Featured Jack Hyles Versus John R. Rice

For those who don't know the background, John R. Rice (1896-1980) was a leading fundamentalist; in my view he was one of the founding fathers of the movement, author of over 200 books and pamphlets. He strongly opposed the KJVO movement.

Jack Hyles (1926-2001) was a megachurch pastor and preached together with JRR for many years in the local and national Sword of the Lord conferences on soul winning and revival. Until 1980, Hyles never took a KJVO position, but after Rice's death, Hyles became a radical KJVO advocate, even touting the perfection and inspiration of the KJV. He was influenced in changing his position by Al Lacy and Gail Riplinger.

I'm currently reading a book about Jack Hyles by Bob Gray, Sr., a close disciple of Hyles, with the title, When Principle Was King, with the subtitle, The Life Principles of Dr. Jack Hyles. (Note: This is not the same infamous Bob Gray arrested for molesting children.) In it, Gray says, "Dr. Hyles often said to me, that if Dr. John R. Rice was alive today and was facd with all of the information and the floding of perversions, he would, also, land n his feet concerning the KJB. How could Dr. Hyles make that statement? Because Dr. Hyles knew the character of Dr. Rice!" (p. 375).

I'm here to tell you that the statement by Hyles was utterly and completely false. How would I know? First of all, I'm the grandson of JRR. Secondly, I wrote a biography of JRR for which I did copious research. In this thread I will back up everything I say from what he is in print saying. Not only was he not KJVO, he opposed Ruckman and others who took the position Hyles took.

 

First of all, as early as 1942, JRR stood for an infallible, verbal-plenary inspiration of the Bible in the original languages and said so in his 1942 pamphlet, Verbal Inspiration of the Bible. H

When Ruckman published his first major book on a KJVO position in 1970, Rice had already taken the position that “[a] perfect translation of the Bible is humanly impossible” in his 1969 book, Our God-Breathed Book—The Bible. (John R. Rice, Our God-Breathed Book—The Bible (Murfreesboro: Sword of the Lord, 1969, p. 377).

In the same book, he further wrote advocating the ASV, a revision of the KJV, “The scholar and the preacher would do well to have the American Standard Version at hand and to consult it when necessary, but generally would do well, we think, to use the King James Version in the pulpit, in memory work, and in class teaching, since it is actually the translation of the mass of people. And the beauty of its language is not equaled in other translations, we think” (Ibid, 383).

More tomorrow, unless someone bites the bait before I go home at 4:00.

 

Wow, I'm honored! So much blessing in his life, but those two relationships, BJ Jr. and JH, ended in such a tragic way.

I knew more than I could say concerning the relationship between my Granddad and Hyles. However, my goal in describing that relationship was that the history of the relationship of the two men could be seen, and hopefully I succeeded with that.

That's a tremendous book, perhaps his magnum opus. I was greatly influenced by that book during the disagreement with BJ Jr. Unfortunately, in retrospect John R. Rice did not clearly understand textual criticism, but the average reader probably wouldn't see that. He mixed up the Greek texts.

 

Here are quotes that prove John R. Rice held the same position on the inspiration of the originals as opposed to an inspired translation all through his life.

"Of course we do not mean that God gave the words in English as they are in our King James or Authorized Version of the Bible. We mean that God gave the words as the original writers wrote them down; the Old Testament writers writing generally in Hebrew, the New Testament writers writing in Greek. (Parts of Daniel were written in the Chaldaic language.) In the original manuscripts the very words were the words of God."
Twelve Tremendous Themes (Murfreesboro: Sword, 1943), 18.

"Remember, however, that when we speak of verbal inspiration we mean that God gave the very words originally to the Bible writers, and as they put them down in the original manuscripts the very words were the words of God."
Twelve Tremendous Themes (Murfreesboro: Sword, 1943), 67-68.

“The fundamentalist position is that God gave the very words of Scripture in the original manuscripts. That is, literally ‘verbal inspiration,’ word-for-word inspiration.”
John R. Rice, I Am a Fundamentalist (Murfreesboro: Sword, 1975), 79.

Note that in 1975, Rice specifically stated that the inspiration of Scripture took place in the original manuscripts. This was when he was almost 80. Most theologians don't change their doctrine at that age! By that time there had been a decade of KJVO writings, and he had been attacked for his stand by KJVO writers such as Peter Ruckman and Herbert Evans (More on that later.)

 

On p. 354 of Our God-Breathed Book--the Bible, he fails to realize that there are families of Greek manuscripts:

"And we have thousands of manuscripts; so if one copyist made a stake, accidentally altering or leaving out a letter or adding a word, and if perhaps two or three others copied his mistake, yet we have hundreds of other manuscripts that did not make the same mistake so that we can compare them and almost certainly come to the very original words."

Then, I haven't found what Rice source the quote is from, but Bob Sumner has Rice saying that modern translators “took advantage of the three great manuscripts – the Sinaiticus, the Vatican, and the Alexandrian manuscripts.” Of course, it is the "Vaticanus," not the "Vatican," and the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are manuscripts, yet he distinguishes them from “the Alexandrian manuscripts.”
Robert Sumner, “Is the Sword of the Lord Anti-John R. Rice?” in The Biblical Evangelist, Volume 39, Number 4, July - August 2008.
The Biblical Evangelist, accessed on 8/2/24.

Aha. Just found where Sumner got his quote. It is from Dr. Rice, Here Is My Question, p. 59.

 

And the majority of the mss are? And how many Alexandrian mss are there?

Forgive me, but you are not thinking this through.

 

I see that I started a similar thread several years ago, but this thread has a different focus, if you'll look at the OP of this thread and what Hyles said about JRR.

Here is the previous thread: John R. Rice, Jack Hyles, and the KJV

 

Yes. And my dear grandfather showed no knowledge of this.

 

Now here are quotes proving that JRR knew very well about many modern versions, and was very careful about how he commented on them.. He opposed liberal versions such as the RSV and GNB, but recommended other versions for study.

“The scholar and the preacher would do well to have the American Standard Version at hand and to consult it when necessary, but generally would do well, we think, to use the King James Version in the pulpit, in memory work, and in class teaching, since it is actually the translation of the mass of people. And the beauty of its language is not equaled in other translations, we think.”
John R. Rice, Our God-Breathed Book—The Bible (Murfreesboro: Sword of the Lord, 1969), 383.

“I constantly use the King James Version. Practically all of my memory work is done in it. Because of its beautiful, stately language and because it is loved by common people everywhere, I find it best to preach and quote from this version, unless some passage is more clear in another version.”
John R. Rice, Dr. Rice, Here Is my Question (Murfreesboro: Sword of the Lord, 1962), 59.

“I prefer the more literal and exact translations. All expanded and amplified translations tend to be somewhat an interpretation. And that is more true generally of the modern translations which take liberties with the text, for example, doing away with a Hebrew or Greek idiom, to fit modern speech. For example, Phillips Translation is a sorry paraphrase, inaccurate, irreverent. Phillips is openly an unbeliever in the authority and infallible inspiration of the Bible. He feels perfectly free to put in words or even whole sentences to make the meaning appear as he wants it to appear.”
John R. Rice, Dr. Rice, Here Is my Question, 59.

“The American Standard Version, translated in 1901, is perhaps the most accurate of all versions. it does not take the place of the King James Version, but in many places it has genuine help. Of course there are some mistakes, but many of the scholars who prepared it were devout Christians and believers.”
John R. Rice, Dr. Rice, Here Is my Question, 59.

“Phillips Translation is a sorry paraphrase, inaccurate, irreverent. Phillips is openly an unbeliever in the authority and infallible inspiration of the Bible. He feels perfectly free to put in words or even whole sentences to make the meaning appear as he wants it to appear.”
John R. Rice, Dr. Rice, Here Is my Question, 59.

“I think the Williams Translation of the New Testament is generally accurate and good, better perhaps than other one-man translations of the New Testament. It gives very careful attention to the tenses of the Greek verbs and is especially helpful on some difficult passages.”
John R. Rice, Dr. Rice, Here Is my Question, 60.

“I do not advise the Christian to use Moffatt's Translation or Weymouth's or Goodspeed's. They are all right for scholars to have at hand, perhaps, but they are prepared by modernists, and sometimes the notes and even the translation will be wrong.”
John R. Rice, Dr. Rice, Here Is my Question, 60.

“The Amplified New Testament is a reverent translation which many lay people find interesting. It has the great limitation that it is partly a translation and partly a commentary, and that always leaves room for mistakes by the translator. For that reason I do not especially like it. But those who translated it intended for it to be true to the original text and to exalt Christ, and I do not think it will lead anybody especially wrong in doctrine.”
John R. Rice, Dr. Rice, Here Is my Question, 60.

“The New English Bible is scholarly and in colorful modern speech. But it is a free translation, sometimes a paraphrase, translated partly by unbelieving modern scholars, and I believe it is not reliable.”
John R. Rice, Dr. Rice, Here Is my Question, 60.

“On the whole, the Berkeley Version of the Bible is a good version compared to others in modern speech. However, I do not think the language is as beautiful as the King James Version, and I do not think it is as accurate as the King James Version and the American Standard Version.”
John R. Rice, Dr. Rice, Here Is my Question, 60.

 

Although Hyles never claimed to follow Ruckman, as far as I know (maybe Logos can help here), he did openly follow Gail Riplinger and gave her an honorary doctorate of humanities. He also made her nonsensical and illogical and unbiblical book, New Age Versions, to be used as a textbook at Hyles-Anderson College. I can document this from When Principle Was King: The Life Principles of Dr. Jack Hyles, by Bob Gray, Sr., but that book is at home.

According to Bob Gray, Hyles learned his KJVO position from Evangelist Al Lacy. I have Lacy's book, Can I Trust My Bible? (1991), and it's very radical. If he is not a Ruckmanite, he's very close to it. His positions are Ruckman's, and he writes like Ruckman in a very insulting way.

Gray's book mentioned above is almost worshipful of Hyles, and what I am saying as negatives he referenced as positives. Now, he fully admits that Jack Hyles changed positions after John R. Rice went to Heaven. This means that he not only abandoned the reasoned position on translations of Rice, but took a very radical position: the KJV is inspired (as opposed to the originals), the KJV is inerrant, no one can get saved without the KJV, etc.

A PhD dissertation written about Rice says, “Hyles made the sole use of the King James Version a new fundamental of the faith, effectively rejecting Rice’s model of fundamentalism” (p. 32), and "Within a few years of Rice’s death, Jack Hyles [had begun] repeating Ruckman’s arguments" (p. 34).
Matthew Lee Lyon, “John R. Rice and Evangelism: An Essential Mark of Independent Baptist Fundamentalism” (PhD diss., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019).

 

Back to John R. Rice. Here is what he said about Peter Ruckman:

"When a Peter Ruckman sets out to say that only he and a few others in the world are right on the matter of manuscript evidence for the Bible and says that in the King James Version the translation itself was inspired of God and is without error…, and that all are modernists or hypocrites or ignorant who do not agree that the King James Version—even the translation—is inspired perfectly, then we know that that arrogant attitude, that calling of good men by bad names, shows the man cannot be trusted in doctrine."
John R. Rice, I Am a Fundamentalist (Murfreesboro: Sword of the Lord, 1979), 74.

Significantly, this is in a chapter of that book with the title, "Be a Fundamentalist, and Not a Nut." So Ruckman was a "nut" in Rice's opinion. Rice would absolutely not have ever become a follower of Ruckman's brand of KJVO.

 

Here is my terminology.

In my thinking, followers of Ruckman or Riplinger and their ilk are radical KJVO, or Ruckmanite. This includes a belief that the KJV is a perfect translation. Sometimes the more brainy advocates limit this to the English language. Others in the radical camp believe that the KJV must be the basis for all missionary translations, making them more radical than the radicals!

Ruckman himself believed that you can correct the original Hebrew and Greek texts from the KJV, but the typical radical KJVO advocate doesn't deal with that issue, though it is a logical follow-up to the "perfect KJV" belief, because the original and the translation are by no means exactly the same; that would be impossible, since they are in different languages.

Then there are those who believe that the KJV should be the only Bible used in English. I would call this position moderate KJVO. They usually couch their support for the KJV with the statement, "the preserved Bible in the English language," or something similar. Those with this position are often TR only when it comes to missionary translations.

The more reasoned position is KJV Preferred, and that is what John R. Rice was. It is not a King James Only position. This position says that the KJV is the best translation in the English language, but there are other translations faithful to the original texts.

Here is a KJV Preferred statement by John R. Rice: “I prefer and I use the King James Version of the Bible altogether in my preaching, in my devotions, and principally in my study. I have for years, checked up with Scriptures in the American Standard Version, that is, the 1901 version, and find it very valuable.” ("Why Divide God's People Over Greek Manuscripts They Cannot Know About?", Sword of the Lord, Dec. 15, 1972.

Another position that is not KJVO is Byzantine priority. This is the position that the preservation of the Greek NT by the Lord occurred in the Byzantine family of Greek manuscripts. It does not argue for a perfect Greek text per se, but that the Byzantine family is closest to the original.

I hope this helps.

 

Here is another quote about Ruckman from Rice:

“Now, following a false teacher, a man with an angry disposition who split his own church, broke his own home and now, I hear, is in worse trouble—following him you have made a big issue about a doctrine not taught in the Bible at all, that the King James Version itself is the exact and inspire translation of the Bible.”
Herbert F. Evans, DEAR DR. JOHN: Where is my bible (sic)? (Harlingen, TX: Wonderful Word Publ., Inc., 1976). The quote is on p. 3 of the pamphlet from a letter to Evans from Rice dated 2/2/73.

Rice is referring to Ruckman's divorce. Ruckman was actually divorced a second time, also, I believe after this was written. It is a shameful thing for a servant of God to follow a twice-divorced "preacher." Such a man is disqualified from the ministry.

Then there is Gail Riplinger, given an honorary doctorate by Jack Hyles and honored by Curtis Hutson (who followed John R. Rice at the Sword of the Lord Foundation, and took the position of Riplinger). She was also divorced twice. Her magnum opus, New Age Versions, did not come out until 1993 when John R. Rice would have been in Heaven for 13 years. I guarantee that Rice would have written in the Sword against that bizarre book.

 

In the above mentioned pamphlet, Dear Dr. John: Where is my bible? (sic), Herbert Evans challenges Rice to debate Peter Ruckman! That would have been bizarre. But be it known that, regardless of Ruckman's degrees and apparent knowledge (but not much understanding or wisdom), Rice would have whipped him in a debate! What Evans did not know is that Rice was a championship debater in college.

Having said that, here is Rice's answer: "A debate with Dr. Ruckman? No, the Scripture says, 'Make no friendship with an angry man' (Prov. 22:24). His language, his spirit, are not the kind with which good Christians ought to fellowship, in my judgment, and the fact that you read his abusive words and are not offended is very sad. And I have far more important and better things to do than to enter into such a debate" (p. 15 in an arbitrary numbering, necessary since the pamphlet has no page numbers; I gave a page number in my previous quote from Evans, but it was actually on the letter reproduced, not the pamphlet.).