Preface

"I have never yet found anyone who could quite share my doubts, and there is no one to whom I would teach them…"

Soon after writing these words in 1849, Brooke Foss Westcott found 12 pupils to whom he would teach his doubts. In 1858, Fenton John Anthony Hort, one of those 12 disciples, shared his own doubts with their publisher:

"My notion of the N.T. translation was to put into English in the shape of a translation the results of our Greek work, retaining all, or nearly all, the doubtfulnesses of text, and adding to these the doubtfulnesses of the meaning of text."

Westcott and Hort's Greek text was first used as the basis for two modern English New Testament translations: the English Revised Version of 1881 and the American Standard Version of 1901. Based on a few fake manuscripts, many notes were added and words, phrases, and verses were removed or changed, causing the readers to doubt the text as well as the translation and the meaning of the text. This was exactly what they wanted.

Why they wanted it is a fascinating study of the abandonment of millennia of solid translation practices that produced thousands of reliable manuscripts. Instead, they bought the lie that "modern science" offered a superior way. Instead of using tried and true manuscripts, they substituted only a few tainted manuscripts that have since been proven to be elaborate fakes.

How did the mission in life of these two scholarly ministers change from encouraging faith to spreading doubt?

How could churches promote a Bible that damages the very faith they try to instill?

Today we are shocked by the shallow faith of the newer generations of believers who were nurtured on these doubt-producing Bibles.

In this book are the facts we need to inoculate the next generation against these defective Bibles. Then we can open them up to God's preserved words still available to us in the time-proven Authorized King James version.

Note: Any bold emphasis in this book is my own, and not in the originals, unless otherwise noted.

Introduction

"For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind…" Hosea 8:7

This book is about two men who were raised in families that taught faith in the Scriptures. But in their century, powerful storms of doubt were brewing.

These two bought into these doubts and by the end of their lives, the doubts they in turn sowed had already begun to reap a whirlwind of confusion among Christians worldwide.

Westcott and Hort were not solely responsible for this. But they were the willing victims of it. As we study their lives, in their own words, we will start to see a clear picture of one of the greatest deceptions that Satan has succeeded in pulling off in the history of the world.

For centuries Satan had tried to stamp out God's words by burning Bibles —and torching Christians. When that failed, he decided on a more subtle approach. The Devil left the Bible text largely in place, but he tried to destroy powerful doctrines by changing crucial words.

In the Garden of Eden, Satan questioned God's words, saying, "Yea, hath God said…?" In Westcott and Hort's time, he got people to question God's commitment to preserving His words. Satan suggested that God stopped overseeing His Book after the prophets and apostles wrote the originals.

Then Satan pushed science as the saviour to examine all the copies since then and show us the scholars' best opinion of what God originally said. As you will see, that did not end well.

God did preserve His words. And they are in English, in a Bible that Satan is trying desperately to get people to reject. But the Devil never lost sight of his end goal: one world Bible for one world religion. And he has used the Westcott and Hort Greek text to create the multitude of modern Bibles available today as elements of that grand plan.

Along the way, Satan was also able to maneuver the Protestant world into an age-old Roman Catholic trap of transferring the trust of the common people in God's Book, to their priest or pastor for ultimate truth. No longer do people in the pew open a Bible to verify what the preacher is saying. They must accept their pastor's favorite version projected on the overhead screen. Deep personal Bible study is largely sacrificed in this confusion.

Roman Catholics have been told for centuries that they cannot understand the Bible without the priest's interpretation. Satan has maneuvered Protestants into the same position. This is the essence of priestcraft: placing a "holy man" between man and God and His preserved words.

Chapter 1

Westcott's Spiritual Life

Brooke Foss Westcott was a child of the 19th century. He was born on January 12th, 1825, and died at the tip of the 20th century, July 27th, 1901. He was taught by intellectual leaders and educated at Cambridge University. There is nothing particularly unusual about his Anglican English upbringing. In short, he was not a closet Satanist as some have implied.

Westcott was an ordinary student. But he kept excelling in his academics and soon graduated from student to teacher.

In that century, serious winds of change were blowing which critically affected the development of his worldview. Enlightenment, Scientism, Romanism, Textual Criticism, and eventually evolution, all were, or became, part of his academic and religious environment, with varying degrees of influence.

One element seems to have been missing, however: a deep commitment to the claims of the gospel.

We first encounter Westcott as a young man with high hopes, and soon, with a girlfriend. We are especially privileged to see the letters Westcott wrote to her and others, as well as what he wrote in his diary. They let us see far deeper into his life—and his heart.

After Westcott died, his son Arthur compiled these and other letters into two volumes: Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, Volumes 1 and 2. But in the introduction, Arthur's brother, Canon Frederick Brooke Westcott (1857-1918), made an unusual set of statements.

"... those who met the teacher in after years would never have guessed he had passed through a struggle of grievous doubt—his faith was so serene, so obviously unshaken. We know now it was not always so, as these pages will disclose to those who care to read."

Grievous Doubts?

According to Frederick, his dad went through "a struggle of grievous doubt." That's understandable. Many, if not most of us, have dealt with doubts before. Then Frederick continued:

"[M]y father's was a devotion on what may be truthfully called the very grandest scale. As such it was exposed to a certain misconstruction. "Unsound" or "shadowy" or "mystical" were terms often applied to him. There were even who doubted, through misunderstanding of the man, his fidelity to the very foundations of the Faith."

It isn't a modern phenomenon to question the validity of Westcott's Christian faith. Frederick said people raised questions about Westcott's faith both when he was alive, and soon after he died. Does that show up in your history books? Not mine. When I read these words, I was driven to start checking what Westcott said for himself. But see this further description by his devoted son Frederick:

"But to all who came near to him the irresistible truth was certainly brought home, that here was a servant of Christ who served Him every day and all the day. He would often say of himself that there was inborn in him a spirit of 'puritanism.' By this he meant, of course, that the sense of life's intense seriousness was always with him. And so it was."

That's interesting. I would think a spirit of puritanism, based on reading their words, meant that Westcott's days were spent trying to show God his devotion to Him. But here, "seriousness" is substituted for "devotion to God." I don't equate the two. It's a tiny thing, but I think Frederick just discounted a major element of life as a Puritan. He concluded:

"At least it [Arthur's book] is an offering (in which we all would share) of real sonly devotion to the memory of a father who was worshipped by his children beyond the common."

He sounds like such a marvelous Christian! It only remains for us to read Westcott's own words and see whether these things are so.

Judging the Evidence

I was challenged many years ago that some Christians had totally taken Westcott wrong. They had exaggerated his interest in the occult, in Mary and other Catholic issues, and they had covered up his true devotion to the scriptures, the truth, and ultimately to God. But to respond to them and find out for myself, I had to get over a hurdle. Not my preconceptions—but the way Arthur's book was put together!

It turns out that Westcott wrote his dates in a funny way. One letter, to Mary Whittard, was dated "18th Sunday after Trinity, 1852." Who counts 18 weeks after Trinity? And what's "Trinity," anyway? I had to find liturgical calendars for the various years that Westcott wrote, then count the weeks and days to figure it out. In this example, Trinity Sunday is the first Sunday after Pentecost. Eighteen Sundays later was October 10th in 1852. Simple, right?

After that, I made a discovery: Arthur Westcott did not list his dad's letters in a chronological fashion. This made it difficult to follow his dad's journey of faith—or doubt.

First, I had to figure out the dates. Only then could Westcott's statements on various topics be arranged in chronological order. But what I found astounded me. It was clear: Westcott had indeed moved steadily from faith to doubt.