HERE IS WHAT I CONSIDER TO BE THE MOST
IMPORTANT PASSAGES (Keith Hunt)
QUOTE
"Every Scripture (is) God-breathed, and (is) profitable for
teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in
righteousness; so that them of God mat be fitted out, having
been fully furnished for every good work" - 2 Timothy 3: 16
You now have in your hand the fourth and final volume of THE
INTERLINEAR HEBREW - GREEK - ENGLISH - BIBLE, which is presented
to you and to all the Christian community with much exultation,
tempered by fear and trembling and awe towards our almighty God
and Savior, Jesus Christ.
It is hoped that you will discern that we have fully
believed all the words of this holy Book, handling it with
reverence, knowing that "Man shall not live by bread alone, but
by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God" - Matthew 4:
4. For we recognize that these words did not come "by the will of
man, but men spoke from God, being borne along by (the) Holy
Spirit" - 2 Peter 1: 21. It has also been written that each of
the sons of men shall be judged by the words of this Book, "And
if anyone hears My words, and does not believe, I do not judge
him.....the word which I spoke is that which will judge him
in the last day" - John 12: 47, 48.
Considering that the words of this Book are the ones that
will judge every person who has lived in all ages, how important
it must be that the very words of God, and no other, shall be
contained in a portable book, to be distributed far and wide, in
a form and in a commonly understood language which can be easily
and immediately taken into the heart and into the consciousness
of all who have the privilege to read them.
With these considerations in mind, and in holy fear
inculcated by our God, we have sought to provide in The
Interlinear Hebrew-Greek-English Bible all the original God-
breathed Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek words.
And after much prayer laborious study, it was concluded that
this could best be done by providing you with the two attested
texts that alone have been uniquely preserved whole, and accepted
in all generations, in all lands, by the vast majority of God's
people as their 'received text.'
Other texts have been put forth from time to time, but none
have been powerful enough to displace these two texts: The
Masoretic Text of the Old Testament, and the Received Text of the
New Testament.
WHY ANOTHER INTERLINEAR NEW TESTAMENT NOW
The market-place is being glutted with new books which are
being represented as "versions" of the Bible. Each one claims to
be the very word of God, there are literally thousands of
differences between them - and such differences as to cause one
to discern that there is much disagreement as to which Greek
words are to be translated, or paraphrased.
In one way these new versions agree: they all leave out
dozens of references to the deity of Jesus Christ, and they add
words which tend to question His virgin birth, His
substitutionary, fully satisfying atonement. This is due to their
decision to depend on an Alexandrian textbase, instead of that
body of God's words which have been universally received and
believed in for nineteen centuries, known to us as the Received
Text.
These new versions are not only marked by additions, but
also by subtractions, since some four whole pages of words,
phrases, sentences, and verses have been omitted by these new
versions. And these are words attested to as God's words by
overwhelming evidence contained in all the Greek manuscripts, in
the ancient versions, in the writings of the early fathers, and
these from every inhabited land on earth where Christianity has
been.
It is for these reasons we conclude another interlinear New
Testament is needed, so that those who love every word of God,
and who live by every word of God, may be able to compare any
version to the original Greek, and to know if any of the words of
God are being withheld from their hearts. Then they will know
that it is important to their spiritual life to be reading the
right version of the Bible, complete with all the words of
God.
Again, then, let this question be posed: Has Satan, like a
slight-of-hand shell-game artist, finally brought God's children
to the point where they are searching desperately for the true
Word of God? Are we to believe that it cannot now be in tact,
having been run through the shredder of unholy hands and heads?
Let it not be said! Let your answer be a resounding, crashing,
NO!
For remember that it has been written, "For I say to you,
Until the heavens and the earth pass away, in no way shall pass
away one iota or one point from the Law; until all things come to
pass" - Matthew 5:18. Who then will you believe? If our Almighty
God assures us that not even an iota, or a point, of His Word
shall pass away, then an important word, or phrase, or a
sentence, or verse, surely cannot be lost! But still we see
version after version after version pouring off the presses,
without hundreds and hundreds of authentic, well-attested words
which have always been held to be the very words of
God.
Should you not ask, Who are these men who tell us these are
not God's words? And what evidence do they give to you to
persuade you to give up these historically accepted, venerable
words that have stood the test of time - and this despite the
onslaughts of emperors, heathen hordes, philosophers, popes, and
fleshly inducements?
How did these words come to be questioned in the first
place? What is behind these omissions?
A cardinal rule for the Bible reader should be: "Let God be
true, and every man a liar" - Romans 3: 4. Then Lord Jesus did
not trust Himself to men, and not one of us should do so.
Instead, let the read put his faith in God, for it is only by
faith that the word of God can be apprehended. Being thus armed
with faith towards God, depending on him to very the words which
are truly His words, and at the same time being armed with a
healthy suspicion of men, one can ask, Who are these men who are
assuring us that this or that word, or phrase, or verse does not
belong in our Bible?
If they are learned scholars, should we not allow their
scholarly minds guide us as to what words to believe? No! for it
is written, "And we have not received the spirit of the world,
but the Spirit from God, that we may know the things freely given
to us from God, which things we also speak, not in words taught
of human wisdom, but in (words) taught of (the) Holy Spirit" - 1
Corinthians 2: 12, 13. And, "But the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit
which the Father will send in My name, that One will teach you
all things, and remind you (of) all things which I have said to
you" - John 14: 26. And, "But when that One, the Spirit
of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth" - John 16: 13.
Through faith, we believe. And through faith it is that we
are equipped to judge which words to believe.
What then is the evidence these Bible-alterers offer to
persuade you to give up the precious words they have removed from
their versions? Mainly, they cite two manuscripts, admittedly
old, but also admittedly carelessly executed. The Sinaiticus was
so poorly executed that seven different hands of 'textual
critics' can be discerned as they tried to impose their views on
the Bible. They twisted it like a nose of wax to meet their
purposes at the time. It is no wonder it was discarded, found in
a wastebasket fourteen centuries after it was executed. The
Vaticanus manuscript lay on a shelf in the Vatican library at
Rome until 1431, and was considered so corrupt that none would
use it (Erasmus, the noted Roman Catholic scholar, refused to
consider it as a source when he formed the Received Text).
The Vaticanus has errors so absurd that the books purporting
to teach 'technical science' carefully avoid mentioning these
gross errors in their favorite manuscript. They take this one and
add to it a handful of other manuscripts from the Alexandrian
textbase, all of them very loose in their handling of the
Scriptures. From these they give you their theories, their
hypotheses, their glosses. And year by year one or another
explodes the theories of the past year.
But let them be known by their fruits. What are these words
which they have so freely removed from their version of the
Scriptures? (a) They have made Joseph to be the begetter of
Jesus....; (b) they have made Jesus to be a begotten
creature.....He is an eternal Being, having always existed ; (c)
they have deleted 'Son of God' from Mark 1:1; (d) they have
removed from their so-called versions Christ, or Jesus, or Christ
Jesus, or Christ of God, twenty-five or more times; (e) and in 1
Cor. 5: 7, they have Christ suffering, but not 'for us'; (f) in 1
Pet.4: 1, they have Christ sacrificed, but not 'for us'; (g) in
Luke 24: 3, 6, 12, 37, 40, 51, 52, they have systematically
removed Luke's witness to the ascension of Christ - and of course
they have done away entirely with Mark's witness to the
ascension, simply because these last twelve verses do not appear
in those two corrupt manuscripts, the Vaticanus and the
Sinaiticus (yet the scribe of the Vaticanus has left an empty
space exactly large enough to contain those twelve verses - he
must have seen them in older manuscripts, else how would he know
how much space to leave? And the last 12 verses of Mark in the
Sinaiticus manuscript are written in much larger letters, very
loosely, to fill up the space which would contain these last
twelve verses if the same size letters had been used throughout.
.......why should we give them up without overwhelming
evidence......The fact is, history is repeating itself again. In
the beginning it was the old Serpent, Satan, who was the first
textual critic, as well as the first murderer. He succeeded in
insinuating into the itching ears of Eve, "You shall not surely
die....you shall be as God" - Genesis 3: 1-5. From that point on,
men became sinners, and as sinners without saving grace they have
preferred to believe a lie, if that lie suited their fancy better
that what God has written for us.
Like Origen, an early textual critic, too many men believe
what he said, that "The Scriptures are of little use to those who
understand them as they are written," (quoted by McClintock and
Strong Cyclopedia, article on Origen). And given the opportunity,
many like Origen will actually alter the manuscripts to make them
say what they understand them to mean. In fact the apostles,
Paul, Peter and John all warned that corruptions of the word of
God were already plying their trade within the first century
churches. For example, God warned His children through Paul, "I
am amazed that you are quickly being transported away from him
who has called you by (the) grace of Christ, to a different
gospel, which is not another, except there are some troubling you
and desire to pervert the gospel of Christ" - Galatians 1: 6-7.
And....the apostle John wrote, "For many false prophets have gone
out into the world" - 1 John 4: 1. And through the apostle Peter
we learn perverters of the Scriptures were already rampant among
those calling themselves Christians, "even as our beloved brother
Paul wrote to you, according to the wisdom given him....among
which things are some thing hard to understand, which the
ignorant and the unsettled ones pervert, as also the other
Scriptures, to their own destruction" - 2 Peter 3: 15, 16.
By these and other Scriptures, we see.....the
Bible-tinkerers began to distort and to adulterate the word of
God. By the time the apostle John died, gnosticism had gotten
a toe-hold in many Christian churches. And quickly thereafter
they expanded their poisonous influence at a rapid pace.
Justin Martyr, Valentinus, Clement of Alexandria, Marcion,
Tatian, and a horde of others practiced their 'textual science'
by operating on manuscripts, or by writing their own 'version.'
To this we have many testimonies, such as this one, "The worst
corruptions to which the New Testament had ever been subjected
originated within a hundred years after it was composed; that
Ireneus (A.D.150), and the African fathers, and the whole
Western.....used far inferior manuscripts to those employed by
Stunica, or Erasmus, or Stephens, thirteen centuries later, when
moulding the Textus Receptus" - Scrivener, Introduction to the
New testament, third edition, p. 511. And Eusebius, quotes a
second century father as writing, "Wherefore they have no fear to
lay hands on the divine Scriptures under pretence of correcting
them....As for their denying their guilt, the thing is
impossible, since the copies were written in their own hand; and
they did not receive the Scriptures in this condition from their
teachers, nor can they show the originals from which they made
their copies" - Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, LCS, Vol. 1,
pp. 522-524.
Even Origen condemned Marcion and Lucian for altering the
Scriptures, though he himself can be shown to have quoted the
same verse of Scripture in two contradictory wordings in many
places. Like many 'textual critics' of our day, Origen moulded
the Scriptures according to his philosophy, or his fancy based on
the allegory of the day, having no twinge of conscience for doing
so. It is this Origen, considered by his pupils Jerome and
Eusebius to be the master technical critic, that we owe so many
of the invidious deletions from our modern versions. Do we see
the Godhood of Jesus being surreptitiously removed from these
modern versions? Origen believed Jesus Christ was a created
being, and by his reputation, and his influence on his pupils,
the Latin Vulgate, the ornate manuscripts made for the libraries
and rulers of his day, our latter-day attackers of the Majority
Text attempt to keep out many references in the Scriptures
which plainly reveal Jesus Christ to be God the Son, our original
Creator ("because in Him were created all things, the things in
the heavens, the things on the earth, the visible and invisible,
whether thrones, or lordships, or rulers, or authorities, all
things through Him and for Him have been created...." Colossians
1: 16).
We who love every word that proceeded from the mouth of God
are asked by nearly all of the modern 'versions' to do without a
host of testimonies to the Godhead of our Lord and Savior, Jesus
Christ......
THE PROVIDENTIAL PRESERVATION OF THE SCRIPTURES
We believe wholeheartedly that God has preserved His word,
that He guided His true followers to carefully copy, and to use
the whole Bible, as is represented in the majority of the extant
manuscripts. We believe that this was done in the same way God
guarded the Canon of the New testament, using the Greek Orthodox
Church and the Greek manuscripts used by the churches in all the
habitable world to safeguard the deposit which He had given to
us.......All modern day critics will admit that the text as
essentially displayed in the vast majority of the extant
manuscripts has been virtually identical in copy after copy from
the period from the fourth century until the invention of
the printing press.
In fact the Received Text was so widely and so completely
accepted in all countries, and in all the denominations except
the Roman Catholic, that Wescott and Hort felt compelled to
invent a mythical council of church fathers, who supposedly met
and fixed the text as we now know it. Such a council is unknown
to history, and being totally demonstrable by evidence, it must
be considered a myth proposed in order to deceive.
Truly God in His mercy did not leave His people to grope
after the true New Testament text.......First, many trustworthy
copies were produced by faithful scribes. Secondly, these were
read, used, and recopied by true believers when those original
copies were worn out. Thirdly, untrustworthy copies (such as the
Vaticanus and the Sinaiticus) were laid aside, not copied,
consigned to oblivion. Today there are more than 5,00 manuscripts
and lectionaries in Greek as witness to the New Testament text.
And 95% of them witness to the Received Text readings.
Partly due to the fact that ancient manuscripts containing
the Received Text were worn out by use, while the Alexandrian
textbase manuscripts were preserved by the dry conditions in
Egypt, some have sought to discredit the Received Text because
they say it is not ancient. But now that manuscript portions from
the second century are being unearthed, it is found that many of
the readings of the Received Text which had been tagged
scornfully as 'late readings' by nearly unanimous consent of the
'textual scientists' are appearing in these ancient manuscripts.
Reading which were before called 'late' and 'spurious' have been
found in these early-date manuscripts. For example, the Chester-
Beatty Papyri contained 65 readings which had before been
rejected from the versions of the critics. And Papyrus Bodmer II,
of the second century, actually was found to contain 13% of all
the so-called late readings of the critic-despised Majority Text.
Yet, strangely, in textual criticism classes, such
discoveries are swept under the rug, not reported to the class.
and so it goes, day by day we see the conjectures of these
reputed experts being swept away, along with their hypotheses.
Next we trust, will be the discrediting of their 'version.'
In the light of these facts, should we then allow these
'scientists' (falsely so-called - "O Timothy, guard the deposit,
having turned away from the profane, empty babblings and opposing
theories of the false-named knowledge, which some having asserted
have missed the mark concerning the faith" - 1 Timothy 6: 20,
21). A man of faith is not spiritually blind, and should not be
found following these men who pretend to be able to tell us which
are and which are not the words of God. All who follow them will
wind up in the spiritual ditch.......
Keep in mind that which is written, "You shall not add to
the word which I (am) commanding you, and not take away from it"
- Deuteronomy 4: 2; and "Do not add to His words, lest He reprove
you, and you be found a liar" - Proverbs 30: 6; and, "If anyone
take away from the words of (the) Book of this Prophecy, God will
take away his part from the Book of Life" - Revelation 22: 19.
Do not be misled by an appeal to your logic. Try the
spirits, whether they are of God.
END OF QUOTE OF PART ONE
Jay P. Green Sr. next comments on:
The Greek Text in this Volume (Greek/English Interlinear)
The English Translation
Interpretations
Distinctive Translations
Translation Problems and Challenges
The Majority Text Notes
Responsibility for the Translation
I shall give you the important sections of all the above in the
second part - Keith Hunt.
..............................
Compiled 2003
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