Featured Gail Riplinger

RIP, Dr. Cassidy. He was great for the BB and many other places.

 

I just sat for an hour while my makeup was being put on for tonight's dress rehearsal of "A Christmas Carol." When we first came back from Japan to teach here, the college administrator came into my office and said, "Everyone says you look like Scrooge. Would you like to play him in our Christmas play?" I said yes, and really enjoyed it, but we all found out that I have a terrible time learning lines--except that "Bah, humbug" one. Now, in case you don't know what a humbug is and why Scrooge kept saying it, a humbug is a fake.

In my thinking, to pontificate about Bibles in languages you can't even read is a humbug! Unfortunately, this takes place all too often. Now Gail Riplinger has admitted on a radio broadcast that she cannot read either Hebrew or Greek. (See The Messianic Claims of Gail Riplinger, by Phil Stringer, p. 4.) Yet she rails against these beautiful languages and the Bible God gave in them. She has the word "Greek" 1855 times in a 550 page book, and virtually none of the statements are complimentary.

I know we have at least one Russian speaker on the BB. What would you think of me if I railed against a Russian Bible translation without even being able to read it??? Frankly, that would make me a humbug.

Anyway, since I had a hard time memorizing lines, they gave me the role of Charity Solicitor #1 in future performances, such as tonight. Now, when Dickens wrote his classic, "charity" meant the same thing it does now: helping meet the needs of the "poor and destitute" among us. On the other hand, in 1611 "charity" meant what we now call "love." Yet, Riplinger objects to that and calls it a "corrupt" definition on p. 77.

I tell my students to read the 1611 KJV as what it is, a 1611 British English document. If Riplinger were actually a linguist, she would know how words change in meaning over the centuries. Does she actually think she will have a huge, American style mansion with many rooms in it in Heaven? (She doesn't mention that verse in this book.) Yet, in Britain to this day, a "mansion" simply means a dwelling place. That word has migrated into Japanese, where a manshon (マンション) is simply a nice apartment.

I think I'll change my BB icon to my Scrooge look. Bah, Humbug.

 

I'm going to be very busy for the next several days acting in "A Christmas Carol," and may not get back to the thread until next Monday. So, before I get off work I want to point out that, contrary to Riplinger's opinion, many times the Hebrew and Greek can prove the reliability of the KJV. I won't take time to do that here and now, but having compared the entire KJV NT to the Greek as I worked on translating the NT into Japanese, I am very satisfied with the faithfulness to the original text of both the KJV and NKJV. (I know the NKJV is anathema to many KJVO folk, but I can live with that. )

Of course, many other times knowing the Greek can increase one's knowledge of the Word of God. An example I give to my Greek students on their very first day of class is what Christ said on the cross, "It is finished" (John 19:30). The Greek word there is Τετέλεσται, which is a perfect tense verb. Now, the verbal aspect of the Greek perfect tense is that it indicates action which has been completed, with results continuing. So Christ died for our sins, and the results continue in the lives of us who are saved by His blood!

Another place where the Greek helps is in the seeming contradiction of the burdens of Galatians 6:2 and 5. We are to bear each other's burdens, but each of us is to bear our own. There are two different Greek words there, though the KJV only has the one English word. We are to bear the burdens (βάρος, what we think of as burdens hard to bear) of suffering people, but each of us must bear his or her own burden (φορτίον, more of a responsibility). Riplinger will never learn such gems from Scripture, since she, like Ruckman did, believes that the KJV replaces the original languages in which God gave the Bible.

Makes you wonder why, if that be true, God didn't make English the lingua franca of the Roman Empire.... (Think about the linguistic absurdity of that statement. ) But no, He chose Greek.

 

Many of the great preachers and missionaries have been scholars of the original languages. There have been exceptions to that, of course, such as D. L. Moody and Billy Sunday. However, those who studied the ancient languages assiduously include:
1. Charles Wesley, whose "Holy Club" when he was young included study of Greek
2. "Father of Modern Missions" William Carey, who translated the whole Bible or parts of it from the original languages into over 40 languages
3. Adoniram Judson, who translated from the Greek and Hebrew into Burmese
4. John R. Rice, who often used the original languages in his preaching and writing
5. R. A. Torrey, who studied theology in Germany, but became Moody's assistant and then the next great evangelist
6. Hudson Taylor, who studied Greek while training himself to be a missionary.

These are just from memory. With a little effort I could name many more. But if Gail Riplinger and her ilk had their way, the great missionary Bible translators would have been stopped, because they did not translate from the KJV: Carey, Judson, Nathan Brown of Japan, Henry Martyn (Persian and two other languages), etc.

 

Contra Riplinger, the Lord led A. T. to write that.

 

I'm glad you are not a follower of Ruckman or Riplinger, either one.

I would be very surprised if you did not know more than I do on many passages. We do have the same Holy Spirit within us, do we not?

Having said that, the Bible says that we are not wise to compare ourselves: "For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise" (2 Cor. 10:12).

Now, you have compared yourself to me in spiritual understanding. I have compared myself with Riplinger only in the area of linguistics, not in spiritual areas. and only to show that she is not a linguist by any stretch of the imagination. That's because her entire claim to expertise in these areas is based on her claim to be a linguist.

Are you accusing me of something here? If you are, please be plain, say it straight out.

You lost me. What theory?

You have already falsely accused me of not believing in the preservation of Scripture. Now you are falsely accusing me of attacking Riplinger just to build myself up. So, you are attacking me for attacking Riplinger. You may have thrown her book away, but you have her attitude.

My purpose in this thread is not to build myself up. The KJV says, "A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject; Knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself" (Titus 3:10-11). So this thread is the rejection part. I am attempting to show gullible people how awful her life and teachings are.

Yes, kind of like how you have tested your theories and found them to be true. That's not praising yourself, right? But you can freely attack my character, and that's all right.

Now, if you think I've been hard on Riplinger, go to the Bible For Today website, and other places where Phil Stringer accuses her of being a Kabbalist, and read what he says about her. She is a great spiritual danger to all who read her stuff.
Gail Riplinger and Suing Baptists
http://www.biblefortoday.org/pdf/stringeronriplinger.pdf

 

On the website for the Reina-Valera Purificada, Michael Hollner has a pamphlet in pdf form by Riplinger, criticizing any Spanish version (in particular, the RV Gomez) that uses the wrong word for "word," according to her thinking. Here is the pdf: https://www.valera1602.org/_files/ugd/804ef4_f9f755e11ce44ae0b14ebcf3fe608a9f.pdf

This whole thread was inspired when I objected to that, and Michael said to start a thread on it and he might participate. Well, here's the thread, and I hope he's reading it, at least.

The chutzpah of anyone criticizing a Bible version in a language she does not even speak just blows my mind. (Maybe JD731 is hoping my mind blows. ) Beyond that, how could Riplinger even think that she knows nuances is a foreign language she does not even speak?

Even after 33 years in Japan, and 7 more years working on our Japanese translation here in the US, I still miss nuances. So, Dr. K (a NASA scientist and our last proofreader) informed me that we had the wrong word for "defense" in Phil. 1:7 and 17. We apparently used the word for the defense of a country rather than that of an individual. So after all of this time I still miss nuances. Yet not Riplinger. Nope, she has perfect understanding of Spanish nuances, even though she can't even read the language.

 

So, I've been going through the pamphlet on the Spanish Bible linked to in my previous post. It's easy to see that self-proclaimed linguist Riplinger makes basic errors in linguistics. To put it bluntly, she is linguistically naive.

1. She assumes for most of the pamphlet that the Latin Bible (both Jerome's and the Old Latin) have the same meanings. There is no one to one correspondence between two dialects of the same language, much less two entirely different languages such as Latin and Spanish. Yes, Latin was an ancestor of Spanish, but they are not the same language. Remember my previous example of how the word "mansion" is different between American (a large, luxurious house) and British (a nice flat) English, and how the British meaning has become a lone word in Japanese, マンション. I have a whole book of those differences between American and British English meanings!

2. She assumes the same meaning between words in the same language but different times in history. This is also false. She says on p. 14: "Some recent editions of the 1865 Spanish Bible change John 1:9, altering its longstanding “Aquel Verbo” to “Aquella Palabra.” This suggests that there is recognition that “Palabra” is the original 1865 reading in other verses, which should likewise be restored in all verses, not just one." However, just a little thought will show this to be a false assumption (even if we don't know Spanish). For example, consider how the meaning of "gay" has changed in English in just several decades. Or, think of how the word "let" meant "hinder" in the 1611 KJV, but means "allow" in modern English.

I'd better quit with this here. I've got to be on stage as "Charity Solicitor #1" in a half hour.