One of the recent phenomenon I have noticed is the corruption of the scriptures. What I have found to be true is that people are oblivious to the change because they don't know history. The general public acts as if they have never seen a Bible before in their lives. Maybe that is the problem. They don't know any better so they like the easier to read Revised Standard Version, or New International Version, The Message or The Living Bible. I believe that the King James Version (AV1611) is closest to the original manuscripts. By that I mean the correct manuscripts that have been handed down by true followers of Christ. I believe that if God can inspire a Bible to be written He can also preserve it down through the ages as well. There may be some old English words and phrases used in the KJV. That means you may have to put forth some extra effort in understanding the message. If you opt for another translation, you may get a very different message, not what God said in the original autographs.

      Lets look at the original manuscripts. First we know that ALL the originals have been lost. They are not available for comparison. What we have are copies of copies. Are they accurate, you ask? When the manuscripts used for the KJV were compared to the Dead Sea Scrolls, there were very few errors found. However when you compare the Dead Sea Scrolls with the Alexandrian translations, there are a lot of problems. The other manuscripts don't even agree within them selves nor with each other. (I'm speaking of Aleph and B)

      Let me quote from a book entitled Our Authorized Version Vindicated, copyright 1930, by Benjamin G. Wilkinson, who (being a Seventh-Day Adventist) cannot be accused of being partial to me. Mr. Wilkinson wrote: "... down through the centuries there were only two streams of manuscripts.

      The first stream which carried the Received Text in Hebrew and Greek, began with the Apostolic churches, and reappearing at intervals down the Christian Era among enlightened believers, was protected by the wisdom and scholarship of the pure church in her different phases; by such as the church at Pella in Palestine where the Christians fled, when in 70 A. D. the Romans destroyed Jerusalem; by the Syrian Church of Antioch which produced eminent scholarship; by the Italic Church in northern Italy; and also at the same time by the Gallic Church in southern France and by the Celtic Church in Great Britain; by the pre-Waldensian, the Waldensian, and the churches of the Reformation. This first stream appears, with very little change, in the Protestant Bibles of many languages, and in English, in that Bible known as the King James Version, the one which has been in use for four hundred years in the English speaking world.

       The second stream is a small one of very few MSS. These last manuscripts are represented: (a) In Greek:--The Vatican MS., or Codex B, in the library at Rome; and the Sinaitic, or Codex Aleph, its brother (in the Russian Museum in Moscow). (b) In Latin:--The Vulgate or Latin Bible of Jerome. (c) In English:--The Jesuit Bible of 1582, which later with vast changes is seen in the Douay, or Catholic Bible. (d) In English again:--In many modern Bibles which introduce practically all the Catholic readings of the Latin Vulgate which were rejected by the Protestants of the Reformation; among these, prominently, are the Revised Versions."--pp. 12, 13.

Let's look at the two streams side by side:

      

Apostles (Original)		Apostates (Corrupted Originals)
Received Text (Greek)		Sinaiticus and Vaticanus Bible (Greek)
Waldensian Bible (Italic)		Vulgate (Latin).Church of Rome's Bible.
Erasmus (Received Text)		Vaticanus (Greek Restored)
Luther's Bible, Dutch, French, Italian, etc.,(from Received Text)		French, Spanish, and Italian (from Vulgate)
Tyndale (English) 1535 (from Received Text)		Rheims (English) from Vulgate (Jesuit Bible of 1582)
King James, 1611 (from Received Text)		Oxford Movement. Westcott & Hort (B and Aleph)American Revised 1901.

      By 157 A.D. the Old Latin Vulgate (not Jerome's Vulgate) was in use by the true Christian Church. Justin Martyr in 100 A.D. corrupted the scriptures with Gnosticism. Tatian (150 A.D.)(a student of Martyr) later embraced Gnosticism also and he in turn instructed Clement of Alexandria, Egypt. Clement taught that there was no heaven, hell, blood atonement of Christ, and that the Bible was not inspired. There was a cult formed in Alexandria, Egypt, which had many followers, one of whom was Origen. He followed these philosophies and translated the manuscripts. Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus was a product of the cultist and philosophers of Egypt. He headed the school of Theology in Alexandria.

      Origen added baby baptism to the corrupt teachings and said the Bible was an "allegory". That teaching is prevalent today in the modern churches that want to deny the first 11 chapters of Genesis as being true history. Do you see how the corrupt Bibles and Evolution work together in their denial of Gods teachings? He taught and believed that Christ was created and subordinate to God (as do 20th Century Jehovahs Witnesses) and the pre-existence of the soul (as do 20th Century Mormons). Recent cults began in ancient Egypt but manifest themselves in these latter days. There are many New Age religions and secret secular organizations that are built upon early Egyptian philosophy. Of course, the Catholic Church had Jerome translate the Bible into Latin in 380 A.D. The Sinaiticus and Vaticanus manuscripts were most likely the scriptures given to Constantine by Eusebius of Caesarea . Early Christians abandoned those manuscripts as being worthless and adulterated until about the late 13th Century. The Catholic Church attempted to attach the name "Vulgate" to these corrupt Bibles to entice the common people to use them. That did not fool true Christians though. The C.I Scofield Bible editors used the same trick with his Bible in 1967, saying it was the KJV. Since he died some 40 years previous to that time, it seems unlikely it was his notes they used. However, He was a follower of the teachings of John Darby and the Brethren.

      Since 1901 all major translations have used these same corrupt manuscripts. They are said to be the oldest MSS due to the fact they were abandoned on the shelf of the Vatican or (Sinaiticus) rescued from a trash bin in a monastery of Sinai. Of course they would be older, the others (being authentic Bibles) would be worn out and needed to be replaced over the years. Aleph and B (Aleph being Sinaiticus, B being Vaticanus) lay dormant for about 1500 years. Tischendorf in 1869 was the first Protestant to use these corrupt MSS. IN 1881 two very dubious fellows (Westcott & Hort) used these MSS to create a NEW Greek Manuscript. They gathered together a group of theologians with a diverse doctrinal background and array of religious beliefs to translate these distorted MSS into the English Revised Version. You see, Satan had to combat the Authorized Version of 1611. I will quote An Understandable History of the Bible by Samuel Gipp, Th D.;

      . . in the mid to late 1800's a theory was initiated by two scholars of the names Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort. This is the theory that the Traditional Text was a "conflate" text produced by editors and not merely by scribes. Their theory has remained over the years, as Darwin's theory of evolution has remained, just a theory. It has never been proven and has in fact lost support over the years. Fuller confirms this when he records Martin's statement that "the trend of scholars in more recent years has been away from the original Westcott-Hort position."

      They hand selected the translation committee for the Revised Version and in 1881 it was unveiled as the replacement for the King James Version. Philip Schaff was the committee president for the 'New' American Standard Version. His biography does not show the true liberal side of Schaff. His own son said parents refused to send their children to his theology classes so he moved on to Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He sought men of his "liberal outlook" and rejected those who believed in, what he called, "the moonshine theory of the inerrant apostolic autographs" He may well be the father of the New Age movement of today. Schaff saw Christians, Buddhists, Brahmans, etc as one big happy family, all going to heaven together. Goodspeed used words like "myth", "fable", "tradition", "fancy", "legend", for the ancient manuscripts and may have been the springboard for all types of heresies. Westcott and Horts' Greek Text has changed the reading of the Textus Receptus in 5,337 places! This is NOT a revision of the King James Bible, but a complete meltdown. They use a translation method called Dynamic Equivalency. This allows the translator the opportunity to infuse his ideas of philosophies into the text, which is what they did very liberally. So you don't get the word of God but their IDEA of God. Of course this opens up the scriptures to man's interpretation depending upon his philosophy or personal theism. This is in contradiction to 2 Peter 1:20. For instance, Westcott & Hort were ghost chasers and worshiped Mary. Origen injected a lot of Egyptian pagan ideas into Christianity with a word here and a phrase there. There are over 60,000 changes to the original text in the so-called new easy-to-read Bibles. In the next chapter we will look at a few of the glaring "revisions" and see where those errors lead us. You may be surprised to find a New World order or maybe humanism or pantheism in your favorite verses.

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