The
Bible is the word of God, the written word of God. It is absolutely essential
to our sanctification, being set apart for God’s purpose. Its importance cannot
be overestimated. But, what is a Bible? Is it a New American Standard Version? A New King James Version? The King
James Version? After all, each of them say different things at key points
and each of them are translated from different manuscripts with in some cases
only slight variations and in others extreme changes.
I believe that the Authorized
Version of the Bible, the King James
Version, is the preserved word of God and the last of what can truly be
called an authentic Bible. If you read it over and over, and I am on my 63rd
reading of it, God will use His words to change your heart and mind, not only answering
your prayers but giving you a greater understanding of His purpose in your
life. This book is my final authority in all matters of faith, practice, and
doctrine and that most, if not all, modern Bibles are perversions of God’s word
made possible by Satan who, from the beginning, has caused mankind to question
what God said. Those of us who still hold to the King James Bible as God’s word in English, or any other language
for that matter, are often derided by modern evangelicals as being reactionary
and ignorant. Some of your brothers and sisters in Christ might even call you a
rebel, and not in a very complimentary way, if they are not mocking your
refusal to go along. But, are you are rebel or are you really a remnant,
holding on to the faith of your spiritual forebears with regard to God’s words?
This series is going to contain some historical information that might seem dry
to you but I hope you will pay attention so you know some of the background of
why you believed what you believed about the Bible. Take your time and try to
understand what you can. It will be helpful for you to know from whence you
came in regards to the question of “What is the Bible?”
This session we’re going to lay a
foundation and get some background on the people and events that led us to
where we are. It may seem a bit dry for you but please bear with me. I think
this information and this appraisal is important.
A movement began among Independent Baptist churches in
1964 that regarded the King James Bible as
the very word of God in print, with all other modern translations being counterfeits
and frauds. The founder of the movement, and for decades its most outspoken
proponent was Dr. Peter S. Ruckman of the Bible Baptist Church in Pensacola,
Florida. Dr. Ruckman fired the first salvo in the movement with a book
published by his church’s bookstore entitled, Bible Babel. This book was the beginning of a movement that split
many Independent Baptist churches apart and struck at the heart of fundamentalism
in America. First published in 1964, the book was reprinted in 1981, revised in
1987, and reprinted again in 1994. There are at present approximately one
thousand, five hundred congregations in the U.S. and abroad that hold the King James Bible to be their infallible
guide in all matters of faith, practice, and doctrine.[1]
The central themes of the King James-only
Movement are that the King James Bible (KJB), also known as the King James Version (KJV) or the Authorized
Version (AV), was inspired by God (or in that Bible’s expression, “given by
inspiration”), no less than the original autographs, or is God’s word
providentially preserved in English, at the very least, with any Bible
translated after 1611 an unreliable substitute or counterfeit.[2]
If you believe this there are many Christians who will insist you are being
rebellious and are nothing but a divider, working against the gospel of Christ
and, in fact, are somewhat of an embarrassment to mainstream evangelicals. But,
are you a rebel or are you simply, and more importantly, a remnant, someone
standing on the faithfulness of past generations who were responsible for the
greatest movement of evangelism since the first century on the truth of the
Bible?
Dr. Ruckman began in his,
“Introduction,” to Bible Babel an
attack on noteworthy fundamentalists who upheld modern Bibles based on the
Westcott and Hort Greek text that resulted from the Anglican revision of the AV completed in 1881. His diatribe
against prestigious fundamentalist schools such as Bob Jones University, Tennessee
Temple, and Hyles-Anderson was written, not in a scholarly fashion, but in a
manner designed to appeal to and be understood by the average church-going
Independent Baptist. The central focus of Ruckman’s books was his anger at
traditional fundamentalism’s perceived contempt for the Bible whose authority
he accepted without question.
Let’s talk a little about the beginnings of American
fundamentalism. In the late 1800s, a
series of meetings of conservative Protestant Christians in America began, some
of which, being held at Niagara, New York, resulted in them being referred to
as the Niagara Conference. The clergy and laymen that attended these meetings
are referred to as, “the founding fathers of fundamentalism.”[3]
The label, “fundamentalists,” was not coined until 1920 to describe
conservative Protestants of varying denominations who were actively militant in
defending the basics of what they perceived was orthodox Christian belief.[4]
The
term came from a series of essays published in the first decade of the
twentieth century as The Fundamentals, provided
free to the Christian public.[5]
Noteworthy evangelical R.A. Torrey figured prominently among the authors.
Fundamentalists rose to national
prominence in their involvement in a judicial proceeding in the mid-1920s that
is popularly known as, “The Scopes Monkey Trial,” over the teaching of
evolution in the public schools. Although it was a legal win for those opposed
to evolution being taught, the resultant negative publicity drove fundamentalists
further from mainstream America. It resulted in the development of
fundamentalist universities such as Bob Jones University, whose faithfulness to
the critical text of Westcott and Hort and the inerrancy of the unseen original
autographs figured prominently in the origins of the King James-only movement.[6]
After the 1920s, fundamentalism ceased to be a powerful political movement and
retreated from engagement with the majority of the public who did not share its
views. By the 1960s virtually all fundamentalist churches were Baptist.[7]
The movement rose to prominence again in
the 1970s with Jerry Falwell’s, “Moral Majority,” and the courting of the
movement by the 1980 Ronald Reagan presidential effort.[8]
Fundamentalism, as a movement within
conservative Protestant churches, was ultimately made possible by the doctrines
set forth early in the Reformation by Martin Luther. Luther’s exchange of the
authority to access and interpret Biblical texts from the organization of the
Roman Catholic Church to the individual Christian ultimately allowed for the
existence and justification of modern Protestant fundamentalism.[9]
Luther expressed a new line of thought in opposition generally accepted
Christian belief, that took access to Biblical texts and interpretation of them
from the priest or an elite consisting of the educated and gave this to the
individual Christian. For Luther, every man was a theologian.[10]
What is the
traditional fundamentalist view of the Bible? The foundational importance of the Bible in
Protestantism was expressed very clearly in the seventeenth century by Anglican
divine, William Chillingworth, when he declared emphatically, “The Bible, I
say, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants!”[11]
In the nineteenth century, Presbyterian theologian Charles Hodge, in his three
volume work Systematic Theology, stated in 1873, quoting Martin Luther’s 1537
Smallcald Articles, that, “All Protestants agree in teaching that ‘the word of
God, as contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only
infallible rule of faith and practice.’”[12]
Again, this view was affirmed by Baptist theologians
in the twentieth century as fundamentalism was moving away from a cross section
of conservative Christian denominations and was focused more and more in the
Baptist faith tradition. This traditional view of the Bible’s importance in
fundamentalism was expressed in an even more extreme manner by Henry Clarence
Thiessen in his Introductory Lectures in
Systematic Theology: “It [what he called the true Church] bases its view on
the belief that the Bible is the embodiment of a divine revelation, and that
the records which contain that revelation are genuine, credible, canonical, and
supernaturally inspired.” [13]
The fundamentalist view of the divine inspiration of
the Bible had its origins in the Princeton Seminary, in the nineteenth century.
In 1879, a doctrine was expressed that insisted that the original autographs of
the presumed Bible writers, and those writings only, were inspired by God,
inerrant and infallible.[14]
All subsequent translations attained to
varying degrees of reliability and trustworthiness. This allowed a fallback
position from the assault on the truth of the Bible narrative by German
Biblical criticism and the acceptance of Darwin’s version of the theory of evolution
to a Bible that didn’t actually exist in reality, as the original autographs
were never in one Bible, and were themselves not extant so they could not be
questioned. The mark of fundamentalism in America was a conservative, literal
approach to scriptural interpretation and a belief in the divine inspiration of
the original autographs with translations being trustworthy but not perfect. It
reduced divine inspiration to mere transmission from God to writing on a single
occasion.[15]
Presbyterian Pastor Archibald Alexander Hodge, son of Princeton Seminary
theologian Charles Hodge, wrote in 1863 that what the Bible calls, “given by
inspiration,” is revelation, while
inspiration referred only to the process of writing an infallible and inerrant
document.[16]
That this did not include any translation is apparent. American Baptist
minister and author Dr. Wayland Hoyt, speaking at a conference held on Biblical
inspiration in Philadelphia in 1887, said, “But neither for version nor for
manuscripts is Inspiration to be claimed. Inspiration is only to be claimed for
the primal sacred autographs …We affirm Inspiration and authority of the original Scriptures, the sacred autographs, but not of the copies
or versions.”[17]
But, the King James
Bible, says in 2 Timothy 3:16 that all scripture is given by inspiration
and in the only other place where inspiration is mentioned, Job 32:8, states
that God’s inspiration gives men understanding. Peter, writing in 2 Peter 3:15,
said that Paul wrote by the wisdom given to him, both understanding and wisdom
implying God’s revelation of Himself to the writers as well as the wisdom to
write. In Jeremiah 36:32 the originals, being burned in a fire, are rewritten,
with the addition of many words, so the question of God inspiring only the
original autographs is apparent. Which originals? Also, in 2 Timothy 3:16, “all
scripture,” is not likely referring to original autographs as it is highly
unlikely Timothy had access to the original autographs of Moses’ more than
one-thousand-year-old writings but to only copies and translations.
Added into the mix was the effort to revise the AV completed by the Anglican Church’s
Bishops Westcott, Hort, and company in 1881, unrelated either to the Niagara
Conference or the Princeton Seminary’s thoughts on the inerrancy and
infallibility of the original autographs. New manuscript discoveries of a
non-Biblical nature that were believed to shed light on the original Bible
languages and dissatisfaction with the perceived archaic English of the Authorized Version led to the Anglican
Church’s 1881 Revision of the King James
Bible. The Revision was the first effort in two hundred and fifty years
with any Anglican Church authority behind it to revise the King James Version.[18]
Plans for a revision of the AV were in the works since at least 1820,
when Anglican Bishop Herbert Marsh, in a lecture on the interpretation of the
Bible at Cambridge, published in 1828, called for it as necessary.[19]
This struggle to have the idea of a revision seen through happened in fact,
even though many, such as philologist and pioneering American environmental
conservationist, George Perkins Marsh, said that a multitude of Bibles would
result from such a revision, dividing Protestantism and causing more harm than
good .[20]
The Revision committee, laboring for over a decade, published its work in 1881.
The Revision efforts consisted of an English committee headed by Anglican
bishops Westcott and Hort, and an American committee headed by Bible scholar
and historian, Philip Schaff.
The resultant Revised Version of the Bible and its American counterpart, the American Standard Version, were not so
much revisions of the Authorized Version but
new versions of the Bible based on an entirely new background text for the New
Testament and a departure from the traditional Old Testament text. The effort
did not escape criticism. John Burgon, a noted expert on Greek language and manuscripts,
panned the revision efforts in writing in 1883. He wrote, “…’the New Greek
Text,’ – which, in defiance of their instructions, the Revisionists of the
‘Authorized English Version’ had been so ill-advised as to spend ten years in
elaborating, - was a wholly untrustworthy performance: was full of the gravest
errors from beginning to end….”[21]
Philip Schaff, the head of the American
revision committee, acknowledged that one reason for the difficulty the new
text had in being favorably received was that “for the great mass of English
readers King James’ Version is virtually the inspired Word of God.” [22]
Nevertheless, fundamentalists in
America took to the new versions of the Bible quite readily. Evangelist R.A.
Torrey wrote that, in his estimation, “the Revised Version is manifestly much
more exact,” than the Authorized Version.[23]
It
was not until another contributor to The
Fundamentals, lawyer Philip Mauro, began to express serious reservations
about the Revised Version’s
background text in the early 1920s that fundamentalism began to break down into
two camps on the Bible translation issue. One camp followed the Westcott-Hort
Greek text (representing the Alexandrian line of manuscripts) and the Bibles
that flowed from it such as the Revised
Version, the American Standard
Version, and later the Revised
Standard Version, the New American
Standard Version, the New
International Version, etc., with the second camp using and uplifting the Textus Receptus, in English the Received Text. This was the traditional
textual line of manuscripts, called the Byzantine, that were the background
texts for the Authorized Version, with
that Bible version simply being considered, not inspired, but the most
trustworthy translation of an inspired Greek text. Although the Old Testament text was also
different it was not usually the subject of much argument until later. Both
parties felt that their version of the Greek text was representative of the
originals, which only were given by inspiration of God. Translations were reliable,
trustworthy, or, in the case of the Authorized
Version, the best, but most definitely not inspired by God and merely the
devoted work of skilled and faithful translators. The battle within
fundamentalism was not over the authority of the Bible but over the question,
“What is the Bible?”
This
is a fundamental question for you. Remember what God has said about his words.
Psalm 138:
2 I will worship toward thy holy temple,
and praise thy name for thy lovingkindness and for thy truth: for thou hast magnified
thy word above all thy name.
John 17:17
¶ Sanctify them through thy truth: thy
word is truth.
Next,
Peter Ruckman throws a monkey wrench into the wheel of fundamentalism in
America with regards to the Bible.
[1]
“Bible Believers’ Church Directory,” Bible Believers. Accessed 1.1.2014, www.biblebelievers.com.
Random House, 2004), 372.
Laurier University Press, 2008) 7.
[8]
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh:
Life in a Fundamental Baptist Church (New York:
Random House,
2004),1 & 6 .
[10] Ibid.
repr.,London:
Henry G. Bohn, 1846), 463 .
Kindle
edition, ch. 6.
MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1949), 79.
[14]
Sandeen, 74.
[16]
A.A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New
York: Robert Carter & Bros, 1863), 68.
Papers and
Addresses Delivered at the Bible Inspiration-Conference, Philadelphia
(1887, ed. by A.T. Pierson. New York: Anson D.F. Randolph & Co, 1888), 14, 15..
Publications, 1971), xi.
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