Steven Avery
Administrator
7/19/2016 - Letter to Asahel Adams after an in person meeting at the Homestead Heritage Cafe and land.
Discussion of an important section in the Homestead Heritage book. Small modifications made for this article.
In this Q13, Homestead Heritage is simply following the deficient pseudo-scholarly writers whose purpose was to gloss over the thousands of new corruptions that were in the versions built on the Westcott-Hort recension. This is the recension using the heavily corrupt, full of omissions, reader digest style Codex Vaticanus as a type of proof text. So in the late 1800s these men came up with a new schema of statistical charlatanism about the purity of the Bible. Originally, they were trying to replace the earlier positions of actual Bible belief such as in the Westminster Confession and they still wanted the Bible to be considered as sort of pure. They also changed apologetics to only be involving invisible, ethereal original autographs (Question 36), not any Bible or version we actually read.
All the quote and information sources are coming from individuals writing with the presupposition of the superiority and accuracy of the hortian Critical Text and its theories and conclusions and confusions. These men presuppose the Alexandrian text (Vaticanus primacy) viewpoint. Ironically, this is the Alexandrian textual viewpoint that you, Asahel, quite properly reject and dismiss with a smile, and is ostensibly denied by Homestead Heritage today. Thus when these writers, in the quotes in Question 13, quote numbers as to how many variants there are, or significant variants, or percents, the numbers are quoted from the totally errant perspective of the hortian proponent (as their presupposition).
Technically, one major fallacy involved in almost all these statistics is the fallacy of exclusion, where the statistics are not based on all the evidence, but are based on and biased towards a preselected subset. To make it worse, this is an exclusion that you claim to reject, where the data accepted is the Alexandrian variants and text. And these are contra the Greek Byzantine and Received Text. So for you to quote the fallacious statistics is a real problem.
The writers you quote are men who have (or who are, in the secondary and tertiary source parrot chain, themselves using data from men who have) pre-discarded much of the pure Bible text.
Such as the
24 verses (12+12) of the traditional Mark ending and the
incredible Pericope Adulterae. Or
“Father forgive them..”. Or the
doxology of Matthew 6:13.
The loss of the heavenly witnesses.
Or losing the full sense of the angel troubling the water in John 5.
Or the ascension of Jesus in Luke 24:51 that agrees with the also-missing ascension in the Mark ending.
The list here will be long and distinguished Bible verses, omissions in the Critical Text (the English modern versions themselves vary greatly as to how they handle their embarrassing source text, often they try to fake out their own readership by crafty use of notes and fonts. In such cases they are hypocritical because they say on one hand the section or verse is not the word of God, on the other hand they try to give the reader a different impression.) And then you have the multifold corruptions, as well, such as losing “God was manifest in the flesh” and having an only-begotten God.
Please note that James White, a shill for the modern versions who you indicated is a source of much of your information, makes the same types of errors with these numbers. Beyond that, he actually makes a big point of how he will not accept or use such Bible verses and would like to take them out of the Bible. Daniel Wallace does similar. Caveat emptor.
The islamists and skeptics and atheists and others contra the Bible are not dumb, so they run with all the double-minded error about the word of God from the modern version hortian shills and proponents. They will gladly point out all the opposition of White and Wallace against the traditional Bible sections and verses as their proof of the corruption of the Bible (look at the glee of the islamists on youtube in quoting James White) and in fact they do have a point because of all the worthless Alexandrian corruptions that are in the plethora of modern corruption versions from the Version of the Month Club today.
This faux presuppositional view towards the modern version Critical Text taints every quote and reference in Q13, since these men, in coming up with the statistics you use, will assume that massively supported Byzantine and Received Text readings are false. And thus the pure Bible readings do not even have to be considered in the equation, in giving numbers and percents and significance.
e.g. The absence of the Mark ending and the Pericope Adulterae are considered as certainties, as not scripture (today, in the UBS A-B-C-D scale, they are given an “A” is certain). This is simply a bogus analysis. Therefore, by the charlatan reasoning, they can be left out in giving numbers.
Does Homestead Heritage agree that these 24 verses are to be stricken out of all their Bibles, versions and editions? Have you taken a magic marker to 40-odd NT verses that are omitted from the Critical Text as not scripture? In our discussion, you said “no”. Even Joel Stein, in our correspondence, implies no. My conjecture is that your magic marker will hit about five verses, although you do not say anything directly.
Thus, we have your quotation and analysis sources in
Q13: Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton Hort, Philip Schaff, Benjamin Warfield, Frederic Kenyon, F. F. Bruce, Norman Geisler and William Nix, and Josh McDowell.
Westcott and Hort are the main source, and they, as men that were buffeted by occult forces, in fact created the modern versions through the Westcott and Hort recension. After about a century, from Griesbach on, of men trying erratically to attack the Reformation Bible, with wildly differing attempts, the dynamic duo of Westcott and Hort followed the deceiver and parleyed their efforts to create the decrepit Revision and a corrupt Greek New Testament. This gave a brand new text, never remotely seen before, using Vaticanus as a base augmented by Sinaiticus (which can properly be seen as an 1800s fake). And the contras rallied around their myriad errors and blunders, and from that point on we have a parrot festival of misinformation. And your using the errors and disinformation from these men will only make you accomplices in the Alexandrian text deceptions that are common fare today. They are statistical charlatans. On top of that, the last two apologist sources include an incredible blunder, which made it to the Homestead Heritage literature as a truth.
My conjecture for Asi: all this statistical error and disinformation is what happens when Joel Stein is the conduit on textual matters for the information used by Blair Adams. The result is embarrassing to Homestead Heritage. Beyond that, it will deceive those members who are similarly unaware. Looking it over in total, I can see only two possibilities.
#1: Joel does not really understand these issues, or
#2: he writes for convenience, cherry-picking false and errant quotes in order to make superficial talking points.
Without real concern for the accuracy and truth of what is asserted. (If you wonder why this does not go to the researcher, Joel decided not to hear anything from me unless I first accepted his overall viewpoint and authority through the Homestead ministry on these issues. Which of course is totally impossible. Plus, Joel's name is not on the byline, not even as the researcher, which is itself a bit puzzling. Also puzzling is the 1978 copyright notice. I was in New Jersey in 1978 and my remembrance is that we had no literature of this nature.)
As to the two possibilities:
#1, Joel (and any primary helpers that have come on board with authority) should study afresh and/or retire from the Bible textual research field. Allowing that he may still be fine on apologetics in areas like science and history, creation and archaeology. If
#2, there is a real integrity concern. I speak straight on this aware that it may lead to some voices saying even more loudly “you can not listen to the donkey, he does not accept our authority on these issues”. Whether you object to what I am saying or not, the point itself would be 100% true, yep, I do not accept any presumed authority you claim to choose or to determine the pure word of God. And if it is perversely said that my faith in the word of God, the scriptures that I read and study with joy,
2 Timothy 2:15
Study to shew thyself approved unto God,
a workman that needeth not to be ashamed,
rightly dividing the word of truth.
the tangible, readable, inspired and preserved, infallible and inerrant, pure and perfect, word of God … is heretical, then we are essentially brought back to a confession:
Acts 24:14
But this I confess unto thee,
that after the way which they call heresy,
so worship I the God of my fathers,
believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets:
Not 87.5% truth … not 98.33% .. Or 95% .. all things in the scriptures, OT and NT, are what I believe. From the pure and perfect word of God.
And I also do not accept your perverse claim that there should be errors in the scriptures (Q34, covered below) that the plumb line should be flawed and uncertain and skewed. This simply makes no sense. When my dedication to truth on these matters is in some sense accused of being supposedly heretical, I simply smile, under the aegis of the Holy Spirit and in conformity with the scriptures.
And now I will go down the first part of the Question 13 section linearly:
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The New Testament in the original Greek (1881)
Introduction to the American Edition
Philip Schaff
https://archive.org/stream/newtestamentinor01west#page/n59/mode/2up
While you referenced the very similar 1883:
http://archive.org/stream/companiontogreek00scharich#page/176/mode/2up
and the 150k number is ancient history.
False non-scholarship.
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Plus, you should note that a “different reading” can itself be as much as the inclusion or omission of a full verse, or 12 full verses (counted as only one reading.) In such a section, the one variant has multiple meanings and various doctrines are involved.
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In fact, it is easy to find 500 textual variants in the NT of real solid “significance”. The “Magic Marker” page of Brandon Staggs (author of the Swordsearcher software and involved in a fascinating vidoe back-and-forth with James White on Acts 8:37 and a truly wonderful gentleman) is excellently done, and has about 200 glaring omissions. And I can show you a totally different list of 25 hard errors in the Critical Text New Testament. Will Kinney and Ken Matto and others have research writings on 100s of other variants where there are real problems caused by the Alexandrian corruption, which is usually ultra-minority in the Greek ms line. So, on any “significance” the number is easily in the thousands, on glaring significance, 500 is a reasonable number, within the under 8,000 verses. In fact, looking at the language used, it is hard to find a “textual meaning” that is not “significant”, so the very claim itself is word-parsing of no substance.
Proverbs 30:5
Every word of God is pure:
he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him.
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In fact, the very concepts of Bible infallibility and inerrancy were radically changed to accommodate all the new errors brought into the versions and the new concept of a probability text.
Articles of faith everywhere can be different, the situation is even worse today when you consider the tendency to cherry-pick the actual English version text from dozens of available versions. Find the version that you feel matches your eschatology or soteriology at specific points. Even basic issues like young earth creationism or the words condemning sodomy can be made comportable to errant and perverse views, by searching around. You can even go to The Message, if you want a new age flair under the veneer of supposedly “Christian” views.
In fact, the public discussion by Christians of the Bible has become one big mumble-jumble of competing texts and translations. The center does not hold. Each one supports their views by whatever texts are available. Homestead Heritage does similar when it rummages through the versions looking for a text that can be used to support their doctrines. (This does not mean that any particular doctrine is false, it simply means that the Homestead Heritage smorgasbord approach will give unreliable results that should be rejected.)
There is an important and incredible exception, however, with Reformation Bible and those who esteem the Authorized Version as God’s pure word. They can seek to reason together, to discern sound doctrine, with the straight and true plumb line. Thank you Lord Jesus for your pure word.
Psalm 12:6-7
The words of the LORD are pure words:
as silver tried in a furnace of earth,
purified seven times.
Thou shalt keep them, O LORD,
thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.
Psalm 119:140
Thy word is very pure:
therefore thy servant loveth it.
The claim (article of faith .. precept of duty) given by Homestead Heritage is simply the parroting of word parsing from Philip Schaff designed (consciously or not) to deceive the reader about the significance of the words of God. A whole industry developed around corruption version pseudo-apologetics.
A major element of this was Benjamin Warfield’s abandonment of infallibility and inerrancy apologetics in any tangible, readable Bible. The traditional view defended the source language texts, the Reformation Bibles from the Received Text, as the inspired and preserved apographa. And with the translations into English and other languages being fully capable of being invested with the same properties of excellence, majesty and accuracy. This Warfieldian (and later, Chicago Statement) change, to what is essentially a laughable new doctrine (infallibility and inerrancy in an unknown and unknowable text), spearheaded by Warfield, was a necessary and important compliment to the nouveau Westcott and Hort recension corrupt text, with its many hard errors. Warfield had to deal with the new concept of the textual criticism probability text, which can change any year as theories change, as new textual discoveries are found or faked, and the text can even vary among each individual proponent. No verse is really sure. This change to ethereal, unknown and unknowable autographs from Warfield was necessary in order to keep a veneer of evangelicism. In your book, you support this disaster.
Returning to the “articles of faith…” .. to have any meaning at all, first you would have to clearly and precisely define what is every “article of faith” and every “precept of duty”. Which is never done. Would you accept as true and complete a list of “articles of faith” and “precepts of duty” given by Philip Schaff? Do you agree with Schaff that the verses affect some passages on the “doctrine of the Trinity”? Or do you agree with revision scholar George Vance Smith? (Who denied even the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ and emphasized how important the Revision was for his doctrinal viewpoints, see “Texts and margins of the revised New Testament affecting theological doctrine briefly reviewed.”) Surely, you do not think that Schaff was talking of the Homestead Heritage “articles of faith”!
Please, let us strive for some consistency and scholastic honesty. Let’s eschew the quote-snippet mentality. Lets avoid vagaries like unknown “articles of faith”.
Ironically, Schaff even quotes Richard Bentley and the unitarian Ezra Abbott (who was against worship of the Lord Jesus Christ, as a “creature”, which made the American Revision notes) in making these claims. Richard Bentley was attempting to parry Anthony Collins, who was analogous to Bart Ehrman today, so at least that could be an interesting historical study.
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Now, the 19/20th is technically accurate in the sense that there really are less than 20,000 of the 400,000 Greek ms textual variants that have any real pizazz or significance. A good number is 5,000 overall, translatable, although of course only 1,000 or so are glaring. However, sometimes what looks like a piddle corruption (e.g the faux ultra-minority grammar of a demon being personified in Mark) can have major implications in the rolly-bolly world of New Testament exegesis.
Anyway, all this 19/20th stuff is generally irrelevant. Similar number juggling was used by Daniel Wallace in his own special case of statistical illiteracy where he bases statistical manipulation on misplacing large numbers, in a grossly deficient attempt to attack both the Received Text and the Greek Byzantine Majority Texts.
When this irrelevancy that you quote is given with a reference it goes like this:
"Dr. Ezra Abbott was accustomed to remark that
‘about nineteen-twentieths of the variations have so little support that, although there are various readings, no one would think of them as rival readings, and nineteen-twentieths of the remainder are of so little importance that their adoption or rejection would cause no appreciable difference in the sense of the passages in which they occur.’ “
An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (1887)
Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield
https://books.google.com/books?id=ZWINAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA14
Warfield was working with 200,000 variants, with 400,000 variants that would leave 1,000 appreciable differences. 400,000 x .05 x. .05 = 1,000. Do you see how charlatans can play with numbers by emphasizing and doing the math on the irrelevant large numbers? Sounds impressive, means nothing. Like the 400,000 total variants. Why not simply say .. “There are 500 or 1000 appreciable differences” (really the number is 1000s.) Simply because it is harder to be a charlatan if you speak accurately.
A longer Ezra Abbot quote, with its own nuances and differences and deceptions, is given by Schaff, when Abbot was trying to defend the decrepit Revision, American version.
https://archive.org/stream/newtestamentinor01west#page/n59/mode/2up
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Now I understand men of no textual understanding, hortian dupes like Lightfoot and Geisler, making the blunder. The fact that it is parroted by Homestead Heritage is not good, it shows that your Bible textual agenda is multi-version pseudo-apologetics, as part of your allowing Alexandrian corruption versions. And is not one of seeking to understand these issues. Anybody with a little sense and background would never fall for this blunder.
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Es suficiente. A small review of the rest.
The statements on Question 13 continue with this type of error, confusion and disinformation. They are actually, at best, worthless assertions. Would you like more corrections? I would be happy to continue to go down line by line. If not, here are some highlights.
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One of the worst elements is using Alexandrian apologists, who you quote, in an appeal to the numbers of manuscripts, e.g:
These claims are totally hypocritical, since the scholars that McDowell follows consistently reject the mass of Byzantine Greek manuscripts as corrupt. What good is appealing to the number of Greek mss if you think they are woefully corrupt and unreliable? Obviously, you have shot your own position in the foot if you appeal to the 1000s of mss while saying that the mass of mss are worthless and corrupt. Which is in fact the position of all the hortian dupes you are referencing.
Another joke is:
So what? How does that help? When that “true meaning” is not considered the scripture, then the modern version dupes are reading a false meaning and rejecting the true meaning. What good does it say that the “true meaning” is in some rejected text? All we have is sophistry.
And for you to actually quote statements like:
When you must know full well that this is not true, makes you accomplices in the deliberate deception of the Christian believer. You should know full well, if nothing else, that 40+ full verses are included in the Reformation Bible texts and called non-scripture by the corruption version scholars. Why are you quoting what you know to be false? Why are you writing as hortian dupes who think the Critical Text is the verified pure Bible? Remember, you said to me that you reject the Alexandrian ultra-minority corruptions that pollute that text.
This would be 87.5% of the words. This actually comes from Westcott and Hort from 1881.
https://books.google.com/books?id=gZ4HAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA2
It would leave the equivalent of 1,000 verses as unaccepted. Is this meant to be an argument you would use responsibly? Or is a concession speech from the probability text positions? (“We do not know the word of God.”) Have you thought this out? Or are you just trying to dazzle the reader with numbers? Hort in his normal turgid and obtuse style continues from that point.
Again, totally false (from the same page above.) That would be the equivalent of 8 verses. How do you pigeon-hole the 40+ full verses and the 4,000+ CT-TR differences into those 8 verses? Why are you trying to deceive your readers with dazzle numbers?
Here we add the fallacy of false precision. This charlatan number, parroted by Josh McDowell and Homestead Heritage and others, goes back to Westcott and Hort in 1881:
The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881)
Westcott and Hort
https://books.google.com/books?id=h71GEubFIAQC&pg=PA2
“one sixtieth of the whole New Testament”
Since Hort’s 59/60 = 98.33.
And Hort, unlike Geisler and Homestead Heritage, was at least honest enough to at least point out that these last two computations, 1/1000 and 98.33%, are based on:
“If the principles followed in the present edition are sound, this area may be very greatly reduced.”
However, Hort’s principles, and the resulting Alexandrian text, are totally unsound. As you well know. So we have GIGO, given falsely in Homestead Heritage literature as fact. Homestead Heritage in this section hides behind quoting ignorant and errant assertions from others, claims that are not defendable. Affirmation by proxy is often a fallacious approach, and one that we associate with the probabalism mentality of the Jesuits. We find this proxy-style faux appeal to authority drifts into modern version and Critical Text corruption version defense with writer after writer. And I would hope that Homestead Heritage would have the insight and wisdom to eschew this trickery.
Now, it is clear that your research was largely using Josh McDowell as the fulcrum, since he provides the beginning quote-mining, and then working backwards to the McDowell sources. This is not a good way to study or learn the history, or the field of textual analysis, or the numbers.
Sidenote: Note 65: Hort is given the wrong initials, Fenton John Anthony is F. J. A. This is correct in the text, wrong in the footnote.
====================
Question 36 is important because you show that you do not believe there is any divinely inspired word of God that you are reading, in any language. Only the “original manuscripts”. Which you do not have, nor do you claim to know the text. Nor do you point to any apographa that would be pure reflections of the original manuscripts.
(Note: you place Word in capitals when referring to the scriptures, which really is not right. You can see the proper way in the AV. You are mixing the Word made flesh with the word of God, the scriptures. You actually make the basic point of the distinction in Question 37, it would be best to adjust the caps to reflect the distinct meanings.)
====================
Question 16, ostensibly about “translations”, simply begs the question of the 4,000+ differences between the Westcott-Hort recension and the pure Bible.
====================
Question 34 has one of the most grievous sections.
Here you are saying there is no perfect word of God today. And you are lauding the fact that the versions you use have unknown errors. And where are the “errors”? Who can tell? If there are deliberate, pseudo-providential errors in your Bible today, they could be … anywhere. No verse is sure. And we have no plumb line, there is only a skewed line. This is false, the word of God today is 100% pure and perfect. You really should study and understand the Reformation Bible history and the historic confessions. Although this weak view you espouse of embracing errors could be helpful if a ministry would like to have its members unsure of the word of God. And subject to the temporal textual and translational decisions of an eldership.
And if Homestead Heritage does not like a verse or a word, they can now simply say ..
“oh, we know that this is one of the minor errors, listen to us, do not trust your Authorized Version, do not trust your Greek New Testament, our anointed ministry will tell you what is error-free. And please, do not notice our errors in writing and speaking about the Bible, we really are anointed and our views should be received as perfect.”
Is this Bible belief? I trow not.
This is a good description of the current conundrum at Homestead Heritage. The smorgasbord versioning, including from errant texts and translations, is in fact the pick and choose mentality. The Holy Spirit tells me that I am never to have part or parcel with such manipulations.
====================
The Bible book also uses the mangled non-name of “yahweh”. It may use in one spot “yahshua” as in the Homestad Heritage book HalleluYah. However, when I went back I could not find any spot, I thought I had noticed the usage. And I do plan to send you a bit about your use of yahshua, which truly surprised me the other day.
As to these two faux names, error begets error. Homestead Heritage can not identify the pure scriptures, and you can not identify the names that the scriptures declare and that are consistent with the scriptures. You have some guesses, and they are wrong.
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To be fair, the book has a lot of reasonably solid general apologetics, around issues like science and history. This is not at all a critique of your position on issues like creation and archaeology.
However, nothing is referenced about the many hard errors in geography, logic, science, internal consistency, and more, brought in to the New Testament by the Westcott-Hort recension.
====================
Asahel, I felt I had to speak straight above. Please excuse anything that feels harsh, my goal is to help and assist, not become your enemy. My goal here is simple:
Ephesians 4:15
But speaking the truth in love,
may grow up into him in all things,
which is the head, even Christ:
Today is the day for Homestead Heritage to seek and find the pure Bible. I share to you simply as the donkey who the Lord Jesus told to speak. My hope is that you find the above helpful and edifying.
Ephesians 6:13
Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God,
that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day,
and having done all, to stand.
Thank your for your consideration and attention! With deep appreciation for the Homestead Heritage ministry and historic interest in the truth of the Bible, our plumb line of faith.
In the beautiful and holy name of the Lord Jesus Christ!
Steven Spencer
Dutchess County, NY
Discussion of an important section in the Homestead Heritage book. Small modifications made for this article.
Question 13 is as close as Homestead Heritage gets to discussing the purity and corruption of the Bible. Amazingly, the issue of the thousands of differences in the two divergent types of Bibles and versions you use is simply bypassed.
In this Q13, Homestead Heritage is simply following the deficient pseudo-scholarly writers whose purpose was to gloss over the thousands of new corruptions that were in the versions built on the Westcott-Hort recension. This is the recension using the heavily corrupt, full of omissions, reader digest style Codex Vaticanus as a type of proof text. So in the late 1800s these men came up with a new schema of statistical charlatanism about the purity of the Bible. Originally, they were trying to replace the earlier positions of actual Bible belief such as in the Westminster Confession and they still wanted the Bible to be considered as sort of pure. They also changed apologetics to only be involving invisible, ethereal original autographs (Question 36), not any Bible or version we actually read.
All the quote and information sources are coming from individuals writing with the presupposition of the superiority and accuracy of the hortian Critical Text and its theories and conclusions and confusions. These men presuppose the Alexandrian text (Vaticanus primacy) viewpoint. Ironically, this is the Alexandrian textual viewpoint that you, Asahel, quite properly reject and dismiss with a smile, and is ostensibly denied by Homestead Heritage today. Thus when these writers, in the quotes in Question 13, quote numbers as to how many variants there are, or significant variants, or percents, the numbers are quoted from the totally errant perspective of the hortian proponent (as their presupposition).
Technically, one major fallacy involved in almost all these statistics is the fallacy of exclusion, where the statistics are not based on all the evidence, but are based on and biased towards a preselected subset. To make it worse, this is an exclusion that you claim to reject, where the data accepted is the Alexandrian variants and text. And these are contra the Greek Byzantine and Received Text. So for you to quote the fallacious statistics is a real problem.
The writers you quote are men who have (or who are, in the secondary and tertiary source parrot chain, themselves using data from men who have) pre-discarded much of the pure Bible text.
Such as the
24 verses (12+12) of the traditional Mark ending and the
incredible Pericope Adulterae. Or
“Father forgive them..”. Or the
doxology of Matthew 6:13.
The loss of the heavenly witnesses.
Or losing the full sense of the angel troubling the water in John 5.
Or the ascension of Jesus in Luke 24:51 that agrees with the also-missing ascension in the Mark ending.
The list here will be long and distinguished Bible verses, omissions in the Critical Text (the English modern versions themselves vary greatly as to how they handle their embarrassing source text, often they try to fake out their own readership by crafty use of notes and fonts. In such cases they are hypocritical because they say on one hand the section or verse is not the word of God, on the other hand they try to give the reader a different impression.) And then you have the multifold corruptions, as well, such as losing “God was manifest in the flesh” and having an only-begotten God.
Please note that James White, a shill for the modern versions who you indicated is a source of much of your information, makes the same types of errors with these numbers. Beyond that, he actually makes a big point of how he will not accept or use such Bible verses and would like to take them out of the Bible. Daniel Wallace does similar. Caveat emptor.
The islamists and skeptics and atheists and others contra the Bible are not dumb, so they run with all the double-minded error about the word of God from the modern version hortian shills and proponents. They will gladly point out all the opposition of White and Wallace against the traditional Bible sections and verses as their proof of the corruption of the Bible (look at the glee of the islamists on youtube in quoting James White) and in fact they do have a point because of all the worthless Alexandrian corruptions that are in the plethora of modern corruption versions from the Version of the Month Club today.
This faux presuppositional view towards the modern version Critical Text taints every quote and reference in Q13, since these men, in coming up with the statistics you use, will assume that massively supported Byzantine and Received Text readings are false. And thus the pure Bible readings do not even have to be considered in the equation, in giving numbers and percents and significance.
e.g. The absence of the Mark ending and the Pericope Adulterae are considered as certainties, as not scripture (today, in the UBS A-B-C-D scale, they are given an “A” is certain). This is simply a bogus analysis. Therefore, by the charlatan reasoning, they can be left out in giving numbers.
Does Homestead Heritage agree that these 24 verses are to be stricken out of all their Bibles, versions and editions? Have you taken a magic marker to 40-odd NT verses that are omitted from the Critical Text as not scripture? In our discussion, you said “no”. Even Joel Stein, in our correspondence, implies no. My conjecture is that your magic marker will hit about five verses, although you do not say anything directly.
Thus, we have your quotation and analysis sources in
Q13: Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton Hort, Philip Schaff, Benjamin Warfield, Frederic Kenyon, F. F. Bruce, Norman Geisler and William Nix, and Josh McDowell.
Westcott and Hort are the main source, and they, as men that were buffeted by occult forces, in fact created the modern versions through the Westcott and Hort recension. After about a century, from Griesbach on, of men trying erratically to attack the Reformation Bible, with wildly differing attempts, the dynamic duo of Westcott and Hort followed the deceiver and parleyed their efforts to create the decrepit Revision and a corrupt Greek New Testament. This gave a brand new text, never remotely seen before, using Vaticanus as a base augmented by Sinaiticus (which can properly be seen as an 1800s fake). And the contras rallied around their myriad errors and blunders, and from that point on we have a parrot festival of misinformation. And your using the errors and disinformation from these men will only make you accomplices in the Alexandrian text deceptions that are common fare today. They are statistical charlatans. On top of that, the last two apologist sources include an incredible blunder, which made it to the Homestead Heritage literature as a truth.
My conjecture for Asi: all this statistical error and disinformation is what happens when Joel Stein is the conduit on textual matters for the information used by Blair Adams. The result is embarrassing to Homestead Heritage. Beyond that, it will deceive those members who are similarly unaware. Looking it over in total, I can see only two possibilities.
#1: Joel does not really understand these issues, or
#2: he writes for convenience, cherry-picking false and errant quotes in order to make superficial talking points.
Without real concern for the accuracy and truth of what is asserted. (If you wonder why this does not go to the researcher, Joel decided not to hear anything from me unless I first accepted his overall viewpoint and authority through the Homestead ministry on these issues. Which of course is totally impossible. Plus, Joel's name is not on the byline, not even as the researcher, which is itself a bit puzzling. Also puzzling is the 1978 copyright notice. I was in New Jersey in 1978 and my remembrance is that we had no literature of this nature.)
As to the two possibilities:
#1, Joel (and any primary helpers that have come on board with authority) should study afresh and/or retire from the Bible textual research field. Allowing that he may still be fine on apologetics in areas like science and history, creation and archaeology. If
#2, there is a real integrity concern. I speak straight on this aware that it may lead to some voices saying even more loudly “you can not listen to the donkey, he does not accept our authority on these issues”. Whether you object to what I am saying or not, the point itself would be 100% true, yep, I do not accept any presumed authority you claim to choose or to determine the pure word of God. And if it is perversely said that my faith in the word of God, the scriptures that I read and study with joy,
2 Timothy 2:15
Study to shew thyself approved unto God,
a workman that needeth not to be ashamed,
rightly dividing the word of truth.
the tangible, readable, inspired and preserved, infallible and inerrant, pure and perfect, word of God … is heretical, then we are essentially brought back to a confession:
Acts 24:14
But this I confess unto thee,
that after the way which they call heresy,
so worship I the God of my fathers,
believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets:
Not 87.5% truth … not 98.33% .. Or 95% .. all things in the scriptures, OT and NT, are what I believe. From the pure and perfect word of God.
And I also do not accept your perverse claim that there should be errors in the scriptures (Q34, covered below) that the plumb line should be flawed and uncertain and skewed. This simply makes no sense. When my dedication to truth on these matters is in some sense accused of being supposedly heretical, I simply smile, under the aegis of the Holy Spirit and in conformity with the scriptures.
And now I will go down the first part of the Question 13 section linearly:
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A: What is a “reading” really has to be defined, however the data is very stale, way over a century stale. The more general number today in the Greek ms. line is 400,000 or 500,000. The 150k number dates from a Philip Schaff writing in 1881, written as an introduction for Westcott and Hort on p. liii :
The New Testament in the original Greek (1881)
Introduction to the American Edition
Philip Schaff
https://archive.org/stream/newtestamentinor01west#page/n59/mode/2up
While you referenced the very similar 1883:
http://archive.org/stream/companiontogreek00scharich#page/176/mode/2up
and the 150k number is ancient history.
False non-scholarship.
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A: This is an absurd number, again from the hortian dupe and apologist Philip Schaff. (ibid. 1881, p. liv.) There are over 4,000 differences in the NT included in the apparatus differences of sources like Nestle-Aland, UBS and Reuben Swanson . And the apparatus differences are almost always inclusive of “textual meaning”. 4,000, not 400. And the 400 is itself is a high amount of doubt for what is supposed to be God’s pure word.
Plus, you should note that a “different reading” can itself be as much as the inclusion or omission of a full verse, or 12 full verses (counted as only one reading.) In such a section, the one variant has multiple meanings and various doctrines are involved.
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A: Absurd. More Schaff deception, (1881 p. liv , 1883, p. 177.. “not more than about fifty are really important for some reason or another” .. in fact you have totally mangled by faux editing even the Schaff mangling of truth. Shoddy scholarship and writing on your part is the nicest that can be said, since Schaff did not talk of “any significance” but “really important…”.)
In fact, it is easy to find 500 textual variants in the NT of real solid “significance”. The “Magic Marker” page of Brandon Staggs (author of the Swordsearcher software and involved in a fascinating vidoe back-and-forth with James White on Acts 8:37 and a truly wonderful gentleman) is excellently done, and has about 200 glaring omissions. And I can show you a totally different list of 25 hard errors in the Critical Text New Testament. Will Kinney and Ken Matto and others have research writings on 100s of other variants where there are real problems caused by the Alexandrian corruption, which is usually ultra-minority in the Greek ms line. So, on any “significance” the number is easily in the thousands, on glaring significance, 500 is a reasonable number, within the under 8,000 verses. In fact, looking at the language used, it is hard to find a “textual meaning” that is not “significant”, so the very claim itself is word-parsing of no substance.
Proverbs 30:5
Every word of God is pure:
he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him.
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A: Nonsense. “God was manifest in the flesh” is fought tooth and nail by the low-Christology unitarians and adoptionists and ebionites not as a scholastic game, but because of the incredible significance in declaring the majesty and glory of the Lord Jesus Christ, which they deny. The “only-begotten God” of the literal Critical Text in John 1:18 (NASV, Emphasized) is affirmed by the Arians, like the JWs, precisely because it fits their doctrine of Jesus being a begotten God. The ascension is removed from the modern versions. The believer’s baptism testimony of Acts 8:37, which Homestead Heritage used to teach as a fundamental of the faith, is removed, and is nowhere else to be found. Maybe Homestead Heritage would prefer to remove it today, since the emphasis is simply on the revelation of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. It would be interesting to know if you teach this as scripture today. In the CT (critical text), Luke does not have that amazing verse where Jesus asks the Father to forgive from the cross. The signs following of the Mark ending, along with the resurrection appearances of Jesus, are gone. Jesus does not teach the forgiveness of the woman caught in adultery in the hortian versions.
In fact, the very concepts of Bible infallibility and inerrancy were radically changed to accommodate all the new errors brought into the versions and the new concept of a probability text.
Articles of faith everywhere can be different, the situation is even worse today when you consider the tendency to cherry-pick the actual English version text from dozens of available versions. Find the version that you feel matches your eschatology or soteriology at specific points. Even basic issues like young earth creationism or the words condemning sodomy can be made comportable to errant and perverse views, by searching around. You can even go to The Message, if you want a new age flair under the veneer of supposedly “Christian” views.
In fact, the public discussion by Christians of the Bible has become one big mumble-jumble of competing texts and translations. The center does not hold. Each one supports their views by whatever texts are available. Homestead Heritage does similar when it rummages through the versions looking for a text that can be used to support their doctrines. (This does not mean that any particular doctrine is false, it simply means that the Homestead Heritage smorgasbord approach will give unreliable results that should be rejected.)
There is an important and incredible exception, however, with Reformation Bible and those who esteem the Authorized Version as God’s pure word. They can seek to reason together, to discern sound doctrine, with the straight and true plumb line. Thank you Lord Jesus for your pure word.
Psalm 12:6-7
The words of the LORD are pure words:
as silver tried in a furnace of earth,
purified seven times.
Thou shalt keep them, O LORD,
thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.
Psalm 119:140
Thy word is very pure:
therefore thy servant loveth it.
The claim (article of faith .. precept of duty) given by Homestead Heritage is simply the parroting of word parsing from Philip Schaff designed (consciously or not) to deceive the reader about the significance of the words of God. A whole industry developed around corruption version pseudo-apologetics.
A major element of this was Benjamin Warfield’s abandonment of infallibility and inerrancy apologetics in any tangible, readable Bible. The traditional view defended the source language texts, the Reformation Bibles from the Received Text, as the inspired and preserved apographa. And with the translations into English and other languages being fully capable of being invested with the same properties of excellence, majesty and accuracy. This Warfieldian (and later, Chicago Statement) change, to what is essentially a laughable new doctrine (infallibility and inerrancy in an unknown and unknowable text), spearheaded by Warfield, was a necessary and important compliment to the nouveau Westcott and Hort recension corrupt text, with its many hard errors. Warfield had to deal with the new concept of the textual criticism probability text, which can change any year as theories change, as new textual discoveries are found or faked, and the text can even vary among each individual proponent. No verse is really sure. This change to ethereal, unknown and unknowable autographs from Warfield was necessary in order to keep a veneer of evangelicism. In your book, you support this disaster.
Returning to the “articles of faith…” .. to have any meaning at all, first you would have to clearly and precisely define what is every “article of faith” and every “precept of duty”. Which is never done. Would you accept as true and complete a list of “articles of faith” and “precepts of duty” given by Philip Schaff? Do you agree with Schaff that the verses affect some passages on the “doctrine of the Trinity”? Or do you agree with revision scholar George Vance Smith? (Who denied even the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ and emphasized how important the Revision was for his doctrinal viewpoints, see “Texts and margins of the revised New Testament affecting theological doctrine briefly reviewed.”) Surely, you do not think that Schaff was talking of the Homestead Heritage “articles of faith”!
Please, let us strive for some consistency and scholastic honesty. Let’s eschew the quote-snippet mentality. Lets avoid vagaries like unknown “articles of faith”.
Ironically, Schaff even quotes Richard Bentley and the unitarian Ezra Abbott (who was against worship of the Lord Jesus Christ, as a “creature”, which made the American Revision notes) in making these claims. Richard Bentley was attempting to parry Anthony Collins, who was analogous to Bart Ehrman today, so at least that could be an interesting historical study.
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A: Eliminating 19/20th of the more accurate 400,000 leaves 20,000 variants. So what good is it to be “allowed” to reduce the conundrum to only 20,000 variants? This would leave 21/2 variant problems per verse average in each of the almost 8,000 verses. Not a big help.
Now, the 19/20th is technically accurate in the sense that there really are less than 20,000 of the 400,000 Greek ms textual variants that have any real pizazz or significance. A good number is 5,000 overall, translatable, although of course only 1,000 or so are glaring. However, sometimes what looks like a piddle corruption (e.g the faux ultra-minority grammar of a demon being personified in Mark) can have major implications in the rolly-bolly world of New Testament exegesis.
Anyway, all this 19/20th stuff is generally irrelevant. Similar number juggling was used by Daniel Wallace in his own special case of statistical illiteracy where he bases statistical manipulation on misplacing large numbers, in a grossly deficient attempt to attack both the Received Text and the Greek Byzantine Majority Texts.
When this irrelevancy that you quote is given with a reference it goes like this:
"Dr. Ezra Abbott was accustomed to remark that
‘about nineteen-twentieths of the variations have so little support that, although there are various readings, no one would think of them as rival readings, and nineteen-twentieths of the remainder are of so little importance that their adoption or rejection would cause no appreciable difference in the sense of the passages in which they occur.’ “
An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (1887)
Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield
https://books.google.com/books?id=ZWINAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA14
Warfield was working with 200,000 variants, with 400,000 variants that would leave 1,000 appreciable differences. 400,000 x .05 x. .05 = 1,000. Do you see how charlatans can play with numbers by emphasizing and doing the math on the irrelevant large numbers? Sounds impressive, means nothing. Like the 400,000 total variants. Why not simply say .. “There are 500 or 1000 appreciable differences” (really the number is 1000s.) Simply because it is harder to be a charlatan if you speak accurately.
A longer Ezra Abbot quote, with its own nuances and differences and deceptions, is given by Schaff, when Abbot was trying to defend the decrepit Revision, American version.
https://archive.org/stream/newtestamentinor01west#page/n59/mode/2up
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A: Totally false! This was a well-known and quite embarrassing blunder from Neil R. Lightfoot and the more public Norman Geisler and William Nix, starting in the 1960s. Later, parroted by others, like Josh McDowell, ignorant men on this topic, now referenced as scholars by Homestead Heritage. This situation was so bad that Daniel Wallace has even written a paper (helpful for correction yet itself uneven) about this specific blunder, this “evangelical miscalculation.” That phrase is sufficient to find the paper online, along with discussion.
Now I understand men of no textual understanding, hortian dupes like Lightfoot and Geisler, making the blunder. The fact that it is parroted by Homestead Heritage is not good, it shows that your Bible textual agenda is multi-version pseudo-apologetics, as part of your allowing Alexandrian corruption versions. And is not one of seeking to understand these issues. Anybody with a little sense and background would never fall for this blunder.
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Es suficiente. A small review of the rest.
The statements on Question 13 continue with this type of error, confusion and disinformation. They are actually, at best, worthless assertions. Would you like more corrections? I would be happy to continue to go down line by line. If not, here are some highlights.
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One of the worst elements is using Alexandrian apologists, who you quote, in an appeal to the numbers of manuscripts, e.g:
These claims are totally hypocritical, since the scholars that McDowell follows consistently reject the mass of Byzantine Greek manuscripts as corrupt. What good is appealing to the number of Greek mss if you think they are woefully corrupt and unreliable? Obviously, you have shot your own position in the foot if you appeal to the 1000s of mss while saying that the mass of mss are worthless and corrupt. Which is in fact the position of all the hortian dupes you are referencing.
Another joke is:
So what? How does that help? When that “true meaning” is not considered the scripture, then the modern version dupes are reading a false meaning and rejecting the true meaning. What good does it say that the “true meaning” is in some rejected text? All we have is sophistry.
And for you to actually quote statements like:
When you must know full well that this is not true, makes you accomplices in the deliberate deception of the Christian believer. You should know full well, if nothing else, that 40+ full verses are included in the Reformation Bible texts and called non-scripture by the corruption version scholars. Why are you quoting what you know to be false? Why are you writing as hortian dupes who think the Critical Text is the verified pure Bible? Remember, you said to me that you reject the Alexandrian ultra-minority corruptions that pollute that text.
This would be 87.5% of the words. This actually comes from Westcott and Hort from 1881.
https://books.google.com/books?id=gZ4HAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA2
It would leave the equivalent of 1,000 verses as unaccepted. Is this meant to be an argument you would use responsibly? Or is a concession speech from the probability text positions? (“We do not know the word of God.”) Have you thought this out? Or are you just trying to dazzle the reader with numbers? Hort in his normal turgid and obtuse style continues from that point.
Again, totally false (from the same page above.) That would be the equivalent of 8 verses. How do you pigeon-hole the 40+ full verses and the 4,000+ CT-TR differences into those 8 verses? Why are you trying to deceive your readers with dazzle numbers?
Here we add the fallacy of false precision. This charlatan number, parroted by Josh McDowell and Homestead Heritage and others, goes back to Westcott and Hort in 1881:
The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881)
Westcott and Hort
https://books.google.com/books?id=h71GEubFIAQC&pg=PA2
“one sixtieth of the whole New Testament”
Since Hort’s 59/60 = 98.33.
And Hort, unlike Geisler and Homestead Heritage, was at least honest enough to at least point out that these last two computations, 1/1000 and 98.33%, are based on:
“If the principles followed in the present edition are sound, this area may be very greatly reduced.”
However, Hort’s principles, and the resulting Alexandrian text, are totally unsound. As you well know. So we have GIGO, given falsely in Homestead Heritage literature as fact. Homestead Heritage in this section hides behind quoting ignorant and errant assertions from others, claims that are not defendable. Affirmation by proxy is often a fallacious approach, and one that we associate with the probabalism mentality of the Jesuits. We find this proxy-style faux appeal to authority drifts into modern version and Critical Text corruption version defense with writer after writer. And I would hope that Homestead Heritage would have the insight and wisdom to eschew this trickery.
Now, it is clear that your research was largely using Josh McDowell as the fulcrum, since he provides the beginning quote-mining, and then working backwards to the McDowell sources. This is not a good way to study or learn the history, or the field of textual analysis, or the numbers.
Sidenote: Note 65: Hort is given the wrong initials, Fenton John Anthony is F. J. A. This is correct in the text, wrong in the footnote.
====================
Question 36 is important because you show that you do not believe there is any divinely inspired word of God that you are reading, in any language. Only the “original manuscripts”. Which you do not have, nor do you claim to know the text. Nor do you point to any apographa that would be pure reflections of the original manuscripts.
(Note: you place Word in capitals when referring to the scriptures, which really is not right. You can see the proper way in the AV. You are mixing the Word made flesh with the word of God, the scriptures. You actually make the basic point of the distinction in Question 37, it would be best to adjust the caps to reflect the distinct meanings.)
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Question 16, ostensibly about “translations”, simply begs the question of the 4,000+ differences between the Westcott-Hort recension and the pure Bible.
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Question 34 has one of the most grievous sections.
Here you are saying there is no perfect word of God today. And you are lauding the fact that the versions you use have unknown errors. And where are the “errors”? Who can tell? If there are deliberate, pseudo-providential errors in your Bible today, they could be … anywhere. No verse is sure. And we have no plumb line, there is only a skewed line. This is false, the word of God today is 100% pure and perfect. You really should study and understand the Reformation Bible history and the historic confessions. Although this weak view you espouse of embracing errors could be helpful if a ministry would like to have its members unsure of the word of God. And subject to the temporal textual and translational decisions of an eldership.
And if Homestead Heritage does not like a verse or a word, they can now simply say ..
“oh, we know that this is one of the minor errors, listen to us, do not trust your Authorized Version, do not trust your Greek New Testament, our anointed ministry will tell you what is error-free. And please, do not notice our errors in writing and speaking about the Bible, we really are anointed and our views should be received as perfect.”
Is this Bible belief? I trow not.
This is a good description of the current conundrum at Homestead Heritage. The smorgasbord versioning, including from errant texts and translations, is in fact the pick and choose mentality. The Holy Spirit tells me that I am never to have part or parcel with such manipulations.
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The Bible book also uses the mangled non-name of “yahweh”. It may use in one spot “yahshua” as in the Homestad Heritage book HalleluYah. However, when I went back I could not find any spot, I thought I had noticed the usage. And I do plan to send you a bit about your use of yahshua, which truly surprised me the other day.
As to these two faux names, error begets error. Homestead Heritage can not identify the pure scriptures, and you can not identify the names that the scriptures declare and that are consistent with the scriptures. You have some guesses, and they are wrong.
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To be fair, the book has a lot of reasonably solid general apologetics, around issues like science and history. This is not at all a critique of your position on issues like creation and archaeology.
However, nothing is referenced about the many hard errors in geography, logic, science, internal consistency, and more, brought in to the New Testament by the Westcott-Hort recension.
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Asahel, I felt I had to speak straight above. Please excuse anything that feels harsh, my goal is to help and assist, not become your enemy. My goal here is simple:
Ephesians 4:15
But speaking the truth in love,
may grow up into him in all things,
which is the head, even Christ:
Today is the day for Homestead Heritage to seek and find the pure Bible. I share to you simply as the donkey who the Lord Jesus told to speak. My hope is that you find the above helpful and edifying.
Ephesians 6:13
Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God,
that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day,
and having done all, to stand.
Thank your for your consideration and attention! With deep appreciation for the Homestead Heritage ministry and historic interest in the truth of the Bible, our plumb line of faith.
In the beautiful and holy name of the Lord Jesus Christ!
Steven Spencer
Dutchess County, NY
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