Bible Babel by Ruckman Dr. Peter S

Author:Ruckman, Dr. Peter S. [Ruckman, Dr. Peter S.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: BB Bookstore
Published: 2011-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The “Older Manuscript” Hoax

One of the many mythological legends passed down from campfire to campfire, by one liberal to another, is that the older a thing is, the more accurate it is. Of course, these foxhunters reverse this when it comes to moral standards and English translations of the Bible. The older the English bibles are (like 1611, for example), the poorer they are supposed to be. (At least this is the thinking applied at the deadline of 1611.) They always say that the further back we go, the more intolerant and superstitious people were, but NOW we are learning to become “broad minded,” and we “accept” certain taboos as really “wholesome.” You see, the contradictions are not in the King James Bible; they are in its critics and revisors.

The International Bible Encyclopedia (p. 2955) says plainly that, “Later copies really represent a more ancient reading...in some cases,” and this is admitted by Hort (see Pickering’s work on The Identity of the New Testament Text). This statement is an admission by scholars themselves that age is not the absolute or final standard in determining which manuscript shall be used in deciding a passage. Other factors must be considered, and it takes more than AGE to qualify a correction of the AV text. For example, Dean Burgon, more than one hundred years ago, postulated that the number of manuscripts bearing witness to a reading should be considered, the variety of evidence to a reading should be considered, the continuity of that variety throughout history should be considered, and the respectability of that witness should be considered. The “respectability” of the witnesses is what broke Hort’s back, for the “respectable” crowd that suckered in A. T. Robertson, R. A. Torrey, and the faculty members of Bob Jones University consisted of the popes, archbishops, cardinals, Jesuits, inquisitors, and such respectable characters as Bloody Mary, Charles V, Louis XIV, the Council of Trent, and those who taught the immaculate conception and the assumption of Mary.

It is absolutely essential that the Bible believer grasp this truth, for the accepted authority today in the field of manuscript evidence is the Westcott and Hort text—a text that accepts a Roman Catholic manuscript from the fourth century as the final “say-so” against the Authorized Version’s Textus Receptus, Nestle states it quite clearly when he says that the Vatican manuscript (B) should have “precedence” in choosing readings. To demonstrate this precedence, you will find the Vatican manuscript used with less than five hundred other witnesses (see Nestle’s critical apparatus) to overthrow readings that sometimes have as many as one hundred witnesses, in all four families of manuscripts. On other occasions (Matt. 19:24, 20:19, 20:23; Luke 23:34, 24:12, 24:52; John 4:51; Acts 4:37, et al.), Nestle and his “good, godly, dedicated, scholarly, etc.” friends will throw Vaticanus into the footnotes, simply because it agrees with the Receptus readings of the Authorized Version. In 1881, Westcott and Hort made some telling statements about the Textus Receptus, and it was quite evident that they held it in little esteem.

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