I found it real interesting that last month’s issue of the Berean Searchlight, a publication put out by the Berean Bible Society, Germantown, Wis., emphasizes in italics this passage from a reprinted old article by Bible scholar C.R. Stam:

“Sinaiticus and Vaticanus have by now been thoroughly exposed as two of the most corrupt manuscripts in existence.”

Now the last time I checked, the Berean Bible Society supports ministries of various men (including Pastor Dennis Kiszonas in New York City) who not only preach and teach out of corrupt modern bible versions (derived from Sinaiticus and Vaticanus), but encourage their flock not to be “duped” into a “King James Only” mentality.

I actually attended Kiszonas’ Brooklyn congregation for a brief period in 2003 but was quickly turned off by his preferred usage of the New King James Version.

I also attended a women’s bible study through the church in which versions being read from around the table included the King James, the New King James, the New International Version and the Life Application Bible.

What should be common knowledge anymore, especially with books like Gail Riplinger’s exhaustive expose in 1993, New Age Bible Versions, is that the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus manuscripts used for the modern versions represent the corrupted copies of the Bible known as the Alexandrian Manuscripts.

Riplinger writes, “The Septuagint (LXX), a Greek translation of the Old Testament, is used today by textual critics, in many instances, to determine the wording of new versions. It appears that Origen was the author of this A.D. document. The NIV translators admit they use the O.T. text which was ‘standardized early in the third century by Origen. . .

“Origen has provided through his Septuagint Old Testament and New Testament documents, a vehicle for the propagation of the ‘East meets West’ religion for the ‘New’ Age. . . This corrupt ‘tree of knowledge’ is rooted in Platonism and branched out to reach Philo, then Clement and finally Origen. Its twisted branches cast a century’s long shadow over today’s new versions and ‘New’ Age Movement.”

As an article posted to the website Chick.com (entitled “Where Did the King James Bible Come From?” and adapted from the book Let’s Weigh the Evidence by Barry Burton) accurately reports, “The Sinaiticus is a manuscript that was found in 1844 in a trash pile in St.Catherine’s Monastery near Mt. Sinai, by a man named Tischendorf. It contains nearly all of the New Testament plus it adds the ‘Shepherd of Hermes’ and the ‘Epistle of Barnabas’ to the New Testament.

“The Sinaiticus is extremely unreliable, proven by examining the manuscript itself. John Burgeon spent years examining every available manuscript of the New Testament. He writes about the Sinaiticus:

“ ‘On many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40 words are dropped through carelessness. Letters, words or even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled; while that gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same words as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament.’ ”

*****

In expressing my concern to Kiszonas over his endorsement of corrupt Bibles, he told me the King James Bible had mistakes in it that related even to a person’s salvation and pointed me to I Cor. 9:27. In this verse, Paul writes, “But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”

Kiszonas argued that the “incorrect” usage of the word “castaway” made the verse say a person could be damned, losing their salvation. In the New King James, the verse reads, “But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified.”

As my pastor, Richard Jordan, explains, “If you’re knee-high to a grasshopper to an old codger you know what a castaway is because you’re familiar with the seven stranded castaways there on Gilligan’s Isle. A castaway is someone who is still alive; they’re not dead, they’re not lost—they’ve simply made ‘shipwreck of the faith.’ (I Tim. 1:19)

“When you make ‘shipwreck of the faith’ you can either be drowned, as in I Tim. 6:9 where some people were caught in snares, or you can be shipwrecked. That is, you’ll be like be like the Captain, and Gilligan, and Ginger, and Maryanne, and the professor, and Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell III and all that business. You can still be alive but you’re just stranded out there, out of commission and useless—out of circulation. Of no value to anyone in life.

“People talk about how, ‘Well, the King James Bible is hard to understand.’ Aghh, it’s not hard to understand! People find it hard to understand because they don’t want to understand it. They’ve got some ulterior motive where they want to do something else.”

*****

By Paul’s reference to “nor by letter as from us” we know there were people sending bogus epistles to the Thessalonians pretending they came from Paul.

“That’s how you corrupt the Bible,” says Jordan. “You produce versions and texts that claim to be the Word of God and aren’t. If you insert into the Bible, what did you do? You corrupted it.”

What’s very telling is that while the King James Bible quotes Paul (in II Cor. 2:17) as saying, “For we are not as many, which corrupt the word of God,” the New King James reads, “For we are not, as so many, peddling the word of God.” The same verse in the New International Version starts out, “Unlike so many, we do not peddle the word of God for profit.”

One of the many things that really struck me about Kiszonas is that when he gave an introductory study on dispensationalism in a Saturday class he purposely got out his King James Bible to read this very famous verse: “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” (II Tim. 2:15)

Of course, no other version outside of the King James uses the word “study.” The New King James says, “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”

The New International Verse says, “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.”

*****

Kiszonas, by his own admission, follows a neo-orthodoxy-style line of reasoning that says it’s the message that matters, not the exact words on the page.

Jordan says, “Do you understand you can call the Bible the Word of God but what’s the Word made up of? Words. And when you say words, you’re talking about the individual words on the page that make up the message.

“So there’s more than just the message; it’s the means of communicating the message. The words. John 12:48 says, ‘He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.’

“Notice the contrast? The word; that’s the Book with all of them in it. That’s the singular thing: ‘Here’s the Word of God.’ But what’s the Word of God made of? Words.

“So when we’re talking about what doesn’t pass away (Jesus Christ says in Matt. 24:35, ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’), it isn’t simply enough to say the message doesn’t pass away.

“After the Millennial Kingdom, the earth is going to be dissolved and done away and reconstituted but ‘my words shall not pass away.’ That’s a great verse on what we call the ‘preservation of the Bible.’ You see it doesn’t say my word singular, it says my words plural?

“What is generally assumed (by theologians) is that what Christ’s saying is, ‘The message I’m preaching—the truth I’m proclaiming—won’t pass away.’ These are the people who believe that that’s what preservation of the Word of God is; it’s that the message God proclaims, and the Good News God preaches, won’t ever pass away.

“If it said my word singular you might have a case, but when it says my words plural, that’s more than the message; those are the vehicles communicating the message.

*****

Jordan continues, “There’s a lot of different ways to understand inspiration. One of the popular ways in the last century is what’s called neo-orthodoxy. It used to be you had the modernists who believed the Bible was full of errors and was never right, and then you had the fundamentalists who believed it was the inerrant Word of God.

“Then, in the late 1800s-early 1900s, the fundamentalists got fighting with the modernists and made a big mistake: They abandoned the statement of faith that had carried the Protestant church for 400 years; they abandoned the issue of preservation and went to a doctrinal statement that said something like this—‘The Word of God is inerrant and infallible in the original manuscripts.’

“Now, if you don’t have the original manuscripts, which you don’t, and that’s the only place you believe the Bible’s inerrant, so what? If that inerrancy doesn’t exist anymore, why would you argue about it?

“And it’s interesting, because the fundamentalists (the modernists mocked them, calling them ‘funnymentalists’), in order to avoid the stigma of being less ‘intelligized’ than the elitists, they made a couple of real concessions that have frankly been the downfall and ruin of fundamentalism.

“One of them is this idea, ‘Well, it’s only in the originals.’ So, I don’t know why anybody would want to argue about the point if that’s all there was. Just concede it and go on because what you have now isn’t the original, so you’re acknowledging that it’s impossible to have the Word of God in its inerrancy today.

“If believe it isn’t inerrant and has errors in it, who cares what you believe about one you don’t have? So, what the fundamentalists did is they maintained an orthodox statement, but in practice weren’t any different than the Catholics and the modernists and so forth.”

(Editor’s Note: To be continued. . . )