This is the next chapter of the book, The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy – By Michael de Semlyen

This article talks about the differences between Calvinism and Arminianism. I personally don’t understand why theologians want to debate doctrines like this. Neither John Calvin nor James Arminius taught me the Gospel of Christ. I want to get my doctrines straight from the Word of God, from the Bible, and not say I’m a follower of either Calvin or Arminius. We’re supposed to be followers of Jesus Christ!

The phrase “believe on” appears 15 times in 14 verses in the New Testament, and two of those verses are commands!

Acts 16:31 And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.

1 John 3:23 And this is his commandment, That we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment.

Aren’t our beliefs subject to our will? Obeying a command or not is certainly subject to our will. Calvinism says our salvation is not subject to our will. Does that mean our belief in Jesus is also not subject to our will? Arminianism says it’s subject to our will. Both Calvinists and Arminians call each other’s belief heresy. All I know is the Bible commands us to believe on Jesus and I obeyed.

I may be wrong but I don’t see any reason to debate which is correct and which is not. That’s just my opinion. However because this chapter is part of the book I am posting on this website, I am including it. It is an interesting read to learn the history behind these two doctrines. But as I say, I can’t go by what theologians tell me the Bible says, I can only go by what I know the Bible says. It tells me in Titus 3:5:  
Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost;

What does that mean? Exactly what it says. According to Scripture our salvation therefore is not man-centered, but Christ centered.

PART III
ARMINIANISM: A MAN-CENTERED GOSPEL

Chapter 11
The Origins of Arminianism

James (Jacob) Arminius (1560-1609) was a Dutch theologian who studied and taught the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ that had been rediscovered and proclaimed by the Reformation. Subsequently he changed his position and began to preach and teach a man-centered gospel. Calvin, Luther, Cranmer, Latimer, Zwingli, and Knox, among many other great preachers, taught the centrality of the grace of God and His gift of faith alone, for salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ. This Christ-centered gospel was, and is “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.”(Romans 1:16) In this section we set out to study the man- centered gospel that has become standard in many parts of what is still called “Evangelicalism.” This man-centered message sees the receiving of the Gospel as deriving from a person’s own faith. It assumes wrongly that salvation originates with the will of man by his choice or decision and it is finally to be positioned in the human heart. The Scriptures make clear that salvation originates with God, not to be within the human heart but to be “in Christ.” For example, the Apostle Paul states in his own testimony “…that I may win Christ and be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith.” (Philippians 3:8-9) How then did this man-centered salvation come into the Christian church? As we shall seek to show there has been a great falling away from the truths that were proclaimed at the time of the Reformation. (This is fully documented in Evangelicalism Divided by Iain Murray (Banner of Truth Trust, 2000).) Many modern evangelicals, in sharing their gospel, publicly offer “invitations” such as, “Accept Jesus into your heart”, “Invite Jesus into your life”, or “Make a decision for Christ.” Like Roman Catholicism, such a gospel looks for salvation in the human heart, and is thought to be brought about by man’s own choice.

The author asks for the reader’s patience in studying this third section of the book, in order to carefully take note of the record of history, the witness of Scripture and the testimony of post-Reformation servants of Christ who have warned of “another gospel” and “another spirit.” (2 Corinthians 11:4) All that follows has been documented in order to demonstrate that much of what has come to be accepted as Christianity is misconceived. Totally missing in the modern man-centered message is the defining Biblical truth spelled out by the Apostle Paul, “There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understands, there is none that seeks after God.” (Romans 3:10-11) In fact the Apostle makes clear to the would-be convert that there is absolutely nothing we have to offer to contribute to our salvation. God makes alive those “who were dead in trespasses and sins.” (Ephesians 2:1) We shall show from the record of history that this man-centered Christianity has become what is now the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. The Second Vatican Council has taught that man is simply incapacitated or wounded by sin, and he can decide his own destiny in the sight of God.

Arminianism among evangelicals has been described as a halfway house to Roman Catholicism and has been responsible for much of the growth of the Ecumenical Movement. Man-centered “free-will” Christianity and Roman Catholicism are equally wedded to a wrong message. To understand this more fully we need the historical explanation of just how this whole system of thought arose. In this section we will use the eponymous term Arminianism to refer to that system which upholds a man-centered message.

An Historic Heresy

Dr. Lorraine Boettner, American author of two important books, Roman Catholicism and The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, has given us an helpful observation to begin examining this difficult subject.

We have shown earlier in this book how in the sixteenth century Jesuit scholars were commissioned to undermine the Received Text and to re- interpret Bible prophecy in order to vindicate the Papacy from its widely held identification as the Antichrist.

However, shielding the Church of Rome from the sword of the Spirit would not be enough. The Reformation’s newly rediscovered doctrines of grace, underlining the sovereignty of God and underpinning the eternal security of the believer, altogether at odds with the pretensions of the Pope, would need to be challenged and overturned. The Jesuits were commissioned to infiltrate the church and its institutions of learning.

The Pope’s secret army of infiltrators was prophesied in the Scriptures, “…false brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage:” (Galatians 2:4) The Apostle Peter also described them and what they would do.

“But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction. And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.” – 2 Peter 2:1-2

In his book Arminianism: The Road Back to Rome, Augustus Toplady, preacher, scholar, theologian, and hymn-writer (“Rock of Ages” and “A Debtor to Mercy Alone”), wrote that “as Arminianism came from Rome, so it leads thither again.” Also, he added the following:

In England, in the seventeenth century, during the Arminian regime of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633 to 1645 and a persecutor of both Puritans and Covenanters, zealous Arminians were promoted to the best bishoprics. A famous letter written by a Jesuit to the Rector of Brussels and endorsed by Laud himself was found in the Archbishop’s own study at Lambeth. A copy of this same letter was also found among the papers of a society of priests and Jesuits at Clerkenwell in 1627. The following is an extract from this notorious letter:

In his book Justification by Faith Alone Dr. Joel Beeke, Professor of Systematic Theology at the Puritan Reformed Seminary at Grand Rapids, exposing the error at the heart of the free will system, stated:

The Founder of Arminianism, Its Articles, and the Synod of Dort

James Arminius (1560-1609) is generally regarded as the founder of the system of Arminianism. He was educated at the new Dutch University at Leyden and then at Geneva under the tutelage of Theodore Beza, Calvin’s well respected follower and successor. Around 1591, after only a year at the Geneva Academy, he began to develop views that were to become diametrically opposed to the doctrines of free and sovereign grace that were taught at Geneva. He departed and continued his education elsewhere. He became a minister in Amsterdam and was later invited to become Professor of Divinity at the University of Leyden. It was from this point that he began propounding his theories with (guarded) vigour.

James (Jacob) Arminius

As the doctrines of free grace were in the ascendancy at the time, his teachings on free will were bound to arouse controversy and bring him into conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities. This was a dangerous activity, as heresy could be a capital offence. Perhaps because of this Arminius was difficult to pin down. His teachings could be very ambiguous and sophistical. In 1605, for example, the Synod set nine simple questions for Arminius to answer in an attempt to clarify his position. He responded with nine opposite questions and employed scholarly and philosophical devices to avoid giving simple, straight answers. The first question was, “Which is first, Election, or Faith Truly Foreseen, so that God elected his people according to faith foreseen?” Arminius did not—perhaps dared not—give a straight answer. And so the controversy rumbled on even until after his death in 1609.

Eventually his followers, known as the Remonstrants, petitioned the Government of Holland with a five-point Remonstrance, which was a development of the core teachings of Arminius. It was systematised and published in January 1610 by Jan Uytenbogaert and Simon Episcopius, both former students of Arminius. They led forty-three fellow ministers in introducing their document The Arminian Articles of Remonstrance to the ecclesiastical authorities. Their objective was to bring about the convening of a synod, which would overthrow the Doctrines of Grace, which had been freely preached since the Reformation, and make the teachings of Arminius the official doctrine of the Reformed Churches in all of Europe. They were successful in the first part of their endeavour; a General Synod at Dordrecht (Dort) was called in 1618, and representatives attended it from all of the Reformed Churches in Europe, including those from England. The following is a summary of the five Remonstrance articles:

• Free Will or Human Ability – Arminius believed that the fall of man was not total, maintaining that there is enough virtue in man to enable him to choose to accept Jesus Christ unto salvation.
• Conditional Election – Arminius taught that election is based on the foreknowledge of God as to who would believe. Man’s “act of faith” is the “condition” governing his being elected to eternal life, since God foresaw him exercising his “free will” in response to Jesus Christ.
• Universal Atonement – Arminius held that Christ died to save all men, but only in a potential fashion. Christ’s death enabled God to pardon sinners, but only on condition that they believed.
• Resistible Grace – Arminius believed that since God wants all men to be saved, He sends the Holy Spirit to draw all men to Christ. But since man has absolute “free will”, he is able to resist God’s will for his life. Therefore God’s will to save all men can be frustrated by the finite will of man. Arminius also taught that man exercises his own will first, and then is born again.
• Falling from Grace – If man cannot be saved by God unless it is man’s will to be saved, then man cannot continue in salvation unless he continues to will to be saved.

In order to deal with these five articles of Arminianism, a conference was convened in 1618, which became known as the Synod of Dort. It was no convention of novices or of weaklings that met at Dort in 1618. Rev. J.A. McLeod, Principal of the Free Church of Scotland College, Edinburgh, described the Synod thus.

These great theologians of the day sat for one hundred and fifty four sessions over a period of seven months, assessing the teachings of Arminius in the light of Scripture and concluding that they could find no Biblical basis for his propositions. The Synod finally determined there was no reason to overturn the teaching of the Reformation. It reaffirmed the position that Arminius opposed. The Articles of Dort declared that God is entirely sovereign in salvation, “…Salvation is of the LORD” (Jonah 2:9), and formulated five statements rebutting Arminian theology. In time these statements became known as The Five Points of Calvinism.

“…and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed.” Acts 13:48

Thus, the teachings of Arminius and his cadre were unanimously rejected by the venerable divines assembled at the Synod of Dort. They were declared to be heresy. The positive response of the Assembly was the reaffirmation of the Doctrines of Grace as taught at the Reformation.

In order to refute the five points asserted by the Arminians, the Synod issued four canons, which were subsequently revised to five. These canons have come down to us today as the Five Points of Calvinism and are often remembered as “TULIP”, an acronym that was devised to summarise the Canons of Dort in response to the heretical five-point scheme of the Arminian Remonstrance.

• Total Depravity – This refers to the total inability of man to change his fallen state, ‘dead in trespasses and sins’ (See Ephesians 2:1,5; Colossians 2:13; Psalms 80:18) Because man is utterly dead, spiritually, he has not the capacity to do good or to exercise faith. Moreover, he does not have free will as it is “…in bondage under the elements of the world:” (Galatians 4:3; See also Romans 5:12; 2 Timothy 2:25)
• Unconditional Election – “Those of mankind who are predestinated unto life, God, before the foundation of the world was laid, according to His eternal and immutable purpose and the secret counsel and good pleasure of His will, hath chosen in Christ unto everlasting glory, out of His mere free grace and love without any other thing in the creature as a condition or cause moving Him thereunto.”
• Limited Atonement or Particular Redemption – Christ died only for His sheep, for His church, for those numbered in the Elect, by name, from all Eternity. (See Ephesians 5:25; John 10:11)
• Irresistible Grace – Calvinists believe that the Lord possesses grace that cannot be resisted. The free will of man is so far removed from salvation that the elect are regenerated or made spiritually alive by God even before expressing faith in Jesus Christ for salvation. If God hath purposed from all Eternity to save His Elect, it follows that He must also provide the means for calling them into so glorious a Salvation. “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” (John 6:37; See also John 6:44-45; Psalms 110:3; Galatians 1:15; 1 Peter 2:9, 5:10; Romans 8:20; Acts 16:14; Mark 3:13; Psalms 100:3; Psalms 65:4; Isaiah 27:12)
• Perseverance of the Saints – The 1689 Baptist Confession again closely agrees with Dort. “Those whom God hath accepted in the beloved, effectually called and sanctified by His Spirit, and given the precious faith of His Elect unto, can neither totally nor finally fall from that state of grace, but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved, seeing the gifts and calling of God are without repentance…” (See Romans 8:27-30; Philippians 1:6; John 6:39, 10:28; Romans 5:10,8:l;etc.)

Pelagius and Semi-Pelagianism—the Forerunner of Arminianism

There is nothing new under the sun. “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” – Ecclesiastes 1:9 Essentially the Arminian controversy has been a re-run of a similar controversy which, more than a thousand years earlier, was waged between the British monk Pelagius and Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, as the early Church sought to formulate its theology.

Pelagius arrived in Rome at the dawn of the fifth century and spent most of his life in that city, studying, writing and teaching theology. He began asserting the self-governing ability of man before God. He denied original sin and the depraved state of mankind as well as the absolute requirement of God’s Sovereign Grace in the salvation of His saints. Pelagius was condemned as a heretic by the Roman Church and the modified form of his heresy, semi-Pelegianism, was also condemned at the Council of Orange in 529. Semi-Pelagianism, the fore-runner of Arminianism, essentially teaches that humanity is tainted by sin, but not to the extent that we cannot cooperate with God’s grace on our own—in essence, partial depravity as opposed to total depravity.

However, the same Scriptures that refute Pelagianism also refute semi- Pelagianism. Romans 3:10-18 most definitely does not describe humanity as only being partially tainted by sin.(Romans 3:10-18) The Bible clearly teaches that without God drawing a person, we are incapable of cooperating with God’s grace. “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him…” (John 6:44) Nevertheless the semi-Pelagian view of man’s ability to cooperate and to possess inherent or conferred righteousness is widely prevalent today.

As R.C. Sproul writes, “…the basic assumptions of this view persisted throughout church history to reappear in Medieval Catholicism, Renaissance Humanism, Socinianism, Arminianism, and modern Liberalism. The seminal thought of Pelagius survives today, not as a trace of tangential influence, but is pervasive in the modern church. Indeed the modern church is held captive by it.”

Pelagius, Augustine, and Luther’s The Bondage of the Will

In AD 411, with the onset of Alaric’s second raid on Rome, Pelagius fled the city with his pupil Coelestius, finding a safe haven in North Africa. In the purposes of God this brought him into the orbit of Augustine, although Pelagius soon moved on to Palestine. He left his protégé Coelestius behind at Carthage, but both men continued to promote the heresy of the autonomy of man and his free will over against the free grace and the Sovereignty of God. Pelagius was shocked by the prayer in Augustine’s Confessions, “Grant what thou dost command, and command what thou wilt,” which seemed to remove from man all freedom, and therefore all responsibility. Pelagius certainly thought that man needs God’s grace, but by grace he meant man’s power to choose the good, and God’s revelation of that good in the Law, the Prophets, and, above all, in Christ. Each soul, he taught, comes into being in the same condition as Adam. There is no inherited guilt, no sin inherited from Adam by virtue of the Fall. The confrontation between Augustine and Pelagius about the will of man in his fallen condition was re-echoed eleven hundred years later in Erasmus’ semi-Pelagian Diatribe and Luther’s answer in The Bondage of the Will. The able reformer, like Augustine, knew from Scripture that sinful man has a will, but his will is enslaved and bent towards evil, and can do no good thing. For until man is converted and is renewed by the Holy Spirit, his will is captive to Satan and is “taken captive by him at his [Satan’s] will.” (2 Timothy 2:26)

The publisher’s comments on The Bondage of the Will state that,

J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston add to this in the “Historical and Theological Introduction” to The Bondage of the Will by stating,

“‘Justification by faith only’ is a truth that needs interpretation. The principle of sola fide [by faith alone] is not rightly understood till it is seen as anchored in the broader principle of sola gratia [by grace alone] …. for to rely on oneself for faith is no different in principle from relying on oneself for works,.

Yet another comment on this work of Luther’s offers that, “Luther here refutes the Romish notion of ‘free will’ in man and upholds the absolute sovereignty of God in the salvation of sinners

— as well as justification by faith alone. Luther clearly saw the issue of free will as the primary cause of his separation from Rome.”

The Bible teaches that faith itself is, and has to be, a gift of God, by grace, and not of self.

Though the will is never forced, nor destined by any necessity of nature to perform evil, yet sinful man has lost all ability of will to perform any of the spiritual good which accompanies salvation. He is not able, by an act of the will, to repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. He is not willing to be converted. Unless the Lord intervenes, man remains bound, for “…men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19) A corrupt tree bears corrupt fruit. That is all it can do. The natural man is not able by his own strength to turn to God, or even dispose himself towards God, for “No man can come unto me, except the Father which have sent me draw him:…” (John 6:44) He is “…dead in trespasses and sins;” (Ephesians 2:1) He is at “enmity against God.” (Romans 8:7) Grace or unmerited favour is essential, for man does not seek God. It is God who seeks him. It is instructive to note that all the sixteenth century Reformers were originally Augustinians, that is, they believed in the total depravity of man’s nature and the absolute sovereignty of God’s grace.

Pelagius denied all of this and instead asserted the full ability and potential of the human will. He taught that man can eliminate sin from his life by the exercise of his will and can keep the commandments of God if he really wants to. He arrived at this conclusion by twisted logic that concluded, “God would not command man to do what cannot be done by man.” Thus Pelagius, in considering the will, ignored, or rather played down, the consequence of Adam’s fall. The Scriptures show us that man was created able, but lost his ability through his apostasy. But Pelagius insisted that no obligation could ever be placed outside man’s limitless capacity for good. He established the definitive Pelagian view that if God commands anything we must be able to obey. God has no right to command if we are unable to obey!

In July AD 415, at the Synod of Jerusalem, Pelagius was condemned in absentia. In December of the same year, at the Synod of Lydda (Diospolis), he appeared, but managed to escape condemnation by what B.B.Warfield has described as follows:

As with Arminius, in Pelagius we see a man purporting to contend for truth who brims with equivocation. He exploited his escape from condemnation to the maximum, falsely claiming an endorsement for his heresies. But he was soon to be undone.

A two-pronged attack by Augustine and Jerome —a powerful combination—led to Pelagius’s condemnation by two African councils in 416, a decision upheld by Pope Innocent I, who in 417 excommunicated Pelagius and Celestius. Though Innocent’s successor, Zosimus, at first overturned this verdict and action, he was shaken by such a storm from the African bishops that he not only changed his mind, but also wrote a letter requiring Western bishops to endorse the condemnation. On May 1, 418, the teachings of Pelagius were declared to be anathema. His supporters deserted him in droves to save their own skins, although his heretical teachings on free will continued “underground.” After this nothing more is heard of Pelagius. One source has him dead by 420, another report says he lived for at least another twenty years. Despite his formal discrediting, his teachings kept resurfacing for more than a century, until they were firmly repudiated at the Council of Orange in 529.

The Conclusion to the Canons of the Council of Orange begins with a clear and comprehensive statement that states,

Truth is ever hammered out on the anvil of error, and in the purposes of God, this controversy was the vehicle used to define the doctrines of Free and Sovereign Grace. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, and the servant of God in this watershed in the development of Christian Theology was Augustine of Hippo. For more than a millennium his teachings on the Sovereignty of God and His gift of Free Grace were held dear by true believers until the controversy was revived by Arminius and his followers in the seventeenth century. Like all of Adam’s fallen race, the regenerate Augustine was most certainly prone to error. But at the same time the Lord endowed him with an insight into the workings of His Sovereign Grace that has not been surpassed. Augustine’s influence was enormous. B.B.

Warfield described the Reformation as “the triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over his doctrine of the Church.” R.C. Sproul has written that “the Reformation witnessed the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrines of grace over the legacy of the Pelagian view of man.” It was Augustine who was the bulwark chosen by God to stem the tide of error, which has ebbed and flowed over the centuries through the teachings of Pelagius.

Augustine was the first of the “Church Fathers” to codify the Doctrines of Grace and to confront and refute the impostures of human free will in salvation. His recorded preaching and writings against Pelagius are so voluminous that we cannot begin to explore them here. It suffices to say that his wisdom was acknowledged even by Arminius and that he was the man principally responsible under God for the fact that the false teachings of Pelagius are widely recognised as such today.

What is mystifying, humanly speaking, is that, notwithstanding the above, the heresy of free will in salvation has repeatedly resurfaced, albeit in modified guises, and that the doctrines of Free and Sovereign Grace have been assailed at diverse times despite Augustine’s masterful expositions of these cardinal doctrines and his systematising of them into a whole Body of Divinity.

Continued in Catholicism and Arminianism in England and France During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

All chapters of The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy

This is the next chapter of the book, The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy – By Michael de Semlyen

Chapter 10
Bible Verse Comparisons

Just thirty examples follow, out of many hundreds of instances in which the new translations seriously diminish the divinity of Christ and undermine the Atonement. The new versions are also markedly ecumenical, lending support to Roman Catholic teaching and dogma, as will be shown; and for this reason they have surely been an important factor in the recent rapid advance of the inter-church process. We have discussed earlier that the modern versions lend themselves more readily to futurism, to a two-stage Second Coming, and to a world ruler Antichrist to appear after the rapture of the saints. Daniel’s “seventy weeks” is translated with an unmistakable antichrist “prince” to fit the futurist thinking of the Oxford movement, of Newman, of Westcott and Hort, and of so many others who have exonerated the papacy from Scripture’s identification.

We believe that conservative evangelicals are correct when they insist that the KJV is the only Protestant Bible in common use in our language. We are not aware of any instances of the KJV weakening the translation in any way in relation to the standing of Christ, His divinity, His name, His blood or His sacrifice. Even those who have set out to argue the superiority of the new translations have not cited instances of the KJV in any way undermining the great truths of the Gospel. Where opponents of the Authorised Bible point to what may seem to be obvious error in the translation they are often mistaken. Perhaps the best example of this is Easter in Acts 12.

1. Acts 12:3-4

Those who oppose the concept of a perfect Bible seize on the translation of Easter for the Greek word pascha as clear proof of the imperfection of the KJV. After all, in twenty-eight other appearances in the New Testament pascha is translated Passover. However, Easter is correct and Passover incorrect. Easter derives from the ancient pagan festival of Astarte, or Ishtar, the female goddess, known in the Bible as the “queen of heaven’’ (Jeremiah 7:18; 44:17 & 25). Herod was a pagan Edomite and would therefore observe Easter in honour of Astarte, not the Passover. The key to the correct translation is the sequence of events. Verse 3 tells us that Herod imprisoned Peter during the days of unleavened bread which were after the Passover (Exodus 12:13-18) with the intention of holding a public trial after his own festival of Easter. The Passover preceded the events of Acts 12. Scripture does not use the term “Passover” to refer to the entire period. “The Feast of Unleavened Bread” is the form used, for example Mark 14:12.

The Deity of Christ

2. Acts 8:36-38 (Verse 37 removed.)

This verse, one of the outstanding testimonies to the deity of Christ in the Bible, is missing altogether from the text of the new versions. It appears as a footnote in both the Good News and in the NIV. Yet, the Church fathers Irenaeus and Cyprian mention it in the second and third centuries, well before the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus codices came into existence.

3. Micah 5:2 (Jesus’ origins “from ancient times”?)

This great prophecy refers to the eternal Son of God who has no origin. John 1:1 : “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Both the NIV and the Jehovah’s Witness NWT blasphemously describe the Lord Jesus Christ as a created being.

4. 1 John 5:7-8 (Verse 7 removed; verse 8 rearranged.)

The NIV, Good News and almost all other modern versions omit verse 7, which says, “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one.” Additionally verse 8 is divided to conceal this omission.

Known as “the Johannine Comma”, this verse and its inclusion in the Bible has been at the centre of considerable controversy for a long time, and the arguments against it are formidable. However, there is surely no verse in Scripture that more clearly defines the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. For Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons it is unanswerable, unless they can marshal the arguments of the “naturalistic” and “higher” textual critics, or argue that it wasn’t divinely inspired.

The omission of the last twelve verses of Mark’s Gospel in the Westcott and Hort versions, which record in the footnote that “the two most reliable early manuscripts do not have Mark 16:9-20”, was comprehensively challenged by John Burgon, Dean of Chichester, who wrote to the Revision Committee:

Later on, in 1883, Burgon, the principal dissenter of the 1881 Revising Committee, gave a second solemn warning to posterity,

Also missing from Mark’s Gospel is the second part of verse 11 of chapter 6, the Saviour’s solemn warning, as shown below.

Mark 6:11

5. Matthew 5:44 (Verse from the Sermon on the Mount is mutilated.)

6. 1 Timothy 3:16

This verse clearly reveals the divinity of Jesus Christ. The Authorised translation describes Christ as truly God; the NIV translation could hardly be more banal. Widely seen as the most serious corruption of God’s pure and holy Word (which one would expect to find in the Jehovah’s Witness bible). Believers who use the NIV are handicapped in evangelising Jehovah’s witnesses.

According to Burgon, out of 254 copies of Paul’s Epistles known to the 1881 Revision Committee, no less than 252 preserved the expression “God was manifest” with only the favoured two differing with “he who was manifested (the revisers first translation). The 1882 choice of wording was influenced by the Unitarian member of the Committee who declared himself entirely satisfied with the translation.

7. Daniel 3:25

The KJV describes the fourth man in the fiery furnace as “like the Son of God”. One edition of the Good News Version translates this as “like an angel”. In the NIV, the NWT, The Good News footnote, and several other versions it is “like a son of the gods.” The difference is very considerable.

8. Matthew 8:2

In this one short verse, Christ’s divinity is twice lessened by The Good News Version. The word worshipped, referring to Jesus during His ministry, is used six times in the Authorised Version of the Gospel of Matthew but only once in The Good News.

9. Zechariah 13:6

The prophetic reference to the crucifixion has been removed from the NIV and other modern versions.

Washed in the Blood of the Lamb (?)

10. Revelation 1:5

The NIV, the Good News and almost all other modern versions nowhere have the believer “washed in the blood of the lamb.” Thus the majority of Christians now sing “O happy day—when Jesus washed my sins away” without Biblical warrant.

The Virgin Birth

11. Luke 2:33 (Jesus—the Son of God or the son of Joseph?)

Besides this change in verse 33 (in the NIV and most of the new versions), in verse 43, “Joseph and His mother” becomes “his parents”. In both places the Greek text contains the word Joseph. It is translated as Joseph thirty-three times in the New Testament. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there seems to have been a deliberate attempt to undermine the Virgin Birth, which is nowadays called into question by many leading liberals in the Church of England and elsewhere.

12. Isaiah 7:14

In The Good News Version this famous Messianic prophecy does not predict the Virgin Birth. Any young pregnant woman may have a son, but the Virgin Birth is unique. Of a total of fourteen occasions when the word virgin is used in the Greek and in the KJV, the Good News has eleven times substituted different words, i.e., girl, young woman, young girl and unmarried.

The NIV translation of Isaiah 7:14 is “The virgin will be with child…” as it is also in Matthew 1:23. The use of the definite article points to The Virgin Mary, the “Mother of God”, and the “Queen of Heaven” of Roman Catholicism.

Roman Catholic Doctrine supported by Ecumenical Translations

13. Matthew 1:25

The NIV and most other modern versions, to uphold Roman Catholic teaching of the perpetual virginity of Mary, omit first-born.

14. John 1:42 (Peter—the Rock or the Little Stone?)

Whereas the KJV translates the name Peter as “a stone”, The Good News, The Message, and some other modern versions translate it as “rock.”

Much of the new authority recently gained by the Roman Catholic Church, based on the ancient claim of the Popes to be the successors of Peter, rests on these new translations. The Good News is seen as an ecumenical bible; the Revised New English Bible, a recent addition to the many revisions, is also an ecumenical bible, translated by both Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars. According to the International Bible Society, the NIV, RSV, NASV, Good News and RNEB New Testaments are all based on the United Bible Society/Nestle-Aland Greek eclectic text. Prominent among the scholars that produced this text in its second and third editions was His Eminence Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, Archbishop of Milan, a Jesuit and the Vatican’s leading Greek scholar, who had long been among the favourites to succeed John Paul as Pope. Many “new evangelicals” see the wide distribution of these “ecumenical Bibles”, based on “a common text” authorised by the Vatican, as an essential step towards reunion with Rome.

15. John 6:55

The KJV translation emphasis on “indeed” carries the meaning “true” which is the closest to the Greek Received Text. The new translations suggest “the real presence”, the dogma of Roman Catholicism which was the central and crucial issue of the sixteenth century Reformation in England. Most of the martyrs of the faith chose to die in denying that there is “real food” or “real drink” in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. They insisted that there is the true spiritual nourishment received in the heart by faith with thanksgiving.

16. Matthew 24:23

This has long been interpreted, as warning against “the real presence” and “the Blessed Sacrament” which is “reserved for adoration” in Roman Catholic and many Anglican Churches. The “real presence” is being brought back into currency again in a different form among professing Protestant churches through the summoning or calling down of the Holy Spirit to effect healing and other signs and wonders or “to practise the real presence of God with us.”

17. Matthew 19:17

The Church of Rome calls all that have been beatified or canonised “good”. They are to be venerated and often their relics are to be adored. This is an example of a “dynamic equivalence” translation in the NIV—the ecumenical translator not accepting from the plain text what he believes simply cannot be there.

18. Matthew 6:7

Repetitious prayers like the “Hail Mary” can be said without censure from the new versions.

19. James 5:16

Here we find the new biblical warrant for the Roman Catholic sacrament of the Confessional.

20. 2 Peter 1:20-21

In other words prophecy is not an expression of the personal opinion of the prophet, but of God, through His Spirit. The Good News translation renders a totally different meaning to these verses by beginning, “No one can interpret any prophecy of Scripture by himself…”

The Apostle was teaching us how prophecy was given. This and other modern versions tell us how it should be received. The Church of Rome’s position that the individual must not exercise private judgement in interpreting Scripture but submit to the authority of Mother Church, the Magisterium, is supported by this translation. As Kansas City Jesuit Professor, H. Willmering, recently wrote in The Catholic Community, “it is of prime importance to know that prophecy of Scripture is not subject to private interpretation by every individual, as the false teachers assume it is.” It will not have escaped the reader that the issue here is that very issue at the heart of the Protestant Reformation —the authority of the Bible over the authority of the Church, or the authority of the Church over the Bible.

21. 2 Thessalonians 2:7

The New King James Version, although considerably closer than other modern versions, is not the KJV in updated language. Nor is it faithful to the Received Text. Like other modern versions it reflects the views and interpretations of its translators and is eclectic in its choice of manuscript renderings, often preferring the corrupted minority texts to the received text.

Some new Bible versions, besides the New King James Version translate this as He (not he), which clearly means the Holy Spirit. This only allows for a futurist interpretation and a pre-tribulation rapture. See Chapter 1, “The Historical View of Prophecy and Antichrist”; Subheading “The Man of Sin and Mystery of Iniquity.”

22. 2 Thessalonians 2:10

The coming of the “man of sin” was to be with “all deceivableness of unrighteousness.” As J. A. Wylie, Victorian author of The History of Protestantism wrote, “Let us mark the phrase. It is a very remarkable one. It is used in no other place; it is employed to describe no other system; it describes the great apostasy and it alone. It is not simply ‘deceivableness,’ nor is it simply ‘unrighteousness’, it is the ‘deceivableness of unrighteousness,’ nay, it is the all-deceivableness of unrighteousness.

“Paganism was a system of deceivableness. It was the worship of a false god, under the pretence of being the worship of the true God, but popery is deceivableness on a scale far beyond that of paganism. The one was a counterfeit of the religion of nature; the other is a counterfeit of the Gospel. Popery has a god of its own— him, whom the canon law calls ‘the Lord our God.’ [Decretales Gregorii IX. Tit. 7. The Pope is called God, Decretum Gregorii XIII. Distinctio 96, Can. 7]. It has a saviour of its own—the Church. It has a sacrifice of its own—the Mass. It has a mediator of its own— the Priesthood. It has a sanctifier of its own—the Sacrament. It has a justification of its own—that even of infused righteousness. It has a pardon of its own—the pardon of the Confessional; and it has in the heavens an infallible, all-prevailing advocate unknown to the Gospel—the ‘Mother of God.’ It thus presents to the world a spiritual and saving apparatus for the salvation of men, which neither sanctifies nor saves anyone. It looks like a church; it professes to have all that a church ought to have; and yet it is not a church. It is a grand deception; it is ‘the all deceivableness of unrighteousness.’”

Prophecy Lost

23. Isaiah 31:5

Many Christians who hold to an historical view of Bible prophecy believe that this Scripture was actually fulfilled in December 1917. The deliverance of Jerusalem from the longstanding Moslem rule of the Ottoman Turks was accomplished, in answer to the faithful prayer of God’s people, by the British forces under General Allenby, using aeroplanes for the first time in such a campaign.

The Modem Versions are at variance one with another. The NIV translation is similar to the KJV, but the Good News does not allow for such an interpretation at all: “Just as a bird hovers over its nest to protect its young, so I, the LORD Almighty will protect Jerusalem and defend it.” The seriousness of the problem of different translations is perhaps illustrated here as clearly as it is anywhere— God’s prophetic Word altered into something entirely different.

24. Isaiah 59:19

The second part of the Scripture is virtually unrecognisable in the NIV; this great word of prophecy is mutilated.

25. Daniel 12:4

The vivid portrayal of life as we now live it in the second half of the verse is obscured entirely in the Good News and other modern versions’ mutilated renderings.

26. Daniel 9:26-27 (Daniel’s 70th Week)

Careful comparison of Daniel’s great words of prophecy in the KJV, NIV, and Good News versions demonstrates how the Protestant Historical view of these verses as predicting the sacrifice to end all sacrifices at Calvary, followed by the desolation of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70, is superseded now by the Futurist theory of Antichrist at the end of the church age. In the new translations, Antichrist, who has replaced Christ “the Prince” of the KJV rendering, will make and break a covenant with the Jews, first allowing them to offer sacrifices in a “rebuilt” temple and after three and a half years causing the sacrifice to cease. The “fulfilled” interpretation, which can only be received from the KJV translation, has the covenant confirmed and the sacrifice and the oblation ceased when Christ died after a ministry of three and a half years in the middle of the 70th week. See Chapter 2, “Futurism Devised by the Jesuits – The Wiles of the Devil”; Subheading “The Seventy Weeks.”

Doctrine Lost

Apart from such enormous variations in the text and such radical changes in meaning, and apart from the loss of whole verses and even whole passages of Scripture, key words of much spiritual significance are changed or left out of the new editions. For example the word “blood” is omitted no less than thirty-four times in the New Testament by the Good News Version. As we have already noted, “virgin” is replaced, not translated, by “young woman” eleven times. “Hell” is another word that the new translators prefer to avoid, as do many of the new school of preachers. It is often replaced with “Hades”, “Sheol” and “world of the dead”. The NIV changes it to “grave” in several instances. The word “sin”, another of the “buzz words” of the Bible, as one Charismatic preacher called it, has survived the purging of such terms in the new versions, although it has not fared so well in the pulpit, nor in everyday use in the nation.

27. Mark 2:17

The term “repentance” disappears several times from the New Testament in both the NIV and the Good News Version.

28. John 3:16

Possibly the best known verse in the Bible teaches in the NIV that we are not sons and our God in heaven is not our father. The KJV tells us that God has only one begotten Son.

29. Matthew 5:22

According to this verse in the NIV, Jesus’ conduct in Mark 3:5 would be subject to judgement.

30. Titus 3:10

The Scripture has been turned on its head. The “divisive” person that warns of error and heresy in the church (the “heresy-hunter”) is liable to be the one that is excluded from fellowship and rejected. But Romans 16:17-18, “Mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine you have learned; and avoid them,” which is as clear in the NIV as the KJV demonstrates the poverty of the translation, “divisive person.”

As American Bible teacher Dr. Charles Woodbridge once noted in a warning to the well-known evangelist Billy Graham: “If you persist in making common cause with those that deny the Word of God, and thus in minimizing the sharp line of distinction between those who are loyal and those who are disloyal to the Scriptures, it is my strong opinion that you will be known as the great divider of the church of Christ of the 20th century.” (September, 1963, from “Dr. Billy Graham, the Champion of Compromise”, accessed 2/11/06.)

The loss of the term heresy in Scripture and from today’s preaching has in a very real sense undermined and emasculated church history. The inference is that in the past, Christians were less enlightened, less tolerant and loving, and were diverted from the fullness of relationship with Christ by negative attitudes. This can be seen as part of the strategy of Satan for dividing the true church as well as seriously weakening the Word of God. Bishop Ryle’s words summarise the issue very well.

The term reformation has also been dropped from Hebrews 9:10 and with it the strong link with our Protestant heritage.

The NIV and the Good News have replaced reformation with the term new order, which is entirely different and suggests departure from the past. It cannot be ruled out that in the near future we shall have a version called The New Age Bible.

Perhaps the foundations for such a bible are already being laid.

Isaiah 14:12-15

The KJV makes it very clear that it is Lucifer whose self exaltation caused his being thrown down into the pit. The NIV, on the other hand, is by no means as clear, as it uses the very same title that the Lord attributes to Himself in Revelation 22:16: “I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.”

Luke 11:2-4

Again, the KJV is quite clear as to Whom we are praying—God, our Father in heaven, Whose will is done in heaven, Who alone can deliver us from evil. The Lord Jesus of the NIV only tells us that we are to pray to some indefinite father, and who that father is remains in the realm of our vain imaginings, making this prayer quite acceptable to those who prefer to honour the “whoever-one-wants- him-to-be” god of the New Age.

Continued in The Origins of Arminianism

All chapters of The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy

My good friend Reinhard from the Netherlands sent this to me. He says it’s part of a seminar he gave to the college of his Baptist Congregation about Jacob and Esau. I value history and this article certainly has information I was not aware of!

The emphasis in underline are mine.

“Behold, your house is left desolate for you,” Matt. 23:38.

“If they build, I will destroy” Mal. 1:4.

“The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are Esau’s hands.” Gen. 27:22.

The destruction!

According to the Word of the Lord, the Roman legions came to put down the Jewish uprising and destroy Jerusalem in 70 AD. The army commander Titus did not originally intend to demolish the temple, but was ordered to do so by the emperor and his soldiers were so enraged by the fierce resistance of the Jewish fighters that they left no stone unturned in the sanctuary.

The Jews also received a treacherous dagger in the back. The Jewish historian Flavius ​​Josephus mentions the following in “The Fall of Jerusalem”: “Just before all the approaches to the city had been closed by the besiegers, the Romans, the Jews had admitted a large crowd of Idumeans (Edomites), who joined the defense would help.” However, when one reads how suddenly these “allies”, once they were inside the wall, changed their face and – quite unexpectedly – proceeded to massacre tens of thousands of civilians in the most brutal manner. An act with which they contributed not a little to the fall of the city.

It is also interesting what Rabbi Maimonides (A.D. 1135-1204) mentions about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in particular. In his tract Taanith, c. 4, he says: “The foundations of the temple were excavated according to Roman custom.” He further said, “On the ninth day of the month Ab, the fatal vengeance was executed by the wicked Turnus Rufus, of the children of Edom, who plowed the temple and the places round about, that the word of Isaiah might be fulfilled.” that Zion shall be plowed into a field” (Isaiah 64:10). This Turnus, or rather Terentius Rufus, was the left-handed general in the army of Titus, with orders, as the Jews assume, to destroy the city and the temple.

Not all expelled.

The Jews were not all taken into captivity in 70 AD. Roughly a third of the population was killed, a third taken captive and a third remained in Palestine. This became apparent in 132-135 AD at the time of the Bar Kokhba rebellion. Afterwards many were expelled from Judea who settled in Galilee and the spiritual center (Sanhedrin) initially resided in Jawneh on the coast and later elsewhere in the north of the country until the year 425 AD. Then the center was moved abroad to Baghdad. But many Jews remained in their homeland for centuries.

Under Byzantine (i.e. Eastern Roman) rule, they led a fairly quiet existence. When the Arabs conquered the country in the 7th century, they were not exterminated, but, probably forced, they converted to Islam and so these Jews became Palestinians! There may have been a mixture with the Arabs, but there is an interesting DNA study on this.

Sons of Abraham.

A frequently heard claim is that the Jewish settlers in the 19th century ended up in an uninhabited, empty country, which is not entirely true, to say the least. The priest Elias Chacour wrote in his book “Sons of Abraham” what he had experienced in the last century, before the Jewish state was founded in 1948.

Fighters of the Jewish Hagana, who wanted to liberate Palestine from British rule, had expelled the “Arabs” from their villages in Galilee. However, they were lucky, because some other villages had been massacred. The victims had been hastily buried ‘sloppily’, while arms and other limbs were still sticking out of the sand!

Jews exterminating other Jews? That would be pure fratricide!

DNA research among Jews, Israelis and Palestinians:

The first scientist to conduct such a study was Dr. Ariella Oppenheim, biologist at the Hebrew Yeshiva University, who published her findings in a voluminous work in 2001. Her conclusion was that some Palestinians had Jewish DNA and that there was even a group that had a DNA chromosome showing that they were descendants of the “Cohens”, priests of the ancient temple and synagogues of the Jews.

This study was confirmed several years later by Dr. Eran Elhaik and his associates at the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine (John Hopkins University, School of Genetic Medicine), although he was primarily concerned with the Khazar ancestry of many Azkenazi Jews. Khazaria was a large empire in southern Russia that converted to Judaism in the eighth century.

That finding is also supported by Tel Aviv University professor of History Shlomo Sand in his 2007 book, “The Invention of the Jewish People,” which caused a stir in Israel.

In this book, Sand quotes David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of modern Israel, who publicly and in writing acknowledged that the original Jews of Palestine had converted to Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries and had never left their homeland.

Ben-Gurion then stated: “The Fellahin (the Palestinian people) are not descendants of the Arab conquerors who took over ‘Eretz Israel’ (the Land of Israel) and Syria in the 7th century (AD). The Arabs did not exterminate the ordinary population they found in the country. They only expelled the foreign Byzantine rulers, but left the local population untouched.”

An article from the Daily Mail on May 4, 2013 reported that a documentary by Jewish producer Ilan Ziv, in which he also exposed these matters, was narrowly canceled by the BBC in the United Kingdom. This information is apparently too sensitive and puts a damper on Zionist efforts to “repatriate” the world’s expelled Jews to modern Israel.

Those who want to know more about the “Palestinian cause” could read the English-language book by Israeli author Ilan Pappé, entitled “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.” Pappé currently holds a chair in History at the University of Exeter in England and has written several books about the peoples of the Middle East.

It is clear that both DNA research and the historical findings of scientists show that there are Jews in the Palestinian people and an infusion of Khazars among the Israelis. You can only wonder whether the percentage of Chazars in Azkenazi Jewry that they claim is indeed 90% or (much) less, is still the question in my opinion. It is notable that at the beginning of the last century there were only 500,000 Sephardic Jews, while the number of Azkenazi Jews exceeded 11,000,000, which is considerably more.

R. Schaap

St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, the murder of French Protestant Huguenots by the Roman Catholic Church in 1572

Prepared by Darryl Eberhart, Editor of ETI & TTT Newsletters // Website: www.toughissues.org A 4-Page Handout // Jan. 27, 2011 // Mar. 3, 2011

QUESTION: Who are the greatest “haters” in the world?

ANSWER: The greatest haters (and also the greatest torturers and mass murderers) in the world are the prelates (i.e., the high-ranking clergy) of the Roman Catholic Church-State (i.e., Papal Rome). Sadly, many mid-to- lower-level Roman Catholic clergy have often participated in the hateful deeds (e.g., “holy” Inquisition and “holy” crusades) commanded by their religious superiors – and by their popes!

Almost from its very beginning, the Roman Catholic Church-State has persecuted and murdered its “competition” – its “perceived enemies”. From “holy” Inquisition to “holy” crusades, it has committed more “crimes against humanity” than any other nation, religion, or institution in the world! The Roman Catholic Church-State has not only tortured and murdered individuals, but it has also frequently conducted genocide on an enormous scale. It seems that every 50 to 100 years the Roman Catholic Church-State goes on a “mass- murder spree”. In 1882 French historian Baron de Ponnat stated: “Roman Catholicism was born in blood, has wallowed in blood, has quenched its thirst in blood, and it is in letters of blood that its true history is written.”

Indeed, from its very beginning the Roman Catholic Church-State has been an “equal-opportunity” hater. It hates Jews; it hates independent Bible-believing Christian groups and associations; it hates Orthodox Christians (e.g., Greek, Russian, and Serb); it hates Muslims; and, it hates Protestants. Some folks who read this handout may now be saying: “The Roman Catholic Church has changed – and she now loves all the ‘separated brethren’ – and she even loves Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and people of all religions.” Well, that is what the Roman Catholic Church-State “says”; however, that kind of “talk” is simply sweet, ecumenical “honey” (i.e., sweet-sounding rhetoric) designed to lure all religions into a one-world religion headed by the Pope of Rome.

Despite Papal Rome’s sweet-sounding rhetoric, her actions and deeds over many centuries tell a totally different “story”. Instead of love for “separated brethren”, Jews, Muslims, etc., we instead find hate. Again, the Roman Catholic Church-State – Papal Rome – has indeed been an “equal-opportunity” hater, persecutor, torturer, and mass murderer – committing a multitude of heinous, barbaric “crimes against humanity”.

Papal persecution of its “competition” started almost from the very beginning of the Papacy. Here is but a small sampling of Papal hated, persecution, torture, and mass murder (hopefully in chronological order):

4th century – The Bishop of Rome and some of his secular and ecclesiastical friends (e.g., Augustine) begin to persecute the Bible-believing Donatists in North Africa. (The Donatists had refused to submit to a centralized ecclesiastical system.) Many of the Donatist leaders are executed; others are sent into exile.

Early 7th century – Roman Catholic authorities in Great Britain – with their secular allies – persecute the Bible-believing Celtic Christians in Britain and on the European continent. On one occasion 1200 British Celtic Christians are slaughtered by a pagan army at the instigation of Roman Catholic clergy.

7th century – The Bishop of Rome urges secular and ecclesiastical authorities to persecute the Bible-believing Paulicians in various locations in Italy and other parts of Europe.

1095 – Pope Urban II proclaims the First Crusade. Here is what historian Will Durant has written concerning this Papacy-instigated murder spree: “When in 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade, some Christians [Ed.: i.e., Roman Catholics] thought it desirable to kill the Jews in Europe before proceeding so far to fight Turks in Jerusalem. Godfrey of Bouillon, having accepted the leadership of the crusade, announced that he would avenge the blood of Jesus upon the Jews…leaving not one of them alive; and his companions proclaimed their intention to kill all Jews who would not accept Christianity [Ed.: i.e., Roman Catholicism].”

1096 – Roman Catholic Crusaders slaughter half the Jews of Worms, Germany while passing through that city.

1098 – Roman Catholic Crusaders, sent on a “holy” mission by Pope Urban II, reach Antioch (a city in southern Turkey). The Roman Catholic Crusaders capture the city on June 3, 1098, and slaughter almost all of the inhabitants – men, women, and children – Muslims, Jews, and even some Christians of the Eastern Church!

1099 – Roman Catholic Crusaders, sent on a “holy” mission by Pope Urban II, reach Jerusalem. They take the city on July 15, 1099; they herd the Jews into a synagogue, and set it on fire. These Roman Catholic Crusaders butcher almost all of the city’s inhabitants – men, women, and children – Jews, Muslims, and probably even a few Christians of the Eastern Church! Up to 70,000 Muslims and Jews are massacred!

1171 – In response to a papal bull, Roman Catholic King Henry II of England starts a war against the Celtic Church in Ireland. Once the Celtic Church is destroyed, Roman Catholicism becomes the dominant religion.

1203-1808 – This is the “official” timeframe, according to some scholars, of the Roman Catholic Inquisition. Some historians estimate that up to 50 million lives are taken by this so-called “holy” Inquisition. Many thousands of human beings – made in the image of God – are roasted slowly to death at the stake!

1208-1226 – The “Albigensian Crusades” take place. In 1208 Pope Innocent III proclaims a crusade against the Bible-believing Albigensian Christians in southern France. Roman Catholic armies are sent to exterminate them. On July 22, 1209 Roman Catholic “crusaders” butcher approximately 20,000 men, women, and children at the French city of Beziers. In 1219 the Roman Catholic “crusaders” slaughter all the inhabitants (approx. 7000) – men, women, and children – of the market center of Marmande in western Languedoc (in southern France). The Albigensian Christians are eventually exterminated shortly after these “crusades” conclude!

1211 – Roman Catholic authorities burn at the stake approximately 80 Bible-believing Waldensian Christian men and women – made in the image of God – at Strasburg in Alsace (in northeastern France)!

1229 – The Roman Catholic Inquisition executes 32,000 Bible-believing Albigensian Christians – made in the image of God – at Toulouse, France – and confiscates all their property!

1231-33 – Roman Catholic authorities in Germany persecute Bible-believing Waldensian Christians.

1236 – Roman Catholic Crusaders slaughter Jews in the Anjou and Poitou regions of western France. Historian Will Durant tells us: “[Ed.: Roman Catholic Crusaders] invaded the Jewish settlements of Anjou and Poitou. …[Ed.: The Roman Catholic Crusaders] bade all Jews be baptized; when the Jews refused, the [Ed.: Roman Catholic] Crusaders trampled 3000 of them to death under their horses’ hoofs.”

1243 – All Jews in Belitz, Germany (near Berlin) are burned alive by Roman Catholics. According to historian Will Durant, their alleged crime was that “some of them had defiled a consecrated host”.

1348-49 – The Roman Catholic Church blames the Jews for the “Black Death” (probably the bubonic plague). Here is what Dave Hunt has written on page 267 of his book, “A Woman Rides the Beast” (1994), concerning this time in history: “From the time the popes ruled Rome, the Jews’ plight…was far more grievous than it had ever been at the hands of the pagan rulers. Pagans had blamed every disaster upon Christians. Now the Roman Catholic Church blamed all on the Jews. Accused of causing the ‘Black Death’, Jews [Ed.: made in the image of God] were rounded up and hanged, burned, and drowned by the thousands in revenge.”

c.1350-c.1500 – Roman Catholic authorities in England and Scotland persecute the Bible-believing Lollards. (Many Bible-believing Lollards are imprisoned; some are burned; many others are driven into exile!)

1389 – The Jewish community in Prague is accused of attacking a monk carrying a sacramental wafer (used in the Roman Catholic Mass). 3000 Jews in Prague are then surrounded by Roman Catholic mobs – and when the Jews – who are made in God’s image – refuse to be baptized (into Roman Catholicism), they are murdered!

1429 – Pope Martin V orders the King of Poland to exterminate the Christian Hussites in Bohemia!

1477 – Pope Sixtus IV organizes a crusade against the Waldensian Christians in southern France.

1481 – Kickoff of the “Spanish Inquisition”: Spanish State and Church authorities start an orgy of torture and burning people alive – called the Inquisition. Aimed initially and primarily at Jews and Muslims, the Inquisition also targets those Christians whose beliefs are not completely in line with the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrines and practices. In the first two years (1481-1483), at least 2000 individuals are burned alive!

1492 – Up through this year the Spanish Inquisition has driven 500,000 Jews out of Spain!

1540-1570 – The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church sends a number of armies into southeastern France and surrounding areas that succeed in butchering at least 900,000 Bible-believing Waldensian Christians – men, women, elderly, and children made in the image of God – during this thirty-year period!

1550-1560 – 250,000 Dutch Protestants are exterminated via torture, hanging, and burning! (Roman Catholic King of Spain Philip II had sent 10,000 Spanish Roman Catholic troops, led by the Duke of Alva, to the Netherlands, in accordance with the Edict of 1550, to stamp out Protestantism there.)

1555-1558 – Roman Catholic Queen Mary I of England (“Bloody Mary”) and Roman Catholic Cardinal Reginald Pole preside over a mini-Inquisition in England that sees almost 300 Christians burned at the stake!

1572 – A massacre of Protestant French Huguenots by Roman Catholics occurs in France. (The massacre starts in Paris on St. Bartholomew’s Day.) At least 18,000 – possibly up to 30,000 – Protestants are butchered!

1588 – Roman Catholic Spain – with promises of funding and support from Pope Sixtus V – sends the Spanish Armada to bring England back under the temporal power of Papal Rome, and to destroy Protestantism in England. Author James Heron tells us this in his book “A Short History of Puritanism”: “The mighty fleet was manned by 9000 sailors…a force of 21,855 soldiers…and an immense company of Jesuits, friars, and priests to stimulate the soldiers, and to convert the English…with many officers of the Inquisition armed with instruments of torture…” Almighty GOD alone knows how many men and women were spared cruel burnings at the stake, being racked, and being tortured in a myriad of ways because of the bravery and skill of the English seamen – and because of the storm that destroyed so many Spanish ships! (Might GOD have sent that storm?)

1618-1648 – The Thirty Years’ War takes place. This bloody religious war was planned, instigated, and orchestrated by the Roman Catholic Jesuit Order and its agents in an attempt to exterminate all Protestants – men, women, and children made in the image of God – from off the face of the European continent.

1641 – The bloody massacre of Protestants by Roman Catholics occurs in Ireland. Approximately 150,000 Protestants are butchered from 1641 through 1649. (Priests urged Roman Catholic mobs to commit cruel acts!)

1685 – Roman Catholic French King Louis XIV, at the urging of his father-confessor, Jesuit Pere La Chaise, revokes the “Edict of Nantes” that had granted religious liberty to all Frenchmen. He then orders his dragoons to slaughter the French Protestant Huguenots. 500,000 Protestants (men, women, and children) are butchered!

1914 – World War I (WWI) starts in the Balkans. Papal Rome’s involvement in fomenting WWI has been well documented by author Edmond Paris in his book, “The Secret History of the Jesuits”. Paris stated: “The public is practically unaware of the overwhelming responsibility carried by the Vatican and its Jesuits in the starting of two world wars – a situation which may be explained in part by the gigantic finances at the disposition of the Vatican and its Jesuits, giving them power in so many spheres, especially since the last conflict.”

1917 – The Russian Revolution takes place. The Bolsheviks (Communists) seize power in Russia – funded by wealthy Knights of Malta in the United States and Europe. Later, two Jesuit-trained thugs, Joseph Stalin and Roman Catholic Cardinal Gregory Agagianian, oversee the Soviet Gulag slave-labor system. (Both Stalin and Agagianian had been trained by Jesuits who taught at the Byzantine Rite seminary in Tiflis, Soviet Georgia.) Millions of Russian Orthodox Christians are butchered by a vicious, totalitarian Police State! (Remember, the Papacy has long hated Orthodox Christians, and has slaughtered them whenever and wherever it could.)

Approx. 1938 to 1945 – The Jewish holocaust occurs in Nazi-Fascist-controlled Europe. Up to six million Jews, made in God’s image, are murdered and starved to death! Roman Catholic involvement in this holocaust is extensive. Roman Catholic Monsignor Ludwig Kaas (a close confidant of Pope Pius XII) and German Roman Catholic Knight of Malta Franz von Papen are two of the top players involved in putting Adolf Hitler into power. The German Roman Catholic Center Party’s endorsement of, and unanimous vote for, the Enabling Act of March 1933 is orchestrated by Roman Catholic Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, and is crucial, giving Adolf Hitler the 2/3s majority he needs to assume dictatorial powers in Germany. A number of Roman Catholic priests put on the black uniforms of the Nazi SS. The Vatican signs Concordats with Nazi Germany and with Fascist Italy. Roman Catholics are installed as puppet dictators in a number of Fascist countries. For example, in Slovakia, Jesuit Monsignor Josef Tiso is installed as dictator. Roman Catholic Knights of Malta head up three powerful intelligence agencies during World War II (William Donovan heads the American OSS – which later becomes the CIA; German General Reinhard Gehlen heads Nazi Intelligence on the eastern front; and Russian Anton Turkul heads Soviet Intelligence, and uses Jesuit priests for his couriers). By using various elements within the warring factions, the Vatican is able to ensure the slaughter of large numbers of its favorite targets: Jews, Protestants (in northern Germany and in Prussia), and Orthodox Christians! At the end of the war, the Vatican helps many thousands of Nazi and Fascist war criminals to escape via the “Vatican Ratlines”, hiding them in convents and monasteries in Europe until they can safely escape to such countries as the USA, Argentina, etc.

1941-1945 – The “Vatican’s holocaust” occurs in Fascist Croatia. Though primarily aimed at Serb Orthodox Christians, much smaller numbers of Jews and gypsies are also targeted. This religious genocide is carried out by Roman Catholic clergymen – mainly Franciscan priests, monks, and friars! Roman Catholic Croatian dictator Ante Pavelic teams up with high-ranking Roman Catholic prelates, such as Jesuit Monsignor Aloysius Stepinac (Archbishop of Zagreb) and Jesuit Monsignor Ivan Saric (Archbishop of Sarajevo), to use Roman Catholic Ustashi paramilitary units to torture and butcher up to 1 million innocent Serb Orthodox Christian men, women, and children! This genocide includes the most brutal forms of torture, forced conversions, burning people alive, raping and murdering girls and women, impaling young children alive on stakes, gouging out the eyes of victims to make necklaces, starving children to death, burying victims alive, crucifying Orthodox priests to wooden doors, etc. Roman Catholic clergymen not only frequently advise the Roman Catholic Ustashi paramilitary units on how to torture and murder, but also actually participate in the savagery!

1960s – Francis Cardinal Spellman (Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York) and Pope Pius XII install fanatical Roman Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem as President of South Vietnam. Diem’s two Roman Catholic brothers fill important offices in South Vietnam as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Hue and the Chief of [the Secret] Police. These three fanatical Roman Catholic brothers start a mini-Inquisition in South Vietnam against the majority Buddhists. (Roman Catholics make up only about 10% of the population of S. Vietnam.) The result: the USA gets heavily involved in this war because Cardinal Spellman and Pope Pius XII – and some of their Roman Catholic friends in America – push the USA into this war! Avro Manhattan, author of numerous books, tells us: “The role played by the Vatican in the Vietnam War (1956-1976) was not only important, it was decisive. …Since without the Vatican such a war would have never occurred.” Thus Pope Pius XII and Francis Cardinal Spellman are responsible for the deaths of over 58,000 Americans in Vietnam!

Again, remember that the above information represents but a small sampling of Papal Rome’s hatred, torture, and mass murder. In view of all this Papal wickedness, which included slowly roasting at the stake men and women made in God’s image, can the Roman Catholic “Church” possibly be called “Christian”? No! This “Church” bears no resemblance to true, Biblical Christianity – and its popes, and most of its higher-level prelates, bear no resemblance to Jesus Christ and His apostles! This system of pure evil must be exposed!

This is the next chapter of the book, The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy – By Michael de Semlyen

Chapter 9
The Textual Controversy

In the Preface of the NIV we read, “the Greek text used in translating the New Testament was an eclectic one.” Eclectic refers to the practice of using a number of differing manuscripts to select verses or portions of Scripture at the sole discretion of those scholars appointed to the task. The Preface further explains, “the translators made their choice of readings according to accepted principles of New Testament textual criticism.” The “accepted principles” refer to those laid down for posterity by Westcott and Hort. The controversial theories of these two men have determined the accepted method of New Testament criticism for the twentieth and twenty- first centuries and beyond.

Unlike 1611, when there was total unanimity among the group of scholars— godly men who were sold out for Christ and who worked entirely in the open—the 1881 committee, which met secretly, was not united. One indicator as to why unity was not achieved was the inclusion of a Unitarian at the insistence of both Westcott and Hort. They had both made this a resigning issue. The minority, dissenting view was publicly represented by John Burgon, Dean of Chichester, a strenuous upholder of the Majority (Byzantine) Text, the Textus Receptus, which he called the Traditional Text. Burgon, who is ranked among Victorian textual scholars alongside Tregelles, Scrivener, and Tischendorf, was sufficiently challenged by the Oxford Movement’s assault on the Scriptures to dedicate his life to the defence of what he regarded as the infallible Word of God. He believed that the traditional text was the true text, which by perpetual tradition, generation by generation, had been handed down by God’s grace and providence, unfailingly, from the time of the apostles. God had fulfilled His promise to preserve His Word.

“I am utterly disinclined to believe,” wrote Dean Burgon, “that after 1800 years, 995 copies out of every thousand, suppose, will prove untrustworthy; and that the one, two, three, four or five that remain … will be found to contain what the Holy Spirit originally inspired. 1 am utterly unable to believe, in short, that God’s promise has so entirely failed, that at the end of 1800 years much of the text of the Gospel had in point of fact to be picked out of a wastepaper-basket by a German critic [Professor Tischendorf] in the convent of St Catherine.” ¹

¹ Professor Tischendorf’s account states that Sinaiticus was discovered among other manuscripts stored in St. Catherine’s Roman Catholic convent near Mount Sinai in Egypt.

In his book Revision Revised, Burgon wrote in the dedication to his friend Viscount Cranbrook:

Dean John Burgon

“The transition from one to the other, as the Bishop of Lincoln (Christopher Wordsworth (1807-1885), author of Is The Papacy Predicted by St Paul? and Rome Babylon and the Apocalypse,) remarks, is ‘like exchanging a well-built carriage for a vehicle without springs, in which you get jolted to death on a newly mended and rarely traversed road.’ But the Revised Version is inaccurate as well; exhibits defective scholarship, I mean, in countless places.

“It is, however, the systematic depravation of the underlying Greek which does so grievously offend me; for this is nothing else than the poisoning of the ‘River of Life’ at its sacred source. Our Revisers, (with the best and purest intentions, no doubt) stand convicted of having substituted for them fabricated readings, which the Church has long since refused to acknowledge, or else has rejected with abhorrence; and which only survive at this time in a little handful of documents of the most depraved type. … We venture to assure the reader without a particle of hesitation that Aleph [Sinaiticus], B [Vaticanus], and D [Bezae] are three of the most scandalously corrupt copies extant; exhibit the most shamefully mutilated texts which are to be met with; and have become by whatever process (for their history is wholly unknown) the depositaries of the largest amount of fabricated readings, ancient blunders and intentional perversions of truth which are discoverable in any known copies of the word of God.”

However Dean Burgon’s views and those of the Bishop of Lincoln failed to carry the day and the “revised editions” were published in Britain and the United States to widespread acclaim. The stakes in that momentous controversy simply could not have been higher. “If Burgon was right and Hort wrong, then Hort pulled off the tour de force of all time,” was one commentator’s summary of what had taken place. If this were so, it would prove to be, in Burgon’s words, “the most astonishing, as well as the most calamitous literary blunder of the Age.”

The American Revision Committees – Dr. Philip Schaff

The American Revised Version and its Committees followed on from the radical work of its English counterpart. As in England, two companies were formed for Revision—one for the Old Testament, the other for the New Testament. Bishop Ellicott and Dr. Angus of the English Revision Committee asked Dr. Philip Schaff to take the lead in America and in conjunction with them he selected the other committee members, drew up the provisional draft of the Constitution and organised the first American meeting. He often travelled to England to confer with Ellicott, Westcott, and Hort. Like the two Cambridge Professors who were dominant on the English committee, Schaff was the prime mover for all the work of both Old Testament and New Testament Committees in America and chaired them both. One Old Testament Committee member, Dr. T.W. Chambers, remarked that, “the Christian public is indebted to Philip Schaff more than to all other persons together.”

Dr. Philip Schaff

Dr. Schaff ’s theology seems to have been as deviant from orthodoxy as that of his two colleagues in England, Westcott and Hort. Like both English professors he was a liberal evolutionist, and he also declared himself a follower of the pantheistic German theologian Schleiermacher, whom he described as “the greatest theological genius since the Reformation.” His life’s work, The History of The Apostolic Church, begun in 1853, reveals theories and doctrines so startling that several leading theological journals in America and Canada denounced them as anti- Scriptural and anti-Protestant. In classifying the sources of history, he puts in the first rank “the official letters, decrees and bulls of Popes,” pronouncing them “pure, original utterances of history.”

Schaff was twice tried for heresy by his denomination and taught at the very liberal Union Seminary. As chairman of the revision committee, Dr. Schaff not only was greatly influenced by Westcott and Hort, but also by the Unitarians Ezra Abbot and Joseph Thayer, of Harvard, as well as other liberals whom he placed on the committee. Most new versions since that time have adopted the same presuppositions as did those 19th century revisers.

The unease about the suitability of Dr. Schaff as Head of the American Standard committee was expressed in the 1854 New Brunswick Review. “Through the misty drapery of Dr. Schaff ’s philosophy, every essential feature of the papal system stands forth with a prominence so sharply defined, as to leave doubt impossible and charity in despair,” said one reviewer. The following quotation from contemporary writers of standing present the danger of Schaff ’s teachings:

Dr. B. G. Wilkinson, in his 1930 book, Our Authorized Bible Vindicated, described the Gnostic influence that could be traced from Origen and the third-century corrupted text through to the Oxford Movement, Newman, and the textual bias of the Revisionists in England and America:

The Effect of Textual Criticism on Contemporary “Bibles”

Few Christians are aware of how in many respects the New International Version (NIV) is very much closer to the New World Translation (NWT), the Bible of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, than it is to the King James. The same verses at odds with those in the KJV are again and again to be found in both versions. The same omissions are made, except that whereas the NIV often records the verse omitted as a footnote, the NWT leaves it out altogether. As Reverend Charles Salliby writes in his 1994 book If the Foundations Be Destroyed, “the NIV is clearly an ‘Interdenominational (and ecumenical) masterpiece’ that can cross any church threshold and make all within happy with whatever they believe. With this translation you could prove or disprove the Virgin Birth, or indeed the Deity of Jesus. … Something to ponder: I do not know of one Christian who uses a New World Translation nor have I ever heard that such a Christian exists. Have you? Yet the NIV, whose contents so closely resemble those of the NWT, is the best selling Bible in the English speaking world today. If that is not a paradox, what is? (Charles Salliby: If the Foundations be Destroyed)

Not many Christians are aware of the extraordinary views held and expressed by Dr. Robert Bratcher, chief translator of the Good News Version, published in 1966 by the American Bible Society. In 1953 Dr. Bratcher had written in a Brazilian Baptist publication that, “Jesus Christ would not enjoy omniscience. That is an attribute of God. … Jesus did not claim He and the Father to be one — which would be absurd.”

In a letter to Julius C. Taylor, Dr. Bratcher wrote, “Of course I believe what I wrote in The Journal Batista of July 9th 1953.” In 1981 he is quoted as saying: “Only willful ignorance or intellectual dishonesty can account for the claim that the Bible is inerrant and infallible. To invest the Bible with the qualities of inerrancy and infallibility is to idolatrize it, to transform it into a false god.” (The Baptist Courier, April 2, 1981.)

The uproar following these and other remarks was such that Dr. Bratcher apologised in a press release. However, his apology was made because he had offended people, not in any way a retraction of the content of the many things that he had written and said. Dr Bratcher, of course, as Westcott and Hort before him, is fully entitled to his beliefs and enjoys the freedom under Christ to express them. However, such liberal beliefs must inevitably influence the interpretation and translation of Holy Scripture, and have done so, as we shall demonstrate.

Without venturing any deeper into the complex controversy among textual critics regarding the integrity of the different Greek manuscripts and their deployment in the many new versions, we simply seek to present comparisons of the English translations that speak for themselves.

Continued in Bible Verse Comparisons

All chapters of The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy

This is the next chapter of the book, The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy – By Michael de Semlyen

Chapter 8
The Modem Versions – Origins and Influences

The 1881 committee that produced the Revised Version, the mother of the majority of today’s modem versions, was unimpressed with the weight of the evidence supporting the Received Text, which had been used for English translations by William Tyndale, John Rogers, and Miles Coverdale, as well as later by the 1611 translators.

The Revising Committee and the Minority Texts

Led by Anglo-Catholic Cambridge Professors Westcott and Hort, the 1881 Revising Committee convinced most of the Church that the “Alexandrian” and “Western” Greek texts should replace the Received Text where the versions differed. Arguing that these Minority Texts were the oldest and therefore the most accurate and pure,¹ they often substituted what may well have been the third century corrupted text of Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome whenever the manuscripts differed. These texts had been rejected by the church fathers of the Antioch School and were also rejected by the Protestant Reformers.

¹ Textus Receptus Traced Back to the Year AD 350 – Surprisingly, of all people, Dr. Hort, testifies to the fact, to which all authorities must agree, that the Greek New Testament of the Textus Receptus type can be traced back very positively to the year AD 350 and is as old as any known manuscript. Hort says; “The fundamental text of the late extant Greek MSS [manuscripts] generally is beyond all question identical with the dominant Antiochian or Graeco-Syrian text of the second half of the fourth century. The community of text implies, on genealogical grounds, a community of parentage; the Antiochian Fathers and the bulk extant MSS written from about three or four to ten or eleven centuries later must have had, in the greater number of extant variations, a common original, either contemporary with or older than our oldest extant MSS, which thus lose at once whatever presumption of exceptional purity they might have derived from their exceptional antiquity alone,” — Hort’s Introduction, p.92. This gives a greater antiquity to the TR than to the Greek Text of the Revised Version.

Origen, the best known leader of the Alexandrian School, and now very much back in fashion in our theological colleges, taught that Christ was a created being—divine, but in a lesser sense than the Father—although at the same time he did teach the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son. Steeped in Gnosticism, he edited a six-column Bible called the Hexapla, with a different version of the Bible in each column, and was continually changing Bible verses to accommodate his own philosophical and mystical ideas. Dr. Philip Schaff, who became head of both American Revising Committees (Old and New Testaments) as we shall see, shared many of Origen’s Gnostic ideas and wrote of Origen, “his predilection for Plato led him into many grand and fascinating errors.”

The fifth column of the corrupted Hexapla was copied by Eusebius for Emperor Constantine’s new State Church in AD 331. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, the two key Greek New Testament manuscripts used in the 1881 Revised Bible, may well have derived directly from this source or even have been two of the fifty prepared by Eusebius and others at that time. Many textual authorities believe that Jerome’s Latin Vulgate Bible, favoured always by the Church of Rome, also originated from this family of manuscripts, as it is largely in agreement with the Minority Texts.

One of the newly authenticated manuscripts, Codex ‘B’ or Vaticanus, discovered in 1481 in the Vatican library in Rome and kept there ever since, was of central importance to the revising work. Erasmus, who, along with Beza, Stephanus, and the Elzevirs, edited the Textus Receptus, had had access to ‘B’, also known as Vaticanus, at the beginning of the Reformation, but had rejected it. 3 Manuscripts of the same stable were available to the 1611 translators too, but they also refused to make use of them. Yet to these manuscripts the Westcott and Hort Committee assigned supremacy. American New Testament scholar, Dr. Herman C. Hoskier, who in 1913 had written the lengthy volume Codex ‘B’- A Study and Indictment, is quoted as saying, “We always come back to ‘B ’, as Westcott and Hort is practically ‘B’. My thesis then is that ‘B’ (Vaticanus) and Aleph (Sinaiticus) and their forerunners, with Origen, who revised the Antioch text, are Egyptian revisions current between AD 200 and 400 and abandoned between 500 and 1881, merely revived in our day.” In fact there are over three thousand differences between Aleph Sinaiticus and B Vaticanus in the Gospels alone.

Westcott and Hort

Bruce Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort, both brilliant and respected scholars of their day, were dominant on the 1881 Revising Committee. We can learn much about their views and theological positions from their letters and biographies published by their respective sons. Both Cambridge professors were liberal theologians of the new higher critical school, who were greatly influenced by the Oxford Movement, the forerunner of the Ecumenical movement within the Church of England. Both men were anti-Protestant, sacerdotalist, and had pronounced leanings to Mariolatry.

Professor Westcott wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, “It does not seem to me that the Vaudois [the Waldensians] claim an ecclesiastical recognition. The position of the small Protestant bodies on the Continent is no doubt one of great difficulty. But our church can, I think, only deal with churches growing to fuller life.” Hort wrote to Westcott, on September 23,1864, “ I believe Coleridge [Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poehttps://www.jamesjpn.net/wp-admin/post-new.phpt] was quite right in saying that Christianity without a substantial church is vanity and disillusion; and I remember shocking you and Lightfoot not so long ago by expressing a belief that ‘Protestantism’ is only parenthetical and temporary.” Hort harboured a lifetime hatred of the Received Text, which as early as 1851 he described as “vile, leaning on late manuscripts” and “villainous”.

Bruce Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort

Professor Westcott wrote in another letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, “I wish I could see to what forgotten truth Mariolatry bears witness.” He saw the Virgin as another manifestation of God. In writing to his fiancée in 1847 about his religious experiences in France, he described a small oratory housing a life-size “Pieta” (Madonna and dead Christ) with place only for one person to kneel. “Had I been alone I could have knelt there for hours.”

Professor Hort, who called the doctrines of evangelicals “perverted rather than untrue”, described himself as “a staunch sacerdotalist” and declared that “the pure Romish view of the sacraments seems to me nearer, and more likely to lead to the truth than the evangelical…. We dare not forsake the sacraments or God will forsake us.” He also had been “persuaded for many years that Mary-worship and Jesus-worship have very much in common in their causes and results.”

Both men rejected the substitutionary nature of Christ’s atonement. In line with Roman Catholic dogma they believed that it was not through Christ’s death that He atoned for sin, but through the Incarnation. As Hort wrote to Westcott in 1860, “Certainly nothing could be more unscriptural than the modem limiting of Christ’s bearing our sins and sufferings to his death; but indeed that is only one aspect of an almost universal heresy.”

Both men favoured the Darwinian hypothesis and the new Old Testament higher criticism and were opposed to a literal interpretation of the first three chapters of the book of Genesis. Neither Westcott nor Hort ever stated that the Bible was verbally inspired or inerrant. Professor Westcott’s pioneer work on subjecting the sacred text to critical and sceptical analysis helped to usher in the school of modernism and the work of well-known liberal scholars, like Wellhausen, Karl Barth, Bultmann, and more recently Hans Kung, Dr. John Robinson (author of Honest To God), and David Jenkins, who, like Westcott, was a former Bishop of Durham.

Continued in The Textual Controversy

All chapters of The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy

My dear friends and readers of this website, it gives me no pleasure at all to write this article. My wife and I like pastor Chuck Baldwin of Liberty Fellowship. For years we used to listen to his weekly messages given at Liberty Fellowship of Kalispell Montana. We gave to his ministry. We like his commentaries on Matthew 24, Romans chapter 13 about government, what he has to say about Zionist Israel, his stand against COVID-19 vaccines, and his stand against the medical mandates during the pandemic. He often quoted from noteworthy Bible commentators of the past, men of God such as Matthew Henry, Albert Barnes, Adam Clarke, John Gill, and the Geneva Bible commentaries. They all taught standard Protestant Historicist interpretation of Bible prophecy. They all pointed to the “man of sin” of Second Thessalonians chapter 2 as the popes of Rome. They all proclaimed the “great whore that sitteth upon many waters”, the woman arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, of Revelation chapter 17 to be the Roman Catholic Church.

We were therefore alarmed and dismayed when in January of 2023, Chuck Baldwin began to teach that the Book of Revelation was written before the destruction of Jerusalem and that all of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation have to do with Jerusalem and its destruction! Folks, this is what Jesuit Luis de Alcazar (1554-1630) of Seville, Spain taught and something the Jesuits would like you to believe!

Alcazar devised what became known as the ‘preterist’ system of prophetic interpretation. This theory proposed that the Book of Revelation deals only with events in the Pagan Roman Empire, that the Antichrist refers to Nero, and that the prophecies were therefore fulfilled long before the time of the medieval church.

Alcazar taught that for the same reason that Francesco Ribera taught the 70th Week of Daniel is a 7-year end-time scenario of the Antichrist in the future, the doctrine which is known as futurism. The reason is both preterism and futurism divert attention and blame away from the Roman Beast and the Whore of Revelation 17, namely the Roman Catholic Church, the popes of Rome, and the Jesuits! And though these two doctrines contradict each other, the Roman Catholic Church put its imprimatur, its official stamp of approval to publish books that teach both these doctrines! Preterism puts the Antichrist in the past, and Futurism puts the Antichrist in the future. Either one of these two doctrines takes Protestant Christians’ eyes off the popes of Rome as the fulfillment of the man of sin prophecy of Second Thessalonians chapter 2. The Roman Catholic Church doesn’t care which one of them you believe, it just wants you to believe one of them.

On January 20, 2023, I wrote the following to one of the members of Liberty Fellowship, a person who lives in Kalispell and who probably sees Chuck Baldwin regularly:

He did not reply to me. He used to reply to all my previous messages to him.

And even before that, in December of 2022, I was shocked when a friend pointed out to me that Pastor Baldwin does not name the Pope as Antichrist which is the true Protestant Reformation historicist position. Now that I think about it, I don’t know if he ever did. What baffles me is how can a man who reads and quotes from good men of God of the 17 and 18th centuries who all taught that the papacy is the office of the Antichrist not teach likewise? Is he under somebody’s influence for the sake of monetary gain?

Today, May 7th, 2024, I came across Chuck Baldwin’s latest message, “Babylon The Great – Part One – The Mother Of Harlots (Prophecy Message #21) – 5/5/24”. I thought, “Great! He’s gonna talk about Revelation chapter 17, a crystal clear picture of the Roman Catholic Church! Let’s see what he has to say.” I told my wife Tess and she eagerly listened to him with me for the first few minutes. Sad to say, he did not point to Rome, the popes, or the Jesuits but talked about Jerusalem instead! Did Jerusalem rule the civilized world and control the kings of Europe for over a thousand years like the Popes of Rome did? Nope.

I mean, how can anyone not see a picture of the Roman Catholic Church in Revelation chapter 17? Not to see it means either ignorance of history or ignoring history, especially Church History.

I found a talk by a pastor named Sam Adams who I believe tells the truth about Chuck Baldwin. He says it better than I can. I transcribed the first 6 1/2 minutes of the YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7FPbKViBcI

Partial transcript of Sam Adam’s message

I’ll be starting today in Revelation chapter one as I bring a follow-up to a message I started a few weeks ago refuting the deceptive and obliging Romanist Doctrine being promoted by Chuck Baldwin via a series of sermons on Bible prophecy that he’s posting online. And this follow-up message is just as crucial for all followers of Chuck Baldwin to hear than the last if not more so.

Baldwin is a somewhat popular public, politician, and pastor of the non-denominational and ecumenical Liberty Fellowship Church in Montana. He does do a good job of exposing some of the evils of Washington DC, but then he blames the wrong cabal or the wrong Puppet Master for those evils.

As I mentioned last time, many of our like-minded friends also follow Chuck Baldwin, some of whom are being deceived by his false teaching, and so I do believe it’s important that we post this expose and refutation of his doctrine online.

I’m going to be covering several passages and providing lots of information in this message so some may need to listen through two or three times while taking notes along the way. I’m going to show in this message how Chuck Baldwin consistently and in every single passage, deals with and focuses on a few select verses while intentionally ignoring the context of those verses so that he can mangle the meaning or the interpretation of the scriptures.

Baldwin uses the King James Bible and he pretends to be a fundamentalist but with the way he mangles and twists the scriptures in this recent sermon series in a way that benefits Rome and his loyal agents that hold the controlling interest over Washington DC, I conclude that Baldwin has finally exposed himself as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

After spending the first 30 years of his ministry preaching the devil’s false multi-gospel anti-Jesus heresies of Scofield’s pre-trib rapture dispensationalism, which system itself was concocted in the 1500s by a Jesuit priest named Francisco Rivera who revived somewhat but also corrupted and perverted the original pre-millennial eschatology of the Apostles and contaminated it with Scofield’s multi-gospel, dual covenant, and pre-trib rapture heresies, Baldwin finally abandoned that heretical system, but then he’s shifting gears to another very blinding perversion of the scripture is known as preterism, which was also concocted by the Jesuits and at about the same time. Baldwin says his eschatology is Jesus-based rather than Israel-based, but much to the contrary as I’ll explain in this message, his eschatology is agenda-driven. It’s an eschatology that spiritualizes and recklessly mangles the scriptures to promote an agenda, which rather than being Jesus-based as he claims, is instead highly Jesuit-based, having been undeniably developed during the Counter-Reformation of the 16th century by another Jesuit priest named Luis de Alcazar, who expanded on the spiritualized view of the Bible first proposed by the Roman Catholic Augustine of Hippo in the 5th Century to produce the first systematic preterist exposition of Bible prophecy, the purpose of which was just like Ribera’s dispensationalism to divert attention from the Roman Catholic papacy, which Luther and the Protestant reformers of that day believed to be the Antichrist.

Here’s a brief quote from the Wikipedia article detailing the history and the development of Baldwin’s preterism.

“Historically, preterists and non-preterists have generally agreed that the Jesuit Luis de Alcazar (1554–1613) wrote the first systematic preterist exposition of prophecy Vestigatio arcani sensus in Apocalypsi, published during the Counter-Reformation. Moses Stuart noted in 1845 that Alcasar’s preterist interpretation advantaged the Roman Catholic Church during its arguments with Protestants. Due to resistance from Protestant historicists, the preterist view was slow to gain acceptance outside the Roman Catholic Church. Among Protestants, preterism was first accepted by Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), a Dutch Protestant eager to establish common ground between Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church.”

As I would add Baldwin also appears to be.

So the fact is that both of these systems dispensationalism and preterism were concocted by the Jesuits, and in merely shifting gears from one heresy of the Jesuits to another, Chuck Baldwin is both following and in fact, promoting the doctrine of the new world order globalists that served Rome and who truly control Washington D.C, whom he is aiding and abetting by diverting attention from Rome and blaming Zionist Jews for doing that instead, just as the Jesuits have always used the Jews for their scapegoats.

Baldwin has both denied and avoided calling himself a preterist but in this series especially in part four where he addressed the second Thessalonians chapter 2 and the definition of the term Antichrist in part seven where he covers the date John wrote the book of the Revelation and in part nine where he covers the Seal of judgments in Revelation chapter 6. because he has finally come out stating that the Book of Revelation was primarily fulfilled in the first century with the destruction of Jerusalem, it is therefore correct to label Baldwin as a full-blown preterist. By the preterist position he’s adopted, he is on a mission to convince the world that Bible prophecy is irrelevant and can be ignored, that the events of our day have nothing to do with Bible prophecy since it’s all already been fulfilled in history, and which I suggest poses a danger to all those who hear and become deluded by Baldwin’s message.

And then as further evidence of his Rome-favoring agenda, in his weekly column released a few weeks ago on September 8th Baldwin asserted that Vladimir Putin is a Christian and that Russia’s State Orthodox Catholic Church is also a Christian even as that organization teaches the same blasphemous idolatry promoted by the Roman Catholic Church.

These are the reasons that Chuck Baldwin’s agenda-based doctrine is dangerous. So in this message, I’ll be refuting and exposing Baldwin’s redefinition of the term Antichrist as the Apostle John used that word, and his misinterpretation of the man of sin in Second Thessalonians chapter 2, along with his misplaced date of the writing of John’s Revelation before the destruction of Jerusalem which he and all preterists must do to make their system work.

(End of transcript.)

I don’t like to be overly critical of people as some are, but it’s not a little thing for me when a person I like suddenly starts to teach false doctrine. I just hope and pray pastor Baldwin will come to see the truth.

I believe Sam Adams is correct about Chuck Baldwin’s preterism, but not about what he has to say about Israel and Romans chapter 11. I think pastor Baldwin got that right. Others agree with pastor Baldwin, notably Charles A. Jennings and I think Steve Gregg. Nobody’s perfect, right? I don’t claim to be. I try to follow what I believe the Word of God says, not just what some preacher says it says. And my understanding may not always be correct. I do believe the Protestant Reformers got it right about most things which is why they caused a revolution and wounded the Roman Beast with a wound close to death. (Rev. 13:3) That’s why they are hated by traditional Catholics to this very day.

This is the next chapter of the book, The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy – By Michael de Semlyen

PART II
THE KING JAMES BIBLE
AND MODERN VERSIONS

Chapter 7
The Proliferation of Modern “Bibles”

During the last century the Church has preached a watered-down Gospel from a seemingly unending range of “bibles”, each of which differs from the other, sometimes radically. Until the closing years of the nineteenth century, “the people of the Book” were convinced that in the King James or Authorised Version they had the Word of God. They saw it as infallible; they had no doubt of its inerrancy. Preachers and their congregations approached the Scriptures with great reverence, “Thus saith the Lord.” This was the authorised Bible; it was rare for anyone to question that which was universally accepted as the Word of God. There was no serious alternative to the King James for most of three hundred years. Rival editions, and there was no shortage of these, fell flat on their face before the majesty of the King James. Although custom and language changed, the King James Bible did not. Indeed there was no real case for change, and for most people the idea of change was unthinkable. It was widely regarded then as the Word of God in English.

If today, because of the prevalence of all the other translations, it is no longer seen as this, then which particular version has taken its place? If there is not to be any one version but a combination or synthesis of all versions, and there are more than one hundred and fifty of them, the number rising fast; then who is to choose the true Scriptures and discard the false? If there were to be no one trustworthy version with a just claim to be the Word of God, then we would have to conclude that we worship a God who is either careless or powerless to keep His Word pure through the ages. The very question posed repeatedly in today’s pulpits by the words “depending on what version you are using” reminds us of man’s first questioning of God’s Word, “… has God said?” (Genesis 3:1) The existence of so many differing versions is a major problem for evangelism, especially to Muslims and others of different religions or cults who have their own scriptures.

The footnotes that are to be found in new versions, including the N1V, the RSV, the NASB, the NEB, and the Good News, question the choice of manuscript and cast doubt on the authenticity of the Scriptures. Verses or parts of verses and whole passages are omitted with an explanatory footnote, or often without one. The inevitable consequence of this is the undermining of Scripture’s claim to be absolute Truth. “Thy word is truth.” (John 17:17)

How can we claim that God’s Word is inerrant and infallible and at the same time admit that there are errors in every translation and that we don’t possess a Bible that we can trust? We are not just being inconsistent and illogical; much more serious—we are in direct conflict with Scripture. Scripture declares emphatically that God will preserve His Holy Word pure in all ages. He has done so in the Authorised King James Version, the complete Word of God and the Final Authority in all matters of faith and practice.

“The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.” – Psalm 12:6

“Thy word is very pure: therefore thy servant loveth it.” – Psalm 119:140

That purity is patently missing in popular new versions such as the NIV and the Good News, as we shall show in our section comparing selected key verses of Scripture. The Bible clearly supports the doctrine of verbal inspiration. Dr. Napier Malcolm asks, “How can we say that each word of the Bible (that is, the Hebrew and Greek originals) is inspired of God and true when different Bibles say different things? The modem versions are based on the belief that not every word of our present Bibles is necessarily true.

The translators believe that God may have inspired the original, but He has not preserved the original.” (British Church Newspaper, December 24, 2004.)

Preservation of God’s Word

Again and again God’s providential preservation of His Word is promised in the Bible:

“… Thou shalt keep them (the words of the Lord), O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.” -Psalm 12:7

“For ever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. ” -Psalm 119:89

“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. ” -Matthew 24:35

“Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever.” -1 Peter 1:23

“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the Word of our God shall stand for ever.” -Isaiah 40:8

Men of great faith of the past have admitted their difficulty in explaining those things regarding inspiration and inerrancy, which are hard to be understood. But, as Bishop Ryle pointed out, “We may rest assured that the difficulties which beset any other theory of inspiration are tenfold greater than any which beset our own.” Ryle’s high view of Scripture reflected his belief that the Authorised Version that he used was preserved inspired, infallible and inerrant, and entirely trustworthy.

The Bible as God’s Word

“This Bible is God’s Bible,” insisted C. H. Spurgeon, “and when I see it, I seem to hear a voice springing up from it, saying, “I am the book of God; man, read me. I am God’s writing; open my leaf, for I was penned by God;’……….. Oh, book of books! And wast thou written by my God? Then will I bow before thee. Thou book of vast authority!………… for he has written this book himself,………….let us love it; let us count it more precious than much fine gold…… I plead with you, I beg of you respect your Bibles, and search them out,………..go home and read your Bibles,. ” (A Sermon (No. 15) delivered on Sabbath Evening, March 18, 1855, by the Reverend C.H.)

As internationally recognised New Testament textual critic Edward F. Hills argued, “In regard to Bible versions, then, we follow the example of the Apostles and the other inspired New Testament writers. Just as they recognized the Septuagint as the providentially appointed translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek, so we recognize the King James Version and the other great historic translations of the holy Scriptures as providentially approved. Hence we receive the King James Version as the providentially appointed English Bible. Admittedly this venerable version is not absolutely perfect, but it is trustworthy. No Bible-believing Christian who relies upon it will ever be led astray. But it is just the opposite with modem versions. They are untrustworthy, and they do lead Bible-believing Christians astray.” (Edward F. Hills: The King James Version Defended, Christian Research Press)

Dr. B. B. Warfield and countless others have tried to devise a theory of the special providential preservation of the Scriptures which leaves room for naturalistic New Testament textual criticism. But this is impossible, for the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Naturalistic New Testament criticism requires us to treat the text of the New Testament like the text of any other book, in other words, to ignore or deny the special providential preservation of the Scriptures. Hence if we really believe in the Scriptures’ special providential preservation then we cannot follow the naturalistic method of New Testament textual criticism.

Dr. Hills, in his book, The King James Version Defended, pointed to six principles in support of this view:

1. The Old Testament text was preserved by the Old Testament priesthood and the scribes and scholars that grouped themselves around that priesthood.
2. When Christ died upon the cross, the Old Testament priesthood was abolished. In the New Testament dispensation, every believer is a priest under Christ the great High Priest. Hence, the New Testament text has been preserved by the universal priest-hood of believers, by faithful Christians in every walk of life.
3. The Traditional Text, found in the vast majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts, is the true text because it represents the God-guided usage of this universal priesthood of believers.
4. The first printed text of the Greek New Testament represents a forward step in the providential preservation of the New Testament. In it the few errors of any consequence occurring in the Traditional Greek Text were corrected by the providence of God, operating through the usage of the Latin-speaking Church of Western Europe. In other words, the editors and printers who produced this first printed Greek New Testament text were providentially guided by the usage of the Latin-speaking Church to follow the Latin Vulgate in those few places in which the Latin Church usage rather than the Greek Church usage had preserved the genuine reading.
5. Through the usage of Bible-believing Protestants God placed the stamp of His approval on this first printed text, and it became the Textus Receptus. It is the printed form of the Traditional Text found in the vast majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts.
6. The King James Version is an accurate translation of the Textus Receptus. On it God has placed His stamp of approval through the long continued usage of English-speaking believers. Hence it should be used and defended today by Bible-believing Christians.

“Not only do English speaking Christians own in the King James version the greatest translation of the Bible ever produced in any language, called ‘The miracle of English prose’, but also the greatest literary masterpiece ever authored. ‘It’s language,’ one said, ‘we reserve for God.’ Its power, sweep and breathtaking authority transcends all other works, while its Elizabethan eloquence, antiquated yet timeless, speaks more profoundly and intimately to our heart than our modem day tongue.” (Rev. Charles Salliby: If the Foundations Be Destroyed. Pine Hill Press Inc.)

Difficult to Read

An answer to those who protest that the Authorised Bible is too difficult for the modem reader to read, with all its archaic terms and turn of phrase, was provided by the much-respected expository preacher, the late Dr. D.M. Lloyd-Jones who was quoted in ‘The Majority Text: Essays and Reviews in the Continuing Debate.

Prince Charles, who does not seem to have understood the main message of the Bible, and much needs the prayers of God’s people at this time, sought to express in simple fashion something of the lofty inaccessibility and majesty of so much of Scripture, in contrast with the banalities of the Alternative Service Book: “The Word of God is supposed to be a bit over our heads. Elevated is what God is.” (Excerpt from a chapter contributed to by the Prince of Wales to The Real Common Worship, published to protest against the new Anglican Prayer Book.) If he becomes King, providing his Coronation Service remains the same, he will be required to assent to a higher view of Scripture than this. His mother, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, at her accession, swore her Coronation Oath affirming that the Bible is “the most valuable thing that this world affords. Here is wisdom. This is the Royal Law. These are the lively oracles of God.”

To those who continue to argue that the Authorised Version is hard to understand, and that we therefore need modem versions, author Alan O’Reilly asks in his book, O Biblios, how it is that its text caused the English people to become a Bible loving people— “the people of the book”—in the words of the historian Green.

The marvellous fact is that the King James Bible is comprehensible to the untrained mind. In many parts of the “Bible belt” in the United States today the great majority of ordinary grass roots Christians would use no other version. The same applies in African countries where both the King James and another version have been used. There is simply the widespread recognition that the KJV has clarity and authority that is not found in other versions. Apart from its magnificent use of language the Authorised Bible flows rhythmically and has actually proved far easier to learn than other translations.

The As American Creation Scientist, Henry M. Morris, author of The Genesis Project, has written, “The English of the King James is not nearly so archaic or difficult to follow as its critics allege. In fact, it is in general written in a much simpler vocabulary, with a higher percentage of one and two syllable words, than almost any of the new translations. The honest reader will find it at least as easy to understand as any other.” Dr. Hills maintains that “the English of the King James Version … is not a type of English that was ever spoken anywhere. It is biblical English.” (King James Version Defended, p. 218.)

However, the ultimate criterion is not the ease with which we can read it, rather it is the purity of the text. The King James translators were of a calibre and breadth of scholarship surely unmatched in the world today, and they were entirely submitted to the Scriptures, which they regarded as sacred and inerrant. They approached the work of translation with great reverence attested to by their handling of the Greek and Hebrew texts, placing each word and phrase precisely as they perceived was intended by the Holy Spirit. There is a consistent faithfulness in their approach to the original text, which is testified to by the use of Italics when words are added in the English translation.

The question that we need to ask of our Bible is “is it inspired by the spirit of God who leads us into all truth or is it just the product of scholarship, reason and research?” We shall be trying to show the importance of an awareness of the crucial and often startling and shocking differences between the King James and the modern versions; and we do urge the reader to take a little time to study the section which follows which compares translations.

In arguing the case for the King James Version, we do not suggest that those Christians who use it are necessarily more spiritual, better informed, more faithful in prayer, more competent in expounding the Word or more zealous in reaching out to sinners than those who use another version. Nor is this an excursion into what some call “bibliolatry” but is a serious attempt to encourage discernment in the use of Bible versions. We walk in a minefield of deception as the version comparisons in the section at the end of this chapter and elsewhere in this book are intended to demonstrate.

Different Greek Manuscripts

One misconception among Christians today needs to be cleared up. The belief that all modem versions are simply revisions of the Authorised Version in more up-to-date language is incorrect. Such revisions do exist, but the great majority of modem versions use translations from entirely different Greek manuscripts. The underlying Greek text of the King James Version of the New Testament is called the Textus Receptus or Received Text. It derives from what is known as the “Majority Text”, so named because approaching 95% of all existing manuscript evidence supports this text. It was first printed in Basel, in 1516, under the editorship of Erasmus and was the text most relied on by the Protestant Reformation in England and in Europe. It was reproduced in many editions in the sixteenth century, and the 1611 King James translation was largely based on Theodore Beza’s Fourth Edition of 1588.

The modern translations are mainly based on the “Minority Texts”, which were presented to the world as alternatives to the Textus Receptus (TR) at the end of the nineteenth century. We recognise the sincerity, the weight of argument and the thoroughness of scholarship of textual critics who support these “rediscovered manuscripts.” We respect, too, the carefully reasoned arguments that seek to invalidate the TR, although we do not accept their conclusions. The simple fact is that the originals or “autographs” are not to be found, and therefore the evidence relating to the integrity of codices or manuscripts is highly complex. This author is in no way qualified to enter into it. He simply looks to set out the facts, and without concealing his confidence in God’s providential role in preserving His Word and providing it in English, invites the reader to look more closely into these things.

Continued in The Modem Versions – Origins and Influences

All chapters of The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy

This is the next chapter of the book, The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy – By Michael de Semlyen

I learned so much from this chapter!

Chapter 6

Islam in Prophecy

Many historicists see the two legs of Nebuchanezzar’s image in Daniel 2 as referring to the divide of the post-Christian Roman Empire into the Western Empire under the Papacy and the Eastern Empire under Islam. The Historicist interpretation of the fifth trumpet in the book of Revelation (chapter 9:1-11) reveals the emergence of Islam in Arabia under Mohammad and the devastating early campaigns and conquests of his followers against Christendom.

Rev. E. B. Elliott’s commentary of this passage describes an antichrist spirit ruthless in its savagery. At the same time he demonstrates how the Muslim “locust hordes” were used as an instrument of God’s judgement on the “Christian” idolatry of Byzantium. The fulfilment of prophecy can repeat itself. As the twenty-first century’s apostate Christendom falls away into idolatry and secularism, it is instructive for us, confronted by the same malign spirit, to be reminded by Scripture of the roots of Islam and its savage and sustained onslaught on apostate Christendom in the seventh and eighth centuries.

ISLAM in REVELATION – Chapter 9:1-11 – the Fifth Trumpet

(From the Historical interpretation by Rev. E. B. Elliott)

1. And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key to the bottomless pit.

2. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

3. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

4. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.

5. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.

6. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

7. And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.

8. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.

9. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running

10. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.

11. And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

In his Thirteenth Lecture, Elliot interprets this passage as follows:

I. First as the peculiar country and people whence it was to originate. The locust, the groundwork of the symbol, is wholly Arabic. It was the “east wind which brought the locusts” on Egypt (Exodus 10:13)—a statement distinctly pointing to Arabia, as to the land upon the east of Egypt. The Syrians, we are told by Volney, “have remarked that locusts come constantly from the deserts of Arabia.” The terms Arab and locust are in Hebrew almost the same. The symbol is used elsewhere in Scripture with like appropriateness: “They [the Midianite Arabs] came as grasshoppers,” meaning locusts. (Judges 6:5)

Great peculiarity attached to these monsters in the vision before us; they were half beast, half man. Their coming, locust- like, in destructive swarms, is in accordance with the figure; but their shape was like horses. The horse was peculiarly Arabian, and seems to indicate hordes of cavalry; they were, it is said, “prepared for battle.” They had teeth like lions—savage destroyers of life—and they resembled scorpions in their poison stings, implying that they would be the tormentors of those whose lives they spared. The scorpion is of the same native locality; witness the words of Moses, when reminding the Israelites of God’s goodness to them throughout their forty years’ wanderings: “Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents and scorpions?” (Deuteronomy 8:15) Thus the zoology is all Arabian.

Next, as to the human appearance of these locusts: their faces like men, their hair as the hair of women. What people could be thus pictured? … There was a nation to which the whole of the descriptive symbol was literally applicable. Pliny, St John’s contemporary, speaks of the Arabs as wearing the turban, having the hair long and uncut, and with the moustache too on their upper lip – “that venerable sign of manhood,” as Gibbon calls it. In the Arabian poem Antar, written about Mahomet’s time, we find the beard and moustache, the long-flowing hair and the turban, all specified as characterizing the appearance of the Arab. And the turban of the Arab was often noted as a crown. So Ezekiel spoke of “Sabeans [Arabs] from the desert, with beautiful crowns on their heads.” (Ezekiel 23:42) The breastplates of iron worn by these creatures are also noted in the vision. The Saracens’ policy was to wear defensive armour, their coats of mail being repeatedly mentioned by historians. Thus, on the whole, these concurrent symbols point to Arabia as the country whence the woe was to originate. And if we turn from prophecy to history, we find, at the opening of the seventh century, a fact notoriously verifying the prediction. A mighty Saracen or Arab invasion is the chief event, which it records.

II. But what of the abyss, out of which those locusts are said to have issued? The word is often used in Scripture with reference to Hell, or the place of the departed wicked. And in the New Testament it is likewise introduced as “the deep,” into which the devils entreated of our Lord that they might not be sent; and in the Revelation as “the bottomless pit,” where “that old serpent, the devil” is bound. Moreover, as the natural light of the sun is a fit emblem of the spiritual illumination that comes down from the God and Father of lights, so may we infer that whatever is described as darkening the atmosphere, even as smoke from a pit, must be meant in the opposite sense of a moral or spiritual pollution. This smoke, then, in the Apocalyptic vision, we consider to be an emanation from Satan issuing from the pit of hell; i.e., some system of false religion, which should obscure truth, or dim the light of heaven.

And was it even so? Did it so happen, at this particular juncture, that such a system of pestilent error rose up? And if so, did it take its rise from Arabia? To these enquiries we reply, Who has not heard of Mahomet, that false prophet; and of the spread of his too popular creed? This deadly evil came out from Arabia at the very time we speak of—a creed the invention of fanaticism and fraud. In its system the blessed God is described as cruel and unholy; and in its morals, pride, ferocity, superstition and sensuality, are held up for admiration, and show palpably where it had its origin. It was just after embracing Mahometan principles that the Saracens, as “locusts from the abyss,” issued forth on Christendom. It was the adoption of this creed, the creed of Mahomet, that made them what they were, that united these hordes as one, that gave them the impulse to fly locust-like to propagate their faith over the world, and that imparted to them, as to raging lions of the desert, their destructive fury of fanaticism. Their scorpion venom was thereby prepared to torment such of the Christians as they should bring under their yoke, while the hope of gross licentiousness to be indulged in both here and hereafter, added sensualism to their ferocity. Well does the Saracen history accord with the prophetic emblem concerning them!

III. We have to observe the peculiar nature of the commission, “Hurt not the grass or trees, but only those men who have not God’s seal on their foreheads.” Mahomet expressly declared that his mission was against “idolaters;” and such he considered Christians. But in urging forward his followers against them, the Caliph Aboubeker did but fulfil the precept of the prophet when he gave the command, “Destroy no palm trees, nor any fields of corn, cut down no fruit trees, nor do any mischief to cattle.” It was the dictate of policy, not of mercy; for by following this plan the Saracens, soon after their conquest, had formed flourishing countries round them. It was a marked peculiarity; for in other invasions, as the Gothic, fire, sword, and devastation tracked the invader’s progress, and was accordingly prefigured in the Apocalyptic imagery: but with the Saracens it was the very reverse; and this reverse still more connects it with the prediction now before us.

IV. We have so far identified this passage with the Arabian heresy and irruption, that the inference we clearly deduce, is that Mahomet was the star, or ruler, adhered to. But why is this imposter referred to as a star? And why still more, since success followed his course for such a length of time, is he said to be a fallen star? To answer this question we must trace Mahomet’s history back to his birth. His origin was princely, being descended from one of the noblest families in Arabia. Gibbon says, “The grandfather of Mahomet and his lineal ancestors appeared in foreign and domestic transactions as the princes of their country.” They were, in the view of the Syrian Greeks, as among the stars on the political horizon. But just after the prophet’s birth his father died; and soon after, his grandfather. Then the governorship of Mecca and keys of the Kaaba (or holy place of religion among the Arabians) attached to the office, passed into another branch of the family. Thus Mahomet became a star fallen from power. He says of himself, that at the opening of the seventh century, “he was a desolate orphan.” He was indeed fallen, when as a poor widow’s servant, he used to traffic in the markets of Damascus.

Mahomet, however, was imbued with a spirit calculated to struggle against, and triumph over misfortune. … About three miles from Mecca was a cave called Hera; it was a secret and desolate spot. There he withdrew every year to consult, as he said, a spirit who was wont to visit him in his solitary hours, and hold converse with him. Gibbon well calls it, “The spirit of fraud and enthusiasm, whose abode was not in heaven, but in the mind of the prophet.” This cave has aptly suggested to interpreters the idea of the pit of the abyss, whence the pestilential fumes and darkness were seen to issue. When, privately at first, and then more publicly, he began to announce his creed, for awhile his uncle and the elders of the city affected to despise the orphan’s presumption. They chased him from Mecca, and his flight marks in history the era of the Hegira, A.D.622. Seven years afterwards was seen in Mecca’s streets one to whom all bowed down in honour; whose words the multitudes revered; to whose command armies were obedient; who swayed the minds of men that they yielded implicit faith in his wild or crafty imagination. The “fallen star” had come forth again. The key of office was restored to him. The fugitive missionary was enthroned as the prince and the prophet of his native country. … Even so in allusive contrast it is written in Revelation, “The key of the abyss” was given to him; and truly the smoke that arose, upon his opening, was as the pestilential fumes and darkness of hell.

“There came out locusts on the earth.” It was in A.D.629 that the Saracens first issued from the desert, and proclaimed war against Christendom. The year 639 saw Syria subdued, and the Muezzin, calling to prayer, soon after sounded from a mosque built on the site of Solomon’s temple. There he is still heard to this very day, when the appointed hour comes round for remembering the prophet. The subjugation of Egypt followed quickly on that of Syria; then some few years after, that of the African province; then, at the commencement of the eighth century, that of Spain. All this was within the limits of Roman Christendom, and consequently within the sphere of the Apocalyptic vision. But beyond this their conquests extended far and wide with terrible rapidity. Two short statements from history will give some idea of the progress of the Saracens, and of the desolations caused by them; of whom it might be said, as was said of the desolating force mentioned in Joel. “The land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness.” (Joel 2:3). The one—that in ten years, from A.D.634 to 644, they had reduced 3600 castles to ruins, destroyed 4000 churches and had built 1400 mosques for the exercise of the religion of Mahomet. The other—that at the end of the first century of the Hegira, the Arabian Empire had been extended from the confines of India and Tartary to the shores of the Atlantic.

Bitterly did the Christians feel the scorpion’s sting. They were deprived of the use of their arms, and like slaves of old, made to pay annually a life-redemption tax. They were required to stand up always in the presence of their tyrants, and were called by the names of opprobrium, as “infidel dog”, “Christian dog”, etc. In further token of contempt to their religion, to which the Christians still clung in fond attachment, no new churches were permitted to be built; no church bells to be rung; while the scoffing Moslem had free access, even during divine worship, to all those which were allowed to exist. Insults of the grossest kind were continually offered to Christian females; and undefinable acts of oppression practised on all. Every inducement was offered to apostasy; and the punishment of death was inflicted on any, who, after apostasy, again professed the Christian faith.

These locusts, it is said, had a king over them, whose name was “Abaddon,” or the “Destroyer.” Mohammed professed that the “spirit of the cave” had dictated to him the Koran; this was accordingly the law that governed the Saracens. The Caliphs, or chief governors, held rule only as vicars of the false prophet. What the doctrine of the book was, as acted out by them, appeared on the field of battle. There, when we see not only the loss of bodily life resulting, but also the ruin of souls from the poisonous precepts of Mohammedism, we cannot find more a fitting title to express the perpetuation of the prophet’s character in each successive Caliph, than that of the “Abaddon,” the “Destroyer” of Christians! There was, however, a term and limit prescribed to these locusts, both as to effect and as to duration. For observe, they were not to kill, i.e., to annihilate the men of Roman Christendom as a political body; but “only to torment them.” And this woe was to last 150 days; i.e., in prophetic language, 150 years. …

Observe now what had been the length of time occupied in these transactions. We date from the period when Mahomet publicly announced his mission to propagate his religion by violence and with the sword: a mission, which made his followers a woe to all countries, but especially to Christendom. The destroying commission might be said to commence at that period, when Mahomet, addressing his assembled followers, enquired, “Who will be my lieutenant?”

Ali, called by him “the Lion of God,” replied, “O prophet, I will be thy lieutenant. Whoever rises against thee I will dash out his teeth, tear out his eyes, break his legs, rip him open. I am the man. I will be thy vizier.”

Mr. Hallam justly observes: “These words of Mahomet’s illustrious disciple are, as it were, a text upon which the commentary extends into the whole Saracenic history.”

Thus then, reckoning from A.D.612 to A.D.762, when the Caliphate was removed to Baghdad, we find the intervening period to be precisely 150 years. To two remarkable coincidences, which occurred during this period, we should give attention. It has been observed that the apostasy of the Church was the assigned and predicted cause of this judgment. Now Mahomet’s asserted commission was especially directed against idolaters; and it was in that character, as an idolatrous people, that Christendom appeared when the Saracen woe fell upon it. Up to the close of the seventh century the reproach of image- worship might seem deservedly to give cause for the scourge which they suffered under the Moslem sword; but about the year 717, the Isaurian family ascended the throne of Constantinople. For sixty years its princes, supported by many real Christians, though opposed by the Popes and the masses of the people, resisted image-worship and endeavoured to overthrow it. Mark then—it was during this period of resistance to the error that the Saracen horde received its first defeat at Constantinople.

Again in A.D.754 Constantine Copronymus called a council in order to condemn the idolatrous image-worship. It passed a solemn judgment against it: and, behold, it was the very next year that the Caliphate was divided, and the intensity of the Saracenic woe was brought to an end. But alas! The efforts of these emperors availed but little. In the year 781, the Queen Irene succeeded to the throne, having murdered her image-destroying husband. She convened what is called the seventh general council; and by a solemn act of the Catholic Church, the worship of images was declared lawful. Just then the Saracenic woe seemed for a time to revive. The Arab forces swept through Asia Minor into Greece, again and again bearing down all before them. Was there in all this no warning from God? The Eastern Church, however, persisted. In A.D.842 the struggle ended under the reign of the Empress Theodora, and image-worship became indisputably established. Through the ninth and tenth centuries it so continued; yet such was the long-suffering of God, no judgment seemed to follow.

But the time of retribution came at last.

Here we close, as far as regards this vision. But a fact or two, relative to the downfall of the Saracenic power, may be added. Luxury, we have said, weakened its strength. In A.D.841, the Caliph, distrusting his guards, was forced to hire a protective force of 50,000 Turks. These, like the Praetorian guards at Rome, in their turn became tyrants, and accelerated the sinking of the Saracens…. The Persians, in A.D.934, stripped the Caliph of Baghdad of all temporal power, and left him only the title of Pontiff of Islamism. In the west, a century after, the Saracens were driven out; and though they continued as marauders, and even gained victories in Crete and Sicily, the woe might be said to have passed from Christendom.

One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes hereafter. (Revelation 9:12)

The sixth trumpet’s first woe was again soon to fall on idolatrous Eastern Christendom. Vast numbers of Turkmans, or Turks, from the area of the Caspian sea and the Euphrates, converted to the new all- conquering religion and “animated by the same spirit of hell,” as Elliot describes it, waged “a holy war against the infidels” of Greek Christendom, occupying and settling all of Asia Minor. The second woe of the sixth trumpet culminated in the fall of Constantinople when history records a third part of the men were killed (Revelation 9:18).

Note: Another great commentary about Revelation chapter 9 verses 1-11 is David Wilcoxson’s article: The Fifth Trumpet Of Revelation 9

Continued in The Proliferation of Modern “Bibles”

All chapters of The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy

The cover of the book, Horae-Apocalypticae by 19th century expositor Rev. E. B. Elliott.

This is the next chapter of the book, The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy – By Michael de Semlyen An “expositor” is another word for commentator, in this case, a Bible commentator. This chapter is about the best Bible commentators of the 19th century who held the original Protestant historicist view of the prophecies of the books of Daniel and Revelation.

Chapter 5

Historicist Expositors of the Nineteenth Century

Dr. H. Grattan Guinness, in his review of Post-Reformation interpreters, recorded his belief that the false futurist writings of the Jesuits Ribera and Bellarmine had been ably answered by Brightman and Mede in the seventeenth century and by Isaac Newton in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Joseph Mede’s most excellent exposition of Revelation was approved and printed by the Puritan Parliament in 1641, and at the same time the Westminster Confession of Faith endorsed the historical interpretation of prophecy. Sir Isaac Newton followed Mede and the Puritan writers and further advanced the comprehension of prophecy. The vastness of his genius led him to the most extensive views of things natural and Divine. He studied nature as a whole, history as a whole, chronology as a whole, and (in connection with these) prophecy as a whole. (Ref: Romanism and the Reformation)

In 1842, Rev. Edward Bickersteth, hymn writer and author of the well respected book, The Trinity, who later in life became Bishop of Exeter, joined with Professor T. R. Birks in founding The Prophecy Investigation Society. Earlier, in 1839, Bickersteth had issued a warning against mixing doctrines and speculative prophetic interpretation, couched in temperate language:

Birks, in his First Elements of Sacred Prophecy, was more forthright. He warned of the dangers of rejecting, “without distinction, the maxims in the interpretation of the sacred prophecies generally received by the Protestant churches, ever since the time of the Reformation.” He referred to “several late writers” (including Burgh, Maitland, and Todd).

Apart from Bickersteth and Birks, the principal historical expositors of the nineteenth century were Albert Barnes, Grattan Guinness, Christopher Wordsworth (the Bishop of Lincoln), Dr. A. J. Gordon in the United States, and Rev. E. B. Elliott. Elliott is widely recognised as the greatest among them.

Elliot’s four-volume exposition, Horae Apocalypticae (Literally, “Hours with the Apocalypse”), was published in 1844. C. H. Spurgeon, who was himself an Historicist, or a “Continuist” as he called it, described Elliot’s work as “the standard work on the Apocalypse.” A monument of both historical and theological scholarship, Horae Apocalypticae traces the main streams of interpretation, handed down through the centuries by “that great cloud of witnesses” and illuminated by the Holy Spirit through the light of history. It shows with a wonderful weight of evidence in lingering detail how the Book of Revelation has been fulfilled right up to the sixth vial in chapter 16.

E. B. Elliott also wrote of the new Futurist scheme, “It has a great advantage over every other form of interpretation in that it is not chained down by the facts of history. It can draw on unlimited powers of fancy, wherewith to devise in the dreamy future whatever may seem to fit the sacred prophecy.”

Elliott went on to show, “the insuperable difficulties attending the Futurist scheme—how it sets language, grammar, and context at defiance; how inconsistency marks it from beginning to end; how erroneous is their conception of antichrist, how self-contradictory and illogical; how opposed to History, Scripture, and the Ancient Fathers is the Futurist view of the religion of Antichrist… but that it is, even intellectually speaking, a mere rude and commonplace conception of Satan’s predicted masterpiece of opposition to Christ, compared with what has been actually realised and established in the Papacy. The Papal system is beyond anything that the Futurists have imagined, or ever can imagine, the very perfection of Anti-Christianism.”

Continued in Islam in Prophecy

All chapters of The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy

This is the next chapter of the book, The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy – By Michael de Semlyen

Chapter 4

Futurism Devised across the Centuries by the Jesuits

The Futurist interpretation of prophecy was originally propounded by the Spanish Jesuit scholar Francisco Ribera and was developed by the eminent Jesuit “Saint” and apologist, Cardinal Bellarmine, at the end of the sixteenth century. Ribera’s ingenious scheme was part of the spiritual counter-attack known as the Counter-Reformation, the spearhead of Rome’s fight-back against the growing threat posed by the Protestant Reformation.

The sixteenth-century Futurist theories of Ribera, which projected forward all but the first five chapters of the Book of Revelation into the future, and pointed forward to an individual and political Antichrist, found little favour with Protestants for approaching two and a half centuries. However, the Jesuit theories had laid the groundwork for the radical departure from the widely accepted historicist view.

Ribera’s ideas were further developed in a book, first published at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which has exercised inestimable influence on the church right up to the present day. The book, which was written in Spanish, was called The Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty. It laid the basis for “dispensationalist futurism” and originated the theory of the two-stage Second Coming. It was written under the name Ben Ezra, who represented himself as a scholarly Jewish convert to Christ seeking enlightenment for his Jewish brethren.

Although the Church of Rome distanced itself from Ben Ezra, and even banned his book in some countries, it seems highly probable that this was a deception perpetrated by the Jesuits, comparable in ingenuity and scope with any of the many elaborate wiles and schemes that have been devised in the long history of the Papal institution. It may be helpful and instructive to give but one other important example in history of this kind of deception.

For four centuries before the Reformation, the Church of Rome built up her pretensions on what are known as the “Decretals of Isidore”, a fictitious collection of Bulls and Rescripts supposedly issued by the Bishops of Rome during the first three centuries of the Christian era. The decretals were said to evidence the authority of the popes of that early age. They were supposed to represent the fruit of the researches of Isidore of Seville, one of the most learned bishops of the ninth century, given to the world two centuries after Isidore’s death. In the general ignorance that characterised that “Golden Age” of the Church of Rome, the Decretals were everywhere accepted as authentic, and men beheld with awe the power wielded by Peter and his immediate “successors.” During the Reformation the genuine history of these centuries was examined, the forgery was discovered, and the “Decretals of Isidore” exposed, vying with “The Donation of Constantine” as the most audacious imposture ever palmed off on an unsuspecting world. Yet for four centuries they did their work, and Rome reaped the benefit.

Rabbi Juan Josafat Ben Ezra was in fact the assumed name of Emmanuel Lacunza, a Chilean of Spanish descent. He was a Jesuit, who joined the order at the age of sixteen and had risen within it to be a zealous superintendent of the Noviciates, before embarking on the task of writing the four volumes of The Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty. Had not his true identity been discovered and much later been made known through his untimely and mysterious death, the Christian world would have continued to believe, as many still do, that he was a Messianic Jew. With the Jews of his day marginalised by the Roman Church, this identity was ideal for gaining acceptance from Protestants. There can be little doubt that it was for the consumption of Protestants that this elaborate Jesuitical deception was prepared. To get them to begin dabbling in the theory of a future Antichrist was worth a vast amount of time and labour to the Church of Rome. The Protestants would have been impressed by the exclusion of the book by Rome and its listing among banned books, which were very often their favoured reading. Apart from the sheer scope and breadth of scholarship of the book, they also may have been perhaps cleverly won over by aspects of Ben Ezra’s eschatology that were in step with the beliefs of the Reformers, but out of step with Rome. For example, Lacunza’s scheme postulated not a single individual, but a world-wide organisation, as Antichrist.

In 1816, fifteen years after his death, the Diplomatic Agent of the Republic of Buenos Aires published the first complete Spanish edition of Lacunza’s work in London. Ben Ezra’s real identity, that being a son of the Mother Church from Chile rather than a Jewish Rabbi, must have been known to the publishers, but at that time had to be concealed in Protestant England. An English edition of Lacunza’s book translated by Edward Irving appeared in 1827. Irving, described as the forerunner of the charismatic movement, was a highly intelligent and zealous Scottish preacher whose once Presbyterian congregation applied to join the Church of Rome and developed into the “Catholic Apostolic Church.” Irving learned Spanish in record time in order to translate and publish Lacunza’s book. In doing so he became an ardent advocate of Lacunza’s prophetic views and with flaming oratory preached the Secret Rapture and a second Second Coming of Christ with His saints in glory after the seven-year reign of Antichrist. This is thought to be the first time in the whole history of the church that anyone taught that the saints would be “caught up” or raptured secretly. It had not previously been considered part of the true faith once given to the saints.

The idea was originated in The Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty, the manuscript of which was published in London, Spain, Mexico, and Paris between 1811 and 1826. Lacunza had written, “When the Lord returns from heaven to earth upon His coming forth from heaven, and much before His arrival at the earth, He will give His orders, and send forth His command as King and God omnipotent: with a shout (‘by the order’) with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God. At this voice of the Son of God, those who shall hear it, shall forthwith arise, as saith the evangelist Saint John ‘those who hear shall live.’” Here may be found for the first time, with the selective use of Scripture, the concept of “the secret rapture” (the saints to meet their Lord in the air without the world knowing), perhaps prompting the Voice from heaven (and the ecstatic utterance of a young girl named Margaret McDonald) that is said to have commanded Irving to begin preaching the “secret rapture of the saints.” Then follows the appearance of the individual world ruler, “the Antichrist”, who will swiftly emerge as the world dictator and revive the old Roman Empire as a ten-nation confederacy. He will make a covenant with the Jews, involving the rebuilding of the temple and the reinstitution of animal sacrifices and promising peace and safety; then break it and launch the great tribulation prior to the return of Christ with his saints. Thus, at odds with Scripture, Christ’s second (or third) coming is dated, and the day will be known to the world several years in advance.

The Seed is Sown

The Diplomatic Agent made a copy of Irving’s translation of Lacunza’s book, with its Futurist elements, available to the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1826, Dr. S.R. Maitland, the scholarly librarian to the Archbishop, published the first of a series of tracts on futurist prophecy, An Enquiry into the generally accepted year-day view of the 1260 days of Daniel and Revelation. Probably not realising that he was advancing the theories of a Jesuit, he adopted the ideas of Rabbi Ben Ezra, a Jewish convert, as it seems likely he believed Lacunza to be. He also adopted the concept of a future personal Antichrist, a world ruler, again presumably unwittingly, from the earlier work of Ribera.

The Catholic Emancipation Act was enacted in 1829, and the Jesuits were again active, having been allowed back into England. In 1833 the Tractarian or Oxford Movement was launched. Dr. Maitland’s publications and those of William Burgh and Anglican Professor James Todd, both members of the faculty of Trinity College, Dublin, provided the spiritual fire-power and the theological foundations needed to help launch the new movement. Its leaders included John Henry Newman, who building on the foundations laid by Maitland and especially by Todd’s large treatise, wrote on the future Antichrist in several of his Oxford Tracts. He and fellow Futurists Sir Robert Anderson and Reverend Michael Baxter were able to argue that the tracts showed that Protestants had unjustly represented the Papacy as the Antichrist of Scripture and that the Reformation had gone much too far. The new reading of Scripture confirmed them in their partiality towards ritualism and Romanism. The sense of injustice and outrage aimed at the Reformed faith spurred them on in adopting Roman Catholic doctrine and practice as well as blinding them to its errors.

The Brethren, newly formed in Dublin in 1827, and in particular J.N. Darby, one of the founding fathers of the movement, an Anglican High Churchman who had been “rocked in the cradle of Tractarianism,” also acclaimed the “great discovery” of Maitland and Irving as a divine revelation. Significantly, “J.N. Darby and Edward Irving both attended lengthy meetings on the study of Bible Prophecy at Powerscourt House in Ireland. Topics discussed included the 1260 day-years, the gifts of the Spirit, Antichrist, and, very probably, the secret rapture that would precede Antichrist’s appearance.”

Directed by Darby’s Tractarian background and instincts, the early Brethren, based in Plymouth, outdid the Oxford Movement in the publishing of tracts, many of which were directed to the foretelling of future events, most particularly the exciting prospect of the secret pre-tribulation rapture. Scottish Hebrew and Gaelic scholar Duncan McDougall in his booklet The Rapture of the Saints described what took place:

In this fashion the carefully devised seeds of Futurism, patiently planted by the Counter-Reformation over a period of more than two centuries, had grown into a theological tree with many heretical branches, which, by and large, deny the fulfilment of prophecy until right at the very end of the Christian era. History, foretold by God the Holy Spirit, had been declared redundant by the preaching and teaching of Irving, Maitland, and Darby, and before them by the scholarship of the Jesuits Ribera, Bellamine, and Lacunza. As former Secretary of the Protestant Truth Society and author Albert Close wrote in 1916, So the Jesuits have enticed our Theological professors and the Plymouth Brethren to fire high over the head of the great Antichrist, at their two mythical Antichrists; one in the past, the Praeterist, the other in the future, the Futurist Antichrist. Between these two schools the whole Christian Ministry has been mixed up, and is practically sitting on the fence. Few ministers now preach from Daniel or the Revelation.” (From: Antichrist And His Ten Kingdoms – By Albert Close)

By no means did all of the early Brethren, the majority of whom were ardent and committed Christians, embrace the new theories. Many were carried along by the tide of enthusiasm for the new teaching for a time, but changed their view when they learned of its origins. This was the experience of the eminent Greek scholar, S. P. Tregelles, who said of the secret rapture, “… it came not from Holy Scripture, but from that, which falsely pretended to be the Spirit of God.” He was later excommunicated from the Brethren.

Given the impact of the theological colleges and the wider church of the new Higher Criticism in the climate of advancing humanism and Darwinism, it is not surprising that, in the years that followed, the new understanding of Bible prophecy spread as swiftly as it did. Early in the twentieth century, the popular Scofield Reference Bible, which like so many other bibles today is filled with scholarly footnotes, incorporated Futurist theology into its Dispensationalist scheme in such a convincing way that few were able to distinguish it all from the inspired Scriptures. Dispensationalist Futurism has subsequently spread widely in evangelical circles, especially among Charismatics. As Evangelical Times writer John C. J. Waite has pointed out, “Dispensationalism has propagated the notion that the Old Testament Prophets have nothing to say about the church; that in fact they have only to do with Israel. The Church Age is regarded by some as a kind of parenthesis. Even those who do not accept the dispensational theory (of the Bible being divided up into up to seven distinctive dispensations…) have been affected unconsciously by this approach.”

As we have already seen, this has contributed much to the neglect of the study of Church History. Dispensationalist Futurism, in restricting so much of Scripture to Israel and the Jews, has seriously weakened the spiritual armoury of the church. Thus the Antichrist portrayed in Old and New Testaments is deemed not necessarily to come out of the church. But the Bible is entirely about Christ, and those who belong to him – not those who reject Him.

‘Thus it was that sola scriptura, the Word and only the Word, the axiom of Luther and the matrix of the Reformation, was put to one side by the many who took to the exciting new teaching. With the Antichrist yet to appear and the Papacy vindicated from its accusers, the authority of Scripture was enhanced among those who sought reconciliation with Rome. The Counter-Reformation, so hostile and confrontational towards heretics in the past, had emerged with a new face and a new strategy. The stage was being set for reunion with Rome. True, a new Bible would be required, to firmly establish Futurism within a revised text and undermine the faith of Protestants with a corrupted translation. The basis was being laid for the twentieth-century ecumenical movement. The stakes were high indeed. A few years before the Revising Committee (headed by Anglo-Catholics Westcott and Hort) produced the new Bible, Cardinal Manning, the leader of Catholicism in England (and, like Newman, a convert from the Church of England), spoke to the Jesuit “fathers” in stirring fashion, calling them to battle and unmistakably laying out the strategy for the twentieth century.

But it was not all one-way traffic—at least not in the nineteenth century. The historical view of Prophecy was, as we have seen, widely and well presented. Gifted and godly preachers like Charles Spurgeon, Grattan Guinness, and J. C. Ryle spoke out uncompromisingly; and books and tracts were published, matching the output of the Tractarians and the Brethren. Ryle, the first Bishop of Liverpool, saw what was happening as clearly as Cardinal Manning and the Jesuits:

Bishop J.C. Ryle and Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Spurgeon saw the danger too. “It is the bounden duty of every Christian to pray against Antichrist, and as to what Antichrist is no sane man ought to raise a question. If it be not the Popery in the Church of Rome there is nothing in the world that can be called by that name. … Popery is contrary to Christ’s Gospel, and is the Antichrist, and we ought to pray against it.” He pointed to the cost of commitment to the truth. “If a man be earnest about Truth, he will be sectarian. When we cease to strive, seek, contend and maintain the Truth, it will cease in our land and error alone shall reign.” The Westminster and Baptist Confessions of Faith of his day took the same position with respect to the Scriptural identity of the Papacy. When the Metropolitan Tabernacle was being built in 1859, Spurgeon placed the newly reprinted Baptist Confession of Faith under the foundation stone.

A generation earlier Lord Shaftesbury and other Protestant leaders had vigorously opposed the reconstitution of a Roman Catholic hierarchy for England and Wales, which they regarded as “Papal aggression”. Shaftesbury sounded a warning, “Let us turn our eyes to that within, from Popery to Popery in the bud; from the open enemy to the concealed traitor.”

Continued in chapter 5 Historicist Expositors of the Nineteenth Century

All chapters of The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy

This is the next chapter of the book, The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy – By Michael de Semlyen

Chapter 3

The Counter-Reformation – The Source of the Futurist View of Prophecy

The Roman Catholic institution had been rocked and shaken by that great movement of the Spirit, as the new printing presses poured out Bibles, books, and tracts, and the great truths of the gospel swept across the Western World. Salvation by grace alone through faith alone, the supremacy of the Bible, and the church’s identification of the Papacy as the Antichrist revealed in Scripture, were transforming the religious and political map of Europe. Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Holland, Switzerland, and England had become Protestant. France, Poland, Bavaria, Austria, and Belgium were swinging that way as well. In consternation the Papacy looked around in every direction for help. The Lord, in His mysterious sovereignty, allowed the desperate prayers of the Roman Church to be answered in the person of the remarkable man who was to lead the Counter-Reformation, Ignatius Loyola, born in the very same year as Martin Luther (1483).

Martin Luther and Ignatius Loyola

The Council of Trent (1545-1564) was called to take drastic measures to deal with the crisis. The Jesuit Order, established by Loyola in 1540 and instituted to prosecute the Counter-Reformation, dominated the Council. Accommodation or compromise with the spread of Protestantism was not on the agenda. Anthony Froude, Regius Professor of History at Oxford University in the 1890s, described the Council:

The Jesuits, founded and led by Ignatius Loyola, were utterly single- minded in their determination to re-establish the divine rule of Rome and bring about the infallibility of the Pope. As author Benjamin Wilkinson has suggested:

Even all of this would not be enough, however. The printing and widespread distribution of the Word of God was rendering persecution less effective, and sometimes even counter-productive. “All that walk godly in Christ Jesus shall be persecuted;” (2 Timothy 3:12); “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.” (Psalm 116:15) The newly published Scriptures encouraged true Christians greatly, showing plainly the great privilege accorded to servants of Christ, being chosen to suffer for the Master, and showing, too, the source of the persecution. “And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus…” (Revelation 17:6a) Luther’s Babylonian Captivity of the Church underlined the truth revealed throughout Scripture of the identity of “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” (Revelation 17:5)

The Battle for God’s Word

Pursuing and punishing “heretics” (true believers) was counter-productive. It was clear that the Counter-Reformation needed to take on the very Word of God itself. The Jesuit Bible of 1582, the Douay-Rheims Version, brought out to combat the much loved Tyndale Version, like the Roman Catholic Spanish Armada six years later, succeeded in making little impact on a Protestant people nurtured on the solid food of the pure Word and utterly convinced of the identity of Antichrist. The Jesuits concluded that it was essential to devise a counter-system of interpretation that would nullify the revelation in Scripture of the Antichrist identity of the Papacy. However, this was easier said than done. The Word of God, providentially preserved through the centuries, was jealously guarded by His saints.

Harvard Bible scholar, Edward F. Hills, wrote about the cosmic spiritual warfare waged throughout the Christian era in graphic terms:

The critics that Dr. Hills refers to were the mainly German “higher critics” of the Counter-Reformation who attacked the Received Text and exalted the Alexandrian text. Among these critics were Sclhleiermacher, Griesbach, Wellhausen, Tischcndorf, and Tregelles. They were the new Gnostics10 who helped build the shaky foundations of the bible intended to replace the Authorised Version.

The adoption of the Futurist system of prophecy in the period leading up to the 1881 Revised Edition of the Bible undoubtedly increased the pressure in the demand for revision. Spurred on by Newman and other leaders of the Oxford Movement, the Anglo- Catholic led Revising Committee were intent on assisting the re-interpretation of great prophetic passages of antichrist such as the Apostle Paul’s description of the man of sin of 2 Thessalonians 2. Clearly the proposed new bible was designed to less readily lend itself to the Protestant reformed prophetic portrayal of the Papal Antichrist.

Futurism Aided by Modern Versions of the Bible

The Futurist interpretation of the Bible has gained further currency and authority as a result of the modem versions that have proliferated during this last century. The many variations among different renderings of the prophetic passages of Scripture have inevitably caused doubt about their true meaning. When in doubt, it is natural to avoid controversy. The historical view, that the Papacy is clearly revealed in Scripture, is controversial. Almost without exception, the translators of the new bibles have held to a Futurist theology. Their translations inevitably reflect this. The familiar wording of the Authorised Bible has been replaced in most modern versions to an extent that makes it difficult to recognise the “man of sin” or the “little horn” of Daniel as did our forefathers in Christ. As part two of this book will seek to show, the new translations or modem versions, in marked contrast to the Authorised Version, have so altered the Scriptures identifying the Papacy and Romanism, that the traditional Historicist and Protestant view is difficult to sustain. No wonder so few evangelicals hold to it today!

This impoverishes true history. Although the Bible clearly directs us in many different ways to “remember the things of old”, we rarely do so today. “One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts,” (Psalm 145:4) wrote the psalmist, but our magnificent Christian heritage is virtually discarded. Many of the great deeds of God of the past, including the deliverances in England of 1588 and 1688 and the selfless sacrifice of countless martyrs of the faith, have become an embarrassment for those who now wish to offer and receive a “love gospel” unhindered by uncomfortable truths.

Continued in Futurism Devised across the Centuries by the Jesuits

All chapters of The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy

Chart made by deceived Bible teachers who follow Darby's and Scofield's Jesuit doctrine based false interpretation of Daniel 9:27.

This is the next chapter of the book, The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy – By Michael de Semlyen

Chapter 2

Futurism – Leapfrogging History – The Wiles of the Devil

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” – Ephesians 6:12

How then was the historical understanding of Scriptural prophecy lost to so much of the church?

Futurism, cleverly devised by Spanish Jesuit scholarship, was able to accomplish this in a fashion that is difficult not to admire. Such an accomplished counterfeit, which would involve a counterfeit church, a counterfeit bible and a counterfeit prophecy of antichrist, may have been foreseen by the Apostle John, “… and when I saw her I wondered with great admiration.” Revelation 17: 6b

It is important to realise that scholars—both Roman Catholic as well as Protestant—have agreed as to the Jesuit origin of the Futurist school of prophecy. The Roman Catholic “Truth Society” has described the Futurist School as that “founded by the Jesuit Ribera in 1591, which looks for Antichrist, Babylon, and a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem, at the end of the Christian Dispensation.”

The second school of interpretation—the Praeterist (or Preterist) scheme— has been defined by the same Roman Catholic Truth Society as that, “founded by the Jesuit Alcasar in 1614, and explaining the book of Revelation by the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD or by the fall of pagan Rome in 410 AD.”

Both systems of interpretation, originated by the Counter-Reformation, succeeded in divorcing the antichrist, revealed as the man of sin, the little horn, and the Mother of Harlots, from the here and now and from mediaeval and modem history. Between them these two schemes manage to avoid the entire period of more than fifteen centuries of the Papacy. They do so by stopping short of its beginnings in the fifth century and then by projecting forward from today into the unknown future.

Futurism denies that the dynasty of Popes is the Antichrist and points instead to a future individual world ruler at the end of the age. It thus postpones most of the prophetic predictions of Scripture including almost all the Book of Revelation into a fragment of time in the indefinite future. Ribera and later Futurist scholars determined that Daniel’s seventieth week should be separated from the first sixty- nine and projected forward to the end of time, thus establishing “the futurist gap.”

If we were to look ahead to a world leader who is yet to appear, our expectancy would inevitably be governed by the shaping of this event and not to the coming of the Lord. The Reformers and like- minded Christians before and since were described as “those who love the coming of the Lord.” If we are to live in a manner that Scripture clearly requires, in the daily expectation of the Lord’s return, how can it be that there is supposed to be so much unfulfilled prophecy in the Bible?

The result of this, inevitably, is that our guard is dropped. Vigilance is rare and few watchmen are at their posts.

Today’s extraordinary paradox is that so many in the church say they believe in the imminent Second Coming, and yet interpret the prophecy of the Antichrist, which must be fulfilled before the Lord returns, to take place sometime in the indefinite future. This ambivalent thinking surely has much to do with the decline of holiness in the church today.

The Futurist Pre-Tribulation Rapture theory provides for the departure of the church before the world ruler antichrist makes his entrance to begin a seven-year tribulation period. Dispensational Futurism is not to be confused with historic pre-millennialism, which believes in a visible reign of Christ in glory on earth with the risen saints for one thousand years, but not a two-stage second coming begun by a “secret rapture” (nowhere to be found in the New Testament).

The Antichrist in the Historicist Protestant understanding is the longstanding spiritual enemy of the people of God, not discernible to the world but clearly recognised in Scripture and in history. Praeterism’s Antichrist pre-dates the fall of the Roman Empire, is an individual persecuting ruler, and has often been identified as Nero. Futurism looks forward to the end of the age for Antichrist’s appearance as a world dictator who will covenant with the Jews and then persecute them and the rest of the world in the great tribulation. The futurist system set out expressly to shield the Papacy from the identification of Antichrist and to counter the established historical view.

The historical view sees the prophecies in Daniel, the letters of Paul and John, and the Revelation as fully and faithfully laying out the entire course of Christian history. In contrast, the Praeterist view sees them as having been fulfilled before the fall of the Roman Empire, while the Futurist view sees them as dealing with a new scenario, within a future fragment of time at its close, after what has become known as “the futurist gap.”

The Seventy Weeks

As the new Futurist system evolved during the nineteenth century, the fragment of time predicted as the period of the great tribulation became identified in Scripture with “Daniel’s seventieth week.” To this end, this week of seven day-years is detached from the previous sixty- nine weeks and pitched forward to a time still in the future, revealing “the futurist gap.” Ribera, the father of Jesuit Futurism, had postulated this in his scheme. For Ribera, “prophecy stopped with the fall of the Roman Empire only to resume at the time of the Rapture. It was as though God put a giant rubber band on the Messianic time measure … this is exactly the scenario used by Hal Lindsey and a multitude of other prophecy teachers.” 8 This supposed gap of around two thousand years or more is a concept which, apart from Ribera, had found very little support throughout all of church history until a South American Jesuit’s theories were taken up and developed at the time of the Oxford Movement. The gap has no Scriptural support, seems to be arbitrary and illogical and stretches the meaning of the Hebrew translation into grammatical inconsistency.

The modern versions’translations of Scripture undoubtedly favour the futurist gap theory. A comparative study reveals how the great prophetic passage in Daniel 9:24-27 calls for an entirely different interpretation in the new Bibles—relating to both Christ and Antichrist, rather than, as indicated in the Authorised Version, to Christ alone. In fact, the eclipse of the historical interpretation of prophecy was, very likely, a determining motive in the move to replace the Authorised Bible in the nineteenth century. This consideration and the wide disparity in the translation of key passages, between the Authorised Version following the received or majority text, and the new versions with their favoured selections from differing eclectic Greek texts, is the subject of much of the second part of this book.

Seventy, in Scripture, is a number of special significance, signifying completeness. The children of Israel, the family of Jacob that went into Egypt were seventy. (Exodus 1:5) The Lord commanded Moses to appoint seventy elders to help him bear the burden of the people. (Numbers 11:16) He sent out seventy other disciples also ahead of His own ministry. (Luke 10:1) He commanded his disciples to forgive each other “seventy times seven”. (Matthew 18:22) The Babylonian captivity was to last seventy years. (Jeremiah 25:11,12) Then Daniel, who understood by Jeremiah the expiration of the seventy years of the captivity, was employed to make known to the church another more glorious release, at the end of seventy, not years, but weeks of years.(Daniel 9:2)

“Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.
“Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times.
“And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.
“And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate. ” (Daniel 9:24-27)

This great prophecy of completeness is centered on Jesus Christ and His cross and was completely and perfectly fulfilled when, after three and a half years of His ministry, He was cut off in death in the middle of the seventieth week of seven years. He confirmed the covenant with His blood of the new covenant (testament), finished transgression and made an end of sins, caused the sacrifice and oblation to cease with His complete and perfect once-for-all sacrifice, reconciled His people to Himself, brought in everlasting righteousness imputed to the believer, and sealed up the vision and the prophecy at the precise time in history defined by Daniel.

The confirmation of the covenant “upon thy [Daniel’s] people” for the week of seven years was fulfilled by the Lord’s ministry before the cross and the apostles’ ministry for three and a half years afterwards*, specifically proclaiming the gospel to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (John 1:31, Matthew 10:5-6)

* No seven-year agreement was to be made by the Antichrist with the Jews to enable them to rebuild the temple and offer sacrifices which will be broken after three and a half years so that the sacrifices cease—no “futurist gap.”

The remainder of this prophecy of the complete work of God is fulfilled finally with another “seventy”—AD 70—when the people of the prince that shall come (the predicted Messiah) will destroy Jerusalem and the Temple, in judgement, with a vast Roman army (with a “flood”). The Son of God lamented as he looked ahead once more to the destruction and desolation of His own—as a hen her errant chicks— knowing what lay ahead. Again and again the rebellious children of Jerusalem had been chastised for their transgressions by the invasions of foreign armies. The Lord of Hosts, the Prince, was the One who sent them. The great tribulation of that time would be carried out once more by the pagan armies of the World Empire of the day. This time, those armies would come from Rome. In Old Testament times the terrible judgements of the Lord had been carried out by Assyria, Babylon, and neighbouring nations. This was “the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet,” the Roman host of idol-worshipping Gentiles who would “stand in the holy place” (Matthew 24:15,16) in Jerusalem, which would be “compassed with armies” and from which believers would be enabled to make their escape.

Continued in chapter 3, The Counter-Reformation – The Source of the Futurist View of Prophecy

All chapters of The Foundations Under Attack: The Roots of Apostasy