Chapter H1
Lucifer's Rebellion
The War on the Word
––– Chapter 7 –––
The Advent of Mere Bible Versions
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Topics covered: ►Famous scholars over the centuries had good reasons for selecting certain manuscripts & rejecting others. ►Mars-Hill infatuation had given the newly-available Greek-language manuscripts a popularity they didn't deserve. ►The printing press made people familiar with the Bible, & many became Protesters against Rome by quitting the Catholic Church. ►When Rome's burning people & Bibles changed nothing, it turned to theology, which is the tactic Satan used against Eve when he had her use her Reason to see if she thought the forbidden fruit would really be bad for her. Theology's anti-Bible weapon is "what-do-you-think" Reason. Just take Reason out of theology and you've become a Bible believer whose read-it-&-believe-it literal interpretation makes the Bible clear & consistent. ►The inerrant KJV has made it undeniable that old manuscripts & textual criticism have done nothing but produce myriad mere Bible versions that are as forgettable & uninspiring as the Matthew's & the Douay-Rheims Bibles. The inerrancy of the KJV removed the doubt & uncertainty that cause people to turn to the Self-based guesswork of theology, & gave them the faith to stand – unashamed & unafraid – on the solid Rock of the literal Thus saith the Lord.
Chapter 7 (14 pages)
THE ADVENT OF MERE BIBLE VERSIONS
Born again Christians have a spiritual need to feed on the word of God. Therefore, from the beginning of the New Testament era until about 1500, Christians thanked God whenever they got a chance to feed on His sacred words in handwritten manuscripts that consisted usually of one of the books of the Bible or portions thereof. Their spiritual eyes and ears worked properly, and their hearts hadn’t been hardened by worldly knowledge. That gradually changed between 1000 AD and 1500 AD when events like the Crusades, the rise of Christian rationalist scholars like Peter Abelard (AOR p.H7-3), the rise of trade, the increased use of money, the destruction of the slow-lane feudalistic lifestyle, and the printing press, all combined to begin the unprecedented sixth-day catapulting of society into the fast lane of civilized sophistication in which we began to walk by sight rather than by faith – in every way.
In 600 AD the head bishop of the fledgling church congregation in Rome, to compete with the Greek-speaking church system centered around Constantinople, banned all Bibles that weren’t in Latin. Lots of Christians who spoke different languages, when they finally heard about the decree weeks and months later, correctly reacted to it by looking at one another and saying, “I know who Christ is, and I know who the apostles are that He used to write His NT…but who does this guy in Rome think he is?!” And they kept right on translating whatever portions of the Bible they could get their hands on.
In 670 AD in the northern part of Scotland a tattered handwritten portion of the Latin Vulgate was translated into the old Anglo-Saxon English (also called Old English). Then an Anglo-Saxon-language copy of the Psalms was made in about 700 AD, and another Anglo-Saxon portion of the NT was copied in 735 for the Angles in northeastern England. In the 900s a couple of Old English translations of the four gospels are known to have been made. It is believed that these Anglo-Saxon Bible manuscripts later kept many local congregations (predominately in the northern reaches of the British Isles, but scattered around all areas) from being brought under the growing doctrinal control of the Catholic Church. For example, these local congregations are known to have rejected the celibacy of the priesthood, transubstantiation, the Catholic inventions about Mary, etc. – and they kept producing vernacular copies of the Bible. Over the centuries, even as the power and reach of the Roman Church grew, vernacular copies of the Bible were still produced – albeit quietly – by humble, unEnlightened men who just wanted to read and share the word of God. But denominationalism (Catholicism) was becoming more influential, as was Enlightened education.
1381 and 1384: John Wycliffe’s handwritten New Testament and Bible
John Wycliffe (1330-1384) was a Roman Catholic priest who lived at a time when most people had given up trying to speak the sophisticated French and Latin of the upper classes. They were content with English, which had morphed from Anglo-Saxon Old English into Middle English. One of the reasons most people were no longer interested in speaking French and Latin was the egalitarianism of Greek philosophy had, since about 1000 AD when universities began being built, easily spread from the educated classes to the masses. I said easily because it’s not complicated for a Naturally-carnal human being to grasp and quickly agree with the idea of equality. Equality is related to independence – which makes independence automatically contrary to authority…and therefore independence is related to rebellion. The spreading ideology of equality-based rebellion is ably demonstrated by the Magna Carta rebellion of 1215 and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
John Wycliffe was bright and principled…but he was also affected by the growing social culture of egalitarianism and by his education at Oxford University. (Oxford was a real hotspot for “town vs. gown” acrimony, including fatalities during riots. Wycliffe’s heart was with the townies.) In the mid-1300s Wycliffe noted that copies of the Psalms in English that included biased religious comments that told people what the Scriptures “really” said were becoming popular among the people. Wycliffe also thought the masses had a right to speak English no matter what the authorities wanted them to do. And he thought the masses had a right to read the Bible in English no matter what his religious authorities to whom he’d sworn respect and obedience decreed. Therefore, Naturally enough, Father Wycliffe became a rebel. By doing that which was right in his own eyes, he became a casualty of Satan’s Self-based, well-intentioned war on the word of God, and was swept along by the strong currents of Enlightened, anti-authority egalitarianism, which is the broad way that leadeth to destruction. He should have come out from his Roman masters by simply resigning from the priesthood, but Satan’s alluring battle plan of go-by-the-god-of your belly rather than by what God says made him decide to use his Reason to fight for what he thought was right and good.
Wycliffe’s life is an early indication that a major change was happening within the Christian world. And this change wasn’t produced by one or two shockingly-horrible things; it was the result of a very subtle tidal wave of ideologically-driven conditions and events whose subtilty belied its power to affect society as a whole. Christianity was only 300 years into the sixth day of the War, and it was proudly, boldly, confidently, and defiantly energized by its well-intentioned carnal belief in the rightness and goodness of Enlightened principles – and the powerful influences of the Industrial Revolution, the Corporate Revolution, and especially the Digital Age were still several centuries away. Remember, Wycliffe wasn’t alone: Reason was commonly used by scholars (such as Albertus Magnus) before Thomas Aquinas formally blended Reason with Christianity…and Aquinas was made a saint about the time Wycliffe was born…and William of Ockham (AOR p.H8-4) was a fellow Oxford alumnus. What was it that was going on within Christianity that was proving to be way beyond the capabilities of intellectual giants to comprehend and resist? It was the spiritual war on the word that was subtly weakening our abilities to walk by faith by using the forbidden fruit of equality to insolently ask – as did Satan – Yea, hath God said? The growing acceptance of Reason was sidetracking us from the reality, the truth, and the life-giving and life-saving literal Thus saith the Lord.
Ideology is what determines the course of human events. The Three Pillars of Western civilization – Alexander, Augustine, and Aquinas – established pagan Greek philosophy (of all things!) as the foundation of, well, everything…and brilliant men like Augustine and Aquinas who studied and taught the Bible, were blinded by Greek equality-based ideology. They were casualties in this spiritual war…and they didn’t have to contend – like we do – with the modern two-fisted knockout power of ideology and the love of money thrust upon every facet of our lives.
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One of the many minor things that affected Wycliffe was his English resentment of the fact that his Pope supported the French in the Hundred Years’ War – therefore, Wycliffe concluded, the Pope wasn’t infallible. But that was a minor influence compared with the rising tide of the Age of Reason that was quietly but powerfully liberating priests and pewsters alike from all Godly authority by making their Self-based opinions just as good or better than the opinions, wishes, and decrees of their authorities good or bad, right or wrong. The issue is authority! And back in the early days of the Age of Reason that defiant independence was still unusual, shocking, and offensive to many people in society – which made Wycliffe (and other priests like Martin Luther) more bellicose: he had a chip on his shoulder, he had an axe to grind, he had a point to prove…and that point was he was right! He fought an eleven-year, very public fight with the Pope.
The Bible of his time was the Latin Vulgate. Wycliffe accepted it as it was – it would be another 200 years before Father Erasmus showed everybody that the Catholic Church had quietly changed Bible passages in order to “prove” some of its false doctrinal teachings. Wycliffe just wanted to make the Bible available to his fellow Englishmen in their own language (which would prove to be a good thing – see the paragraph on AOR H8-6 that contains Gen 11:1-9). So Wycliffe translated the Latin Vulgate’s NT into English (1381), and then three years later with the help of several men including his fellow priest, Father John Purvey, translated the Latin Vulgate’s OT into the first complete, handwritten manuscript of the Bible in English. It proved to be very popular.
However, scholarship was beginning to rear its ugly, ever-learning-and-never-able-to-come-to-the-knowledge-of-the-truth head: Fathers Wycliffe and Purvey became convinced that neither Wycliffe’s 1381 NT nor their 1384 whole Bible were good enough. So a revision was begun in 1388 several years after Wycliffe died. Purvey finished the revision…which contributed to the beginning of the modern Reason-based belief that nothing is the word of God – which is a result of the manuscript mess, the quagmire of myriad textual choices, and obvious textual errors that proved these well-intentioned efforts by scholars had not produced the word of God. In 1395 Purvey did another “new, improved” revision.
Wycliffe is important mostly because his complete Bible in English was a first. But because it was handwritten and was completed shortly before his death, it had little immediate impact outside of England. But within England it caused many people to ignore the Catholic Church’s 600 AD decree that Latin was the only language allowed for the Bible. The growing use of the vernacular language caused by Wycliffe’s English Bible resulted in panicked hysteria and paranoia in the Vatican. For example, in 1517 alone, Foxe’s Book on Christian Martyrs (which is not a complete record) documents the burning at the stake of seven people by the Catholic Church for teaching their children to say the Lord’s Prayer in English rather than in Latin. (How should we weigh the parents’ rebellion against their Church against the Vatican’s frowardness?)
Wycliffe’s main reason for translating the Latin Vulgate into English wasn’t for religious reasons as much as it was for social reasons; his carnality coupled with his ignorance of proper doctrine made him hope the Bible would reveal the fallibility of his Church, undermine his Church’s authority (!), and promote social equality (like we in the United States have – and regret). After he died, some of his followers built on his foundation by adding radical, controversial, anti-Catholic commentaries and prologues to English-language Scripture manuscripts, and these began to bear so much fruit in society that in 1408 the threatened Catholic hierarchy added to the ban on translating the Bible into English by making it a crime to even read it in English. The anti-Catholic, anti-authority propaganda being added to Scriptural manuscripts was an early proof of society’s growing belief in social egalitarianism; Wycliffe and his men were, for the first time in history, appealing directly to the masses rather than to their rulers – something Martin Luther would later emulate. With their mostly-social crusade for egalitarianism, Wycliffe and his followers didn’t really create a rift within the Catholic Church; they merely participated in a growing ideological tidal wave caused by the Enlightenment that would eventually result in the Protestant Reformation and its Greek-philosophy-based body-rules-head democratic denominations. If Wycliffe and his fellow Catholic priests wanted to avoid becoming casualties of Satan’s brilliant war on the word, they just needed to stick with the word by using Thus saith the Lord to examine themselves to see whether they were in the faith…or if they were well-intentioned-but-rebellious reprobates (2 Cor 13:5). Their actions show that Greek philosophy was turning Christianity into an equality-based humanistic crusade rather than a Christ-oriented disciplined lifestyle of walking after the Spirit by submitting to the Bible – which is why the Catholic Church was transitioning from an Augustine-based religion ruled (supposedly) by Scripture into an Aquinas-based religion ruled by Reason.
1514 and 1522: Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros’ first-printed Complutensian Polyglot Bible (OT & NT)
A little over a century after Wycliffe died, two major simultaneous historical events greatly affected all Bible scholars and theologians. The first event was the fall of Constantinople to the Muslims in 1453. (I tend to ignore the Muslims because their history is so predictably savage and murderous that I find it boring. But much in southern and eastern European history concerns the desperate struggles to keep them from fulfilling their religious intent to conquer and rule the world.) Because of the Muslim’s ruthless onslaught, many refugees fled west to Europe – taking their Greek Bible and their Greek philosophy manuscripts with them. The second event was the universal adoption of Gutenberg’s printing press, which did more to reveal the Bible manuscript mess and to spread Greek philosophy than anything else in history.
Some of the more popular early printing projects included Gutenberg’s Latin Vulgate Bible in 1454, a German Bible printed in 1466, the Psalms printed in Hebrew in 1477, a French Bible printed in 1478, and another French Bible printed in 1487. The complete Old Testament was printed in 1488, and a Spanish Pentateuch was printed in 1497. With the availability of different Bibles like these – and others being printed all the time – Europeans couldn’t help noticing textual differences…and arguing over them, which served to shift the historical emphasis from the Bible’s message to the new-and-growing scholarly interest in textual differences…thus diluting faith in the veracity of God’s word by changing us from faithful servants ensuring that our deeds conform to God’s word, into skeptical authorities whose critical opinions sit in judgment on God’s word. Finding “errors” to proclaim this verse or that manuscript “better” was all the rage…which brings us to Catholic Cardinal Jimenez.
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Cardinal Jimenez (1436-1517) was a Catholic archbishop in Spain who began work in 1502 on his “Complutensian Polyglot.” It was named “Complutensian” because it was printed in the town of Alcala, which was called Complutum in ancient Roman times; and “Polyglot” because it had parallel columns of Hebrew, Aramaic (where applicable), Greek, and Latin text. The text was divided into numbered chapters that proved convenient and popular, but nobody thought to number verses yet. The very wealthy and influential Jimenez (he rubbed elbows with the Pope and the king and queen of Spain) spent a lot of his own money acquiring many of the best manuscripts and scholars for his project. Even though Jimenez had easy access to the Vaticanus manuscript (which had been in the Vatican library since 1475), like Origen and Jerome centuries before, he and his team of Catholic scholars rejected all Alexandrian manuscripts as inferior. One of the texts we know the Polyglot scholars used was the Codex Complutensis I – so named because Jimenez purchased it. Even though the Complutensis I manuscript included parts of the Apocrypha, Jimenez and his scholars, after much deliberation, made the somewhat risky decision in the Catholic world that the Apocrypha shouldn’t be part of the Bible. The Complutensis I manuscript was 500 years old when Jimenez purchased it (made in 927 AD), and its textual ancestry seems to go way back to some of the Old Latin manuscripts before Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. To the disgust of modern, Alexandrian-promoting scholars, its text contained both the woman caught in adultery in John 8, and the Trinity in 1 John 5:7,8.
The Polyglot team either didn’t record all of the textual sources they used, or that information has been lost, and therefore most of the manuscripts selected for the Complutensian Polyglot and why the scholars chose them over the many other available manuscripts remains unknown. The Polyglot scholars did record their enthusiasm about their manuscript choices, which they called “ancient and valuable.” Other records show that Jimenez did consult and compare a number of manuscripts from the Vatican Library, but no details have survived. We just don’t know much about many of the manuscripts sources he chose to use. For emphasis, I call these now-missing manuscript sources, “The Distinguished Lost Elite of the Manuscript Mess: The Chosen Few whose Quality caused them to be Hand-picked because they Stood Out from the Rest.” My intention is to remind you that these manuscripts that are unknown to modern scholars (who deceptively speak as though these manuscripts never existed) were so impressive and pure they were deliberately chosen by Jimenez and his Polyglot team of scholars who, don’t forget, had the knowledge, integrity, and strength of character to – after discussing the political fallout that might occur – unanimously agreed to reject the Vaticanus Alexandrian manuscript even though it was a prized possession of the Pope’s Vatican Library. We’ll soon see, as we continue documenting the manuscript ancestry of the King James Bible, that this now-unknown group of select Bible manuscripts (and other textual sources such as letters written by early Christian scholars and leaders) will grow larger and larger. This Complutensian Polyglot was the first of several scholar-compiled Greek New Testaments over the next 100 years that would collectively contribute to 1) the King James Bible in 1611, and then later to 2) the Greek NT texts of 1633 and 1881 that would collectively be called the “Textus Receptus.”
Just to emphasize a point: There is a reason modern scholars wistfully daydream about going back to Origen’s era of 200 AD and to the hundred years leading up to the King James Bible. It’s because back then they realize The Distinguished Lost Elite of the Manuscript Mess were not yet lost! Modernists wish they had Origen’s manuscript resources that would show them how futile textual criticism is; they wish they had the manuscript resources Cardinal Jimenez and his team of scholars had that would give them the confidence they need today to be minority voices speaking out against the Alexandrian manuscripts; and they wish they had the manuscript resources – together with God’s guiding light – to be able to produce an inerrant Bible that could withstand four hundred years of irrelevant and nonsensical criticism. But they don’t; they know the manuscripts existed, and they know manuscripts are sometimes lost for various reasons over the centuries. So they inwardly whine that – if only they had those lost manuscripts – they would become strong enough to speak out. But if they had faith they'd have eyes that see that the KJV isn't lost…and it’s better than the Lost Elite.
Knowing the text of the Latin Vulgate had been corrupted over the centuries by his Church, Jimenez hoped his Polyglot would restore some of its credibility among scholars – and perhaps even cause a much-needed revision of the Vulgate. His Polyglot Bible did not include a Spanish-language column because he had no intention of making the Polyglot available to the general Spanish-speaking public…and because he believed using only the three “sacred languages” used on the cross of Christ – Latin, Greek, and Hebrew – would help keep the sacred text from falling into the corrupting hands of the ignorant, bumbling masses. The Polyglot turned out to be an impressive work, so much so that even Erasmus would use it to correct some of the readings in his own published Latin-Greek NT.
1514-1535: Desiderius Erasmus’ first-published Latin/Greek New Testament
Erasmus (1466-1536) was a Dutch Catholic priest who was the preeminent scholar of his time. Even Cardinal Jimenez tried unsuccessfully – twice – to recruit Erasmus to work on the Complutensian Polyglot Bible in the hope of restoring the original text of the increasingly-corrupt Latin Vulgate.
One of the men who greatly influenced Erasmus was Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), a humanist professor at Oxford who taught Erasmus. Because of the growing enthusiasm for the “original Greek” manuscripts flooding Europe from regions around Constantinople, Linacre went to Italy, studied Greek, and then established a Greek-teaching curriculum at Oxford. When he compared the Greek Bible manuscripts with the Catholic-Church-ravaged text of the Latin Vulgate, he commented about the sometimes-shocking differences by recording in his diary, “Either this [Greek Bible manuscript] is not the Gospel…or we [Latin Vulgate users] are not Christians.” (I’ll have an example of this when we get to William Tyndale.)
When Erasmus examined the Latin Vulgate, he, too, saw that its text had accumulated many flaws over the centuries of Catholic “improvements.” He had long been an expert on the Scripture-quoting writings of ancient church scholars and leaders, whose Scripture quotations were so numerous and extensive they could be used to reconstruct most of the New Testament from scratch. Adding to that wealth of knowledge, he studied Greek and Latin Bible manuscripts. Then he was contacted by Cardinal Jimenez and asked to help with the Complutensian Polyglot project. That request energized Erasmus: He turned Jimenez down and began (rather hastily) his own Latin/Greek NT so readers could compare his corrected version of the Vulgate’s NT with the Greek text.
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He spoke with a close friend of his, Johann Froben (1460-1527), who was a prominent printer, publisher, and admirer of the original Latin Vulgate’s Eusebius Hieronymus – also known as Jerome in English. Froben, who named his son Hieronymus after Jerome, was enthusiastic about Erasmus’ project…not because Erasmus wanted it to spur corrections to the Vulgate’s text, but because – since the advent of the printing press – there hadn’t been any Greek New Testaments published – and being the first to do so would mean big sales now that Greek-language manuscripts were soaring in popularity among scholars. He encouraged Erasmus to complete the project as quickly as possible in order to get it published before Cardinal Jimenez finished and published his Polyglot Bible. (Jimenez had already printed the NT portion in 1514, but his completed Bible wasn’t quite ready yet, and therefore wasn’t published – and therefore couldn’t be sold.)
At Froben’s urging, Erasmus did rush. In less than a year he finished his Latin/Greek side-by-side NT and submitted it to Froben…who printed and published it right away (1516) with little or no proofreading beforehand – and none during the typesetting. Erasmus also used his fame and political clout to secure from both Emperor Maximillian and Pope Leo X a guarantee that no other Greek NT could be published for four years, during which only Erasmus’ NT would be available to purchase. Therefore, Jimenez wouldn’t be allowed to publish his work until at least 1520. However, he died a year after Erasmus published his inferior first edition, and his death delayed the full publication of the Complutensian Polyglot until 1522. Its sales never approached those of Erasmus’ works.
Erasmus’ first edition was poorly received because it had too many errors of scholarship and way too many typesetting errors. Historians try to make this first edition a big deal by stating that it was published in 1516 and the Protestant Reformation began in 1517. But the first edition didn’t start the Reformation, and neither did the Ninety-five Theses Luther nailed to the church door; it was started by the growing Enlightenment equality-based ideology of anti-authority and pro-self.
Embarrassed by his first edition, Erasmus decided to try again, and his second edition was published in 1519 without the Trinity in 1 John 5:7,8, which contributed to this second edition, like the first, being panned by scholars. (But that didn’t stop Martin Luther – who was never accused of being a first-rate scholar – from using Erasmus’ second edition for his German-language NT of 1522. But in all fairness, Luther’s NT wasn’t intended for scholars; it was for the German masses who couldn’t read the Latin Vulgate.) Erasmus tried to defend the absence of 1 John 5:7,8 by saying the Greek manuscripts he consulted didn’t have it – but the evidence forced him to agree his second edition needed to be redone.
His third edition was published in 1522, met the expectations of scholars – including restoring 1 John 5:7,8 to its rightful place – and sales were strong. Two scholars who were impressed with his 1522 third edition included William Tyndale (who used it as one of the sources for his 1526 NT in English) and Robert Stephanus (who used it as a source for his 1550 Greek NT…which impressed the translators of both the 1560 Geneva Bible and the 1611 King James Bible).
Erasmus’ fourth edition of 1527, which added the text of the Latin Vulgate Bible as a column that could be compared with Erasmus’ corrected Latin column, was unremarkable except for the last six verses of Revelation. He only had one Greek handwritten manuscript of Revelation, and its last page (called a “leaf” in ancient manuscript language) was missing – having fallen off years before from use and age. That missing leaf contained the last six verses of Revelation. Erasmus knew from other ancient sources the missing verses belonged there, but not having a Greek manuscript that contained it, he simply translated those six known-to-be-correct verses from the Latin Vulgate Bible into Greek for his first three editions. But for this fourth edition he decided to use Cardinal Jimenez’s Complutensian Polyglot, which had been published posthumously in 1522 – to rave reviews by scholars. Erasmus got a copy, found it to be as outstanding as its reputation, and copied the six Revelation verses from the Polyglot’s Greek column into his fourth edition. The verses didn’t change any because the Vulgate had them right all along…but since the Vulgate was losing favor with scholars, those verses now came from Cardinal Jimenez’s unimpeachable source.
In 1535 Erasmus published his fifth edition. It, too, was unremarkable; all it did was drop the superfluous Latin Vulgate column.
Modern scholars have had fun wasting everybody’s time arguing about where Erasmus got 1 John 5:7,8. At one point, he claimed he got it from Codex Britannicus, which dates from the mid-1400s to about 1500. Scholars disdain Britannicus because its wording of 1 John 5:7,8 makes it look like it didn’t come from an old Greek manuscript – it seems to have come from an Old Latin manuscript, possibly by way of Jimenez’s Latin column in his 1514 printing of the NT portion of his unpublished Polyglot. It is therefore conjectured that Erasmus may have lied about Britannicus as his source because he didn’t want to give Jimenez’s as-yet-unpublished Polyglot any publicity or his unofficial endorsement. Other scholars’ research suggests Erasmus got 1 John 5:7,8 from the ancient (200 AD) writings of early Christian scholars, with which he was so eminently familiar. The truth of 1 John 5:7,8 no longer mattered to scholars; what manuscript it came from did.
Modern scholars are also disdainful of anything they don’t know and anything that isn’t Hebrew or Greek. For example, one of the Greek manuscripts we already know Erasmus had, did not contain the last 6 verses in Revelation because they had flaked off and that flake was lost. But Erasmus’ Greek NT not only contained the last 6 verses of Revelation, it said “book of life” (rather than tree of life). Scholars were unaware of any Greek manuscripts available to Erasmus from which he got book of life. The reading book of life does appear in Jerome’s much-older Latin Vulgate Bible, so scholars therefore guessed Erasmus took the Latin and deceitfully translated it into Greek to make it look like he had a Greek source…when they guess he had none. Fact 1: They don’t know all of Erasmus’ manuscript and ancient Christian writings sources, but they don’t like to admit that he had sources about which they know nothing. Fact 2: They don’t know any of Jerome’s manuscript sources, either, but they do grudgingly admit he had access to many more ancient manuscripts than we have today. Fact 3: Scholars have become aware in recent years of the humanly insurmountable challenge presented by the Manuscript Mess, but they rarely acknowledge it unless forced to. Fact 4: They know perfectly well that at least some of the manuscripts used by Jerome, Jimenez, and Erasmus were among “The Distinguished Lost Elite of the Manuscript Mess: The Chosen Few whose Quality caused them to be Hand-picked because they Stood Out from the Rest” …which they try to obscure by wasting everybody’s time talking about unknown sources for readings like “book of life” and “the brother of” [Goliath]. Fact 5: In the last 6 verses of Revelation in the Latin Vulgate there is a commonly-used, known-to-everybody word, come, that Erasmus would have back-translated into Greek by using the normal spelling. But that’s not what happened. Erasmus’ Greek text uses an uncommon Greek spelling of come. If Erasmus really did not have a genuine Greek manuscript with the last 6 verses of Revelation, as scholars charge, how did he know 1) about book of life and 2) about the rare spelling of come? The common Greek spelling is used the vast majority of times throughout the NT, including 4 out of 5 times in the last 6 verses of Revelation. I say again, only one time does the uncommon spelling of come appear in the last 6 verses of Revelation. Verse 17 uses the common spelling twice and the uncommon once, and verse 20 uses the common spelling both times. If Erasmus only had the Latin Vulgate, he could not have known about that single instance of the uncommon spelling in verse 17, because there is only one Latin spelling. That means Erasmus did have a genuine Greek manuscript that contained the last 6 verses. But how did he know to use book of life instead of tree of life, since book appears in “only” a few of the almost 6,000 Greek NT manuscripts we know about? Scholars think the gambling odds of the few times book of life appears in existing Greek manuscripts should convince (democratically speaking) us that book isn’t valid. But book is used the vast majority of times in the 10,000 Old Latin and Latin Vulgate manuscripts; book is also used in ancient other-language Bible versions; and book is used a number of times in the ancient writings of Christian leaders. (Note: I’m only using these examples to show how ignorant or deceitful modern scholars are; I’m not trying to make you think you should spend your valuable dark-last-days’ time wading through a bunch of bullshit. I have learned nothing important doing my research for this book, and I pray that you’ll not waste your time like I’ve done. Gird your loins with Thus saith the Lord…and stick with it!)
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Frederick Nolan (1784-1864) was a British theologian, Greek and Latin scholar, and historian who spent 28 years researching liberal scholars’ whinings about trivial matters about the manuscript origins of the Textus Receptus. His detailed findings made him conclude that it is foolish to suggest men like Jimenez and Erasmus, who had well-deserved and long-standing reputations as top-tier scholars, were suddenly afflicted with rare mental conditions that made them abandon their characteristic mental discipline and intellectual clarity when searching for and selecting manuscript sources and textual readings. He said these noble men of proven character had already discovered that only two classes of manuscripts exist, those that generally agree with the Byzantine Majority text, and those that agree with the Alexandrian Minority text…and based on tangible evidence, Jimenez and Erasmus consistently and logically accepted the former and rejected the latter – and they did so not because they were ignorant of the Alexandrian readings, but because they went with better readings. For them to have done otherwise would have been hugely and suspiciously out of character.
By their fruits ye shall know them: When we look back at the hundred years during which a number of top scholars researched and put together a collection of Greek manuscripts that would later be termed “the Textus Receptus,” it becomes evident that all of those manuscripts have textual agreements that link them to the works of Jimenez and Erasmus. Liberal Alexandrian-manuscript advocates try to avoid the amazingly-consistent texts produced over a century by men whose source manuscripts varied. The textual consistency is obviously not the product of low-life dullards who mindlessly “copied” those who went before. On the contrary, their works are indicative of men whose scholarship was laudable, and whose different manuscript sources were obviously and notably superior to those used by modern scholars for modern Bible versions. How can we say that? By examining their fruits. The works of the scholars who produced the Textus Receptus have the kind of enduring consistency and quality modern Bible versions lack. Indeed, modern versions are proof that the manuscripts and methods of textual criticism so favored today are incapable of turning the manuscript mess into any semblance of enduring quality – which is why an unsatisfied marketplace calls for new, revised, better, improved Bible versions every other month. The more you look into the manuscript mess and the Bible versions that have emerged from it, the more you conclude that the difference between the quality and consistency of the manuscripts and versions that have emerged from the Textus Receptus, and the lack of quality and consistency of those that have emerged from the Alexandrian manuscripts isn’t so much the people who worked on them as it is the manuscript sources they used.
The sad reality is that Jimenez and Erasmus undertook their projects solely because the veracity of the word of God was being questioned among scholars. What happened to cause that? It was a simple matter of Yea, hath God said? The message conveyed to us from God has always been paramount. It didn’t matter if it was conveyed by Adam, by Job, by Moses, by Jeremiah, or by Peter and Paul. It didn’t matter what language they used…as long as the message got across. But the Yea, hath God said effect of the manuscript mess allowed scholars to shift their attention from the message, to whether or not the text should say supersubstantial bread or daily bread; tree of life or book of life; and even thee or you. And then when we wannabe scholars decided we had the prerogative to decide if this word or that word was “correct” or “better” than some other similar word, we had transformed ourselves from subserviently-obedient servants glorifying God – into independent authorities sitting in judgment on whether or not God really used a word or not. And in this way we subverted our humble faith in God and His word.
Yes, I am aware that the thousand-year reign of the Latin Vulgate had to come to an end because of the deliberate corruption it suffered at the hands of agenda-driven “revisors.” And, yes, I can see how God used the manuscript mess and the well-intentioned men who produced the Bible versions prior to the King James Bible to test our faith…and patience. But I’m focusing on the fact that when the KJV came out the manuscript mess no longer mattered, because the old ERROR manuscripts became irrelevant. And yet way too many Christians are having their attention diverted from the inerrant purity of both the words and the message of the KJV by the Satanic Yea, hath God said tactics of theology.
For now, all I want to establish is the (perhaps somewhat nit-picking) fact that Wycliffe, Jimenez, and Erasmus were scholars who swallowed the hook of knowledge, and they were reeled in by the Devil and fooled into not trusting the word of God. They were like many (not all) scholars who depended on scholarship. And they were unlike most humble non-scholars whose slow-lane lives kept them “out from among them” – thereby helping them preserve their salt-savored faith in God and His written word.
The Complutensian Polyglot alone testifies to the fact that 500 years ago all Catholic and Protestant scholars who examined the Alexandrian text completely rejected it. If it had been halfway decent, some of history’s brightest minds wouldn’t have rejected it. When the Polyglot is put together with the Erasmus Greek/Latin NT, we see that even though they were very similar in the messages they had in all of their editions, they all also had minor word differences. Over the next hundred years we’ll see that pattern continue as the different manuscripts put together by different men become collectively named “THE Textus Receptus” – even though they all had (relatively few) differences from one another. In other words, what we know as The Textus Receptus is a myth no matter how you look at it. To wit:
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No manuscript in the Textus Receptus grouping is inerrant.
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No two Textus Receptus manuscripts completely agree with each other.
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The KJV did not come from the Textus Receptus – which we’ll get to.
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Those who reject the KJV and “prefer” the Textus Receptus because it represents the “Majority” or “Byzantine” textual family, are just as aware of the errors in the Textus Receptus as are those who “prefer” the error-ridden Alexandrian “Minority” manuscript family…but it doesn’t bother them because they do not believe God’s word – as He defines it – exists, and they warn people against “worshipping” any Bible version…even though none of us knows anybody who actually does worship a Bible version. (Note: Online there are seeming KJV-only websites. But some of them promote a “2016 King James Bible” over the AV1611. They claim their translation is faithful to the Greek-language Textus Receptus/Majority/Byzantine “textual tradition” because it only updates the “vocabulary and spelling” of those Greek-language manuscripts…as if you and I care about Greek spelling and vocabulary! But they have quietly changed English words in the 1611 KJV text they believe to be errors. For example, they have removed Jesus from Act 7:45 and inserted Joshua – just like many of the modern versions do, as covered in AOR p.D22-8; D23-4.)
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Neither Erasmus nor Luther was the root of the Protestant Reformation. Luther was a catalyst, but he wasn’t the root cause. The seeds of the Protestant Reformation were sown long before either of these men showed up. The main force behind the Reformation was a social one – the growing agreement with Greek Reason’s belief in the sovereignty of the individual, which is the mortal enemy of authority. People were losing their ability to submit to anything – including religious and Scriptural authority. Faith itself was beginning to be subverted by Logic and Reason. There had been voices gently advocating reform within the Roman Church for many years prior to Luther, but it took the Enlightenment two centuries to begin having widespread success subverting the supremely-important Scripture-based ideology that had held Christianity and society together since the beginning of time – authority. One of the subtle effects Reason was having within Christianity since about 1300 AD was a quietly-growing movement among Christian scholars to question the authority of Scripture – no matter what Bible version or old manuscript was being read. For example, today theologians are quibbling over “went into the temple” vs “went into the temple of the LORD,” which never would have bothered rank and file Christians centuries ago. Why? Because they say the exact same thing; God’s message is clear to those with eyes that see and ears that hear. But to those who have lost faith in the authority of God and His word, they have the independent arrogance to pompously whip out their layman’s aid to decide what they think God really said – which means they are independent heads, carnal enemies of the Headship of God and the authority of His word.
Sixty-one years passed between the advent of the printing press (1455) and the publication of Erasmus’ Greek text of the New Testament in 1516. During those sixty-one years, at least one hundred printings of Jerome’s Vulgate were published. It was a war between what the Bible says, and mankind’s Natural inclination to believe the Enlightenment’s gospel of self-evidence. During these 61 years the flood of Greek-language manuscripts that were brought to Europe by Christians fleeing Muslims who were attacking Constantinople caused scholars to have a Natural Mars’-Hill attraction and fascination with something new: The Latin-language Vulgate had been the Bible for 1,100 years, and Latin had been accepted as the language of religion and scholarship the whole time…which made them “old” – as in, familiarity breeds contempt. The fascination with these “new” Greek-language manuscripts slowly made the Greek language begin its rise to dominance over Latin among more and more scholars, who then began to study Greek so they could read it. When Erasmus (and, to a lesser degree, Jimenez) used Greek-language texts to show what corruption the Catholic Church had “revised” into the Vulgate, they unknowingly began a subtle process of establishing Greek-language NT manuscripts as somehow superior to NT manuscripts in all other languages. Because of this specious-but-growing emphasis on “original Greek” manuscripts, we shall see in centuries to come liberal scholars devalue ancient Latin and Syrian Bible manuscripts, as well as early Christian correspondences that quote Scripture verses, as “untrustworthy” if they did not appear in the few extant Greek-language, Apocrypha-containing Alexandrian manuscripts. This Mars’-Hill infatuation with Greek manuscripts would grow into an irrational obsession that would produce two interesting results:
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The intentions of both Jimenez and Erasmus were drowned out by the new obsession with Greek: They both wanted their manuscripts to result in a proper, accurate revision of the Vulgate, thus restoring its faded luster. The only purpose of their Greek columns was to add credence to their Latin columns…but everybody ignored the Latin, lost interest in the Vulgate, and began referring to Erasmus’ Latin/Greek manuscript as his “Greek manuscript.”
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Modern scholars, while hypocritically praising men like Origen, Jerome, Jimenez, and Erasmus, would completely ignore the fact that those brilliant men valued and used all of the various sources of Scripture…with a single exception: those brilliant men of old universally scorned the Greek Alexandrian manuscripts. Modern apostasy has appallingly and inexcusably taken the sensible-and-consistent methods, conclusions, and results of 1,700 years of scholars…and turned them upside down.
1522-1534: Martin Luther’s German Bible
Just as Father Wycliffe used his Bible to show Catholic pewsters he was right in his fight with the Pope and other authorities in the Catholic Church, so, too, did Father Martin Luther (1483-1546). Father Luther used Erasmus’ 1519 second edition Latin/Greek NT as the basis of his 1522 German NT…followed by the complete Bible in 1534. His German Bible was a huge commercial success among the general population, but it was a different story with scholars; Luther’s OT portion (which was translated by others, not by Luther) achieving some acceptance among scholars…but the NT was scorned. Nevertheless, people did learn from Luther’s Bible. For example, when previously-celibate German bishops who couldn’t read Latin, read Luther’s German Bible, they began marrying.
Most historical sources say, without specificity, Luther used Erasmus’ Greek NT when making his German NT. But they may say that only because most people sloppily refer to Erasmus’ two-columned Latin/Greek NT as “Erasmus’ Greek NT” …they either ignore or don’t know Erasmus’ NT was also in Latin, which Luther could read. A few sources do specifically say Luther used Erasmus’ Latin column for his German NT. Combine that with the fact that, while Luther could have done most of his NT translating because of Erasmus’ Latin column, the fact that Erasmus made no Latin column of the OT, and the fact that Luther needed other men to translate his German OT, suggest that Luther – the man who was so fond of talking about “the languages” – may have lacked translator proficiency in both of the very languages, Greek and Hebrew, he referred to.
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Luther was opposed to the Catholic doctrine of salvation by works. Combine that with his failure to understand the Biblical difference between works and works of the law (see AOR chapter D20) and you’ll see 1) why he rejected as Scripture the books of Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation (as exampled by KJV Jam 2:24 Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only), and 2) why he preached salvation by faith alone. In fact, he was so zealous about faith alone that where the Bible says “faith without,” he changed it to say “faith alone without.” No other Bible translation committee in history found any justification to add the word alone to the words already existing in Romans 3:28. That’s but one of the reasons scholars gave “some acceptance” to the committee work on Luther’s OT – but not to Luther’s work on the NT. No matter what Luther thought, he shouldn’t have added to the word of God.
KJV Rom 3:28 Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.
MLV Ro 3:28 Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith alone without the deeds of the law.
1526-1534: William Tyndale’s first printed English New Testament
Father William Tyndale (1494-1536) was educated at Oxford, and, like Wycliffe, believed society needed some liberating from the rule of the Catholic Church. He thought Wycliffe’s English NT had been a good start at showing how wrong Catholicism was, so Father Tyndale decided to produce the whole Bible in English. His first-edition NT was completed in 1526. Then he revised his NT, and only completed half of the OT in his planned second edition of 1534 (which in 1537 became the basis of the Matthew’s Bible). Tyndale, in keeping with his desire to level society, spread social egalitarianism, and attack the Catholic Church, put liberal activist comments/notes in his Bible that were considered heretical to unEnlightened Christians. (Half of Tyndale’s notes were copied directly from Luther’s radical notes in the German Bible. Interestingly enough, the always-Catholic Tyndale rejected the Catholic doctrine that at communion you were literally eating the body of Christ – and Luther, who quit Catholicism, continued to believe the Catholic communion doctrine.) When John Calvin used much of the accurate and eloquent textual wording in Tyndale’s Bible for the Geneva Bible, he also realized Tyndale’s/Luther’s notes were an effective way of telling Christians what to believe, so Enlightened notes and explanations were included in the Geneva Bible.
Tyndale spent much of his 42-year life hiding from and fighting his Church superiors. Before he was able to finish the second half of the OT in his 1534 edition, he was caught hiding in Belgium, excommunicated for producing a Bible in English, tied to a stake, strangled to death, and then burned. (Miles Coverdale and John Rogers finished Tyndale’s OT, so calling it “Tyndale’s Bible” is not technically accurate.) A few months before Tyndale was executed by the Catholic Church, England’s King Henry VIII split from Catholicism and legalized previously-outlawed Bibles in English. That one-two punch by King Henry produced an impotent rage among authorities in the Roman Church…and may have caused Tyndale’s “double” execution. Catholic officials did not let their prisoner, Tyndale, know about King Henry’s actions, which is why Tyndale’s last words were, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”
Tyndale mostly used Erasmus’ excellent 1522 third edition Latin/Greek NT for his NT. His secondary sources included Jimenez’ Complutensian Polyglot and Luther’s German Bible. The combination of Erasmus’ superb scholarship and Tyndale’s gifted ability to eloquently word phrases in English (ignoring some of his wordings known to be incorrect translations) made Tyndale’s Bible an absolute must for all subsequent Bible translation committees – including modern Alexandrian-text-based versions. Remember: 1) Most of the readings in the Alexandrian Minority text and the Byzantine Majority text are in agreement. 2) Therefore, Erasmus’ excellent third edition was and is as close to a go-to reference as you could get for both KJV-era and modern-era translation committees. 3) Erasmus’ third edition was the basis for most of Tyndale’s work, which meant he was using an excellent and accurate source. 4) Tyndale had an obvious talent for English wording. 5) Therefore, when translating committees past and present finish figuring out the meaning and message of Greek passages, they often decide to use Tyndale’s wording because it combines accuracy with eloquence. Sadly, you will find modern scholars wrongly saying the KJV translators did very little translating because – modernists claim – the translators did so much “copying” from Tyndale’s Bible…and then these deceitful men will recommend a modern version without telling you it also uses many of Tyndale’s accurate and eloquent readings.
Father Tyndale was a scholar, and he was fluent in eight languages. When he was translating the OT Hebrew into English, he noted that Hebrew and English share an interesting quality: they both easily, clearly, and efficiently impart a clear understanding of the intended information, and the reverse is true in that thoughts and descriptions are easily put into appropriate words in those two languages. Because of this quality, Tyndale often said Hebrew is much easier to translate into English than into any other language.
Earlier, we noted that Erasmus’ Latin/Greek NT was necessary because, as his professor recorded in his diary, the wording of the Latin Vulgate had been so tailored to Catholic doctrine (which had intensified during the buildup to the Protestant Reformation) that it was doctrinally no longer Christian. That’s why Erasmus did his NT in both Latin and Greek; his emphasis was on using the correct Latin translation of the Greek to show the corrupted Vulgate needed an overhaul. Look at the different use of present and past tenses in the following examples of Hebrews 1:3:
Catholic/Latin Vulgate Heb 1:3 …making purgation of sins, sitteth…
Tyndale NT Heb 1:3 …hath in his own person purged our sins, and is sitten…
King James Heb 1:3 …when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down…
The Catholic-revised Vulgate’s use of the present tense “making purgation,” together with the absence of a word like “after” to establish the proper past-tense context – such as saying “after making purgation” – allows the survival of the Catholic doctrine of Christ’s ongoing sacrificial death during every Catholic mass. No verse wording like this exists in any Bible version – except in Catholic ones. (The Catholic Douay-Rheims Version, for example, is incorrectly worded exactly as the Catholic/Vulgate above.) That is why men of integrity like Cardinal Jimenez, Father Erasmus, and Professor Linacre wanted the Latin Vulgate restored to the accuracy it had back in Jerome’s day.
The above Scripture examples demonstrate that the KJV translators sometimes came up with better ways to articulate the message of Scripture than did Tyndale, and if they couldn’t they were not averse to using Tyndale’s wording or something similar. In the final analysis, Tyndale’s Bible text can be called very good when it comes to accuracy – because of Erasmus’ ability; and it can be called excellent and enduring because of its memorable wording that is still used today. However, the fact that it included “teaching” prefaces, notes, and comments – many of them argumentative, was a distinct weakness it shared with Luther’s German Bible and many versions up to and including Calvin’s Geneva Bible. Remember, the Protestant Reformation of this era was a vicious and bloody war that often used the Bible as political, social, and religious propaganda.
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1535, 1537, and 1539: Miles Coverdale’s Bible, the Matthew’s Bible of John Rogers, and Coverdale’s Great Bible
Miles Coverdale (1488-1569) worked as an assistant to Father William Tyndale. Coverdale was weak-willed, unmanly, and drifted through life. He studied philosophy-based theology at Cambridge, became an Augustinian friar and a big fan of Augustine…but because his personal Bible was John Calvin’s Geneva version, he allowed Calvin’s infamous Geneva Bible’s copious “teaching” notes and comments to gradually convert him to Calvinism. He fled from England when King Henry VIII was a Catholic, returned when Henry became a Protestant, fled again when Catholic bloody Mary became queen, and returned after her death.
John Rogers (1505-1555) was an Englishman who quit Catholicism after meeting the anti-Catholic activist, Father William Tyndale – even though Tyndale never quit Catholicism (perhaps so he wouldn’t lose his Catholic financial benefits for past services rendered). After Father Tyndale was strangled/burned by his church, Rogers helped Coverdale finish Tyndale’s second edition and publish it as the Matthew’s Bible in 1537. When bloody Mary became queen, Rogers publicly preached against Catholicism, was arrested, and in 1555 became the first of hundreds of Protestants burned at the stake by Queen Mary. These gruesome deaths caused many English Protestants to flee to places like Geneva, which helped prompt the creation of the Geneva Bible in 1560.
Coverdale Bible of 1535: When Tyndale was arrested, Coverdale and Rogers finished the last quarter of Tyndale’s Bible and published it shortly before his execution. The Coverdale Bible, therefore, was the first complete Bible in English to be published. Its Enlightened comments and notes, although not as radical as Tyndale’s, were offensive enough to keep his Bible from being sanctioned by the king.
Matthew’s Bible of 1537 was mostly a compilation by John Rogers, because he was not a translator, and he did very little work on “his” Bible; he merely assembled the work of Tyndale, Erasmus, Luther, and Coverdale. Rogers named his compilation the Matthew’s Bible because he didn’t want to be arrested, and the anonymity emboldened him to add copious inflammatory notes. He added Job to Luther’s list of illegitimate books of the Bible. After Bloody Mary became queen, it only took her two years to find, capture, and burn John Rogers at the stake.
The Great Bible of 1539: Neither the king nor his bishops were happy with the quality of the existing English Bibles and the notes they contained. King Henry VIII wanted all of England’s churches to have a pulpit Bible. But the new Church of England was in disarray; it had new “Protestant” priests, many of whom still wanted to be Catholic, and it had no established hierarchy, which caused it to take the easy course and give the job of translating a new version to the weak-willed Miles Coverdale. Even though the resulting pulpit-sized Great Bible did look “official” in church, and even though it had all comments and notes removed, the final product used the same hodge-podge of sources, including the Catholic-corrupted Latin Vulgate that had been used for the Coverdale Bible and Matthew’s Bible. It was a decent effort, but nobody was excited about it because the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts flooding Europe, and the new Bibles being published every other year were edging people closer to thinking the “Holy Bible” was but another “mere version” in an unending succession of different versions that attempted to improve the text…and try to clean up the usual, unending typesetting mistakes.
Coverdale knew little Hebrew and Greek, so he relied heavily on Latin renderings and on Luther and Tyndale’s works. Coverdale established the precedent of separating the Apocrypha from the Old Testament by putting it in a non-Scripture section. Like his friend, Tyndale, he was gifted with English phraseology, and improved some of Tyndale’s prose. Coverdale was also known for his interesting sermons, and his works contributed to the wording in both the Geneva and King James Bibles.
Several years after the Great Bible came out, the bloody conflict of the Protestant Reformation, together with activist bishops in England who wanted the Church of England more Catholicized, resulted in an effort to have a new English version created that was faithful to the Catholic-corrupted Latin Vulgate. King Henry VIII, who hated the social-activist notes in all the earlier English versions, reacted by ordering all Latin Vulgate Bibles to be collected and destroyed – which is why so few copies of them exist today. Also, because the Great Bible had no notes, a fairly-accurate text, and had restored the books of Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation to the Scripture part of the Bible, it was decided to leave the Great Bible in place. It lasted for less than thirty years.
1545: The Catholic “Counter-Reformation” to the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on the Bible
Anti-Catholicism activists such as Father Wycliffe, Father Tyndale, Miles Coverdale, and John Rogers; and pro-Catholicism loyalists who correctly recognized the need for an accurate Bible, such as Cardinal Jimenez and Father Erasmus, all contributed to an exodus from the Catholic Church. It got so bad the Vatican held a series of meetings to discuss ways to counteract the Protestant Reformation. The main problem as they saw it was the spreading of the word of God. They had already tried banning Bibles in the vernacular so their parishioners couldn’t read Scripture, they had excommunicated anti-Catholic activists, and they had been burning Bibles and the people who promoted them. But nothing worked; the Bible continued to spread.
To deal with the growing problem, the Vatican convened the Council of Trent in 1545 to officially launch its Counter-Reformation. One of the more surprising actions it took that shows how panicked and angry the Vatican was, is what it did to one of its brightest minds, Father Erasmus. Both Cardinal Jimenez and Erasmus had been dead for over a decade, but it was Erasmus who was being continually lauded by Protestants for his Latin/Greek NT that revealed how much the Vatican had corrupted Jerome’s Latin Vulgate over the centuries with “revisions” that supported false Catholic teachings. Yes, Jimenez’s Complutensian Polyglot had also revealed the errors in the Vulgate, but his Polyglot got relatively little attention because Erasmus’ NT was published first. Also, because of the high praise scholars had for Erasmus’ NT, interest had grown for some of his other less-well-known writings. In them, Erasmus had been quietly trying to help Catholicism correct its corruption and incorrect doctrines such as Christ’s repeated death at every mass, confession, the Pope’s rule over every Catholic Church in the world, and the requirement that priests be celibate. Therefore, even though Erasmus was a favorite of Pope Leo X (1475-1521), and even though Erasmus had dedicated his NT to him, the new Pope, Paul IV, in one of his first actions at the Council of Trent, shockingly pronounced Erasmus a heretic and banned all of his writings.
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Among the myriad mystical organizations and murderous methods Rome came up with to counter Protestantism’s emphasis on Holy Scripture, those that were most lasting and most effective were related to Thomas Aquinas’ mixing Reason and religion. Catholicism had already transitioned from an Augustine-based religion (using Scripture to formulate and defend Catholic doctrine) to an Aquinas-based religion (using theology to formulate and defend Catholic doctrine), but that was primarily directed at scholars because they were the ones who debated issues. Now, however, it wasn’t just scholars leaving the Church; it was all levels of society – and their main reason for leaving was the Bible! Therefore, the Catholic Jesuit organization and many other “orders” quickly began establishing educational schools and institutions all over the world to teach subsequent generations that using Reason and theology to subvert the plain wording of Thus saith the Lord was right and necessary to find the truth and to avoid Dark-Age ignorance and superstition. The irony of this – and the brilliance and subtilty of Satan’s war on the word – was the fact that all the Vatican was doing was more quickly and obviously spreading among Bible believers the very same Reason that Protestant “reformers” were already spreading. In other words, the Vatican realized its main enemy was/is the literal word of God, and the Vatican realized its most effective weapon against Scripture was/is Reason…so it set about deliberately and formally weaponizing Reason by promoting theology because:
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The carnal mind is enmity (violent hatred) against God because it is not and cannot be subject to the law/word of God (Rom 8:7), and
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If you take Reason out of theology you’ve abandoned carnality and have turned to the faith-building simplicity of reading and believing the word of God – which meant Reason is theology’s essential appeal; it is what gives theology its pride-building, humanistic self-evident “sophistication” that blinds its adherents to the fact that it is undermining their belief in Scripture…which meant Rome needed theology in its war on the word of God.
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Because Reason is the essence of theology, and because Reason/carnality is by definition enmity against God, and is not and cannot be subject to the law/word of God (Rom 8:7), theology makes its adherents independent heads who – rather than submit to what it says – exalt self above God by deciding what Scripture really means and whether or not it is valid and trustworthy. I say again: When Rome's burning people and Bibles changed nothing, it turned to theology, which is the tactic Satan used against Eve when he had her use her Reason to see if she thought the forbidden fruit would really be bad for her. Simply stated: theology's anti-Bible weapon is “what-do-you-think” Reason. Just take Reason out of theology and you've become a Bible believer whose faith-based read-it-and-believe-it literal interpretation makes the Bible clear and consistent.
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By its fruits ye shall know theology undermines faith in what God plainly says, which is defined as rebellion against God (1 Sam 15:22,23; Jer 28:15,16; 29:31,32). Theology is a thinly-disguised wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Aquinas’ blending of Greek philosophy’s Reason with Christianity, which caused Reason to spread to all of society, was and is the most effective and far-reaching tool of the Devil in this spiritual war. His other tactics, as bad as they are, can be overcome and/or avoided by sticking with Thus saith the Lord. Theology is designed to subvert the word of God, and, beginning in the 1500s, it was weaponized by the Catholic Church. Thomas Aquinas’ teachings are still eminently important and mandatory today, as stated in a 1914 encyclical sent by the Pope to all bishops around the world: “The [teachings] in the philosophy of St. Thomas are not to be placed in the category of opinions capable of being debated one way or another, but are to be considered as the foundations upon which the whole science of natural and divine things is based.” The Catholic Counter-Reformation against the Bible is still going on…and it has caused Catholicism and society to become wackier and wackier. We’ll get into more of this Catholic Counter-Reformation when we get to the Douay-Rheims Bible of 1582.
1546-1551: Robert Stephanus’ editions of the Greek New Testament
Robert Stephanus (1503-1559) was a French Catholic scholar and printer who converted to Protestantism. His name is Stephanus in Latin, Stephens in English, and Estienne in French. His first and second Greek-language editions of the NT were published in 1546 and 1549. They were taken from Jimenez’s highly-respected Complutensian Polyglot and the Erasmus NT. But it was his third and fourth editions that really put Stephanus on the map.
His third edition of 1550, in addition to the Complutensian Polyglot and the Erasmus NT, used as source texts 16 other known Greek manuscripts and two other manuscripts that are lost – the oldest that we know of (Codex Bezae) dates back to 1,100 years before Stephanus to the time of Jerome! In other words, Stephanus used some stellar manuscripts, which we know because for the first time in history, he enumerated the manuscripts he used…and he included some alternate readings from them. Because Stephanus’ text and sources are so impressive, modernists despise it. For example, one of their favorite targets is the fact that Luke 17:36 appears in Stephanus’ text:
Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
Yes, the verse is in the ancient Codex Bezae Greek manuscript, and, yes, it’s in all manuscripts that have Mat 24:40 (which says the same thing), and it’s in all 10,000 ancient Old Latin manuscripts as far back as the 300s, and it’s in all Syriac manuscripts (between 300 to 400 of them) from the regions around Antioch, the oldest of which date back to about 400, and it’s in most of the early Latin Vulgates. So, even though everybody knows Christ really did say it, it might not belong in Luke because it’s not in a valued Greek fragment (P75, which has part of Luke and John) that some think might be older than Codex Bezae and therefore might be “more accurate” than Codex Bezae. It doesn’t matter to modernists that many, many ancient manuscripts from different geographic regions include Luke 17:36…if those manuscripts aren’t in Greek. I say again, the Dead Sea Scrolls proved that the “older is better” theory is Dead Wrong, and the Manuscript Mess has proven over and over that we don’t have a clue what we’re talking about. The hypocrisy and inconsistency of modern scholars is shown in the fact that they love the old Syriac manuscripts because it is believed most of the books of the NT were written in that region by the apostles, which means manuscripts from that area are generally considered more accurate than manuscripts from other regions. But the fact that every Syriac NT does contain Luke 17:36 is ignored – because of a single ancient Greek manuscript fragment that doesn’t have it.
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You and I would probably like it if Luke 17:36 appeared in the Complutensian Polyglot, Erasmus’ NT, Wycliffe’s NT, and the Tyndale, Coverdale, and Matthew’s Bibles. But it doesn’t. Interestingly enough, it is in Coverdale’s 1539 Great Bible. I say interesting because the Codex Bezae manuscript with Luke 17:36 that was used by Stephanus for his NT, didn’t show up in history until 1545…so it looks like a manuscript that Coverdale did not have for his earlier two Bibles, he later found and used to include Luke 17:36 in his Great Bible. And this manuscript contains the same Luke 17:36 that was in Stephanus’ manuscript. That’s all we know…and it testifies to the impenetrable nature of the Manuscript Mess and to the fact that there were so many manuscripts used prior to the AV1611 that have since vanished from history. From the Great Bible on, all Bibles either include Luke 17:36 or have a hugely-understated footnote that says “many” manuscripts (tens of thousands!) have it.
Manuscript Mess fact: If we closely examine Codex Bezae and the P75 fragment (and most manuscripts) we’re going to find a few readings that, taken by themselves, could be used to “discredit” the manuscript. These readings are there because of things like human copying errors (a very common error that is often overlooked), human bias, and text taken from poor manuscripts. Both conservatives and liberals, therefore, have plenty of ammo to defend their favorite manuscripts – as long as they ignore the flaws in those manuscripts…and hope their opponents don’t know about them. The Manuscript Mess is a mess because it has manuscripts with missing words, missing sections, different readings, missing manuscripts (that we know scholars actually used), and manuscripts that consist of a mixed bag of readings from different geographic regions, different original languages, and even different centuries. The reason all Bible versions (but one) have errors is they were put together by human beings, and even the smartest and well-intentioned editors and translators had to contend with the humanly-impossible task of trying to find conclusive textual finality and certainty in the Manuscript Mess. The fact that the Manuscript Mess is unfathomable, has – since the end of the 1900s – been recognized, proven by computer analysis, and quietly accepted by scholars and theologians…who continue to publicly pretend we’re still in the golden age of theology of the mid-1900s by marketing new, known-to-be “mere” Bible versions. All of the above is why the historically unprecedented inerrancy of the King James Bible – the only Bible version or manuscript known to modern man to have a flawless text – is reassuring to Bible believers who have actionable faith in God and in the way He defines His word. The King James Bible isn’t humanly possible. It is unprecedented. It is a Godsend in these dark last days to counteract the increasingly-overwhelming weapons Satan is using in his war on the word that have made so many Christians afraid to have the Scripture-based faith to believe in God’s inerrancy.
Stephanus’ fourth edition contained the same text as his famous third edition, but the fourth included verse numberings for the first time in history. It is believed that Stephen Langton (of Magna Carta infamy) was the first one to divide the NT into numbered chapters in about 1246. Then in 1445 a Jew, Mordecai Nathan, divided the OT into numbered chapters, and then later he and a friend added verse numbers to the OT. And Stephanus completed the Bible’s numbering in 1551. The numberings were always very popular when they came out because they made “here a little, and there a little” study quicker and easier, and they made spoken and written references easier.
It is laudable that Stephanus made notations of his sources and of some available alternate readings. But his notes were rudimentary, incomplete, and therefore leave us wondering what other readings his now-lost manuscripts contained. Nevertheless, he is appreciated for starting a trend to record info about his sources.
His third and fourth editions were highly praised by scholars and greatly used for New Testament texts. For example, the 1557 NT of the Geneva Bible used Stephanus’ Greek NT as a source…and it included his popular verse numbers.
Because of the source notations Stephanus made for his third edition, we can add two more manuscripts to “The Distinguished Lost Elite of the Manuscript Mess: The Chosen Few whose Quality caused them to be Hand-picked because they Stood Out from the Rest” that definitely existed at one time...may still exist...and are waiting for God’s own timing for them to be “discovered” again…and that modern scholars ignore because those now-lost manuscripts are proof that when theologians make pompous decrees about…pretty much everything – they’re just making ignorance-based guesses soaked in anti-KJV bias because the AV1611’s inerrancy makes the Manuscript Mess irrelevant, makes all old manuscripts irrelevant, makes it obvious that theology has always been wrong and harmful to Christianity, and has sharply reduced the tremendous financial profits from the sale of mere Bible versions, layman’s aids, and other harmful theological works.
1565: Theodore Beza’s Greek New Testament
Theodore Beza (1519-1605) was a French Catholic who converted to Protestantism, moved to Geneva, studied under the Enlightened John Calvin, and became Calvin’s successor when he died. Beza’s most important work was his 1565 Greek NT. Some of Beza’s sources included Stephanus’ 1551 Greek NT (which used some of the Distinguished Lost Elites of the Manuscript Mess) with verse numbers, Jimenez’ Complutensian Polyglot, Erasmus’ Latin/Greek NT (which used the Distinguished Lost Elites), and various other manuscripts, some of which were from the regions around Antioch, Syria. An interesting fact emerges with Beza’s work: All of the varied manuscript sources (including the Lost Elites) used by those who preceded him, together with the fact that Beza’s own sources included Syrian- and Arabic-language New Testaments, resulted in something previously unknown: they produced texts that had very few substantive differences from each other. The so-called “Greek” NT text of the Bible (so-called because of its many other-language contributions) – after so many scholars worked with so many varied manuscripts, and who then evaluated each other’s finished works – had become essentially established, settled, finalized. No, it wasn’t perfect, but it was as close to perfection as it could humanly get. (I say again, this underscores how deceitful it is for scholars to pretend manuscripts in languages other than Greek should be viewed as inferior.) From here on, there would only be occasional minor word changes. The text of all modern Bible versions, while not without flaws, is basically settled, and therefore each new version – for all of its marketing hype – merely uses different words to say essentially the same thing they’ve all said for centuries (ignoring the modern trend to use wacko renderings because they can’t be proven to be incorrect). Back in Beza’s day, the constant nit-picking and useless bickering by scholars and theologians about this word and that word (1 Tim 6:4) had become the status quo among most of the "educated elite" …and it has continued.
The 1572 French Catholic massacre of French Huguenot Protestants affected Beza; it caused him to decide. That’s right, he used his Reason to decide the Bible doctrine of submission to all rulers – even froward ones, was wrong. He began teaching it was Christian to resist froward rulers – even violently if you think it’s necessary. It was Beza who taught rebellion to Andrew Melville (AOR p.H10-5), who became a pain in King James’ royal posterior.
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1560: The Geneva Bible
In England, King Henry VIII had destroyed all Bibles except for the Great Bible, which was the only one without subversive Enlightened notes. The Great Bible was only published in the huge lectern format because King Henry VIII didn’t want the masses to have a Bible. And when Queen Elizabeth took over, she didn’t care enough about religion to pay attention to what was going on in her kingdom. Therefore, the Enlightened Protestants in Geneva, including John Calvin, Theodore Beza, John Knox, and Knox’s protégé, William Whittingham, decided to produce a new Bible version to be used as a primer and proselytizer for Calvinism. The English scholar, William Whittingham (1524-1579) was responsible for the major part of the Geneva Bible. Miles Coverdale was also involved to an unknown degree. Sources used for it included a Hebrew OT…and then the text was chosen primarily from Tyndale’s Bible and Coverdale’s Great Bible. In fact, about 85% of the words in the Geneva Bible came from Tyndale and Coverdale’s Bibles for the simple reason that those two men had a gift for phraseology, which has caused many translation committees – including modern ones – to borrow heavily from the wording in the versions those two men worked on. When the Geneva was published, in addition to the usual numerous, laughable typesetter errors, it contained a much-ballyhooed, embarrassing factual error of scholarship that did not and does not exist in any other Bible version: Every time Matthew chapter 2 has the word child, the Geneva translators inserted babe, which does not appear in any known manuscript in any language, and that helped create a false tradition about Christ’s age (that persists to this day) when the Wise Men visited Him. They deliberately borrowed “babe” from Luke 2:12 and used it to replace “child” in Matthew 2. The translators knew they had no manuscript support for what they were doing, and it reflected poorly on their character. That shameful 1560 error wasn’t corrected until the editions of 1576 and 1599! When the Geneva Version was first published in England in 1576, its low price, together with its carnal, flesh-feeding notes made it very popular.
The Geneva Bible eventually became the most widely-used Bible in England for several reasons. 1) It was published in a normal user-friendly size, which made it much easier to handle and afford than the Great Bible. 2) Most people were insecure about their understanding of the Bible, and the Geneva contained explanatory notes all the way though it – and most people, because they didn’t know doctrine, didn’t realize they were radical. 3) The Geneva used a newfangled Roman font (similar to what you are reading now) rather than the more formal, but harder to read bold blackletter font commonly used back then.
Because the Geneva Bible was intended to be a proselytizing book to “reform” Christianity, it had to be cheap enough for the masses. All of its early printings, therefore, were quick-print, low-quality books with poor proofreading and lots of typesetting errors. The Geneva did much to Enlighten Christians, which revolutionized societal culture, government, and the economy. The 1560 Geneva Bible did more in the short term to subvert Christian belief in Thus saith the Lord than the entire 1545 Catholic Counter-Reformation. Christianity is hard, because getting the carnal old man to submit to the rule of a Bible-based new man faces many challenges including the Romans 7 struggle. And yet, the dramatic increase and widespread popularity of political activism among English Christians who were “educated” by the Geneva Bible is still lauded by Enlightened modernist “Christians” as proof that the Enlightened radicalism of the Geneva Version was good and Christian. The Geneva caused a sudden rise in radical social activism (that would have made Wycliffe, Tyndale, and Luther envious) for the simple reason that it unleashed and legitimized the carnal beast within us that we find so appealing (Rom 7:19,23). The social activism was not (as is so often said) because English subjects had become “a people of the Book.” History, in fact, attributes a significant part of the rapid transition of the English people from Catholic to Protestant to the Geneva Bible’s notes – not its text. Just before the Geneva was published, Catholic bloody Mary was succeeded by Protestant Elizabeth. The startling contrast between the murderously-rabid Catholicism of Mary and the lukewarm indifference of Elizabeth, combined with the murderous zeal of the Catholic Inquisition along with some of the European Catholic monarchs, produced a rapid, horrified rejection of Catholicism and a slower rejection of monarchy – even rejecting good and peaceful kings like Britain’s Charles I. The Geneva Bible’s anti-authority notes were also very popular in Scotland, partly because of the dominant influence of John Knox: Every Scottish household, beginning in 1579, was required to have a Geneva Bible – as enforced by mandatory inspections.
1568: Archbishop Parker’s Bishops’ Bible
The young Church of England was in a state of tension. The rabidly-Catholic Queen Bloody Mary had died and been replaced by the tepid Protestant Queen Elizabeth, and the bishops in the Church of England were a mix of pro-Catholics, pro-Protestants, and a bunch of “don’t cares.” Coverdale’s 1535 Bible and Roger’s 1537 Matthew’s Bible had been purged because of their rabble-rousing notes. The existing, officially-sanctioned Great Bible by Coverdale had no notes but was too large and expensive for people to buy and use at home. The Geneva Bible, even though it had been published for only a few years and had a few well-known errors and was cheaply-and-poorly printed, was selling throughout England and Scotland like hotcakes. Those bishops of the Church of England who were at least halfway decent, felt betrayed by the English translators in Geneva for two reasons: First, the Geneva Bible had the kind of radical notes those men in Geneva already knew would be objectionable to Bible believers in England, and second, their cheaply-made, low-quality Geneva Bible was very popular because it was cheap, conveniently sized, cheap, had notes that made people who were too lazy and unmotivated to study to shew themselves approved unto God think they knew the Bible, and it was cheap. Therefore, the bishops in England obviously weren’t going to use Coverdale or any of the other English scholars who worked on the Geneva Bible for another Bible version, so the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker (1504-1575), who oversaw the Bishops’ Bible project (and paid for it himself because neither the Parliament nor the Queen cared about Christianity), appointed local bishops who knew Greek and Hebrew and who cared about “Christian doctrinal orthodoxy.” Archbishop Parker was offended by the growing undercurrent of independence in society (which he called “mutinous”), and wanted the Bible to be the foundation of social order (as in “order over anarchy”). He was horrified that the traditional Bible-based “religious enthusiasm” was being challenged by the growing swell of Self-based “popular enthusiasm” that said “the people” should be responsible for determining how the church should be “reformed.” He rejected the anti-authority radical notes of the Geneva Bible. Archbishop Parker was fighting an uphill battle for a Bible-based church and society because he had zero help from Parliament, from most bishops of the Church of England, and from the apathy and self-absorption of Queen Elizabeth I.
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The problems with both the Great and the Geneva Bibles, which were just the latest in a series of “mere Bible versions,” were well known among scholars. In fact, the number of supposedly “new and improved” Greek NT texts and Bible versions that all ended up being neither significantly different nor better than their predecessors, was beginning to dampen the excitement, the enthusiasm, and even the interest in yet another mere Bible version.
The bishops on the Bishops’ Bible committee did a good job. Their work was made easier by the fact that the Greek NTs, the Masoretic Hebrew OT, and the last several Bible versions were all generally reliable and consistent. There is, after all, only one word of God, and therefore no matter how many “original-language” texts, and no matter how many new Bible versions are marketed as “improved and more reliable,” they are all supposed to be pretty much the same thing that preaches the same message from God – but the advent of “mere versions” was subverting faith in the veracity of God’s word to such a great extent that “pick-and-choose” layman’s aids would eventually command even more respect than the inerrant King James Bible among a huge segment of Christians.
The Great Bible sources were the same quality sources everybody used, and – not surprisingly – the bishops on the committee ended up liking the Tyndale/Coverdale English phraseology to express the Bible’s message for many readings – just like everybody has ever since. The Bishops’ Bible has not been judged as “scholarly” as the Geneva it was hoping to replace, but that’s just a fairly-picky matter of degree because the message of the Geneva and Bishops’ mere versions was the same, and the Tyndale/Coverdale phraseology was the same. The Bishops’ Bible did include a few mild notes that emphasized Biblical submission to authority, but, because the Bishops’ Bible was a higher quality commercial product than the Geneva, it was unable to compete with the rock-bottom price of the Geneva. People back then were no different from people today: They had a choice of buying a domestic, quality-papered, higher-priced Bishops’ Bible…or a foreign-made, cheap-papered, lower-priced Geneva Bible…and the overwhelming majority went with the cheaper one because all the mere versions had no real differences from each other.
The Bishops’ Bible was the official Bible from 1568 until 1611, but it failed to slow down the rapidly-spreading leaven contained in the Greek-philosophy-based anti-authority ideological notes in the Geneva Bible – as evidenced by a brief look at the Archbishop of Canterbury who succeeded Archbishop Parker:
Seven years after the publication of the Bishops’ Bible, Archbishop Parker died and was succeeded by Archbishop Edmund Grindal (1519-1583). Grindal was a supporter of Calvinistic Puritanism, and was an adherent of the new liberal democracy-loving “reformed” movement. One of the first things Grindal did was to allow the Geneva Bible to be printed in England. He had despised Archbishop Parker’s belief in the Scriptural imperative that the populace submit to the rule of government. Historians have said Grindal, who could not have gotten away with openly supporting public anti-authority outcries, temporized by always giving the anti-authority activists as much leeway as possible…and he always dealt with them as slowly as possible.
1582-1610: The Catholic Counter-Reformation’s Douai-Rheims Bible
As previously noted, the Catholic Counter-Reformation was formally launched in 1545 by the Council of Trent. The Douay-Rheims Bible was but a small part of the Counter-Reformation. A quick summary of events the Douay-Rheims Bible was part of:
King Phillip II (1527-1598) of Spain had inherited a worldwide empire, was very wealthy and powerful, and hoped, with the active help of the Vatican and the Catholic League to establish a Catholic Europe whose rule went around the world. The first big opportunity for Phillip and the Vatican was in 1553 when Queen Bloody Mary became the Catholic ruler of Protestant England. Both Phillip and Mary were devout, activist Catholics, and it didn’t take much for them, with the approval of the Vatican, to realize how powerful their royal marriage would be. Two days after they met, they wed. Phillip continued to live in Spain, Mary in England…even though they were now joint rulers over Spain and England. However, Bloody Mary died 5 years later, and the “Grand Plan” died with her. In 1558, Queen Elizabeth, who’d been in jail during Bloody Mary’s Catholic reign of terror, decided to stick with Protestantism. In 1568 the Bishops’ Bible was published. In 1569 an insurrection attempt by English Catholic nobles and an army of about 700 knights began capturing English castles with the aim of eventually executing Queen Elizabeth. In 1570, hoping to inspire English Catholics to aid the insurrection, the Vatican stupidly “excommunicated” the Protestant Elizabeth and “deposed” her (legally declaring her rule invalid and therefore she was supposedly no longer the queen). Although the Vatican’s decrees were stupidly invalid, they did inspire several English Catholic plots to assassinate her. Elizabeth raised a huge army, crushed the rebels, executed hundreds of them, which caused hundreds more to flee the country. In 1572 in France, the apex of the religious war in France between Catholics and Protestants was the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of about 20,000 Protestants, which guaranteed that Protestants would always be a minority in France. In 1580, English Catholic Cardinal William Allen (1532-1594), who was in France as an exile/escapee from Elizabeth, established a Jesuit “seminary” in the French town of Douay – and then in Rheims. This “seminary’s” primary purpose was to kill French Protestants, send Catholic spies, saboteurs, and assassins into England (about 130 of whom were caught and executed); and its secondary purpose was to produce a Catholic note-filled Bible version to counteract the exodus from Catholicism caused by English Bible versions. In 1582 the NT portion of the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible was published and was smuggled into England. In 1584, King Phillip signed the Treaty of Joinville to 1) finance the increasingly-effective work of the Catholic League’s anti-Protestant war; 2) make it clear that the anti-Protestant activities launched by the Council of Trent’s Counter-Reformation would be continued and enforced; and 3) Catholicism would be the only religion allowed in France – and those who refused to convert would be executed. In 1585, Elizabeth responded to the Joinville Treaty by sending troops and money to aid a rebel uprising in the Netherlands against their Spanish rulers. In 1587, having gotten wind of plots to put Scotland’s former queen, Mary (King James’ Catholic mother, who was now a political prisoner of Elizabeth’s) on the throne of England, Elizabeth executed her in a botched, very messy beheading. In 1588, King Phillip, with guidance from Cardinal William Allen of Douay-Rheims, launched the huge Spanish Armada to defeat the English fleet, land an army, kill Elizabeth, take over England, and make it Catholic. It (and two more armada attempts) failed miserably…and brought the Phillip/Vatican/Catholic League machinations to an end. (But the Counter-Reformation continues today.)
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The Douay-Rheims Bible was one of the Catholic Counter-Reformation projects under the direct supervision of Cardinal William Allen. It is so-named because the Bible committee was chased out of one town into the other by irate French Protestants. The decision to produce the Douay-Rheims Bible was a tacit admission that the Catholic ban on all Bibles in languages other than Latin had failed. It was also an admission that trying to keep the Bible out of the hands of commoners had failed.
There was a growing public realization/suspicion that the Catholic Church was anti-Bible. After all, Wyclif produced a NT…and his bones were dug up after his death and burned; Tyndale produced a Bible…and he was burned at the stake; Coverdale's Bible and the Great Bible couldn’t be produced in England under Catholic King Henry VIII…for fear of execution; the Geneva Bible was produced by English refugees in Geneva…because it was well known Catholic Queen Bloody Mary would kill them, and the Bishops’ Bible could not be produced in England…until after the newly-Protestant Elizabeth had been ridiculously excommunicated and deposed by the Vatican. Also, why were the manuscripts of Jimenez and Erasmus proving the Catholic corruption of the Latin Vulgate being suppressed and ignored? It was these well-known, undeniable, damning truths that made the Vatican decide it had to somehow persuade people that the Catholic Church wasn’t against the Bible, and it wasn’t against Catholics having the Bible in a language they understood…it was always only against incorrect versions. But the Vatican could no longer pretend the Latin Vulgate was accurate; the Vulgate’s reputation had already suffered irreparable damage, so a new version was needed with a different name.
Some say the King James Bible translators used some words from the Latin Vulgate, and others say they used words from the 1582 Douay-Rheims NT. The purpose of these statements is usually to exalt a Catholic version or to badmouth the KJV translators. The fact is the KJV translators were confronted with the difficulty of trying to properly express the meaning of “informal soldiers’ street Greek” verses that had no direct English representative. In some cases they decided using Latin-originated words that had become widely-used by English speakers because of the long dominance of the Latin Vulgate, would be more accurate, more effective, and less clumsy than purely English words. An example from Romans 11:14 was emulation, a well-known Latin word used for a thousand years in the Vulgate…and then in the Douay-Rheims…and then made an “official” English word by the KJV:
Latin Vulgate If, by any means, I may provoke to emulation them who are my flesh and may save some of them.
Douay-Rheims If, by any means, I may provoke to emulation them who are my flesh and may save some of them.
Wycliffe If in any manner I stir my flesh for to follow, and that I make some of them safe.
Tyndale That might provoke them which are my flesh: and might save some of them.
Coverdale If I mighte provoke them unto zeal, which are my fleshe, and save some of them.
Geneva To try if by any means I might provoke them of my flesh to follow them, and might save some of them.
KJV If by any means I may provoke to emulation them which are my flesh, and might save some of them.
Another example from Titus 3:5 using regeneration:
Latin Vulgate Not by the works of justice which we have done, but according to his mercy, he saved us, by the laver of regeneration and renovation of the Holy Ghost.
Douay Rheims Not by the works of justice, which we have done, but according to his mercy, he saved us, by the laver of regeneration, and renovation of the Holy Ghost;
Wycliffe not of works of rightwiseness that we did, but by his mercy [but after his mercy] he made us safe, by [the] washing of again-begetting, and again-newing of the Holy Ghost,
Tyndale not of the deeds of righteousness which we wrought, but of his mercy, he saved us, by the fountain of the new birth, and with the renewing of the holy ghost,
Coverdale not for ye dedes of righteousnes which we wroughte, but after his mercy he saved vs by the fountaine of the new birth, and renuinge of the holy goost,
Geneva Not by the works of righteousness, which we had done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of the new birth, and the renewing of the holy Ghost,
KJV Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost;
The Douay-Rheims anti-Protestant notes were copious and aggressively ugly. And its preface says the Douay-Rheims was made necessary because the Protestant Bibles were guilty of “casting the holy to dogs and pearls to hogs.” The complete Douay-Rheims Bible (both testaments) was published in 1610. It was a big flop, and the Catholic Church’s backing failed to make it popular…so the Douay-Rheims languished for a century. During that century the newly-published King James Bible went from 1) just another “mere version,” 2) to being increasingly recognized and lauded as inerrant, 3) to becoming “the Bible.” In fact, it became so popular the Catholic Church decided to revise the Douay-Rheims, a revision that was completed in 1750. In many places the “new, improved” Douay-Rheims used the KJV’s wording, hoping that would be enough to slow the ever-increasing sales of the King James among Catholics. It wasn’t.
The Catholic Church later decided it had been an error to make its 1750 Douay-Rheims emulate the KJV (I'm using another word the KJV got from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate), so in 1810 it published another “new, improved” revision of the Douay-Rheims. The Vatican ordered that this new revision undergo a massive rewording to get as far away from the KJV’s wording as possible, hoping that giving the Douay-Rheims its own distinctive “truly Catholic” wording rather than continue to look like a “KJV wannabe” would improve sales. It was a colossal failure, and the Douay-Rheims – for all of its “new, improved” revisions that spanned 228 years (!) was recognized as – and relegated to being – but another mere version.
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1624-1641: The Elzevir brothers’ Greek “Textus Receptus”
Abraham and Bonaventure Elzevir were Dutch printers who reprinted already-existing Greek New Testaments produced by Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza. They were not scholars; they did no translating – all they did was print stuff. In 1633 they printed their most famous work – one of Beza’s Greek NTs. Because they were human, they made a number of typesetting errors; and because they were printers, they made a few small changes/corrections (like proofreaders do for publishing houses today before books are published) that would improve the finished product. The 1633 Elzevir NT is famous merely because its preface contains a grandiose statement in Latin saying, “What you have here, is the text which is now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted.” And over time the Latin phrase “Textus Receptus” came to mean any of the Greek-language NTs produced by Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza. Collectively calling these three Greek NTs the Textus Receptus and saying the KJV came from it is problematic because they all differ from each other (in relatively minor ways because they all contain the Bible’s message) and they differ from the KJV in almost 300 instances. And in 1881 another member of the “Textus Receptus family” would be produced by F.H.A. Scrivener. In short, none of these TR texts is without errors, there is no single Textus Receptus text, and when you say “Textus Receptus” you are using words a printer came up with when trying to market the texts of three men long dead. Technically, when the Elzevir brothers claimed they were publishing the “text we all received,” they were saying it – not the text of the KJV – was God’s word. I say technically, and I only bring it up for two reasons: 1) Most scholars back then had been suckered by the war on the word into thinking nothing was the word of God – not any of the Greek texts, not the Hebrew Masoretic OT, and not any mere Bible version. 2) The Elzevir brothers were just trying to make money in the same way modern scholars and publishers do – keep printing more and more stuff that is either “new and improved,” or – in this case – “the text received by all.” The Elzevir brothers published their Greek text in 1633, which was 22 years after the KJV was published. During those 22 years, all other Bible versions were increasingly recognized as “mere” Bible versions – but not the King James. Scholars and informed pewsters alike were amazed at what they were finding out about the KJV’s text as they continued examining it…and that unprecedented, rising excitement caused the Elzevir printers to advertise the Greek text that was as close as they could get to the actual text of the KJV as “the text received by all” – rather than just another short-lived also-ran text rejected by all.
Reviewing what truths have emerged over these 250 years from Wycliffe to the Elzevir brothers
Until the Authorized 1611 King James Bible was published, the Manuscript Mess – whether you are referring to any of the Greek-language NTs, the Hebrew-language Masoretic OT, the Greek-language Septuagint OTs, or any of the other-language manuscripts – had prevented any scholar or collection of scholars from producing an inerrant Bible; all of those manuscripts – in any combination – have never produced anything but short-lived mere versions. Then F.H.A. Scrivener in 1881 compared the King James Bible’s readings with all existing Bible manuscripts…and found that in the 270 years since the AV1611 was published, more manuscripts had vanished from history. There were several KJV readings that Scrivner could not find in any existing Greek or Hebrew manuscripts. But the amazing and unprecedented fact that the KJV is irrefutably and uniquely inerrant, means either God used the KJV translators without their knowledge, or He made sure they selected “questionable readings” that originated in “The Distinguished Lost Elite of the Manuscript Mess: The Chosen Few whose Quality caused them to be Hand-picked because they Stood Out from the Rest.” I said “questionable readings” because scholars claim if a word in a manuscript can’t be traced to another “valued” manuscript it was “probably” added by some “possibly” unscrupulous scholars a thousand years ago. (Valued no longer has any meaning: It used to refer to manuscripts that were “older” and therefore “better.” But as more old manuscripts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, are found, they have become continual embarrassments to scholars because they prove older and younger mean nothing…and some of the worst manuscripts with the most errors are the oldest! Most scholars during the 150-year run of the “older is better” scam ignored those intrepid scholars along the way who had the integrity and backbone to proclaim the evidence-based conclusion that older means nothing. They also ignore the proven fact that “The Distinguished Lost Elite” manuscripts were selected and used by many brilliant scholars over and above many readings from the used-to-be-“valued” manuscripts. But to those with faith in God, those lost readings are no longer lost: they have been recovered in the miraculously-unique text of the KJV – as validated by its inerrancy. To faithful saints the KJV appears to be some of the evidence of things not seen.
The many revisions the Douay-Rheims Bible underwent – including switching back and forth between KJV readings and Alexandrian readings – in vain efforts by various teams of scholars to make it appear to be more than just another mere version, succeeded only in putting the spotlight on the difference between the centuries-long acknowledgement that the KJV is a unique original the likes of which nobody has ever seen…and all of the mere versions that, whether they came from the Textus Receptus or the Alexandrian or the Byzantine or some combination, have proven to be – in a very short time – mere Bible versions whose commonplace, unexceptional, run-of-the-mill mediocrity has prompted – indeed, guaranteed – the production of many, many more mere Bible versions…and has actually caused scholars to disingenuously recommend that Christians use several mere versions along with one or more layman’s aids. None of this theological ever-changing uncertainty has gone unnoticed, and it, compared with the KJV’s unique inerrancy and stability, made people wake up to a few things:
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The continual production of “new, improved” mere Bible versions – because of the existence of the KJV – is not needed, will add nothing, and are going to be short-lived at best. (The life expectancy of modern mere Bible versions before they are superseded by another mere “improved” version is close to 6 months!)
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All of the daisy-chain Bible versions have been essentially the same; their differences were small and their shortcomings undeniable. But the KJV has been different; it is unique, it is perfect – and its arrival made new Bible versions so unnecessary that the King James came to be called “the translation to end all translations.”
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The KJV, in exposing six centuries of mere Bible versions, has shown that the Greek Textus Receptus, the Hebrew Masoretic text, and the Alexandrian Greek text all have the same thing in common – they have produced nothing but mere Bible versions that are, eh, decent…but are as forgettable and uninspiring as Matthew’s Bible and the Douay-Rheims. Indeed, the miraculous, unprecedented text of the KJV has made the Greek and Hebrew texts obsolete, no longer needed, because the KJV is the recognized and accepted word of God. It is the God-given crutch to carry us through these dark last days. It is a necessity.
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All of the bickering among modern liberal scholars over the flawed readings of their “new, improved” mere versions that make another “even better” mere version needed, has revealed a huge secret scholars wish they’d been able to keep hidden: the Manuscript Mess has allowed scholars to use their useless wranglings about its impenetrable mysteries to create a huge money-making mere-version scheme based on the old short-lived Mars’-Hill allure of “some new thing” (Act 17:21,22).
Have ears that hear...
and endure to the end, comrades!