A while back a man from our church who was raised Catholic had to arrange a funeral for a parent to be held at the family’s long-time Chicago parish. After pleading with the priest to let him include a scripture reading during the service, the son was told, “Okay, you can read a passage but it must be from a Bible version other than the King James.”

Relaying this anecdote during a Sunday morning sermon, my pastor, Richard Jordan, reasoned, “Well, there’s a man who believes what his church teaches! As I’ve said over and over, the King James Bible is the Protestant Reformation text of scripture and every ‘modern version’ on the market today is really a Roman Catholic bible.”

What many Bible-believing Christians are either ignorant of or refuse to accept is the fact that the New Age and Roman Catholic agendas are intricately intertwined and the corruptions that abound in the “modern bible versions” are Catholic-New Age in origin, coming from a small handful of polluted Alexandrian/Catholic manuscripts that were then further perverted by revisionists with New-Age motives.

“Since both the Catholic and ‘New’ Protestant bibles are now based on the identical critical Greek text (United Bible Society/Nestle’s,) which are based on the same 1% minority Greek Manuscripts (Vaticanus, B), the Catholic doctrinal bend in the NIV and NASB and other ‘New’ bibles is substantial,” writes Gail Riplinger in her 650-page exhaustive expose book from 1993, New Age Bible Versions, a must-read for understanding today’s New Age-submerged culture. “Hand-in-hand, Catholics and unwary Protestants, with their Gnostic Vatican manuscript under their arm, are being steered into the waiting arms of the one world church of the Antichrist. Dean Stanley, a member of one of these corrupt translation committees, applauds this subtle work of the new versions in preparing for ‘amalgamation’: ‘The revision work is of the utmost importance . . . in its indirect effect upon a closer union of the different denominations.’ ”

As Riplinger thoroughly documents in her book, Alexandria, Egypt (the source of the corrupt manuscripts) represents the taproot for the New Age philosophy of which B. F. Westcott and F.J.A. Hort (the two men who led the 1871-1881 English Revision Committee to “correct” the Traditional Greek text), along with their compatriot H.P. Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society, were its 19^th Century proponents.

“The western roots of the New World Religion of the false prophet can be found in the philosophies of Egypt, Greece and Rome,” writes Riplinger. “The esoteric meanderings of philosophers such as Saccas, Philo and Origen spring from Egypt into the books of today’s New Agers. The Greek philosophies of Plato provide the perfect broth for blending East and West in the New Age caldron. Moving further north yet, the Rome of Constantine and Eusebius, with their merger of Christianity and paganism, cradled the infantile crossbreed which today is Satan’s seasoned scarlet woman. (Rev. 18)

“Looking down into this poisoned well of the past reveals: 1.) the reservoir of ‘ideas’ spawning much of the ‘New’ Age and 2.) the course of contamination found in the ‘New’ versions.”

*****

Bible revisionist Westcott actually boasts in one of his writings, “Alexandria was a meeting place of east and west. . . [I]deas were discussed, exchanged and combined. When the east and west enter a true union then the canon [New Testament] is found perfect.”

Riplinger writes, “Westcott is not alone among new version editors who seek the union of ‘east and west.’ Phillip Schaff (‘New’ Greek Text, ASV and its offshoots the NASV and Living Bible) helped organize the ‘World Religion Parliament’. Its keynote speaker, a Hindu named Vivekananda told attendees, ‘The East must come to the West.’

As for Hort, the other 1881 revision committee leader, he disclosed in personal letters his penchant for Philo, writing in one particular missive, “I’m glad you are working on Philo’s psychology . . . I lay on the sofa and read. . . Clement. . .wrote a piece of Introduction to the text (his ‘New’ Greek text to replace the King James). . .took my manuscript book. . .and references from Philo. . . dinner came. . .then a good piece of Shakespeare. . . more Introduction. . . a little Philo at night and some Bible.”

Philo, Riplinger informs, advanced the idea that scriptures “held an occult or hidden meaning,” bringing about a “philosophical ideology by coalescing the Old Testament (for which he ‘expressed contempt for the literal narrative’) and the Greek philosophies of the Stoics and Heraclitus.”

She writes, “While Philo was influencing Hort’s work on his ‘New’ Greek New Testament Text, Madame Blavatsky was penning quotes from Philo in her occult tome, The Secret Doctrine. There she cites Philo to explain her odd beliefs, like ‘Satan is a God, of who even the Lord is in fear.’ In her Theosophical Glossary, she states that Philo, ‘. . . was a great mystic and . . . in esoteric knowledge he had no rival.’

“Not only did Philo’s philosophy influence the revisers of the ‘New’ Greek, but his own codex was used to alter the NIV in Luke 1:78. Papyri #4 was discovered in the binding of a codex of Philo’s. Needless to say, this was not a ‘repository’ of truth. In Luke 1:78 his papyrus reads, he ‘will come to us.’ It uses a future tense verb, rather than he ‘hath visited’ us, the reading seen in the Majority Greek Text and consequently the KJV. This denial that Christ has come in the flesh is the mark of antichrist as described in I John 4:2.”

*****

A great verse to use with those who will argue that the New King James Version is just as much God’s Word as the King James, only easier to read and comprehend, is Galatians 2:7.

In the King James, the verse reads, “But contrariwise, when they saw that the gospel of the uncircumcision was committed unto me, as the gospel of the circumcision was unto Peter.”

The New King James Version (ala Westcott and Hort) “corrects” the verse to read: “But on the contrary, when they saw that the gospel for the uncircumcised had been committed to me, as the gospel for the circumcised was to Peter.”

As Jordan explains, “Paul makes clear in Romans 11:11-15 that ‘through the fall of Israel salvation has come to the gentiles’; that now it makes NO difference who you are. He says, ‘In Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision,’ if you look at his argument in Galatians 5:6.

“Well, if circumcision has no power to produce any positive benefit for you, and uncircumcision has no power to produce any negative benefit for you, is that in ‘times past’ or ‘but now’? Obviously it’s ‘but now’. So the mistranslation and misrepresentation of what’s going on in Galatians 2 is something you need to be aware of and not let some (preacher) fool you into thinking that they know what they’re talking about when they re-translate those verses.

“It’s always a fascinating thing to me how dispensationalists, and especially Mid-Acts dispensationalists (Grace Believers, so called), could be so enamored with these new bibles; the new translations—the NIV, NASB, the Holman Bible, Good News to Modern Man, any of them—because they take almost every key verse and knock the dispensational truth right out of them!

“Now, this isn’t so strange to me if you’ve read the history of the Grace Movement. If you go back and get books written in the ’40s, ’50s and ‘60s—get books written by Cornelius Stam, or Charles Baker or William Root or any of the people writing and producing books back then—one of the characteristics of those books is that they would use any translation of the Bible that said what they wanted it to say.

“Have any of you ever heard of the Williams translation? I’ve only seen one Williams translation in my life and I’ve got it. It’s not a translation very many people have and yet there are three verses (these men) like to take out of that version.

“I knew some of these brothers personally and they didn’t use the Williams translation constantly; they weren’t poring over it and studying it. It just happened to translate Philippians 1:10 the way they liked so they would reference it and use it.

“And I used to think, man, that’s going to kill ’em! Philippians 1:10 in the Williams translation is where you get the thing about testing things that differ, instead of ‘things that are excellent.’

“That passage has NOTHING to do with dispensational things! Even if you translate it ‘things that differ’ it has nothing to do with dispensational things and yet they pull a verse out like that and say, ‘Oh, we got us another right division verse!’ No you didn’t! And any honest person who reads the passage would know you didn’t!

“So, now you’re trying to use a version to do something that isn’t honest. Somebody argued with me one time, ‘Well, Brother Jordan, the only bible you can prove that stuff you’re teaching out of is the King James Bible,’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’

“He said, ‘Doesn’t that mean it’s wrong?’ and I said, ‘Well, maybe we ought to test out our bibles and see which ones make mistakes and which ones don’t. Why don’t we test Galatians 2:7 and see which one is right?’ Well, the answer is one is right and the others aren’t.

“So the version issue is a very important issue because you need to have in your language a book you can carry around, and you don’t need to go home and say, ‘Now what did Brother Rick say that verse ought to say?’ How frustrating would that be? You might need to study what a (King James Bible) says but you don’t need to wonder what it ought to say.”