Five Signs You Might Be Using a Counterfeit Bible

Are you using a coun­ter­feit Bible? Terry Watkins of the fun­da­men­tal­ist Dial-the-Truth Min­istries believes that a great deal of us may be using per­verted, twisted ver­sions of the Bible, and he has pro­vided over two dozen checks for us to use to deter­mine whether we’re using the real McCoy or not. I use the Eng­lish Stan­dard Ver­sion, and I’m curi­ous: Will it pass the Terry Watkins test? I’ll exam­ine the first five verses in this post and will pick up the rest at a later date. If you are a King James Only­ist, I sin­cerely hope you con­tinue read­ing and that you do so with an open yet dis­cern­ing mind.

Gen­e­sis 22:8

The ESV reads, “Abra­ham said, ‘God will pro­vide for him­self the lamb for a burnt offer­ing, my son.’ So they went both of them together.”

It appears that isn’t good enough, though; appar­ently, it should only read “God will pro­vide him­self the lamb.” Any other ren­der­ing dis­torts the prophecy which is ful­filled in John 1:29: “The next day he saw Jesus com­ing toward him, and said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’”

How­ever, the pas­sage in John doesn’t explic­itly label the Gen­e­sis pas­sage as being prophetic. It seems more likely that, just as in the life of Joseph, these events in Abraham’s life are allu­sions to Jesus Christ. Abra­ham believed that God would pro­vide a lamb for the sac­ri­fice, and that lamb was to be His own Son, Jesus Christ.

No “dis­tor­tion of the prophecy” appears here in the ESV, and its trans­la­tion agrees with just about any other ver­sion, includ­ing lit­eral translations.

Isa­iah 14:12

The ESV reads, “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!”

Terry accuses the mod­ern ver­sions of “confus[ing] the Lord Jesus Christ with Lucifer.” The rea­son­ing begins with the assump­tion that the King James Version’s use of “Lucifer” in this pas­sage is the cor­rect trans­la­tion. Given that, “replac­ing” the name of Lucifer with the title “Day Star” con­fuses him with Jesus Christ.

How­ever, this doesn’t make any sense; there is already over­lap in the titles ascribed to Lucifer and to Jesus Christ in the King James Ver­sion. Lucifer is described as the “son of the morn­ing,” while Christ is titled the “bright and morn­ing star” (Rev­e­la­tion 22:16).

Both titles are ref­er­ences to Venus, the “morn­ing star.” This makes sense — allu­sions to the stars and heav­enly bod­ies are used quite often in the Scrip­tures. The host of angels are called “morn­ing stars” in Job 38:7.

Jesus shares many titles with other beings — both man and angel — He is a son of man and is the Son of Man, He is a son of God and is the Son of God, and so on. Lucifer and the other angels may be described as “morn­ing stars,” but Jesus is the Bright and Morn­ing Star. His titles are superla­tive, for He is worthy.

How­ever, I believe the titles used in Isa­iah 14 to describe the king of Baby­lon are entirely sar­cas­tic. I pre­fer the trans­la­tion of the ESV over that of the King James Ver­sion as I do not believe “Lucifer” to be a proper trans­la­tion. The king of Baby­lon here is being mocked, taunted by the rem­nant of Israel, and they insult his fall from such a lofty posi­tion in a very poetic way: “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn!”

They are not lit­er­ally call­ing him an angel or any­thing absurd like that; the whole verse is a scathing boast of how fall the man has fallen.

Isa­iah 14:15

As a sub-complaint, Terry Watkins accuses mod­ern ver­sions of send­ing Lucifer not to Hell but to “the con­fus­ing ‘Sheol.’” Keep in mind that the Hebrews did not believe in a place called Hell; instead, they believed in a place called שְׁאוֹל which, not sur­pris­ingly, is pro­nounced “she’ôl.” A lit­eral trans­la­tion of this place name would be Sheol, not Hell.

Actu­ally, a great vari­ety of place names believed in by the Hebrews and early Chris­tians are all trans­lated as “Hell” in the King James Ver­sion. Gehenna, Sheol, Hades, Tar­tarus… How does any­one know which place is being spo­ken of if all they have is the King James Version?

Now, I’m con­fused… The King James Ver­sion reduces con­fu­sion by means of ambiguity?

Matthew 20:20

The ESV says, “Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came up to him with her sons, and kneel­ing before him she asked him for something.”

The accu­sa­tion here is that the mod­ern ver­sion “rob[s] wor­ship from the Lord Jesus Christ” — rather than report­ing that Salome came to Jesus wor­ship­ing, the so-called coun­ter­feit Bibles report that she merely knelt before Him. As is usual in this check­list, the King James Version’s trans­la­tion is the gold stan­dard, but even more author­i­ta­tive is the Greek word itself: προσκυνέω (oh look, pi!). This word, pro­nounced pros-koo-neh’-o, is where we get the our word “pros­trate,” as in “pros­trate your­self before” someone.

And that is exactly what Salome is doing here: she is kneel­ing before Christ, pros­trat­ing her­self before Him. If the King James Version’s trans­la­tion of “wor­ship­ing” is the gold stan­dard, then it must be admit­ted that wor­ship­ing can be achieved via the sim­ple act of kneel­ing, which is what προσκυνέω means.

The mod­ern ver­sions aren’t rob­bing Jesus Christ of any wor­ship; rather, they are being more spe­cific in what Salome was actu­ally doing. Here again we see that the King James Version’s “supe­ri­or­ity” depends a great deal on ambi­gu­ity, and I can’t help but won­der why defend­ers feel the need to hide the rich speci­ficity of the Scrip­tures from stu­dents of the Word.

Matthew 26:28

The ESV says, “for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the for­give­ness of sins.”

Like the pre­vi­ous one, this case of coun­ter­feit­ing is a devi­ous case of word swap­ping. Which word raises the ire of Terry Watkins? None other than “Covenant.”

The King James Ver­sion says “tes­ta­ment”; most mod­ern ver­sions, includ­ing lit­eral trans­la­tions, use “covenant.” Terry Watkins uses this occa­sion to make fun of mod­ern ver­sions because, while they use the word “covenant” here, they don’t mar­ket the New Tes­ta­ment as the New Covenant.

So what about this word swap? The Greek word in ques­tion is διαθήκη (dee-ath-ay’-kay) which, accord­ing to Strong’s Con­cor­dance, refers to a “con­tract,” with both “covenant” and “tes­ta­ment” being listed as spe­cific trans­la­tion possibilities.

In Eng­lish, accord­ing to Noah Webster’s dic­tio­nary (in my opin­ion the most use­ful Eng­lish dic­tio­nary for fig­ur­ing out what words meant in the King James Ver­sion or other older Eng­lish ver­sions of the Bible), the word “tes­ta­ment” has two mean­ings: either a will (as in “last will and tes­ta­ment”) or one of the two major divi­sions of the Bible. Web­ster says that in that lat­ter instance the word is equiv­a­lent to “covenant.”

I think I have to dis­agree with Web­ster on that one; there are numer­ous covenants in the Bible: there’s the covenant with Noah, with Abra­ham, with Moses, with David…

Jesus’ death ini­ti­ates a new covenant, as described in the verse in question.

A covenant, accord­ing to Web­ster, is a meet­ing of the minds or more specif­i­cally, a con­trac­tual agree­ment. In our verse, Jesus is speak­ing of that which is described as the covenant of grace: the “con­tract” between God and man that God would grant com­plete sal­va­tion to men who believe in Jesus Christ, repent­ing accord­ing to the Gospel, thereby ful­fill­ing the “con­trac­tual oblig­a­tion” of this covenant.

Why Terry Watkins takes such issue the use of “covenant” instead of “tes­ta­ment,” I don’t really know; how­ever, I have noticed that most King James Only­ists are also heav­ily Dis­pen­sa­tional. Dis­pen­sa­tional the­ol­ogy under­em­pha­sizes the rich­ness of the scrip­tural covenants; indeed, depend­ing on how mil­i­tantly one stands against covenant the­ol­ogy, the very word “covenant” may put off some.

Mark 3:29

The ESV says, “but who­ever blas­phemes against the Holy Spirit never has for­give­ness, but is guilty of an eter­nal sin’—”

Terry Watkin’s accu­sa­tion here is that the pun­ish­ment for blas­phem­ing the Holy Spirit is changed from being “in dan­ger of eter­nal damna­tion” to sim­ply being “guilty of an eter­nal sin.”

How­ever, the mod­ern trans­la­tion of the ESV doesn’t weaken the pun­ish­ment at all; if any­thing, its lan­guage is more def­i­nite than the King James Version’s.

If I were “in dan­ger” of falling off of a cliff, it doesn’t mean that I’ve actu­ally fallen off of the cliff. And accord­ing to the King James Ver­sion, I can blas­pheme the Holy Spirit, but that only places me “in dan­ger” of eter­nal damna­tion — it doesn’t actu­ally push me over the ledge, so to speak. Of the var­i­ous pos­si­ble trans­la­tions of ἔνοχος (en’-okh-os), “in dan­ger of” is per­haps the weak­est. Other pos­si­bil­i­ties include “liable to” and “guilty of,” both phrases car­ry­ing with them far more cer­tainty and def­i­n­i­tion than the phrase cho­sen by the King James Ver­sion translators.

Accord­ing to the ESV, blas­phem­ing the Holy Spirit makes you “guilty of an eter­nal sin” — do not pass go, do not col­lect $200: you are guilty, and for you there is no forgiveness.

More to Come

These were just the first five of many accu­sa­tions brought against mod­ern ver­sions of the Bible, and I wel­come your feed­back on my admit­tedly brief assess­ments, regard­less of which posi­tion you maintain.

For many of you read­ing this, King James Only­ism is not an issue; to you, I encour­age you to say a word of thanks to Yah­weh for that bless­ing. King James Only­ism is a rad­i­cal move­ment with very dan­ger­ous beliefs that can severely hin­der one’s growth in Christ. I know many peo­ple who are immersed in Only­ist beliefs, and I know many who have found lib­er­a­tion from them, just as I have. I know the joys that come with find­ing the free­dom to use just about any ver­sion of the Bible for study, to not be bound to a trans­la­tion that is not only out-dated but which has demon­stra­ble errors in it. I wish that every­one can share in that joy, which is why I choose to respond to King James Only­ists as I have above.