Hey everybody, thanks for joining us for a special
Baptist bias episode. We're not in our studio. We're actually in the vault. So we're actually
in Vancouver, Washington. We're here at Sher Foundation Baptist Church for the King James
Bible Conference and we're kicking it off this evening. I've got my co-host, Ben the Baptist.
How did they let you on an airplane?
You know what unlike you? I don't have white privilege. So it's a little bit more of a struggle
But at the end of the day, I made it here by hook or by crook and I'm really excited for the King James Bible conference
I'm really excited for this live stream tonight Baptist bias vault edition. Let's get started
And, of course, we've got a special guest with us tonight, and it's going to be Pastor
Stephen Anderson.
He's actually the first guest preacher this evening for the conference, and we're really
excited to have you on the show.
Hey, Pastor Anderson, how's it going?
Yeah, it's going great.
Always love coming up here.
It's beautiful, a little bit of like sprinkling rain outside and all the trees and wildlife.
So it's beautiful.
I've been excited about this conference for a long time.
It's the it's the red hot preaching conference replacement this year since it got canceled
So I'm stoked man. I'm ready to bring down the house. God willing. I'm kind of interested in your thoughts
You know, we we've talked about the King James Bible a lot. You've made two documentaries about this
Do you think there's still a need for a conference? It's really talking about the King James
I mean, what are your thoughts on why have a King James Bible conference? Well, absolutely because it's just such a massive subject
that I don't think you're ever going to run out of material.
I think, unfortunately, sometimes a lot of the same arguments end up getting rehashed over and over again
when there's actually just really so much to talk about.
I mean, think about how big the Bible is, right?
And when it comes to the differences between the King James and the modern versions,
there are pretty much significant differences on almost every page.
And so, you know, talking about the history,
talking about the linguistic issues, talking about just the differences in versions,
there's always going to be something to talk about. And let's not forget also
that the modern versions are constantly changing.
You know, the Greek text is constantly changing when it comes to critical text crowd.
Our Greek text, of course, has been virtually the same for 500 years,
but their text is continually changing.
And so as new phony versions come out,
and as they update and change and edit their existing phony versions,
you know, we're going to still need to keep exposing it.
But I will say this, you know, back in the 1990s,
King James onlyism was a big issue.
And, you know, I've just seen it just continue to be a big issue.
And if anything, it seems like a bigger issue now than it's ever been.
I feel like the KJV is trending, surging, doing better every year.
I feel like the internet has really opened people's eyes on this issue
because in the 90s, it was more like...
physical books and materials that people were going to or maybe like a preaching cassette tape
being passed around exposing the modern versions whereas now with the internet
it's really waking people up and and you know of course obviously the empire is going to strike back and so
you know the modern version crowds uploading all their garbage and then the king james crowd is is
you know continuing to upload information and
It's just a huge topic. It's still very relevant, still hotly debated, and, I mean, if the Bible is our foundation,
if it's our final authority in all matters of faith and practice, what could be more important than making sure that we have the right text of Scripture?
And that's what my whole sermon tonight is going to be about. It's going to be called, Difference Is Effect Doctrine,
because, you know, some people claim, like, oh, no doctrine is affected.
Yeah, I think that that's a great that's a great topic to address and really when you look at
most doctrinal statements
I find that the Bible or their beliefs about the Bible is typically the number one yeah thing listed and
Of course almost everybody says hey
We believe the word of God is preserved in the quote originals or the originals were the inspired word of God
But a lot of doctrinal statements stop there and and we're trying to say hey
We're going beyond just the originals to say he's also
preserved it, we made a movie, The Preserved Bible.
Do you think, Ben, that we've really seen a momentum shift
on this issue towards the King James?
What is kind of your feeling on the culture right now
and in people's attitudes towards this issue?
Well, obviously I'm ingrained with King James' onlyists
in the sense that they surround me,
they're all my friends, so that might play a role
in my perception, but,
I would echo the sentiment that we have a ton of momentum right now because of the age of the internet and all of the valuable information that has been disseminated about this issue.
You talk about the preserved Bible, you talk about the doctrine of preservation, you talk about all the different material out there related to King James' onlyism.
So I think people are more informed arguably than they have been in the past and for that reason I think you have seen a resurgence and a real momentum shift.
For our side, I always feel like the enemies of King James only ism have kind of waxed weaker and weaker through the years
And so, you know, one of the things that I think is we're really loud and vocal for the King James
And I think that we kind of give it a little bit better name than some of the past leaders
someone like Peter Ruckman or some other people and so we're kind of putting some intellectual ism
and reality and some modern, you know, cool stuff that we're kind of bringing new information.
I feel like there's a lot of new information. And when we talk about this issue, I think a lot
of people focus in on kind of the Greek aspect, the New Testament aspect. But one thing that,
you know, is also important is just the Old Testament issue. And I think, you know, you're
pretty passionate about this, Pastor Anderson. You know, I've hear a lot of King James onlyism.
Isn't it important that we also address the Old Testament
and where that's coming from too, from this perspective?
Yeah, I think that the reason that so much focuses
on the New Testament is because of course,
you could argue that the New Testament is more important because that's kind of like our primary
document as New Testament Christians. Obviously the Old Testament is super important as well,
but you know, if you're on a desert island and you can only have one, you know, it's like
you want the New Testament, right? If you can only have one in a certain language,
it's obviously going to be the New Testament. And so I think that's part of the focus. And then I
think another reason is that a lot of people just think that Greek is probably a lot easier to learn
just a lot less people who've taken the time to learn Hebrew and delve into that and then also
you know the Hebrew text was pretty much settled for a really long time. There wasn't as much
textual variation in the Hebrew text because of course famously in the Middle Ages the scribes
of the Hebrew text the Masoretic scribes were just extremely careful about the way that they copied
and everything is just copied extremely carefully whereas with the Greek text sometimes it was a
is copying, some people are copying really accurately, some people aren't, and so, you know...
But now that's all kind of changed in the 20th century with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
and now all of a sudden, you know, the Septuagint crowd is trying to come in and claim that the
Septuagint is superior to the Masoretic Hebrew text. And so now it's kind of like they've kind of
reopened this can of worms about the Old Testament instead of, you know, just kind of the agreed upon
Hebrew Old Testament that, you know, pretty much everybody agreed upon.
now in the 20th century and into the 21st century,
now the Old Testament's up for grabs.
Well, you're using a lot of words
that I don't know if all of our audiences are familiar with,
and I kind of want to ask you a few questions here.
Number one.
You know, it's called the Masoretic Hebrew. I'm kind of curious if you can give us an idea. Why is it called Masoretic?
What does that mean? And you brought up the Septuagint. So what are we kind of talking about and then the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Can you kind of give us a brief? Just just what are these documents?
What are these things that you're talking about and then we want to kind of I want to understand like the source behind these things?
Yeah, so it you know, let's just kind of go all the way back to the beginning, right?
And go back to the Hebrew scriptures being written before
the time of Christ and they're written in the Hebrew language, okay? Well, as you
approach the time of Christ, more and more Jews started speaking Greek instead
of Hebrew because Hebrew by the time Christ walked on the earth was already
dying and almost a totally dead language and it already started to become just a
language of like academics or you know religion or something but it wasn't like
And by the end of the first century AD, it was pretty much completely a dead language.
And what do I mean by dead language?
A dead language is something that no one speaks as their primary language just at home.
They're born...
and raised in a home, speaking it as their primary language.
Hebrew is a dead language after the first century.
And in the first century, it was already dying, okay?
So there obviously was a need for the Hebrew Old Testament
to be translated into other languages,
and most notably Greek, because, you know,
today English is the main language of the world
as far as like a second language, right?
Universal second language, lingua franca.
That's how Greek was back then.
century BC the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek okay and there's
one specific translation of it that's from Alexandria Egypt where it was
translated into Greek and it's called the Septuagint. Now isn't this from like
typically known as LXX right and what's kind of funny isn't that Roman numerals
LXX.
Well, the reason why is simply that in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, the language
of scholarship is Latin.
So, they're going to use a Latin word, septuagint, which means 70, and then they're going to use a Latin Roman numeral system to represent that.
And here's the thing. The story of how the septuagint came into existence is just a totally bogus legend that has zero basis in reality, and it's just a total fiction.
but a lot of people, unfortunately, believe in it.
But the idea is that, oh, they have these 70 scholars,
or sometimes it's 72 scholars,
and, you know, they all went and worked on the translation
by themselves, and then they came back and compared it,
and it was just identical.
because they were all just like inspired by God
or re-inspired translation.
So basically 70 Rachmanites all went
and just translated exactly word for word
and then all came back and it all lined up.
And so that's why it's called the Septuagint
because it's 70.
70 translation.
It's the LXX because it's 70.
And so it's a Greek translation of the Old Testament.
you know, is this something that is exactly just matches the Hebrew Bible? Does it have more or less?
It has a lot more and a lot less.
It's very different.
But here's the big point I want to make,
is that this story about the 70 translators and all this stuff
is totally bogus for a bunch of reasons, okay?
First of all, there's no actual real historical evidence for this.
It's just stuff that was centuries later talked about.
But here's the thing about it.
I've read the whole Septuagint cover-to-cover in the original Greek.
it varies dramatically in quality so certain books like for example like the Pentateuch the first
five books of the Bible are like pretty well translated and then other parts of it are just
horribly translated like when you're into books like Samuel and Kings and stuff like that or like
for example when you're reading in Exodus and they're building the tabernacle all the like
technical terms for all the little like sockets and knobs and you know all the different bars and
hooks and rings and kind of like construction special terminology you know will be translated into
Greek then when you go to like where the temple is being built in Kings and those things are just
why would you transliterate those things like if you either you don't know what they mean in Hebrew
or you don't know what they mean in Greek it's just like low quality sometimes ridiculously
overly literal translations later in the Old Testament and so what I'm saying is having read
there is absolutely no way that the same person
or the same group of people did this whole translation.
Because the translation style is dramatically different
in one part from another,
the quality is all over the place.
So-
Very inconsistent.
Okay, and as far as like what's missing,
you have hundreds of verses missing from the book of Jeremiah.
234, I think. You have over 200 verses missing from the book of Job.
40% of the David and Goliath story is missing. So you have just giant chunks of text missing,
and then you have the addition of a whole bunch of apocryphal garbage that is just
you know, mixed into the text.
It's not in a separate Apocrypha section,
just for reference, like in the King James.
It's just mixed into the text.
So like, if you read the book of Esther, for example,
in the book, or in the Septuagint,
it just has all this weird extra material
that just totally ruins the story and makes it laughable.
So, here's the thing.
What about something in Daniel?
There's like, I believe in some apocryphal books,
there's like two extra books, maybe like Bell and the Dragon.
Is that part of the Septuagint?
Yes.
What about when it comes to the Septuagint?
Is there just one copy of the Septuagint?
Absolutely not.
So like Constantine Von Tischendorf
is accredited with finding a Septuagint
in a monastery.
Sinaticus.
Sinaticus in quote, the Sinai, you know, monastery.
And
Is this the same Septuagint as the one you read?
Is there even differences between these Septuagint?
Here's what you have to understand is that
was there a Greek translation of the Old Testament
before the time of Christ?
Absolutely.
Yeah, of course, because people speak Greek,
they want to read the Bible, they translated into Greek.
First of all, the Septuagint's not even
the only Greek translation.
You have other Greek translations,
lots of Greek translations, and then lots of revisions.
of the Septuagint, different editions of the Septuagint, but when we talk today about the
quote-unquote Septuagint in modern scholarship, here's what we're talking about. We're talking
about a fourth century AD text. So we're talking about a text from over 300 years after the time
of Christ. And guess what the three most important manuscripts are for the Septuagint? Sinaiticus,
No, if you don't trust them for the New Testament, then why would you trust them for the Old Testament?
And so the sip first of all the sip to a jet came out of Egypt in the first place and
It was probably in a lot of places based on
corrupted
you know, divergent Hebrew texts, and then it went through all these different editions,
and copying, and changing, and it was just kind of all over the place, okay?
And then what they're calling the Septuagint today, they're basically taking a 4th century AD
manuscript, and then claiming like, oh, this is what was translated in the 2nd century BC.
This is what Jesus and the Apostles were using. Well, how can Jesus and the Apostles use a book
from 300 years after they lived.
You know, it's just...
But what they want to do is they want to trick you.
Because, yeah, of course Jesus and his disciples
used a Greek Old Testament.
But did they use, quote,
the Septuagint?
And what do they mean by that?
A fourth century.
Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus.
I'm sure that the apostles used Greek versions of the Old Testament.
Maybe they used certain books out of the Septuagint,
other books from other translations,
because remember, you know, it wasn't like they were walking around with a leather-bound
copy of the Old Testament with 39 books in it, right?
It's like scrolls that they would have been dealing with.
And here's the biggest proof, just in a nutshell.
Proof that the G's and the apostles weren't just using the Septuagint quote-unquote as their Bible.
Why do they never quote from the Apocrypha?
And why do they never reference the Apocrypha at all?
Because think about, when you're reading the New Testament, isn't there continual reference to books like Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges?
I mean, go down the list.
Virtually everything except the book of Esther is going to be referenced.
Quoted all throughout the New Testament well in the Septuagint you have all this other apocryphal material baked in
Why are they never talking about? They're never preaching it. They're never quoting it. They're never referencing it
And so, you know, it's a lie, but now there's this lie out there
Oh, Jesus and the Apostles use the Septuagint. So therefore the Septuagint's wonderful and here
Let me hand you the Septuagint and it's from 300 years after the time of Christ and it's from, you know
Sinaiticus and I believe I believe they also would argue our opponents on this issue that there are certain
readings that you can find only in the Septuagint and not in the Hebrew
Masoretic text because the belief is that the New Testament quotes from the
Septuagint in several places according to them. And my question for you is
this Pastor Anderson, is it possible that the Septuagint was corrupted in
those places to make it look like the New Testament is quoting it?
Yeah absolutely it's possible.
that by the time we get to the fourth century AD,
someone could have
changed the Greek Old Testament text to bring it into harmony or uniformity with the New Testament
because they wanted it to match verbatim with the New Testament quote.
So which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Yeah.
It's impossible to prove.
And then what they'll say is,
oh, but we found manuscripts of the Septuagint at the Dead Sea Scrolls.
But here's the thing about that is that they found a couple little scraps
and they are not the parts of the Septuagint that anybody's even arguing about.
You know, they find a few scraps from Leviticus' numbers in Deuteronomy,
and then all of a sudden it's like,
oh, we have the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
When they say they have Septuagint manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
okay, there's 929 chapters in the Old Testament, you know,
and yet you just have a couple of scraps,
and then they want us to just accept the whole thing.
I don't know if I'm making it clear.
Yeah, I want to revisit a few things.
Number one, we have over 100 people live in the show.
Thanks to our audience.
And if you want to ask a question, you can always drop it in the chat.
I want to say, always, Baptist says that the set looks awesome,
and I have to agree, this is pretty epic.
This is making me feel like we need to step up our game on the Baptist bias.
But hey, I'm really glad that we're here.
We do already have a few people trying to ask some questions,
so if you ask a question, I might be able to get to it, but if you have them,
put them in the chat.
We're not gonna be able to take in callers or anything.
I wanna kinda revisit the question that I asked you.
Because I was kinda asking you about
the Masoretic Hebrew, the Septuagint,
the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I feel like you really gave us a great understanding
of the Septuagint.
Septuagint was a Greek translation of the Hebrew text.
However, there's many different.
There's many different.
Versions of it, some are even past the time of Christ and so there's kind of this
Uncertainty about the text. There's a lot of extra stuff in it. It's it's known as Septuagint or LXX
or there's maybe a few other ways they might refer to this.
But when we talk about the Masoretic Hebrew,
I kind of want to know, why isn't it just called Hebrew?
Why is it called the Masoretic Hebrew?
So here's why.
Okay, because obviously it's originally written in Hebrew
and then it's passed down over the years
and there are Hebrew scribes that are copying the thing
and they're mainly Jews.
that are copying the Hebrew Bible.
So, the word Masoretic simply just comes from the Hebrew word that means tradition.
So, Masorah.
So, it's just, Masoretic basically just means the traditional Hebrew text.
So, is there different Hebrews?
Because we talk about the Septuagint having some variation here in many forms.
Yeah.
What about, if we're calling the traditional Hebrew, it sounds like there might be
other Hebrew alternatives potentially.
No, so until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
the Masoretic Hebrew text is just the Hebrew text.
It's just, and people will try to be like pedantic
and split hairs, kind of like they do like,
well, which text does this receptice, you know?
Just kind of this dumb little hair splitting.
There is not a significant difference.
between Hebrew texts.
Are we talking like Cambridge versus Oxford variation?
Are we talking King James versus Bishops Bible variation?
No, we're talking Cambridge versus Oxford level of difference.
So, and again, just for the audience's sake,
Cambridge versus Oxford, we're talking about like 12 words
different, and the words that are different
are like that versus which, which please explain to me
what the difference is between that and which.
So, here's the deal, okay?
Until the 20th century,
The oldest Hebrew manuscript in existence of the full Bible is the Leningrad Codex and it goes back to, like, the 11th century A.D.
Okay, so a thousand years after the time of Christ, and then the oldest partial Codex from the 10th century A.D., the Aleppo Codex.
Our Hebrew manuscripts basically go back to a thousand years after Christ, okay?
And they match each other. That's just the traditional Hebrew text.
That's what's been preserved. That's what's been copied and handed down.
And as I mentioned earlier, the Jewish scribes who copied it were extremely meticulous about the way they copied.
You know, and you hear all the famous stories. Every time they come to the name of God, they go like...
take a bath and then write the name of God or whatever, you know, they make a single mistake
and they throw away the whole thing and stuff. So they're like super careful, super meticulous
in their copying. Well, in the 16th century, right, 1525, Venice, Italy, you have this printed
on a printing press for the first time because, you know, it had always been copied by hand.
1525, rabbinical Hebrew Old Testament being printed in a book form.
Okay, and I have a copy of, you know, I have a, what's it called, replica of this.
It's four volumes, and when you open this thing up, what you have is, you have one column is the Hebrew text of the Scripture.
Then next to it, there's another column that's the Aramaic Targum, the Aramaic interpretation,
and then surrounding the edges of the page, you have medieval rabbinical commentaries.
okay, from Jews. So this is what the King James translators had in front of them
while they were translating the Old Testament into English and, you know, all the other Renaissance
Bibles, Bishops Bible in English, right, you know, German, Martin Luther Bible where everybody's got
this Bomberg, you know, 1525 Old Testament and that's what they're looking at. That's the traditional
Hebrew text and it's based on
you know, these handwritten manuscripts like the, you know, Leningrad codex, Aleppo codex, you know,
not those exact manuscripts, but manuscripts that are virtually the same as those.
So here's the thing, if I pull out my Hebrew Bible and one of these modern critical text people
pulls out their Hebrew Bible, we're both looking at the same book.
So with this rabbinic commentary, then we have the cultural context so we can always know
Obviously, we don't care what the Jews said in that commentary
But but the thing is like about the Dead Sea Scrolls then so so we kind of have a we have an idea
Okay, the Masoretic Hebrew
It's just the Hebrew that basically all the Jews give credence to there's not very much variation on this
I think I think a lot of people act like the quote Septuagint
is like the Hebrew you just described,
where there's just this one Septuagint
in all kind of Greece.
Not even close.
But it's actually not really the same at all.
No way.
When it comes to the Dead Sea Scrolls,
give us a little bit of a timeline on that.
But, and someone asked in the chat,
and I kind of want to,
I think this question kind of helps us too,
because they said,
This is from our
manned
Madrange or madrange says pastor Anderson
Do you think the apocryphal was written after the New Testament?
Seems like the author of quote Tobit knew the New Testament very well
So I think if you address the Dead Sea Scrolls and then was there any evidence that apocryphal books existed before the time of Christ?
there is you know a theory that
Tobit in particular is later, but
you know, many of the apocryphal books we know are written before the time of Christ,
so you can't necessarily paint them all with a broad brush.
Because remember how I said that this legend about the quote-unquote Septuagint in Toto
being translated in the second century BC by 70 people, blah, blah, blah,
is a made-up phony fairy tale.
It's possible that what was originally translated in the second century was just the first five books,
the rest of the Tanakh was translated later,
and then other apocryphal books like Tobit
or whatever could come even later.
Obviously, some of the apocryphal books
have been found in the Dead Sea Scrolls,
which would prove that they are older
than the New Testament, because here,
let's just talk about what the Dead Sea Scrolls are.
Yeah. Okay.
So, this is what the Dead Sea Scrolls are.
In the middle of the 20th century, late 1940s,
All of these scrolls were discovered in these caves of Qumran, and it's over 900 different scrolls.
Some of them are just like a fragment with a few letters on it, others are like really well preserved, intact.
You can read the whole thing, and you know, they're all available online.
Like any of the Dead Sea Scrolls that I wanted to, I could actually look at a super high quality image of
online on my laptop in a matter of seconds, I could pull it up, I can zoom in, because I've done
that on certain, you know, important issues or discrepancies and zoomed in and looked at it.
Are they written in Hebrew? What is the language?
It's almost, it's predominantly Hebrew, there's very little Greek material there,
it's by and large Hebrew. So here's the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Until finding the Dead Sea Scrolls, our oldest Hebrew manuscripts are from the 10th century AD.
Which is way later and so when are these dated these are from like the first century BC?
So this is proof of like the the Old Testament Bible
being before Christ, which is significant in the context of a lot of these Old Testament
prophecies, had clearly been written down, transcribed, translated, before they even
knew Christ was going to be born in Bethlehem and Christ was going to die on the cross and
all these things that we could reference.
with the traditional Hebrew with the Masoretic Hebrew?
So here's what's going on.
It's a mixed bag because you have, for example,
in the same cave, you have these two Isaiah scrolls.
OK, one of them matches up virtually identically
with the Masoretic Hebrew Isaiah.
But then you have another Isaiah scroll
that's just like a weird, rewritten copy that's just
different.
And so you have some really
strangely different copies, and then you have some that are just dead on with the Masoretic Text.
So definitely, the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm the antiquity of the Masoretic Text.
They prove the Masoretic Text goes back to before the time of Christ.
that text type. But then there's also all this variety where you have these other like
corrupted texts. And the kumran sect, and I did a sermon about this a while back,
the sermon is called The Preservation of the Old Testament, if anybody's interested.
But I talked about how this is, this kumran sect was like a weird heretical sect. And so it'd
And you found a King James Bible, but then you also found the Book of Mormon.
You also found the Joseph Smith translation. You also found the Pearl of Great Price.
You also found doctrines and covenants. Okay, you know, to use the Dead Sea Scrolls
to change the Bible is stupid and absurd. Okay, we believe in the preservation of God's Word.
We believe that it has been
providentially preserved and kept pure in all ages.
So we don't need to dig up something.
Like, here's the thing, what if our oldest Hebrew Bible
was from the 10th century AD?
Would that shake your faith or bother you at all?
Because it wouldn't bother me at all.
Well, again, something that you kind of like briefly said,
and it's interesting, these Jews
that are copying the Old Testament Hebrew
when they make a mistake, what do they do?
You said it, they bury it.
That's kind of their practice, right?
So instead of burning it or destroying it,
they're burying it.
And so if we're going and finding an uncovering,
buried texts, what is the likelihood
that that's actually purposefully been buried
because it was an error?
It's a problem, it's a mistake.
So why wouldn't I use the one that's been passed down
and actually being used as opposed to one that's
buried. But there's another thing you brought up, and I kind of want to get your opinion on, because
you brought up this idea about people reading...
Moses, or we're talking about the Greek a little bit.
In the book of Acts, I believe it's in chapter number 15, yeah.
The Bible says this, it says in verse 21,
from Moses of old time,
hath in every city,
them that preach him,
being read in the synagogues every Sabbath day.
Now, this is my kind of thought experiment here.
It's probably unlikely
that everybody in the whole world is speaking Hebrew.
Especially considering almost no one speaking right especially considering the context of this timeline
Greek is the predominant language or Aramaic or but I'm just saying of the world
Yeah, it's probably Greek is like Greek the big one. Yeah, the Greek and Aramaic were both big
So it kind of makes sense that they might be reading
a Greek translation, and all these different various cities.
Just like today, we read an English Bible because we speak English,
so it's probably likely that they're reading a Greek translation of the Old Testament.
But at the same time, the King James translators did not want to go and use a Greek translation
for the underlying text.
They used Daniel Bomberg's 1525.
edition of the Maserati text. Why?
Well, and so did everyone else, by the way.
So, here's the thing.
We could even go back further
and think about the Roman Catholics.
You know, in the 4th century AD,
they wanted to make one definitive Latin translation
because you had a bunch of Latin translations floating around.
And again, look, people have always translated the Bible into a bazillion languages and not all those translations have even survived.
Because even think about today, how many people have you known where it's just like one guy just like made his own translation of the Bible into Norwegian or just and he didn't like it.
He did his own Spanish.
Wait a minute. How many people have made an English translation that haven't survived?
Because if you actually go, there's a Bible Museum in Houston.
Did you go with us to the Bible Museum in Houston?
Yes.
Ben, if you go there, they have a copy of just so many English translations of the Bible,
like Noah Webster.
He's famous for having made a translation of the New Testament.
And then, and it may not be that bad, you even have like really bad versions of this,
because didn't Thomas Jefferson make his own kind of version of the New Testament?
Were you like cut out even certain portions of the New Testament? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't call that a translation
It was more like an addition or something or revision. Yeah, I would call it a redaction
Yeah, but I'm just saying I'm just saying like there's even English
Don't survive. Yeah, you know the things that survive are the ones that people are actually using exactly. They think that's authentic legitimate
And we want to go back to the source text.
I mean, if you read the translators to the reader,
they emphasize that they want to go back to the fountain,
to the source, to the pure,
the thing that's been preserved.
I mean, here's a question though.
Obviously the Bible in the New Testament
makes it pretty clear that the Jews are kind of the enemy.
The Jews rejected Jesus.
They didn't believe Moses.
He constantly says, have you not read?
Why would I then trust that for giving me the Bible?
If they're kind of demonized in the New Testament, they reject the Lord Jesus Christ, they've been replaced, they're the synagogue of Satan, why am I trusting this 1525 Daniel Bomberg Old Testament?
Well, so here's the thing, that's an argument that will be made by the Septuagint supremacy crowd, and they'll say, oh,
the Hebrews actually corrupted the text
in order to obscure prophecies about Jesus
that are clearer in the Septuagint.
They're trying to like hide it,
and that's why your New Testament quotes
don't always match up exactly with Old Testament quotes.
But again, the Dead Sea Scrolls
actually just totally destroys that argument
because of the fact that you have Dead Sea Scrolls
of Masoretic Hebrew, you know, text type.
I should say, Hebrew texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls that match the Masoretic text type from before the time of Christ.
So how could they be like changing it to hide prophecies about Christ when Christ hasn't even come yet?
Like, that wouldn't even make sense, right?
Because if we only had it back to the 11th century AD,
then you could make that argument and say,
oh, the Jews, they're evil, they tampered with it.
But then if you go back and look at the Dead Sea Scrolls
and find the ones that do,
if any of them match the Maserati text,
that shows that text was around before the time of Christ,
which proves that it's not some reaction to Christ.
So that's why that argument holds no water.
Okay, but not only that, you know, we're not just trusting a 1525 Bomberg text,
because we can check it with the 11th century Leningrad Codex, the 10th century Aleppo Codex,
and then now, of course, you even have confirmations from the Dead Sea Scrolls or whatever.
But I would make the argument that the fact that basically all Bible-believing Christians,
whether they're Baptist,
Presbyterian, you know, evangelicals of whatever, the Stripe, Nandanam, whatever.
Every single person is carrying to church this Sunday a Bible whose Old Testament is translated from the Hebrew text, not the Septuagint.
Because if it were from the Septuagint, there'd be 200 verses less in the Book of Job, 230 some verses left in Jeremiah, less in Jeremiah.
40% of the David and Goliath story would be gone.
no one is carrying that Bible to church this Sunday to a Bible-believing church.
So if God's people have rejected it consistently as being the final authority
and have gone with the Hebrew, then there you go.
You know, 500 years since the Reformation,
and we're all using the Hebrew Old Testament, all of us.
And the King James translators, they said the apocrypha is not doctrine.
It's not legitimate inspired scripture.
Many editions of the King James Bible
past 1611, never even included the apocrypha because of their rejection of it.
So that's a good point. I'm going to go into great detail on that on Saturday, the apocrypha thing.
Well, and here's the thing I want to ask you, Ben. I mean, the Bible does say that not one jot
or one tittle so passed from the law. So is that a verse to maybe confirm the idea
that the Hebrew is going to be preserved even though maybe the Jews aren't saved?
I mean, I don't think that all the scribes were necessarily saved in the Old Testament.
I mean, maybe they're not. None of them are saved after the time of Christ.
You mean the ones before Christ? I'm saying modern-day Judaism today,
the practice of Judaism, are not saved. None of them are saved.
And so, they're preserving this text for us,
even though they may not be saved, and there could have been scribes
and there's probably likely scribes of the Old Testament, though.
Well, God uses unsafe people all the time.
Right, but I'm just saying, do you think John and Tittle
is a preservation of the Hebrew confirmation.
I have to believe that of course the Lord Jesus Christ Himself said,
till heaven and earth pass, one jotter, one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law to law be fulfilled,
and in my mind that necessitates there being a Hebrew Old Testament
that was preserved in every jot and in every tittle,
and although I can't read it, I do believe that the Daniel-Bomburg edition
as a result of this doctrine is perfect
and it was perfectly preserved.
Well, you know, there's a group though
of people that I call, quote, Ruckmanites,
and they kind of don't like that term.
It's kind of like when you ask a Mormon, are you Mormon?
And they kind of get mad about that title.
They're like, well, we're the Latter-day Saints.
You know, we're the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints, we're not Mormons.
But again, we call them Ruckmanites
because they tend to not really believe
that the Hebrew and Greek have been preserved
and that they're reliable
and they're kind of like only believing
that the King James has survived.
But I find that that viewpoint actually attacks
the preservation of God's word.
I mean, do we not have to also believe
that the Hebrew and the Greek have been preserved
if we want to say that the King James Bible
has been, quote, preserved?
Bible? Absolutely. You can't bring a clean thing out of an unclean thing.
So if the King James Bible is 100% from the Daniel-Bomberg Hebrew Old Testament and it's from
the Greek-Texas Receptus in the New Testament, then those documents would have to be right
in order for the King James to be right. And these Rachmanite types just defy common sense
and find fault in the Greek, find fault in the Hebrew, and then say the King James is perfect.
Well, the stupid thing about that is they just say,
oh, well, the King James transard, they had access to all this other stuff we don't know about.
They weren't no.
They just it's kind of like an alternative history even it is because because they're like just denying all the documentation proving
They use Daniel Bamberg proving they use the visa proving that they used to Faunus proving
They use Erasmus's edition because we point to that and they say oh well
This isn't matching our word for word
So it can't be what they used or the Scriveners not what they just don't understand how language works because it does match
exactly matches all the time and so it's just kind of it's just kind of a bad way to present
King James only ism to say because then people always ask this question where was the Bible for
1611 but how do you answer that question well here's the the Hebrew Old Testament's always been
there it's always been copied it was that Masoretic tradition of just copies and copies and copies
that Hebrew Bible so the Hebrew Bible has always been good to go you know and then and the new
in thousands of handwritten Greek manuscripts.
And there's your Bible, you got the Greek, you got the Hebrew.
You know, it didn't necessarily all get put together into one book
and churned out in mass production, printed copies,
until the inventing of the printing press really just made it just super, you know...
Diled it in.
Diled in.
But yeah, but to go back to what I was saying about the Latin, though, because, you know,
I want to finish up on this topic of the Ruckmanite type mentality.
Okay.
So, in the 4th century, you have a whole bunch of different Latin translations of the Bible floating around.
And so, the Roman Catholics, they wanted to have like one authoritative Latin translation, right?
So, they have Jerome doing this, and Jerome moved to the city of Bethlehem.
So, he's kind of just immersed in, you know, the Hebrew language,
and things so that he can be in Bethlehem and and be you know translating the Old Testament and obviously he already knew Greek and stuff
So so while he's working on this
There's like a kind of a battle amongst the Catholics because you have Augustine who's the Catholics favorite
Saint he's like they're big Saint and in fact the orthodox love him
Protestants love August and Calvinists love Augustine. Saint Augustine is basically Catholicism
Orthodox. Yeah. Every variation of Catholic flavor. This guy is their father. He's like
basically Father Abraham is Father St. August. He's huge for them. Okay. Well, Augustine.
Did not believe that the Old Testament should be translated from the Hebrew. He said no
The Septuagint is the perfect word of God and we need to translate the Septuagint and not the original Hebrew
And they had letters back and forth argue and Jerome in Bethlehem
He's saying no no no we got to go to the original Hebrew
We don't want to do a translation of a translation, you know, let's go to the source
Let's go to the Hebrew and they went back and forth and argued about well Jerome won the argument
And the Catholic Church ended up going with Jerome and saying,
yeah, we're going to do the Hebrew Old Testament.
Think about if you had lost that argument,
basically history would be different, because then the Catholic
Bible would be based on the Greek Septuagint.
And who knows how that would be.
But obviously, God had a hand in these things.
Even though the Roman Catholic Church is not of God,
all things still work together for good for the people who
do love God, so that we could get the right Bible.
And so what happened is.
Jerome is going to translate the Hebrew Old Testament into the Latin Vulgate, okay?
But here's the problem is that, you know, the Catholic Church, they love these apocryphal books.
Those aren't in the Hebrew Bible, okay?
So here's what people at home need to understand.
The 39 books that you have in your King James Bible, that is the exact canon of the Hebrew Bible.
So Jews...
with their Hebrew Bible is identical, it's those same 39 books.
They call it 24 books, but it's only because they're lumping things together.
Like, the 12 minor prophets is one book to them.
But, literally, every verse in a Hebrew Bible that Jews would use
is identical to what is in a King James and vice versa.
It's the same text.
They have a slightly different order of books as well.
Yeah, they put it in a different order.
They lump things together, but it's the same text.
Okay.
This is a problem because basically the Catholic Church wants the Apocrypha but Jerome is translating from the Hebrew and the Apocrypha, he couldn't find any text of it in Hebrew.
It was only available in Greek because the Jews reject it, it's not part of their Hebrew Bible, so he can't find any copies of it.
Now the word Apocrypha literally means hidden. It's a Greek word meaning hidden and he's basically saying, I can't find it.
Like, I can't find these books in the Hebrew Bible, and so therefore those books had to
be translated from Greek because they don't even exist in Hebrew.
Now later, you know, they found, like I said, copies of them, original Hebrew copies or
parts of them, or at least some of them, could have had Hebrew originals now because, you
know, Dead Sea Scrolls have shown that those seem to have had Hebrew originals, some of
them.
There is no Hebrew version, so he had to translate from the Greek, so he said, well, these are apocrypha, you know, so like he put them in a separate category.
as not being legitimate, because he is believing in the supremacy of the Hebrew Bible for the Old Testament.
So that's what the Vulgate is. The Vulgate is a translation of the Hebrew Bible.
And then of course, you know, translation from the Greek in the New Testament.
And again, you know, the Latin Vulgate has...
Problems all of it wasn't necessarily translated by Jerome other people did parts of it
And so we don't really know for sure all the details
Jerome is obviously a genius not saying that he did everything perfectly
But and obviously he's a Roman Catholic. So, you know, we're not gonna look to him for doctrine or anything like that
But as far as just a language guy
He's brilliant.
He's a brilliant scholar and language guy, and the Latin Vulgate is beautifully translated
in many places, you know, not to say that it's perfect or that it's, you know, consistent
throughout in the quality, but, and I've read the Latin Vulgate cover to cover, you know,
in the original Latin, and, you know, a lot of it's wonderful.
And so here's the thing, Augustine is basically being a Ruckmanite.
Because Augustine is saying, the Greek translation supersedes the original Hebrew.
Jerome is saying, whoa buddy, let's go back to the original Hebrew.
And then Augustine is being a Rachmanide saying, oh no, no, no, the translation is the only thing that's preserved.
Well, and again, the apocryphal books don't even have Hebrew basing, so...
Some of them do. Now we know that, but at the time, they didn't know that.
But in a sense, I'm just saying you have this text that you have no source for.
Yeah.
In a similar way, the Rachmanites want to act like, oh, we don't have the source for...
this English anymore, the Greek is all wrong,
the English corrects the Greek.
Like, is it the translators?
It's crazy different things.
Translate something that's self-destructed,
like Joseph Smith's golden tablets.
Well, I just want to make the statement,
and it's going to sound jarring for people at first to hear,
but in my mind, the Rachmanites in this specific area
are joining hand-in-hand with James White.
And here's what I mean by that.
James White would make the argument
that there isn't one
Greek text you could point to and say this has been perfectly preserved by God or
Even the same I believe in the Hebrew. I'm not exactly sure as you on the Old Testament
But my point is the Rachmanites make that exact same claim when they argue that the original
Hebrew and Greek has been lost
We don't have the autographs anymore, right and the King James is all we have there. They're essentially saying the same thing
Again, then, you know, that would be, unfortunately, the same.
in the King James Bible itself,
just in the fact that you have many different editions,
right, where you technically have
these little tiny microscopic meaningless variations,
and that would be like what we're talking about
with Greek manuscripts where it's virtually
the exact same text, you can just tell,
and so when you collate these things,
we can tell where the true text is.
That's what Scrivener did, is he made a collation,
he did not make a translation of the Greek,
So again, Daniel Bomber kind of has a collation.
Here's the Hebrew text.
We have the, you know, Stefanus and Visa.
They're making collations.
And then of course, Scrivener comes alongside and does the same thing for the King James
after it's been worked on.
Because when the King James translators were making the King James Bible, they didn't necessarily
They also are considering Stefan although it's 99% B's right and they're considering a rasmus
So they they definitely almost kind of made their own coalition a slightly and that's what Scrivner is doing
But but again
Here's the thing about that is that these people are straining it in that and swallowing a camel because
differences in
editions of the Masoretic texts or differences in
editions of the Greek textus receptis are
minuscule compared to these like gigantic differences
between critical text and textus receptus,
or, you know, gigantic differences
between Septuagint and Hebrew Bible.
You know, 200 missing verses in the book of Job or something,
and then they're worried about this little minutiae.
It's ridiculous.
Word differences that have the same meaning.
Whereas when we actually compare the King James with modern Bibles,
it's actually missing phrases, missing verses,
and changing doctrines, having different ideas, being contradictory.
And I think that's important because if we look at a modern Bible today
and the King James and we look at the Old Testament,
isn't there going to be places where the modern Bibles
are actually rendering sections versus phrases from the Septuagint instead of
the Masoretic Hebrew and it actually has a significant difference or it changes
the meaning of the text. Absolutely and here's the thing is that none of them
want to translate the Septuagint into English because it'd be so weird it would
freak people out. Where's half the David and Goliath story? Why am I missing 200
verses in Jeremiah? Like that would be so jarring and shocking.
Okay? That they don't do that.
But what they do instead is they just, every once in a while,
they decide, oh, the Hebrew text here is corrupt.
And so, let's go with the Septuagint just in this one spot.
And it's very easy to find this.
If anybody wants to find these places where the modern Bibles do this,
get an NIV, and at the bottom of every page,
there'll be a couple of footnotes,
and it will say,
and then we'll tell you what the Hebrew says.
I always wondered, whenever I first got an NIV
and looked at it, I wondered like,
well, if that's what the Hebrew says,
then why the heck didn't you translate that?
Why not put that in English?
Because I thought that's what we're doing here.
I thought we're translating the Hebrew in English.
So, of course, a very clear example of this
that everybody's familiar with is Genesis chapter six,
where it says, the sons of God.
Right, that's what the Hebrew says the sons of God, but then in the NIV it'll say angels
But then down it'll have a footnote saying well Hebrew is sons of God
Here's why because the Septuagint says angels
Okay, and and so the stuff like that and then they use the the
But it's funny because that same crowd will use the Hebrew word nephilim
And then they'll say that it's angels
I think they just like the way nephilim sounds, but you know what I can point I can point at my
Greek New Testament my Scrivner Greek New Testament and pointed it and say this is the word of God without error
and I believe every word of it is right on without error.
And I could also point at my Hebrew Bible,
and I don't even care if it's the Leningrad Codex
or the Bomberg or whatever.
I can point at that and say that that also is the perfect word of God without error.
Now, there is a little more of a complicated issue with the Hebrew.
Simply, and it's outside the scope of this broadcast,
The Hebrew text has places where there's like two options given.
You know, which is the Coray and the Cateve option. Yeah, and and that's another complicated subject
But you know, the King James translators had that in front of them. What it is is that in places where there was
Doubt, you know, they preserved both
Readings basically and so there are places where the King James translators had to decide between two options or whatever
But it's all there. It's all on the page in front of you. You have the con I believe, you know the continental text
of the Hebrew without the vowel markings is the preserved perfect word of God.
And then when it comes to the, the Karei Kativ is just how you pronounce it,
and that can affect the meaning.
So I want to take a pause for just a second and say, hey,
we're getting really close to our upcoming conference kickoff.
It's at 6 p.m. Western time.
And so we are going to be cutting off here in just a few minutes.
You got to check out Sure Foundation Baptist Church
so you can hear the King James Bible Conference.
Pastor Stephen Anderson is going to be the first speaker.
He's going to be preaching on differences affect doctrine.
It's going to be a great sermon. You're really going to want to hear it.
And so you want to check out the King James Bible Conference, Sure Foundation.
We're in their vault.
We've taken over the vault.
We somehow dug a tunnel, just like the Jews did in New York City.
And we snuck in here and we're talking about the Hebrew Bible because the Jews inspired us.
But I got a question here in the chat.
And I want to ask you this.
And this is from A.O. Neal21.
Does the inscription on the cross in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew
form an acronym of something?
I recently heard this in a video on Easter from Chuck Misler.
Wait, wait, just stop right there.
Anything from Chuck Misler is crap.
Do not listen to anything Chuck Misler says.
Chuck Misler is a liar and a fraud
Every time you listen to the guy, every five minutes,
he's coming out with these radical translations
of the Bible that have never been known.
Like, I saw him the other day and it was like,
the part where it says,
then began men to call upon the name of the Lord?
He's like, well, actually, if you go back to the Hebrew,
it's then began men to blaspheme the name of the Lord.
And it's like, there's not a Bible on the planet
that translates it that way.
So he basically, every Bible's wrong, listen to me,
he's weird, he's a fraud.
He's super into Nephilim, weird, strange doctrines.
He's a total mess.
He's not saved, false gospel.
Yes.
Again.
Oh, but Robert Cornuke loves him.
Yeah, of course.
Well, they're buddies.
I mean.
Because Robert Cornuke's selling all his stuff, I think.
It's like Coinea House, or something like that,
is the name of their ministry.
It's a city lost.
Anything, Chuck Missler?
Temple Zero.
Runs screaming in the other direction
from anything, Chuck Missler.
It's a total Temple Zero.
it's a total miss, it's a total city lost.
So it's funny how in their own words,
it's just a miss, a loss, and a zero.
But I do think that it's interesting
that we have, on the cross of Jesus Christ,
we have an inscription in Hebrew, in Greek,
and in Latin. I think that is interesting.
I think it's symbolic because you have Hebrew
representing the Old Testament.
Amen.
Excuse me. We have Hebrew representing the Old Testament, Greek representing the New Testament, and then Latin, you know, obviously that became another super significant.
language in the transmission of the text of God's word.
But then not only that, you know, you could think of Latin also as representing English because
English is written in Latin letters. We use the Latin alphabet. So you could you could even think
of it as like the original Hebrew, the original Greek and the King James version, you know,
or you could think of it as original Hebrew, original Greek, Latin, Vulgate, you know, however
you wanted to look at that. But either way, it's kind of like a prophetic picture of like important
in the transmission of God's Word.
You know, telling us that, hey, this is Jesus,
the King of the Jews.
Amen.
I mean, even just kind of like the process,
like the Bible is kind of transmitting through the Hebrews,
then it kind of has a Greek process,
because if you think about it, the apostle Paul
really founded the church,
and it's a lot of Greek churches
and a Greek language to a lot of Greek people.
The Bible even says to the Jew,
Greek and then you kind of have the Latin representing kind of the last installment
of the importance of Christianity with, hey, you could even throw in the Vulgate,
but yeah, Western civilization, turning into English, which is this kind of final product
in the King James Bible. I do think it is significant. I don't really go for the acronym,
I'm wondering, does this then point to the fact that the doctrine of preservation must apply to the original Hebrew, the original Greek, and the lingua franca of the world?
What do you think about that concept?
Yeah, because they couldn't, you know, the inscription couldn't have been in Greek, Hebrew and English because English didn't exist at that time.
But I think that God is always going to use the most significant language.
He used Hebrew in the Old Testament because it's primarily about Israel and they speak Hebrew.
He used Greek in the New Testament not because of any particular nation, but because it was the lingua franca of the world at that time.
providentially allowed, you know, this perfect storm of just politics and scholarship and everything
to produce the par excellence translation of the Bible of all time, the English King James Bible.
And so that's not an accident that we have just the most awesome Bible in 1611 produced.
in any language, as far as a translation.
And then, here we are in 2025,
and English is by far the most important language.
Did we really know in 1611 that English was gonna be
by far the most important language in the whole world?
It might not have necessarily felt that way in 1611, right?
There could have been.
No, the French were powerful.
You, the Spanish are powerful, and of course, even Eastern countries and empires
would definitely have some prominence.
But in hindsight, so yeah, now English is the language because of America
and is built on the King James Bible.
And God knew that.
Amen. Hey, I like what Ronald Reagan says,
because he says, as pious judges try to get it right,
it will not dawn on them that it has already been gotten.
Right, and we really thank you guys for tuning in.
You want to check out the King James Bible Conference,
Sherr Foundation, Baptist Church.
Hey, the Baptist bias is taken over,
but it's time to hand the baton back.
We're in the vault.
Check us out tonight.
Check us out tomorrow night.
God bless and get the Baptist bias.