Editing God: Textual Criticism and Modern Bibles Analyzed

By Michael D. Fortner

(Version 1.4 March, 2023) The KJV Only (KJO) believers accuse modern Bibles of being corrupt because they remove many words and phrases and even whole verses, removing enough text to equal 1st and 2nd Peter, and make many other changes. So the author investigated the issue. The question he set out to answer was, are the claims of the KJO believers accurate, or are the modern Bibles more accurate than the KJV?
The author never expected his investigation to turn into a book, because there are already several books supporting both sides. However, his skill-set is thinking outside the box and figuring things out, as seen in his other books. As such, he has some new insights and surprising discoveries to offer. The reader will learn that the Greek text of the KJV is not as corrupt as we have been told and that modern Bibles are far more corrupt than you would ever imagine.

Westcott and Hort, the creators of the questioned Greek New Testament text, both despised evangelicals and their literal view of Scripture. There are many quotes from them proving their liberal unbelief. Though they were officially Anglican bishops, they were actually secret Unitarians because only members of the Church of England could be college professors or hold a government job. So they kept their liberal unbelief a secret, but it was revealed after their deaths by the publication of their private letters. 

Their purpose was to produce a liberal Bible that Unitarians, then and today, love. The advocates for the modern Bible versions want us to believe that all the modern Bibles are the authentic Words of God, even though they are all different. The modern translations pretty much include or leave out what they want, since that was how the Greek master-text was created. It causes people to doubt the reliability of the Bible, and to doubt the truth of Christianity. Apparently, God cannot make up his mind what he wants to say, so he says whatever these "experts" want him to say, and it changes with each new edition of the Greek master-text, and each new translation that comes out.

 

NOTICE: A reviewer of this book falsely said that John Wycliffe did not die of a stroke; he did.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trumpet Press
• Release date: Feb 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9798201234492

Michael D. Fortner

The author is a journalist and historian, with a God-give ability to figure things out and to think outside the box. He researched Bible prophecy for 30 years before writing his book series. He is also the author of The Almost True Yet False Prophet, The Truth About United Flight 93: A Reasonable Analysis of the Evidence, Discoveries in Bible Prophecy, Satan's False Prophets Exposed, and Editing God: Textual Criticism and Modern Bibles Analyized.

Book preview

Editing God

Textual Criticism and Modern Bibles Analyzed

Michael D. Fortner

Trumpet Press, Lawton, OK

First Edition Copyright 2019

Version 1.4 March, 2023

Death of Tyndale corrected, one irrelevant paragraph deleted, added some commas and semicolons.

Learn about other books by the author and watch videos at www.michaelfortner.com Version 1.3.3 copyright 2022 Michael Fortner

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without written permission by the copyright holder.

"Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society"

Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Dedication

About the Author

A Note From the Author

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Beginning

Chapter 2: God’s Providence

Chapter 3: Higher and Lower Criticism

Chapter 4: The Sinaiticus and The Vaticanus

Chapter 5: English Revised Version

Chapter 6: Westcott and Hort

Chapter 7: Unbelieving Text Critics

Chapter 8: The Changes

Chapter 9: Problems in The New Versions

Chapter 10: The Last Twelve Verses of Mark

Chapter 11: Why the Text is Shorter

Chapter 12: Byzantine Text

Chapter 13: Erasmus

Chapter 14: The Peshitta

Chapter 15: Negative Effects of Textual Criticism

Chapter 16: Distortions and Lies

Chapter 17: Which Bible?

Chapter 18: Conclusion

Bibliography

Dedication

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED to all the seekers of truth everywhere, who go against the flow and believe truth whenever they find it, even if it goes against the teaching of science, religion, history, medicine, or whatever field it may be.

About the Author

MICHAEL D. FORTNER is a journalist (B.A.) and historian with a God-given ability to figure things out and to think outside the box. He is the editor of The Book of Enoch Updated, and The Sibylline Oracles: Revised and Updated.

Bible Prophecy Revealed: 2023

The Fall of Babylon and The Final Antichrist

The Approaching Apocalypse and Three Days of Darkness

Satan’s False Prophets Exposed

A Note From the Author

YOU WILL NOTICE THAT in this book there are no endnotes at the end of the chapter or the end of the book. The reason there are no endnotes is because it is very troublesome for a reader to look up a note which may have some important information that will go unread or may only be Ibid. It is especially difficult to have endnotes with an eBook; therefore, the print and eBook editions of this book have been formatted exactly the same, with notes within the text.

Even though I use the NIV as the main translation in this book, I occasionally give a verse in the KJV or Green’s Literal Translation (LIT) or some other version in order to get a better sense of its meaning. Sometimes it takes reading a verse in several translations to see clearly what it actually means in the original Greek or Hebrew. Using a different translation does not mean I endorse the entire translation.

Also, all underlining or other emphasis in this book is my own, and is never found in the original quotes.

Where necessary, I cite references and tell you where I get information and interpretation; other than that, you can assume that the interpretation is my own; about 99% of this book is my own interpretation. Even when I quote others, I often will make observations related to the quote which are not found in the original information.

Now a word about quotes. Because of the misuse of source material in other books, from science to religion, some people will suspect that I have taken passages out of context or that I have misrepresented what the prophecy actually says, so I include the actual quotes so you can read them for yourself, at least most of the time. And it is important that you read the quotes to get the most out of this book; I assume that you will read the Scripture passages.

Virtually all of the quotes in this book can be verified using the internet, by consulting Google Books, the Internet Archive, various websites, and even Amazon.com’s Look Inside the Book feature. However, one book that is out of print is not found in any of the above places, which is, A History of the Revised Version of the New Testament, by Samuel Hemphill, 1906. So I had to rely on quotes found in And the Darkness Comprehended it Not, by A. Adrian Bacon, and For Love of the Bible, by David W. Cloud.

Introduction

THE KING JAMES ONLY (KJO) believers accuse modern Bibles of being corrupt because they remove many words and phrases and even whole verses; removing enough text to equal 1st and 2nd Peter, and make many other changes. So I investigated the issue. The question I set out to answer was, are the claims of the KJO group accurate, or are the modern Bibles more accurate than the KJV?

I never expected my investigation to turn into a book because there are already several books supporting both sides, however, my skill-set is thinking outside the box and figuring things out, as seen in my other books; so I have some new insights and surprising discoveries to offer.

The reader will learn that the textbase of the KJV, called the Textus Receptus, is not as corrupt as we have been told and that modern Bibles are far more corrupt than you would ever imagine. This book will make the KJO proponents unhappy, but those who promote the modern Bibles based on a Greek text created by B. Westcott (1825-1901) and F. Hort (1828-1892) (WH), will be very upset.

I originally read the KJV, then as a teenager, I loved the NIV, but I was troubled by footnotes that said some verses are not found in the "oldest and best manuscripts. I wrongly believed that the experts" knew what they were doing.

Several decades later, as a researcher, journalist, and historian, I learned that most modern Bibles were translated from a Greek master-text different from the Greek text used for the KJV. I read websites and books full of information presented by the King James Only advocates, and the supporters of the modern Bibles. As it turns out, the WH text was made by putting together mainly two Bibles copied in the 4th century. The problem is the texts of those two Bibles were likely created by heretics and are so corrupt they disagree with each other over 3,000 times in the Gospels alone. So I understand why many people have rebelled against the modern Bibles, and use only the King James Version.

I originally discounted the whole King James Only idea, because I have used many different translations and also looked up words in the original Greek using Greek/English dictionaries; so I know that the KJV is not perfect. But I was surprised when I learned that almost all modern translations are based on Greek texts that were adulterated by heretics like the Gnostics and Arians.

A major problem is that many KJO believers have gone to an extreme by teaching that the English of the KJV translation is itself divinely inspired, and therefore perfect, without a single word or verse that could be translated better. This is sad because it causes many people to reject their argument completely, including the information against the WH text, and accept the modern versions which are indeed corrupt.

However, I must give credit and thanks to the KJO group for keeping alive the truth about the modern versions being corrupt. Without them, the Christian public may never have gotten exposed to the whole truth of the matter and may have completely accepted the modern versions.

There are other people who are not KJO who also reject the WH text and the modern Bibles, but they are small in number and not very vocal. This group includes a small number of text experts who support the Majority Text (MT), which is a compiled text made from the majority of Greek manuscripts (MSS), which is only slightly different from the text-base of the KJV called the Textus Receptus (TR). They oppose the WH-based modern Bibles.

The change from the Textus Receptus (TR) to Bibles made from Westcott and Hort’s Greek text began in 1881. Revisions of their text have become the foundation of all modern Bibles except for the New King James Version, the Modern English Version (MEV), and several King James updates like the Modern KJV.

I have never been a KJV advocate, and much prefer the wording of modern Bibles, especially the NIV, and have used it as the primary text in several of my other books. But it is plagued by the same issues as most other modern Bibles; many words, phrases, and whole verses removed and even more changed.

For those of you who are just learning about this subject, I will present a concise history of how we got the KJV and our modern Bibles, what textual criticism is and how the textual critics often engage in faulty reasoning.

I have long prayed that God would give us a better translation based on the TR, which happened with the MEV, but it is still not perfect. Though it is much better than the KJV and even the NKJV, because the wording of the NKJV is not great, and the translators could not resist shedding doubt by saying the "oldest and best" manuscripts don’t have certain verses, even though they included them.

Westcott and Hort, the creators of the corrupted Greek New Testament text, were both liberal Cambridge professors who despised evangelicals and their literal view of Scripture. I have many quotes from them proving their unbelief. Hort, especially, was an unbeliever who said there was more truth in Greek philosophy than in revelation, meaning the Bible.

Though they were officially Anglican bishops, they were likely secret Unitarians because only members of the Church of England could be college professors or hold a government job. So they kept their liberal unbelief a secret, but it was revealed after their deaths by the publication of their private letters. Their plan, which they executed with great success, was to produce a liberal Bible that Unitarians, then and today, love.

They even confessed their plot to make many small changes that may not seem important, and just "appear to be trifling alterations, Hort said. But taken together the accumulation of small details then produces its full effect," said Westcott.

Advocates for the modern Bible versions want us to believe that all the modern Bibles are the authentic Words of God, even though they are all different. The modern translations pretty much include or leave out whatever they want, since that was how the Greek master-text was created. One Bible includes a particular verse, another Bible leaves it out; one says one thing, another says something else. It causes people to doubt the accuracy of the Bible, and to doubt the truth of Christianity.

Apparently, God cannot make up his mind what he wants to say, so he says whatever these experts want him to say, and it changes with each new edition of the Greek master-text, and each new translation that comes out. Some people have actually lost their Christian faith because of it (examples are given). Even some textual critics themselves lost their faith and became unbelievers, such as Bart Ehrman. He now writes books about the Bible in an effort to make other people become agnostic like he became.

The modern Bibles have received so much condemnation that the advocates are blaming the King James Only believers for it, but they are NOT the ones who are causing people to doubt, but the corrupted Bibles. The KJO movement is merely pointing out the corruption in the modern Bibles.

Text critics will have you believe that it is not necessary to be a God-fearing Christian full of the Holy Spirit to edit the very Words of God, but only have a command of ancient Greek. But the Bible says that only by the Holy Spirit can anyone understand what the Bible means, yet we are expected to let unbelievers decide what the actual Words of God are! Abomination! And that is exactly what you get when you have an agnostic like Bart Ehrman dissecting the Bible and deciding what God said or did not say.

But what is also a huge travesty, is that conservative Bible-believing Christians have adopted the WH text and their faulty ideas. They are even writing books for the sole purpose of trying to convince the Christian public that the modern Bibles are the reliable Word of God. Shameful.

The Greek text used for the KJV became known as the Textus Receptus (TR). I know that it is not perfect and needs to be corrected in several places, but textual experts did not set out to correct the TR, they threw it in the trash while compiling a different Greek text from old Bibles that have clearly been grossly corrupted. And they teach in seminaries and Christian colleges that the KJV is corrupt and that the Greek text it was made from is corrupt, even that the entire family of MSS the Greek text was based on is corrupt, so they claim!

The first official English translation done after the KJV, was supposed to be a revision of the KJV, but WH and a few others on the translation committee, dominated the proceedings and went far beyond the original mandate for the revision and made so many changes to the English Revised Version (RV) that it closely resembles the Greek text created by WH. This caused several members of the committee to publically renounce the RV translation after it was completed.

This book includes the story of how all this came about, starting with how Gnostics and other heretics corrupted many copies of the Bible, and then to the Greek text that Westcott and Hort (WH) created; to the first English translation they produced; to the corruptions they put in our modern Bibles, and why they are errors.

However, because I don’t read Greek, I am not writing as a Greek expert, as some of the previous authors on this subject, but merely as a Christian journalist and historian who believes the Holy Spirit is still active and guiding his people today. So this is not a scholarly book, this is a book of historical analysis, and spiritual observations and insights, with a lot of quotes from the textual experts who have not drunk the Kool-Aid.

Even though supporters of the corrupted Bibles dominate the field, a few scholars with multiple degrees have written against the WH text for 150 years, but their words have been ignored by the Christian seminaries and Bible publishers. Therefore, I am compelled to write yet another book on the subject, because it is of eternal importance.

Temperate, sincere, and intelligent inquiry and discussion are only to be dread by the advocates of error. The truth need not fear them. . . (Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813)

Chapter 1: The Beginning

THE FIRST WE HEAR OF Satan in the Bible he causes Eve to doubt what God said, "Has God said, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?" (Gen. 3:1). His number one attack has always been to cause people to doubt God’s Truth, and the only way we can know God’s truth is by reading the Bible.

Prior to the arrival of modern Bibles, people did not have great doubts about the Word of God, but now with each new translation saying something different, and with many verses and phrases removed from most of them, doubts are growing. It causes people to doubt when they read, that the "oldest and best" manuscripts do not have this or that verse.

So why do modern Bibles say those things, and why are they so different from each other? We will begin by looking at the big picture of how we got the Bible. There will be many details presented throughout this book; even though details are important, it is just as important to zoom out and look at the big picture.

The Early Texts

In the early years of Christianity, the Christians studied the Old Testament and the newly written letters; "daily examining the Scriptures, to find out if these things were so" (Acts 17:11). When the books were written that eventually became the New Testament, they were copied and spread far and wide. Paul even gave instructions that his letters should be spread to other congregations:

When this epistle is read among you, ensure that it is read also in the church of the Laodiceans, and that you, likewise, read the epistle from Laodicea. (Col 4:16) (MEV)

This began the practice of spreading Paul’s letters, which resulted in collections of his letters. The gospels were also written, circulated, collected, and then circulated as a collection. As the number of churches grew, more copies of the existing books were needed, so more copies were made.

Some of the books of the Bible were written down on papyrus by the author’s own hand, while some authors dictated to a scribe. Paul states clearly in several places that he used a scribe for at least some of his letters. At the end of Colossians, there is a note added by the two scribes. This note is included in the KJV, but left out in all other versions:

The salutation by the hand of me Paul. Remember my bonds. Grace be with you. Amen. Written from Rome to Colossians by Tychicus and Onesimus. (4:18)

Even Jerome dictated his writing to a scribe. Since the printing press had not been invented, all books were hand-copied on papyrus, a primitive form of paper, or on animal skin. Some scribes were professional, some semi-professional, others were amateurs with various levels of skill.

Books of that era were first written in scrolls, but that is not efficient when you have many books. So the codex was invented, either by the Romans or Christians. A codex was made by taking several pages of papyri, then later parchment, folding them and stacking them up and sewing them together into a modern-type book. They even had covers of wood or just a piece of thick leather.

Various manuscript discoveries indicate that the codex was the widely established Christian practice by the early second century. (The Heresy of Orthodoxy, Michael J. Kruger and Andreas J. Kostenberger, p. 193.)

And so codices of the Bible were widely copied and distributed throughout the Roman Empire. Wherever Christian churches were founded, the texts quickly followed. And you would expect this to happen because the public reading of Bible texts made up the major portion of the services at that time. In 1 Tim. 4:13 Paul tells Timothy to devote himself to the public reading of Scripture.

Detractors of the Bible try to tell us that the copyists were all amateurs who made so many mistakes that we cannot know what the original words of the Bible were. But this is not true:

We have little reason to think that early Christianity was a movement of illiterate peasants that would have been unable to reliably transmit their own writings. Instead, Christianity was a movement that was economically and socially average—representing a variety of different classes—and had a relatively sophisticated literary culture that was committed from its earliest days to the texts of the Jewish scripture as it sought to produce and copy texts of its own. (The Heresy of Orthodoxy, Kruger, page 186.)

Haines-Eitzen said most of "The earliest copyists of Christian literature were trained professional scribes," (Guardians of Letters, p. 68. quoted in, Ibid, page 190). That is understandable, because papyri, parchment, and ink were all expensive. Each sheet of papyri was handmade from the stems of a water plant, plus writing with a sharpened stick was very difficult, so you hired a professional to write a letter or make a copy of one for you.

[T]he fact that a number of early Christian manuscripts contained an impressive amount of punctuation and readers’ aids—which are rare even in literary papyri—suggests that early Christian scribes were more in tune with professional book production than often realized. (Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, page 188)

It was an established practice of the time to keep a copy of each letter or document you wrote and sent off. Even though the original of each Christian book was used to make other copies, minor mistakes did happen. During those long days, occasionally a scribe would get tired and would write down a wrong word, or skip a word, or transpose two words. Anyone who has done any transcribing can understand how easy it is to make a mistake. However, "the vast majority of textual variations are insignificant and irrelevant to determining the original text of the New Testament" (Ibid, page 218). Even today, these minor mistakes are easy to find and recognize by comparing several copies of the same text.

Even professional scribes made mistakes, this was why scriptoriums would always proofread