God's protection covers His word as well as all believers!

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After spending over one year researching the amazing history of the presentation and preservation by God of His Word, it made for a very enlightening Journey. It is absolutely wonderful to see God’s working.

Approximately 2,728 years after Creation (or 1276 BC) God inspired Moses to write down the prior history and the giving of the law in what we call the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Old Testament

The one peculiarity of the Hebrew language is that in its original alphabet had no vowels. This is important to note because at the birth of our Lord Jesus there was no existing Hebrew text everything was in the Greek language or derivative.

Alexander the Great, was born in 356 BC, became King at age 20 in 336 BC, and died in 323 BC at the age of 32 yrs 8 months. One of my favorite secular reads of all time is a book, The Life of Alexander the Great, by Rev. John Williams (link below).

What’s so amazing, is the miracles that happened, in the less than 12 years that Alexander took to conquer the known world, that enabled this to happen. Very clearly God is setting up the scene for the coming of The Christ, Jesus. Miracle after miracle happened in battle after battle. What makes this so very important is the preservation of what God truly says in His Word.  You see the there is no other language as precise as the Greek, and the Greek language became the predominant language of the world for several hundred years. The Jews and apostles spoke and wrote in it, even the Sanhedrin were using it at the time of the birth and life of our Lord here on earth.

John Williams’ book shows the mindset of Alexander in relationship to the Jews, it was his goal and those around him to destroy Jerusalem and the Jews. On his way to Jerusalem he had a vision of men in white robes coming out of a city and in 332 BC as he approached Jerusalem and the Priests of Israel, given a vision by God, came out of the city in their white robes, and the result was a 180 degree turnaround in Alexander’s thinking, which stunned his generals. But as a result Jerusalem was saved and further influence convinced Alexander to preserve many of the writing of the world into Greek, of those was the Hebrew Old Testament. Seventy Hebrew scholars in Alexandra performed this task from which we have The Septuagint (meaning 70, or LXX) the most accurate Old Testament.

Also more importantly Our Lord’s apostles wrote in the Greek thus preserving God’s Word for us in this day. As an example in English we have three tenses, past, present and future. In Greek we have seven tenses, present, imperfect, future, aorist, perfect, pluperfect and future perfect. These give added definitive meaning to what God has recorded for us in His Word.

In 1516 Erasmus compiled the Greek New Testament Manuscripts and produced what is called the Textus Receptus, or Received Text. This Received Text then became the go to Greek used for translations of the Bible into most all other translations to other languages.

There is so much history surrounding the battle with the different versions but our focus will be on the King James or Authorized Version AV or KJV. The KJV stands out because of its consistent translation of the Greek the same exact way each time the word appears, and they translate all the Word of God without leaving words out. Two very important points.

Long about the mid to late 1700’s a growing number of atheistic unbelievers started the promotion of changing the bible to match their distorted view of life.

In 1860’s it was proposed by a large group of biblical scholars to promote a revising of the KJV to clean up some of the things in the translation. For instance at the time of the KJV translation coming to fruition the translators sought to promote the hierarchy of the church, using the words bishop instead of servant, and church for the word meaning “called out to Christ ones”, the actual word church only appears a couple of times in the New Testament.

Well two of the organizers of this effort, named Westcott and Hort came to this assembly of scholars with a ton of theories contrived by themselves and two manuscripts of very questionable integrity, seeking to do, not what was expected, but rewrite the whole bible. When they laid out their agenda all but one of the scholars of faith got up and left the conference, saying it would never fly. Westcott and Hort very deceptively promoted a manuscript Codex Sinaiticus that was found in a monastery in 1859. It was Hebrew, remember Hebrew had no vowels given in the written language and here we have 1800 years latter untrained scholars adding vowels to the writing when in many cases it was left up to the judgment of the person inserting the vowel which can dramatically change the meaning. This very imperfect manuscript was then promoted to take the place of the Textus Receptus. 

Well the result of this gathering produced a new version of the Greek and what is called the Revised Version of the Bible. The process is outlined in a book called: True or False edited by David Otis Fuller (link below). This version altered the KJV over 36,000 times and changed the Greek 6,000 times. One word in the Greek “θεος” meaning God is removed over 160 times.

Ultimately under the guise of clarifying scripture there have been multiple versions since. The word of God speaks expressly 1 Timothy 1:4 Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils.

We encourage the daily reading of the Bible Especially the KJV. Eternity is a long time and both Heaven and Hell are real. This life is not about anything but a journey to Eternity!

Jesus Christ paid the price for the whole world!