DO THE MODERN VERSIONS CHANGE DOCTRINE?

[Distributed by Way of Life Literatureâs Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Copyright by David W. Cloud. These articles cannot be stored on BBS or Internet sites and cannot be sold or placed by themselves or with other material in any electronic format for sale, but may be distributed for free by e-mail or by print. They must be left intact and nothing removed or changed, including these informational headers. This is a listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Our goal is not devotional but is TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. If you desire to receive this type of material on a regular basis, e-mail us, give us your name, address, and the name of the church you are a member of, and request to be placed on the list. Please note that this is not a free service. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and each subscriber is expected to participate. To unsubscribe or to submit a change of address, send your name and the request to fbns@wayoflife.org. This is not an automated list. Changes in the database often require two to four days to activate. Some of these articles are from O Timothy magazine. David W. Cloud, Editor. O Timothy is a monthly magazine in its 17th year of publication. Subscription is $20/yr. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site -- http://www.wayoflife.org.]

February 11, 1996 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The following material first appeared in O Timothy magazine, Volume 12, Issue 3, 1995.

Many contend that the modern Greek texts and the new versions do not change doctrine. These do not understand the nature of the changes which have been made. This is something akin to Neo-orthodoxy. The critical text is not a frontal attack on truth; it is a clever infiltration. The attack of the modern versions is not tanks blasting; it is termites eating. The modern versions don't wholly omit doctrines (unless it is the doctrine of fasting) but they undermine many doctrines, and doctrine in general, by deleting repetitious passages, omitting titles of Christ, deleting a key passage here and there, questioning other key passages--a little cut here, a little doubt there. It is easy to underestimate the overall effect. The eclectic Greek text upon which the modern versions are founded is a shorter text than the Received Text underlying the King James Bible. The modern text omits thousands of words and phrases, an amount of text equaling the entire books of 1 and 2 Peter.

The area of repetition is an interesting one. In Genesis 41:32 Joseph explains to Pharaoh why God repeated the dream. It was to reinforce the authority and impact of the message. Jesus Christ often used the term "verily, verily" to emphasize the importance of what He was saying. Many phrases are repeated almost to tediousness in the Bible. "They shall know that I am the Lord" in Ezekiel is an example. Peter's vision prior to his being sent to Cornelius shows how God uses repetition to reinforce a point. He repeated the vision three times. This is the purpose of biblical repetition. Yet the critical text and the modern versions reduce the repetition and thereby reduce the power and impact of God's Word in a subtle yet very real manner. For example, Matthew 4:4 and Luke 4:4 have the same warning that man lives by every word of God. That message is weakened in the modern versions by the omission of the last half of the verse in Luke 4:4. Christ's sermon on Hell in Mark 9 contains another example. That is a passage that shook me up before I was saved. It is probably the most powerful sermon on Hell in the Bible. Three times Christ repeated His warning that Hell is a place "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched" (verses 44,46,48). This sermon in the modern versions is not as hot. It is hot, because the fire is still there in verse 44, but it is not as hot as the sermon in the Received Text and the KJV, because verses 46 and 48 are omitted.

By removing some of the repetition of the Bible, the modern versions weaken the overall standard of doctrine. The critical text is shorter roughly by the amount of text equal to the entire books of 1 and 2 Peter. And the critical text is weak; it is soft; it is less forceful; overall it is more hesitant in presenting the great doctrines of the faith. It IS a theologically corrupt text.