bad flashback

the last time i blogged on this topic, some guy i didn't  know got mad at me and posted a mean comment. :)

I listened to Dr. Silva from Westminster Seminary lecture on textual criticism while driving home today. He mentioned a scholar named Streeter, and immediately all I heard in my head was a deep, deliberately slow voice drawling, "Seven-ty fiiive rea-sonss whyyy Iiiiii Chooose the Kiinng Jaames Version.............Num-ber One...." An odd combination of mental cringing and giggles distracted me from the rest of the lecture as I flashed back to Dr. Streeter's painful chapel messages. But the textual criticism lectures and the flashback to Dr. Streeter really do make me wonder about the TR/KJV only position.

How in the world do you get away from the Greek Septuagint, which varied significantly from the Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament, and that Jesus and the writers of the New  Testament  all quoted from?  How can you expect something to be done for the New Testament when translated from Greek to English when that same thing was not done for the Old Testament when translated from Hebrew  to Greek? If it were a problem, wouldn't Jesus only quote from the Hebrew texts? Why do we have him quoting from the Septuagint? Why do the writers of the NT all quote from the Septuagint? How can  the  NT writers quote three different versions of Habakkuk 2:4, even in the Textus Receptus, if changing  one word of the Scriptures is the same thing as willful perversion and amounts to a leavening of the whole  lump?

I wish just once in all the lectures we were forced to listen to at PCC about the King James Version and the Byzantine Text and the very righteous Erasmus (Luther just rolled in his grave) and King James (William Brewster just rolled in  his grave) and the very wicked Wescott and Hort (and they just rolled in their graves), that just once someone had meaningfully engaged the Greek Septuagint and its implications for Scripture translation. Or even the textual criticism that Erasmus engaged in, and the extent to which he borrowed from the Latin Vulgate when the Byzantine manuscripts didn't supply enough information, and how in the world his  textual criticism was any different from Hort's textual criticism. I still have inner panic attacks when I remember the sloppy scholarship and awful writing demonstrated in the book we were forced to read, Touch Not the Unclean  Thing.Talk about an unconvincing argument!

Jesus and the inspiring Holy Ghost apparently didn't have the same standards  for translation that the Received Text scholars do. Even Erasmus didn't have those standards, and he's the one who put the whole TR together! It blows my mind.

My very favorite PCC KJV-only moment came when in Touch Not the Unclean Thing I read that Westcott  and Hort were involved in the occult and some other Very Bad Things, only to later learn that there was a man in London named Westcott who practiced  black magic. It was not the same Westcott, but hey, the similarities are striking. I mean, they both lived in the same city at the same time. It doesn't take much of a leap to figure out that since one Westcott was a bad egg, the other must be one too!