English Standard Version ?

I wholeheartedly recommend the ESV. As has been pointed out, it is a great middler between the NIV and NASB. Conservative, Bible believers finally have a Bible that is literal without sacrificing readability, and lucid without sacrificing accuracy.

ESV Bible Homepage

 

This is an evangelical revision of the Revised Standard Version that corrects the non-Christian interpretations of the RSV blah blah blah blah

warmed up cow dung is still cow dung. you want to read a Bible? get yourself a King James.

 

Actually, I have over 25 KJVs. I also have many others as well, too!

Neal

 

You have picked an interesting way to refer to God's word. To call a faithful translation "cow dung" is wholly outside the bounds of Christian decency. To refer to God's word with so little respect is apalling.

 

I didn't call God's Word (AV 1611) cow dung. I called some person's** perversion of God's Words cow dung. I'm sure you already knew that's what I meant though.

**notice the copyright inside the cover of that perversion saying that those words belong to the person who wrote that book. God's Words (AV 1611) are not copyrighted.

 

Pastor Larry,
I see that Harvest is a Ruckmanite, so this is probably the nicest he can be. Remember who he studied under (check out his website pictures). Consider that possibly the rudest, most twisted preacher in America is someone he looks up to. They are like roaches; they keep coming back.

 

Oh, my! I don't know how you people just keep
hanging in there. Mmay our God bless you with
an over-abundance of energy and time, with the
words to combat this.

[ January 23, 2003, 07:16 PM: Message edited by: Abiyah ]

 

I knew exactly what you meant and I was correcting you. The ESV, whether you like it or not, is God's word. Your personal preferences are not the deciding issue here. The Scriptures are. You need to provide the teaching of Scripture that the KJV alone is the word of God. Until you can do that, your comments will be abiblical and you will be asserting the teaching of men such as Ruckman over the authority of God's word.

A commonly repeated misstatement. The KJV is copyrighted by the Crown of England. The words of the ESV are copyrighted to protect them, to keep others from changing them, and to prevent the theft of work. This is a straw man argument that has not been studied by those who use it.

 

I can use the entire KJB text as I see fit and not get sued.

You can not use the entire text of your Bible-like books and not get sued because the companies who made them said..."Those are our words, if you use them, you gotta pay us". Why would God restrict how much of His words you can use?

 

I thought this might come up. Instead of discussing the issue you want to bring up Peter Ruckman. Do I respect Peter Ruckman's teachings? Yes. Have I learned a great deal about the Bible from Peter Ruckman? Yes. Did I believe the King James Bible to be THE PERFECT WORDS OF GOD before I ever heard of Peter Ruckman? Yes. Am I going to waste time defending Peter Ruckman? No, he can take care of himself.

By the way, I have only been to his church once and that's when that picture was taken. I live in Idaho and he is in Florida. I would go to his church, but it's kind of a long commute.

 

Unfortunately, you won't use it to prove that the KJV is the only word of God. Why not?

I use the text of my Bible every week, day in and day out to preach the word of God and call people to salvation through repentance and faith and then to godly living. God doesn't restrict how much of his words I can use. That is a straw man -- which strangely enough, I already said.

 

The Harvest said:

I can use the entire KJB text as I see fit and not get sued.

In other words, the entire KJV-only copyright argument boils down to "sour grapes." You can't take advantage of someone else's hard work that you didn't lift a finger to contribute to, so you whine about it being "corrupt" instead.

Not that copyright matters a single iota to whether the KJV is exclusively the perfect and inerrant Word of God in English. But it's nice to see the KJV-onlyists' real motivation - selfishness.

 

The Harvest said:

I can use the entire KJB text as I see fit and not get sued.

Pastor Larry answered:

Unfortunately, you won't use it to prove that the KJV is the only word of God. Why not?

KJV-onlyism is theologically non-existent, ergo the KJV is not "fit" to be used in that way.

 

How about this, You prove that God has decided to preserve His words imperfectly through a multitude of conflicting copies, versions, etc. KJB critics will sometimes state that they believe that the words of God have indeed been perfectly preserved, yet they teach that no one can find them all at one time, and place them in one Book! According to this view God's words are not preserved in any real sense! They are not preserved enough to read in one Book. KJB critics do not believe a person can read, from Genesis to Revelation, every perfect word of God that was found in the originals. How then can they call this "preservation"? You prove your view of preservation. How will you do it? Will you use a Bible that you claim is not 100% perfect?

 

The Harvest said:

How about this, You prove that God has decided to preserve His words imperfectly through a multitude of conflicting copies, versions, etc.

Why the expletive deleted should anyone have to "prove" what is obvious to anyone with nominal reasoning capacity?

There are thousands of manuscripts of the Bible, more than all the textual evidence for the next ten works of ancient literature combined.

Not only has God preserved His word in all these thousands of manuscripts, he has done it in a big way.

Not that you KJV-onlyists are interested in a reasonable answer, of course. The modus operandi of the KJV-onlyists is to employ skepticism and doubt to undermine the Bible's authority in favour of your man-made tradition.

This tactic of doubt-creating is identical to the one employed by Roman Catholic apologists to undermine the doctrine of sola scriptura. All these denominations can't agree on anything! All this confusion! You need a final authority - the Roman Catholic Church.

In their recent work Holy Scripture: The Ground and Pillar of our Faith, David King and William Webster cite several examples of Roman apologists appealing to the uncertainty of the Biblical text in favour of so-called Sacred Tradition. King and Webster refute these assertions with the words of the textual critics. Protestant and Catholic critics alike testify to the overwhelming certainty of the text, such that no truth remains in question because of a variant reading. Furthermore, as one author puts it, "In any event, no doctrine of the Christian faith depends solely upon a passage that is textually uncertain" (Bruce Metzger, qtd. in King and Webster, vol. 1, p. 154).

King comments on the Romanist methodology:

Replace "oral tradition" with "KJV-onlyism," and "the Roman Church" with "the King James Bible," and you have The Harvest's argument in a nutshell.

I don't buy this garbage from the Romanists. Why should I buy it from the indy-fundy Baptists?

 

What kind of Baptist are you ransom?

 

Don't change the subject. It doesn't work on me.

 

i'm not changing the subject, i'm asking an honest question

 

I think i can return the same question unto you. Do you speak Greek? Do you speak Hebrew?

 

1. This is a red-herring
2. This is sophistry
3. This is untrue in places where the KJV copyright is still in effect. USA happens to not be one of those places.