We are faced with a church in America which says it believes the Bible but does not practice what it already knows. The battle is not over which Bible but obedience to Christ.
Hi brother, you have a good point here. However I would like to point out two things. One, more and more Christians today are coming to the position that The Bible is not inerrant and therefore cannot be believed in its entirety.
The second thing is that none of us practices what we already know. Our knowledge of Christ and what we SHOULD do is always way ahead of what we actually do. This is true of us all. We all fall way short of the glory of God and are light years away from the character of Christ.
God continues to humble us all by our indwelling sin and shortcomings, that we may cast ourselves on His mercy and recognize that it is Christ's righteousness alone that makes us acceptable before Him.
Anyway, you bring up some good points I agree with.
As for the ever changing "bible" here is a little study I just finished.
Luke 4:44 Geological blunder in many modern versions
In Luke 4:44 we read: "And he preached in the synagogues of GALILEE." The immediate context clearly shows that the Lord Jesus was in Galilee, which is far north of the region of Judea. In fact, the very next verse tells us: "And it came to pass, that, as the people pressed upon him to hear the word of God, he stood by the lake of Gennesaret." Gennesaret is another name for the Sea of Galilee. See Matthew 4:18 and Mark 1:16.
Galilee and Judea are two distinct and separate regions in the land of Israel, with Decapolis and Samaria standing between them. (See Matthew 4:25; 19:1; Mark 3:7; Luke 2:4; 3:1; 5:17; John 4:3 and Acts 9:31)
"He preached in the synagogues of GALILEE" is the reading found in the vast Majority of all Greek manuscripts, including A and D, and the Old Latin copies of a, aur, b, c, d, e, f, ff2, l, q, and r1. It is also the reading of the Vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta, the Gothic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Georgian, many Coptic, and the Slavonic ancient versions.
However the Westcott-Hort text, as well as the Nestle-Aland and UBS Critical texts actually read: "and he preached in the synagogues of JUDEA." So read the RSV, NRSV, ESV, NASB, the Catholic New American Bible and Jerusalem bible, and the NIV. This is a clear geographical blunder. This erroneous reading is found in P75, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, the so called "oldest and best" manuscripts which differ from each other in significant ways more than 3000 times in the gospels alone.
It is of more than passing interest that even the Revised Version of 1881 and the American Standard Version of 1901, both of which generally followed the W-H texts and omitted some 4000 words from the New Testament, did not follow the Westcott-Hort text in this place, but rather saw the blatant blunder of this false reading, and instead went with "in the synagogues of GALILEE."
Not only this, but now there are three more modern bible versions that have recently come down the pike, and which are also based on the UBS critical text. All three have now gone back to the correct reading of "in the synagogues of GALILEE". These are the Holman Standard of 2003, the Message 2002 and the 2004 ISV (International Standard Version)
Agreeing with the correct reading of "he preached in the synagogues of GALILEE" are Wycliffe, Tyndale, Coverdale, Bishops' Bible, the Geneva Bible, the NKJV, RV, ASV, Douay, Bible in Basic English, Young's, Weymouth, Darby, New Life Bible, Spanish Reina Valera, Italian Diodati, German Luther, French Louis Segond, and the Modern Greek versions.
Among the silly reasons for adopting the bogus reading of "the synagogues of JUDEA", Daniel Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary, whose NET version also reads this way, says: "Judea is probably the original reading since it is both the harder reading and supported by the best witnesses. “Galilee” is an assimilation to Mark 1:39 and Matt 4:23."
Now this is interesting. According to Mr. Wallace, we should adopt this "probably original reading" because it is the harder reading and supported by the "best witnesses" which disagree with each other literally thousands of times in the N.T. alone. The reading of "Judea" is not only "the harder reading" but it is the IMPOSSIBLE reading. It is just flat out wrong. According to men like Daniel Wallace, if the reading doesn't make any sense and is contrary to all historical evidence, then it must be right! Go figure.
Will Kinney
