What we know about God and His will comes from His speaking about Himself and what He wants.  What we know about the Bible itself we get from the Bible, whether that be inspiration, authority, canonicity, sufficiency, or preservation.  Our position on preservation of scripture should be the biblical one.  The biblical one would also be a historical one.  If a position on preservation is different than what the Bible teaches and what Christians historically believed, that is the one that is confused or heterodox (not orthodox).

For myself, I’m open to the idea that I’m wrong about preservation.  I’m willing to go back to the drawing board on this.  If I’m wrong, I need to be shown scripture, but almost never am I shown scripture (I don’t remember ever).  Even if it comes with a bit of mockery, I would take that in order to be corrected by scripture.  Instead, I just get the mockery and not the scripture.  The former doesn’t serve to convince me.

My issue with modern versions is that they come from a different text of scripture, even the New King James Version.  I am not ready to embrace other modern translations of the same text as the King James Version.  I believe that scripture teaches perfect preservation.  I haven’t been shown the Bible teaching something different.  Saying the Bible teaches something less than perfect preservation is diverging from a biblical and historical position.  I’m not fine with that.

What’s curious to me is how that men don’t mind taking a position that is different than one that is biblical or historical.  I understand the most conservative position of those who do not believe in perfect preservation of scripture is that all the words are somewhere on earth in an available manuscript.  We just don’t know what they are.  I don’t see that position reflected in the Bible.  My faith comes from scripture, so I reject that position.  It won’t convince me to call that confused or heterodox.  I don’t believe it and no one has proven it.  They assert it without proof.  It seems more like propaganda or an attempt to receive applause from a particular crowd.

If people are going to live according to scripture, they have to believe it is scripture, not maybe scripture.  If we aren’t sure we have what God said, why would anyone do the hard thing of doing it?  It’s a major reason why there is a precipitous drop in obedience to scripture in numbers of areas.  The Bible has lost its authority, in part because people are not sure about it.  It is way more damaging than Mark Ward’s “false friends” and “dead words,” that criticize translation.

What spawned this post was a series of unfortunate events.  The first I wrote about almost a month ago, Mark Ward’s address to the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship International Conference.  Mark said that the sole usage by a church of the King James Version of the Bible should result in separation by FBFI churches, because of a violation of a very strained application of 1 Corinthians 14, that requires several leaps to arrive at this severe censure. It is not the nature of most of the type of churches of which Ward approves to stretch application of the text to this degree.  I can’t think of a single example of a similar practice.  The Gospel Coalition, where Mark made an appeal, itself welcomes continuationists, who don’t mind unintelligibility in the form of tongues, an actual direct violation of 1 Corinthians 14 — no call for separation from Mark though for the cool guys at TGC.  He veers off the road past the sidewalk into back yards to pick off those who still use the King James Version.  I’m fine with separation.  I would expect a better basis or explanation.

I’ve said, if Mark’s right, let’s change. I believe it. I’m happy to follow scripture.  But second, the FBFI, who had invited Mark in the first place, somewhat walked back his invitation and the content of his session by authoring a post at their online publication, Proclaim and Defend, entitled “FBFI and the KJV,” by Kevin Schaal.  I had already mentioned that I didn’t think that anyone in Mark’s audience actually, really believed his farfetched application of 1 Corinthians 14.  I would suggest for anyone at least first believing and practicing 1 Corinthians 14 before someone starts with novel applications.

Then third, something akin to Tolstoy’s War and Peace breaks out at professing fundamentalist forum, SharperIron, to deal with this “unimportant” issue (almost always how they refer to it) with at present, 103 comments, an anthology now past the length of a theological treatise.  I’ve been mentioned four or five times in the discussion, sometimes, as usual, misrepresented (sometimes I want to guest comment there to clear up the misrepresentations or at least have someone post my comment).

A word used in the FBFI article and then among the comments was orthodoxy, and this was the label claimed by modern version, eclectic-text folk.  Another word used very often to classify men such as myself, was “confusion.”  I want to address the ideas of orthodoxy and confusion.  I also want to speak to a series of articles highly recommended in the comments by Thomas Overmiller, entitled Bible Preservation and Translation.  Overmiller wrote these posts in lieu of his leading his church both to change from the King James Version to the New King James, but also to welcome visiting preachers to use the NASV or the ESV at his church.  A key line among everything he wrote in his essays was the following:

Biblical evidence indicates that God preserves the words of scripture within the many ancient manuscripts that remain in the world today.

He provided no basis for this position which is the crux of this issue, the preservation of scripture.  Mark Ward wants to turn the version issue into readability, where that must be the issue and nothing else, and most others don’t provide any biblical basis at all for a decision.  Overmiller uses one of his articles to treat the doctrine of preservation, but he doesn’t make a connection with those passages at all to his conclusion.  For the most part, he attempts to explain away the doctrine of preservation while referring to preservation passages.

In a recent post, I mentioned that modern doctrinal statements leave out a doctrine of preservation, that was once included in historic confessions and creeds.  They leave it out without explanation.  I noticed that in the doctrinal statement provided by the man who began the discussion at SharperIron.  They just drop it out.  Orthodoxy is right doctrine, doctrine that has been established as right, connected to and in the history of Christian doctrine, what Christians have believed.  The unorthodox changes that.  By definition, orthodox means:

conforming to what is generally or traditionally accepted as right or true; established and approved

The position that was generally or traditionally accepted as right or true, established and approved, the one believed and taught from the Bible is not the one believed and taught by these men using the word “orthodox.”  They don’t give me a means to believe what they want me to believe.  The new position is the unorthodox one.  There is a line of truth and it veers off of it before establishing from scripture why to do that.

The people who are confused are the ones who don’t understand scripture, the ones who have had new or alien teaching draw away their minds from the teaching of the Bible.  Very often confusion comes from material external to scripture and virtually everything that buttresses the modern version or an eclectic text position originates from outside of the Bible.  It also confuses people as to the certainty of scripture.

The right view of the doctrine of preservation would not find a problem with a new translation.  Just because someone wants to keep using the King James Version doesn’t mean that he thinks that every one of those words are the only way to translate a particular word.  The impetus for a new translation from the Hebrew Masoretic and the Greek textus receptus, the text behind the King James Version, will come from the churches that use that translation and want a new one.  I preached the gospel to a youngish Roman Catholic woman this week, the entire gospel, for over an hour, at the end of which she seemed convinced of what I told her utilizing numerous verses from the King James Version.  Hispanic in ethnicity, she absolutely understood it, and she had no scriptural background.  This occurs about every week.

Alright, now I want to deal with the supposed exegesis of preservation texts, by Thomas Overmiller.  I was very disappointed by what I read from him.  I wish I could be happy from his decision to look at the Bible in his attempt to persuade his own church to use a different English translation.  His dealing with woeful.  I have a hard time not viewing his commentary as dishonest.  I know those are harsh words, but my other option is ignorant  or just shoddy. Maybe that’s it too, but he’s at least terribly wrong.  His first two sentences read:

The Bible provides us with helpful perspective about what to expect regarding the continuation [sic] God’s written words in the world throughout history. This is especially important to understand because the original manuscripts themselves are not available.

Those two sentences don’t seem to be directing someone to the Bible’s teaching on preservation.  They do not rely on what scripture says to frame the teaching.  The original manuscripts not being available itself is not a teaching of scripture.  Preservation is not dependent on possessing them.

He first points to Psalm 12:6-7, which he doesn’t even believe teaches preservation of scripture.  Overmiller either doesn’t understand Hebrew or he is playing off the ignorance of his audience.  Masculine pronouns do refer to feminine nouns in the Hebrew and especially as they relate to scripture (read here).  He leaves this point out.  Gesenius’s Hebrew Grammar states that “masculine suffixes are not infrequently used to refer to feminine substantives.”  There is a strong argument, especially in the psalms that you would expect the pronoun to be masculine that refers to feminine “words.”  Plain reading of the passage reads as though it is teaching preservation of scripture.  The whole argument on preservation isn’t buttressed by those two verses, but they should be included as teaching on the preservation of scripture.

It is an odd article that claims to be teaching on preservation and starts by explaining how a passage doesn’t teach preservation of the words of God.  This is not uncommon for modern version advocates.  They look for ways to explain away what God’s Word says.  This is confusing and unorthodox.

Overmiller next deals with Psalm 119:89, which reads:  “For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven.”  He says that again is not teaching preservation — “it doesn’t speak about preservation at all” — but that God’s Word is unquestioned and authoritative in heaven.  At one point and in a wrong way among his eight essays, Overmiller speaks well of the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament.  In the Brenton edition, natsab, the Hebrew word translated “settled” in the King James Version, is translated with the Greek word, diamenei.  The Hebrew scholars that translated the Brenton edition of the LXX said that “settled” means to “remain, continue.”  God’s Word remains or continues in heaven.

When you look at Spurgeon’s Treasury of David on this verse, Spurgeon himself says, “the Lord’s word is from of old the same, and will remain unchanged eternally. . . The power and glory of heaven have confirmed each sentence which the mouth of the Lord has spoken, and so confirmed it that to all eternity it must stand the same.”  As he does in the Treasury, Spurgeon quotes others, such as Thomas Manton: “It implies that as God is eternal, so is his word, and that it hath a fit representation both in heaven and in earth.”  John Trapp in his complete commentary writes on Psalm 119:89:

It is eternal and perpetual, neither can it be vacated or abolished by the injury of time or endeavours of tyrants. The Bible was imprinted at the New Jerusalem by the finger of Jehovah, and shall outlive the days of heaven, run parallel with the life of God, with the line of eternity.

It isn’t that we can’t get more from this verse than preservation, but that it at least teaches preservation, or adds to what the whole Bible teaches about its own preservation.  To say it doesn’t teach preservation at all, but that it refers to “authority” instead, as Overmiller says, just seems like a deliberate misrepresentation.  Acid washing preservation from scripture will not justify before God a lax approach to God’s Word.

In the next passage, Psalm 119:152, 160, Overmiller says these passages teach preservation, however, in my opinion attempting to downgrade the preservation teaching by saying they teach the preservation of the Torah.  They apply to all of God’s Words.  Overmiller should know that in Psalm 119:152, a masculine pronoun “them” refers to a feminine noun, “testimonies.”  That can’t occur, right?  This is his whole point from Psalm 12:6-7 and one that is sandblasted by Psalm 119:152.  Everyone should take this into consideration.

The teaching from Psalm 119:152 and 160 is consistent with what the Bible teaches about its own preservation.  It is regular and often.  This is why so many people assume that God preserved every word, only to have that undermined by preachers, who have been duped by a rationalist approach.

Lord-willing, I’m going to come back tomorrow to deal with the rest of Overmiller in this section, where he claims to show what the Bible teaches about its own preservation.  I look forward to it.

When people don’t believe in hell, why don’t they believe in hell?  Scientific studies don’t show hell exists.  There is no empirical evidence for hell.  You can’t tunnel somewhere or take a ship somewhere to find it.  I don’t know of any expeditions in the works or future digs to find hell.

Hell is eternal torment.  Even annihilation, the belief of some, is preferable.  I think most would say far preferable.  It’s so horrible, hell, that the invention of a kind of holding tank for hell, purgatory, was invented as an alternative.  Except scripture doesn’t teach annihilation or purgatory.  They might make sense to someone, but they aren’t in the Bible.  We believe in hell, what it actually is, because of what the Bible says.  That’s all we’ve got for it.  It’s fideistic — no empirical evidence, against human reasoning, just based on scripture alone.

The hardest things to believe require faith.  You can believe some easy things that don’t seem like they are faith.  I believe sin is destructive.  That’s not hard.  I can see it.  The Bible teaches it, but it’s not hard to believe.  Some you just believe, even though it’s hard, and that’s how you know you’re operating by faith.  I agree that scripture has to teach it, but you believe it anyway.  Someone can be weak in faith and believe all the easiest things to believe.  The hard things to believe are also usually where the faith is attacked the most.

19 And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sara’s womb: 20 He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; 21 And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform. 

29 Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. 

I will neither presuppose Christianity is true apart from the need for positive evidence (fideism, presuppositionalism or Reformed epistemology) or suppose that by amassing legions of historical facts we can convince someone of Christian truth (evidentialism). Rather, I will offer a variety of arguments that verify or confirm the Christian worldview as superior to its rivals, thus showing that Christianity alone makes the most sense of the things that matter most.

I would be fine with Phil Johnson being right about separation and fine with James White too, if what they believed and practiced was biblical about separation.  I often check the old pyromaniacs twitter feed, because of the interesting links and comments of either Phil Johnson or Dan Phillips.  Through that feed, I’ve noticed the recent issue of some of James White’s associations with various people and institutions.  Phil has been attacked by certain factions for his support of White, finding himself in the position of defending White and himself against certain charges.  A recent effort from Johnson was commentary on the friendship of James White with Michael Brown, the Jewish Charismatic apologist.

Several years ago, I attended the Evangelical Theological Society meeting in San Francisco, and in particular one session with a panel discussion on the book, Four Views on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism.  Separation came up in the discussion, because that differentiates all other forms of evangelicalism from fundamentalism.  I asked during the session where one book on biblical separation could be found anywhere in the mammoth book room for the ETS meeting.  In general, evangelicals ignore what scripture says about separation, so when you do read something about it, it’s worth taking note.  How much will evangelicals rely on the Bible for their doctrine and practice?  Is what Phil writes about it true?  Does he represent what the Bible teaches about separation?

The James White and Michael Brown relationship and its interaction provide a case study for biblical separation.  I’m not writing to get personal with Phil Johnson or James White.  I see it as a great opportunity to think on God’s Word about separation.  Separation is found in every New Testament epistle and all over the Old Testament.

Phil Johnson divides his article into main points.  First, he deals with the friendship of James White and Michael Brown.  He is not troubled that James White and Michael Brown are friends, because, he says, Michael Brown needs better, more scriptural friends.  It’s worth considering.  What is the relationship between fellowship and friendship?  How are they different?  Can you be friends and yet not be in fellowship with someone?

At the beginning of his second point, Phil says that he doesn’t tell his friends who they should and shouldn’t be friends with.  Is that the biblical thing to do?  Phil offers no scriptural guidance for his dogmatic statement.  I would deal with friends over whom they’re friends with, because they’re my friends.  Several passages all over the Bible forbid ungodly associations (cf. 2 Sam 13:3; Ps 1:1, 101:3, 139:21-22; Prov 22:24; 1 Cor 15:33; Eph 5:11; James 4:4).  Friendship doesn’t just relate to us, but it also relates to God.   In 1 Corinthians 10:24, Paul writes, “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils.”  What or whom you associate with does matter to God.

Phil says second, “I deplore hyper-separatism almost as much as I hate ecumenism.”  Ecumenism is a technical term with a lot written about it, while hyper-separatism is not.  Both terms need definition.  I’ve found him to provide anecdotes of hyper-separatism, often hypotheticals and straw men.  It would help to know what scripture says about separation and unity (like we have laid out in our book, A Pure Church).  Phil’s first reference to scripture is to justify friendship with sinners from Luke 7:34.  Verses 33-34 say:

For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil. The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!

The “ye” of these two verses, the commentators upon John and Jesus, were the Pharisees.  The Pharisees called Jesus a “friend of sinners.”  That doesn’t mean He was a friend of sinners.  If Jesus was a friend of sinners, was He also a glutton, winebibber, and, did John the Baptist also have a devil?  Because Jesus cared for unsaved people and evangelized them, the Pharisees attacked him as being sinner’s friend.  What we know is that He cared for and evangelized sinners.  We don’t have any actual examples of the Lord Jesus being friends with unsaved people.  We should not justify friendship with all manner of doctrinal perversion and unbelievers by what the Pharisees said about Jesus — that is a fallacious application of that passage.  It also clashes with other teaching in the Bible, which cautions believers about their friendships.

If a Pharisee asked me to eat with him, like Jesus, I would, and, like Jesus, with a purpose to evangelize.  That doesn’t make the Pharisee and I friends.  The Apostle Paul distinguishes between who  we should and shouldn’t socialize with in 1 Corinthians 5, treating professing believers different than unbelieving people.  Scripture teaches us that we shouldn’t socialize with everyone.  We should try to help people follow what the Bible says about separation.  1 Corinthians 5 isn’t talking about even friendship, but about socializing with someone.  It matters even who you socialize with, let alone who you are friends with.

According to Phil, “Dr. White stated that critics have been telling him, ‘You have to separate yourself from anybody that you have disagreements with when it comes to theology.'”  I’ve heard James White enough, that I don’t believe him.  He’s striking a straw man as he so often does, and also is treating his criticism like he’s persecuted.  I’ve never heard anyone say what he claims they have in my entire life.  I think you’ve got to be about as gullible as you can be to believe that critics, plural, have been saying that to James White — “anybody that you have disagreements with when it comes to theology.”

I would happy for anyone to show me one person who separates over every theological disagreement, even among the mystery group, the “hyper-separatists,” what Phil describes as those “who seem to relish conflict and treat every disagreement as an excuse to fire off anathemas.”  This doesn’t exist as a problem.  The word “seem” probably gives Phil a semi-truck of deniability.  Who in the world treats every disagreement as an excuse to fire off anathemas?  I’ve never met one, except that Phil would probably categorize me as one.  Phil needs to do better than that for this to be a realistic discussion of fellowship and separation.  Anathemas are in the Bible in Galatians 1 or in 1 Corinthians 16 and they are reserved for those who preach a false gospel and those who love not the Lord Jesus Christ.

Whatever type of friendships Phil Johnson has, his own experience can’t serve as a basis for friendship.  Is there any line to be drawn on friendship?  The way Phil talks, there isn’t any.  That is dangerous teaching (which is different than saying anathema to the teaching).  What are the limitations?  Would a modern day Nadab and Abihu, offerers of strange fire, be fine friends?  Cain, post murder of Abel?  You might work with Korah, but should you be friends with him?  At what point are you complicit with someone’s false teaching or conduct?  Maybe you’re not offended with someone as a friend, but is God?  Life is not all about you.  If someone is your friend, couldn’t he influence you, and you don’t even know it?  Are you not also subject to possible deceit?  What does scripture say?

Phil Johnson focuses on a very narrow teaching and application of separation, that is, “we are forbidden by Scripture to partner with or promote someone who comes in Christ’s name and perverts or rewrites the gospel (Galatians 1:8-9; 2 John 7-11)” [underlining his]. The Bible has far more to say about separation than that.  It does teach that, but not in contradiction to the other several teachings about separation in the New Testament.  That’s how Johnson communicates this issue, as if the teaching in those two passages has drained all the Bible says on the subject. Phil knows of 2 Thessalonians 3:6, 14:

Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us. . . . And if any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man, and have no company with him,, that he may be ashamed.

Among others, why not list those verses and their teaching too?  They apply to White and Brown and separation, and there are other passages too.

Hyper-separation seems to be any separation that is more than Phil’s separation.  For years, I’ve noticed that’s how both Phil and James White roll on separation.  Hyper should be something unscriptural, adding to scripture in some way.  We know God separated from everyone on earth except for Noah and his family.  Is that hyper separation?  The concern should be over biblical separation.  If someone obeys scripture on separation, he is not a hyper-separatist.  If someone is not a biblical separatist, is he an ecumenist?  What matters, what should matter, is that we are obedient to God and His Word.

In my experience, someone like myself, who believes what scripture says about its own preservation, must answer every possible gotcha question about textual variants in the handwritten copies of the New Testament.  I have to give an honest answer, knowing that these are gotcha questions.  Among these are, “Which printed edition of the TR (textus receptus) is the perfectly preserved text?” and “What about the few words in the King James that translate no known original language manuscript?”

Nothing was wrong with the Old Testament.  Salvation wasn’t different in the Old Testament.  It was like the book of Hebrews talks about, a shadow of things to come.  It was good for what it was, but a proper understanding and acceptance of it is a move toward the New Testament.  You don’t really accept the Old if you don’t receive the New.  The new covenant is a superior covenant.

The Old Testament isn’t law and the New Testament grace.  They are both grace.  A perversion of the old covenant could be “law.”  The Old Testament itself, however, is grace.  Old and New are both grace.

Both the Old and the New Testament have “rules.”  “Rules” are a means of ruling.  God is sovereign.  He rules.  We look to what God says in His Word to see what His rules are.  He says that if you love Him, you will keep His rules.  The one that God receives to Himself is not the one who says, Lord, Lord, and doesn’t do what God says.  It is he who does the will of the Father, like Jesus did.

Justification by faith is not a get out of jail free card.  Paul was clear on that in Romans 6.  He also said that grace is not an occasion, a base of operations, to and for the flesh.  In Jude, we see false teachers who turn the grace of God into lasciviousness.

Grace enables righteous living.  God works in someone both to will and to do of His good pleasure. A primary purpose of church is to to consider one another to provoke unto love and good works.  What are good works?  Are they not the works that God prescribes in His Word?  Are those not rules?  How are we supposed to provoke someone to good works, if we are to just wait for the Holy Spirit to do it? That’s not something taught anywhere in scripture.

What I’m describing is how evangelicalism and now much of fundamentalism approaches biblical teaching that they don’t like.  They call it legalism.  The grace of God, however, is not a garbage can that just keeps swallowing up disobedience to God’s Word.  It is a cleansing agent that empowers righteous living, which is obedience to what God said.

Evangelicals and many fundamentalists pervert God’s grace today.  2 Peter 2 talks about it.  Men don’t want to do what God says and the grace of God is corrupted to allow people to disobey scripture. That’s not how God’s grace works.  Paul told Titus that God’s grace taught believers to deny worldly lust and to live soberly and righteously in this present world.

According to James, believers are presented with tests of faith. They are to pray for wisdom to pass those tests.  What is wisdom?  It is the proper application of scripture.  Why does someone need wisdom if scripture doesn’t need to be applied?  If the only scripture someone obeys are specific actions stated, no wisdom is needed for that.  It’s just wrote obedience.  However, scripture does need application.

Almost all of scripture comes in principles that need to be applied.  The application comes in a second term.  God commands no corrupt communication to proceed from the mouth.  Wisdom requires understanding what corrupt communication is.  Believers are assumed to know.

Today if a church has a modesty or dress standard, it is called legalist.  I know because our church gets it all the time.  We rarely talk about dress.  However, we are still criticized as legalistic.  I hear these evangelicals, conservative ones, say that we are dangerous because we are telling people to keep rules and rules are legalism.

God’s grace doesn’t allow nudity.  It doesn’t allow cross dressing.  Are those rules?  They are God ruling by His grace in the life of a believer.  Grace isn’t less holy.  It allows someone to live holy and pure.

The apostate wants to do what he wants.  He doesn’t want a boss.  A common corruption of grace allows him to do what he wants and yet still categorize himself as spiritual enough, godly enough, or religious enough.  This false, made-up, perversion of grace takes care of all the ways he disobeys God by not applying scripture.  He’s doing what he wants and still getting credit for doing what God wants, at least in his mind.  That isn’t the grace of God.  It isn’t how God’s grace works.

Whole evangelical churches are doing what they want and calling it the grace of God.  They design their churches to be worldly to attract the worldly.  If you critique their music and their dress or lack thereof, they pull the legalist card.  This is old.  It occurs again and again.

If you read here, you know I call them legalistic.  They are the true legalists in the tradition of the Pharisees, who reduced God’s rules, His laws, to what they could keep.  Evangelicals don’t require obedience to the so-called non-essentials.  Their view of grace says that those are permissible.  The non-essential list is growing.  They are not non-essential to God. God wants believers to live according to every Word that proceeds from His mouth.  That’s also how God’s grace works.

Evangelicals, operating in the flesh, shorten the list of commandments or sayings to be kept, to a list they can keep.  Pharisees did this.  They asked Jesus the greatest commandment, because they were accustomed to ranking their laws, because they knew they couldn’t keep them all in their flesh.  Evangelicalism keeps its own rules, except in the flesh.  It keeps those rules by reducing them to a smaller number.  This is not how the Bible teaches Christian living.  God’s grace enables a believer to keep everything that God said.  It is a supernatural, spiritual work in the soul of a man that testifies to God.

Reductionism, reducing what scripture has to be kept to a smaller number, depends on the flesh.  It is left-wing legalism.  It says that it is grace, but it really is an operation of the flesh to live how someone wants to live, but still call it Christian living.  It isn’t, and it won’t be judged as so.

I’m tired of the legalism card, but I think it will keep going.  It is a horrendous lie that is used out of guilt.  Evangelicals are guilty of violating scripture.  Their programs and their attendance and their gimmicks are more important than the Word of God.  They are willing to keep their crowd by lying and calling true believers, legalists.  I expect it will continue.

This course on Biblical preservation, Bible texts and versions, and manuscript evidence will examine God’s promises concerning the perfect preservation of Scripture and its perpetual availability to His churches.  The fulfillment of those promises throughout history in the Hebrew Masoretic Text and the Greek Textus Receptus underlying the Authorized, King James Version of the Bible will be surveyed through an examination of the history of the Hebrew and Greek text’s transmission.  The errors and corruptions found in the Greek alternatives to the Textus Receptus, the Hebrew Masoretic text, and the English Authorized Version will be examined and refuted, as will the unbelieving presuppositions underlying these non-preserved texts and the unbelieving authors of those presuppositions.  The historic Baptist position on the preservation of Scripture will also be examined, as will the history of the Bible in English.

So many words in a title.  This post is mainly about what John Owen wrote.  I am teaching the book of Hebrews to folks at Mid-Coast Baptist Church next week in Brunswick, Maine.  I’ve taught through Hebrews three times in my life, but I have been doing some reading.  You can download for free the pdf of a five volume commentary by John Owen on Hebrews, which is too much to read before I go, but I wanted to see some things that John Owen said about Hebrews, to get his thoughts. It was helpful in one way that is not related to Hebrews itself.

When James White began attempting to talk about his own scriptural presuppositions, and it began looking like someone walking through thick mud up to his neck, he dropped “Jesus’ use of the Septuagint.”  He said it very haltingly.  I can only guess why he wasn’t really chipper about bringing that up, but my speculation is that he knows it doesn’t work, that it doesn’t count as a presupposition for a defensible position on preservation.  It is just another dust cloud.  If you take the argument to its end, which I’m sure he hopes someone does not, it crashes and burns big time.

Old Testament textual critics now correct the traditional text of the Old Testament by using “the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls.”  I’m sure to some people that sounds really neat.  They are saying that the Old Testament needs correcting.  They can’t even stop with the Old Testament, so what hope is there that they can or will with the New Testament?

I can’t write everything about this, because I’ve got to get to the John Owen point I was making.  I’m pretty sure no one has this material out there and I want you to have it.  However, before I do, can you for a moment wrap your brain around the idea that these OT textual critics are using a Greek translation from the Hebrew to correct the Hebrew?  These are some of the same men who criticize Erasmus for “back translating from the Latin to the Greek in Revelation.”  That’s only bad when it helps their cause.  I’ve never said I was opposed at the preservation of God’s Word in languages other than the original languages.  I’m happy about Latin speaking people having the Bible in their language. But I digress.  I don’t want to turn this into a session on Erasmus.  Neither do I want to go off on the criticism of eclectic text supporters that it is wrong to take a trajectory from an English translation to its underlying text.  They, of course, can only accept that when it travels through a Greek translation into a Hebrew text, eradicating their complaint about trajectories to original language texts from their translations.

If you believe that Jesus quoted from “the Septuagint,” you are left with a low view of scripture.  You then believe that the Hebrew text of the Old Testament was lost.  You also believe that Jesus was very satisfied with a corrupt translation from a corrupt text that differed from the Old Testament text received by God’s people.  Even the Old Testament textual critic believes his Septuagint is corrupt.

Reader, you may wonder why I put “the Septuagint” in quotes.  There is no settled Septuagint.  You are not referring to one translation when you say “the Septuagint.”  There is no “the Septuagint,” and most textual critics like White would be happy to have you keep thinking that way.  There is little evidence that some established Greek translation of the Old Testament existed before Jesus from which He could quote.  The view we should take should be the one that respects the inerrancy of scripture the most.  Saying that Jesus quoted the Septuagint doesn’t do that.

A position that does respect the Bible and is a historic position based on biblical presuppositions is the one taken by John Owen that I have also read in some more contemporary books on the Septuagint.  Hebrews quotes a lot of Old Testament, especially Psalm 110.  In Owen’s first volume on Hebrews, he spends a few pages speaking on this issue that we’re talking about.  I’m not going to give you all the pages.  I’m going to give you the explanatory quote.  Owen writes (pp. 67-68):

Concerning these, and some other places, many confidently affirm, that the apostle waved the original, and reported the words from the translation of the LXX. . . .  [T]his boldness in correcting the text, and fancying without proof, testimony, or probability, of other ancient copies of the Scripture of the Old Testament, differing in many things from them which alone remain, and which indeed were ever in the world, may quickly prove pernicious to the church of God. . . .  [I]t is highly probable, that the apostle, according to his wonted manner, which appears in almost all the citations used by him in this epistle, reporting the sense and import of the places, in words of his own, the Christian transcribers of the Greek Bible inserted his expressions into the text, either as judging them a more proper version of the original, (whereof they were ignorant) than that of the LXX., or out of a preposterous zeal to take away the appearance of a diversity between the text and the apostle’s citation of it. And thus in those testimonies where there is a real variation from the Hebrew original, the apostle took not his words from the translation of the LXX. but his words were afterwards inserted into that translation.

Owen says more, but this is the essence of it from the Hebrews commentary.  He’s got a whole section on it in his biblical theology too, which was only recently translated from the Latin.  This is Owen’s position.  This was an accepted position.  This fits biblical presuppositions.  It is also a defensible position.  White’s position is not defensible.  “The Septuagint” sometimes follows the Hebrew Masoretic and sometimes it doesn’t.  White and others selectively use it.  With their usage, they are in very murky waters theologically.  Owen’s position is an old position. It’s what believers have thought.  You actually can’t prove him wrong.  His position has theological underpinning.  His position should be believed.  I believe it.