have been omitted from Mark 15:47, nineteen words from Mark
1:32–34, twenty words omitted from John 20:5–6, and thirty-nine
words from John 19:20–21.
The naive scholarship of Machen, Robertson, Wuest, Hort,
Gregory, Birch, Davidson, Alford, and the present revision
committees of the Ecumenical Council failed to notice that extreme
corruption and thorough disfigurement is one of the characteristics
of “ancient uncial manuscripts.” No manuscript is more disfigured
or more polluted than “D” (Western); yet it is one of the five oldest
uncials.
Manuscript “Aleph” (Sinaiticus) does not merely omit the
ending on Mark chapter 16, it omits the end of John’s gospel also!
The Alexandrian scribe evidently objected to the entrance into
history of a character who could monopolize the subject matter of
books!! The intelligent student of the Greek texts may ask himself
why new versions do not end at John 20:24. Is not this a logical
ending? Is it not in Sinaiticus, which was used to correct the
Receptus on eight dozen occasions?
Manuscript “B” (Vaticanus) does not merely omit the ending on
Mark chapter 16, it omits all of Luke 22:43–44. But one does not
fully appreciate the corruptness of these two ancient Bible
perversions (B and Aleph) until one studies the places where the
two together have conspired to alter the entire body of manuscript
evidence.
1. Tischendorf, Gregory, Wetstein, Westcott, Hort, Davidson,
Alford, and the committees of the ASV (1901) and RSV (1952)
incredibly attribute the absence of words in John 9:38; Matthew
1:25; John 3:13; John 8:59; and Mark chapter 16 to the absence of
the words “from the inspired autograph of the evangelist”! Having
thus committed themselves to a superstitious reverence for these
corruption’s beyond the bounds of common sense and reason, the
committees refuse (or choose—alternately) the following
interpolations peculiar to the two corruption’s:
2. John 19:24; Matthew 27:49; John 2:3; John 9:4; Luke 6:48;
John 1:18; John 9:11; John 1:4; Luke 10:1; John 1:34, and several
score more.
3. Countless cases of clumsy revision show that B and Aleph
are the “carelessly copied” manuscripts, accumulating “centuries of
corruptions.” The careless and clumsy scholarship of the eighteenth
and nineteenth century would have you believe that these
descriptive phrases are true of the Receptus. Quite to the contrary;
there are not as many variations in five centuries of Receptus
manuscripts as there are in one century of B and Aleph. The
advanced student of textual criticism and manuscript evidence is
referred to a careful study of the numerous errors in Vaticanus and
Sinaiticus (in the Greek texts) which show a felicitous tampering
and meddling with the Holy Bible which any competent scholar
would have observed unless he was deliberately blinded by
religious, superstitious, and spiritual ignorance.
a. Luke 5:1, b. John 6:17, c. John 6:64, d. John 9:35, e. John
10:14, f. John 17:10, g. John 21:18, h. Luke 23:15, i. Matthew
11:19, j. Matthew 21:13, k. Mark 14:30, 68, 72, l. Matthew 28:9,
m. Mark 15:23, n. Luke 24:13, o. Mark 1:28, p. Luke 1:26, q. Acts
8:5.
The consistent Christian who is interested in these matters
should never fear the opposition of contemporary scholarship.
“Contemporary” Biblical scholarship is about 40 percent less
intelligent than it was in the 1880s, and in the 1880s it was not
intelligent enough to grasp the fundamental elements of manuscript
evidence. The faculties of Conservative schools in the 1980s will
have less grasp of the matter than those in the 1880s.
4. The crowning evidence for the hopeless corruption of
Vaticanus and Sinaiticus—at least on the basis of the transcriptural
New Testament Greek text—is the amazing corruption found in B
and Aleph in Ephesians 1:1. (Serious students of the Bible will
observe that the term “Laodicea” occurs in Colossians five times.
No Bible believer will fail to note the connection with Revelation
chapter 3. See The Bible Believer’s Commentary on Revelation,
1970.)
A detailed discussion of the dual omission of “en Epheso” (“At
Ephesus”) by B and Aleph is found in Burgon’s work (already
cited) in Chapter VII, p. 169. The long and short of it is that the
omission of the two words was done by “Marcion the Heretic”
(A.D. 140) for doctrinal purposes (Burgon, Ibid., p. 185) and was
cited by Origen (184–254) and hence incorporated into Sinaiticus
and Vaticanus (and ONLY Sinaiticus and Vaticanus!) by the Bible
revisers of A.D. 250–370. Proof that this is the case is found by a
study of the manuscript readings (in the Greek text) of 1
Corinthians 16:19; John 1:4; Matthew 13:35; and John 6:51.
Scrivener, “Introduction,” p. 386, is quite emphatic in stating that
the purest Bible text available had to appear after A.D. 200–400.
Ephesians 1:1 is the unique and outstanding mark of spuriousness
which Vaticanus and Sinaiticus inherited from their corrupt
ancestors. They are clearly not to be trusted in matters of
manuscript evidence.
This fact is attested to by a Church Father who was
contemporaneous with Marcion: Tertullian (A.D. 200). Jerome, a
century and a half later, bears witness to the same statement, and
Epiphanius (311) furnishes the third witness (Tertullian, Praescript.
Haer. c. 38, p. 50).
Tertullian states that Marcion used a knife (Jer. 36:23!!) instead
of a stylus when he made his own “revisions,” and goes further and
states that Marcion wrote an epistle which he called The Epistle to
the Laodiceans. Marcion’s reason for doing this was exactly the
same reason why the Catholics incorporated the Apocrypha into
their Bible, why someone wrote The Book of Enoch, why the
Septuagint added, “Let us go into the field,” to Genesis chapter 4,
and why Origen omitted a commandment from Matthew 19:19.
Marcion wanted to account for the expression found in Colossians
4:16. Marcion, as all scholars since his time, could not find An
Epistle to Laodicea, so he wrote one (Burgon, Ibid., p. 184–185).
This phony Laodicean epistle contains whole portions of the book
of Ephesians, and Tertullian says—in regard to Ephesians—that
Marcion “presumed to prefix an unauthorized title to that very
Epistle.” (Adv. Marcion, lib. v, c. xvii, p. 455 sq.)
This is exactly the phenomenon we discussed in the chapter on
“The Mythological Septuagint.” “God’s little helpers” are so
anxious to straighten the Holy Spirit out that they start a chain
reaction that corrupts every school and faculty for the next
seventeen centuries. Origen, undoubtedly, had access to one of
these manuscripts from which the words in Ephesians 1:1 had been
removed; and a man as blinded, as prejudiced, as self-righteous, as
deceived and as angry at the Bible as Origen was—see chapter on
“The Original ASV: Origen’s Hexapla”—would have sworn on a
stack of Ovid and Horace that Marcion had the right reading. This
accounts for the condition of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus—the only
two major uncials bearing this outstanding stamp of fraud.
Other works available on Kindle
Entire publication list at
www.kjv1611.org