Wednesday, January 5, 2011

I Heart Antioch & the Great Falling Away

I no longer hold the ideas expressed in this post with regards to modern Bible versions and the critical Greek NT (see here for more details). I'm leaving this post up as a reminder to me as to just how deeply immersed in error I can be and not know it. It is hoped that I'll remember this lesson should I ever be tempted to deal dismissively with an erring brother. J.K. 21/04/14





Time to look up, folks, the Great Falling Away is in its 11th hour…

The road from Antioch to Alexandria is hot, dry and full of vipers, but this hasn’t stopped what appears to be the majority of the North American (online?) Church from turning their backs to the sun en masse and heading for Egypt. Yes, with a mighty resolve, they divorced themselves once and for all from the Great King James Bible and took up with a harlot—the ESV.

Actually, the ESV is the second harlot, a lot of them shacked-up with the NIV first, then, developing a taste for strange flesh, traded her in for this new one. But they traded down, as the sports scouts say, and have no one but themselves to blame for the apostasy to follow.

It’s astounding just how many people have fallen for the relentless marketing tactics of Crossway Publishers (Jeff Riddle at stylos was too much of a gentleman to call it “relentless” on his blog last November, but he implied it). I’m sure many of the same people now quoting from the ESV would’ve turned their noses up at the RSV just a few year ago. What a difference a slick ad campaign can make, eh?

Well, thank God for people like the Dean Burgon Society. But not for fighting against this latest example of spiritual adultery. No, fighting the will of God isn’t such a good idea, so I don’t thank them for that, per se. I thank the Dean Burgon Society, and those like them, for cataloguing the slide and keeping the story of the True Original Greek Scriptures available for people like me to discover. What a hopeless generation we would be if it wasn’t for these Watchmen on the Walls.

And I personally would be in a heck of a state—I just knew there was something wrong with those Bibles, but didn’t know exactly what it was. I can’t thank them all enough!

Naturally, though, there are those who take the whole King James Only thing too far. Such a one is bibleprotector over on YouTube. While I admire his zeal for the KJB, I have to part company with him on his English Primacy theory:



To me, this just sounds like an English-speakers' ethnocentrism writ large. History tells us that most of the diaspora Jews spoke Greek in the 1st Century; more of them even reading the OT in Greek (the LXX) than in Hebrew. Koine Greek was spoken by the whole world 1500 years before English was developed and, along with Latin, for many years after that. A strong argument could be made that the Zephaniah prophecy was telling the Jews that YHWH would eventually use Greek to speak to His Elect; Koine Greek, the language of the Apostles, and a much purer language than English ever was (and much richer, deeper, more nuanced, etc). And lets not forget how the Ante-Nicene Fathers, such as Iranaeus, fought like terriers to preserve the wording of the Greek manuscripts. They were under no illusion as to what the real Λογος του Θεου looked like.

Still, at the end of the day, if everyone erred in favour of the KJV like bibleprotector, the reeling English-speaking Church would be a darned sight better off than it is now. Better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire...(Mat 18:9 KJV)



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