This is the next chapter of the book, The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy – By Michael de Semlyen

Chapter 10
Bible Verse Comparisons

Just thirty examples follow, out of many hundreds of instances in which the new translations seriously diminish the divinity of Christ and undermine the Atonement. The new versions are also markedly ecumenical, lending support to Roman Catholic teaching and dogma, as will be shown; and for this reason they have surely been an important factor in the recent rapid advance of the inter-church process. We have discussed earlier that the modern versions lend themselves more readily to futurism, to a two-stage Second Coming, and to a world ruler Antichrist to appear after the rapture of the saints. Daniel’s “seventy weeks” is translated with an unmistakable antichrist “prince” to fit the futurist thinking of the Oxford movement, of Newman, of Westcott and Hort, and of so many others who have exonerated the papacy from Scripture’s identification.

We believe that conservative evangelicals are correct when they insist that the KJV is the only Protestant Bible in common use in our language. We are not aware of any instances of the KJV weakening the translation in any way in relation to the standing of Christ, His divinity, His name, His blood or His sacrifice. Even those who have set out to argue the superiority of the new translations have not cited instances of the KJV in any way undermining the great truths of the Gospel. Where opponents of the Authorised Bible point to what may seem to be obvious error in the translation they are often mistaken. Perhaps the best example of this is Easter in Acts 12.

1. Acts 12:3-4

Those who oppose the concept of a perfect Bible seize on the translation of Easter for the Greek word pascha as clear proof of the imperfection of the KJV. After all, in twenty-eight other appearances in the New Testament pascha is translated Passover. However, Easter is correct and Passover incorrect. Easter derives from the ancient pagan festival of Astarte, or Ishtar, the female goddess, known in the Bible as the “queen of heaven’’ (Jeremiah 7:18; 44:17 & 25). Herod was a pagan Edomite and would therefore observe Easter in honour of Astarte, not the Passover. The key to the correct translation is the sequence of events. Verse 3 tells us that Herod imprisoned Peter during the days of unleavened bread which were after the Passover (Exodus 12:13-18) with the intention of holding a public trial after his own festival of Easter. The Passover preceded the events of Acts 12. Scripture does not use the term “Passover” to refer to the entire period. “The Feast of Unleavened Bread” is the form used, for example Mark 14:12.

The Deity of Christ

2. Acts 8:36-38 (Verse 37 removed.)

This verse, one of the outstanding testimonies to the deity of Christ in the Bible, is missing altogether from the text of the new versions. It appears as a footnote in both the Good News and in the NIV. Yet, the Church fathers Irenaeus and Cyprian mention it in the second and third centuries, well before the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus codices came into existence.

3. Micah 5:2 (Jesus’ origins “from ancient times”?)

This great prophecy refers to the eternal Son of God who has no origin. John 1:1 : “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Both the NIV and the Jehovah’s Witness NWT blasphemously describe the Lord Jesus Christ as a created being.

4. 1 John 5:7-8 (Verse 7 removed; verse 8 rearranged.)

The NIV, Good News and almost all other modern versions omit verse 7, which says, “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one.” Additionally verse 8 is divided to conceal this omission.

Known as “the Johannine Comma”, this verse and its inclusion in the Bible has been at the centre of considerable controversy for a long time, and the arguments against it are formidable. However, there is surely no verse in Scripture that more clearly defines the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. For Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons it is unanswerable, unless they can marshal the arguments of the “naturalistic” and “higher” textual critics, or argue that it wasn’t divinely inspired.

The omission of the last twelve verses of Mark’s Gospel in the Westcott and Hort versions, which record in the footnote that “the two most reliable early manuscripts do not have Mark 16:9-20”, was comprehensively challenged by John Burgon, Dean of Chichester, who wrote to the Revision Committee:

Later on, in 1883, Burgon, the principal dissenter of the 1881 Revising Committee, gave a second solemn warning to posterity,

Also missing from Mark’s Gospel is the second part of verse 11 of chapter 6, the Saviour’s solemn warning, as shown below.

Mark 6:11

5. Matthew 5:44 (Verse from the Sermon on the Mount is mutilated.)

6. 1 Timothy 3:16

This verse clearly reveals the divinity of Jesus Christ. The Authorised translation describes Christ as truly God; the NIV translation could hardly be more banal. Widely seen as the most serious corruption of God’s pure and holy Word (which one would expect to find in the Jehovah’s Witness bible). Believers who use the NIV are handicapped in evangelising Jehovah’s witnesses.

According to Burgon, out of 254 copies of Paul’s Epistles known to the 1881 Revision Committee, no less than 252 preserved the expression “God was manifest” with only the favoured two differing with “he who was manifested (the revisers first translation). The 1882 choice of wording was influenced by the Unitarian member of the Committee who declared himself entirely satisfied with the translation.

7. Daniel 3:25

The KJV describes the fourth man in the fiery furnace as “like the Son of God”. One edition of the Good News Version translates this as “like an angel”. In the NIV, the NWT, The Good News footnote, and several other versions it is “like a son of the gods.” The difference is very considerable.

8. Matthew 8:2

In this one short verse, Christ’s divinity is twice lessened by The Good News Version. The word worshipped, referring to Jesus during His ministry, is used six times in the Authorised Version of the Gospel of Matthew but only once in The Good News.

9. Zechariah 13:6

The prophetic reference to the crucifixion has been removed from the NIV and other modern versions.

Washed in the Blood of the Lamb (?)

10. Revelation 1:5

The NIV, the Good News and almost all other modern versions nowhere have the believer “washed in the blood of the lamb.” Thus the majority of Christians now sing “O happy day—when Jesus washed my sins away” without Biblical warrant.

The Virgin Birth

11. Luke 2:33 (Jesus—the Son of God or the son of Joseph?)

Besides this change in verse 33 (in the NIV and most of the new versions), in verse 43, “Joseph and His mother” becomes “his parents”. In both places the Greek text contains the word Joseph. It is translated as Joseph thirty-three times in the New Testament. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there seems to have been a deliberate attempt to undermine the Virgin Birth, which is nowadays called into question by many leading liberals in the Church of England and elsewhere.

12. Isaiah 7:14

In The Good News Version this famous Messianic prophecy does not predict the Virgin Birth. Any young pregnant woman may have a son, but the Virgin Birth is unique. Of a total of fourteen occasions when the word virgin is used in the Greek and in the KJV, the Good News has eleven times substituted different words, i.e., girl, young woman, young girl and unmarried.

The NIV translation of Isaiah 7:14 is “The virgin will be with child…” as it is also in Matthew 1:23. The use of the definite article points to The Virgin Mary, the “Mother of God”, and the “Queen of Heaven” of Roman Catholicism.

Roman Catholic Doctrine supported by Ecumenical Translations

13. Matthew 1:25

The NIV and most other modern versions, to uphold Roman Catholic teaching of the perpetual virginity of Mary, omit first-born.

14. John 1:42 (Peter—the Rock or the Little Stone?)

Whereas the KJV translates the name Peter as “a stone”, The Good News, The Message, and some other modern versions translate it as “rock.”

Much of the new authority recently gained by the Roman Catholic Church, based on the ancient claim of the Popes to be the successors of Peter, rests on these new translations. The Good News is seen as an ecumenical bible; the Revised New English Bible, a recent addition to the many revisions, is also an ecumenical bible, translated by both Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars. According to the International Bible Society, the NIV, RSV, NASV, Good News and RNEB New Testaments are all based on the United Bible Society/Nestle-Aland Greek eclectic text. Prominent among the scholars that produced this text in its second and third editions was His Eminence Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, Archbishop of Milan, a Jesuit and the Vatican’s leading Greek scholar, who had long been among the favourites to succeed John Paul as Pope. Many “new evangelicals” see the wide distribution of these “ecumenical Bibles”, based on “a common text” authorised by the Vatican, as an essential step towards reunion with Rome.

15. John 6:55

The KJV translation emphasis on “indeed” carries the meaning “true” which is the closest to the Greek Received Text. The new translations suggest “the real presence”, the dogma of Roman Catholicism which was the central and crucial issue of the sixteenth century Reformation in England. Most of the martyrs of the faith chose to die in denying that there is “real food” or “real drink” in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. They insisted that there is the true spiritual nourishment received in the heart by faith with thanksgiving.

16. Matthew 24:23

This has long been interpreted, as warning against “the real presence” and “the Blessed Sacrament” which is “reserved for adoration” in Roman Catholic and many Anglican Churches. The “real presence” is being brought back into currency again in a different form among professing Protestant churches through the summoning or calling down of the Holy Spirit to effect healing and other signs and wonders or “to practise the real presence of God with us.”

17. Matthew 19:17

The Church of Rome calls all that have been beatified or canonised “good”. They are to be venerated and often their relics are to be adored. This is an example of a “dynamic equivalence” translation in the NIV—the ecumenical translator not accepting from the plain text what he believes simply cannot be there.

18. Matthew 6:7

Repetitious prayers like the “Hail Mary” can be said without censure from the new versions.

19. James 5:16

Here we find the new biblical warrant for the Roman Catholic sacrament of the Confessional.

20. 2 Peter 1:20-21

In other words prophecy is not an expression of the personal opinion of the prophet, but of God, through His Spirit. The Good News translation renders a totally different meaning to these verses by beginning, “No one can interpret any prophecy of Scripture by himself…”

The Apostle was teaching us how prophecy was given. This and other modern versions tell us how it should be received. The Church of Rome’s position that the individual must not exercise private judgement in interpreting Scripture but submit to the authority of Mother Church, the Magisterium, is supported by this translation. As Kansas City Jesuit Professor, H. Willmering, recently wrote in The Catholic Community, “it is of prime importance to know that prophecy of Scripture is not subject to private interpretation by every individual, as the false teachers assume it is.” It will not have escaped the reader that the issue here is that very issue at the heart of the Protestant Reformation —the authority of the Bible over the authority of the Church, or the authority of the Church over the Bible.

21. 2 Thessalonians 2:7

The New King James Version, although considerably closer than other modern versions, is not the KJV in updated language. Nor is it faithful to the Received Text. Like other modern versions it reflects the views and interpretations of its translators and is eclectic in its choice of manuscript renderings, often preferring the corrupted minority texts to the received text.

Some new Bible versions, besides the New King James Version translate this as He (not he), which clearly means the Holy Spirit. This only allows for a futurist interpretation and a pre-tribulation rapture. See Chapter 1, “The Historical View of Prophecy and Antichrist”; Subheading “The Man of Sin and Mystery of Iniquity.”

22. 2 Thessalonians 2:10

The coming of the “man of sin” was to be with “all deceivableness of unrighteousness.” As J. A. Wylie, Victorian author of The History of Protestantism wrote, “Let us mark the phrase. It is a very remarkable one. It is used in no other place; it is employed to describe no other system; it describes the great apostasy and it alone. It is not simply ‘deceivableness,’ nor is it simply ‘unrighteousness’, it is the ‘deceivableness of unrighteousness,’ nay, it is the all-deceivableness of unrighteousness.

“Paganism was a system of deceivableness. It was the worship of a false god, under the pretence of being the worship of the true God, but popery is deceivableness on a scale far beyond that of paganism. The one was a counterfeit of the religion of nature; the other is a counterfeit of the Gospel. Popery has a god of its own— him, whom the canon law calls ‘the Lord our God.’ [Decretales Gregorii IX. Tit. 7. The Pope is called God, Decretum Gregorii XIII. Distinctio 96, Can. 7]. It has a saviour of its own—the Church. It has a sacrifice of its own—the Mass. It has a mediator of its own— the Priesthood. It has a sanctifier of its own—the Sacrament. It has a justification of its own—that even of infused righteousness. It has a pardon of its own—the pardon of the Confessional; and it has in the heavens an infallible, all-prevailing advocate unknown to the Gospel—the ‘Mother of God.’ It thus presents to the world a spiritual and saving apparatus for the salvation of men, which neither sanctifies nor saves anyone. It looks like a church; it professes to have all that a church ought to have; and yet it is not a church. It is a grand deception; it is ‘the all deceivableness of unrighteousness.’”

Prophecy Lost

23. Isaiah 31:5

Many Christians who hold to an historical view of Bible prophecy believe that this Scripture was actually fulfilled in December 1917. The deliverance of Jerusalem from the longstanding Moslem rule of the Ottoman Turks was accomplished, in answer to the faithful prayer of God’s people, by the British forces under General Allenby, using aeroplanes for the first time in such a campaign.

The Modem Versions are at variance one with another. The NIV translation is similar to the KJV, but the Good News does not allow for such an interpretation at all: “Just as a bird hovers over its nest to protect its young, so I, the LORD Almighty will protect Jerusalem and defend it.” The seriousness of the problem of different translations is perhaps illustrated here as clearly as it is anywhere— God’s prophetic Word altered into something entirely different.

24. Isaiah 59:19

The second part of the Scripture is virtually unrecognisable in the NIV; this great word of prophecy is mutilated.

25. Daniel 12:4

The vivid portrayal of life as we now live it in the second half of the verse is obscured entirely in the Good News and other modern versions’ mutilated renderings.

26. Daniel 9:26-27 (Daniel’s 70th Week)

Careful comparison of Daniel’s great words of prophecy in the KJV, NIV, and Good News versions demonstrates how the Protestant Historical view of these verses as predicting the sacrifice to end all sacrifices at Calvary, followed by the desolation of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70, is superseded now by the Futurist theory of Antichrist at the end of the church age. In the new translations, Antichrist, who has replaced Christ “the Prince” of the KJV rendering, will make and break a covenant with the Jews, first allowing them to offer sacrifices in a “rebuilt” temple and after three and a half years causing the sacrifice to cease. The “fulfilled” interpretation, which can only be received from the KJV translation, has the covenant confirmed and the sacrifice and the oblation ceased when Christ died after a ministry of three and a half years in the middle of the 70th week. See Chapter 2, “Futurism Devised by the Jesuits – The Wiles of the Devil”; Subheading “The Seventy Weeks.”

Doctrine Lost

Apart from such enormous variations in the text and such radical changes in meaning, and apart from the loss of whole verses and even whole passages of Scripture, key words of much spiritual significance are changed or left out of the new editions. For example the word “blood” is omitted no less than thirty-four times in the New Testament by the Good News Version. As we have already noted, “virgin” is replaced, not translated, by “young woman” eleven times. “Hell” is another word that the new translators prefer to avoid, as do many of the new school of preachers. It is often replaced with “Hades”, “Sheol” and “world of the dead”. The NIV changes it to “grave” in several instances. The word “sin”, another of the “buzz words” of the Bible, as one Charismatic preacher called it, has survived the purging of such terms in the new versions, although it has not fared so well in the pulpit, nor in everyday use in the nation.

27. Mark 2:17

The term “repentance” disappears several times from the New Testament in both the NIV and the Good News Version.

28. John 3:16

Possibly the best known verse in the Bible teaches in the NIV that we are not sons and our God in heaven is not our father. The KJV tells us that God has only one begotten Son.

29. Matthew 5:22

According to this verse in the NIV, Jesus’ conduct in Mark 3:5 would be subject to judgement.

30. Titus 3:10

The Scripture has been turned on its head. The “divisive” person that warns of error and heresy in the church (the “heresy-hunter”) is liable to be the one that is excluded from fellowship and rejected. But Romans 16:17-18, “Mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine you have learned; and avoid them,” which is as clear in the NIV as the KJV demonstrates the poverty of the translation, “divisive person.”

As American Bible teacher Dr. Charles Woodbridge once noted in a warning to the well-known evangelist Billy Graham: “If you persist in making common cause with those that deny the Word of God, and thus in minimizing the sharp line of distinction between those who are loyal and those who are disloyal to the Scriptures, it is my strong opinion that you will be known as the great divider of the church of Christ of the 20th century.” (September, 1963, from “Dr. Billy Graham, the Champion of Compromise”, accessed 2/11/06.)

The loss of the term heresy in Scripture and from today’s preaching has in a very real sense undermined and emasculated church history. The inference is that in the past, Christians were less enlightened, less tolerant and loving, and were diverted from the fullness of relationship with Christ by negative attitudes. This can be seen as part of the strategy of Satan for dividing the true church as well as seriously weakening the Word of God. Bishop Ryle’s words summarise the issue very well.

The term reformation has also been dropped from Hebrews 9:10 and with it the strong link with our Protestant heritage.

The NIV and the Good News have replaced reformation with the term new order, which is entirely different and suggests departure from the past. It cannot be ruled out that in the near future we shall have a version called The New Age Bible.

Perhaps the foundations for such a bible are already being laid.

Isaiah 14:12-15

The KJV makes it very clear that it is Lucifer whose self exaltation caused his being thrown down into the pit. The NIV, on the other hand, is by no means as clear, as it uses the very same title that the Lord attributes to Himself in Revelation 22:16: “I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.”

Luke 11:2-4

Again, the KJV is quite clear as to Whom we are praying—God, our Father in heaven, Whose will is done in heaven, Who alone can deliver us from evil. The Lord Jesus of the NIV only tells us that we are to pray to some indefinite father, and who that father is remains in the realm of our vain imaginings, making this prayer quite acceptable to those who prefer to honour the “whoever-one-wants- him-to-be” god of the New Age.

Continued in The Origins of Arminianism

All chapters of The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy

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