Monday, January 3, 2011

What's Wrong with Dr John?

UPDATE 12/12/2016

This post is just an embarrassment now. It was only six years ago, but it's like looking at something you wrote when you were a teenager. Whew. Sorry ESV and sorry John MacArthur. Glad God brought me to a clearer understanding of Textual Criticism before I closed this blog (see here and here). Whew.




The ESV, because it is translation from a corrupt, heretical, non-canonical text, is a counterfeit Bible just like the NIV; just one more modernistic substitute for the Word of God in English.
—Howard King, Foundations Ministries

Just listened to a sermon by Howard King on SermonAudio.Com entitled “What’s Wrong with the ESV?” and am very glad I did! Highly recommended for anyone interested in evidence of how far the poison of apostasy has spread in the Church. (It is truly astounding how far the Great Falling Away has progressed.) King does a masterful job of refuting, not only the proponents of the ESV, but the giant hydra-headed mushroom of Textual Criticism itself.

I became aware of the Text Family controversy when I started studying Koine Greek a year ago and have been marvelling at the deceptions on the Critical Text side ever since. It took me a while to decide finally which side I was on, but, as a KJV advocate and despiser of the NIV, I'd heavily favoured the Textus Receptus/Majority Text arguments from the start. King’s sermon gives all the intellectual reasons why I'm firmly in the TR/MT camp now (just like crazy Jim Brown of the last post), but the deciding factor was the Greek NT that the Lord eventually put in my hands.

You see, I desperately wanted a Greek NT, but didn't want to get the wrong one. So, instead of just buying the first one I could find, I prayed and waited, prayed and waited, then, about two months into my Greek lessons (I was teaching myself via the internet, J.W. Wenham's Elements, and James Voelz's podcast), I had occasion to buy a used, inexpesive copy of Scrivener's THE NEW TESTAMENT IN GREEK ACCORDING TO THE TEXT FOLLOWED IN THE AUTHORISED VERSION TOGETHER WITH THE VARIATIONS ADOPTED IN THE REVISED VERSION (man, I love that title). Talk about a two-fer!

Anyway, I found King's sermon while googling for info on the presumptuously titled English Standard Version, after hearing that a disreputable outfit called the National Council of Churches [spit] was sitting somewhere down the murky ESV profit track. King’s sermon confirmed this rumour (apparently they hold the rights to the RSV which the ESV is based on; in fact, less than 10% of the RSV was altered to produce the ESV), along with many others.

Actually, I’d only become acquainted with this warmed-over RSV very recently; first as the RefTagger Bible Version over at Pyromaniacs (see the link on my Blog Roll), then as the text of the John MacArthur Study Bible, in luxurious Tru-Tone® Blue for only $55, where “John’s goal is to let the Bible speak for itself—nothing more, nothing less” by including notes “based on [his] verse-by-verse approach to the Bible and nearly forty years of careful study”.



Is the reason for this clear approval of the ESV by MacArthur (and his friends at Pyro) as obvious as it is worrying? The publishers of the ESV are Crossway Books (the book publishing arm of Good News Publishers) who proudly proclaim on their website that “Since its inception in 1979, Crossway Books has been privileged to publish more than 1,500 different titles, including books by…John MacArthur”. Here’s John’s page on Crossway’s Authors listings. Has John MacArthur, or someone very high up in his Ministry’s brain trust, made a deal with the Devil and agreed to promulgate a deceiving, antichrist translation of the Λογος του Θεου in order to sell a pile of his marginal pencil scratchings?

Okay, that last question might've been a bit unfair, but you have to admit that something stinks at Grace to You. Maybe Dr John has become too famous. I mean, all his supporters will tell you how godly and educated and un-PC "Doctor John MacArthur" is and point you to all his Larry King appearances and YouTube sermons, but, please, at the end of the day, he did put his name on the cover of the Bible. The Holy Bible. To sell it and make money.

And his name's in the larger font.
Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets. (Luke 6:26)
Then again, given all that, it's probably a good thing for his sake that the MacArthur Study Bible isn't a real Bible after all...


UPDATE: Since posting about the ESV & John MacArthur, I've been wheeling around the intertubes seeing how common the ESV is and getting more creeped out by the minute. Seems like I've been hopelessly out of the loop here in New Zealand; looks like everybody and his little brother in the US is using the ESV!

Oh well, thank God for Howard King above and the well-researched Terry Watkins.



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