Which Bible?

by David Otis Fuller, D.D.

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WHY THIS BOOK?

In many important matters everyone recognizes the need for an authority - a supreme "court of appeal" higher than which no one can go. In the realm of supernatural things there is only One Authority recognized by Christian people. This is not the church, nor the "infallible" words of men, nor one's own ego, nor a hierarchy of Roman "priests," Protestant ministers, or Jewish rabbis. All such are fallible and prone to error and prejudice. The Bible makes high claims to Divine inspiration, inerrancy and authority; and if it is true that the Sovereign God of the universe has condescended to reveal Himself supernaturally in His Book, even as He has revealed Himself naturally in the material universe, then man - even in a world ruined by sin - has a firm foundation on which to build for time and eternity.

That the Sovereign God of creation has done this in the Holy Scriptures is acknowledged by many earnest Christians, but a question arises which demands a clear answer: "Which Bible do you mean?" A generation or two ago this question would have had but one answer - the King James Version; but now many new translations demand recognition and prominence - the Revised Version, the American Standard Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New English Bible, the Knox Version, the Anchor Version, the Berkeley Version, etc., etc.

Jasper James Ray, missionary and Bible teacher, in the splendid book, God Wrote Only One Bible, says - "A multiplicity of differing Bible versions are in circulation today, resulting in a state of bewildering confusion. Some versions omit words, verses, phrases and even chapter

portions which are well known to be included in a number of the ancient manuscripts. In some of these new versions words and phrases have been added which have no corresponding basic expression in authentic copies of the Hebrew and Greek. Among these you will not find the Bible which God gave when "holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost" (II Peter 1: 21; II Timothy 3: 16).

Those who favor the modern versions claim that they are based upon the oldest and best manuscripts, but oldest and best do not necessarily go hand in hand. Mr. Ray's

book makes this clear - "Within the first hundred years after the death of the Apostles, Irenaeus said concerning Marcion the Gnostic, 'Wherefore also Marcion and his

followers have betaken themselves to mutilating the Scriptures, not acknowledging some books at all, and curtailing the gospel according to Luke and the Epistles of Paul, they assert that these alone are authentic which they themselves have shortened.' "1 Epiphanius in his treatise the Panarion describes no less than eighty heretical parties, each of which planned to further its own ends by the misuse of the Scriptures.2

Those who were corrupting Bible manuscripts said that they were correcting them, and corrupted copies were so prevalent that agreement between them was hopeless. The

worst corruptions to which the New Testament has ever been subjected originated within a hundred years after it was composed. The African fathers and the whole Western,

with a portion of the Syrian Church, used far inferior manuscripts to those employed by Erasmus or Stephanus thirteen centuries later when molding the Textus Receptus. Many

1 Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, 1953), Vol 1, pp. 434-435.

2 G. T. Fisher, History of Christian Doctrine, p. 19.

of the important variations in the Modern versions may be traced to the influence of Eusebius and Origen - "the father of Arianism.

Eusebius was a great admirer of Origen and a student of his philosophy. J. J. Ray quotes from Dr. Ira Price's Ancestry of the English Bible,3 "Eusebius of Caesarea, the first church historian, assisted by Pamphilus, or vice versa, issued with all its critical remarks the fifth column of Origen's Hexapla with alternative readings from the other columns, for use in Palestine. The Emperor Constantine gave orders that fifty copies of this edition should be

prepared for use in the churches." It has been suggested that the Codex Vaticanus may have been one of these copies. Many modern textual critics regard this document as the oldest and best representative of the original text of Holy Scripture. The object of the following chapters is to demonstrate that this appraisal is fundamentally wrong, and that the Majority Text or Traditional Text - sometimes called the Received Text - underlying the King James

Version more faithfully preserves the inspired revelation.

There have been many attempts to adulterate and to destroy the Holy Scriptures, and every age has witnessed such assaults. As early as the second century such writers as Irenaeus describe the attempts of heretics to corrupt the inspired records, and during periods of Roman persecution imperial decrees demanded the surrender and destruction of the copies cherished by many of the Lord's people.

In the Reformation period the Church of Rome sought to maintain its dominant position by burning not only the copies of the Bible, but also those who recognized the supreme authority of God's Word. Tyndale was burned at the stake at Vilvorde outside Brussels in Belgium on August 6, 1536. His great offense was that he had translated the Scriptures into English and was making copies available against the wishes of the Roman Catholic

hierarchy. His prayer was heard before he died, - "O Lord, open the eyes of the King of England." His prayer was heard and answered; and in less than a year King Henry VIII, who

3 J. J. Ray, God Wrote Only One Bible, p. 70.

had ordered Tyndale's death, gave his permission for the Bible to be placed in the parish

churches, and the people of England rejoiced to have the Word of God in their own tongue.

Ray asserts that while the true Christian religion puts the inspired Word of God above everything else, the false system puts something above the Bible or places human

tradition in a chair of equal authority with it. At the Council of Trent in 1546 fifty-three prelates made a decree declaring that the apocryphal books together with unwritten

tradition are of God and are to be received and venerated as the Word of God. In the primitive church the only authentic Scriptures recognized were those given by the inspiration of God (II Peter 1: 21 ). These are the true Word of God, and through His gracious providence and infinite wisdom the stream of the life-giving water of God's inspired Word has come to us crystal clear.

The "god of this world" directs his attack first on the character and Person of the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word, and then on the integrity and

accuracy of the written Word of God - the Bible. From the beginning there has been no pause in the assault on God's Son and God's Word. The first Gospel promise in

Genesis 3: 15 had hardly been uttered when Satan sought to erase the "Seed of the woman" from the scene. There came a time when a six-month-old baby was the only one

left of the royal line following a massacre by the wicked Queen Athaliah (II Chronicles 22: 10-12). When Jesus was but a baby He, with His foster father Joseph and mother Mary, was forced to flee into Egypt from the wrath of Herod the Great, who secured and kept his throne by crimes of unspeakable brutality, murdering even his own wife and two sons. It was this Herod who slew the children of Bethlehem in an effort to kill the Christ.

In the days of His earthly ministry three times they sought to stone Him to death; once they hustled Him to the brow of a hill overlooking Nazareth and were going to cast Him down headlong, "But he passing through the midst of them went his way" (Luke 4:30). True, they

finally crucified Him, but only by His permission; for it is written, "Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again" John 10: 17). In all these, and in many other ways the hatred of Satan toward the Son of God was manifested.

In the second arena, that of the Word of God written, Satan is more than ever active today. From the very outset, when he cast doubt upon God's Word in the garden with the question, "Yea, hath God said ... ?" he has sought to corrupt or destroy that which God has caused to

be written. The power and providence of God are displayed in the history of the preservation and transmission of His Word, in fulfillment of the promise of the Son of God, "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the

law, till all be fulfilled" (Matthew 5: 18 ). Our Lord was not given to exaggeration, and God's holy Law was not confined to the commands of Sinai but is set forth in all that He inspired His prophets and apostles to write.

The whole realm of created things is ordered and sustained by the over-ruling providence of God, Who upholds all things by the word of His power. The Scriptures make it quite clear that He is also well able to insure the providential preservation of His own Word through the ages, and that He is the Author and Preserver of the Divine Revelation. The Bible cannot be accounted for in any other way. It claims to be "Theopneustos," "God-breathed." "All scripture is given by inspiration of God" (II Timothy 3: 16). Without impairing or destroying

their individual personalities and style, the Spirit of God "carried along" those inspired writers of His words, so that they did in fact record the very words of God - "Not in words which man's wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches." Those who reject this as impossible would reduce the Almighty to the stature of a fallible man but " with God all things are possible."

The compiler of this book, and the able writers whom he quotes, all contend that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant and authoritative Word of God and that there has been a gracious exercise of the Divine providence in its preservation and transmission. They are also deeply convinced that the inspired text is more faithfully represented by the Majority Text - sometimes called the Byzantine Text, the Received Text or the Traditional Text - than by

the modern critical editions which attach too much weight to the Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus and their allies. For this reason the reader is encouraged to maintain confidence in the King James Version as a faithful translation based upon a reliable text.

Many ancient copies of the Scriptures have perished, but the Divine revelation has been preserved. In countless instances the old and well-worn copies were deliberately

destroyed when new copies had been made from them. In this way the ancient text bas been perpetuated in less ancient copies. Some very ancient copies have escaped

decay and destruction for the simple reason that they were not regarded as accurate enough for copying purposes or for common use. Dr. E. F. Hills draws attention to this in his scholarly little book, The King James Version Defended. The author received his A.B. from Yale University and his Th.D. from Harvard. He also pursued graduate studies at Chicago University and Calvin Seminary. Dr. Hills is entitled to a hearing because of his scholarship and scientific research, which qualify him to evaluate the facts. The following extracts are taken from his book, pages 42, 43 and 69.

"Kirsopp Lake, a brilliant liberal critic of the Scriptures, began his study of the Byzantine manuscripts with the expectation of finding many cases in which one of the manuscripts examined would prove itself to be a direct copy of one of the other manuscripts. But to his

amazement he could discover no such cases of direct copying. He summarized this surprising situation in the following manner: 'The Ferrar group and family 1 are the only reported cases of the repeated copying of a single archetype, and even for the Ferrar group there were probably two archetypes rather than one .... Apart from these two there seem to be no groups of manuscripts which are conceivably descendants of a single lost codex

.... Taking this fact into consideration along with the negative result of our collation of manuscripts at Sinai, Patmos, and Jerusalem, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the scribes usually destroyed their exemplars when they had copied the sacred books.'4

"But this hypothesis which Lake advanced as something new and startling was essentially the same as that for which consistently Christian scholars, such as J. W. Burgan (1813-1888), Dean of Chichester, had contended long before. According to Burgon,5 there once were many

ancient manuscripts containing the Byzantine text, manuscripts much older than B6 or ALEPH. But they were read so constantly and copied so frequently that finally they wore out and perished. This is why only a few ancient Byzantine manuscripts are extant today, none of which is as old as B or ALEPH. And conversely, the reason why B, ALEPH, and other non-Byzantine manuscripts have survived to the present day £s because they were rejected by the Greek Church as faulty and so not used.

"Burgon's contention was universally rejected in his own day by naturalistic critics. It is interesting, therefore, to see it confirmed forty-five years later by a leading representative of the naturalistic school. For if Lake was right in supposing 'that the scribes usually destroyed their examplars when they had copied the sacred books,' then many ancient Byzantine manuscripts could have perished in this manner, and certainly B, ALEPH, and other ancient

non-Byzantine manuscripts now extant would have so perished had they contained an acceptable text.

"Naturalistic New Testament critics seem at last to have reached the end of the trail. Westcott and Hort's broad highway, which appeared to lead so quickly and smoothly

to the original New Testament text, has dwindled down to a narrow foot path and terminated finally in a thicket of trees. For those who have followed it, there is only one

thing to do, and that is to go back and begin the journey all over again from the consistently all over again from the consistently Christian starting point; namely, the divine inspiration and providential preservation of Scripture.

4 Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 21 (1928), pp. 34 7-349.

5 The Revision Revised (London, 1883), p. 319.

6 The 4th century Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, by which misguided critics have attempted to correct the New Testament text.

"Those who take these doctrines as their starting point need never be apprehensive over the results of their researches in the New Testament text. For the providence of God was watching over this sacred text even during the first three centuries of the Christian era. Even during this troubled period a sufficient number of trustworthy copies of the New Testament Scriptures was produced by true believers under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. These were

the manuscripts to which the whole Greek Church returned during the fourth and fifth centuries, again under the leading of the Holy Spirit, and from which the Byzantine text was derived."

Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, author of the penetrating and incisive book, The Suicide of Christian Theology, makes this comment on page 38: "The historical value of the New Testament records about Christ is, when considered from the objective standpoint of textual scholarship, nothing less than stellar. Writes Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, formerly director and principal librarian of the British Museum: 'The interval ... between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.'"7

Dr. Yigael Yadin is the author of a most unusual book, Masada, the momentous archaeological discovery revealing the heroic life and struggle of the Jewish Zealots. Dr.

Yadin at the time of Israel's struggle for independence and during the War of Liberation in 1948, became Chief of Operations of the Israeli Defense Forces and later Chief of the General Staff.

7 The Suicide of Christian Theology, © 1970 Bethany Fellowship, Inc.

In 1952 he resigned from the army to resume his research and joined the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where he is now professor of archaeology. In 1955 and 1958 he directed the excavations at Hazor, and in 1960 and 1961 he led the explorations of the Judean Desert Caves where Bar-Kochba documents were discovered. He has done much research work on the scrolls from the Dead Sea area and has written numerous papers in archaeological and scientific journals. In 1956 he was awarded the Israel prize in Jewish studies and in 1965 the Rothschild prize in humanities. The following are extracts from his book. 8

"About three feet away from the shekels the first scroll was found. All the details of this discovery are sharp in my mind. In the early hours of the afternoon, while I was in one of the northern storerooms, Shmaryahu Guttman came running to me, followed by some of the volunteers working with him, and flourished before me a piece of parchment. It was so black and creased that only with difficulty could one make anything out. But a quick examination on the spot showed us immediately that here was a fragment from the Book of Psalms, and we could even identify the chapters: the section ran from Psalm 81 to Psalm 85.

"A little while later we also found another part of the scroll, which completed the top part of the first fragment. .. : This discovery is of extraordinary importance for scroll research. It is not only that this is the first time that a parchment scroll has been found not in a cave, and in circumstances where it was possible to date it without the slightest doubt. It could not possibly be later than the year 7 3 AD, the year Masada fell. As a matter of fact, this scroll was written much before - perhaps twenty or thirty years earlier; and it is interesting that this section from the Book of Psalms, like the other Biblical scrolls which we found later, is almost exactly identical (except for a few minor changes here and there) to the text of the biblical

books which we use today. Even the division into chapters and psalms is identical with the traditional division" (pp. 171-172).

8 Yigael Yadin, MASADA: Herod's Fortress and the Zealots' Last Stand. Copyright © 1966 by Yigael Yadin. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

"On the very first day of the second season, early in the afternoon, it fell to a young lad from a kibbutz in Western Galilee to discover in the western comer of the court in front of the large wall, fragments of a scroll scattered among the ruins. This discovery provoked great excitement and was taken as a happy omen for our future work. Parts of the fragments had been eaten away, but those that were undamaged were very well preserved and we could

immediately identify them as several chapters from the Book of Leviticus, chapters eight to twelve, and to note that this scroll too was absolutely identical with the traditional text of Leviticus. . . . How this scroll reached this location we shall never know. Maybe it was blown

here by the wind during the destruction of Masada and was buried among the ruined debris; or perhaps it was thrown here by one of the Roman soldiers. At all events, its discovery here might be called an archaeological 'miracle'" (p. 1 79).

"Within a few hours he [Chief Petty Officer Moshe Cohen, from the Israeli Navy] had reached almost to the bottom of the pit and there his groping hands found the remains of a scroll. Though the parchment was badly gnawed, we could immediately identify the writing as

chapters from the Book of Ezekiel; and the parts that were better preserved than others, and which we could easily read, contained extracts from Chapter 3 7 - the vision of the dry bones.

"As for the rolled scroll discovered in the first pit, it was found on opening - which had to be done with great care in the laboratory in Jerusalem - to contain parts of the two final chapters of the Book of Deuteronomy. But the tightly rolled core of the scroll, on which we had pinned much hope, turned out to our dismay to be simply the blank end 'sheets' of the scroll. They had been sewn to the written 'sheets' to facilitate rolling and unrolling. It need

hardly be added at this stage that these two scrolls, too, are virtually identical with the traditional Biblical texts. There are only a few slight changes in the Ezekiel scroll"

(pp. 187-189).

In the following pages though there is language that is technical and difficult for the average layman to grasp, there is also much that anyone may comprehend and greatly profit from. May God, the Blessed Holy Spirit, use the pages of this book to inspire and challenge the hearts of believers who have been bought with the precious blood of the Son of God. Let us be willing to stand against what is erroneous and ready always to give a reason for the hope

that lieth in us in meekness and fear.