Recent content by John of Japan

The Azusa St. believers thought they were speaking an actual language, and thought that their missionaries would then be able to witness on the field without language study. (I can document this from their own historians.) That did not happen. So the original Azusa St. people did not believe...

I only posted on this thread once--really busy right now. But I want to input a couple of things that have not been mentioned. 1. The tongues I've heard and read have not been a language. I am a linguist in Japanese, and teach two linguistic courses in translation, so I believe I'm qualified to...

The very thought of a "private prayer language" is abhorrent. Why in the world would God want me to pray in a language I don't understand for something which I don't know? Our God loves intelligent, sincere and personal communication with His children. In my experience, the "private prayer...

To be fair, in many small churches, especially on the mission fields of the world, the pastor or church-planting missionary has to do all of these things. As a missionary in Japan, a Gospel-resistant country, the church I was planting seldom averaged more than 10-15. I preached 3 times a week...

Great post, brother! For anyone wishing to study inerrancy/infallibility, note that the resource Deacon gives was from 1978. There was a huge battle among evangelicals in the 1970's, kicked off by The Battle for the Bible, by Harold Lindsell, in which he proved that Fuller Seminary and various...

God preserves all of His creation. He made it, so He preserves it. This is the general doctrine of preservation. Here is an excellent theological statement of God's general preservation: "Providence may be defined as that continued exercise of the divine energy whereby the Creator preserves all...

Welcome to the BB. The word "time" occurs in 543 verses in the KJV, according to my PowerBible software. Therefore, to say "Time doesn't exist" is to go against the Word of God. The way to approach the subject is not with a denial, but with an effort to understand exactly what God meant by...

This matter of foreign language texts is one place Ruckman did great harm. He did not know the languages in which he claimed there were KJV equivalent translations, so therefore he often got things wrong. As a result, he caused trouble among missionaries trying to reach souls on the mission...

Years ago a rabid KJV-Only missionary came to the island of Hokkaido. I knew the missionaries there well--they were from our board--and a year or two later we moved up there ourselves. One day my friend Frank and the KJVO man had a conversation in which the KJVO man stated that the Classical...

When we arrived in Japan in 1981, there was no "KJV Bible" or "KJV equivalent" or a NT you could buy that was from the TR. (There was only one NT from the TR in Japanese history, and it was in very hard-to-read classical Japanese, and wasn't in print anymore. To those who believe that the KJV...

Jimmy should have been biblical enough and honest enough to resign his church.

Depends on how you define "paraphrase." “Paraphrase: The statement of the contents of a passage, text, etc., in the same or another language, without following the original text verbatim" (Mario Pei and Frank Gaynor, Dictionary of Linguistics, 159). In this case, the rendering does follow the...

These are certainly relevant Scriptures, especially Ne. 8:8, which I call the Bible translator's theme verse. Here are some more that would rebuke the "translators" of the "GenZ Version," the "Father's Heart Version," and the "Cotton Patch Version." Rev. 22--"18 For I testify unto every man...

Thank you, Rob. Good words. I believe that a Bible translator has a spiritual gift, based on 1 Cor. 12:30, "Have all the gifts of healing? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret?" There is only one word in Greek for translate (written) and interpret (spoken). Cf. also 1 Cor. 14:5, 13, 27...

I have to disagree with this based on the doctrine of verbal-plenary inspiration. Quoting Deut. 8:3, Christ said, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God" (Matt. 4:4). As a Bible translator, this means to me that I must carefully translate...