James A. ThM
One of the most disturbing trends behind the defense of modern “Bible” versions by “scholars” and “apologists” like James White, Daniel Wallace, Bruce Metzger, Norman Geisler, and their ilk is the deliberate omissions in their writings of the rationalists and occultists that laid the foundations for destructive textual criticism. The sycophants of James White often embrace his gibberish about Bible versions without ever bothering to study both sides of the issue, and White uses such vitriolic ad hominem attacks against King James Only Bible believers that he leaves his followers in the dark about the truth behind his influences.
Paul advised Timothy of the importance of knowing who is behind the teachings you embrace: “But continue thou in the things which thou has learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them” (2 Timothy 3:14). Any honest person should be horrified about the men who James White and his ilk endorse to support their attacks on the King James Bible and defense of their Roman Catholic texts.*
Here we will list** just a few of those heretics that James White wants you to trust when he excuses the fact that he can’t point you to a single book on earth or heaven that he can actually say IS the Bible, all the while claiming that he believes in something he calls “THE” Bible-he just can’t tell YOU where you can get your own copy.
Johann Jacob Griesbach (1745-1812)
Griesbach was influenced by a German Rationalist named Johann Semler. Semler did not believe that the entire canon of the Bible was inspired. He promoted the “accommodation theory” that holds one can give a person limited information about the truth because they presently lack the capacity to understand it. Semler taught that the New Testament writers’ miracles were fictitious and only written to appease certain needs of the followers of the apostles. He rejected the inspiration of Revelation calling it “the production of an extravagant dreamer”.
Bruce Metzger claimed that Westcott & Hort never collated any manuscripts, but simply “refined the critical methodology developed by Griesbach, Lachmann, and others, and applied it rigorously” (Metzger, Text of the New Testament, p. 129).
George Vance Smith (1816-1902), Westcott & Hort Revision Committee
Smith was a Unitarian that denied the deity of Christ and the blood atonement, the personality of the Holy Spirit, and the doctrine of the Trinity altogether. Smith did not believe in the inspiration of Scripture. Thousands of clergy protested Smith’s appointment to the revision committee of Westcott and Hort who threatened to quit if Smith was not allowed to remain on the committee.
Ezra Abbot (1819-1884)
Abbot was behind the American Standard Version (ASV) of 1901. He claimed that Christ should not be worshiped. He wrote in a footnote in John 9:3 of the 1901 ASV that Christ was a created being, and made a distinction between Christ (created) and God (Creator).
Eberhard Nestle (1851-1913)
Nestle, of the popular Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament (nearly 30 different editions now), rejected the infallibility of the Bible, and believed it was no more than a normal piece of literature. He claimed that authors of the New Testament never expected their writings to be read by others let alone be taken as the authoritative word of God.
United Bible Society (UBS) Greek New Testament
The UBS, which is highly recommended by James White (along with NA 28, and Westcott & Hort’s critical Greek apparatus), is partnered with the Pontifical Biblical Institute of Rome. One of its leading editors added in 1967 (1967-2002) was a Jesuit priest, Carlo M. Martini. Martini believed in evolution, that the Bible was ordinary literature and embraced numerous New Age philosophies.
The UBS 5 was recently endorsed by Pope Francis. Imagine that! James White and Pope Francis both endorse the 5th edition of the UBS Greek New Testament.
Kurt and Barbara Aland
Partner with Eberhard Nestle (above), he and his wife are also contributors the UBS. Aland does not believe in verbal inspiration of the Bible, and that the Old Testament and the gospels are full of myths that were not inspired by God but merely a naturalistic process. Kurt Aland does not believe that the canon of Scripture is complete or settled.
Bruce Metzger (1914-2007)
Plagiarist Bruce Metzger also denies the infallibility of the Bible. In his notes on the Reader’s Digest Condensed Bible, he rejected the authorship, dates, and supernatural inspiration of books written by Moses, Daniel, Paul, James and Peter. In the 1962 New Oxford Annotated Bible RSV, Metzger opined that the Old Testament is “a matrix of myth, legend and history”. He rejected the flood of Genesis, and said that Isaiah was written by two other authors, and the story of Jonah was a fairytale.
Westcott & Hort
Westcott & Hort led the committee that created a never-before-seen Greek New Testament. They used as their exemplar, the Codex Vaticanus, an abandoned and dusty ms from the shelf of a Vatican library in 1475, “rediscoverd” in the late 1800s (ironically, shortly after the “discovery” of the Codex Sinaiticus), and the Codex Sinaiticus, a forged document by a Greek paleographer named Constantine Simonides in 1840, stolen from the trash room of a Catholic/Muslim*** monastery in Egypt (St. Catherine’s) by Constantine Tischendorf who was wined and dined by Rome for his endeavors. Both are missing entire books of the Bible and have been deliberate altered in thousands of places. Neither of them believed in the infallibility of the Bible.
They belonged to several occult societies and socialist groups, and had an affinity for the Mary of the Catholic. Arthur Westcott writes that upon the finding of a pieta (Roman Catholic statute of Mary holding the dead body of Christ), that BF Westcott stated, “Had I been there alone I could have knelt for hours”. Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, Vol I, p 81 (1903).
Although much has been written about these men, their greatest influence on the revision committee was the Genealogical Method and Lucian Recension. (For a thorough take down of these two methods, see Wilbur Pickering’s Identity of the New Testament, II, chapter 3) There is no historical evidence to support either one, and Westcott & Hort themselves never applied the genealogical method to their own New Testament. It was only used to attack the Greek Textus Receptus. Not even modern scholars use the method, and yet it, as well as the ghost theory of the Lucian Recension are touted as justifications for the hatchet job that Westcott & Hort presented in 1881 as the “best and oldest” manuscripts.
If taking James White and his ilk seriously, we are to believe that the transmission of the Textus Receptus which was maintained by faithful, persecuted Christians since the inception of the church, was full of errors, mistakes, and deliberate alterations (like those in the Lucian recension which James White rejected my challenge to debate proof for), and was preserved by God through Christ denying heretics who didn’t believe the Bible was infallible or inspired, and who persecuted those who did. We are also led to believe that the church was kept in the dark until 1881 when Tischendorf “discovered” the “oldest” and “best” manuscripts.
KJVO critics often ask the dumbest question ever: “where was the Bible before 1611?”, which we have answered ad nauseum, and it wasn’t sitting on a shelf in a Vatican library collecting dust. But modern version onlyists never answer that same question: where was the Bible before 1881? Did God sandbag the church by hiding the best and oldest manuscripts from the entire church for 1800 years only to cause them to be found by heretics and rationalists on a dusty shelf and a library shared with Muslims in Egypt?
Those of you defending James White who believe his absurd rhetoric about King James Only”ism” need a serious reality check.
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*James White will often punt to his “debates” with Roman Catholics as proof that he does not support the Catholic church, but he never calls them to leave the Roman Catholic Church, he never refers to it as a cult (which it is)-of course while referring to King James Only advocates as cultists (many of whom are Calvinists like James White)- he has defended Pope Francis’ statement that Jesus death on the cross was a failure, and he is a staunch advocate for the two Roman Catholic manuscripts that underlie all of the modern Bible versions. James White is also an amillennialist which is the same eschatological heresy taught by the Catholic church. White ignores prophecy debates even though he claims to be an “apologist”. Any apologist who neglects the defense of over half of the Bible is no real apologist (Acts 20:27).
The subtlety of the devil and of the Jesuits is permitting just enough truth to appear orthodox, but leaving out enough that a person is never actually called to repentance and belief of the truth. Catholics frankly don’t care that White “debates” them, so long as White never encourages and of them to LEAVE even though he claims to believe in repentance. And as long as he endorses their Bibles, no honest critic of Catholicism could ever take him seriously that they have a common theological enemy.
** The outline follows chapter 2 of David Cloud’s exhaustive and excellent expose of this subject in For the Love of the Bible. WayofLife.Org
*** It is well known that St. Catherine’s was a Catholic monastery. What modern versionists do NOT tell you is that it was also shared with Egyptian Muslims who had numerous Islamic relics and writings stored there. This probably explains the reason why a 12th Islamic prophecy is scrawled in Arabic on the footnote of Revelation 7-8 on the Codex Sinaiticus. How 12th century Islamic prophecies using 18th Century Arabic writing style ended up on a supposed 4th century ms is an anomaly that James White has continually dodged, telling his followers that I and Dr. James Ach are “the biggest trolls on the internet”, and “beneath contempt
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