The Greek text that is used in most Bible seminaries and colleges is produced by the United Bible Societies, an organization composed of more than 100 national Bible societies. We used the third edition when I was in school. Since then a fourth edition has appeared. In Bible school I was not told that the editors of that volume are apostates, but they are. We will consider four of the editors: Carlo Martini, Eugene Nida, Kurt Aland, and Bruce Metzger.

CARLO MARTINI

Jesuit cardinal Carlo Maria Martini (1927- ) is the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Milan. Since 1967, he has been one of the editors of the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament. His diocese in Europe is the largest in the world, with two thousand priests and five million "laity." He is Professor of New Testament Textual Criticism at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. He is also President of the Council of European Bishop's Conferences. Time magazine, December 26, 1994, listed him as a possible candidate in line for the papacy. Another Time magazine article reported that Martini brought together a syncretistic convocation of over 100 religious leaders from around the world to promote a new age, one-world religion. In addressing this meeting, Mikhail Gorbachev said, "We need to synthesize a new religion for thinking men that will universalize that religion for the world and lead us into a new age."

EUGENE NIDA

Eugene Nida (1914- ) is the father of the blasphemous dynamic equivalency theory of Bible translation. Nida was the Executive Secretary of the Translations Department of the United Bible Societies from 1943 to 1980. Though retired, he continues to act as Special Consultant for Translators.

As to his view of biblical inspiration, Nida says, "... God’s revelation involved limitations. ... Biblical revelation is not absolute and all divine revelation is essentially incarnational. ... Even if a truth is given only in words, it has no real validity until it has been translated into life. ... The words are in a sense nothing in and of themselves. ... the word is void unless related to experience" (Nida, Message and Mission, p. 222-228).

The Psalmist did not hold to Nida’s theories about the words of Scripture. He said, "The words of the Lord are pure words..." (Psalm 12:6). Throughout Scripture it is the very words of the Bible which are said to be important, not just the basic meaning. The words ARE something in and of themselves, regardless of whether they are related to anything else. Nida is wrong. The words of the Bible are intrinsically the eternal words of God.

As to the atonement of Jesus Christ, Nida says, "Most scholars, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, interpret the references to the redemption of the believer by Jesus Christ, not as evidence of any commercial transaction by any quid pro quo between Christ and God or between the ‘two natures of God’ (his love and his justice), but as a figure of the ‘cost,’ in terms of suffering" (Eugene Nida and Charles Taber, Theory and Practice, 1969, p. 53). In A Translator’s Handbook on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Nida (with co-author Barclay Newman) says, "... ‘blood’ is used in this passage [Romans 3:25] in the same way that it is used in a number of other places in the New Testament, that is, to indicate a violent death. ... Although this noun [propitiation] (and its related forms) is sometimes used by pagan writers in the sense of propitiation (that is, an act to appease or placate a god), it is never used this way in the Old Testament."

Nida is wrong. The sacrifice of Christ was not just a figure; it WAS a placation of God, of His holiness and of the righteous demands in His law. Christ’s sacrifice WAS a commercial transaction between Christ and God, and was NOT merely a figure of the cost in terms of suffering. The sacrifice of Calvary was a true sacrifice, and that sacrifice required the offering of blood—not just a violent death as Nida says. Blood is blood and death is death, and we believe that God is wise enough to know which of these words should be used. Had Christ died, for example, by beating, though it would have been a violent death, it would not have atoned for sin because blood is required. Those, like Nida, who tamper with the blood atonement often claim to believe in justification by grace, but they are rendering the Cross ineffective by reinterpreting its meaning. There is no grace without a true propitiation. This word means "satisfaction" and refers to the fact that the sin debt was satisfied by the blood atonement of Christ. The great difference between the heathen concept of propitiating God and that of the Bible is this—the God of the Bible paid the propitiation Himself through His own Sacrifice, whereas the heathen thinks that he can propitiate God through his own human labors and offerings. The fact remains, though, that God did have to be propitiated through the bloody death of His own Son.

Nida is a clever man. He does not openly assault the blood atonement and the doctrine of inspiration as his translator friend Robert Bratcher does. (Bratcher, translator of the Today’s English Version, has co-authored books with Nida.) Nida uses the same words as the Bible believer, but he reinterprets key words and passages such as those above. This is called Neo-orthodoxy. Beware.

BRUCE METZGER

Another of the editors of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament is Bruce Manning Metzger (1914- ). Metzger is George L. Collord Professor of New Testament Language and Literature, Princeton Theological Seminary, and he serves on the board of the American Bible Society. Metzger is the head of the continuing RSV translation committee of the apostate National Council of Churches in the U.S.A. The Revised Standard Version was soundly condemned for its modernism when it first appeared in 1952. Today its chief editor sometimes is invited to speak at Evangelical forums. The RSV hasn’t changed, but Evangelicalism certainly has!

Metzger was the chairman for the Reader’s Digest Condensed Bible and wrote the introductions to each book in this butchered version of the Scriptures. The Preface claims that "Dr. Metzger was actively involved at every stage of the work, from the initial studies on each of the sixty-six books through all the subsequent editorial reviews. The finished condensation has received his full approval." The Condensed Bible removed 40% of the Bible text, including the warning of Revelation 22:18-19! In the introductions to the books of the Reader’s Digest Bible, Metzger questions the authorship, traditional date, and supernatural inspiration of books penned by Moses, Daniel, and Peter, and in many other ways reveals his liberal, unbelieving heart. Consider some examples:

Genesis: "Nearly all modern scholars agree that, like the other books of the Pentateuch, [Genesis] is a composite of several sources, embodying traditions that go back in some cases to Moses."

Exodus: "As with Genesis, several strands of literary tradition, some very ancient, some as late as the sixth century B.C., were combined in the makeup of the books" (Introduction to Exodus).

Deuteronomy: "It’s compilation is generally assigned to the seventh century B.C., though it rests upon much older tradition, some of it from Moses’ time."

Daniel: "Most scholars hold that the book was compiled during the persecutions (168-165 B.C.) of the Jewish people by Antiochus Epiphanes."

John: "Whether the book was written directly by John, or indirectly (his teachings may have been edited by another), the church has accepted it as an authoritative supplement to the story of Jesus’ ministry given by the other evangelists."

1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus: "Judging by differences in style and vocabulary from Paul’s other letters, many modern scholars think that the Pastorals were not written by Paul."

James: "Tradition ascribes the letter to James, the Lord’s brother, writing about A.D. 45, but modern opinion is uncertain, and differs widely on both origin and date."

2 Peter: "Because the author refers to the letters of Paul as ‘scripture,’ a term apparently not applied to them until long after Paul’s death, most modern scholars think that this letter was drawn up in Peter’s name sometime between A.D. 100 and 150."

Metzger’s modernism was also made plain in the notes to the New Oxford Annotated Bible RSV (1973). Metzger co-edited this volume with Herbert May. It first appeared in 1962 as the Oxford Annotated Bible and was the first Protestant annotated edition of the Bible to be approved by a Roman authority. It was given an imprimatur in 1966 by Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, Massachusetts. Metzger wrote many of the rationalistic notes in this volume and put his editorial stamp of approval on the rest. Consider some excerpts from the notes:

INTRODUCTION TO THE OLD TESTAMENT: "The Old Testament may be described as the literary expression of the religious life of ancient Israel. ... The Israelites were more history-conscious than any other people in the ancient world. Probably as early as the time of David and Solomon, out of a matrix of myth, legend, and history, there had appeared the earliest written form of the story of the saving acts of God from Creation to the conquest of the Promised Land, an account which later in modified form became a part of Scripture. But it was to be a long time before the idea of Scripture arose and the Old Testament took its present form. ... The process by which the Jews became ‘the people of the Book’ was gradual, and the development is shrouded in the mists of history and tradition. ... The date of the final compilation of the Pentateuch or Law, which was the first corpus or larger body of literature that came to be regarded by the Jews as authoritative Scripture, is uncertain, although some have conservatively dated it at the time of the Exile in the sixth century. ... Before the adoption of the Pentateuch as the Law of Moses, there had been compiled and edited in the spirit and diction of the Deuteronomic ‘school’ the group of books consisting of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, in much their present form. ... Thus the Pentateuch took shape over a long period of time."

NOTES ON GENESIS: "[Genesis] 2.4b-3.24 ... is a different tradition from that in 1.1-2,4a, as evidenced by the flowing style and the different order of events, e.g. man is created before vegetation, animals, and woman. ... 7:16b: The Lord shut him in, a note from the early tradition, which delights in anthropomorphic touches. 7:18-20: The waters covered all the high mountains, thus threatening a confluence of the upper and lower waters (1.6). Archaeological evidence suggests that traditions of a prehistoric flood covering the whole earth are heightened versions of local inundations, e.g. in the Tigris-Euphrates basin."

NOTES ON JOB: "The ancient folktale of a patient Job (1.1-2.13; 42.7-17; Jas. 5.11) circulated orally among oriental sages in the second millennium B.C. and was probably written down in Hebrew at the time of David and Solomon or a century later (about 1000-800 B.C.)."

NOTES ON PSALM 22: "22:12-13: ... the meaning of the third line [they have pierced my hands and feet] is obscure." [Editor: No, it is not obscure; it is a prophecy of Christ’s crucifixion!]

NOTES ON ISAIAH: "Only chs. 1-39 can be assigned to Isaiah’s time; it is generally accepted that chs. 40-66 come from the time of Cyrus of Persia (539 B.C.) and later, as shown by the differences in historical background, literary style, and theological emphases. ... The contents of this section [chs. 56-66] (sometimes called Third Isaiah) suggest a date between 530 and 510 B.C., perhaps contemporary with Haggai and Zechariah (520-518); chapters 60-62 may be later."

NOTES ON JONAH: "The book is didactic narrative which has taken older material from the realm of popular legend and put it to a new, more consequential use."

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT: "Jesus himself left no literary remains; information regarding his words and works comes from his immediate followers (the apostles) and their disciples. At first this information was circulated orally. As far as we know today, the first attempt to produce a written Gospel was made by John Mark, who according to tradition was a disciple of the Apostle Peter. This Gospel, along with a collection of sayings of Jesus and several other special sources, formed the basis of the Gospels attributed to Matthew and Luke." [Editor: The Gospels, like every part of the New Testament, were written by direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. This nonsense of trying to find ‘the original source’ for the Gospels is unbelieving heresy.]

NOTES ON 2 PETER: "The tradition that this letter is the work of the apostle Peter was questioned in early times, and internal indications are almost decisive against it. ... Most scholars therefore regard the letter as the work of one who was deeply indebted to Peter and who published it under his master’s name early in the second century." [Editor: Those who believe this nonsense must think the early Christians were fools and the Holy Spirit was on a vacation.]

NOTES FROM "HOW TO READ THE BIBLE WITH UNDERSTANDING": "The opening chapters of the Old Testament deal with human origins. They are not to be read as history ... These chapters are followed by the stories of the patriarchs, which preserve ancient traditions now known to reflect the conditions of the times of which they tell, though they cannot be treated as strictly historical. ... it is not for history but for religion that they are preserved ... When we come to the books of Samuel and Kings ... Not all in these books is of the same historical value, and especially in the stories of Elijah and Elisha there are legendary elements. ... We should always remember the variety of literary forms found in the Bible, and should read a passage in the light of its own particular literary character. Legend should be read as legend, and poetry as poetry, and not with a dull prosaic and literalistic mind."

This is the same type of rationalistic wickedness that appears in Metzger’s notes in the Reader’s Digest Condensed Bible. This modernistic foolishness, of course, is a lie. The Pentateuch was written by the hand of God and Moses and completed during the 40 years of wilderness wandering hundreds of years before Samuel and the kings. The Old Testament did not arise gradually from a matrix of myth and history, but is inspired revelation delivered to holy men of old by Almighty God. The Jews were a "people of the book" from the beginning. The Jewish nation did not form the Bible; the Bible formed the Jewish nation! In Metzger’s "Introduction to the New Testament" in the New Oxford Annotated Bible, he completely ignores the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and claims that the Gospels are composed of material gathered from oral tradition. The Bible says nothing about this, but Jesus Christ plainly tells us that the Holy Spirit would guide the Apostles into all truth (John 16:7-15). The Gospels are the product of divine revelation, not some happenstance editing of oral tradition.

Bruce Metzger is a Liberal. He piously claims on one hand that the Bible is the inspired Word of God; but out of the other side of the mouth he claims the Bible is filled with myth and lies. He denies the Bible’s history, its miracles, and its authorship, while, in true liberal style, declaring that this denial does not do injustice to the Word of God, for the Bible is not "written for history but for religion" and is not to be read "with a dull prosaic and literalistic mind"!

Metzger has been called an Evangelical by some who should know better, but upon the authority of the man’s own writings, I declare that Bruce Metzger is an unbeliever. He is a false teacher. He is apostate. He is a heretic. Those are all Bible terms. Having studied many of the man’s works, I am convinced those are the terms which must be applied to him. One Baptist writer partially defended Metzger to me with these words—"he did write a superb pamphlet in 1953 refuting the Jehovah’s Witnesses and defending the full and absolute deity of Christ." Even the Pope of Rome defends the full and absolute deity of Christ. A man can defend the deity of Christ and still be a false teacher. A man who denies the written Word also denies the Living Word. They stand or fall together. If the Bible contains error, Christ was a liar. If Christ is perfect Truth, so is the Bible.

In The New Testament, Its Background, Growth, and Content, which appeared in 1965, Metzger claims that "the discipline of form criticism has enlarged our understanding of the conditions which prevailed during the years when the gospel materials circulated by word of mouth" (p. 86). Not so. Form criticism is that unbelieving discipline which claims that the Gospels were gradually formed out a matrix of tradition and myth. Form critics hold a wide variety of views (reflecting the unsettled and relativistic nature of the rationalism upon which they stand), but all of them deny that the Gospels are the perfect, verbally inspired, divinely-given, absolutely infallible Word of God. Metzger says, "What each evangelist has preserved, therefore, is not a photographic reproduction of the words and deeds of Jesus, but an interpretative portrait delineated in accord with the special needs of the early church" (Ibid.). Metzger is wrong. The Gospel writers have indeed given us, by divine revelation, a photographic reproduction of the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. Praise God for it!

KURT ALAND (1915- ) has served as coeditor of the Nestle-Aland Greek text since the 1940s. His wife, Barbara, is director of the Institute for New Testament Textual Research, Munster, Westphalia, Germany. As most Bible critics, Aland rejects verbal inspiration.

"This idea of verbal inspiration (i.e., of the literal and inerrant inspiration of the text), which the orthodoxy of both Protestant traditions maintained so vigorously, was applied to the Textus Receptus with all of its errors, including textual modifications of an obviously secondary character (as we recognize them today)" (Aland, The Problem of the New Testament Canon, 1962, pp. 6,7).

"The present state of affairs, of Christianity splintered into different churches and theological schools, is THE wound in the body. The variety in the actual Canon in its different forms is not only the standard symptom, but simultaneously also the real cause of its illness. This illness— which is in blatant conflict with the unity which is fundamental to its nature— cannot be tolerated. ... Along this road [of solving this supposed problem], at any rate, the question of the Canon will make its way to the centre of the theological and ecclesiastical debate. ... Only he who is ready to question himself and to take the other person seriously can find a way out of the circuus vitiosus in which the question of the Canon is moving today ... The first thing to be done, then, would be to examine critically one’s own selection from the formal Canon and its principles of interpretation, but all the time remaining completely alive to the selection and principles of others. ... This road will be long and laborious and painful. ... if we succeed in arriving at a Canon which is common and actual, this means the achievement of the unity of the faith, the unity of the Church" (Aland, The Problem of the New Testament Canon, 1962, pp. 30-33).

Thus we see that Aland does not believe in a settled, authoritative canon of Scripture. Everything is to be questioned; everything is open to change. He believes it is crucial that a new canon be created through ecumenical dialogue. He rejects verbal inspiration.

Friends, beware of of the modern versions. They are largely the product of men who deny the faith once delivered to the saints.

[The previous is an excerpt from Myths about Modern Bible Versions,, copyright 1999, David W. Cloud. All rights reserved. This material cannot be stored on BBS or Internet sites without permission from the author. Any articles which are redistributed by e-mail must be left intact and nothing must be removed or changed, including these informational headers. This material cannot be reprinted or duplicated, even for distribution within one church. The material is available as a booklet from Way of Life Literature. See the online catalog at http://www.wayoflife.org/catalog/index2.htm. We offer a discount for multiple copies. The sale of this material is necessary for the maintainance of this ministry. Remember, the Bible says the workman is worthy of his reward. David W. Cloud is the editor of O Timothy, a monthly magazine in its 16th year of publication. Subscription is $20/yr. Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, fbns@wayoflife.org. The Way of Life web site is http://www.wayoflife.org/.]