Commentaries and Podcasts

The first two parts of this series of essays exhibited many plain errors in the translation of the King James Version of the Bible, which clearly contradict the often-heard claims that the famous Authorized Version, as it is also called, is indeed the inspired Word of God in English. Unless one wants to purport that the God of the Bible is the author of error, then the King James Version cannot be deemed infallible. It has even been demonstrated, by the very words of the Westminster Confession formulated in the year 1643, that those very men who first elected the King James Version as their official version of the Bible fully understood and professed that the original languages must be appealed to whenever there is a question of doctrine. A sufficient number of these questions have already been raised here from the King James translations of the letters of Paul and certain statements in the writings of John and in the other epistles. While it has been demonstrated that there are many plain errors in translation in the King James Version, if there is one only, then can we imagine the book to be infallible? Of course we cannot, and we must examine the scripture from sources as original as possible – for it is our Christian duty.

Written at Westminster Abbey by the scholars of the Anglican Church at the behest of the English Parliament in 1643, The Westminster Confession of Faith was also accepted and adopted by many other denominations both in England and abroad. As we see in Chapter 1, Section 8 of the Confession, the churchmen at that time - just over thirty years after the institution of the King James Bible by the Anglicans - did not even consider the A.V. by itself to be the inspired word of God, but admit instead the authority of the original languages. The veracity of this statement as it appears in the Confession has been verified from several sources. From Chapter 1, Section 8, of The Westminster Confession of Faith:

The Old Testament in Hebrew (which was the native language of the people of God of old), and the New Testament in Greek (which at the time of the writing of it was most generally known to the nations), being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as in all controversies of religion the Church is finally to appeal unto them. But because these original tongues are not known to all the people of God who have right unto, and interest in, the Scriptures, and are commanded, in the fear of God, to read and search them, therefore they are to be translated into the vulgar language of every nation unto which they come, that the Word of God dwelling plentifully in all, they may worship him in an acceptable manner, and, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, may have hope.

Examining the claim made by many modern sects, that the Authorized King James Version of the Bible (the A.V.) is in itself the “inspired word of God”, we must ourselves ask this: Is God the author of error? Did Yahweh reveal His Word directly to man in the English language in the year 1611? If it can be shown that the King James Version of the New Testament contains at least some errors, then it should be reasoned that this version – no matter how venerated – was also translated by fallible men. Certainly the language of the New Testament – Koine Greek – is still quite well known to us, there having been a tremendous body of written literature which used it, in addition to what we see in the New Testament. We have much more classical Greek literature available to us than even classical Latin. Here we shall see just how well it was known by the translators of this venerated edition of those writings which we commonly call the Bible. The first part of this examination shall commence with a walk through some of the translations found in the epistles of the apostle Paul.  

Program Notes: Adultery and Fornication

Many people, myself included, assert that the word adultery in the Old Testament means race-mixing. And while I would still assert that this is true, it is not to be told from the definitions of the word as they are given in Strong's Concordance or in Gesenuis' Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon. For that reason, and for the way in which the word is used in some Biblical contexts, it is easy for a scoffer or a doubter to refute the assertion that the word is used to describe race-mixing. So here we shall do a study of this word, and some other words which are necessary to gain an understanding of the difference between adultery and fornication.  

Program Notes – William Finck's July 24th Presentation for the European Fellowship Conference (See the audio & file links at the bottom of the page):

What is the Bible?

Most Christians tend to have a Bible version which they love above all others, and which to them, as they are often taught to believe, represents the inerrant Word of God. But is that a healthy Christian attitude, inasmuch as Christians are urged by scripture in nearly any translation, to prove and to scrutinize all things? We have been raised and taught to love our King James Version, or Luther's version, and much esteem is held for these books among the English or German peoples. These versions contributed so much to Western culture that they even helped build and unify our very languages! But are they really scripture? Should they be blindly accepted as inerrant? The King James version has thousands of known mistranslations. It can clearly be demonstrated that nouns were translated into verbs, verbs into nouns, and even that the grammatical object and subject were reversed in many sentences. Could these errors possibly be by the inspiration of Yahweh? Or rather, do Christians not have an obligation to examine all of these things? Here we will discuss the possible avenues of investigation, since most Christians seem to be ignorant of the sources of their dearest treasure: which is their Bible.

Genealogy, or Geography?

There has long been a tendency among the people of our race to draw their allegiances along geographical lines, often to the detriment of the more natural genetic allegiances. When we move into a land, and multiply and spread ourselves throughout it, we tend to adopt regional names for ourselves. Thus we have Norsemen and Franks, Englishmen and Germans, Yankees and Rednecks, and Buckeyes and Tarheels, and yet they all came from the same place. After years of separation, we then have situations where the aliens in a land, eventually accepted to one degree or another, and for one reason or another, are esteemed to be closer in relationship to us than our own cousins from other lands. And so a crowd of Americans – in spite of their own English descent – may be seen cheering on a negro against an English boxer in a game, simply because the negro is wearing an American insignia. That is just one modern example. More dreadfully, a tribe of Benjamintes would go to war against the surrounding related tribes to defend crimes perpetrated by men of dubious background, and for that the entire tribe was at one time reduced to merely a few hundred, nearly being decimated entirely. 

That is how old this phenomenon truly is: as old as the Book of Judges in the Bible, and probably much older than that. In Judges Chapters 19 and 20, we see related an account where the entire tribe of Benjamin stood up to defend a town, Gibeah, which would not turn some murderers and rapists over to judgement. The criminals were called sons of Belial from the beginning of the account, and it is evident that they were not Benjaminites. The word Belial, as can be proven from an examination of the Hebrew language, refers to the state of being mixed. In 1 Samuel 10:26, much later, we see that these same children of Belial were still in this same town, and they were still causing problems for the Israelites!