TruthVid's 100 Proofs that the Israelites were White, Part 32: 46, Specific NT verse misteachings, mistranslations or corruptions in the epistles of Peter and James

TruthVid's 100 Proofs that the Israelites were White, Part 32

Having finally completed our discussion of particular passages in Paul’s epistles where certain terms are either mistranslated or misunderstood, we now hope to do that same thing in regard to the so-called “Catholic Epistles”, which itself is an errant Church term for the epistles of James, Peter and Jude. Like Paul’s writings, these also have many errors of interpretation, or blatant mistranslations, than do the Gospel accounts or the Revelation, which cause the New Testament itself to be misunderstood. But while James is usually reckoned as the first of these epistles, we will reserve it for later, and begin with 1 Peter.

46) Specific NT verse misteachings, mistranslations or corruptions in the epistles of Peter and James

Peter opened his first epistle with the following salutation, as the King James Version has 1 Peter 1:1: “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia…”

But was Peter really writing to strangers? The Greek word for stranger here is παρεπίδημος, which is an adjective defined by Liddell & Scott as “sojourning in a strange place, esp. as Substantive,” where they cite Genesis 23:4 in the Septuagint as well as the ancient historian Polybius. As a Substantive, the adjective meaning sojourning would be translated naturally as sojourner, not as stranger, even if a sojourner may be a stranger in the eyes of those among whom he is sojourning .

The word παρεπίδημος is formed from two prepositions and a noun. The first preposition, παρά, is beside while the second, ἐπί, is on or upon and the noun, δῆμος, originally described a country or land and was later used of the people of a particular country or land. So a παρεπίδημος is someone who is living or dwelling beside others upon their land in their country. It was used to describe someone who leaves his own land and travels in another country. It is a specific word with a specific meaning which cannot be generalized in English without leaving behind a good part of the original writer's intent. The word does not signify people who are strangers to Israel, which is what the denominational church doctrines suggest. Rather, the word signifies people who were estranged from Israel and who are dwelling elsewhere: a statement which can only be made of the deported Israelites, and that is what the context of Peter’s epistle fully reflects.

For example, Peter himself expresses his intention of this use of παρεπίδημος as sojourner later in this same chapter, by his use of a near synonym, παροικία, in reference to his readers in verse 17 of this same chapter, where the King James Version wrote sojourning. There we read, from 1 Peter 1:17: “And if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man's work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear.” The word παροικία, according to Liddell & Scott, was also used to describe a “sojourning in a foreign land”, but it is a compound of the preposition παρά and the noun οἰκία, which is a house or dwelling.

But another Greek word which appears in 1 Peter 1:1 was completely ignored by the King James translators, and since it appears in the manuscripts of the Majority Text, I have no explanation for its having been omitted. That word is ἐκλεκτός, which in 1 Peter 1:1 is another adjective meaning elect or chosen which modifies the Substantive for sojourners, and which should therefore be rendered as elect sojourners. Forms of these same words, παρεπίδημος and πάροικος, appear again in 1 Peter 2:11, which we shall discuss shortly.

But there is another important passage in 1 Peter chapter 1 which reveals Peter’s intended meaning of these terms, and that is found in verses 9 and 10 where he wrote: “9 Receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls. 10 Of which salvation the prophets have enquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you…” and he goes on to speak of the promises of Christ found in those same prophets.

So the salvation which is in Christ, and the grace which accompanies that salvation, are subjects of prophesy, according to the words of Peter here, referring explicitly to the people to whom he is writing. But looking into the words of the Old Testament prophets, where Peter had written that the prophets had “prophesied of the grace that should come unto you”, we find promises of grace specifically and explicitly to the children of Israel, and there are no other such promises ever made to any other people. It is the children of Israel alone who are described as having been elect, or chosen to receive this grace.

Jeremiah chapter 31 contains an explicit promise of a new covenant for the house of Israel and the house of Judah, but first we read, as the chapter opens: “1 At the same time, saith the LORD, will I be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be my people. 2 Thus saith the LORD, The people which were left of the sword found grace in the wilderness; even Israel, when I went to cause him to rest. 3 The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.” Jeremiah wrote those words perhaps 160 years after the beginning of the Assyrian captivities of Israel and most of Judah. The reason they needed grace was because they had suffered in the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities, and the reason they needed a new covenant was because they had broken and forsaken the old covenant, while Yahweh nevertheless had to keep the unconditional promises which He had made to Abraham.

Without ignoring any Greek word, we must translate the opening verses of 1 Peter chapter 1 to read: “1 Petros, ambassador of Yahshua Christ, to the elect sojourners of the dispersion of Pontos, Galatia, Kappadokia, Asia and Bithunia, 2 according to the foreknowledge of Father Yahweh in a sanctification of the Spirit in obedience and a sprinkling of the blood of Yahshua Christ: favor to you and peace be multiplied.” The purpose of that foreknowledge is also expressed in the prophets. So we can only honestly conclude that the sojourners in the provinces of Anatolia to which Peter wrote were a portion of the scattered Israelites of more ancient times, and that Peter had written to the same people whom James had addressed in his only surviving epistle as “the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad”. This will also be demonstrated in our next discussion, where:

Now we shall move on to 1 Peter 2:9, and addressing those same people Peter wrote: “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.”

First, Peter was making this statement in regard to particular people, who were dwelling in the first century in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. These were Roman provinces, and they were populated by Romans, Greeks, Galatae and Scythians, but more anciently also by Lydians, Phoenicians, Thracians, Persians, Assyrians and even possibly some remaining Hittites. Not all of these groups were the subjects of promises made to the children of Israel, but those which dominated the region at the time, the Romans, Dorian and Macedonian Greeks, Galatae and Scythians certainly all did, which is demonstrable in history and Scripture. All of these provinces were culturally Hellenistic at this time.

But next, how could Peter have regarded any particular Christians as a “chosen generation”? The word γένος means race, stock or family. If Peter was merely referring to all of the Christians living in those provinces as he wrote, how could there ever be any other chosen generations? So that interpretation is quite ridiculous, as there is nothing in Scripture which says that people can somehow become chosen by somehow choosing God. Christ told His apostles, in John chapter 15, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” and “I have chosen you out of the world”. Then even if some people in each province were Christians, how could they be a “chosen generation” apart from all others who were alive at that time and in those same places, who were not Christian? So the word generation, as we understand it today, cannot be a proper interpretation of γένος. But if they were of different races, neither could Peter have called them after the singular form of the word γένος.

And even if some people in each province were Christians, how would that make them a “holy nation” if they were of all different nations? And why did the King James Version not translate the word ἔθνος as Gentile here? The word, according to Liddell & Scott, was used after the time of Homer to describe “a nation, people” and here it is in the singular, so it cannot describe diverse nations or people, and merely professing a belief in Christ does not make inhabitants of different regions to be of the same nation or people. In fact, in the Revelation as well as in the epistles of Paul we are informed that Christans belonged to many different nations. But Christians never became, nor were they ever described, as one nation simply because they were Christians.

Examining 2 Peter chapter 2, where he spoke of certain men who are “natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed” and “Spots… and blemishes, sporting themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you” he was speaking of men of a different race and nation, who had no possibility of repentance or conversion to Christianity, even when feasting among Christians. So he described them as “Having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls: an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; cursed children” while he compared them to the error of fornication with which Balaam had advised the Moabites to entice the children of Israel. Peter could only have been describing the Edomite-Judaeans as opposed to the Israelite Judaeans, who were also found in many places in the Roman world and who were infiltrating and corrupting Christianity through Judaism, as Paul had often described, especially in Galatians. Peter himself also had experience with Judaizers at Antioch, as we see in Acts chapter 15 and as Paul had explained in Galatians chapter 2.

There is only one manner in which these people of diverse regions and tribes could be one, holy nation, and one chosen race, and that is that they were all descended from the ancient children of Israel. In that manner they are also the royal priesthood and peculiar people described in Exodus chapter 19 where we read “5 Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: 6 And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.” Moreover, using the term “royal priesthood” here rather than “kingdom of priests”, Peter was following the Greek Septuagint, and any the Hebrew text, where in the Septuagint we see “royal priesthood” at Exodus 19:6, using the same exact phrase and spelling as we see in Peter’s Greek.

So in this regard we must also discuss 1 Peter 2:10, which in the King James Version reads: “10 Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.” Here Peter was describing the Christians of those same provinces in the opening verse of his epistle, as the subject has never changed. But how could people not be a people? And why is Peter even saying this, as if his subjects had not always been people? In the sense that we understand the word people, what people could not have been a people in the past?

However finding that Peter was making a citation from Hosea chapter 1, there is only one answer to these questions, which also lies in the fact that his intended readers were descended from the ancient Israelites. In Hosea chapter 1, the prophet Hosea was told to take a harlot for a wife, ostensibly as an example that Yahweh God also had a harlot for a wife, the children of Israel. So she bore him a daughter, and Hosea was told to call the girl Loruhamah, which means No Mercy. Then she bore a son, and Hosea was told to call his name Loammi, which means Not My People. These were indicative of the state of the children of Israel who were going into Assyrian captivity at that same time, so we read in Hosea 1:8-9: “8 Now when she had weaned Loruhamah, she conceived, and bare a son. 9 Then said God, Call his name Loammi: for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God.”

But then in the very next verse, the one which Peter cites here, we read a message of their ultimate reconciliation where it says: “10 Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered; and it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God. 11 Then shall the children of Judah and the children of Israel be gathered together, and appoint themselves one head, and they shall come up out of the land: for great shall be the day of Jezreel.” The word Jezreel means God sows, and God had promised to sow the children of Israel even in the time of their captivity.

So, as Hosea says, in the place where it was said to the children of Israel that they were not a people, that they were not the people of God, there it would be said to them that they are the children of God, and if one is not descended from those same ancient Israelites, then one does not have any part in Christianity. As John had explained, in chapter 11 of his Gospel, Christ had died to reconcile the children of Yahweh who were already scattered abroad. So we also must ask, did those words in Hosea make Egyptians not a people? Did they make Chinamen or Indians not a people? Yet neither those nor any other race were ever accounted the people of God, and they still cannot be accounted the people of God, as they are forever left outside of the context of the promises and the covenants.

This in turn brings us to 1 Peter 2:11, where those same two words which we discussed earlier, παρεπίδημος and πάροικος, appear together. We shall read the verse from the King James Version: “11 Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul”.

Now here in this verse the King James Version rendered πάροικος as strangers, but the word παρεπίδημος as pilgrims, which is stranger even yet. I would render these words here as emigrants and sojourners, looking at their meanings and examining the Scriptural context. These are the same words we see in the Greek Septuagint at Genesis 23:4, where Abraham is petitioning to purchase a burial place in Canaan and he says, as it is in Brenton’s Septuagint, “I am a sojourner and a stranger among you”, but in the King James Version, “I am a stranger and a sojourner with you”. While it does better in the Old Testament, concerning these same words the King James Version obscures the true meanings in the New Testament, especially here and in Ephesians 2:19 where they wrongly translated πάροικος as foreigner.

Now in light of all of this, we shall discuss 1 Peter 3:6: “Even as Sara obeyed Abraham, calling him lord: whose daughters ye are, as long as ye do well, and are not afraid with any amazement.”

The portion of this verse which must be discussed here is “whose daughters ye are, as long as ye do well”. The King James Version has a phrase “as long as” here. This is a conditional clause which is not found anywhere in the Greek text. The corresponding Greek text is the phrase ἧς ἐγενήθητε τέκνα ἀγαθοποιοῦσαι, which is literally only “whose children you have been born to do good”. A conditional statement usually includes words such as εἰ or if, δέ or but, or μὲν or indeed, as combinations of these words such as εἰ μὲν or εἰ δὲ. A conditional statement would also usually include verbs of the Subjunctive mood, which indicate that an action may or might or would happen if a particular condition were fulfilled. But there is none of that grammar here, and the two verbs are of the indicative and infinitive forms. So Peter is making a statement which does not contain any conditions.

But the translation of this passage in the King James Version also reads the indicative verb γίγνομαι as it were a form of εἰμί, as to be, or here, you are, when in fact γίγνομαι means to become, to come into being, and of people it means to be born. Liddell & Scott say in part that it means, in its “Radical sense, to come into being… 1. of persons, to be born, νέον γεγαώς new born, Odyssey; γεγονέναι ἔκ τινος Herodotus; more rarely ἀπό τινος Iliad; τινος Euripides… 2. of things, to be produced…” but here, of course the subject is people. The form of the verb being a aorist passive indicative second person plural, of the people here it means you were born.

Then the King James Version also attempted to cover for its errors here by translating the infinitive verb, to do good, as a second person active verb, after it supplied a conditional clause that is not found in the original text. So in the making of one error, which was probably purposeful, they necessitated the creation of another error, and doing so they began to make lies and corrupt the meaning of the text.

Here Peter is speaking to the Christian women of those provinces to whom he had written, informing that that they had been BORN as Abraham’s children, and more specifically as daughters of Sarah, and for that reason they were intended by their Creator to do good. There is no word anywhere in the Bible about anyone being able to somehow become one of Abraham’s children! And although Yahweh God may raise up children to Abraham from stones, just like the Edomites to whom John the Baptist was speaking, that would not make them the children of the promises, who come only through Jacob. Everywhere the translators have inferred such an idea, that one may somehow become a child of Abraham, it does not appear in the meaning of the original Greek. In Isaac, through Jacob and not Esau, is the seed of Abraham called.

So here is our reading of 1 Peter 3:5-6: “5 For thusly at one time also the holy women who have hope in Yahweh had dressed themselves being subject to their own husbands, as Sarah had obeyed Abraham calling him master, whose children you have been born to do good and not fearing any terror.”

Now we shall move on to 2 Peter 1:1: “Simon Peter, a servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to them that have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ...”

The Greek word λαγχάνω, Strong’s # 2975, is according to Liddell & Scott to obtain by lot, by fate, or, as the Greeks were pagan, by the will of the gods. There are many ways in Greek to say obtain, but here Peter uses a specific word which indicates that this particular faith being obtained was by the will of God. Since the decrees of Yahweh are spelled out in the Old Testament prophets and nowhere else, and since the Old Testament prophets tell us that this obtaining is only for the children of Israel, both the dispersed and the still-circumcised, then we certainly cannot assume that Peter was including anyone else in his message here. Along with the general context, we see that this also demonstrates that Peter had written this epistle not to any of the Judaeans, but to the uncircumcised, as he mentions “them that have obtained like precious faith with us”.

While back in Acts Chapter 10 Peter evidently did not yet have this understanding, he certainly shows that understanding here in these two epistles, which were written about 25 years after the event of Acts chapter 10: that the uncircumcised peoples of Europe and Mesopotamia who were the children of those Israelites that had either emigrated or were deported 700 to 1,500 years before the Advent of Christ were still included in the covenants of Yahweh our God and were beneficiaries of the cross of Christ. Ostensibly, these were all also Christians from assemblies which Paul of Tarsus or his own disciples had founded, since at the end of 2 Peter chapter 3, Peter underscores the importance of Paul’s epistles.

In 2 Peter 2:5 the King James Version reads, where Yahweh God is the subject: “And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly...”

The King James reading here is absurd. Noah was not “the eighth person”, where we see that the word person is italicized and was therefore added to the text. The indefinite article was also added to the text, along with the comma, none of which appear in the original. Furthermore, the Greek word ὄγδοος is an ordinal number, and not a cardinal number, which would be ὀκτώ, so neither is it talking about how many people were saved in the flood, as the translators and many more commentators have errantly assumed! Dropping the added words and punctuation, the text clearly states that Noah was the eighth proclaimer of righteousness. The words “proclaimer” and “eighth” are both in the Accusative case, and the adjective modifying the noun therefore the two must be understood as a unit. While they are not adjacent in the Greek, they rather bracket the words for Noah and “of righteousness”, which is not an uncommon device in Greek, and therefore the entire phrase must be understood as a unit.

It is now important to show what “preacher of righteousness” could mean, so let us begin by counting patriarchs from Adam: 1) Adam, 2) Seth, 3) Enos, 4) Cainan, 5) Mahalaleel, 6) Jared, 7) Enoch, 8) Methuselah, 9) Lamech, and 10) Noah. That is ten, and Abel is discounted because he was never a patriarch, not having outlived his father. Now since Enoch and Lamech were also both outlived – or outlasted - on earth by their fathers, neither of them ever fulfilled the role of a living head patriarch, and therefore there were only seven descendants and Adam who served as the eldest living males of the line down through Noah! That is the only thing of which Noah could have been the eighth. He was certainly not the eighth person of the ark, as sons and their wives are never given precedence over their fathers in Scripture. Therefore that is what the term “preacher of righteousness” must have meant, and of course Cain was discounted also – as he was a patriarch of the serpent’s seed rather than Adam's, and he can never be righteous.

In Greek, the terms for Noah, eighth and preacher, or proclaimer, are all Accusative singular terms, which signifies that they are all the object of the verb and must therefore be understood as a unit, the adjective for eighth modifying the noun proclaimer, which was also Noah. They cannot be separated into different grammatical objects or ideas. This verse must be read: “and He did not spare of the old society but He had kept Noah, the eighth proclaimer of righteousness, having brought a deluge upon the society of the impious....” This is also the only way that Noah could be the eighth of anything, if we count down the eldest living sons of the Adamic line from Adam to Noah. This also shows that Cain was discounted from Adam’s genealogy, as he was not a true son of Adam. Likewise, we see in the epistle to Jude that Enoch was “seventh from Adam”, and Jude must be referring to men who were the eldest living sons, but not the eldest living patriarchs. We shall save that for a discussion of Jude, as in either place it is proven that Cain is discounted even before a need for such counting was ever considered.