Who was Commanded by God to Keep and Maintain His Word?
Posted 1/19/25-
Because of the Divine communication of God’s will to Moses, the prophets, and the people, we read of God’s love and plan for man’s salvation, having been revealed to the Jews first and then to the Gentiles. The Scriptures express fully God’s word.
Romans 3:2, “Unto them (the Jews) were committed the oracles of God.” The word “oracles” means something uttered or by Divine communication. We can have complete confidence in the Masoretic text of the King James Bible.
The word “Bible” is a Greek word that means book. The O.T. consists of 39 books, and the New Testament consists of 27 books. The body of the Scriptures, from Genesis to Revelation, was written over approximately 1,400 years. From Moses to the end of the first century, the Holy Spirit inspired the whole of Scripture to those who penned or wrote the text.
The text has come down to us in a remarkable state of preservation. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, written as far back as the second and third centuries B.C., bears witness to this fact. The Christian church recognizes and uses this collection of books from Genesis to Revelation as the inspired record of God’s Revelation concerning Himself and His will for us.
Guidelines have been laid down and defined for us. The word speaks of great men, spirit creatures, enemies of God, friends of God, political and religious history, and future prophesy. After the last book was penned, the prophecy was closed. There will be no further announcements coming from God. Those who add or subtract from the Scriptures will answer to God, and the cost will be steep.
The idea or terms Old and New Testament have been used since the end of the second century. Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the language spoken by the Hebrews in Canaan before the Babylonian Captivity, and a few sections of the Old Testament are written in Aramaic. There are no vowels (A, E, I, O, U) in the Hebrew alphabet, only consonants. The Jewish Masoretic scholars invented vowel signs or points in the sixth century.
Although the Bible has been preserved in its’ original meaning, customs, and traditions, the Hebrew language has undergone many changes. The language has gone from the golden age (Adam to Jacob) through silver (Jews in Egypt), bronze (Babylonian and Medo-Persian captivity), and iron (Greek and Roman conquest,) and like our modern English today, it is a far cry from the original.
Except for a few words and sentences, the New Testament was written in Greek, the people’s language in the time of our Lord Jesus. The Greek of the N.T. is identical to the Greek spoken in the Mediterranean in the first century. The New Testament of the K.J.V. is marked strikingly by the Jewish character and colorful language that existed in the days of our Lord. It holds to the idioms, the peculiar language of a group of people or nation. Other dialects of Greek were Aeolic, Boeotic, Doric, Ionic, and especially the dialect of Attic.
The New Testament of the K.J.B. is called the Received text or Textus Receptus. The first-century Apostolic Christian Churches, the Christian Churches in Israel, and the Christian Syrian Church all used the Received text; even a few early heretics used this text. With this history, it would be appropriate for the King James translators to use this text.
Most of the second to fourth-century Christian churches used the Textus Receptus. They were the Churches of Scotland and Ireland, the Waldensians, and the Greek Orthodox Church; the fifteenth to nineteenth-century Churches used this text. All the Churches of the Reformation, Erasmus Greek New Testament, The Complutensian Polyglot, Martin Luther’s German Bible, Tyndale’s Bible, the French version of Oliveton, the Coverdale Bible, the Matthews Bible, the Taverner’s Bible, the Great Bible, the Stephanus Greek New Testament, the Geneva Bible, The Bishop’s Bible, The Spanish version, the Beza Greek N.T. the Czech Version, The Italian Version, K.J.V. The Elziver Brothers’ Greek N.T., and the list goes on.
The Received text was not used randomly or in a few areas of the known world but totally and wholly throughout the educated religious world of every civilized nation and in every language.
Attic was the Greek language dialect used in the city of Attica, Greece. It became the literary language of the entire Greek-speaking world. This dialect was known for its elegance and pervades every Book of the N.T. Paul used this poetic dialect when he quoted verses from some Greek poets, such as,
- Acts 17:28, “For in Him (Jesus) we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your = (the Greeks) own poets have said, for we are also His offspring.”
- 1 Corinthians 15:33, “Be not deceived: evil communications = (evil company) corrupt good manners = (habits.)”
- Titus 1:12, “One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, the Cre-tians are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies = (lazy gluttons.)”
Because the writers of the N.T. were Jews, they were acquainted with the Hebrew Idioms and the sense of the words of that particular language. When they used a Greek word as a correspondent to a Hebrew word of like meaning, they employed it as the Hebrew word was used, either in a common or appropriate sense or as required. The K.J.B. maintains this sense.
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