Biblical Truth Ministries
is dedicated to preaching and teaching the truth of God’s
Word in a world that is in the grips of deception and lies.
In today’s world a diabolical, deceptive, guiding spirit has
taken hold of every aspect of life—from the cradle to the grave.
It is a universal problem affecting all nations, peoples and
religions of the world! This worldwide phenomenon
permeates nearly every institution of government, the electronic
and printed media, nearly all schools, universities and
religions on the earth.
In this postmodern world, people
believe that “truth is whatever one believes.” Therefore,
everyone’s opinion is supposedly true because he or she believes
it is true and, hence, is equally valid. Consequently,
truth is no longer truth that is provable and stands alone as
absolute truth. Rather, truth has been exchanged for personal
opinion, emotion, illusion, fantasy and lies. Christianity has
fallen victim to this sinister deception.
Through the centuries, after the
death of the original apostles of Jesus Christ, various
denominations of Christendom have developed their own religious
traditions, doctrines and dogmas. In establishing these
beliefs, religious leaders have used some scriptures from the
Bible and blended them with the traditions of men grafted in
from pagan philosophies and religions. These distorted,
erroneous, entrenched teachings—counterfeit “truth”—have been
dogmatically taught and accepted by their followers as the true
doctrines and teachings of the Bible.
Furthermore, very
few religious, church-going people ever take the time to study
their Bibles in order to prove whether the teachings of their
churches are actually the true teachings of the Bible.
They have assumed that their priests or pastors would surely
only teach the truth from the Word of God. Little do they
realize that most of their churches’ teachings and doctrines are
actually a blend of pagan religious beliefs and philosophies.
As such, most of what is taught is contrary to the true
teachings of the Bible—yet, it is done in the name of Jesus
Christ. As a result, very few people understand that what
they have accepted as true Christian teachings are only
myths—fabricated by men. Little do they realize that when
these teachings are compared to the Bible, fully fifty to ninety
percent of what they believe is not true—they believe a lie.
Because they have
believed a mixture of truth and mostly error for so long that
when they hear the true Word of God preached or read their
Bibles, they can hardly believe it. To make matters even
worse, for centuries most of the true teachings of the Bible
have been branded as “heresy” by the leaders of paganized
Christendom.
Consequently, today, the Christian world is upside down! Truth has
been branded as error and lies. Error and lies have
been accepted as truth. As Dresden James once noted:
“When
a well-packaged web of lies
has been sold gradually to the masses over
generations, the truth will seem
utterly preposterous and its
speaker a raving lunatic.”
As this proverb relates, you will be utterly astounded at the true
teachings of the Bible. At first, you may think that since
such teachings are contrary to what particular well-established
Christian denominations teach, they cannot be true. In
order to begin to understand the real truth of the Bible and the
New Testament in particular, you must set aside all religious
myths and lies of men. Then you must recapture the
original teachings of Jesus Christ and His original chosen
apostles.
However, men have
created many stumbling blocks to keep people from understanding
God’s truth as contained in His Word. One of the greatest
stumbling blocks is various corrupted versions of the Bible
itself. Too many men, claiming to be experts and scholars
have taken upon themselves to destroy the true Word of God by
producing translations that are made from corrupted Hebrew and
Greek texts, and rendering translations in modern English that
utterly change the meaning of the true teachings of the Bible.
Therefore, before you can begin to sort out the truth from
errors, you must have a Bible that is a faithful translation of
the true Word of God.
Today’s Dilemma—Which
Bible Should You Use?
In these end times, we are
confronted with the removal of God from the public conscience
and the destruction of the Holy Bible—the Word of God—especially
the New Testament! The foundation of Christianity has been
subverted and corrupted with new translations that change the
Word of God so dramatically, it is tantamount to destroying it.
In recent years, as evidenced by their translations, translation
committees have demonstrated that they are more committed to
carnal-minded, special interest groups, who desire to make the
Word of God convey a particular political, sexist or ecumenical
religious agenda, than to accurately translating the Word of God
in truth. Moreover, they have used inferior Alexandrian-type
Greek texts for their translations of the New Testament.
They have further corrupted the Word of God by using common
street language and superimposing a neuter gender language on
the Word of God in their efforts to please radical feminists and
homosexuals.
They are also assaulting the Word of God with a vengeance.
Their final coup de grace is the elimination of God the Father
and Jesus Christ from the New Testament itself! By changing and
corrupting the Scriptures with new versions that use common
street language and politically correct, neuter gender language,
the sacredness of the Holy Scriptures is debased. Thus,
the Scriptures become secularized and profaned!
How it Happened:
How did such designs against the Word of God ever develop in
Western civilization, the bastion of Christianity that has
published and distributed the majority of the billions of Bibles
in the world today? Why do we see a world so deluded,
deceived, degenerate and immoral that it is readily embracing
Christianity without God and accepting debased, corrupted,
blasphemous, politically correct Bibles with hardly a whimper of
resistance? Rather, than rehearsing a broad overview of
history, we will examine a listing of the various English Bible
versions and translations, which tell the story of a slow but
steady, insidious corruption of the Word of God.
After the publication of the King James Version in 1611
virtually nothing was done to change the English Bible.
However, beginning in 1871, Westcott and Hort, with a committee
of revisers, began to change the Greek text of the Byzantine
family, commonly known as the Textus Receptus, or the Received
Text. They produced a revised New Testament Greek text to
conform to the inferior Sinaiticus and Vaticanus Greek texts
from which the English Revised New Testament in 1881 came,
followed by the complete Bible in 1885, known as the Revised
Standard Version.
After the RSV, many English versions were produced:
Fenton, NT 1895
The Emphasized Bible, Rotherham 1897
The Bible in Modern English, Fenton 1901
American Standard Version in 1901
Moffatt, NT 1913, 1917; OT 1926, 1935
Douay Bible 1941 (Catholic)
New World Translation 1950 (Jehovah’s Witnesses)
Revised Standard Version 1952
New Testament in Modern English, J. B. Phillips 1957
The Amplified New Testament 1958
Berkley New Testament 1959
The Amplified Old Testament 1962
New American Standard Bible 1963
The Jerusalem Bible 1966 (Catholic)
New English Bible 1970
New American Bible 1970
The Living Bible (Paraphrased) 1971
Today’s English Version (Good News for Modern Man) 1976
New International Version 1978
New Jerusalem Bible 1985
Revised English Bible 1989
New Revised Standard Version 1990
Contemporary English Version 1995
New Testament and Psalms (Inclusive Version) 1995
New Living Translation 1996
New American Standard Bible 1997
The Bible in Contemporary Language—The Message 2002
Today’s New International (Inclusive) Version, proposed in 2002
Most of these
Bibles or New Testaments listed above should never be used to
determine the true teachings of God the Father and Jesus Christ.
Every Bible student needs to have a Bible that is essentially a
literal translation of the original languages. To understand the
Word of God and to live by every word of God “…we must
first arm ourselves with the sword of the Spirit (Eph.
6:17), namely, the true Word of God, which is found in the
printed Masoretic [Hebrew] text [for the Old Testament], the
Textus Receptus [Greek text for the New Testament], and the King
James Version and other faithful translations” (Hills,
The King James Version Defended, 2000, p. 242, bracketed
comments and bold emphasis added).
Hills protégé, Theodore P. Letis, wrote of the demise of the
modern-day Bibles because political and sexists agendas are now
controlling the philosophy of Bible translation committees and
publishing companies: “The Bible in English has fallen on hard
times. Not only do some feminists see it as a format from
which to transform Ancient Near Eastern, patriarchal religions
[through the use of inclusive versions] into modern, 20th
century paradigms of egalitarianism [i.e. Communism, under the
guise of liberalism, and world government], but the American
Bible publishing industry has reduced it to a commodity, hoping
to maximize gains by imposing a marketing-manufactured consensus
on conservative evangelicals, calling it the beginning of a ‘new
tradition [Christianity without God]’ ” (Ibid., back cover,
bracketed comments added).
The Flawed Translation Practices Of Most Modern
Translations: Today, too many translators are not
actually translating; rather, they are interpreting what they
think the writer was thinking or intending to write at the time
he wrote it. This method of translation is utterly absurd!
How can a translator today, thousands of years removed, presume
to know what the writer was thinking or intending to write when
he wrote the text? It is impossible! When the writer
wrote the words that became the text, he expressed his thoughts
in those words. He wrote what he was thinking or what he
was inspired or commanded by God to write. Therefore, the
written words of the biblical Hebrew and Greek need to be
translated accurately, faithfully and truthfully because they
are the words of God—the absolute truth from the God of Truth.
In his book The Word of God in English Leland Ryken wrote
a great deal about this dynamic equivalent method of translating
the Bible, exposing the fundamental errors of such translations:
“No principle has been more central to the dynamic equivalent
project than the claim that translators should translate the
meaning or ideas rather than the words of the original….When
these translations claim to give ‘the meaning of the original’ (GNB
[Good News Bible]) or ‘the thought of the biblical writers’ (NIV
[New International Version]), they signal that the translators
were committed to translating what they interpret the
meaning of the original to be instead of first of all
preserving the language of the original. The premise is
that ‘a thought-for-thought translation … has the potential to
represent the intended meaning of the original text even more
accurately than a word-for-word translation’ (NLT [New Living
Translation.
“The fallacy of thinking that a translation should translate the
meaning rather than the words of the original is simple: There
is no such a thing as disembodied thought, emancipated from
words. Ideas and thoughts depend on words and are
expressed by them. When we change the words, we change the
meaning … The whole dynamic equivalent project is based on an
impossibility and a misconception about the relationship between
words and meaning. Someone has accurately said that ‘the
word may be regarded as the body of the thought,’ adding that
‘if words are taken from us, the exact meaning is of itself
lost.’
“When the words differ, the meaning differs. To claim
that we can translate ideas instead of words is an
impossibility” (Ryken, pp. 79-81, bold emphasis added).
Ryken rightly points out that a translator is only a steward of
God’s word: “For essentially literal translators, the translator
is a messenger who bears someone else’s message and ‘a
steward of the work of another’ whose function is ‘to be
faithful to what is before him’ and ‘not … to change the text.’
Dynamic equivalent translators assume the roles of both
exegete and editor. In those roles, they
perform exactly the same functions that exegetes and editors
perform—they offer interpretations of the biblical text right in
the translation, and they make stylistic changes that they think
will improve the biblical text for a target audience” (Ibid., p.
91).
Furthermore, Ryken shows the fallacy of making readability the
ultimate goal of translation while sacrificing truth: “Because
dynamic equivalence has dominated the field for half a century,
the criterion of readability (code language for ‘easy to read’)
has become the chief selling point for modern
translations...Having had a quarter of a century to ponder the
matter, I have concluded that the criterion of readability, when
offered as a criterion by itself, should be met with the utmost
resistance. To put it bluntly, what good is readability
if a translation does not accurately render what the Bible
actually says? If a translation gains readability by
departing from the original, readability is harmful. It
is, after all, the truth of the Bible that we want”
(Ibid., p.91, bold emphasis added).
Being truthful and faithful to the original is the key to
excellence in an English translation because “The only
legitimate appeal to readability comes within the
confines of a translation’s having been truthful to the
language of the original. Faithfulness to what the
Bible actually says is like a qualifying exam. If a
translation does not give us that, it has failed the test, and
we can be excused from inquiring into its readability.
Within the confines of accuracy to the original text, a
translation should strive to achieve maximum readability by
avoiding obsolete words and demonstrably archaic language, and
by using with discretion and where necessary words that are
slightly archaic and words in a reader’s passive as distinct
from active vocabulary (words that are understood by readers
though not regularly used by them)” (Ibid., p. 92, bold emphasis
added).
As Ryken clearly states, it is a fallacy to translate the Bible
on the basis of how we would say something or how the Bible
writers would express something if they were living today.
Of this he wrote: “Once again we need to state the obvious: The
biblical writers are not writing today, They wrote
millennia ago. To picture them as writing in an era when
they did not write is to engage in fiction, and it distorts the
facts of the situation.
“The real objective to claming to know how a biblical writer
would have expressed himself if he were writing today is that it
is totally speculative. There is no verifiable way by
which we can know how biblical writers would express themselves
if they were writing today. In my experience it is
invariably translators who want to produce a colloquial Bible
expressed in a contemporary English idiom who propose to know
how biblical writers would have expressed themselves if they
were living today. To engage in such speculation is to
remake the Bible in our own image….It is pure speculation
how Paul would have expressed himself if he were speaking and
writing today. We do not know how he would have
expressed himself in modern terms. We do not want a
speculative Bible. We need a Bible based on certainty.
What is certain is what the biblical writers did actually say
and write” (Ibid., pp. 98-99, bold emphasis added).
Ryken summarizes what makes the best Bible translation as
follows:
|
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
10)
11)
12) |
Accuracy
Fidelity to the words of the original
Effective diction
Theological orthodoxy
Preserving multiple meanings
The full exegetical potential of the original text
Expecting the best from the readers
Transparency to the original world of the Bible
What you see is what you get
Respect for the principles of poetry
Excellence of rhythm
Dignity and beauty” (Ibid., 289-293). |
In his conclusion Ryken writes: “English Bible translation has
lost its way in the past half century. We are further from
having a reliable and stable text than ever before. The
only Bible reader who is not perplexed is the one who sticks
with just one version and does not inquire any more broadly into
what is going on. English Bible readers deserve a
translation that they can trust and admire because it represents
standards of excellence and dignity” (Ibid., p. 293, bold
emphasis added).
The Wrong Greek Text Has Been Used For the New Testament:
Nearly all the modern translations of the Bible, such as the
GNB, NIV, NEB, NLT, NASB and The Inclusive Version, The
Message—In Contemporary English, have been translated from
corrupt Greek texts—eclectic versions—or the combining of
various spurious texts. After over one hundred years of
scholarly and textual research, these deficient, corrupt texts
have now been shown not to be the true text of the New
Testament. Rather, the very text that was rejected,
beginning with Wescott and Hort in the 1880’s, has now been
proven to be true text of the New Testament that God has
preserved for us today. That Greek text is the Textus
Receptus—Stephens 1550 Greek text and other similar texts.
A Call for a Return to the Textus Receptus Greek Text:
Because of this, there is a strong movement and demand, even by
scholars, for a return to the more accurate Textus Receptus
Greek text. In his book, The Ancient Text of the
New Testament, Dr. Jakob Van Bruggen shows why the
Alexandrian type texts are inferior and should be rejected as
the basis for translating the New Testament. After more
than a century of using these texts for translation, he is
calling for a return to the Byzantine Greek text known as the
Textus Receptus—Stephens 1550 edition and other similar Greek
texts in the Textus Receptus family that were used during the
Reformation. In his concluding remarks, Van Bruggen calls
for a rehabilitation of the ancient text which he calls the
Church text: “There is, therefore, every reason to rehabilitate
the Church text again. It has already been accepted for
centuries and centuries by the Greek Church as the ancient and
correct text. Its right does not have to be proven.
The person who thinks he knows better than those who preserved
and transmitted the text in the past should come along with
proof. The churches of the great Reformation deliberately
adopted this ancient text when they took the Greek text [instead
of the Latin Vulgate] as starting-point again. This text
deserves to remain recognized as reliable, unless real
contra-proof can be given from a recovered better text.
However, there are no better texts … we plead for
rehabilitation of the ancient and well-known text.
This means that we do not dismiss this text which is found in a
large majority of the textual witnesses and which underlies all
the time-honored Bible translations of the past, but [that we]
prize and use it” (page 36, bracketed comments added).
Van Bruggen’s call for the rehabilitation of the Textus Receptus
begins with new translations and the casting aside of the United
Bible Societies eclectic “Majority Text” that was created by
subjective scholarly opinions and guesses: “The
examination of the modern textual criticism and the readings it
defends should, however, not stand in the service of eclecticism
whereby the Byzantine text is only accepted as one of the
sources for optional-readings. Eclecticism is always a
subjective matter and only creates new mixed [false] texts.
The criteria of eclecticism also contradict each other.
Now that there is considerable agreement concerning the texts
exists in the broad stream of the text-tradition, there is no
need to resort to eclecticism. Copies of a corrupt
text-form in the 2nd century,
accidentally saved, would then receive a place equal to that of
copies from many other centuries which are generally accepted as
faithful copies [which is not correct]” (Ibid., p. 38, bracketed
comments added).
“The rehabilitation of the received text should, in the churches
of the Reformation, result in putting this text into use again,
and that first of all for Bible-translation.
Translations which go back to the Byzantine text do not need to
be old translations … But the newest translation should still
give access to the text of the Church of the ages and not to the
text of five learned contemporaries in the 20th
century. The Greek New Testament of the United Bible
Societies should as a basis for translations of the New
Testament be exchanged for an edition of the Textus Receptus …”
(Ibid., p. 38).
Which Bible Should You
Use?
The Old Testament: The King James Version of the
Bible is one of the oldest and most preferred versions. It
was translated from the Hebrew Masoretic text. In the
1530’s William Tyndale, the first man to translate the Old
Testament from the Hebrew into English, used the same Masoretic
text that the translators of the Geneva Bible and King James
Bible used. In fact, fully 90-95% of the text of the Old,
as well as the New Testament, are identical to William Tyndale’s
translation. The KJV can be considered to be a highly
accurate translation.
The New King James Version (NKJV) is a reasonably
accurate translation in Modern English. The English
Standard Version (ESV) 2001 appears to be an accurate
translation of the Old Testament. While the New Testament
of the ESV appears to be a very good translation, it has been
translated from the United Bible Societies eclectic Greek text
Novum Testamentum Graece (27th
ed) edited by Nestle and Aland. This Greek text is very
deficient when compared to the Textus Receptus—Stephens 1550
Text. Any of these Bibles can be purchased from any Bible
bookstore or online Bible outlet.
The New Testament: The most accurate new
translation of the New Testament is:
The New Testament In Its
Original Order—A Faithful Version With Commentary,
translated by Fred R. Coulter from the Stephens 1550
Text—published in 2004.
An Editor’s
Forward to The Faithful Version
“The New
Testament has been used by
the Christian
faithful now approaching two millennia. For over five hundred years, beginning with
William Tyndale, the Bible has been available to the
English-speaking people. The standard translations
such as the
Geneva,
King James Version and the Revised English Bible
are familiar to millions. But mankind’s cultures and languages
are ever in flux so, given great
expanses of time, the Bible which once was comfortable and
understandable for past generations has become harder for
believers to understand.
“Ultimately, the
Scriptures need the deft touch of a restorer’s hand to return to
their original splendor. However, to enhance the clarity
of Scripture obscured by time and by conflicting readings of key
passages [as found in nearly all modern translations] is a
daunting challenge. Fred R. Coulter has provided a
New Testament
translation that retains the grace and grandeur of the King
James Version while seeking to clarify some of the problematic
key passages. He has
been mindful of
the earlier giants who translated the New Testament, such as William
Tyndale, as well as of later studies of scriptural texts and of
Judaic culture.
He has focused
on being accurate and faithful to the original Greek texts.
Their convoluted syntax, at times elliptical phrasings, at
times problematic grammar present a thorny challenge to the translator. That is a challenge I believe
Mr. Coulter
has met—a
challenge that is multiplied manyfold by dealing with ancient
languages
such as Greek and Latin.
“My charge in
editing the text has been to be a footnote to that grand
endeavor, namely to
edit the
scriptural text produced as well as the enlightening commentary
and appendices on those Scriptures. My focus was to be a
nearsighted one, if you will: to peer closely at the new
translation of the various books of the New
Testament and
the new commentary, to look for any irregularities.
“These
‘irregularities’ may be seen as being divisible into matters of
expression
and
matters of convention for both the translation as well as
the substantial commentary that
follows. With regard to expression, the key concern as
editor was the question of
clarity in diction and in phrasing: Is a given word problematic
in terms of being archaic or ambiguous? Does a phrasing's
length, complexity, or
inverted syntax impede comprehension? Is the style—for example, within
individual books of
the New Testament—sustained and consistent? As for conventions
of the language,
my questionings were straightforwardly grammatical or
punctuational. Are the
grammar, punctuation, and usage standard? If not, are the
deviations permissible? Do
the deviations, if allowed, make for a distracting variability?
“As the final
editor for this volume,
The New Testament In Its Original Order—A
Faithful Version With Commentary,
I have rigorously applied the questions
above to its pages. My fervent hope is that what follows in this
volume is a more
translucent window through which to view the beauties, marvels,
and profundities of the New Testament original, now freshly
rendered and then illuminatingly
expounded upon by Fred R. Coulter.”
Dr. Will
Tomory
Professor of English
Southwestern Michigan College
December 2003
This New Testament is available from
York Publishing Company,
P.O. Box 1038; Hollister, California 95024-1038. (It is now available on
Amazon.com.)
The King James and the New King James Versions would also be
adequate for serious Bible Study. However, you need to be
careful because they are biased toward false Protestant
teachings.
