The King James Version: Section VII. The Greek New Testament Fraud

Table of Contents

Continued from Part VI.Tyndale Perfected in English What Luther Created in German

PART TWO – The Greek New Testament
Fraud

Constantin Tischendorf dropped out of his university when his father died.

Figure 13 How did Sinaiticus get there? Aleph had no history before Tieschendorf “found” it.

Figure 14 Bishop Wescott combined Hinduism and Christianity. Hort preferred a Mary religion to a Jesus religion.

Figure 15 Erasmus rejected using Vaticanus, a codex without much of a history and lacked descendants.

Brief Summary

The second part of this book is more like a hastily produced crime drama, not at all elegant or certain, because the narrative involves the attempted murder – of the Bible. The evidence abounds but the facts are disputed, the heroes defamed, and the criminals deified. A young man had a great future, but his parents died while he was in the university. He had to drop out. His name was Constantine Tischendorf. He was able to work his way back into the school by lecturing, and that only served to renew his ambition. As a young professor, he managed to lay claim on Ephraim Rescriptus, a manuscript of the Bible overwritten, after being erased, by the little-known Ephraim. Tischendorf claimed to have unusual eyesight which enabled him to produce the original. His fame rested on his own boasts, so a Columbo might doubt most of it. The future events developed slowly, but they were pivotal for the attempt on the Bible from underneath the Ephraim layer of writing. If Ephraim was the first stage in launching his career, Sinaiticus was second stage, followed much later by Vaticanus. Tischendorf had a papal audience, very unusual for a German Lutheran, and saw his ability to travel and make pronouncements increase. He seemed drawn to a particular location, a monastery called “St. Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai,” but really a Disney Mt. Sinai, with an enormous history but with fake Biblical sights to see.

The first evidence of Tischendorf’s criminal attempt is the fable of his discovery of Codex Sinaiticus. Codex Sinaiticus means a bound book – codex – found there – Sinaiticus, at the ancient monastery of St Catherine’s, at a fake Mt. Sinai in Egypt. (Editor: Galatians 4:25 says Mt. Sinai is in Arabia.) He and his family told the same lie, time after time, and the lie was told to me.* He claimed to have found sheets of parchment loose in a basket, ready to be burned, as many sheets had before, but he intervened to save these remaining ones. The monks saved, repaired, and preserved ancient documents there, so using them as fuel was absurd. The oldest and most obscure works were valuable to the monks – and most importantly – to collectors. This was parchment – leather – and would stink in a fire and not heat anything. Constantine did not save but stole pages from the bound codex and presented the pages to a Roman Catholic ruler. He eventually stole the entire volume by promising to have it set in print in Russia, calling it Aleph, for the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet. He claimed it was 15 centuries old and promoted it as the greatest find in Biblical history.

* The professor neglected to say that no one would burn leather to warm a library, and none of us thought to ask. Parchment is animal skin while papyrus is paper. Do libraries burn 1500-year-old Bibles? We preserve ordinary books that old and carefully trace their ancestry and influence.

This codex and his look at Codex Vaticanus made him the hero of 19th century text criticism, a role which he carefully crafted for the Church of Rome and a sophisticated audience of rationalists, world- religionists, and Unitarians.

Scholars, clergy, and laity may debate the histories and origins of Sinaiticus (Aleph) and Vaticanus (B). One thing is clear – both books are barren and have no descendants. Such books would have been read and copied to death, producing new ones to be used by the faithful. Worn-out parchment (leather) copies would have been burned and the deluxe, costly leather copies used to produce accurate papyrus (paper) copies.

The Apostolic, Majority, Byzantine Tradition

The apostolic witness of the New Testament was preserved by the Christian Church. The thousands of manuscripts prove that to be true. The late copies from the Byzantine (Greek Christian) Empire simply show that the earlier copies were gone, used up, and burned to keep them from heretics. The term Received Text comes from a phrase by Erasmus when he first edited a Greek New Testament. The 1100 years-old Byzantine Roman Empire – Greek-speaking, Christian, almost forgotten by historians – preserved the Majority Text, which is also called the Ecclesiastical Text and the Traditional Text.*

* Stephens edited the Byzantine Text, so that edition is called the Stephanus, the edition which I use for all Greek New Testament citations in sermons, articles, and books.

Simple Math

Which is more likely the correct, apostolic text? On one side we have 5,000 or more witnesses in general agreement, given the slight variation from routine errors. We also know that early theologians quoted those Majority readings, and early translations used the faithful text. False teachers – heretics – erase what they do not like or believe, just as the RSV erased the Virgin Birth in Isaiah 7:10, moved it back, then erased it again in the latest version. Inserting false teaching is much harder than erasing sound material, because no one can run around adding the latest fad into hundreds if not thousands of ancient works.

Those who would erase the Woman Caught in Adultery (John 7) or the ending of Mark 16 (verses 9 and following) cry out, “Those verses do not fit what we expect them to say!” That is subjective and ridiculous. So, we have 5,000 witnesses in the Majority Texts, in as much agreement as humanly possible.* On the opposite side is the fraud of promoting Sinaiticus as the “World’s Oldest Bible” and Vaticanus as another treasure, as if Rome ever cared about the Scriptures, the Gospel, or the truth. The two great codices do not agree with each other, and the new, modern, scientific Greek New Testaments continue to have thousands of changes but still end up in bed with Westcott and Hort.

* Anyone who has published knows how repeated efforts still yield mistakes, in spite of our computers pointing out the most obvious errors, omissions, and additions.

A Simple Comparison – The First Gospel, Genesis 3:15

KJV Genesis 3:15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Roman Catholic Reims-Douai Genesis 3:15 – I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.

We can also find a Roman Catholic version where this obvious error is smoothed over, but that does not mean Rome’s dogma has changed. Nevertheless, the craven heirs of the Reformation are happy to work jointly with Roman Catholic leaders at the highest levels of text criticism, translation, and publishing.

Westcott and Hort Took the Text Frauds to the Next Level

Tischendorf promoted his heroics, which appealed to those who wanted the oldest witnesses to be quite different from the traditional text. Westcott and Hort took over the job of promotion and printed their own Greek New Testament in secret for use in the 19th century revision of the KJV. They pushed it upon the groups of KJV revision scholars but did not openly publish their Greek text until the new Bible came out. Many were horrified by the liberties and unvarnished egos of Westcott and Hort, but their unhinged approach took over by the 1930s and now controls all new Bible translations. Their “modern, scientific, precise” translations are nothing more than cobbled-together, copy and paste jobs edited by the authority of the Bible book sellers.

Figure 16 Barbara and Kurt Aland canonized the Tischendorf-Westcott-Hort efforts and baptized them “The Standard Text.”

Authors and Books – Good and Bad – On the Greek New Testament

This list is very important, necessary for a better grasp of these issues concerning the Bible and its accurate translation. They are in order of importance, so the top ones are best to start. I buy used copies most of the time, from Alibris. Other used sources are Amazon used books, Biblio, and eBay. Watch and wait, because some very expensive books are offered for a fraction of the price later. I got a $300+ book for $25 later.

Greek New Testaments

Stephanus – Majority – Good, also found on Biblegateway.com
Westcott and Hort – Horrible, with no explanations at all
United Bible Societies – Horrible but they include lots of critical apparatus at the bottom of each page, to explain their conclusions.

Bad Text Criticism – Acolytes of Tischendorf, Westcott and Hort

Bruce Metzger – The Text of the New Testament, Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 1964. Note – “corruption” refers to the Majority Text.
Metzger, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian, 1997
J. Harold Greenlee, Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism, 1995. Traditionalists are wrong because they disagree with the bogus and fantastical Westcott-Hort theories! – circular reasoning.
Kurt and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament, 1981. He continued the Westcott-Hort argumentation, via Nestle, his mentor. The Nestle-Aland United Bible Society edition has become the favorite of liberals, apostates, and Lutherans. The New KJV constantly references NU in footnotes – for this Nestle-Aland-UBS edition – and M for the Majority Text. Is this citing of NU any different from the RSV footnoting Isaiah 7:10 – “or virgin?” RSV Isaiah 7:10 now reads – “a young woman will conceive and bear a son.”

Good Text Criticism

2. Wilbur N. Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text, 2014. A layman pointed out Pickering to me. As one person wrote, Pickering destroyed the entire modern argument against the modernist, eclectic (invented) Greek text.

3. About Tischendorf

4. James Bentley, Secrets of Mt. Sinai. The Story of the World’s Oldest Bible – Codex Sinaiticus, 1986. This is so hilariously worshipful that its thesis self- destructs. “Tischendorf was obsessed…” Yes.

5. J. A. Moorman, Was Codex Sinaiticus Written in 1840? 2018. Moorman is a KJV defender and the author of many comparison books on the KJV.

6. Dr. Constantine Tischendorf, Codex Sinaiticus. 1934.

7. YouTube – History Education for KJB Believers – lecture by Chris Pinto, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4sx2WM-nsM

8. David W. Daniels, Who Faked the “World’s Oldest Bible”? 2021. This book goes over the details of Tischendorf’s life and travels, with an emphasis on explaining how a gift book was turned into the oldest Bible, even though there are no traces of it, no record of Sinaiticus until the mid-19th century.

Apologetic Books – In Defense of the Christian Faith

Figure 17 David Otis Fuller has reliable books answering the modernists.

2. Which Bible? – Essays on the KJV translators – learned men; Dean Burdon – by Edward F. Hills, Modern criticism, Codex Vaticanus, the problems of Westcott-Hort theories.

3. True or False? – Various Greek texts explained (Stephens, Tischendorf, etc), Burdon on The Revision Revised. Pickering (above) on the contributions of Dean Burgon.

4. Counterfeit or Genuine? – The Ending of Mark by Dean Burdon, Woman Caught in Adultery – Burdon, Preservation of the Scriptures.

5. Gregory Jackson – Liberalism, Its Cause and Cure. The Poisoning of American Christianity and Its Cure. This is a review of how the 20th century Christian Church became apostate, fallen from faith.

This Is How the Text Fraud Expanded, From Tischendorf to the KJV Revision

Older books, considered classics, are reprinted using the best possible original text of the author. The issue is not whether people can compare and edit the Bible texts, but how they approach their task. In the past, the Biblical text editors were men who considered the Bible the Word of God, the infallible and inerrant revelation of the Holy Trinity. However, the 19th century was greatly influenced by rationalism, so various experts treated the Bible, not as the work of God for man, but another book by man about God. The British-American revision of the King James Version of the Bible was a perfect, but not a unique, example. Given the goal of a modest revision of the KJV language (using the same Traditional Text as before), the team of Westcott and Hort secretly provided their own text of the New Testament. The language of the KJV had been modestly revised before – and we use that revision today – but the new, eclectic or pasted together Greek text emboldened academics to treat the Bible as just another book, no different from Homer’s Odyssey or Marco Polo’s Travels.

Perhaps I was influenced by my father’s name – Homer – and an uncle’s name – Horace – to dabble in classical culture, the so-called dead languages of Latin and Greek, the histories of Greece and Rome. People thought it was odd to waste my college years on Latin and Greek, even more so later. When I told the dean of our tiny seminary that I was also taking Hebrew, he said, “Why, Greg? You will not get academic credit for it.” I wanted to read the original, and I earned the prize at seminary for “best Hebrew scholar” by being the only one. I won a Hebrew Old Testament. I did more language study at Yale, taking Hebrew exegesis of Genesis, Greek exegesis of Thessalonians, and a doctoral seminar that assumed knowledge of the Biblical languages. Besides that, my wife Christina earlier encouraged me to take German 1, 2, and modern German literature – and she took two years of Greek in college. She shocked the Greek exegesis of Thessalonians professor by taking notes for me when I took a course at Yale Medical School.

Although I dreamed of traveling the world on someone else’s budget, the study of languages more than satisfied that longing – by including ancient histories, pivotal battles on land and at sea, against great armies and against Herman the German. I am only listing these language adventures to point out the obvious – the typical pastor no longer knows Greek or Hebrew, because the courses have been dropped or watered down to a summer session. The language of the Old Testament is considered too difficult for the snowflakes of today. Language requirements for future ELCA ministers have slipped down to a summer term in Greek, $3,000 cash payment in advance, to fulfill the requirement. If Biblical languages are almost lost among the clergy, how much discernment can they have with the new Bibles? They are going to aim at the popular preferences, just as they decide on popcorn or peanuts, Coke or Pepsi, for their Sunday Seeker Services.

What will the pastor or lay leader say when the experts declare, “The woman caught in adultery passage does not fit in the Gospel of John and is obviously a late addition to the Gospel of John”? How will they respond to their own New Testament teachers dropping Mark 16:9-20? There must be a connection between selling Here I Stand socks for the Reformation’s 500th Anniversary and promoting a butchered Gospel of Mark at an inflated price, as Concordia Publishing House has done. That commentary is based on the fraudulent Codex Vaticanus! (James Voelz, Mark, Concordia Publishing House, LCMS, 2013.)

This book is aimed at laity and clergy who want to know the issues and how to have reason for the hope within them.

II. Christian Faith and the Greek Text Problem

The sole purpose of the Bible is to teach faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Word Incarnate. Long ago, Yale University taught the Scriptural revelation Creation, Adam and Eve, the Virgin Birth of Christ and His Resurrection. However, rationalism grew in Europe in the 19th century, and American academics trained in Germany brought back these ideas as the new intellectual leaders of their denominations. A good example is Walter Rauschenbusch, whose 1917 Social Gospel lectures at Yale re-interpreted the ministry and message of Jesus. The lectures changed the eternal Gospel into political and social activism. Every miracle had a rationalistic explanation, and Jesus was divine only in the way people could see God through Him.

Two Biblical Views

There are only two basic views of the Bible. One holds that the Spirit reveals God’s will, from the Creation to the end of time. The Scriptures are infallible and inerrant, the inerrancy term used recently because infallible was re-interpreted to mean “fallible in Biblical history and geography,” thanks to the influence of rationalism. This divide became more apparent as people were promoted or shunned for their views on the Bible. R. C. H. Lenski was silenced, shunned, and replaced as the New Testament Professor at Capital University Seminary, for teaching inerrancy and insisting on it before the 1930 merger. Although Lenski remains one of the most respected New Testament scholars in print, he was followed by a professor who taught the opposite to the seminarians. Thus, inerrancy was retired with Professor Lenski although the ALC/TALC retained an illusion of conservatism until it merged with the AELC and LCA in 1987 to form ELCA nicknamed “Every Left-wing Cause in America.”

As the Lutheran Library Publishing Ministry has shown, the Lutheran authors of the 19th century were believers who taught faith in Christ and maintained an unequivocal trust in the truth of the Scriptures. That is what makes the books of Krauth, Jacobs, Schmauk, and many others so valuable today.* They explain the Scriptures rather than substituting their ideas for the truths revealed.

* The classic Lutheran works of the General Council are available and free at the Lutheran Library Publishing Ministry – lutheranlibrary.org. Many are also inexpensively published in print through Amazon.com.

This change in Biblical views, so easily seen in all denominations today, is directly involved in replacing the faithful Greek text – the Majority Text or Traditional Text of the KJV– for a constantly changing version of the Westcott-Hort version. Westcott-Hort, under the management of Nestle-Aland, is now accepted as universal for almost all denominations. The United Bible Society text was marshaled by appealing to cooperation among Protestants and Roman Catholics and creatively paraphrased by the Eugene Nida translation theories. Now they present many versions of the Bible God Would Have Revealed If He Were As Clever as Westcott-Hort, Aland, and Nida.

We are living in the Age of the Great Apostasy. The visible Church is ruled by officials who once believed the basics of the Christian Faith but their replacements now resent the blockheads who insist on the King James Version, the classic hymns, the historic liturgy. Apostasy is far more dangerous than atheism, because the liberated minds and consciences of apostasy bitterly resent the old ways and those who represent them. Guided by their Father Below, they have systematically destroyed church music, the sermon, the liturgy, the Creeds, and the gracious message of forgiveness and salvation through faith in Christ the Savior.

This fact should alarm all the faithful laity – those who attend seminary and college in their denomination are quietly guided to use every translation except one with King James in the title. Divinity schools offering genuine PhDs are just as exacting. The publication houses, hymnals, and educational materials are established in the same Westcott-Hort world view, with monetary rewards and perks enjoyed by constantly replacing hymnals and other materials. The earlier NIV was replaced completely by the new version in 2011. No denomination was allowed to continue publishing their material with the “classic” NIV. The Biblegateway.com website – which they own – also dropped the “classic” NIV in favor of the new one, which was demonstrably worse.

Why do the denomination leaders go radical against those books that advocate for the King James Version? If they want to use guilt by association, a logical fallacy treasured by many today, do they dare look closely at their heroes of text and Biblical scholarship?

Figure 18 Yale’s Nils Dahl asked his doctoral seminar what they knew for certain about the New Testament. We were all stymied. He said, “The text! The text! We have the text!” That is how he moved away from 19th century apostate theories.

III. Books and Authors for Text and Translation Research, Laity and Pastors Alike

Edward Freer Hills (1912-1981) graduated in Latin from Yale University, Phi Beta Kappa.

He earned several seminary degrees, did graduate work at the University of Chicago, and completed a PhD in text criticism at Harvard University. His King James Version Defended is one of the best and most readable books on the topic. His style is plain, so his discussions of the following issues are easily comprehended by ministers and laity alike:

The Johannine Comma, 1 John 5:7-8
The ending of Mark, Mark 16:9-20
The woman caught in Adultery, John 7:53-8:11
The doxology of the Lord’s Prayer.

His King James Version Defended contains a wealth of information about all the issues, including background about the individuals, though Tyndale has been overlooked. The book can be obtained on Amazon and also found as a $5 Kindle in the original title Text and Time.

Wilbur N. Pickering’s The Identity of the New Testament Text is ideal for reading after being daunted and confused by the goofy, unwarranted theories of Westcott-Hort and their acolytes. As someone wrote, Pickering simply destroys their arguments with a careful analysis of the facts. Some basics for the Pickering approach are:

There are no “text-types” among the manuscripts.

Figure 19 Dean Burgon was a scholar who attacked the obvious failings of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, but the buzz favored the Tischendorf frauds and the jigsaw puzzle texts of Wescott-Hort.

Dean John William Burgon (1813-1888)

Burgon has a pugnacious society named after him, the Dean Burgon Society, which helps keep the flame alive for the King James Version. First of all, Burgon was a sworn and published enemy of German rationalism, which was promoted by the Essays and Reviews edited by John William Parker. Burgon was appreciated for his sermons against the book. His writing is heavy duty, not light work to read, but much clearer after reading Hill and Pickering. A good explanation of how Bibles became corrupted is detailed in his The Revision Revised: A Refutation of Westcott and Hort’s False Greek Text and Theory. The basic argument is clear and very much like Hill’s and Pickering’s – the Bible is established for believers and must be studied and explained by believers. There is no middle ground or compromise, even though the denominations are feathering their nests with the constant flow of new, improved, but clearly dishonest translations.

Burgon thought Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were both forgeries, because any codex that old would have been read or copied to extinction. Neither one had an origin or history, with most likely births in the 1840s (Sinaiticus) and the 1500s (Vaticanus). Trusting these two mystery books goes against the basic rules of evidence. The forgeries are a tiny minority of favored examples against 5,000 or more Majority Text witnesses.

Figure 20 Jack Moorman made important contributions to the Sinaiticus fraud and other issues.

Jack Moorman is a member of the Dean Burgon Society, and he has written several books on the topic of manuscripts, including a good summary in

Was Codex Sinaiticus Written in 1840?

Early Manuscripts, Church Fathers, and the Authorised Version.
Forever Settled: A Survey of the Documents and History of the Bible.

Early Manuscripts have extensive charts of the Majority Text compared to sources favored by the modern text critics. For those who like to view the words missing from the NIV, ESV, RSV, this volume is handy and mostly visual.

Forever Settled is a thorough history of versions, translators, and text criticism. The book is quite valuable for amount of time and material covered.

Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament

This is essential reading for understanding the perspective of modern text criticism, which has united previous text and translations efforts. The best way to find the weakness of an argument is to start with those who advocate it. More needs to be said about Eugene Nida, who accomplished as much against precise translation as Westcott-Hort, and Aland did against faithful manuscripts. Kurt Aland denied the apostolic origin of the Four Gospels early in his career, not to mention many other denials. He is no less bigoted against the New Testament as Rev. Hort, who preferred a “Mary religion” to a “Jesus religion.” Hort, as many people recall, “loathed the Textus Receptus” (Majority Text).

Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont came together to show the statistical value of examining the Greek text and found the Byzantine Text the original going back to the apostolic authors, the eclectic (pasted together) text of Westcott-Hort and their followers to be in the wrong.

Imagine the entire radical Westcott-Hort-Nestle-Aland- Nida coming undone as people realize they built their new “scientific” dynamic equivalence Bibles on union with Rome and two fraudulent sources – Vaticanus and Sinaiticus.

See and hear the Byzantine Text here – https://byzantinetext.com/