Waymarks 34 (issues 32 and 33 are missing)

Waymarks 34

 Report of Open Air Preaching

12th June LEIGHTON BUZZARD, by the Cross. A man told me he was encouraged to hear the plain and simple gospel being preached in the open air. He was an “Exclusive Brother”, meeting in Dunstable.

He told me of one of my brethren from Buckland Wharf who had wanted to join them a few years ago. This surprised me. Whoever would want to join the Exclusive Brethren? But he hadn’t been able to accept Household Baptism. And this didn’t surprise me. This unscriptural practice is peculiar to the E B’s.

19th June L. B., by the Cross. A woman who had obviously been listening to the preaching came forward to give me a card offering a free “Jesus” video. She plainly thought I was in need of it! I took it, only that she might then accept a gospel pack from me, which she did. Her card was in contempt of the second commandment, depicting a long-haired Christ. This portrayal has nothing to do with the Christ of Scripture. In fact it was the Mormon jesus. The video claims to be “about the last week of the Saviour’s mortal life.” Mortal means subject to death, which the Lord was not. He chose to die, and HE died for  the sins of the whole world. The wages of sin is death, and Christ did not sin and was not capable of sinning. He was not therefore liable to die.  

23rd June LUTON. On Market Hill. Two women walked very slowly past me as I preached. I thought perhaps they might want to speak to me, so I stopped and the older woman immediately turned back to me. She wanted to shake my hand and tell me what a thrill it was to hear the gospel preached in the town centre. You are a believer and on the way to heaven?  I asked. She replied that she hoped to get to heaven and that she knew and believed that Christ died for her sins. Then you ought to be sure about it, I replied. There were tears in her eyes as she assured me she knew of no other way to heaven apart from Jesus.....and Mary. Oh what a tragedy. What a monstrous delusion. This woman, so genuine, so seeking,, and yet deceived by the vilest of religions. I know that some of my friends would declare her as among the saved, and thereby  maintain her in her error. She gladly listened to a little more concerning the cross and then introduced me to the young lady with her, Amy, who was her son’s fiancee, who had listened to this conversation. The mother’s name is Margaret. Pray for her. She accepted a gospel pack and I believe she is not far from the kingdom.

Rome in her cunning is pretending to be open to the evangelical world, only that it might be dragged back into the bondage of Romanism. But one outcome is that many R C’s have become open to the gospel. So we tell them of the ONCE ONLY sacrifice of Christ upon the cross, of the efficacy of His shed blood and the need of no other sacrifice. We tell them it was Peter who called for repentance and conversion, and that assurance of sins once and forever forgiven comes through faith in His Name.

27th June LUTON. George Street. A man threatened me with a pair of garden shears. He said he was going to cut my head off because he didn’t like my preaching. He is the man who often stops to hurl abuse at me.  On this occasion Mr O was already talking to me. The antagonist obviously knew Mr O, and I discovered that he, like Mr O, was an Italian RC. However, Mr O was quite put out by this man’s aggression and told him “Mr Smid, he good man. You musta go!” The man eventually went but threatened to be back later to do me mischief with his garden shears.

We have previously got Mr O along to a gospel meeting and were able to be of assistance to the family during a time of illness.  

29^th June MILTON KEYNES. Outside M & S. This was a Sunday afternoon Assembly witness. Tracts were given out and the gospel was preached. A group of youths stopped for a few minutes. They were well behaved and asked one or two reasonably sensible questions. They were invited to the Milton Keynes Gospel Hall in Caledonian Road but did not come.

The Integrity of the AV Bible

Matt. 19:9

And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her  which is put away doth commit adultery.

Such is the Satan’s fury against Christ and His Word, that in this chapter nineteen of Matthew’s gospel alone, 35 changes are made by the critical text.

 In verse nine the words and whosoever marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery are not found in the revised Greek  NA text, and so are missing from modern versions. Yet the manuscript authority for them is extensive.

Men will mutilate Scripture to serve their own ungodly purposes. The divorced partner may well be innocent but the marriage bond still holds in heaven, so she is not free to remarry.

Some are trying to get round this by saying that if the marriage is not consummated, the marriage can be annulled. But it is not consummation that makes the bond before God, but rather  the formal marriage vow taken before witnesses. This binds until the death of one annuls it.  

Mark 10: 21

…. And come, take up the cross, and follow me.

The NIV reads “….then come, follow me.” There is no need to take up the cross. The Nestle-Aland Greek Text removes it as it is not found in the Greek Mss  Aleph B C Delta Theta Psi 0274 and a handful of cursives. There is strong ms evidence for its inclusion.

The cross remains an offence and they are the liberal neo-evangelicals who object to discipleship and thus promote the modern versions which will remove the cross.

Colossians 1: 14

In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins.

The NIV reads “In whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins”. Blood is omitted on the grounds that Westcott and Hort’s Greek Text omits it.

Wycliffe, in 1380 AD omitted the blood. He wrote “in whom we han a₃enbiyng and remyssioun of synnes”. He had only Jerome’s Latin Vulgate to work on, so he didn’t know it should be included. Yet the Latin Vulgate of Sixti V. and Clementis VIII has “in quo habemus redemptionem per sanguinem ejus, remissionem peccatorum”.(In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins).

Tyndale has blood in Col.1: 14. There can be no remission of sins without the shedding of blood. 

Whosoever

A “Reformed” correspondent has sent me one of his articles promoting Calvinism. In it he seeks to explain why the word “whosoever” really means “some in particular”. He quotes Rev.20: 15, And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. He explains: “Here the word  ‘whosoever’ refers to people ‘not found written in the book of life’.

Most dictionaries will tell you that whosoever means anybody. In the context of Rev. 20: 15, anybody at all in the whole human race, throughout all time - any individual from this vast company- who was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. But the Calvinist insists the whosoever is limited to those not written.

The reason for this denial of plain English is because the word is also in John 3:16 and according to the Calvinist, applies only to the elect. The whosoever is those who believe. John 3: 16 will therefore mean, that.... God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that “those who believe” believeth in His name...

Calvinists use the Humpty Dumpty syndrome “when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less”. ­  So of course, “world” doesn’t mean the whole human race. To the Calvinist it means a few in particular - the elect. They read “God so loved the world of the elect...”

This leads on to the false teaching of Limited Atonement, expressed by J Riddle, an acclaimed leader in the Brethren Movement, - I quote,

               

                “[Christ] did not bear the sins of all men at Calvary.” - Forward to The Biblical Doctrine of            Substitution; M Browne

This is a rank and blasphemous denial of the atoning work of Christ

Calvinism is growing in Assembly circles —as it is throughout Christendom— and its adherents are growing ever more bold in their assertions. The monthly Believer’s Magazine has become an organ for the promotion of Calvinism. This is not what its founder John Ritchie believed. He strongly refuted Calvinism in his book Contested Truths in 1917.

I Jackson writes in the June 2003 B M, under the heading “Called according to His purpose (Rom 8.28-32)”,

By what process will this [purpose] be brought about? Divine purpose is seen to be acting in five aspects.

But there is no process or order of salvation. There is no mention of regeneration or sanctification in this alleged process of God’s purpose. We note also that the order given in Romans 8 is changed in other passages. We see for example that in Matt.20:16 and 22:14 calling comes before “election”.

In the Calvinistic process of God’s purpose the end result is them he also glorified. This is put into the future, in eternity to show that God’s purpose stretches from eternity to eternity (which it does of course, but not in this context). “Glorified” is in the past tense.

To place it in the future in this verse is bad exegesis. It makes gobbledegook of the Scripture, standing it on its head in order to maintain a line of theology.

We have been called to glory—now, 2 Thes:12, and we already have the spirit of glory, 1 Pet. 4: 14.

We find it remarkable that an evangelist should think the gospel call insufficient to bring a soul to Christ and thereby into new life. We are told there has to be a “specific and effectual call in relation to divine purpose”. The gospel call is therefore ineffectual in relation to divine purpose?

Do we need Textual Criticism Today?

Debra Anderson, Production Editor, Trinitarian Bible Society, writing in the June 2002 issue of Evangelical Times, places great emphasis on the need for ongoing textual criticism. She writes,

While we can be thankful that the current tenets of textual criticism have produced a text which in most instances reflects the autographs, we should strive for more. We need principles that will produce a text which, as far as possible, reflects the inspiration and inerrancy of the autographs.

May it be our prayer that our great God will raise up his servants to undertake the task of truly biblical textual criticism!

   

So what is wrong with the Authorized Version? Does Mrs Anderson speak for the TBS?

The TBS has for such a long time been engaged in the production of AV Bibles based upon the Received Text and the 1611 AD English Bible. Is this about to change?

Alec Gilmore in A Dictionary of the English Bible and its Origins gives this definition of Textual Criticism;

The purpose of textual criticism is to locate or reconstruct the text that is closest to the original, and this calls for a study of the changes which a text has undergone in the course of transmission. 

This work, we suggest, was finalised by Erasmus. He was certainly a textual critic and was well aware of changes made to various manuscripts. He based his Greek New Testament—printed in 1516— on a few representative manuscripts, i.e. those displaying what some have called the Byzantine Text (= Received Text). Erasmus believed this to be the true text with a proven pedigree.  The coming of the printing press has preserved  this text for us. It could no longer be subjected to monkish tampering.

However modern Critics take up their cudgels against the Received Text by giving emphasis to a handful of depraved manuscripts which Erasmus knew about but rejected.  

Mrs Anderson believes that the text of Scripture is not yet settled. She writes in her E T article,

The true God , however, did not see fit to preserve his (sic) Word in that way [with little variation between manuscripts as with the Muslim scriptures- she says], particularly  in the New Testament. Instead, he (sic) has left us with more than 5,000 manuscripts, some of which are very similar and some which differ significantly.

From these, his (sic) people must determine which readings accurately reflect the inspired, inerrant autographs (original writings).

Mrs Anderson charges God with the preservation of error. She holds the Calvinistic fatalist view. To her God is the author of sin. To her, God does not make plain what is His word. He jumbles it all up like several jig-saw puzzles mixed together and leaves it to the scholar to sort it out.

“Scholarship” says Doctor D E Anderson, “is absolutely necessary in the textual criticism of the Scriptures, but it cannot be allowed to replace faith and truth.”

But it has done. Scholarship today is almost wholly apostate and rationalistic. The scholars know how to tear the Bible to shreds, but cannot give an exposition of John 3: 3-8, and do not know the verses experimentally.

But we do have scholars who have investigated the modern philosophy of Textual Criticism and have found it wanting. On the positive side we have men who have demonstrated the worth of the Received text and the Authorized Version. One such is Dr Jack Moorman, whose books are essential to those who want to grasp this subject. For Ever Settled ought to be on every Bible student’s bookshelf.

One or two believers have written to me recently to say that they have not been able to accept the flawlessness of the AV Bible. It is the work of Satan to destroy faith and he is presently doing this through textual criticism — by raising doubts in the believer’s mind. One should be able to trust one’s Bible implicitly in any case, but works such as For Ever Settled give a tremendous boost to confidence.

Mrs Anderson’s final statement in this first article is

While we can be thankful that the current tenets of textual criticism have produced a text which in most instances reflects the autographs, we should strive for more. We need principles that will produce a text which, as far as possible, reflects the inspiration and inerrancy of the autographs.

May it be our prayer that our God will raise up his servants to undertake the task of truly biblical textual criticism!

The current tenets of textual criticism have produced the Critical Text with 8000 differences to the Received text of the AV Bible. Mrs Anderson doesn’t tell her readers that. She places herself among those who “strive for more”! If any should tell us that the TBS is committed to the preservation of the AV Bible, we know they are being economical with the truth!

Mrs Anderson’s second article in the July E T. doesn’t seem to add much to her argument, though it takes up a whole page. It is entitled Whose Word is it anyway? Rethinking Textual Criticism. In it she claims

The commonly held conservative view is that the various books of Scripture in the originals —the so-called ‘autographs’— were subject to plenary inspiration, that is, they were without error down to the individual words.

Though Anderson refers several times to the inspiration of the originals, she nowhere writes that we still have the Scriptures in their entirety, and though the original manuscripts have disappeared, what we have is not lacking in its plenary inspiration. Mrs Anderson appears not to believe that our AV Bible is the fully inspired word of God.

She is uncertain whether the plenary inspiration of the originals could be carried down to the spelling of individual words. That is, the word as it stands on the page of Scripture may not be fully inspired. Maybe the writer was a bad speller and the Holy Spirit Who gave the Word did not “spell it out”? Mrs Anderson of the TBS will bring us on to shifting sand.

Another TBS expert, Malcolm Watts, in his booklet THE LORD GAVE THE WORD, writing about the difficulties in reproducing the authentic New Testament Text suggests that some paid professional scribe, albeit utterly apostate, would be more reliable than the ordinary Christian man. This notion has long been one of Satan’s lies, that if you leave it to believers they will mess it up, the average believer being an untutored clod. He wrote

If he be an ordinary Christian man, his copy would probably contain a number of mistakes. If, on the other hand, he was known to be an apostolic assistant or professional scribe, a very high degree of accuracy could be expected. (p.16)

This lie has been dealt with in the past. We believe that early copying was in the hands of believers until monkish men realized there was money in it. The Enemy of souls has always had enough paid men to wilfully adulterate the word of God.

This “ordinary Christian man” has copied out the first ten chapters of the Gospel of John in longhand and defies any to find a mistake in it. Actually, he made five mistakes, but he spotted them himself and they were corrected before the pages were released. His “copy” is therefore 100% identical to any printed AV Bible.

8000 Differences between the Textus Receptus

and the Nestle-Aland N T Greek Texts

Brother Jack Moorman’s latest book is 8000 Differences. It is a mammoth work of 517 pages on A4.  Each page is in two columns with the Textus Receptus-Scrivener verses in the left-hand column together with the AV reading  and the Nestle-Aland 26,27 is in the right-hand column with the English equivalent. The AV reading is given with each verse with the Greek TR reading under it.  Thus at a glance one can see where there is departure from the AV/TR and what that departure is.

Alas, my copy has arrived without an introduction.            

The Church of the King James Onlyists

A Daily Telegraph journalist (Adam Nicolson; D. T. 27^{th May 2003} )has apparently discovered this Church which, he says, has its headquarters and constituency deep in the South  of the United States. Of course he found no such thing because Bible Believers—which is all that these alleged King James Onlyists are— are found world wide.

During his tour of the U S A for the purpose of promoting his book about the King James Bible, his publishers were careful not to let him meet any members of this Church. The first thing we learn about Nicolson is that he has written a book about the AV Bible but he hasn’t spoken to any of those in the Sates who actually believe it to be the word of God. If he had he might have learned that his opinions, as expressed in his newspaper article, are largely unfounded.

Nicolson’s publishers allowed him to meet only liberal Democrats, steering him away from “fundamentalist—and in effect Republican—America”. These apologised to him for the behaviour of the American government.

So here we have it. Those believers in the Sates “for whom the Authorized Version is not just the most beautiful Bible in English but the only true Bible”, these people who put up Bush and control the U S A, are responsible for all its troubles, including the war in Iraq.

Not having spoken to one of them, Nicolson describes what in his opinion, is their bad attitude. He writes,

All later revisions are nothing but the work of the devil, deliberately distorting the pure Jacobean text¹.

That the 17th-century translators didn't have the most authentic manuscripts to hand², that they didn't have an entirely secure grasp of Hebrew or of the rubbed-down form of Greek in which the New Testament is written³ (the language, according to Charles Bradlaugh⁴, the Victorian atheist, "of illiterate, half-starved visionaries in some dark corner of a Graeco-Syrian slum") is an irrelevance for the King James Onlyists.

And they have an intriguingly complete, fundamentalist argument to support them. God, if He is anything, is in control of what happens in the world⁵. The versions of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures which God provided for the Jacobean scholars, and which formed the basis for the Bible that then spread across the world - there are said to be five billion copies printed - can have been the only text He was interested in promoting. Why else would He have arranged it in that way?

People who think like that would not like my book, which is all about the contingencies and arguments and political motives, the manoeuvring, fixing and consensus-building which lie behind the form and rhetoric of this great and beautiful Bible

1 “All revisions are the work of the devil…” Revisions of the AV Bible, if that is what they are to be called, included the rectification of typological errors; changing of the long “s” for the modern “s”; the altering of the spelling of a handful of words. Modern revisions are far more serious because under the pretence of improving the archaic (Jacobean) language the underlying GREEK text has been altered, and they are not revisions of the AV Bible at all. 

2. Stating that the 17^th Century translators did not have “the most authentic manuscripts to hand” is an undisguised lie. One has only to read The Translators to the Reader to be satisfied about this.

3. The translators were Hebrew and Greek scholars par excellence. The insinuation that the understanding of Hebrew and Greek was limited in the 17^th century has been exposed as a smear. See my History and versions of the Bible pdf. File p4.

4. Why does Nicolson quote Bradlaugh of all people? Bradlaugh was more than an atheist. He was an aggressive God-hater. This is the man who helped establish the National Secular Society. This is the man who in the 19^th century wrote a book advocating birth control. The fruits of his labours are now seen in the butchering of multitudes of unborn babies. He left school at the age of twelve without further education, so his qualification to utter a syllable on the use of the Greek language was nil. 

5. Nicolson thinks all of his King James Onlyists are Calvinistic fatalists. Que sera sera!

In which case they will think that God has changed His mind and maybe now He prefers versions based on the so-called critical text. Those Calvinists who hold to the received text frequently are found to have reservations about the AV Bible, as is evidenced in the TBS camp. Those believers who hold to the perfection of the AV Bible tend not to be Calvinistic.

The fact of 5 billion copies spread across the world is evidence that 5 billion believers have been persuaded that this is indeed God’s book.

Nicolson does not name his book. It is God’s Secretaries: The making of the King James Bible. It is a sequel to Power and Glory; Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible.

Margaret Drabble, reviewing this book in the Financial Review, May 30^th 2003, wrote, “Power and Glory does not claim to be a work of original scholarship, and Nicolson generously acknowledges those who have gone before him.” (Nicoson isn’t even original in his title. Why does he borrow the title of Grahame Greene’s novel about Romish conflict?)

I have more than twenty books on my shelves which give accounts of the making of the King James Bible but none of them use the scathing language concerning King James I and the translators that Nicolson uses in this book and  in  God’s Secretaries.

Nicolson frequently insinuates James I to be a Sodomite but we suggest he has not seen any documentary evidence of this. Alan Taylor, reviewing Power and Glory in the Sunday Herald (6^th April 2003) wrote “James, as Adam Nicolson revels in relating [my italics], cut an unprepossessing figure for a monarch with such power….he was ugly, fidgety, red-haired, peely-wally, histongue too big for his foul mouth, a heavy drinker, ardent hunter and incorrigible harasser of young men”. When I read this kind of stuff I am reminded of the continuing contempt, hostility, and lying wickedness of popery aimed at God’s word, the AV Bible. 

 Nicolson refers also to the evil characters of most of the translators. Richard Thomson was a drunkard, George Abbot a morose and sullen torturer.

Lancelot Andrewes was aceremonialist, practicing pluralism and nepotism. John Cosin was popish [this said to confuse the average reader], John Overall was a man of lust. All the translators are guilty of “losing their tempers” during translation work. Where does this information come from? Nicolson gives an extensive bibliology but does not give the names of the publishers. Many, we think, are RC or Anglo-Catholic. Nicolson quotes Nicholas Lossky in his comments on Lancelot Andrewes. Lossky is described as a Russian Orthodox theologian with Anglican sympathies. He is a member of the Joint Working Group of the World Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church.

Nicolson describes the King James Bible as “a piece of flotsam” (God’s Secretaries; p.63.)….”the only mind that could have produced the KJB is the mind of England itself,” (p.70)[Nicolson is a Scotsman!] ….”the phrases of the KJB are  the product of the passions of the age (p.136).

Nicolson describes evil men as good —Henry Garnet “a good man” (p.116). Garnet was a Jesuit spy who had infiltrated the English cabinet and was hanged for his part in the gunpowder plot.

Nicolson’s attitude to the word of God? He claims not to be an atheist, but not a churchgoer either. If he is not a “churchgoer” why is he opposed to what he calls the Church of the King James Onlyists? Why does it matter to him?  He says Eden is a myth and the Book of Jonah "strange, witty, surreal". He really doesn’t like the Bible which belongs to the Church of God. We wonder, is Nicolson himself a Jesuit?

Bible believers will not regard Nicolson’s works as serious accounts of the making of the King James Bible.

The Perfect Bible in 1610AD

Those who are taking great delight in rubbishing the AV Bible insinuate that if we insist that it is perfect then everything before it must have been imperfect.

Firstly, I haven’t met anyone who insists that a particular edition is perfect. We know that the 1611 AV Bible had a number of faults. None of them had to do with the underlying Hebrew/Greek texts or with the translation itself. They were largely typological, printers errors which could be corrected.

Secondly, the inspired word of God is not limited to a particular language.

Thirdly, we believe God is faithful and has faithfully preserved His word for the Church, though it may be found at any particular time limited to a particular area, people, or language in regard to perfection. We are speaking of The Bible rather than multitudes of manuscripts

One of the earliest Bibles was the Old Latin Version (Vetus Itala). It was translated from the Greek text described by some as Byzantine and which eventually became known as the Received Text. It was available before the end of the second century AD and was used by the primitive churches throughout the Roman Empire. Therefore Christians in Great Britain had this Bible and refused the “Modern Version”  i.e. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate when the papist “missionaries” began to arrive after 250AD.

This Old Latin Bible held its own against Jerome’s Vulgate for a thousand years in Europe— until Latin itself became a dead language.

We challenge the Bible critics to list its imperfections.    

Naming Names

PRIVATE REBUKE FOR PUBLIC FALSE TEACHING? -- Some think that if one
Christian differs with the writings or public statements of another
Christian on a point of doctrine, without rancour or any problem between
them as persons, he is wrong for stating the differences publicly before
going privately to the brother with whom he disagrees. That is a
misconception. First of all, there is no unreconciled condition between
them; they simply differ. Secondly, therefore, there is no matter of church
discipline involved. Thirdly, even if this were a matter of discipline, the
first party wrote or spoke publicly -- he put it before the church or the
world; he did not speak privately. For that reason it is as appropriate for
the second brother to write or speak as publicly as the first did in
refuting what he thinks is a wrong interpretation of the Scriptures and
which, therefore, he believes may hurt the church if he doesn't. [Jay
Adams] Jesus, Paul, and John named names, exposed error, and publicly
rebuked errorists. They did this in love and concern for those who might be
deceived into following such leaders. Fundamentalists have limited media
access today, but must use available means to expose error affecting all
believers -- and continue to confront false teaching in the same public
arena as it is taught. (Calvary Contender, June 15, 1998)

Letters

Dear Ron

I wanted to wish you a very fine and encouraging summer. Enclosed are brochures on Mr Jay P Green and the so-called Modern KJV. Please warn all our like-minded brethren about the “Modern KJV”. You see, Mr Jay P Green has been deceived and seduced by modern scholarship. He also believes in the false Calvinistic teaching of “Limited Atonement” which is pure heresy.

Mr Green also believes that 1 John 5: 7 is an interpolation; that Isaiah 14: 11-14 doesn’t refer to Lucifer (Satan). Sad! The Jesuits could find Mr Green to be a useful tool to deceive unsuspecting Protestants. How sad! You can write to Mr Green at the address on the brochures [Sovereign Grace Publishers Inc.; P.O. Box 4998; Lafayette; IN 47903; USA]

Please let your readers know about this!

Yours in Jesus,

L.W.Jr.

Calif.

Dear brother

I do indeed endorse your letter. Jay Green is the editor of the Interlinear Bible and is the author of many books dealing with the issue of modern bible versions. He holds to the Majority Text view and believes there are 1500 places where the Received Text should be changed.

He has produced The Modern King James Version of the Bible which he claims is an update of the AV. He claims on his website that if it were not for his great work the KJV “would fade away”!

Yet he shows the same misunderstanding of Scripture found among most Bible critics. “Easter” is changed to “Passover” (a simple reading of the context will show this to be a nonsensical alteration). “Jesus” is changed to “Joshua” in Hebrews 4: 8, because Green thought the AV translators were wrong to retain the Greek form of the name as it appeared before them in the Greek manuscript.   

Yours, Ron

Ron