because the Old Testament was written in Hebrew.
It was not written in Greek.
So, we need to go back to the original Hebrew text and
translate that into Latin and cut out this middleman of the Septuagint. Now, not only that, the so-called Septuagint, this 4th century
Greek Bible that they had there, is
something that is so corrupt. I mean, it is filled with so much error.
It's hard to believe that anybody takes it seriously. Okay.
I've got a copy of it right here, the Septuagint with Apocrypha, and I haven't read the whole thing.
I'm working on reading it.
And
let me tell you something. It has a lot of problems. First of all, this so-called Septuagint,
you know, it tampers with the numbers in
the genealogy leading up to the flood in the days of Noah and
the numbers are so ridiculous that it literally has people like outliving
the flood. So, people are like living beyond the flood, but they weren't on the ark with Noah.
But I guess they just treaded water all that time and they just continue to live on. So, the numbers don't even add up.
They don't even make sense. Okay.
Which is why modern Bible versions
don't use those numbers because those numbers are ridiculous. It does all kinds of other crazy things. It removes just
multitudes of verses from the book of Job.
It takes out like half of the David and Goliath story. Like half the chapter is gone.
Okay. It has all kinds of nonsense and garbage in it. Tons of omissions.
It does not match the Hebrew at all. It's completely different, folks.
It's not like, oh, this is a translation of the Hebrew Bible. No, it's
dramatically different. Okay.
Way different.
So, obviously Jerome was right when he said, hey,
we need to go back to the actual Hebrew Bible and not translate from this piece of junk. Okay.
So, James White is basically trying to use this as an illustration and saying, well, you know,
it's just like these King James only people. It's just that they don't want to change.
They're just emotionally connected to the King James and it's sentimental and
they just have this attitude of just don't change. Just stay with it.
And so, he's trying to compare them
to the Septuagint crowd. You know, the Augustine crowd that says, hey, we need to stay with the Septuagint.
It's an aspired translation. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
But that is a totally unfair comparison because the Septuagint says something completely different
from what the original Hebrew says. Now, most people at the time didn't know that because as James White points out in this chapter,
most Christians at that time did not speak Hebrew and had a hard time
with getting the resources to learn Hebrew. And so, they had no clue that their Greek
Septuagint Old Testament was so messed up in the 4th century that
they didn't know how bad it was or unreliable.
So, to compare that to King James onlyism is ridiculous because we've got the King James, but then we've got this right here.
We got a Greek New Testament, and you know, we got a Hebrew Old Testament.
And so, all we have to do is just compare these things and look at them and we can see that the King James
matches up with the original language and says the exact same thing.
So, we've got an English King James that says the same exact thing as a Greek New Testament
that I can pull off the shelf and read and look at and there it is folks. It says the same thing.
Okay.
So, to compare those two things, that's apples and oranges.
But what's even more ridiculous about this is that his precious modern versions, the New American Standard,
the ESV, and the NIV,
they make the same stupid mistake that Augustine made of not going back to the original Hebrew.
See, the Hebrew text
isn't really disputed. I mean, you know, in the Greek text, there are all these different editions.
You know, you got to Textus Receptus and the Nestle Island, and they're way different.
You know, Westcott and Hord is way different and has all these different...
The Hebrew text is pretty much settled.
Okay.
So, you say, well then, why are these new versions so different in the Old Testament? Because they're not
translating from the Hebrew text. That's why when you look up the verses that are the most goofed up in the NIV Old Testament,
they'll say at the bottom of the page, oh, well, the Hebrew says this.
And it'll be the King James reading. You know, like, they'll put angels, but then they'll put, oh, well, the Hebrew says sons of God.
And I'm thinking to myself, well, then why don't you put sons of God if the Hebrew says sons of God? Because they're not translating from
the Hebrew. They are translating in many places from the corrupt
4th century
Septuagint. And you say, well, why do you keep saying 4th century? You know, the Septuagint was translated,
you know, BC, before Christ. Well, here's why. Because there are no copies of the Septuagint from before
Christ.
The copies of the Septuagint that they're actually using are
corrupted manuscripts from the 4th century AD and later. Okay.
So, just like there are all kinds of corrupted New Testament manuscripts from the 4th century and beyond.
Sinaiticus, Vaticanus,
Alexandrinus, etc. Okay. So,
this so-called
Septuagint, this 4th century corrupt Greek text that is just
ridiculously different from the Hebrew Old Testament.
They're using it in the NIV. They're using it in the New American Standard. They're using it in the ESV.
Folks, why don't they just translate the Hebrew Bible into English?
We all know the Old Testament's written in Hebrew. Why are they going to this corrupt Septuagint?
Some people will object and say, well, no, we know that, you know, the Septuagint is
legit because of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They found, you know,
BC manuscripts of the Septuagint. Folks, that is not true.
Go on Wikipedia and look at the list of all of the Dead Sea Scrolls. You can go on there and it lists
all the scrolls. You know, on the top of my head, I think there are
939 of them that were found in Qumran in the 20th century.
Here's what you'll find. The so-called Septuagint that they found in the Dead Sea Scrolls
contains
fragments from Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
That's it. Yet, people will take some corrupt reading of the book of Jeremiah
from the 4th century AD. You're like, well, that's from the 4th century AD. That's not authoritative.
Well, you know, what about the Dead Sea Scrolls? Folks, there's no Greek Jeremiah in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The only
parts of the so-called Septuagint that are in the Dead Sea Scrolls is you have Greek
fragments of
Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Let me tell you exactly what the fragments are.
39 verses from Leviticus. It's not the whole verse, folks.
Just a fragmentary scattered
scraps and parts of 39 verses from Leviticus. Okay, so it's not like 39 verses in a row.
It's just all scattered like Swiss cheese of
39 verses from Leviticus, Swiss cheese of 19 verses from the book of Numbers, and
one verse from the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 11 verse 4. That's it, folks.
There's your Greek Old Testament found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls. You got a total of
59
fragmentary partial verses. Now, to put this in perspective, the Old Testament has
23,145 verses in it. So,
23,145 verses in the Old Testament. The Torah alone, Genesis through Deuteronomy, has
5,853 verses, and they have scraps, Swiss cheese, fragments of
59 verses only from Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. So, they don't even have any proof of any Greek translation
amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls of anything other than the Pentateuch, other than the Torah, okay? And of that, they just have these
59 partial verses. Folks, it's less than 1% of the Torah, and
it's way less than 1% of the Old Testament. So, and then they want to take those little scraps
of less than 59 verses and then just validate
some corrupt Old Testament from the 4th century AD and call it the Septuagint, you know, and try to make it authoritative. And look,
Augustine was dead wrong. Jerome was right. We got to go back to the Hebrew for the Old Testament and the Greek for the New
Testament. We don't need a Greek Old Testament as our authority, especially not some corrupt 4th century AD edition.
So, Jerome was right. Augustine was wrong. But yet, these modern
translators, they're the ones that are stuck on Augustine's
stupid Septuagint, and they're still corrupting the NIV, the ESV, and the New American Standard with Septuagint readings
instead of translating like the King James did from the Hebrew. The King James is 100%
translated from the original languages. 100% from the Hebrew Old Testament,
Greek New Testament, obviously a little Aramaic sprinkled in the Old Testament.
So anyway, he's trying to use this as like, well, you know, people just don't like to change, you know,
they were hung up on that Septuagint. Yeah, but they were wrong. That's the difference, and they were
demonstrably wrong because no one would ever try to claim that the Septuagint and the Hebrew Old Testament both say the same thing.
They're not even close. Okay.
Then he fast forwards to Erasmus.
Okay, and the Vulgate. So basically what he's saying is, okay, so Jerome comes along in the 4th century, and
he wants to make a new Latin translation based on the original Hebrew, and
the Septuagint crowd freaks out and want to stay on the Septuagint. Okay.
So, of course, Jerome won the debate, and Jerome ended up producing his Latin Old Testament.
And, you know,
that became the standard.
That's what we use, obviously, translations from
the Old Testament Hebrew and yada, yada, yada. But even in the Catholic Church, they switched over to
the Latin, which was translated from the original Hebrew. Okay.
So he says, you know, fast forward to Erasmus in the 16th century AD,
and he puts out a Greek manuscript
and a new Latin translation because he says the Vulgate's wrong.
So Jerome's Latin translation
eventually became known as the Vulgate. But that's deceptive though, because here's the thing.
What's known as the so-called Vulgate, like, you know, if I were to just buy
the Vulgate, okay,
this is not
exactly what Jerome translated. This is not
just done by Jerome. This is done by a whole bunch of other people as well besides Jerome.
In fact, a lot of people aren't even sure, you know, which parts Jerome did,
which parts were changed over time. In fact, he even talks about that in his book. Okay, because we're fast-forwarding
in time to Erasmus in the early 16th century,
who is basically reject, supposedly according to James White, you know, he's rejecting Jerome's work and
now he wants to change it. So the same people
who were stuck on the Septuagint and don't want to switch to the to the Vulgate, you know, now it's the opposite.
They're stuck on the Vulgate and don't want to get on
Erasmus's new work. But listen to this, okay, and I hope I'm not being too complicated or I'm trying to make this as simple as I can.
Listen to what James White himself says in his book in this chapter. In the 15th century,
Lorenzo Valla, an Italian humanist who was far ahead of his time in the scholarly realm,
began to study the text of Jerome's work. He discovered that the text in the currently circulating editions of the Bible
differed in a number of places from what he found in Jerome's
commentaries on the Bible. He says a little later, as a result, he produced a corrected version of Jerome's work,
one that was, in point of fact, much closer to Jerome's original than the text used in his day in the Roman Church.
So James White is basically admitting here that the so-called Latin Vulgate that they had in
Erasmus's day in the
15th century and the 16th century was not the same as what Jerome actually did.
Okay, so there's what Jerome translated and other people that translated.
We're not even sure exactly
which parts he did completely.
You know, there were other people who translated parts of the Old Testament and it's hard to pinpoint exactly
what's Jerome's work and what's not. But even so, that Bible from back then, the Latin Bible from back
then, was not the same as the Latin Bible
from the 16th century. So to say, well now Erasmus is, you know, rejecting Jerome's work or rejecting the Vulgate.
Well, no, because what they had in the 16th century
by James White's own admission, it's not the same as what Jerome produced
1,200 years or sorry 1,100 years earlier.
So anyway,
he goes on to say this in
page 38, Erasmus obtained the assistance of John Froben, a printer at Basel, who encouraged him to hurry with his work,
possibly because he had heard that Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros had already printed his
Complutensian polyglot, which included the Greek New Testament and was merely waiting for approval to arrive from Rome before publishing his work.
Time was running out to be the first to actually print
or I'm sorry to actually publish the Greek New Testament. As a result, the first edition of Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum
was hardly a thing of beauty and as soon as it was printed, Erasmus got to work editing the second edition.
In fact, the first edition was so hastily printed that Erasmus himself said it was precipitated
rather than edited and that it was hurried out headlong.
Since he was unwilling to wait for papal approval,
he took a big risk and dedicated his work to Pope Leo X, the same man who excommunicated Martin Luther,
hoping that the dedication would deflect any reprisals for rushing his work to press.
The gamble worked and Erasmus had the first published Greek text on the market.
We will have much more to say of Erasmus's work a little later as
it became with a few changes the basis of the King James Version's New Testament.
This is something that James White just loves to talk about all the time.
He brings this up constantly about how Erasmus was in such a hurry and his first edition was
precipitated rather than published and how it was just thrown together, sloppy, whatever. This is not relevant.
Erasmus's first edition was immediately followed by a second edition
fixing the error. He was in a hurry.
I don't blame him for wanting to get it out the door.
When everybody's in the dark and when the Catholic Church has their corrupt Bible, he's trying to get some truth out there.
He's trying to get back to the original languages, get the original Greek out there, get some Latin out that's less corrupt.
Hey, I don't blame him for being in a hurry to get something out the door, but
that's why he immediately went to work on the second edition, and then there's the third edition, and then there's the fourth edition,
and then there's the fifth edition. So to sit there and say,
Oh, yeah, this is the basis for the King James. Really? Because this work was put out
at the beginning of the 16th century, beginning of the 1500s, and
the King James Bible was translated in 1611. So by the time the King James translators are working,
they're not working off of Erasmus's first edition.
They're not working off his second edition or third or fourth or fifth edition. Look, there have been five editions, and then
Stephanus came in and
edited it and worked on it, and then Beza came in and worked on it. So the King James Bible translators,
they have all this stuff. They have the printed editions of Beza,
Stephanus, Erasmus, and look folks, people had almost a hundred years to find and correct the errors in
that first edition. So to just make some big deal about how the first edition had mistakes in it, so what?
So what? He got something out the door, and he corrected it and purified it and purified it, and they had almost a hundred
years to purify it by the time the King James came out. So any
errors in the first edition of Erasmus are not relevant to the King James Bible because that stuff was all corrected over many, many decades
to follow.
Page 39, just as Jerome's work had received criticism for being new or radical back in the 5th century,
so Erasmus was berated in the same manner for daring to change Jerome. Again, he's not changing Jerome.
He's changing the corrupt Latin of
1,100 years later, okay? And
then it says on page 40, the emotions that drive
today's KJV-only controversy are nothing new at all. This is a phenomenon we've seen before. So the whole chapter is
basically just saying that the reason people are King James only is because they're emotional and they don't want to change.
They're just like the people who wanted to hang on to the Septuagint.
They're just like the people who wanted to hang on to the church's corrupt Latin in the Middle Ages.
They just don't want to change.
And then he says this, it would be funny if it were not so serious.
Jerome takes the heat for translating the Vulgate, which eventually becomes the standard.
Erasmus then takes the heat for publishing the new instrument. Then Erasmus's work in the form of the Textus Receptus becomes enshrined as tradition
by KJV advocates. He who once resisted tradition has become the tradition itself. The cycle continues.
Will there someday be an NIV-only movement? We can only hope not. Of course,
there will never be an NIV-only movement because the NIV is such a piece of junk.
No one would be stupid enough to think that it's the best translation or the only right translation.
It's used by a bunch of shallow Christians who aren't serious about the Word of God.
And look, even James White would admit that serious Bible students don't use the NIV. He doesn't use the NIV.
He praises the NIV throughout this book,
except for the fact that when you actually talk to him about it, he doesn't like the NIV. He doesn't use the NIV.
He doesn't recommend the NIV. He's an ESV or New American Standard guy.
Okay, not only that, but how could there be an NIV-only movement when there was the 1984 NIV that just got
dramatically different in 2011?
So it's dramatically different. It's like a different translation. So these new versions keep changing.
How can there be a New American Standard-only movement when the New American Standard's not even really a thing anymore?
It's all about the ESV now amongst these
Calvinistic types. And so,
you know, this whole chapter is just trying to say, oh, it's just emotional. People don't want to change. Folks,
it's not based on emotion. You know, when we have these Bibles that are saying two dramatically different things,
they both can't be right. Just like
the Septuagint, so-called fourth century corrupt Greek Bible,
you know, you can't say it and the Masoretic Hebrew text are both right. They're both so different. They can't both be right.
Well, guess what? The King James and the NIV can't both be right. The King James and the ESV
cannot both be right. The King James and the New American Standard simply cannot both be right.
They're dramatically different. Entire verses are removed.
Things are changed that give an opposite meaning in many places. And so, it's just too different.