Is "King James Only" a non-scholarly position?

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Jack: Let me ask you this question.

Some people say that believing that the King James Bible is the Bible, isn't a scholarly position. What do you think?

David: It's really easy to put people down by saying they're stupid. You know, Jesus talked about that, and said you don't call ever call somebody "Raca," which means "empty head." Don't ever do that, of anybody, whether they like the King James, or not.

But as far as my own personal case, I have to admit: I did it, too. I did what my professors did with me. I did the same thing with other people. And I used to say, after I finished Bible college at Pacific Christian College and took linguistics with the Summer Institute of Linguistics and went to Fuller Seminary, I used to say in my own church, in my own sermons, that the only thing worse than the King James Bible was the Living Bible.

So I was guilty of the same thing. I thought King James Only people were country bumpkins, who said, "If it was good enough for the Apostle Paul, then it's good enough for me!"

Jack: You mean they had rocks in their head? Rock-a?

David and Jack: Oooooo.

David: I'm not saying that.

But what I'm saying is, I went and got my education. I was a top Greek student. You guys know all that stuff. And I went to seminary. And I took my linguistics training. And after that, I was still anti-King James. It wasn't until years later, after I was married, after I had kids, that I had to deal with some really important issues. And one of those issues was, if God preserved His words or not.

That doesn't have to do with whether you are scholarly or not. It has to do with whether you are a Christian or not. It has to do with whether you believe the scriptures or not. We're saved by grace through faith. That means we have to trust things we don't always understand, or even before we understand them. Because sometimes we do end up finding the answers. And we thank God for those things. I've spent years researching. I've got books on papyri, you know, like this one right here. I can read these books until I turn green. I can go through my textual commentaries and all the books I have up here, and still not have those answers.

There are some simple, basic questions. It's not a matter of how much schooling you had. It's whether or not you're paying attention to what God said. God said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." What part of that did God not mean?

Jack: Now sometimes they say, "Well, we still have His words today. They're just scattered amongst all the various manuscripts."

David: Ho ho ho ho! Now did you catch that? You see, it's like in seminary, where my professor, David Allan Hubbard, who was the president at the time, said, "Well, it's only God's word, not God's words." Then it's like, "You're ignoring every single text in the entire world. It says, ‘My words shall not pass away.'"

So you have to come to a point, no matter how "intellectual" you are, no matter how much training you have, of believing that either God told the truth, and His words, plural, are preserved...

And come on. Any normal person listening to Jesus would not think, "Oh yes. One word would be over there, and one word would be over there..." No! They know what He meant. He meant in one body where you can read them. Otherwise, it's like saying, "Here. Would you like to have a dictionary? It's slightly defective. All the pages are out of order. But they're all there!

Jack: And that assumes they are all there.

In this case, they're saying that "You can have the dictionary. But... the pages are scattered. And we're looking for them. And some day we're gonna find them and put together the original dictionary." Who would ever want a dictionary like that? And yet that's exactly what they say about the word of God. Does that make any sense?

David: Yeah, and who wants to believe in a God like that? Does the God of the Bible reveal Himself as the God who scatters? Or the God who brings together? He said what I whisper in your ears, you tell on the housetops. If you have no concept of confidence of what God said, how can you yell it from the housetops? You don't even know what to say.

Jack: Boy, isn't that the truth? It's sad, the situation.

You know actually what I think it is? It's a worldview. Some people feel like ... they've been taught that God did not preserve His words in a book that's easily accessible to His own children. Now that throws me off right away. It seems to me that the Lord loves His children. That's what I read. And that He cares about us enough that He would provide His words in a book that we can read and believe. He wants us to believe Him.

You know, He says He magnifies His words even above His name, His word above His name? Well, if that's the case, doesn't it make sense that He would gather all His words, after the invention of printing, and put them in a form and a shape, so that anybody could read them and understand them, and learn more about Him? And then, once you learn, you are able to teach others, make disciples, plant churches. Isn't that what we're supposed to do?

David: And I've gotta tell you, you just hit something that just struck me. When I came to the conviction that God had 1) preserved His words, and that 2) He had preserved them in English, and 3) that those English preserved words were the King James Bible, and all the evidence I had read for years added up to that fact, do you know the first thing I did? You can ask my wife, I went out and spent $400.00. I bought brand-new Bibles, King James Bibles, not New Testaments, not scattered pieces of paper, I went and got brand-new King James Bibles for every member of my family. Because I was convicted. Because I wanted my kids to have the what? The whole truth. Would our heavenly Father do any less than that for us?

Jack: He wouldn't.
Jack: To tell lies?

David: Yes.

Jack: Stop the madness! Whew!

David: There you go. There was a Christian --if you heard one of my first videos-- a Christian radio station... a friend, literally, after we had a conversation sent me the link and I got this broadcast of a Christian radio station, where they literally said it's okay to lie, because Jesus lied to His brothers.

Jack: Wow. Can you imagine?

So you see that, there's the answer. Does the wording matter? No cardinal doctrine is affected by modern versions? How about that doctrine? How about the sinlessness of Jesus? Maybe that's not one of the "seven fundamentals" of the faith that the Fundamentalists like to look to. How about just the fact that he's lying?

Well, maybe that was "just a white lie." So those are okay, the "white lies"?

David: If He sinned even one sin, then He's not sinless.

Jack: Exactly.

David: But instead He was tempted in all points as we are, yet without sin (see Hebrews 4:15).

Jack: Amen.

David: Tempted in ALL points. There isn't anything that was missed. Do you think the Devil, with God the Son on the earth, missed a single temptation? Of course not.

And so a lot of the Bibles actually say that Jesus lied. If your Bible says that, seriously, don't trust it anymore. You can't trust a Bible that tells you that Jesus lied. Otherwise, you don't trust your own salvation. And don't go that way.

Look, we have a comic book here that talks about a hypothetical story of a guy in Bible college, whose Bible college professor goes against 1 John 5:7. And he says, "If that's not true, how do I believe in anything else?" And he goes on a rampage.

Well, do you know... I cannot tell you who, but I know of a person, and his own brother went to a Bible college in Central California. And his professor did that, and he did the same question. And his professor says, you know, "I'm the one with the degree, and the original manuscript doesn't have 1 John 5:7." And he says, "If it doesn't have 1 John 5:7, then how do I trust it for John 3:16?" And he became a gangster, a very notorious one.

Jack: Amazing.

David: This really happened. So this is not a hypothetical thing. This is affecting real lives, real people, in real time.


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