Please Beware of Evangelical Scholarship and “Fundamentalists” Who Love It
June 18, 2026
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061
866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
Recently we published “Joshua Barzon, Another Fundamental Baptist Voice for the Modern Versions,” Jan. 7, 2026, www.wayoflife.org.
We warned about independent Baptists such as Bryan Samms and Joshua Barzon who are promoting the modern Bible versions on the basis of insufficient knowledge of the issue.
A missionary in Mexico wrote to disagree with this report, and in trying to refute my position that 17th century biblical scholarship as represented by the Authorized Version translators was superior to evangelical biblical scholarship today. He said,
“I view this statement [‘By the early 17th century, knowledge of biblical languages was at an apex’] as false. While a higher percentage of people knew Latin and Greek, that was Attic Greek, and Koine was still viewed as a ‘spiritual language’ invented by the Christians until Adolf Deissmann found it in common use documents. We now have the works of Moulton and Milligan and others which have brought our understanding of Biblical Greek to a deeper understanding. We have the advantage of building upon the writings of the KJV translators and others of that time and since.”
I replied to this missionary as follows:
Thank you for taking the time to write about that. I read your response, and I disagree with it. Your reasoning on this issue is not good. I did directly address Barzon’s main argument and I believe I refuted it. Of course, I also pointed to much more information on the subject.
If I took the time I could refute your entire review of my little report, but I don’t consider it a worthwhile use of my time for now, at least. I am 76 and focused like a laser on certain projects, not least of which are major things we are accomplishing in South Asia, where we live.
I suspect you are on the way to where Barzon now is. His position has no stability. It is slippery evangelicalism.
I recommend Evangelicalism and the Great Apostasy and The Bible Version Hall of Shame for a better understanding of the deep corruption that has permeated evangelical scholarship.
You said, "We now have the works of Moulton and Milligan and others which have brought our understanding of Biblical Greek to a deeper understanding.”
The following is from The Modern Bible Version Hall of Shame:
GEORGE MILLIGAN (1860-1934)
1. George Milligan, Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism, Aberdeen, Scotland, was on the translation committee that produced the English Revised Version New Testament. He authored several influential books on textual criticism, such as Catalogue of an Exhibition of Bibles: in commemoration of the tercentenary of the Authorized Version 1611-1911 (Glasgow: J. Maclehose, 1911), The English Bible: a Sketch of Its History (New York: A.D. F. Randolph and Co., 1895), The New Testament and Its Transmission (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1932), The Words of the New Testament, as Altered by Transmission and Ascertained by Modern Criticism (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1873), and The Expository Value of the Revised Version (1917). Milligan co-authored with James Moulton The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament Illustrated from the Papyri and other non-Literary Sources (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1930).
2. Milligan was in the Broad Church movement within the Church of England, which made allowance for “new thinking,” particularly the German liberalism. It rejected the doctrine that the Bible is the sole revelation from God and opened itself to human wisdom and philosophy. Dr. James Sightler, in Tabernacle Essays on Bible Translation (pp. 17-18) gives 12 characteristics of the movement, seven of which were as follows: The doctrine of original sin was denied. The orthodox satisfaction theory of the atonement was denied and the moral influence theory substituted in its place, or atonement was ignored and incarnation stressed instead. Broad Church theology saw salvation not in what Christ did but in what He was, therefore not in atonement at all but in incarnation. In Christology the Broad Church teaching varied from rarely held orthodoxy, to denial of the eternal Sonship, to subordinationism and Sabellianism, and on over to outright Arianism and Socinianism. Heaven and Hell were not believed to be real places. The Resurrection of the Lord and His Ascension were spiritualized and made figurative. The resurrection of believers was also denied. Verbal inspiration of the Scripture was denied, and its authority was restricted to matters of faith and practice and then only upon authentication by human reason. Darwin’s theory of evolution was accepted.
WILLIAM FIDDIAN MOULTON (1835-98)
1. William Moulton, Master of the Leys School, Cambridge, was the youngest member of the committee that produced the English Revised Version New Testament. He was influential through his books, such as The History of the English Bible (London, 1878); Winer’s Grammar of the New Testament Greek, which he translated into English and first published in 1870; and A Concordance of the Greek New Testament (with A.S. Geden, published in 1897).
2. Moulton was in the Broad Church movement within the Church of England, which made allowance for “new thinking,” particularly the German liberalism. It rejected the doctrine that the Bible is the sole revelation from God. Dr. James Sightler, in Tabernacle Essays on Bible Translation (pp. 17-18) gives 12 characteristics of the Broad Church movement, seven of which were as follows:
The doctrine of original sin was denied.
The orthodox satisfaction theory of the atonement was denied and the moral influence theory substituted in its place, or atonement was ignored and incarnation stressed instead. Broad Church theology saw salvation not in what Christ did but in what He was, therefore not in atonement at all but in incarnation.
In Christology, the Broad Church teaching varied from rarely held orthodoxy, to denial of the eternal Sonship, to subordinationism and Sabellianism, and on over to outright Arianism and Socinianism.
Heaven and hell were not real places.
The resurrection of the Lord and His ascension were spiritualized and made figurative. The resurrection of believers was also denied.
Verbal inspiration of the Scripture was denied, and its authority was restricted to matters of faith and practice and then only upon authentication by human reason.
Darwin’s theory of evolution was accepted.
3. Moulton wielded vast influence on the English Revised Version of 1881 as well as subsequent English translations through his promotion of G.B. Winer’s work and theories on New Testament Greek. See the report on Georg Benedikt Winer (1789-1858) for more about this.
4. Moulton glorified the Rheims New Testament, the Jesuit Bible of 1582, as agreeing “with the best critical editions of the present day” (http://kjv.unsurpassed.benabraham.com/html/chapter-7.html). In his History of the Bible, Moulton said: “Hence we may expect to find that the Rhemish New Testament frequently anticipates the judgment of later scholars as to the presence or absence of certain words, clauses, or even verses. ... There are many instances (a comparatively hasty search has discovered more than forty) in which, of all versions, from Tyndale’s to the Authorized inclusive, this alone is correct in regard to the article” (p. 188).
5. William Moulton’s brother, R.G. Moulton, a professor at the liberal Chicago University, claimed that the book of Job is a parable. “But the great majority of readers will take these chapters to be part of the parable into which the history of Job has been worked up. The incidents in heaven, like the incidents of the prodigal son, they will understand to be spiritually imagined, not historically narrated” (R.G. Moulton, The Literary Study of the Bible, p. 37).
6. William’s sons Richard Green (1849-1924) and James Hope (1863-1917) followed in his footsteps in many ways. They revised their father’s The History of the English Bible.
Richard was professor of poetry at Cambridge and later professor of English at the University of Chicago. In 1907 Richard published his translation called “The Modern Reader’s Bible: The books of the Bible with three books of the Apocrypha presented in modern literary form.” In The Literary Study of the Bible (1896), Richard championed higher criticism as the saviour of the Bible, supporting the views of the theological liberal Matthew Arnold, Oxford professor of poetry, who called evangelical Bible believers such as Dwight L. Moody “Philistines” and rejected both the fall of man and redemption through Jesus Christ.
James became a Methodist minister and taught Greek and other languages at the University of Manchester and Didsbury Wesleyan College. He co-authored with George Milligan The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament Illustrated from the Papyri and other non-Literary Sources (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1930). He was an expert in the Zoroastrian religion, believing its original teachings to be “the purest and truest religion next to the Bible.” He visited India in 1917 to study the Parsees and their Zoroastrian religion. From there he went to Egypt to join Rendel Harris. He died when the ship they were traveling in across the Mediterranean was torpedoed and sunk. James Moulton denied the infallible inspiration of the Bible. He held the Form Critic approach to the Gospels, believing in the mythical “Q” document, which allegedly provided material for Matthew, Mark, and Luke. “Since, however, there is a large amount of matter, almost exclusively sayings of Jesus, common to Matthew and Luke, but not found in Mark, we postulate the use of another document [now called ‘Q’], which must have been lost very soon after the evangelists worked up its material” (James Moulton, “How We Got Our Gospels,” Egyptian Rubbish Heaps: Five Popular Lectures on the New Testament with a Sermon, delivered at Northfield, Massachusetts, in August, 1914). He believed that Matthew did not write the Gospel we have today by that name. He only wrote a collection of the sayings of Jesus and an unknown person used it to create the gospel of Matthew. “He did not write the Gospel of Matthew as we have it; but he made the collection of the Sayings of Jesus, and this collection became the principal basis of the important book which is called ‘The Gospel according to Matthew.’ This book, like so many others in Old Testament and New, comes down to us without any certainty who wrote it” (Ibid.).
We warned about independent Baptists such as Bryan Samms and Joshua Barzon who are promoting the modern Bible versions on the basis of insufficient knowledge of the issue.
A missionary in Mexico wrote to disagree with this report, and in trying to refute my position that 17th century biblical scholarship as represented by the Authorized Version translators was superior to evangelical biblical scholarship today. He said,
“I view this statement [‘By the early 17th century, knowledge of biblical languages was at an apex’] as false. While a higher percentage of people knew Latin and Greek, that was Attic Greek, and Koine was still viewed as a ‘spiritual language’ invented by the Christians until Adolf Deissmann found it in common use documents. We now have the works of Moulton and Milligan and others which have brought our understanding of Biblical Greek to a deeper understanding. We have the advantage of building upon the writings of the KJV translators and others of that time and since.”
I replied to this missionary as follows:
Thank you for taking the time to write about that. I read your response, and I disagree with it. Your reasoning on this issue is not good. I did directly address Barzon’s main argument and I believe I refuted it. Of course, I also pointed to much more information on the subject.
If I took the time I could refute your entire review of my little report, but I don’t consider it a worthwhile use of my time for now, at least. I am 76 and focused like a laser on certain projects, not least of which are major things we are accomplishing in South Asia, where we live.
I suspect you are on the way to where Barzon now is. His position has no stability. It is slippery evangelicalism.
I recommend Evangelicalism and the Great Apostasy and The Bible Version Hall of Shame for a better understanding of the deep corruption that has permeated evangelical scholarship.
You said, "We now have the works of Moulton and Milligan and others which have brought our understanding of Biblical Greek to a deeper understanding.”
The following is from The Modern Bible Version Hall of Shame:
GEORGE MILLIGAN (1860-1934)
1. George Milligan, Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism, Aberdeen, Scotland, was on the translation committee that produced the English Revised Version New Testament. He authored several influential books on textual criticism, such as Catalogue of an Exhibition of Bibles: in commemoration of the tercentenary of the Authorized Version 1611-1911 (Glasgow: J. Maclehose, 1911), The English Bible: a Sketch of Its History (New York: A.D. F. Randolph and Co., 1895), The New Testament and Its Transmission (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1932), The Words of the New Testament, as Altered by Transmission and Ascertained by Modern Criticism (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1873), and The Expository Value of the Revised Version (1917). Milligan co-authored with James Moulton The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament Illustrated from the Papyri and other non-Literary Sources (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1930).
2. Milligan was in the Broad Church movement within the Church of England, which made allowance for “new thinking,” particularly the German liberalism. It rejected the doctrine that the Bible is the sole revelation from God and opened itself to human wisdom and philosophy. Dr. James Sightler, in Tabernacle Essays on Bible Translation (pp. 17-18) gives 12 characteristics of the movement, seven of which were as follows: The doctrine of original sin was denied. The orthodox satisfaction theory of the atonement was denied and the moral influence theory substituted in its place, or atonement was ignored and incarnation stressed instead. Broad Church theology saw salvation not in what Christ did but in what He was, therefore not in atonement at all but in incarnation. In Christology the Broad Church teaching varied from rarely held orthodoxy, to denial of the eternal Sonship, to subordinationism and Sabellianism, and on over to outright Arianism and Socinianism. Heaven and Hell were not believed to be real places. The Resurrection of the Lord and His Ascension were spiritualized and made figurative. The resurrection of believers was also denied. Verbal inspiration of the Scripture was denied, and its authority was restricted to matters of faith and practice and then only upon authentication by human reason. Darwin’s theory of evolution was accepted.
WILLIAM FIDDIAN MOULTON (1835-98)
1. William Moulton, Master of the Leys School, Cambridge, was the youngest member of the committee that produced the English Revised Version New Testament. He was influential through his books, such as The History of the English Bible (London, 1878); Winer’s Grammar of the New Testament Greek, which he translated into English and first published in 1870; and A Concordance of the Greek New Testament (with A.S. Geden, published in 1897).
2. Moulton was in the Broad Church movement within the Church of England, which made allowance for “new thinking,” particularly the German liberalism. It rejected the doctrine that the Bible is the sole revelation from God. Dr. James Sightler, in Tabernacle Essays on Bible Translation (pp. 17-18) gives 12 characteristics of the Broad Church movement, seven of which were as follows:
The doctrine of original sin was denied.
The orthodox satisfaction theory of the atonement was denied and the moral influence theory substituted in its place, or atonement was ignored and incarnation stressed instead. Broad Church theology saw salvation not in what Christ did but in what He was, therefore not in atonement at all but in incarnation.
In Christology, the Broad Church teaching varied from rarely held orthodoxy, to denial of the eternal Sonship, to subordinationism and Sabellianism, and on over to outright Arianism and Socinianism.
Heaven and hell were not real places.
The resurrection of the Lord and His ascension were spiritualized and made figurative. The resurrection of believers was also denied.
Verbal inspiration of the Scripture was denied, and its authority was restricted to matters of faith and practice and then only upon authentication by human reason.
Darwin’s theory of evolution was accepted.
3. Moulton wielded vast influence on the English Revised Version of 1881 as well as subsequent English translations through his promotion of G.B. Winer’s work and theories on New Testament Greek. See the report on Georg Benedikt Winer (1789-1858) for more about this.
4. Moulton glorified the Rheims New Testament, the Jesuit Bible of 1582, as agreeing “with the best critical editions of the present day” (http://kjv.unsurpassed.benabraham.com/html/chapter-7.html). In his History of the Bible, Moulton said: “Hence we may expect to find that the Rhemish New Testament frequently anticipates the judgment of later scholars as to the presence or absence of certain words, clauses, or even verses. ... There are many instances (a comparatively hasty search has discovered more than forty) in which, of all versions, from Tyndale’s to the Authorized inclusive, this alone is correct in regard to the article” (p. 188).
5. William Moulton’s brother, R.G. Moulton, a professor at the liberal Chicago University, claimed that the book of Job is a parable. “But the great majority of readers will take these chapters to be part of the parable into which the history of Job has been worked up. The incidents in heaven, like the incidents of the prodigal son, they will understand to be spiritually imagined, not historically narrated” (R.G. Moulton, The Literary Study of the Bible, p. 37).
6. William’s sons Richard Green (1849-1924) and James Hope (1863-1917) followed in his footsteps in many ways. They revised their father’s The History of the English Bible.
Richard was professor of poetry at Cambridge and later professor of English at the University of Chicago. In 1907 Richard published his translation called “The Modern Reader’s Bible: The books of the Bible with three books of the Apocrypha presented in modern literary form.” In The Literary Study of the Bible (1896), Richard championed higher criticism as the saviour of the Bible, supporting the views of the theological liberal Matthew Arnold, Oxford professor of poetry, who called evangelical Bible believers such as Dwight L. Moody “Philistines” and rejected both the fall of man and redemption through Jesus Christ.
James became a Methodist minister and taught Greek and other languages at the University of Manchester and Didsbury Wesleyan College. He co-authored with George Milligan The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament Illustrated from the Papyri and other non-Literary Sources (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1930). He was an expert in the Zoroastrian religion, believing its original teachings to be “the purest and truest religion next to the Bible.” He visited India in 1917 to study the Parsees and their Zoroastrian religion. From there he went to Egypt to join Rendel Harris. He died when the ship they were traveling in across the Mediterranean was torpedoed and sunk. James Moulton denied the infallible inspiration of the Bible. He held the Form Critic approach to the Gospels, believing in the mythical “Q” document, which allegedly provided material for Matthew, Mark, and Luke. “Since, however, there is a large amount of matter, almost exclusively sayings of Jesus, common to Matthew and Luke, but not found in Mark, we postulate the use of another document [now called ‘Q’], which must have been lost very soon after the evangelists worked up its material” (James Moulton, “How We Got Our Gospels,” Egyptian Rubbish Heaps: Five Popular Lectures on the New Testament with a Sermon, delivered at Northfield, Massachusetts, in August, 1914). He believed that Matthew did not write the Gospel we have today by that name. He only wrote a collection of the sayings of Jesus and an unknown person used it to create the gospel of Matthew. “He did not write the Gospel of Matthew as we have it; but he made the collection of the Sayings of Jesus, and this collection became the principal basis of the important book which is called ‘The Gospel according to Matthew.’ This book, like so many others in Old Testament and New, comes down to us without any certainty who wrote it” (Ibid.).
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