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Prayer for Apology?

List of 5 Concerns

Mark Ward apparently prays for KJVO leaders to make a public apology about their sin of an official use and promotion of the English Bible translation. One charge he makes is that they aren’t telling the truth in their defense of the King James Version. In part one, I said that, I believe based on listening to him for awhile, Ward alleges the following five points as a main concern of his:

One, these men don’t sufficiently acknowledge archaic English in the King James Version, semantic changes, the worst of which Ward calls “false friends.”
Two, these men say God preserved every Word in the original language text, but they won’t point out the preserved printed edition of the Textus Receptus that represents that.
Three, these men keep using the King James Version, so making the Bible opaque to the average reader, even though modern versions from the same underlying text are available.
Four, these men won’t admit that church men have long recognized textual variants and acknowledged their existence.
Five, these men ignore that underlying text behind the King James Version didn’t exist in a single edition until Scrivener in the late 19th century, who himself didn’t support the Textus Receptus.

I said I would deal with these five after I was done addressing those things Ward said were his reasons for a prayer for an apology.

Acknowledgement Already

Churches that still use the King James Version (KJV) as their church Bible have many varied explanations and positions for advocating for the KJV. As Ward knows, users of the KJV are not a homogenous or cohesive group, even though Ward often lumps them altogether as one. A large mainstream of King James Version defenders long acknowledged semantic changes of several words in the King James Version. Rather than retranslate the same underlying text, leaders of KJV using churches (and others) published a list of these words with their definitions, put them in the margins of the biblical text, and write pamphlets with explanations of these words.

One, Semantic Changes

Long Available Resources

The following is a list of books or pamphlets (and their publication date) already written to deal with word meanings in the King James Version:

1960, 1994 — The King James Bible Word Book: A Contemporary Dictionary of Curious and Archaic Words Found in the King James Version of the Bible
1999 — The King James Bible Companion
2011 — Archaic Words and the Authorized Version
2017 — Bible KJV Plus: King James Version Plus [with Archaic KJV Words Translated and Appended in Brackets]
1998 — The Defined King James Bible
2002 — King James Bible Wordbook
2010 — The King James Version Dictionary
2003 — 4,114 Definitions from the Defined King James Bible
2018 — List of archaic words in the KJV and their modern equivalents
No Date — KJV Archaic Words
No Date — Archaic Words in the King James Bible
2020 — Archaic and Outdated Words in The King James Bible (KJV)
2019 — King James Bible Word List & Definitions
2016 — Archaic Words in the King James Version

Wright

Others already noticed this in 1884 with the mammoth The Bible Wordbook: A Glossary Of Archaic Words And Phrases In The Authorized Version Of The Bible And The Book Of Common Prayer by W. A. Wright. In a recent episode by Mark Ward, he mentions “closet” from the Sermon on the Mount. On page 140, Wright writes (yes, Wright writes):

Closet, sb (Matt vi. 6) Lat. claudo, clausum, whence close, cloister. A private apartment, generally a bedroom. Latimer uses it with a punning allusion to its derivation:
Shall any of his sworn chaplains? No: they be of the closet, and keep close such matters. Serm. p. 98
Ah! Gloucester, hide thee from their hateful looks!
And, in thy closet pent up, rue my shame.
Shakespeare, 2 Hen. VI. 11. 4. 24.
From hence he raiseth his studies to the knowledge of physics, the great hall of nature, and metaphysics, the closet thereof.
Fuller, Holy State, XXII. p. 57.

An actual closet isn’t too bad unless yours looks something like Fred Flintstone’s closet with its requisite bowling ball. This is just a private place though.

Reference Bibles, Etc.

Above is only a sample. Many more of these exist. The Westminster Reference Bible, the Reformation Heritage Study Bible, Holman KJV Study Bible, and the KJV Word Study Reference Bible, among others, have these same words defined or explained in them. All of these various books and helps in addition to the unpublished ones done by churches for decades tell a different tale than what Ward says. Churches and their leaders help and helped people with these words, know they exist, and talk about them.

Deeper Concern

The deeper concern that I’ve had for decades now is the horrific preaching among independent Baptists. This related less to the King James Version itself as it was the poor training among these churches. Concerning all of evangelicalism, doctrinal matters themselves don’t matter. Our area has many different Christian denominations that botch, twist, and pervert the Bible when they teach it. This is rampant all over the country. As an example is the popularization of Jordan Peterson as a Bible scholar and teacher. Tens of thousands listen to him and don’t have the discernment to know how bad it is what he is saying.

Not because they have used the King James Version, young people sit in such places as the University of North Carolina and hear the corrupt teaching of Bart Ehrman. The Great Classes curriculum also features his New Testament courses. Popular teaching across the United States misses what the Bible says, more concerned about what will titillate and keep the audience. Professing preachers use the Bible, but don’t teach what it says. This is not because of the King James Version. This is rampant all over evangelicalism.

A Test

Mark Ward produced a test to give to those using the King James Version to investigate whether they know what the obsolete or archaic words mean. He included pastors in the testing. Overall they did poorly on his test. I’m not surprised. Ward concludes this is a KJV problem. I would disagree with him. It’s worse than that. They don’t know what the Bible means because they aren’t exegeting scripture. That’s not their approach to the Bible. In their “study,” if they do look up a word, they go to an English dictionary. They don’t know how to do a word study. Their colleges have spent much more time on church growth methodology than knowing what the words of the Bible mean.

Two, Printed Edition of the Textus Receptus (TR) Criticism

Presuppositions and the TR Question

Ward and those on his side are not honest brokers on the TR edition question. They still talk like men haven’t answered and don’t answer this point, the “Why TR?” one. I’ve written on it again and again, and yet he’s never acknowledged it. That’s a kind of dishonesty in this debate. He ignores the answer and then says no one gives one. The TR edition question is not a problem with the biblical presuppositions.

TR Editions are printed editions. This is a new phase in the history of the Bible in the original languages. There was no printed edition of the Greek New Testament available until Erasmus in 1516.

The TR Edition period went from 1516 with Erasmus to 1633 with the Elzevir brothers. There was great homogeneity to those editions, which is why they’re all called Textus Receptus. However, they do differ in a relatively small number of ways.

Scriptural presuppositions say that all the words were available to God’s people in the printed editions of the TR. Availability is a presupposition. True churches received those words, another presupposition. God’s people with inward testimony of the Holy Spirit agreed on the Textus Receptus, another presupposition. Translations came from the TR.

Settled Text

Points One through Three

I make several other points about the TR that I’d like to enumerate. One, the words of the Greek New Testament existed and were available, even as translators translated from something. Two, church leaders wrote exegetical commentaries and referred to the underlying Greek words. When they wrote a commentary in English, they used both the King James Version and their own translations and then pointed to the underlying Greek words. They had the underlying Greek words in mind.

Three, scripture teaches canonicity and it is a canonicity of words as I argue in a chapter of Thou Shalt Keep Them (please get book and read chapter). Many other men have since repeated that argument, calling it what I coined then, the canonicity argument. Scripture doesn’t teach a canonicity of Books, but a canonicity of Words. Canonicity of Books proceeds from Canonicity of Words. This recognition of scripture continues through church history and the TR edition period was a part of that until men settled on the words.

Points Four through Six

Four, the explanation of the variants among saved people was “a scribal error in one copy was corrected in another.” This was not a large corruption of God’s Word, although that did happen. This was part of God’s preservation work. Five, an attack on the Words of God has always been occurring since the beginning in Genesis 3. The TR editions represent biblical preservation. Finally, six, churches settled on a text. Scripture teaches a settled text. Every word matters. Man lives by every word (Matthew 4:4). God’s people should expect to have every word available (Isaiah 59:21), just like God inspired every word and all of them (verbal plenary inspiration and then preservation).

Which are the words of the settled text? The TR edition era ended in 1633. As Hills so aptly put it: “the King James Version ought to be regarded not merely as a translation of the Textus Receptus but also as an independent variety of the Textus Receptus.” Those words were preserved and available in every generation of true believers since the completion of the New Testament. This is, again quoting Hills, “the logic of faith.” You can’t keep sampling interminably into the future. If you believe, you bite down on the truth, that is, accept it. The alternative, naturalistic uncertainty or doubt, is not acceptable. Believers should reject it.

More to Come

New List of Reasons for Maximum Certainty for the New Testament Text (Part 5)

May 28, 2024 / Leave a comment

ANSWERING AGAIN THE “WHAT TR?” QUESTION

Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

1. God Inspired Specific, Exact Words, and All of Them.
2. After God Inspired, Inscripturated, or Gave His Words, All of Them, to His People through His Institutions, He Kept Preserving Each of Them and All of Them According to His Promises of Preservation.
3. God Promised Preservation of the Words in the Language They Were Written, or In Other Words, He Preserved Exactly What He Gave.
4. God’s Promise of Keeping and Preserving His Words Means the Availability of His Words to Every Generation of Believers.
5. God the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, Used the Church to Accredit or Confirm What Is Scripture and What Is Not.
6. God Declares a Settled Text of Scripture in His Word.

THE APPLICATION OF THE PRESUPPOSITIONS, PRINCIPLES, AND PROMISES OF AND FROM SCRIPTURE

God’s Word is truth. It provides the expectations for Christians, not feelings or experience. People can count on what God says. True believers go to scripture to get their views for things.

The Lord in His Word gives the expectations regarding the future of scripture. What would God do? If God says He will do it, then He will do it, and believers will believe that He did.

The presuppositions, principles, and promises of and from scripture provide a model, paradigm, or template for knowing what God’s Words are. The true view will follow a biblical model.

Epistemology

What I’m writing in this series considers how people know or can know what they know, what’s called “epistemology.” The critical text and its modern versions are different than the received or traditional text and the King James Version. They can’t both be right. Of the two, how do we know which one is right?

Knowledge starts with God’s Word. Faith in what God says is the primary way of knowing what people ought to know. Someone can open to Genesis 1:1 and know what it says occurred based on God saying it.

Only one text and version position fits the principles, presuppositions, and promises of scripture. The above six true principles lead one to the received text or textus receptus. Only the received text, the underlying text of the King James Version, corresponds to what God said would occur.

Which Textus Receptus?

Opponents or critics of the received text position, critical text proponents, very often ask, “Which Textus Receptus (TR)?” I saw someone recently mock the TR by calling it the “Texti Recepti.” The idea of this criticism is that there is more than one edition of the TR, so which one is it?

The textus receptus is a very homogenous text. All the varied editions are very close and essentially the same. However, the differences would contradict perfect, every word preservation and a settled text. This criticism becomes a major presupposition for a critical text position. It says, “No one knows what the text is, so everyone continues with textual criticism.”

Following the presuppositions, principles, and promises of scripture, one witnesses settlement on the text of scripture. Even though each of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament were considered scripture immediately, its aggregation or collation into one book took one or two hundred years. This occurred through the agreement of God’s people and the testimony of the Holy Spirit, termed “canonicity.”

History of the Received Text

Through church history, God’s people continued to ascertain and identify scripture in the keeping process. Churches kept agreeing on the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. They also received the words of the New Testament, the text of the New Testament. Churches had already been receiving the same text of scripture in the manuscript or hand-written era. A few years ago, I wrote the following.

Kurt Aland

The TR never meant one printed edition. Even Kurt and Barbara Aland the famed textual critics, the “A” in “NA” (Nestles-Aland), wrote (“The Text of the Church?” in Trinity Journal, Fall, 1987, p.131):

[I]t is undisputed that from the 16th to the 18th century orthodoxy’s doctrine of verbal inspiration assumed this Textus Receptus. It was the only Greek text they knew, and they regarded it as the ‘original text.’

He also wrote in his The Text of the New Testament (p. 11):

We can appreciate better the struggle for freedom from the dominance of the Textus Receptus when we remember that in this period it was regarded even to the last detail the inspired and infallible word of God himself.

Barbara Aland

His wife Barbara writes in her book, The Text of the New Testament (pp. 6-7):

[T]he Textus Receptus remained the basic text and its authority was regarded as canonical. . . . Every theologian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and not just the exegetical scholars) worked from an edition of the Greek text of the New Testament which was regarded as the “revealed text.” This idea of verbal inspiration (i. e., of the literal and inerrant inspiration of the text) which the orthodoxy of both Protestant traditions maintained so vigorously, was applied to the Textus Receptus.

I say all that, because Aland accurately does not refer to an edition of the TR, neither does he speak of the TR like it is an edition. It isn’t. That is invented language used as a reverse engineering argument by critical text proponents, differing with the honest proposition of Aland, quoted above. They very often focus on Desiderius Erasmus and his first printed edition of the Greek New Testament. That’s not how believers viewed what the Van Kleecks call the Standard Sacred Text, others call the Ecclesiastical Text, and still others the Traditional Text.

Metzger

Neither does Bruce Metzger refer to an edition of the Textus Receptus; only to the Textus Receptus (The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], pp. 106-251):

Having secured . . . preeminence, what came to be called the Textus Receptus of the New Testament resisted for 400 years all scholarly effort to displace it. . . . [The] “Textus Receptus,” or commonly received, standard text . . . makes the boast that “[the reader has] the text now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted.” . . . [This] form of Greek text . . . succeeded in establishing itself as “the only true text” of the New Testament and was slavishly reprinted in hundreds of subsequent editions. It lies at the basis of the King James Version and of all the principal Protestant translations in the languages of Europe prior to 1881.

[T]he reverence accorded the Textus Receptus. . . [made] attempts to criticize or emend it . . . akin to sacrilege. . . . For almost two centuries . . . almost all of the editors of the New Testament during this period were content to reprint the time-honored . . . Textus Receptus. . . . In the early days of . . . determining textual groupings . . . the manuscript was collated against the Textus Receptus . . . . This procedure made sense to scholars, who understood the Textus Receptus as the original text of the New Testament, for then variations from it would be “agreements in error.”

The Textus Receptus does not refer to a single printed edition of the New Testament. The language of a received text proceeds from true believers in a time before the printing press in hand copies and then leading to the period of its printing.

Edward Freer Hills

Churches up to the printing press ‘received’ the “received text,” hence, “the received text” of the New Testament. This bore itself out in the printed edition era, as churches only printed editions of the received text. However, they didn’t permanently continue printing editions of the TR. They settled, as seen in the discontinuation of printing further editions after about a hundred years. This was a shorter period of time than the settlement or agreement on the twenty-seven books of scripture.

What I’m writing here corresponds to the now well-known position expressed by Edward Freer Hills in his book, The King James Version Defended. He wrote:

The King James Version ought to be regarded not merely as a translation of the Textus Receptus but also as an independent variety of the Textus Receptus. . . . But what do we do in these few places in which the several editions of the Textus Receptus disagree with one another? Which text do we follow? The answer to this question is easy. We are guided by the common faith. hence we favor that form of the Textus Receptus upon which more than any other, God, working providentially, has placed the stamp of His approval, namely the King James Version, or, more precisely, the Greek text underlying the King James Version.

King James Version Translated from Something

Some critical text adherents want to make Hills statement a “gotcha” or “aha” moment. “Look, this is an English priority!” I say, “No, the King James translators were translators, so they translated from something.” From which they translated is represented by the writing and teaching in all the centuries after the last printed edition of the textus receptus and the acceptance of the King James Version.

The King James Version translators translated from available words. They relied on the printed editions of the textus receptus. Their text was its own independent variety, like Hills said. However, that text pre-existed the translation, even if it wasn’t in one printed edition. Again, scripture doesn’t argue for the preservation of an edition.

Those translations forerunning the King James Version also relied on the textus receptus. The necessity of a settled text, that particular presupposition, looks on which the vast majority of believers settled. The concluding certainty comes from faith in what God said He would do.

Printed Editions of the TR

Almost one hundred percent of the words for the King James Version came from the printed editions of the textus receptus. Maybe two or three words total in the King James Version don’t appear in any printed edition of the textus receptus but had textual attestation elsewhere. A vast majority of true believers were not reading the Greek New Testament. They accepted or received the textus receptus by receiving the translation from the textus receptus. This helps explain the Hills statement of an “independent variety of the Textus Receptus.” It’s not unique though in a fair understanding of the word. It reflects what God’s people received as the text of the New Testament since its original writing.

In 1881, F. H. A. Scrivener took on the monumental project of printing the received text underlying the King James Version New Testament. For many decades the Trinitarian Bible Society has printed this edition of the textus receptus. The printing of this as its own edition suggests the independent variety of the Textus Receptus underlying the New Testament of the King James Version.

The Ecclesiastical Text

Some call the textus receptus, “the ecclesiastical text.” I don’t mind that title. It acknowledges the testimony of the Holy Spirit toward His words through the church. God uses the church to attest to the words of God as a means of settling the text. Naturalistic and rationalistic modern textual criticism does not settle the text. It uses naturalistic means as a basis for speculating the original text of the New Testament. It does not claim certainty or knowing what the text is. Because of its means or instrumentality, it doesn’t and can’t claim to know the original text. It also does not acknowledge the truth of the above principles, promises, and presuppositions.

I know I’m saved. Scripture assures me of my salvation. The Bible also assures me that I know what is the text of the New Testament. I know the New Testament text like I know the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.

Acting in Faith

Faith acts. It will bite down on what God said and what He said He would do. You don’t believe if you sit back and taste without swallowing. Faith isn’t a sample-fest.

On this subject, some are reticent to say what is the text of the New Testament. They anticipate the attack coming, including mockery. Those mocking do not bite down. They instead adjust based upon their naturalistic presuppositions. They say something like “confidence” instead of “certainty.” That doesn’t follow what scripture says about itself. This should embarrass them. I think it does many of them, which is why the angry reaction and the resultant mockery.

The trail of faith on this issue ends with the underlying text behind the King James Version. The closest to that is all the words found in the printed edition. That sort of settles, but it leaves wiggle room. It’s a harder-to-defend position, based upon the plain scriptural presuppositions.