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Bible Questions with Michael Pearl
Episode 027: Why do you only use the King James Bible?

By Michael Pearl

Episode Transcription:

Michael Pearl: All right, we got Jarad behind the camera and Michael Pearl sitting here in this $20 chair and ready to answer your Bible questions. So I have my Bible here and if you have a question, put it to me.

Jared: Why do you only use the King James Bible?

Michael: I don't use the King James Bible only. I use a dictionary. I use concordances. I use Treasure Scripture Knowledge, and if I need a good laugh, I use the New International Version. So I am very broad‑minded. I have on my computer about 20 different translations, including four different Greek translations. I have in my library a large number of translations. When I went to Bible College, I got a 25th edition of Nestle‑Aland Greek New Testament when I took Greek. I still have that old original, plus I have the 27th edition as well.

Then I have a couple of other editions of the Bible in the Greek language. So I use all kinds of books ‑ different books for different purposes.

I think what the questioner wanted to know was why do I believe that the King James Bible is the Word of God and not the other books. Well, for the simple reason that the King James Bible is in that great tradition of Bible text that we have received from our fathers. In other words, the Bible says all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable.

Now, what does He mean by all scriptures? You take the word scripture and look it up in the concordance, every time it is used in the Bible, you will find out the scripture never refers to just the originals. The scripture refers to copies of copies of copies of the original.

In Jesus' day, when they refer to scripture, when Jesus said, the scriptures say, "he open to them the scriptures. he open the scriptures and read to them". He was opening a copy of the Bible probably in the Hebrew language, which was in a different Hebrew text than the original. It was in a rounded text rather than the old square text that was used before the Babylonian captivity. So it was a copy of the copy of the copy of the copy of the copy of the original text, and yet Jesus called it scripture, and scripture is the given by the inspiration of God.

So in other words, what Jesus had in His day, those copies, were given by inspiration. Notice that the tense of the word "given", are given. All scripture are given. In other words, it is an ongoing process. God didn't just create an original that was perfect and then desert it and allow error to creep in. God has continued to preserve and pass the scripture down.

Now, the King James Bible is based on what's called the majority text, or we call it the Textus Receptus. The Textus Receptus is really not... it has come to have the connotation of a particular text but there is no what we call Textus Receptus, like a single Greek text that Scrivner or different ones have produced Greek text that differ one from the other in minor ways. And each one of them would be called the Textus Receptus.

Originally, it was ‑‑ think of the term "received text" ‑‑ the text that we received from our fathers. Behind the King James Bible, we have four other earlier English translations. We have got the Bishop's Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Tyndale... We've got a whole line of a couple hundred years of the Bible being put into the English language culminating in the King James Bible.

Even after the King James Bible was given, there were a couple of revisions where it was corrected back to its original perfection ‑‑ when it was originally translated. So the King James Bible is that Bible that is consistent with a multitude of other language Bibles.

In other words, if you go back and you look at the early Latin and the Cyriac and the Ethiopian languages ‑‑ Coptic ‑‑ and many of the languages were translated in 150 AD, or maybe 100 AD or 200 AD. Those early Bibles that have come down to us through the ages, we find are consistent with the King James Bible. 95% of all Greek manuscripts, pieces or bits or whole books... whatever... that are found, that are available to us ‑‑ they are called extant manuscripts.

95% or more of those are in agreement with the King James Bible. Only about five percent or less ‑‑ really quite a bit less ‑‑ are different from the King James Bible. The King James Bible is the Bible that the churches always used in different translations, in different languages. Multiple languages... but it is the text as it reads here.

Only in modern times, as a result of German scholarship, have so called scholars departed from the reading of the King James Bible in any language, and gone to the reading of the Sinaiticus/Vaticanus text. Text that was found in the Vatican library and Mt. Sinai in a waste basket. Those two manuscripts were put together in the middle 1800s and produced a New Greek Bible that had never existed before.

That New Greek Bible became the Nestle‑Aland Greek New Testament. It became the Greek Bible that few preachers says, the original Greeks says, he is not going back to original Greek. He is going back to a Greek manuscript that is a little over a hundred years old. He is going back to a Greek manuscript that was created by two unbelievers and that became the basis of The American Standard Version, The New American Standard Version, the Revised Standard Version, The Good News for modern man, the new International version...

All those translations came from a modern Greek text and that modern Greek text was based on basically two manuscripts and those two manuscripts were actually not written in Koine Greek; they were written in classical Greek. So they read quite a bit different.

But whenever the scholars took the Sinaiticus/Vaticanus text and put it into a modern Greek edition they re‑translated, back translated it into the Koine Greek of an earlier period so that it looked like it was the one that was available in Jesus' day and when, in fact, it was not. It was a manuscript that came about 500 years after Christ, that they were copying from and it can be traced back to North Africa to the origin. It is the so‑called Septugea text in the Old Testament.

This is a vast subject, one that I've studied for years and years. When I went to Bible College and they gave me a Greek New Testament ‑‑ I had to go to the book store and buy one ‑‑ they said this is the original Greek, I was so excited. When I first started reading whole verses and portions of scriptures out of the Greek, I thought, "This is wonderful. I am going back to the original Greek."

When I got out of Bible College, before I learned that was not the original Greek; that was a hundred year old text. And when I went back to one of my professors ‑‑ he wasn't the Greek professor, but he was the professor I went back to ‑‑ and I said, "How come you didn't tell me the Greek manuscripts that you were using to correct the King James Bible was not the written manuscript on which the King James Bible was based. How come you didn't tell me it came from the Sinaiticus/Vaticanus text.” He said, "Huh?" So I repeated the question. And he said, "I don't know what you're talking about." This is the case when many of these Bible college teachers and preachers that are correcting the Bible have no idea about the background of it.

Once you learn, you will be shocked. You will feel the way you do right now about the way that the country is betraying you. The politicians are betraying you and departing from the constitution. The same kind of fraud, the same kind of deceit, the same kind of the willfulness to deprive you of your liberties. They are also depriving you of the Word of God. And the sooner you get educated on it and stop taking the Word of 'The Good Godly Man', the sooner you will be reading the King James Bible and trusting every single word in it as the Word of God.

Announcer:  If you would like to ask a Bible question, email us at [email protected] or call at 931‑805‑4820.

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3 comments on “Why do you only use the King James Bible?”

  1. Hi, I was just wondering does this mean that the NKJV Study Bible I'm reading is also not as reliable as the original KJV? (Our church pastor had us switch to that version a few years back when he noticed that many of the youth had NIV version Bibles). I would like to know because I want to be the best godly mother I can be and having a good honest Bible is key for that to happen.
    Thank you & God bless you! God will reward you and your family so much! I'm just glad to know you and hope that I can be a blessing to others as well!

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