Tag: Unitarian

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian Chapter 6

How should we read Psalm 110:1? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Buzzard is certainly right in saying this is the most repeated Old Testament verse in the New Testament. This is the one verse that Jesus initiated a challenge with the Pharisees over in His ministry. It was extremely foundational in the formation of early Christianity.

So is it a unitarian text?

To begin with, Buzzard says the New Testament is violated if one suggests that two persons are YHWH. Why? We’re not told. Also, if this is what he thinks, what does he do with the Old Testament where in Genesis 19:24, two persons are addressed as YHWH?

He also says Paul goes to great distinction to differentiate by saying God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. An interesting aspect of this is that this actually could go against Buzzard’s claim. If Paul is having to make some differentiation between the two, does that not indicate that there were some grounds where they were seen as similar if not equal? It’s as if he has to qualify who is meant by God now and who is meant by Lord. Would it be because that would lead to confusion if he didn’t?

He refers to Galatians 3:20 where he says Paul says God is one person. The problem is it only says God is one. Buzzard is adding the person in. Keep in mind, this is the same person who complains when he thinks Trinitarian interpreters are changing the text to fit their biases. Rules for thee, but not for me! He even says in this chapter that “the translator or translators have the power to direct the reader’s thinking beyond what the original Greek had meant.” Oh, the irony!

He says about Psalm 110 that if there are two persons who are called YHWH speaking to each other, then monotheism has been abandoned.

Why?

Buzzard doesn’t tell us. He automatically assumes that monotheism means unipersonalism. This is never argued. For someone wanting to go in-depth in explaining a text, you would think just once he would exegete the Shema.

He also says the Lordship of the Messiah was acquired by Jesus at the end of His ministry. That’s strange since I thought Elizabeth greeted Mary as the mother of her Lord and the angels said to the shepherds that Christ the Lord had been born. Eh. Angels and people speaking under the influence of the Holy Spirit. What do they know?

Later, Buzzard says

Now imagine that Peter believed that both the Father and Jesus were equally God. Then God had allowed God to be crucified and God had raised God to His right hand? Does this make the slightest sense? God sitting at the right hand of God would present the audience with a blatantly polytheistic system. God is not two. He is only one. The heritage of Israel would have been overthrown if the Messiah were now to be included as an eternal member of a plural Godhead. No Jew could possibly have been prepared for the notion that the Messiah was part of the Godhead. The Hebrew Bible had announced no such thing . It would have been a staggering innovation, requiring pages of explanation, to say that the Messiah, adoni, my lord, was really the One God of Israel, who was now mysteriously “two.”

This whole paragraph is full of straw men and parodies of what Trinitarians believe and Buzzard should know better. Never mind that no Jew would have been prepared for hearing the Messiah had been crucified for the sins of the world and raised to life bodily in the middle of the age instead of at the end of all things. That too, was a staggering innovation, but free pass because Buzzard believes it.

Still, he doesn’t say why this doctrine of God would be a staggering innovation and why no Jew could have possibly been prepared for it. There is no interaction with the idea already considered by some Jews in such works as the Wisdom of Solomon that God could be multipersonal in nature. There is no interaction with the idea of Hypostases in the Godhead. Nothing. Buzzard just says it’s staggering. After all, Unitarianism!

In response to Bauckham saying that Paul includes Jesus in the divine nature in his Christianization of the Shema in 1 Cor. 8:4-6, all Buzzard says in response is that if the Shema has God as one person and Paul adds another person, then Paul has indeed added to the Shema. Yeah. Notice that conditional. If the Shema has this. Buzzard nowhere gives an argument that it does. Thus, his reply to Bauckham is “This cannot be because it goes against the position that I already hold.” He never shows how Bauckham is wrong on the grounds of his argument.

In Philippians 2, Buzzard says Paul is telling us to model ourselves after Jesus, but it would be amazing if this was a divine being who decided to become a human. Yes. It would be amazing. And? He also says it’s unrealistic. Are we being expected to model the behavior of an eternal person who became human on Earth?

Yes. Yes, we are.

In Col. 1, we are told Jesus is the Wisdom of God. No bother to interact with intertestamental material on Wisdom. Nothing asking what it would mean if God’s Wisdom was not eternal.  He also asks what would this mean if God says in Isaiah 44 that He created everything alone?

Well, Trinitarians have an answer. Now if you want to say God created with Wisdom, but Wisdom was not a second person of the Godhead, then you have that question to answer. We don’t.

So what of Psalm 110:1? Oh. Well, that verse translates the word apparently as Adoni, which does not mean God, and not Adonai, which would. Never mind that those vowel points were added years later as he himself admits. The Jews were faithful and would know what their texts meant! Breaking news people. Non-Christian Jews hundreds of years after Jesus did not agree that Jesus is fully God and fully man in nature. Shock isn’t it? (Also, watch the debate Buzzard had alongside another Unitarian with James White and Michael Brown where this verse came up.)

Just another example of Buzzard’s poor argumentation.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

 

 

 

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian Chapter 5

Did we lose the teaching of Jesus? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I’ve already addressed John 10:36. Now it’s time to deal with John 5:19 which Buzzard uses in two paragraphs and these paragraphs are one right after the other. In this verse, Jesus says He can do nothing of Himself unless it is something He sees His Father doing. Absent from this is how the verse before the author says that Jesus is making Himself equal to God in His claims.

What would Buzzard think Jesus should say otherwise? “I don’t watch the Father do anything! I do what I want!” Of course not! If anything, this is showing a strong unity. The only actions Jesus does is what He sees the Father doing. This is also in reference to healing and doing “work” on the Sabbath, since obviously the Father never walked on Earth and healed on the Sabbath.

Buzzard again also says how easy it would be for Jesus to say “I am God, the second person of the triune Godhead.” Many times, Buzzard seems to indicate He knows why Jesus would not say this, and yet still dishes out the argument. Either he is forgetting what he said in those other places, or he is just being dishonest. You choose. At any rate, this would not have cleared things up. It would have made them more confusing instead!

He also says no Israelite could have remotely imagined reading the Scriptures that the Son of David would have been a member of the Godhead come down in human form. Quite likely! Nor could they have imagined that He would die on a cross for the sins of the world and be raised bodily in the middle of space and time. If Buzzard wants to go this route then, he should cease claiming those events are true as well. However, this argument works when it’s the doctrines Buzzard doesn’t believe in. Convenient, isn’t it?

He also says, another line used repeatedly, that to be the Son of God, you have to be a being who is not God. Very well. Then to be the Son of Man, you have to be a being who is not….oh wait. There’s a problem there. Unfortunately, it’s one Buzzard never brings up. His argument only works if God is unipersonal, which is the very claim under question.

He also says that believing in a being who is God on Earth and a being who is God in Heaven is a problem. Isn’t this two gods? Again, this is still the same assumption of unipersonalism. If this is a problem, what is going on in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19:24?

Look it up. You have the name in there twice. The Lord rains down fire and brimstone from the Lord out of Heaven. We are also justified in believing there is still a figure on Earth called the Lord since He was just conversing with Abraham in the prior chapter. (Also noteworthy there were three people who came, but Abraham is said to talk to “the Lord.”)

In looking at the Reformers and the Trinity, Buzzard says they emphasized Paul over Jesus. Even if that is so, does this somehow change the argument? Does Buzzard not think that Paul and Jesus agree? His argument only works if one disagrees with the other.

He talks about Jacob’s wrestling with the angel in Genesis which he says is not repeated in the New Testament. Correct. And? What has that to do with the price of tea in China. He says that the text says Jacob was wrestling with a man, but when Justin Martyr dialogued with Trypho the Jew, who seems stunned by the argument. Go through and read the dialogue some time, Buzzard. Trypho objects to a lot of arguments you would agree to as well. Still, if you go back to Genesis, what does Jacob say? He saw the face of God and lived and he is told by the man “That he has struggled with man and God and prevailed.”

Oh, no. I have no idea where Justin could have got this crazy interpretation he holds! Maybe he just read the text or something?!

Let’s also deal with this argument that God never dies and thus needs to be resurrected. Okay. What does it mean to die? Did Jesus cease to exist? If so, then we have a problem in Col. 1 since it says by Him, all things hold together. If Jesus holds everything together and He ceases to exist….I think you know what happens.

Instead, what if dying just means the soul of Jesus was separated from the body of Jesus? Many Christians think that’s what happens to them when they die, rightly or wrongly. It is a perfectly sensible idea and deals with the problem.

He also says Jesus never demanded worship as God. True enough. However, he also never denied it when it was given Him. He also says Jesus is to be honored in the highest sense, short of making Him equal to God, but Jesus Himself says in John 5:23 that Jesus must be honored just as the Father is honored.

Buzzard also considers the reply of Jesus to the rich young ruler that “No one is good but God alone!” Okay. Buzzard agrees that Jesus is a sinless human being in this chapter. Is a sinless human being not good? Even Adam was said to be good before the Fall. Did he have something Jesus never had? Does Buzzard want to say Jesus is not good?

But wait, if Jesus is good, and no one is good but God alone, then Jesus is…

Does Buzzard want to go there? Does he want to say Jesus isn’t good to defend his position? It seems he has to.

There is a statement also of what it would mean if the three persons took upon themselves a human nature. Yes. That is what he says. No, Buzzard. That did not happen. Only one person took on a human nature. He also sees Galatians 4:4 as saying Jesus came into existence through a woman. We’ll deal more with preexistence later on.

He says the point of the Messiah is he needs to be a Son of David. He can’t be a non-human creature. Good. We agree. The problem? Does he not realize that all Trinitarians say Jesus was fully human?

Reading Buzzard, you sometimes wonder if he really knows what he’s arguing against.

We’ll continue next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

 

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian Chapter 2

Who was the God of Jesus? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

So we’re continuing our look at Anthony “Have I mentioned the Shema enough” Buzzard’s horrid book. In this second chapter, he’s going to ask who the God of Jesus was. At the start, if you’re an Arian and say Jesus has a God, that’s not going to be a problem to us. Jesus was also a human being who wasn’t an atheist.

So right off, Buzzard tells us that it’s a problem that nowhere in the New Testament does God mean the triune God and that’s a problem. Even if that is true, the response is “So what?” Buzzard doesn’t tell us why this is a problem. If what is being discussed is the relationship between Christ and the Father, then of course we won’t expect the word “Theos” to refer to the Trinity.

He later will say that God is never described as begotten, but Jesus is, which means Jesus had a beginning of His existence. Of course, this entirely begs the question and Buzzard posts this as if no one in church history ever said “Wow. Jesus is begotten! Imagine that!”

Trinitarian relations in understanding have always noted differences in how the persons are. The Son is begotten. The Holy Spirit proceeds. The Orthodox branch of Christianity can disagree with Catholics and Protestants on the filoque, but there is agreement that the Spirit proceeds. Since this is part and parcel of Trinitarian doctrine, it’s hard to see how this is an objection to it.

Here is what the Athanasian Creed says. (Keep in mind Orthodox Churches would disagree with “And the Son” in describing the proceeding of the Holy Spirit, but that is not our focus here.)

The Father was neither made nor created nor begotten; the Son was neither made nor created, but was alone begotten of the Father; the Spirit was neither made nor created, but is proceeding from the Father and the Son.

So here we have something saying the Father is not begotten and saying the Son is and somehow, Buzzard saying the same thing is supposed to be a problem? Also, the writers of the creed didn’t see a problem with the Son being begotten and also being eternal. Either they were all idiots who didn’t recognize a contradiction, or Buzzard is the one who isn’t understanding something. Decisions, decisions….

For those wondering, I view Jesus as begotten in the sense of that which is always in the Father being brought forth from Him. Since God is eternal, this is an eternal activity. The same follows with the Holy Spirit regardless of how many persons in the Trinity were involved.

Continuing in my look, more highlights I have are simply Buzzard making the same claims of Unitarianism over and over. There is a little change when we get to Paul and Buzzard says

Only a very deficient sense of history would permit the impossible notion that Paul believed the God of Israel to have been the Trinitarian God. This is widely admitted.

Unfortunately, Buzzard doesn’t tell us who this is widely admitted by. One wonders what he would think about the things Bart Ehrman would say are widely admitted in New Testament scholarship. There is plenty of scholarship out there anyway that will say Paul did believe in a triune concept of God, but Buzzard is not seriously interacting with that.

He then goes on to quote The New Bible Dictionary.

The Old Testament witness is fundamentally to the oneness of God. In their daily prayer, Jews repeated the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4, 5: “The Lord our God the Lord is one.” In this they confessed the God of Israel to be the transcendent creator without peer or rival. Without the titanic disclosure of the Christ event no one would have taken the Old Testament to affirm anything but the exclusive, i.e., unipersonal monotheism that is the hallmark of Judaism and Islam. Note carefully this candid admission. Reading the Hebrew Bible , on which Jesus was reared and which he affirmed as holy Scripture and which Paul claimed he believed, no one could possibly have imagined God to be more than one divine Person. The Hebrew Bible, says the dictionary, affirmed the unipersonal, non-Trinitarian God. Jesus echoed that affirmation precisely.

First, this can be debated as the intertestamental literature, as pointed out in the Wisdom of Solomon speaks of Wisdom in deified terms. This is not an exception. That being said, is it really a powerful argument to say no one understood it this way until Jesus came?

No, because it’s also true no one understood the Messiah would be born of a virgin (Which I do affirm), grow up among men, live a sinless life, die on a cross as a sacrifice for sins, be buried and raised again bodily in the middle of space and time instead of at the end of the age as would be understood, and would ascend to the right hand of God. Notice in this I didn’t include the deity of Christ since Buzzard wouldn’t agree to that.

So based on Buzzard’s words, since no Jew would have understood that from the Old Testament before, then we should reject it today. That would be nonsense for us. Now that we know the gospel, we can look back and see it there, much like once you know who the criminal is, you can look back on the mystery later and reailze it.

He then quotes someone else who says the Trinity in the New Testament is left implicit and undefined. He says the reader is left to wonder what that means. I could figure it out easily. It means the Trinity is there, but it is not spelled out. It is drawn out from taking the Scripture as a whole and it’s undefined meaning there’s no explicit definition of the Trinity.

He also refers to 1 Cor. 8:4-6. Buzzard is aware of Bauckham’s work, but doesn’t interact with him on this. Bauckham sees this passage as Paul actually putting Jesus in the Shema with the one God being the Father and the one Lord being Jesus. If Bauckham is right, then this totally blows apart Buzzard’s understanding as you have Paul, a devout Jew, seeing Jesus in the divine nature and this early on.

Buzzard later says

Admissions that “language is inadequate” to spell out the Trinity clearly have not prevented the printing of oceans of words attempting to explain the Trinity, using the non-biblical language of Greek philosophy, that the One God of the Bible is three hypostases in one essence, and that the Son of God was, incredibly, “man” but not “a man.” ( Did you know that this is what official Christendom believes?) The Bible nowhere, however, calls God “an essence” and never speaks of “three hypostases.” And any reader of the New Testament should be able to see that Jesus was a man.

This is such a bewildering statement! First, this is what official Christendom believes? Show where. Not just that’s what you think we believe, but show the statement. It doesn’t exist. Finally, we all agree Jesus was a man. Either Buzzard is incredibly ignorant here or he is incredibly dishonest. Neither is good.

He also says Paul had a warning against those trying to define God in terms of philosophy in Colossians 2:8. No. He had a warning against vain philosophy. That’s not the same thing.

So once again, I walk away from Buzzard’s work more convinced. Will anything be remotely persuasive in here? We’ll find out.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian Chapter 1

What is the foundation of Christology? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I don’t know if this one will be as long as the prologue since Buzzard’s whole argument seems to be to reference Mark 12:29, Deut 6:4, and say “Shema” and “Monotheism” over and over. He does reference Ken Samples talking about the importance of the Shema, which all Trinitarians would agree with. At the same time, he does seem to reference Ken Samples as if Samples would agree with him. He would not. I have interviewed Samples and he is indeed an orthodox Trinitarian.

Buzzard does say there is not a word of such revolutionary changes in the nature of God in the New Testament, but this could also be because the idea of a multiplicity in the Godhead was not unfamiliar to the Jews. There is no interaction with the intertestamental literature thus far that I have seen that did inform the Jewish background of Second Temple Judaism Jesus lived in. ONe such work would be the Wisdom of Solomon where Wisdom is presented in terms reminiscent of that of God in passages like the Exodus. I highly encourage readers to read How God Became Jesus. (Unfortunately, my copy is back in Tennessee.)

Buzzard also writes about how a Calvinist pastor once called him a heretic. This is seen as an unloving attitude, but is it? If the pastor really thinks that, is that not more of a warning to Buzzard? We can say all we want that perhaps the tact wasn’t there, but how are we to assume it was done out of an unloving spirit.

Despite this, the next part talks about him speaking and some older ladies in the church come up after his talk and beg he and his family to repent lest they face eternal hellfire. Whatever you think about the doctrine of Hell, I have no doubt the ladies came from a place of love, but Buzzard is apparently upset about that as well. It could just be that Buzzard doesn’t like to be challenged. He also says they seemed unaware of the Unitarian creed (Assumption again) of Jesus and any knowledge of the history of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity was absent.

Ah yes. If only those stupid old ladies were as informed as Dr. Buzzard is. They should be grateful that he just graces them with his presence.

When we get to the history of the doctrine, he talks about the controversy after Arius and says that the fact that there was such controversy should alert us that there is a problem. There wasn’t any of this with the doctrine of God in the ministry of Jesus. In this, there is a big question unanswered.

Why were Jews at the time upset about the ministry of the early church following in the footsteps of Jesus? What were Jesus and His followers doing that was so shocking? Buzzard has already said it wasn’t their doctrine of God, so what was it? What created such a scandal? Thus far, I have no idea from Buzzard.

Also, when the Arian controversy started, it wasn’t the Trinity that was the new doctrine bringing about chaos. It was Arianism. In other words, had someone not been upsetting the apple cart, there would have been no controversy. Also, as was said before, there were problems in actions on both sides. Buzzard will only give you one side.

He also writes about how the average Englishman (Which Buzzard is) who believes in the Trinity doesn’t often understand it. So what? For one thing, if you fully understand your doctrine of God, you have a pretty small God. One problem comes with the question of asking if Jesus is God.

While He is, when we say this, we are using shorthand. It is a statement that Jesus fully possesses the nature of God in His being. It does not mean that Jesus is the Father. We are speaking of God in a sense of nature.

Buzzard also says Jesus foresaw a time of killing coming in John 16:2. Why does Buzzard need to look to the Arian controversy? That killing started with Stephen and keep in mind, Buzzard can’t say it was over the doctrine of God by his own position, so what was it?

He also says that in Matthew 16 Jesus could have said about His identity “I am God, and upon this rock, I will build my church.” Sure. That would have solved everything. Then the question would be “Are you the Father?” This is why the understanding of the Trinity was a gradual matter. Jesus had to show who He is and He also had to show He is not the Father. He trusted us to work it out.

Buzzard actually knows this because he says the same thing when replying to Witherington. He goes a step further and says that any claim to be the God of Israel would have been nonsensical. No Jew would understand it. First off, if that’s the case, then it’s obvious why Jesus didn’t say it. Second, would it be nonsensical? Buzzard has not told us why. He has just assumed it.

The final section has Buzzard saying that the creed was unitarian and thus if Jesus was said to be God, then there would have to be two gods since God is unipersonal. Thus, Buzzard’s assumption that the Shema is Unitarian, which he has not demonstrated, drives his doctrine. We all agree that if God is unipersonal, then two persons cannot be God. The question is “Is God unipersonal?” I can fully say I agree with the Shema. How could I not? I just don’t agree with Buzzard’s interpretation of it.

We will continue next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian

What do I think of Anthony Buzzard’s book? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

So as one who is interacting a lot with JWs on Facebook, I was looking through my Kindle library to find a book arguing against the Trinity and came across this one. I had read a few years ago a book he co-authored on the Trinity as Christianity’s self-inflicted wound. I figured I would go through this one.

Unfortunately, this book is just awful. If you played a drinking game every time you see the term “Shema” or “Unitarian” or anything of that sort, you would die quickly of alcohol poisoning. Thus far, Buzzard really has one argument and he repeats it over and over and over again.

Let’s look at this first instance.

“In these chapters I return often to the central creed of Jesus, the Shema (Deut. 6: 4; Mark 12: 29). I carry on a running dialogue with many distinguished scholars who have commented on Jesus and his strict monotheism. I propose that a vast amount of Christian literature confirms my thesis that Jesus insisted on this unitarian creed.”

Let’s analyze this. The first sentence has the Shema as the central creed. That’s fine. Every Jew would know the Shema well as the defining statement of monotheism of Israel. However, we have a problem when we get to the second sentence when he talks about Jesus and His strict monotheism.

Question. What is meant by strict monotheism? As a Trinitarian, I contend I am a strict monotheist. Is Buzzard saying that strict monotheism equals Unitarian? Is he stating that Trinitarians aren’t monotheists? He has not said what is meant by this term and is likely packing in some assumptions.

However, the final sentence really clinches that possibility. He makes a statement in the first sentence about this being a creed, in the second about strict monotheism, and then all of a sudden in the last sentence a monotheistic creed has become inextricably a unitarian creed. No argument has been made for this position.

The big problem is that Buzzard consistently does this throughout this book. Mark Twain once said that if you took “And it came to pass” out of the Book of Mormon, you’d have a pamphlet. I wonder what he would say if he read Buzzard’s book where he makes the same argument time and time again.

Looking back at this, this is really a sleight of hand that most readers will not catch. For the sake of argument, Buzzard could be right that the Shema is unitarian. However, he needs to argue that and not just assert it.

He does the same thing again here:

I do not think that the New Testament ever reports Jesus as claiming to be the God of Israel, the one true God. Why then should Jesus’ followers adhere to a belief which Jesus gave no indication of holding? If being a Christian means following Jesus Christ, then a Christian’s first aim would be to share the same view of God as expressed by Jesus. The creed of Jesus would automatically be the creed of his followers. Jesus, as the scriptural records reveal, made it perfectly clear who he believed God to be. But churches have done much to make Jesus’ perception of the identity of God at least bewildering if not incomprehensible.

Look at this. The first part of Jesus’s claims is highly questionable as I will demonstrate in later chapters. However, notice this. At the start, Buzzard says this is his opinion that Jesus never claimed this. Fine. However, then he asks why His followers should hold a belief Jesus gave no indication of holding. There is that switch again. We have gone from opinion to a fact that Jesus gave no indication that He had this opinion of Himself. Then once again, Buzzard points back to the creed, AGAIN.

Later, he says that when the church got power in the time of Constantine, they took to persecuting heretics. There is no mention that the Arians were also doing their own persecution. Why was Athanasius in exile? Why was he falsely accused of crimes? He was accused of murdering the bishop Arsenius.

When the charges were brought, the accusers brought forth a human hand they said belonged to Arsenius. Athanasius had a powerful rebuttal when he brought in Arsenius to the courtroom, alive and well, and showed that he still had two hands. Arians were hardly sugar and spice and everything nice.

Buzzard won’t tell you that. He only tells you about what those evil Trinitarians were doing. He even goes so far as to say that could it be the church held a non-Jewish creed because they were really anti-Semites? Such a statement tells me little about the early church, but it tells me volumes about Buzzard.

So thus far, I hope you’ve seen that this will be an interesting one. We’ll see if we get any interesting arguments sometime and I could possibly do a word search sometime through Kindle to see how many times certain words are overused. Keep an eye out for smuggling in assumptions. It seems to be something Buzzard is proficient at.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Spiritual Deception in the Highest 21.2

What about a unitarian? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

So before I wrote this one, I wanted to speak to someone who knew more about this than I do since my searches hadn’t found anything. I spoke to Dr. Warren on campus here who runs our center for New Testament manuscripts. His thoughts were mine. The new translation committee did have a Unitarian, but God uses flawed instruments. I was also told the KJV scholars weren’t all the salt of the Earth either. So as always, the source material can be found here.

“When the company of New Testament revisers (for the Revised Version) were ready to begin their work, a communion service was held in Westminster Abbey. A Unitarian member of the committee partook along with the others. There was serious criticism of this … The upper house of the Convocation of Canterbury passed a resolution that NO person who denied the deity of Christ should take part in the work” [S2P156].

“Westcott expressed his loyalty to apostasy when he threatened to quit if the Convocation were successful in ejecting Smith [the Unitarian] from the Committee. ‘I never felt more clear as to my duty. If the Company accepts the dictation of the Convocation, my work must end. I see no escape from the conclusion'” [S1P165].

Westcott and Hort found an ally for their plan to abolish the Traditional Majority Text, when Dr. Vance Smith, a Christ denying, Unitarian preacher, was seated on the committee.

The language of the last paragraph is problematic as one gets the impression of Westcott and Hort as wicked schemers making a devilish plan to destroy the KJV. Hardly. There is no sense here that Westcott endorsed the beliefs of Smith, but he could have endorsed the credentials and ability.

As to the Unitarian, Dr. Hort said: “It is, I think, difficult to measure the weight of the acceptance won before the hand for the Revision by the single fact of our welcoming a Unitarian” [S1P165].

What were some of Dr. Smith’s beliefs? Dr. Smith called the belief in Christ’s 2nd coming ‘erroneous’. He said:

“This idea of the Second Coming ought now to be passed by as a merely TEMPORARY incident of early Christian belief. Like many another ERROR, it has answered its TRANSITORY PURPOSE in the providential plan, and may well, at length, be left to rest in peace” [S1P165].

Which is all really poisoning the well. It’s interesting that Johnson didn’t spend any time telling us anything about the members of the KJV team. What problems did they have?

Dr. Vance Smith was NOT the only problem within the translation committee. The following quote summarizes the members in general:

“The reputations of the committee members were so tainted that Queen Elizabeth and her chaplain … refused to give it official sanction … Half the Church of England declined involvement, as did the American branch …” [S3P435]. Also: “Others … left after seeing the SINISTER character of the ‘New’ Greek text” [S3P435].

There are so many ellipses and I question a primary source using the idea of sinister and putting it in caps. I remain skeptical of the context of the quote until Johnson can go to primary sources and give it.

When comparing the scholars of his day to those of the King James committee: Bishop Ellicott, the CHAIRMAN of the Revised Version Committee, said:

“We have certainly NOT YET ACQUIRED sufficient critical judgment for any Body of Revisors to undertake such a work as this” [S3P435].

(Please note: “Advocates of modern versions assume that they are the product of scholarship far superior to that of the translators of the King James Version of 1611, but this assumption is not supported by the facts” [S2P13]).

Which is shown by looking at just one translation and not considering all we have learned about text since then and the Greek and Hebrew language.

It was said that Bishop Ellicott was the committee chairman. Actually, the FIRST chairman was Bishop Wilberforce. One meeting, was enough for him. He wrote to a friend: “What can be done in this most miserable business?” [S2P291] “Unable to bear the situation, he absented himself and never took part in the proceedings … One factor had disturbed him considerably – the presence of Dr. G. Vance Smith, the Unitarian …” [S2P291].

I understand some people having concerns, but I don’t. God used Judas to fulfill His plan. Ultimately, aside from Jesus, God has to use flawed instruments in this way. That’s all that there is.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)