Bible Basics: Part 7 Session with Michael Pearl from the Big Texas Shindig

Transcription

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Michael Pearl:  Now here is the first page of the Book of Revelation in the original 1611, a photocopy of it. I have that full thing at home. When I was studying for this several years ago— I've done a lot of writing on this I've never published—I decided if God says that you're not to add to or take away from the words of the book, how many words are in it would be a good thing to find out; right? And so I took the original photostat copy and I counted each word. I would go through a paragraph, about a third of one column, and I'd write it down beside it. I had a little clicker, like this. Still got that little clicker.

I'd go through it three times and count. If I got a wrong count, I kept counting until I got the same thing for three times. Sometimes I'd end up counting six or eight times the same section. Then I totaled up that column, wrote at the bottom and totaled up the other column, wrote at the bottom, and I did that page by page. I think it was about 21 or 22 pages, until I got through the Book of Revelation and I’d counted all the words, so I'd know how many words God wrote in 1611. I guess that's my only scientific original investigation experiment I've done on the subject.

Guess how many there were in the 1611 printing? 12,000 words exactly. No more and no less. That's amazing, since 12,000 appears in the Bible exactly 24 times, 2 times 12. And I then discovered—I guess I already knew it, that in the next printing, two years later, of the Book of Revelation, of the Bible, that there were some words left out of the original printing that needed to be added back in, five of them. You see them listed there.

Revelation 1:11, "unto the churches of Asia." You've got "unto the church at Thyatira and unto the church of Smyrna and unto the churches of Sardis and unto,” and it skipped the "unto" and it said "church of Philadelphia." And so in the next printing, they had to put that back in. It was a typesetting issue. The typesetter just forgot to put it in.

And then in Revelation 5:13, "and" twice is left out. And then in Revelation 1:14, "which are" is left out. So If you count that "which are" as two, three, four, five, you get five times. That would have brought us to a total of 12,005 words in the second printing, which been adding to or something, it wouldn't have been right, since God said, don't add or take away. What is funny is, I went back and I got my computer and I searched several different versions, digital versions of the Bible, and I noticed that I came up with some variations. One of them had 11,990 and another one had 12,002 and 11,998. There's only one English Bible that's perfect and that's the large print Cambridge; not any other Cambridge, just the large print Cambridge.

I found out in the second edition that where they had "two‑edged," they took that apart and made it two words. Where they had "first fruits," they put them together. They took "two-edged" and put it together, took "first fruits" and put them together, took "fellow servants" and put it together three times. That brought the count back to 12,000.

The original printing, with some deletions, were 12,000 words. The next printing, by putting those back in and compounding those words, still came out to 12,000. Today, in your modern Bibles, I compared word by word, very tediously, the original 1611 with the digital Cambridge print and it's exactly the same words in the same order in the same place, without dropping a single one to this day right now.

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