On May 25, 2008, YouTube user icartoon2 posted a video titled KJB KJV Truth of Acts 15. It is a small clip of a presentation in which Seventh Day Adventist Walter J. Veith makes the claim that the NIV is a Jesuit Bible.

Veith supports his Jesuit Bible claim by repeating three arguments directly from Benjamin Wilkinson’s book The Authorized Version Vindicated.

Claim # 1: NIV Restores the Confessional

A slide is shown as follows:

Here the RSV and NIV are accused of promoting the heresy of the Confessional for changing “faults” to “sins”.  This couldn’t make any less sense.  For one thing, all versions read, “to each other” or “one another”, so it is hard to use it as a basis for being forgiven by a priest.  For another, “sins” are exactly what the passage is talking about, and is most likely exactly what the KJV translators meant when they retained the word as translated in the Bishop’s Bible.  Confessing your sins to one another allows your fellow brethren to pray with you and hold you accountable.  To understand “faults” to mean something other than sins–maybe as mistakes?–doesn’t fit in with the passage, especially with 5:15 “and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.”  Is it impossible that “faults” could have meant “sins” in these older English translations?  Not at all.  This is exactly the case, for example, in Galatians 6:1:

Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such a one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.

The inclusion of the quote from the Dublin Review is nothing short of ironic.  It in no way supports the point that Veith is trying to make, and by not doing so, it weakens his case, as the DR author would most certainly have jumped on such an important difference as going from “mistakes” to “sins”.  Instead, there is no question that the DR author understands “faults” to mean “sins”.  If you look at the quote in the original source, two important points will quickly jump out at you.

The Apostles have now power to “forgive” sins, and not simply to “remit” them.  “Confess therefore [emphasis in the original] your sins” is the new reading of James v.16, and the banished particle has returned to bear witness against Protestant evasion.

“The banished particle”?  It is talking about how the word “therefore” is now in the text. Notice how “therefore” is italicized in the original, but the italics were cleverly left out on the presentation slide?  This is the way it appears in Wilkinson’s book, as well, and along with Veith’s obvious emphasis on the word “sins”, and actually skipping the word “therefore” in the presentation; these are subtle tactics to obfuscate what the author of the Dublin Review was really talking about.  The Dublin Review is hardly as excited about the new translation as is implied.  The quote about James 5:16 is part of a single paragraph that gives some “positive” comments about the Revised Version amid an article comprised of many more paragraphs condemning it. In fact, the Catholic author of the Dublin Review article seems to have more in common with King James Onlyism in places:

“So far it has been a question of translation and of names, but here the vital integrity of Sacred Scripture is affected.  By the sole authority of textual criticism these men have dared to vote away some forty verses of the Inspired Word. [...] Many other passages have a mark set against them in the margin to show that, like forest trees, they are shortly destined for the critic’s axe.  Who can tell when the destruction will cease?” (p. 140)

Claim # 2: The NIV Allows for a Multitude of Priests

The next translation attacked by Veith is Hebrews 10:21.

As is normally the case when differences between versions are attacked by KJVO proponents, no mention is made of the underlying text.  There is good reason for translating Hebrews 10:21 as “great priest”.  It can easily be shown by looking back a few chapters at Hebrews 4:14 where we see the words in the KJV, “great high priest” (Greek: megas archiereus).  Notice that megas is translated as “great” and archiereus as “high priest”.  The words in question in Heb 10:21 are megas hiereus, literally “great priest”.  It would seem that “great priest” would be the preferred rendering for people who normally claim to be very concerned with “word-for-word” translation.

Whether “great” or “high” is the proper translation is not really the issue.  The important question to ask is whether translating megas as “great” makes the NIV a “Jesuit Bible”, as Veith claims.  To answer, let’s take a look at how the Catholic Douay Rheims Bible translates Hebrews 10:21.

And a high priest over the house of God:

The Catholic Bible translates it the same was as the KJV.  Does this make the KJV a Jesuit Bible?  The Dublin Review article cited earlier has some interesting remarks to make about this, speaking of the KJV as the second revision of the Great Bible:

And in that revision King James’s revisers were more largely influenced by the Rheims translation than they cared to own.  Dr. Moulton, in his “History of the English Bible,” says, “that the Rhemish Testament has left its mark on every page of the work”

If we are going to apply KJVO reasoning, let’s do it consistently.  It is the KJV rendering of megas that is the preferred Catholic wording.  It is the KJV that is praised by the Dublin Review as being a Catholic-influenced Bible.

Claim #3: Acts 15:23 Supports Hierarchy

Veith spends very little time on the actual text and differences of Acts 15:23, but uses it as a springboard to get into his rant on the priesthood of all believers.  This is a clever, albeit misleading rhetorical technique.  At this point of the YouTube video, the discussion comes to closely resemble a “shell game”, where Veith quickly shows Acts 15:23, then sticks it under a cup, shuffles a few cups around, then presents a different cup with a different topic of discussion as though it were the same one.  At the end you are left thinking, “wow, the NIV doesn’t support the priesthood of believers!”  In reality, Acts 15:23 has nothing to do with this doctrine, and as you have probably now guessed, it has certainly not been removed from the NIV.

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.  (1 Peter 2:9, NIV)

The unwarranted implication that Veith feels links the passages in Acts to 1 Peter is apparently that the idea of roles in the church are somehow related to our ability to approach God without a human mediator.  This link is not supported by the KJV, NIV, nor RSV, so it’s not clear how he has jumped to this conclusion.  On the other hand, even in the KJV there are distinct differences between roles and authority in the church.  There’s not been a KJVO church I have ever been to that would have allowed a woman to preach (except maybe Gail Riplinger, who sometimes gets a free pass).  Does this mean they are not part of the “brethren”, or don’t have access to approach God without a human priest?

Not at all, and yet I’m sure Veith isn’t arguing that the women in the church were authoring the letter of spiritual instruction to the Christians in Antioch.  What he probably means is that the entire body of the church was behind sending the letter.  This is exactly the case in the NIV:

Then the apostles and elders, with the whole church, decided to choose some of their own men and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They chose Judas (called Barsabbas) and Silas, two men who were leaders among the brothers.  (Acts 15:22, NIV)

Notice not only that the “whole church” decided to send men with Paul and Barnabas, but that they are recorded even in the NIV as being from “among the brothers.”

As with Veith’s other two claims, this one can easily be flipped on its head.  By clearly delineating the three different “classes” of apostles, elders, and brethren, it could be argued that it is actually the KJV that supports the clergy/laity division.  In the KJV, the apostles and elders are set apart in their own category above that of the general masses, whereas in modern versions, everyone is included as brothers—all are equal, merely with different roles.

The unsubstantiated accusations thrown at modern Bible versions and translators are really not helpful to the already complex, passionate Bible version debate.  If King James Onlyists would measure their own preferred version with the same measurements they try to use on others, we could save ourselves a lot of time.  Christians need to stop encouraging the production of these arguments by uncritically accepting the things that they hear at the seminars such as the one in this video and what they see on YouTube.

Up until recently, I had gone to churches that were King James Version Only all of my life.  I read the books that were available to me as a youth such as New Age Bible Versions, and some of D. A. Waite’s books.  Honestly, I loved it.  I went to a high school where they used modern versions, and I felt it was my mission to spread the “truth” to as many of my fellow students and teachers as possible.  Once I got a job, I went on shopping spree from Bible For Today and Ruckman’s mail order catalogs to “learn” as much as I could about how the people behind the modern versions were all members of a secret Alexandrian Cult.

After attending an Independent Fundamental Baptist college, my KJVO views became more charitable.  Maybe people behind the modern versions weren’t evil… Just horribly misled.  I became aware of a book called The King James Only Controversy and viewed it with the same fear and contempt I may have had towards a book like The God Delusion, if it had existed at the time.  Luckily, I paged through one of my professor’s copies and saw red ink all over the margins and across the text of every page, and this was all the confirmation I needed that the KJVOC was just a bunch of unscholarly fluff. Before leaving college, I had a chance to pen my magnum opus, a defense of the KJV translation of “Easter” for a single occurrence of the word pascha in the New Testament.  I started building my defense from what I “knew” was true, that Easter was the proper translation, and worked backward from there, selectively finding quotes, definitions and “evidence” that supported my presupposition.  It got high marks, of course.

Fast forward a few years.  One of my children goes to a preschool at a Baptist church down the road from us.  I notice while sitting in the auditorium for one of their little concerts that the Bibles in the pews are New International Version.  After my initial disappointment, I start thinking about it…  These people genuinely seem to love God.  How could this be if they are using a counterfeit Bible?   Wouldn’t it lead them away from God?  If these Bibles were the cornerstone of Satan’s devious and conniving plan to turn people away from the truth, why did it seem to have the opposite effect?

Coincidentally (?) around this same time, I was having a sort of minor crisis of faith at my own church.  I wasn’t by any means a “good Fundamentalist”–I knew that some day I would probably have to stop going to movie theaters, get rid of all of my DVD’s, attend Thursday night visitation every week, wear suits to church, and so on, in order to really be close to God, but at the time being, I was content in my mediocrity.  This was the status quo for some time until–and I won’t go into the details about exactly what transpired here out of respect for my former pastor, but suffice it to say–I realized that my pastor didn’t always have all the answers.  In fact, as I thought a little further about the case he was building in that sermon, it seemed to have an awful lot of logical fallacies. But if we were wrong about this, what else could we be wrong about?

This initiated a very careful, thorough study of everything I believed.   I realized that if I didn’t do it now, I may just be burdening my kids with something that should have been the father’s responsibility.  So I changed my outlook on truth and started coming at things from a different standpoint.  Instead of caring only to prove my treasured beliefs were correct, I sincerely prayed for and sought truth.  It was a liberating feeling. I learned how to have an open mind, being able to adapt my viewpoints as I researched a subject.  And, I think, most importantly, as I read not only books, but even the Bible, I got a thrill out of trying to throw out my presuppositions as I read and really determine what the author was saying.  So by the time I was ready to defend or reject my King James Onlyism, I got myself some books, some for KJVO and a couple against it.

The first thing I noticed was that when the KJVO authors I was reading wrote books, they tended to read their own presuppositions into a text.  No one is perfect, and of course I will always do it myself to some degree, but what I saw seemed to be people just skimming books, trying to find little fragments of text that supported their position, and ripping this out of context and using it as “evidence”, regardless of whether or not the author was actually saying what they supposed he was.  I decided to go back and read some of the source materials frequently used in the debate, and came out with a totally different picture than what was being painted by the authors of the KJVO books. It wasn’t much later that I had to admit I had been wrong about the issue all my life.  This is not a concession that one makes lightly or without much deliberation.

I also found that I wasn’t alone.  You see stories similar to this all over the internet these days.  I believe this is due in large part to being able to research things on-line, without having to finance enormous personal research libraries.  And for every story written, I believe there are many more that are unwritten.  I hope that in adding my story to the mix, some people will be blessed by it.  I certainly do not mean to offend anyone, and I look forward to meaningful interaction on this topic and many others through this blog.