Wes Huff interviewed Mark Ward on his podcast, taking on the subject: “Issues with English Bible Translation.” I’m not going to deal with any aspect of the video except for the subject of the underlying text of the English Bible. Huff brought up the issue and asked Mark Ward a question about it.
In a very personal way, I don’t understand how that professing Christians can’t or won’t see the importance of this issue. I believe they do, because I don’t comprehend how they couldn’t. What signals to me that they do know what this means is how they uniformly do not address the actual issue. They won’t touch it. In general, they won’t come out and say that the very Words of God are not, they repeat, not the standard. And the church never believed that really, even though the historical record is that they did. If they did, they must have been wrong. Just be open about it.
The Doctrine of Preservation
Did God preserve every Word or not? Were people wrong, essentially apostate in their bibliology, for hundreds of years? Is that biblically how God, how the the Third Person of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit, works? They deny verbal plenary preservation. Why? It isn’t based on what scripture teaches on preservation.
How does the doctrine of the preservation of scripture relate to English translations of the Bible? The subject itself is like a third rail. Modern Versionists unceasingly ignore it, when it is the issue. Maybe most professing Christians in the pew see the Bible as a supernatural book that is perfect word-for-word. The dance around this subject is an attempt not to awake those people to their belief that this is not true. Instead of putting their finger on this subject, it becomes “King James only movement” and other diversions. Is it a translation of the very Words of God or is that not a doctrine to believe? We are certain it is.
I’m going to provide the transcript of Ward’s answer again, so you won’t need to go back to part one. In part one, I began chronicling the prevarications of Mark Ward. Here is the transcript. I divided it into sections to make it easier to read and discuss.
Section One
Right now, I think what they’re saying is not right. It’s not sound doctrine, when it comes to the Greek New Testament. That’s not the reason we’re actually differing. That’s a big thing I want to say. I do think that effectively all talk about the Textus Receptus — if that’s reached the ears of your viewers because we’ve gone kind of from beginner to advanced now talking about the Septuagint, talking about the Textus Receptus.
Effectively all talk about the Textus Receptus arises from the King James only movement. It’s people who love the King James — as well they should. People who want to hold on to it in ways I don’t think they should, because they want to use it exclusively and say that every other translation is a corruption. Those are the people who are talking about the Textus Receptus. And the reason they’re doing it is that it’s actually something healthy combined with something unhealthy.
Section Two
The healthy thing is that they’re recognizing, well, it’s not doctrinally sound for me to say that this given translation is inspired by God, so instead I have to go back to its source and say what makes this translation superior to all others is that it uses a pure source and everybody else uses a corrupted source. It’s actually healthy to recognize it’s not the translation itself that’s inspired, because God never said he would inspire any translation in any language.
Um, it’s the original the Greek and Hebrew that are inspired, but it’s unhealthy then not only to to claim that you’ve got the pure Greek New Testament and everybody else is corrupted, but I think it’s unhealthily, unhealthily confusing the issues, when people say that they are Textus Receptus only. They’ll only use translations based on it, but then the question I’ve been asking for years and years and never getting a clear answer to, finding only frustration is, well, what about the New King James — what about the Modern English Version.
Section Three
Those are modern major, you know, translations of the Textus Receptus and the Greek New Testament, uh, of the Greek New Testament Textus Receptus. And why don’t you use them, if your real concern is the Textus Receptus, then those ought to be acceptable to you and I get a lot of bluster and non-answer from people over that to the point where I I have finally kind of just stopped asking, um. I’m, I’ve let my case on that land on the internet and people will make of it what they will. I don’t think that there are hardly any people in the world who really in their hearts truly care about the Textus Receptus.
I think there are some, uh, I think almost all of that is, uh, an unwitting, not dishonest, but unwitting desire to hold on to the King James, because I’ve met, you know, I can count on two hands the number of people that I’ve met who strongly prefer the Textus Receptus but are also fine with the New King James or the Modern English Version. Effectively everybody who wants to use the Textus Receptus also wants to use the King James exclusively and tell me that my Bible is Satan’s Bible, um, that’s divisive and not true and I’ve done a lot of work on my YouTube channel to try to graciously educate people on those issues.
List of Prevarications from Ward
In part one, I listed three prevarications from Ward so far.
- Sound doctrine does not undergird the support of the Textus Receptus.
- Doctrine is not what makes a difference between Textus Receptus supporters and critical text supporters.
- All talk about the Textus Receptus arises from the King James Only movement.
Ward makes these accusations with only his personal anecdotes to back them up.
Accurate Translation
Contrary to what Ward said (his fourth prevarication) those who believe that God perfectly preserved His Words in and with the Textus Receptus Greek New Testament do not say that every other translation is a corruption. Almost all of the men I know that take the same position believe that the King James Version is an accurate translation of a perfectly preserved text. That doesn’t mean that someone or a group of people could not also do or make an accurate translation of the identical text. That occurs in many various foreign language translations of the identical text as the King James.
When I preach (and many men are the same), we will do our own translation of the text. Our congregation opens the King James Version, but I explain to the people the meaning of the words in the original language. When I clarify, I will use a different word, a synonym.
The King James translators themselves had many different options of words for their translation, which would also be accurate. They could have used different words, and they actually did. Very often they translate the same Greek word with a multitude of various English words. For Greek prepositions, like dia, they might translate ten different ways, a few of them accurate for the particular context.
Corrupt Underlying Text
I don’t know if the Modern English Version is corrupt or not (using Wards word, “corrupt”). The TR Only men do not view every other translation as corrupt. We’ve got good reasons why we don’t choose to use a different translation of an apparently identical text (I haven’t researched whether the underlying text of the MEV is the same). I’ve shown Mark Ward how that the NKJV comes from a different text and I’ve given him enough examples to prove it. He knows that the translators themselves did not even believe in the underlying text of their translation.
If God did perfectly preserve His Word, then translations from a differing text than the one He preserved are corrupt. Ward knows that is the problem for those who believe the Textus Receptus. If I were to say that the English Standard Version were corrupt, it’s because it comes from a corrupted text. In the New Testament the critical text is about five percent different. Based on a biblical standard of purity, that is unacceptable. Ward and Huff just ignore this easily discernable point, that two things that are five percent different are not the same. If I said that scripture was 95% inspired, that is not tolerable.
Ruckmanism
In section two, Ward says the real reason why men are TR Only is because, drats and double drats, they don’t believe and really can’t believe that God inspired the translation. In other words, because they don’t want to be Ruckmanites, they diverge to the underlying text as a necessity. They actually are Ruckmanites, all of them, but because they don’t want to be identified as Ruckmanites, they choose preservation in the underlying text instead. This is the fifth prevarication by Ward in his interview with Huff.
To make the judgement he does, Ward is saying that TR Only men are lying when they claim the problem with modern versions is their mistaken underlying text. Ward is accusing them of lying about their real reason for support of the TR. Their real reason is the desire to keep the translation, but they know they’ll have to defend the indefensible, essentially double inspiration like the Ruckmanites. Huff does not push back at all at this slanderous lie by Ward.
Septuagint, an Accusation of Lying, and Health
Ward says the aversion to double inspiration is healthy for the TR Only men. They know God didn’t inspire scripture in English. A question I would ask Ward and Huff, based on something Huff said earlier in the interview: “Did God inspire the Septuagint?” Huff said that Jesus and the Apostles used the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, in their quotations in the New Testament. Ward did not contradict Huff’s assertion.
TR Only men are not stupid. They know Ward (with Huff as an accessory to it) is calling them deceitful, conniving liars. Being perceived as gracious is important to Ward, so he uses this strategy of calling one thing “healthy” and the other “unhealthy.” The healthy is not wanting to believe in double inspiration (even though they actually, really do, he says), but the unhealthy is calling a Bible corrupted that changes five percent of the words. Go figure.
Bluster and Non-Answers
At the end of section two in his rant, Ward accuses the TR Only men of lying about their underlying reason. If they did believe the underlying text was the issue, they would have no problem using a modern version of the same text. There are many reasons why TR Only men might use the King James Version only in their churches. They are not providing “bluster and non-answers” as Ward accuses in section three, another prevarication, his sixth. I’ve listed many reasons we still use the King James Version, but the main issue, contrary to Ward’s prevarications, is the different underlying text from a large majority of the modern versions.
I actually put a link to the first two parts of this under the West Huff video in a comment. That’s all I did, just put the two links with the sentence pointing people to the review, and they deleted it. No explanation. I get why. No answers. Not wanting to deal with the truth. Ward makes these outlandish statements and can’t get any pushback over them.
Thanks for the quotations from Dr. Ward. I had noted in my Ward refutation:
Dwayne Green, Debate Retrospective with Dr. Mark Ward | Part 2, November 11, 2024. Elec. acc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAMuJcQKYOo&. In this same video, Ward also claims that he does not discuss textual criticism with perfect preservationist Christians because he claims that the Received Text cannot really be the issue for them; if it were, they would be fine with contemporary English versions of the TR. Of course, the reality is that those who have reverent care for God’s promises about the preservation of Scripture also care deeply about Scripture’s principles and promises that relate to translation and to the Spirit-led reception of canonical original language and vernacular Scripture by the church, and concern for Scripture’s teaching on those topics leads by good and necessary consequence to the exclusive use of the English KJV instead of inferior TR-based alternatives like the NKJV. It is unfortunate that Dr. Ward can so easily dismiss the fact that KJV-Only Christians regularly state and write that the preserved Textus Receptus, the original language textual basis for translation, is the main issue for them, and, without a shred of written evidence to the contrary, reject what they themselves say for his own speculative conclusion that what they themselves constantly affirm is not truly the case. (https://faithsaves.net/Mark-Ward).
We probably recall that Ward publicly stated that he refused to even read this critique carefully. He is happy to keep repeating falsehoods about why we use only the English KJV, but not happy to actually read what the real reasons are. Followers of Ward who only hear his one-sided presentation are likely to spread this misrepresentation, so we can expect to see it come up in wider circies.
I completely agree with everything you wrote.
I recently got into it a bit with a Mark Ward acolyte on Twitter/X. This individual *could not* grasp that people could understand what the “false friends” really mean on their own without Mark Ward/some other non-preservationist scholar telling them. It was like talking to a brick wall so I eventually just terminated the conversation, but man, it was wild to see this firsthand.
I don’t comprehend their world. It isn’t reality. It is like walking around a false front city, an old Western town, and believing you’re a cowboy.