Cultish from Apologia Studios

Shortly after Wes Huff appeared on Joe Rogan, he came on a podcast, which affiliates with Apologia Studios, called “Cultish.”  The men who do this show are also trying to become viewer or listener funded.  In other words, they think they should go full time doing what they do.  Their show came on my radar because of Wes Huff’s interview by Joe Rogan.  The number of hits on this episode showed the Joe Rogan effect two times removed, 58,000 plus having watched this “Cultish” episode.

Just listening to the interview with Huff to answer King James Only, I would tell them, Don’t quit your day jobs.  No one should fund this and for many reasons.  It’s a hot mess.  So why answer it?  I’m doing it because it offers an evaluation of what kind of gibberish and absolute gobbledygook addresses King James Only.  It reminds me of the typical left-winged rubbish, such as the woman at CBS who said free speech caused the holocaust.  It is on that level, so ignorant, it’s hard to fathom.  I find myself just wagging my head.

Straw-manning Versus Steel-manning

Maybe you’ve heard the difference between steel-manning and straw-manning a position.   Wikipedia gives a definition to steel-manning (in case you don’t know):

A steel man argument (or steelmanning) is the opposite of a straw man argument. Steelmanning is the practice of applying the rhetorical principle of charity through addressing the strongest form of the other person’s argument, even if it is not the one they explicitly presented.

These men, including Wes Huff, only straw-man the position.  If someone were examining something to see if it is a cult (you know, out of concern for the cult member), he would want to give an accurate representation.  They do not do that.  This is in the nature of bias confirmation and speaking into the echo chamber.

Just to start, why does KJVO appear as a cult?  That’s never explained.  The subject matter doesn’t belong on a show about cults, but it’s low hanging fruit for the heavily tattooed Apologia crowd and its cohorts.  If someone will call KJVO a cult, someone could easily call something an Alexandrian or Vatican text cult, and have similar grounds for it.  If KJVO is a cult, how does calling it a cult help deliver someone, who embraces the King James Version as the Bible, from the cult to which he belongs?

The Vulgate Argument

The content of the podcast of part one begins actually around the six minute mark.  The Cultish host asks Huff a question about bridging a gap between the Council of Nicea and 1611 and the King James Version, there seeming to be a crying need for a translation from the original languages in 1611.  It’s not a bad question.  Huff answers the question by saying that the contemporary view of Jerome’s Vulgate is similar to the KJVO view of the King James Version.  He says the arguments for the Vulgate and the King James are about the same.

The Vulgate argument did not originate from Huff.  It’s been around for at least fifty years, and it is a strawman.  As the critical text became more and more accepted in evangelicalism, men began developing arguments against the prevailing view and King James Version support.  Huff says the argument is that the Vulgate had been the Bible for a thousand years (404 to 1604) and the King James for five hundred years (1611 to 2025).  Actually, five hundred years would span the period of the printed editions of the Textus Receptus (1516-2025) from which the KJV New Testament came.

Truth about the Vulgate Argument

It would be nice to have a conversation about these things from two sides.  The acceptance of Jerome came from an apostate state church, those who also believed a false gospel and heretical works salvation.  The true internal testimony of the Holy Spirit is not involved in the acceptance of Jerome’s Vulgate, as also seen in the Roman Catholic embrace of extra-scriptural tradition, Papal pronouncements, the magisterium, and apocryphal books.  They did not look for preservation of scripture in the original languages or in making the Bible available for Roman Catholics.

The Textus Receptus and Hebrew Masoretic was received by those truly saved by grace through faith alone.  They were the texts received by the churches as authentic. The Vulgate didn’t come from an original Hebrew or Greek Text.  Jerome worked from the Greek Septuagint and Latin Translations, not original language texts.  Later Jerome looked at Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament for the sake of accuracy, but he still stuck with Old Latin translations for his New Testament work.

Jerome didn’t translate from the Greek New Testament and consider that “the Bible of the church” as Huff invents on the spot.  He does this on many different occasions when I’ve heard him in different podcasts.  He says this with a face of total confidence, but it is absolutely untrue.  Huff says that the Roman Catholic objection of an original language text is the same as the one of KJVO, that is, the Latin has been the Bible for one thousand years.

Original Language Preservation

Historically, after the fall of the Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages, there were limited vernacular translations due to low literacy rates and strict control over biblical texts by the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authorities.  They didn’t want translation work done from original language texts, but in keeping with the approved Latin Vulgate, which become increasingly less understood by the rank and file citizens of Europe.

The argument for the King James concerns the preservation and availability of the original words of scripture in their original languages.  The churches agreed on these words for hundreds of years.  These were Spirit indwelt men and churches operating therefore with the testimony of the Holy Spirit.  This is the heritage of the King James Version, not a magisterium model of Roman Catholicism.  When you read the bibliology writings of truly converted theologians for hundreds of years after the printing press, they embraced the infallibility of the apographa, the copies of scripture, identical to the originals by providential preservation.

Huff says the KJVO and the Jerome Vulgate were “almost the exact same argument.”  This is just an ad hominem and strawman attack that is patently false.  What Huff really thinks will come out in this podcast and I’ll point it out when we get there.  It was only Roman Catholicism arguing for continued use of Jerome’s Vulgate, not true churches.

Further along, Huff says that the apostles quoted from the Greek translation of the Old Testament.  This is itself a new and common argument from critical text supporters, advocating for a corrupt translation of the Old Testament as an authority.  This makes way for support of a less than perfect text of the Bible, not the biblical or historical view of the church.

Earlier English Translations

From the Vulgate conversation, the other Cultish host asked Huff about the history of English translations of the Bible.  He mentioned Wycliffe and then Tyndale, also saying that Tyndale died for translating the Bible into English.  At his execution on October 6, 1536, Tyndale was accused of “Lutheran heresy” for including prologues and footnotes that criticized church doctrine and authority.  The charges did not say Bible translation.

Huff fails to reveal that the earlier English translations also translated the Textus Receptus and the Hebrew Masoretic, so that the underlying text of the King James was received and reigned before 1611.  He also does not mention that Henry VIII authorized the Great Bible and ordered the translators to compare with Tyndale’s work.  The King James Version is very close to Tyndale.  Huff later says that part.  They obviously also relied on his work.  Tyndale, even though not carrying the name Baptist, which no one used yet, was Baptistic, even as he took a believer’s baptism position, even against both Puritan and Anglican alike.

Editions of the Textus Receptus

The next argument against this “cult” of KJVO from Huff relates to the underlying text of the King James being a Texti Recepti, rather than one Textus Receptus.  Again, this is a strawman.  The editions of the Textus Receptus, although they differ in a very small number of ways, represent one text.  Those who printed these editions didn’t see them as different texts.  Every historian and scholar knows that.  Those who like to point out the several editions are angling for the King James translators doing textual criticism, as another faux argument.

You really can’t say that the King James translators were looking at Hebrew and Greek texts from which to translate and then also say that no text existed for the King James until Scrivener’s in the late 19th century.  These contradict one another and this brings us back to a absence of a needed steel-manning.

Huff called the editions of Stephanus and Beza “updates” of Erasmus.  The editions are homogeneous because they are the same text with minor variations, explained as corrections of minor errors.  This period of printed editions did not continue past the middle 17th century.  The churches settled, this explained as the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit.

The text behind the King James Version was a settled edition from the printed edition period.  Huff says the translators used the science and art of textual criticism, which is a revisionist spin on what they did.  All of the words in Scrivener’s were available to the King James translators and the churches.  They possessed the original language words translated in 1611.  No one was saying, “We don’t have a Greek text.”  No one.  That’s a modern innovation from those whom Huff mimics with this argument.

Underlying Text and Preservation

Huff entraps himself at about 22:45 in the podcast, when he reads the title page of the Trinitarian Bible Society Greek New Testament, which says the underlying Greek text of the 1611 King James Bible.  The key word there is “underlying.”  It underlay the King James Version, not proceeded from it.

One of the hosts asks Huff at about 24 minutes what is the difference between the critical text and the Textus Receptus and Huff says the critical text is “a text that is produced.”  Good answer.  You’ve got a preserved text and then a produced text.  The latter does not represent the biblical doctrine of preservation.  It denies it.  Huff never mentions it.  The doctrine of preservation should be at the forefront, but it isn’t because they deny the biblical and historical doctrine of preservation of scripture.  They see it as naturalistic, something humanly produced.

More to Come