Crucial
for Understanding the Radical Academic Shift to Apostasy
Most believers are not aware of the historic radical Biblical
scholars using the Gospels of Mark and John to advance their theories and deny
the Scriptural truth. Pietism, with its emphasis on cooperation rather than
doctrine, helped rationalism begin to flourish, at Halle University and other
places. The famous Reimarus Fragments were printed anonymously to deny
the miracles of the Bible, among other things. The Gospel of John was dismissed
as belonging to an era three centuries after Christ. That claim allowed the
academics to disregard any support in the Fourth Gospel regarding historical
and doctrinal information. In fact, they hated the open Trinitarian nature of
John’s Gospel, the clear identification of Jesus as the only-begotten Son of
God, His Virgin Birth, Resurrection, and Ascension. They considered Jesus to be
a wandering teacher who inspired love, caused emotional healings, and never
considered Himself the Messiah, Savior, or Son of God.
With the Fourth Gospel out of the way in the quest for
the historical Jesus, the academics could turn Mark’s Gospel into that kernel of
truth they were seeking, the story of Jesus without the divine or miraculous. The
Westcott-Hort Greek New Testament removed “the Son of God” from Mark 1:1.
W-H Mark 1:1 αρχη του
ευαγγελιου ιησου χριστου – The beginning of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ.
KJV – Mark 1:1 The
beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God;
The Westcott-Hort also
stopped the Gospel at Mark 16:8, with the rest of the chapter closed off in square
brackets to show that the traditional ending did not really belong. This
editing of the Greek text, with no support for these actions, reduced the divinity
of Christ in Mark 1:1 and erased His resurrection in Mark 16. A century after
Wescott-Hort, the first RSV edition dropped the ending of Mark into a footnote
and later raised it up with a space between verse 8 and 9 to show that the
ending was foreign.
The changes in Mark’s Gospel made it easier to write
about the undiscovered primitive version, the kernel, the story of a popular
teacher. Humorously, because Biblical experts often weave strange fantasies,
the academics postulated Q, the imaginary source shared between Matthew and
Luke, because those two Gospels had so much in common with each other. However,
nothing like Q has ever been found. Theories build slowly and often fade
slowly. The least likely view, the minority perspective has the Gospels written
by the Apostles Matthew and John and by associates of Apostles Mark and Luke,
inspired by the Holy Spirit.
The Gospel of John is still removed far from the time of
Jesus. In 1975, at Notre Dame, Elisabeth Schuessler-Fiorenza stated, “The Gospel
of John was written in the first century by the Apostle, according to
conservatives, 300 years later – according to liberals.” She is still teaching,
at Harvard Divinity School. For most Biblical scholars with an academic
position, the Bible is just a book to be treated like other books, with lengthy
analysis and competing arguments. Their values are strictly rationalistic, and
their tolerance for traditional Christian professors is zero, including the
issue of the text itself.
The Christian Church once handled the teaching of Biblical
doctrine and the printing of the KJV, but now the Scriptures are dominated by the
extreme Left and Bibles are printed and promoted by a variety of profitable
businesses. College and seminary professors are products and promoters of rationalistic
views and opponents of the King James Version. Faculty are happy to be named as
consultants for the latest, most readable, least demanding Bible. The
denomination will not give them free trips to Israel, but the Bible factory
will.
I remember, as a lad, hearing the excitement about the
RSV being a new, exciting modern version of the Bible, then learning the Virgin
Birth was denied in Isaiah 7:10. Much later I studied in the RSV Room, the
reading room of Yale Divinity School, where the RSV was developed. No one wants
to mention that the Left-wing National Council of Churches owns the copyright for
the RSV. The alleged new improved ESV is printed under license from the NCC, a
fact not promoted by the sellers or readers of the Bible.
The engine behind the repudiation of the KJV is really the
monopoly established by Bible text critics. Westcott-Hort began the
consolidation with their own Greek New Testament, which seemed to fail, but the
modernists ascended in the 1930s and never let go.
The Biblical text, especially the New Testament Greek, has been a playground
for apostates ever since, and a fall-back position for anyone accused of
teaching liberal notions. They cry out, in unison, “The Bible did not float
down from heaven. It was made and transmitted by man.”
