The Origin of the Modern Bible Translations

[0:00] We're going to pick back up here this evening with Dr. Sorensen, and we appreciate him coming and going through these things. And just do make a note, if you are interested in this stuff, they do have some slips back there.

[0:13] You can get the books. I think a lot of the books that they brought have already been gone, but if you want some, they're not gone completely. You can get them ordered, okay? And so they'll be back at the table to get that.

[0:24] So I encourage you to do that. Lots of good stuff there to follow up on, on this material here, even tonight. And so we'll go ahead and have Brother Sorensen come and share with us tonight here as we continue on.

[0:40] Well, amen. Good to see you here on this Tuesday night. Good crowd here, and I'm excited about being here at Plains Baptist Church. As the pastor said, the book table's kind of picked over, but you can.

[0:53] I don't have one with me, but Pam will give you a little yellow slip. You can fill it out, and we'll ship them either to your house or to the church, whichever. And I just wanted to mention two books. One's back at the table called Broad is the Way.

[1:06] You've all heard of fundamental colleges and churches, which in some cases have gone away. In other cases, the churches have gone very liberal and contemporary and become rock and roll churches.

[1:17] And I'm talking about solid fundamental churches. And there is a reason. By the way, one of the things that happens is they change the Bible. And another thing is they change the music.

[1:28] But anyway, that book is back there, Broad is the Way. It's used in Bible colleges around the country. Then another book that's already gone off the table, but just to tell you a little bit about it, it's entitled Have a Heavenly Marriage.

[1:39] Pam and I have been married for 54 years, and we have had a heavenly marriage. And folks, it's all her fault. But I wrote a book about that years ago, and it's published by the Sword of the Lord.

[1:53] It's been in print now for about 28 years, something like that. And let me just tell you a little bit about Pam, how she got saved. Pam grew up in a godless home.

[2:04] They weren't bad people, but they for sure were ungodly people. There was no religion of any flavor whatsoever in the home, nothing. But when she was a teenager, they had moved from Duluth to Minneapolis.

[2:19] And when she was 15 years old, a classmate at a public high school invited her to a youth activity at the old Fourth Baptist Church in Minneapolis. And in those years, back in the 1960s, Fourth Baptist probably had one of the most powerful youth programs in the nation.

[2:36] And their policy was that if that, and they had several youth pastors, but their policy was that they'd have a youth activity every Saturday night and do something, but if the kids didn't bring some unsafe visitors, they canceled the activity.

[2:54] And so there almost always were visitors. And so Pam got invited to one of these activities. They went roller skating on a Saturday night in the suburbs of Minneapolis. And one of her friend's cousins said to Pam, as they were getting ready to go, whatever you do, don't get saved.

[3:12] Pam thought, saved? Saved from what? I'm not drowning. And so they did their roller skating, and then the youth pastor, I guess they took their skates off.

[3:24] I wasn't there, but they took their skates off and set all the kids down on the floor, and he preached. He just didn't have devotions. He preached. And after preaching a salvation message, gave an invitation, and they had an accordion there, and sang verses of Just As I Am.

[3:38] And on the last verse of Just As I Am, Pam got up and went forward, and a lady from the church sat down and led her to Christ on that Saturday night. And folks, when she got saved, she got saved.

[3:50] And she hit the ground running. Arrangments were made to pick her up on the Sunday school bus the next morning. And within a year, by the time she was 16 years old, she was leading one of the junior churches there at Fourth Baptist Church, a big church.

[4:07] They had several layers of junior church. And she was leading the four- and five-year-old junior church program. And she's been going full blast in children's work ever since. But she's a sweetheart, and I'm so glad, thankful the Lord gave her to me.

[4:22] By the way, her father was an American Indian, in fact, grew up on the reservation there in northwestern Wisconsin. And her mother is Finnish. Her parents came from Finland.

[4:33] They were grandparents. And they were atheists. But anyway, so her mother was a Finn. Her father was an Indian. That makes her a Findian. And we've got a bunch of them up in our part of the world.

[4:48] Anyway, take your Bible this evening and turn to 2 Corinthians 6 and verse 17. We're going to read one verse here this evening. 2 Corinthians 6, beginning in verse 17.

[5:01] 2 Corinthians 6 and verse 17. Wherefore, come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive you.

[5:14] And, Father, this evening, again, as we would look at this matter of the Bible translation controversy and the texts that underlie, Lord, in this hour tonight, my name be glorified and your word magnified.

[5:29] And, Father, help me to help your people to understand the issues tonight. And I ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Now, as I said Sunday, the issue is not that I like this translation better than the King James, or this translation is easier to read, or maybe this translation is more accurate.

[5:45] Folks, that's not the issue. The issue is that there are two different Greek texts. On the one hand is the traditional received text, and it's from whence the King James Bible is translated.

[5:58] We'll see tomorrow night. This can be traced right back to the years not long after the death of the Apostle John. On the other hand, all, and this is just a fraction of the modern Bible, there are literally scores of them.

[6:12] But almost all of them are based on the modern critical text, and we're going to talk about this tonight. And we'll see that the modern critical text, you say, why do they call it the modern critical text?

[6:23] Folks, because it's the text of the critics. And we're going to see that most of the people associated with the critical text, from whence these modern Bibles come, most of these people, it's a litany of heresy, apostasy, liberalism, in some cases the occult.

[6:45] And in one case, there's strong suspicion of adultery. I mean, these are the people that are giving us this. Now, I am a fundamentalist. And the twin pillars of fundamentalism are, one, an adherence to cardinal Orthodox Christian doctrine, and number two, separating from apostasy and heresy.

[7:07] I am a fundamentalist by conviction. Some folks today are nervous about using that term. But, folks, there's a rich history there behind it. We won't get into that tonight. But, again, the critical text crowd, the editors, and the origins of it is a who's who of liberals and apostates, and heretics.

[7:25] And so tonight, let's just talk a little bit about the origins and the editors and the developers of the critical text. We touched on last night how that Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, and if you haven't been here, there are two major manuscripts that undergird the modern critical text.

[7:43] One is called Sinaiticus. It was found at Mount Sinai in Egypt. And the other was called Vaticanus. It was found in the Vatican. And those two manuscripts comprise about 98% of the modern critical text.

[7:58] And there's about 45 other fragments that have been woven into the modern critical text. But Sinaiticus and Vaticanus had their roots in there from whence they were copied.

[8:11] They were copied from something, even though, as we saw Sunday morning, they're really not old. Sinaiticus was made in 1840, and Vaticanus probably in 1435. And by biblical standards, that is not old.

[8:25] But the sourcing of these goes back to Alexandria, Egypt. We touched on this last night. And how that Alexandria, Egypt was the hotbed or the seat of the philosophy called Gnosticism.

[8:40] And we saw last night that Gnosticism, as among many other things, but one part of it is that they believe that anything physical or made of matter is evil, and only that which is spiritual is good.

[8:53] And therefore, they did not believe or they do not believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ because he had a physical body. That is heresy. But that has profoundly influenced these manuscripts, and we won't go much at this point or at this moment.

[9:11] But the very origins of the critical text are rooted in Gnosticism. Well, if we fast forward a little further into history, coming into the 1700s, things were developing in Germany.

[9:28] And folks, in the last 300 years, a lot of bad stuff has come out of Germany. Not the least of which was the Nazi Party in the 20th century. And it was rooted in the fact that the religious intelligentsia in Germany in particular had rejected the word of God.

[9:49] And it was called German rationalism. Now, German rationalism today would be just modern liberalism.

[9:59] But the philosophy was that if something in the Bible is not rational, we'll forget what the Bible says and go with that which is rational.

[10:11] For example, in the Bible where it talks about Israel causing the Red Sea, the rationalists or the liberals will say, well, it really was the Reed Sea and it was only ankle deep.

[10:24] Well, what happened to the Egyptians when they went through that ankle deep sea? Or they say, well, when Jesus walked on the Sea of Galilee, what really happened is that there were rocks just beneath the surface of the water.

[10:40] You're just stepping from rock to rock to rock. Have you ever stepped on rocks underwater? Yeah, they're slippery, aren't they? But, I mean, they try to explain away. And so rationalism does not believe in the virgin birth.

[10:53] They do not believe in the inspiration of the scriptures. They do not believe in the miracles of the Bible. They certainly don't believe in a literal hell. Everybody's going to go to heaven, but for sure nobody's going to go to hell.

[11:04] And it's just liberalism. They denied the deity of Christ. They denied the physical bodily resurrection of Christ. This is German rationalism. Now, I belabor that point because this philosophy of rationalism had a profound influence of English editors by the name of Westcott and Hort.

[11:25] We'll come to it in just a moment. But Westcott and Hort had great respect to a German rationalist by the name of Johann Griesbach.

[11:35] And he produced what was probably the first critical text back in the 18th century. But Westcott and Hort were, in their biography written by their sons, said they venerated the name of Griesbach, a liberal, a rationalist.

[11:50] It tells us something about Westcott and Hort. Well, another German rationalist that is a part of the story, and we spent some time on this on Sunday morning, was a man by the name of Tischendorf.

[12:02] And Tischendorf was a German rationalist. He was a liberal Lutheran. And he began with a premise that we have lost the original documents of the New Testament, lost the autographs.

[12:15] And therefore, he was on a mission. He set out on a mission to find old manuscripts, to find out what the New Testament really said. Folks, I don't need to find an old manuscript. I already know what it says. It's right there.

[12:28] He did not believe in preservation, much less verbal preservation. We saw last night where Jesus said, heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words, plural, shall not pass away.

[12:38] Tischendorf did not believe that. And so as we saw Sunday morning, he wound up going to Mount Sinai, the Greek Orthodox monastery there, and cooked up this story of finding a manuscript in the wastebasket that they're using for kindling.

[12:54] And I won't go into that story far here tonight. And what he in fact did is stole it and took part of it away in 1843 and took the rest of it away in 1859. But the point is, here was a rationalist who also was dishonest and frankly a thief.

[13:13] Nice guy. And he also went to the Vatican in 1843, and at a time when the Catholics were very hostile to Protestants, but nevertheless he had a very cozy relationship with Tischendorf, and allowed him to copy an old manuscript in the Vatican library that came to be known as Vaticanus, the Book of the Vatican.

[13:35] Now both these manuscripts, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, made their way to England in the 1850s and 1860s.

[13:47] And there were two British scholars, and we're going to park on these for a while tonight. One was the name of Bruce Voss Westcott, or just Dr. Westcott, and the other was Fenton John Anthony Hort, or Dr. Hort, and more commonly referred to Westcott and Hort.

[14:02] And these are significant figures. I'm going to drop a lot of names tonight and have over the last couple of days, but on the bad guy side, you ought to remember Westcott and Hort. And if you've studied the issue at all, you know that they're key figures.

[14:15] And so they took this, they were given copies, not the actual manuscript, but they're given copies of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, and from about 1851 to 1881, now they didn't do it full time, Dr. Hort was a professor at Oxford University, and Dr. Westcott was a bishop in the Church of England.

[14:35] But over the next 30 years, not full time, but part time, they worked on co-leading these two manuscripts. And by the way, though they are both supposedly Alexandrian manuscripts, they differed in thousands of places.

[14:48] In fact, one British scholar, Dr. Burgon, said that it's easier to find two verses that disagree, or agree than those that disagree. I mean, it's just riddled with contradictions.

[14:59] But anyway, and so they labored for 30 years, and in 1881, they released their revised Greek text, their new Greek text of the New Testament, based primarily on Vaticanus and Sinaiticus.

[15:17] Here it is. And this has become the granddaddy. As we'll see in a few minutes, it evolved into, and that's a good word in this case, very accurate, evolved into the modern critical text, because they're very similar, though they're having some changes.

[15:33] But let's talk about Westcott and Hort tonight, because they are truly the granddaddies of the modern critical text. As I mentioned a moment ago, they venerated the name of Griesbach, who was one of the original German rationalists.

[15:47] What some folks don't want to hear and don't want to believe, but it's verifiable historically, and that is that Dr. Westcott and Dr. Hort, over those 30 years that they were putting together their Greek text, get the right book out here, working on their Greek text, they also were dabbling in the occult, and that's not a suspicion or an allegation, that is a fact.

[16:13] Their sons both wrote extensive biographies of their fathers, and both sons very definitively talked about how their fathers were involved in the occult, seances, trying to raise the spirits of the dead.

[16:34] And it was fashionable in England of that era. They founded or were on the ground floor in England of an organization called the Ghostly Guild. They believed in ghosts and tried to resurrect ghosts in their seances.

[16:50] And that Ghostly Guild later was changed to the name the Society of Psychical Research. You can go online and read about it. It still exists. And in the history of the Society of Psychical Research, two of the organizers of it originally were Dr. Westcott and Dr. Hort.

[17:06] But what is particularly concerning is that they practice something called the communion of the saints. Now that sounds like an innocuous thought and a religious thought, the communion of the saints.

[17:25] But remember with me that in England, and I've seen this in New England as well, in upstate New York, we don't much see it in the Midwest, but quite a few churches will have a cemetery right next door to the church.

[17:38] I mean, the next lot over is a cemetery where members of the church are buried. And in some of the large cathedrals of the Anglican Church in England, Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral and other major churches like that in London, they sometimes buried important church leaders under the floor.

[17:58] And you can go today and tour Westminster Abbey, and there in the marble floor will be plaques of that Saint so-and-so or whatever is buried beneath. Now, what is significant about that is that Westcott and Hort, along with others, would go into such cathedrals at night, at midnight, on a dark night with all the lights turned out.

[18:20] Sounds kind of spooky, doesn't it? And try and conjure up the spirits of those departed dead. And they reportedly did. Now, I don't think they were communing with the spirits of the departed dead, folks.

[18:33] They were communing with another type of spirit, and that is demons. But they would commune with them, converse with them.

[18:45] Folks, that is of the devil. And here are the guys that are in the process of developing this modern Greek text, which is going to become the foundation of all these modern Bibles.

[18:59] That is verifiable history. But most people don't know about that. And so, in the year 1881, Dr. Westcott and Hort released their new Greek text.

[19:12] And we saw last night some of the 16 verses that are omitted from it. And just a few of the many verses that have been altered or changed by changing a word or adding a word and mostly just omitting words.

[19:25] And particularly, a disconnect between Jesus as Lord and Jesus as Christ. And, well, that was in 1881. Incidentally, in 1883, in England, based on the Westcott and Hort text, came the first modern language Bible.

[19:46] It was called the English Revised Version, the E-R-V. Now, I doubt if you could find that anywhere today. You can even go on the internet. You might read about it. But I doubt if you can order it.

[19:58] I think it's totally, completely out of hand. And so many of these modern language Bibles, like I said last night, have a shelf life of about 30 years. And then another one comes along. But anyway, that was the first modern language translation in England.

[20:11] Well, let's cross the pond. Let's come to America. In the year 1901, an American church leader, again, a theological liberal, took Westcott and Hort's text and had it translated into what became known as the American Standard Version, the A-S-V.

[20:36] When I was in seminary in the late 1960s, when I was in seminary, we were told that the A-S-V, the American Standard, was the bedrock of biblical honesty.

[20:49] Well, it was based on the critical text. And I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an A-S-V today. Now, you can find a new American Standard Bible, which revised the original American Standard.

[21:02] And we'll get to that here in just a moment. But anyway, Philip Schaaf, let's talk about him for a minute. Not only was he a liberal theologian, but Philip Schaaf, in 1893, organized the first world parliament parliament of religions.

[21:20] Now, if you recall in American history, in 1893, was the Columbian Exposition there on Lake Michigan on the south side of Chicago. It was a world fair. And people came from all over the world to the Columbian Exposition.

[21:34] One building still survives, and that is the Museum of Science and Industry there on the lakefront in Chicago. But anyway, Philip Schaaf organized the world parliament of religions.

[21:46] And he brought together Catholics and Protestants and Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists and Confucianists and American Indian religion and African Native religion and all the religions of the world.

[22:00] He tried to bring them together. Folks, that's the beginning of the ecumenical movement. And guess who was going to be the final leader of that ecumenical movement? That's the Antichrist.

[22:11] Now, Schaaf wasn't the Antichrist or the false prophet. But he began the movement, and it's still out there lurking in the shadows. And the liberal elements, and the Catholic Church particularly, is trying to get all the Protestants to come home to Rome.

[22:26] And they make no pretense about that. And so, there is the English Revised Version in England. 1901, the American Standard Version in America. Well, let's go back to Germany.

[22:38] Because there are other important characters coming on the scene there of Westcott and Hort had already gone on to their reward, which I don't think was in heaven. I don't think they were born again, man. But in Germany, there was a father and son team by the name of Eberhard and Erwin Nessel.

[22:55] I can't think of Nessel's chocolate. It's spelled that way. I don't think it has anything to do with those guys. But anyway, Eberhard and Erwin Nessel. And the father died, but the younger man continued to be tinkering with the text.

[23:09] And as a new fragment of a manuscript was found someplace in Greece or in Egypt or someplace, then he and another man I'll mention in a moment would integrate that, incorporate that.

[23:26] And so, from then to now, this critical text keeps evolving. I hold in my hand here tonight a Nessel Alon Greek New Testament. And the guy he collaborated with was a guy by the name of Kurt Alon.

[23:39] I'll come back to him in just a second here. But the Nessel Alon text today is in its 28th edition. That means since the 1920s till now it's gone through 28 changes.

[23:52] In the modern sense of editions, there are some of my books in their second or third edition. That means we changed something. There was a mistake in the book or we added something. So it's a little different than it was before.

[24:05] But the Nessel Alon text today is in its 20th edition. The text has been changing about every four or five years. For a hundred years. I thought the word of God never changed, folks. But in their world, as they find a scrap here and a fragment there and they thought, well, we probably didn't get it right before, they keep monkeying with it, tinkering with it, changing it.

[24:25] And so, in the years before World War II, Erwin Nessel began collaborating with a man by the name of Kurt Alland, another German.

[24:39] Kurt Alland was on the ground floor of what then was called the Neo-Orthodox Movement, which is just another flavor of liberalism. Neo-Orthodox, it would use orthodox terms, that is correct terms, but in part a liberal meaning to them.

[24:56] And just a different type of liberalism. Kurt Alland was married, but he took up with his secretary, divorced his wife, and married his secretary.

[25:08] Nice guy. And he and his second wife, Barbara, continued along with the Erwin Nessel to work on their Nessel-Alland Greek New Testament.

[25:21] After World War II, and you recall some of the history there, he wound up on the east side of Germany, which became known as East Germany, and you older folks here tonight will remember that.

[25:36] East Germany, I mean, was not only a communist nation, of course, it was a Soviet state, a puppet satellite state, but it was probably the most communist state in the world. I mean, East Germany was the communist of the communists.

[25:50] And Kurt Alland went to work for the communists. He's the guy that's giving us this modern Greek text from which these Bibles are coming from. Taught in a communist university there in East Germany.

[26:04] Later went to West Berlin, escaped to West Berlin. But from the 23rd edition of the Nessel Alon text came the New American Standard Bible in about 1863.

[26:17] And when I was in seminary long ago, that's back when Abraham Lincoln was president, by the way. Oh, I said 1963, not 1863. But, but we were told in seminary, you ought to get the New American Standard.

[26:33] And I did. I didn't know any better. I was taught and trained and schooled in this philosophy of the critical text. And the general philosophy was a smorgasbord of Bibles.

[26:46] In other words, you go to a buffet restaurant or a smorgasbord. They don't have smorgasbord anymore, do they? I mean, that's a Swedish name for a buffet restaurant. But you go to a buffet restaurant and you pick and choose what you want.

[26:57] Well, back then, and it still is true today, probably even more so today, you pick and choose which Bible you want. And they don't care as long as it's based on the critical text. But, oh, don't pick anything that's based on the traditional text.

[27:10] And so, Kerdeland migrated to the West with his next wife. And they continued up, he died late in the 20th century.

[27:24] It was before the turn of the century. I forget the exact date. Now, as a side note, we've been focusing almost exclusively on the New Testament. But there is also a critical text of the Old Testament.

[27:37] Now, the traditional text of the Old Testament from which the King James Bible is based is called the Ben-Kaim Masoretic text. The Masoretes were scrupulously careful in copying the Hebrew text to the point if they made a mistake, they would tear up the page, throw it away, and start all over again.

[27:58] Masoret would be M-A-S, I'm not sure if there's two S's, I think there's two S's, M-A-S-S-O-R-E-T-E. Maybe there's one S. I have to check here.

[28:09] I don't see it on my notes. The Masoretic text and the particular was Ben-Kaim, that was the Hebrew name. The son of Kaim, Ben in Hebrew means a son, the son of Kaim.

[28:20] That's the traditional text. Now, there is a differing, a slightly different, it's not as egregious as the New Testament problem, but there's a differing critical text of the Old Testament called the Ben-Asher Masoretic text.

[28:36] And it's based on a manuscript found in Russia and it's called the Leningrad Codex or the Leningrad Manuscript. And they give credence to that because it supposedly is the oldest Hebrew manuscript, you know, the oldest and best business.

[28:50] And it was developed in Germany again by a man by the name of Rudolf Kittel, K-I-T-T-E-L. His father, Gerhard Kittel, was a Nazi and was a part of the Nazi party.

[29:08] But anyway, Rudolf Kittel produced this new Hebrew critical text. Are you ready for what I'm going to tell you? He called it Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. I know you're blessed in hearing that.

[29:18] But it just means the Hebrew Bible or Stuttgart. That's where he worked and lived and did his work. But that is the text of almost all the modern, the Old Testament texts of the modern Bibles.

[29:32] And some of the things notable about that is that Goliath has changed to Elhanan. Well, I thought Goliath was killed by David. But they talk about Elhanan. But what is particularly egregious is in Isaiah 53, 53, 8, where it describes the suffering Messiah, they change the pronoun so it's referring to Israel as being the suffering servant, which is significant.

[30:00] I mean, if you witness to a Jew, I mean, you point out how that here they're talking about the Messiah and how he suffered. And they say, no, no, no, that's talking about Israel and how it has suffered. And so that's a major problem in Isaiah 53.

[30:11] But anyway, so that's the critical text of the Old Testament. But again, as we've so far gone and we're not done yet, the critical text is a listing of rationalists, in some cases unbelievers.

[30:23] We didn't talk about Karl Lachman. He was another German guy monkeying with the text around the time of Westcott and Hort. German, or Karl Lachman, studied the Bible, but he just believed it to be another old book, like you'd study Plato or Socrates or something like that.

[30:43] Again, unbelief. Unbelief. Liberalism. The occult. But it continues. Karl Lachman died late in the 20th century. But before he died, he was involved in some other things which I'll tell you about here momentarily.

[30:58] Coming across the ocean to America once again, out on the east coast was a man by the name of Dr. Bruce Metzger. Dr. Metzger taught at Princeton Theological Seminary, which is in New Jersey, basically just across the river from Philadelphia.

[31:16] But Princeton Theological Seminary, which is a Presbyterian seminary, but what's significant about Princeton is that it was and is one of the most liberal seminaries in the world.

[31:29] And he went from being a professor at Princeton to the dean at Princeton and eventually the president at Princeton Seminary, which is an adjunct of Princeton University.

[31:41] Bruce Metzger was the managing editor of the Reader's Digest Condensed Bible. Any of you remember that back in about 1987? And what Bruce Metzger did, he was the managing editor, the controlling editor.

[31:56] He chopped out 40% of the Bible and said it's irrelevant. And so we had the condensed Bible. Doesn't Revelation 22 and verse 19 have something to say about taking away from the words of this book?

[32:10] Yes, it does. But Metzger chopped out 40% of the Bible for the Reader Digest Company. Well, in the late 1950s and early 1960, Bruce Metzger, Kurt Alland, Cardinal, as in Catholic Cardinal Martini, another man by the name of Alan Wickren and Matthew Black, these five men, formed a textual committee of the United Bible Society Now, you hear the word United Bible Society, you think, boy, that must be something good.

[32:40] It's a Bible Society. Well, folks, it was liberal from the beginning, from day one. And they produced what came to be known as the United Bible Society Greek Text, or abbreviated UBS.

[32:54] And from the UBS, about third edition, comes the NIV. Now, the United Bible Society text and the Nessel Alon text are kissing cousins.

[33:04] It's almost no difference. Very, very similar, but they're different flavors and published by different parties. And I sometimes say this because I'm an author and a publisher.

[33:15] Folks, being an author is literary. Being a publisher is business. And business means dollars and cents. I mean, you're signing contracts and hiring printing companies and you're hiring advertising and you're selling it.

[33:32] I think the reason between the Nessel Alon and the UBS was money. And that's the rationale behind many of the modern translations.

[33:44] That's crass, but that's just the bottom line. As they often say, follow the money. And so, today, the United Bible Society text, the UBS, and the Nessel Alon text are the twin kissing cousins, almost identical.

[34:02] But the basic starting point in all of this was Westcott and Hort. And it's not deviated much. Whereas Westcott and Hort was about 100% Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, today, it's about 98% Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, with the other 2%, like I say, of little fragments that have been found here and there along the way.

[34:23] And so, these gentlemen have all gone on to their reward. And to be honest with you, I don't think any of them were born again. Whether it's dealing in the occult or being a radical liberal or divorcing your wife to marry your secretary, and I mean, there's just a litany of ungodliness.

[34:42] And folks will say, well, you know, when you go to the dentist, you don't much care about the dentist personal life. Well, maybe. I mean, if I knew my dentist was involved in all that stuff, I'd probably change.

[34:55] But folks, when it comes to the production, the printing and the publishing of the Word of God, that does mean something. And my Bible says, come out from among them and be ye separate.

[35:08] Touch not the unclean thing. Now, they have all departed the scene. But there's another man in America today who's continuing to monkey with the text, tinker with the critical text.

[35:23] His name is Bart Ehrman. He is the leading textual critic in the world today. And let me tell you a little bit about his lineage and his legacy. He began his educational career back at the old Moody Bible Institute in Chicago when Moody Bible Institute called itself a fundamentalist institution.

[35:43] They don't today, unfortunately. But he began as a fundamentalist. And then he went to Wheaton College, which is a suburb on the western suburbs of Chicago. And Wheaton College, oh my, for the last hundred years, has been an evangelical, that is a new evangelical college.

[36:02] Evangelicalism or new evangelicalism is a step between being fundamental and liberal. It's moving in the leftward direction. And so, Bart Ehrman went to Wheaton and he came out of there as a new evangelical.

[36:15] Got his master's degree. But then he decided that he was going to go and get his PhD. And so he enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary and sat at the feet of Bruce Metzger.

[36:28] And he became a liberal. Today, Bruce Metzger is an agnostic. An agnostic.

[36:41] He said that if God inspired the Bible, then he also would have preserved it. But since he did not preserve it, he did not inspire it either. Folks, that's heresy.

[36:54] He's on record in one of his books as saying that this God, if he exists, cannot be Jesus Christ or the God of the Bible. Well, that's blasphemy.

[37:07] But that's where the logic of the critical text leads. If scripture is not inspired, then it hasn't been preserved and we really don't have an anchor. Folks, I have an anchor.

[37:20] That's right there. It never changes. It's the word of God. I do not believe that God preserved his word through the prophets of Baal.

[37:32] But what we've tracked here tonight is essentially the prophets of Baal. I mean, Gnosticism being at the roots of Vaticanus and Atticus, the two major manuscripts.

[37:44] German rationalism, which is basically liberalism. Westcott and Hort, who, by the way, forgot to mention, they were part of the broad church party of the Church of England.

[37:56] Now, you say, what's the broad church party? In the Church of England hundred and some years ago, and by the way, Church of England was much different in the 19th century than it was around 1600 when King James came on the scene.

[38:07] We'll get into that tomorrow night. But the broad church party was a segment of the Church of England which people could voluntarily associate with. It was radically liberal, denying the inspiration of scripture, denying a literal creation, denying the miracles, denying the deity of Christ, denying the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, denying a literal hell.

[38:30] I mean, that's liberalism. National Council of Churches today on Easter say, well, you know, Jesus didn't really arise physically, he arose spiritually. Well, that's unscriptural.

[38:41] But that was the broad church party and that is where Westcott and Hort voluntarily joined. And so, there's been Gnosticism and German rationalism and liberalism and the occult and you get down to Bart Ehrman even an agnostic.

[38:58] What a litany. I want nothing to do with that. And that's just the external. We saw a little bit of the internal. We're going to see just a bit more in just a second. But I believe that the traditional received text is the preserved Word of God.

[39:13] Now, you can't read Greek, but God has seen to it in our language that he's given to us in English. And the English translation has begun in about 1516 through William Tyndale.

[39:25] We're going to go into this, by the way, much detail tomorrow night. But it went through about 80 years and we talked about seven different translations last night. And here is the purified final English translation.

[39:39] Now, someone will say to me, and often ask if we have a question and answer time, Brother Sorensen, what about the New King James Version? The NKJV.

[39:51] It purports to be based on the received text, the traditional text. And they did begin there. But if you go pick up a New King James, I think there's one on the stack here.

[40:05] But if you go and pick up a New King James Bible, I'm not talking about the economy models you'll find in a hotel desk drawer or bed stand drawer. But if you buy a little better quality New King James, which has marginal notes and most of the later, the better versions or better editions do, marginal notes and footnotes, you'll notice that there are numerous places in the New Testament where there'll be a citation footnote out in the margin that says NU.

[40:36] NU, NU, NU, NU. It's all over peppered. Say, what in the world is NU? Well, do you recall that we talked about the Nessel-Alon text?

[40:49] Take the first letter N. Talked about the UBS text, United Bible Society text. Take the first letter U, NU. It's an abbreviation for the critical text.

[41:01] And the New King James editors reference you to be the reader to the critical text over and over and over again. And in my view, the New King James is a compromised Bible.

[41:17] It's an adulterated Bible. And folks, well, it's a little easier to read. Folks, why compromise when you can have the truth and pure word of God instead of something that's been watered down and adulterated by many cross-referencing and I believe in some cases actually translating from the critical text at various points.

[41:37] I'll stick with my King James Bible. Now, I want to do something here tonight and it'll be a little different than what we did last night, but I'd like for seven volunteers to come up with the pulpit.

[41:48] And it won't be a trick like it was last night. I need to really, seriously, I'd like seven guys to come up here right now. There's one, there's two, there's three, four, five, or is that six?

[42:07] I think we need at least one more. I'll even take a lady. Here it comes, another one. Okay, good. Now, there's a stack of Bibles there gentlemen, I want you each to take one. These are all modern Bibles.

[42:19] I think there's one little one there. Okay. Now, let's turn, everybody turn here tonight to Romans chapter five.

[42:29] We could go anywhere and do this, but I'll just turn to Romans five. It's kind of an interesting point. Romans chapter five. Okay, does everybody have it? All right, on the count of three, I want all of you to read out loud.

[42:46] We'll just read the first three verses. Okay, Romans chapter five. All right, one, two, three. Okay, what did you just hear?

[43:05] Give me a word that just illustrates what you just heard. Confusion. Confusion. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. But that's what's going on today.

[43:16] It's confusion. And you go into other churches and sometimes there'll be seven different translations out there in the pew. And it's hard to memorize scripture when there's such confusion.

[43:30] Thy word is truth. His words endure forever. Stick to the old King James. Now, tomorrow night, now tonight we've fallen the lineage and the track of the liberals, the apostates who have given us the modern critical text.

[43:47] Tomorrow night, we're going to follow the lineage of the received text. In some cases, men who gave their lives so that we can have the Bible in our own language.

[44:01] People who were literally burned at the stake. And it wasn't just William Tyndale. There were others. And we're going to see, in contrast, a godly lineage of people who, when they studied the New Testament, they got saved.

[44:15] Erasmus, for example, we'll get into tomorrow night, was a Catholic priest, but he got saved, and by the time he was near the end of his life and his career, he'd basically become a Baptist.

[44:27] Folks, if all you have is the book, if all you have is the word of God and you study it, you'll become a Baptist. I mean, if you don't go off in some other theology and matrix of somebody else's theological ideas, but Erasmus became a Baptist.

[44:42] And we're going to see similar things. of men who studied the New Testament so they could print it, read it, and got saved.

[44:55] Led others to Christ. And so we'll see tomorrow night the life of King James, for example, which in his early years, he was a godly man.

[45:05] Later in his life, he kind of went off the rails, but in his early years, when he authorized the King James Bible, he was a godly man. man. We'll see the character of the translators of the King James Bible.

[45:23] They were godly men. Men who are not only erudite in linguistics, but they were godly in their character, and they loved the Lord. It is such a profound difference from the group that we saw tonight.

[45:38] Well, come back tomorrow night, same time, same place, same station, and we'll have a good time tomorrow night. Father, thank you for the word of God. Thank you that we can rely on how you have transmitted your word to us to this day.

[45:51] And bless these good folks who've come out on a weeknight. Bring them back again tomorrow night, and I ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.

[46:03] Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.