Royal Deceptions

Okay, this is Michael Coughlin back in the Abrean Podcast, and I have with me a couple of special guests. One of them is my good friend Garrett O'Hara, the Irishman over at Things Above Us, and he is one of my co-bloggers at thingsabove.us, and he is also my personal translation expert guy that I go to whenever I have a question about why a translation looks a certain way. And I know even if he doesn't know the answer, he'll know how to go look and find the answer.

And I also have with me Fred Butler. And the reason why we have Fred today is we want to interview Fred and talk about his book that was just released. When was it released, Fred? November? yeah like at the end of november yeah right around in fact on uh the 25th of november i think is when it went live on amazon okay that's exciting so something good came out of 2020 and that was fred butler uh published the book royal deceptions exposing the king james only conspiracies against God's word.

And this is your first book that you've published, right, Fred? It is. Okay. Because you wrote, you and Lyndon wrote an extended blog series in response to somebody else's response about Strange Fire that I thought should become a book. Well, that was the plan with that. yeah that was against Michael Brown if you guys are familiar with that saga that's right we had strange fire which addressed the charismatic stuff and to this day how many years ago that's 2013 so seven years at least we've had people still to this day contact us wanting that or that changed our life in some way that conference they just heard this on I just heard this on your website and I need to get all the messages or you know I used to be a raving charismatic and this totally changed my life.

Yeah. And so, yeah, Michael Brown then wrote a book about, uh, I can't even remember what it was authentic fire or something like that, where he tried to stranger fire, stranger. And, uh, you know, he tried to naysay everything that went on there at the conference and all the messages and sort of the talking points. And, uh, you know, we, and so Lyndon and I had the time we're blogging kind of on our own.

And we, I didn't really know Lyndon until like after we both started, went our own way, but he was at masters for a few years and we just didn't run in the same circles at the time. And he approached me and said, Hey, would you be interested in doing a series of blog articles? I mean, you can kind of tag team, go chapter by chapter through his book. And I'm like, Oh, I'd love to do that.

Cause I was always wanting to find something to write about. and so we did and linden god loving he put that all in a huge really readable manuscript and uh unfortunately i mean i don't know just the timing of it and after it all got done it seems like controversy was dying down um it just needed a really good edit both of us were nervous about publishing something we really were afraid they didn't probably read well and all of that and Phil wanted to edit it but yeah he got busy doing other stuff and never happened so it still languishes in a pdf format and uh which I'm happy to share with people if they'd ask and uh you know you can read through the articles they were all blogged and then Lyndon went back and added all the links and made sure everything was working correctly and documented everything well and uh yeah it was a great uh time doing that but my king james book kind of came out of the same thing where i was blogging about that topic because i used to be a king james only as when i was a young kind of dumb naive christian and uh because i kind of languished in that for probably a decade before god gloriously rescued me and set me on the right path and helped me see the light as it were. And so those articles were written from another blog series I did. I wrote the chapters in that book.

So I wrote the articles and then had a friend that I work with that was ministering to a lady whose son, I think, gave her a jack chick book written by, I think it's David Daniels. It's the guy who's the current overseer of chick stuff since his death and uh he asked me hey do you have anything that we could give this lady to sort of help her think through this because she's john's not really addressed king james oldenism before and i had my internet articles but you know she's an older lady but i wouldn't know how internet savvy she was or anything like that so i sent her or i sent my friend some links for her to look at and and i just started thinking you know i could get this material and put it in a kind of a PDF format and at least would have something tangible or more substantive to give to people when they ask because to this day I think I published those articles at the 2000 mid-2000s probably to this day I still have people emailing me thanking me for them and asking questions or wanting some follow-up on something I wrote and so I said well you know I could do this with pdf and then i had some friends suggest that i write a book and put it on amazon because they'll print them as you order them so if you uh just have everything have the manuscript submitted and have a cover design that you can put together and put a link up there and so i put the book up there put it in kindle as well had a friend help me do that and it gotten good response i think i think there probably been about almost 100 uh kindles and king james book the books and the kindles that have kind of come together so sold or whatever so that's excellent now you can afford that nice microphone yeah i know i know i can get a nicer microphone a nicer uh yeah no ball i guess i don't know Yeah, the secret to never retiring is to be a Christian publisher, it seems like. Yes, it is.

So let me introduce, let's get everybody introduced real quick. So Fred, you just introduced yourself a little bit, but you work with Phil Johnson, the Phil Johnson? Yeah, no, isn't that amazing? Yeah. Yeah, I work at Grace to You, and my primary duties there are overseeing the volunteer ministries. So I have probably, I think right now about 130 faithful retirees, senior saint types who have been members long term, long term, long time members of grace.

And so they retire and looking for something to do with their time. And so we have a ministry that when we send out offers to our mailing list and say, hey, we'd love to send you this free CD or we'd love to send you this booklet or this book or whatever John's put together. They come in and I gather up all those responses and say, yes, I'd like that.

And we compile them in a list of addresses and whatnot. not and my we print those out and my volunteers come in and uh basically put it all together they package it up put the labels in and help me mail it and that sort of thing and uh we've not been able to do that this much this year um early on in this ridiculous pandemic scamdemic whatever we've been we had to have the staff so i had uh probably maybe 15 people that were at grace to at that time because of the lockdown rules and they'd all have to be in my room helping me package books and stuff and we recently were able to sort of reopen it to some volunteers come out there um on a limited basis and have to sort of limit the number of people spread out the days more usually they come on tuesdays and thursdays and now they come in on monday tuesday and thursday and so yeah it's a it's a great little ministry lots of um i always tell everybody i said it's like having a bunch of grandmas and grandpas if you have like 100 sets of grandparents it's kind of nice they take care of me and my family my kids and they're a blessing in their life so how many kids do you have uh we have five five okay from 18 to eight all right yeah i always I always thought it was more like Santa's workshop with MacArthur's books and CDs. Yeah, in a way, it kind of is. Yeah, I thought it was elves that were sending them to me.

They can be elf-like at times, I guess. But yeah, I know what you mean. I was just glad there wasn't a naughty list. I was getting them every month anyway. Oh, were you? Yeah, no, I appreciate what you do there and the whole ministry.

Grace to you. No, I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, how about you, Garrett? Why don't you give us a little background of who you are and why are you interested in King James onlyism? And as I said that. Did he just die?

Hopefully everything is working because my computer died, but I'm connected by two means to Zoom. So I've got my backup here. Yeah, he's on his backup Zoom. You sound like you're flying an airplane or you're in space, but that's OK. I've got my trucker headset here. but yeah i i started off um thinking about king james only is um really when i got to college um i was saved as a uh teenager uh got to college and was still trying to figure out denominations etc i was unchurched pretty much all the way through um childhood until story at the very end.

There's a longer story there. But I got to college and I recall starting to look at different versions and seeing some of the comparisons that we'll probably talk about later on between King James verses and modern translation verses. And I'm kind of going, okay, why are these differences here? Did the other translators, the modern translators just get soft?

And I remember it being explained to me, you know, just kind of ease up. And this was from folks who were to the left of me theologically. And by the way, I was not a Calvinist at this point by any stretch. I wasn't a Calvinist I'll start again so I wasn't a Calvinist at this point by any stretch but I did I was in a sense right of center slash conservative exclusivist in terms of the gospel that kind of thing inerrantist and it's being explained to me by folks who are to the left of me some of these words in the original languages they take entire paragraphs to write.

So when you see big differences like that, you shouldn't really worry about it. And I'm kind of going, okay, so if it's one, two, three word difference, okay, I kind of understand that in terms of translating a single word. But what about an entire paragraph of text? Like there's an entire paragraph of text in the King James that's missing from, you know, this modern version.

You know, I can't take that. I don't see it. I'm going with the King James. And I was okay with the New King James for that same reason, but I couldn't have told you what the Byzantine text is, what the majority text is or anything like that. I really didn't have a strong basis for my belief but it was essentially a King James slash New King James only as well still being a fellowship with folks who had these modern versions And then later on it was in 2005 I had just finished up my sophomore year going into my junior year I'm in Japan, of all places, at this point, because I'm in the Naval ROTC.

And I'm at the only Christian bookstore in this area of Japan at Hospitality House Ministry. and I find a book called The King James Only Controversy by James R. White. I've got no idea who James White is at this point, but hey, it looks like a good book, and I pick it up, and that's when I start getting a little more educated about it going on from there.

So what does Byzantine and majority text mean? Like for people that don't know, what are those terms? The Byzantine text refers to a text type. We could say family of manuscripts, although that's more of a technical term. A family of manuscripts is actually a smaller subset. But you could think of it in terms of maybe a rough analogy would be like an ethnicity.

Certain ethnicities of people have certain distinguishing characteristics in their faces or in their physicality, even their skin color. that kind of thing. Are we allowed to say that? I think we are. We're going to have to make this explicit content. Go ahead. I'm the minority, so I'm the only one of us three who's allowed to say that, though.

Oh, you're allowed. I'm just not allowed to laugh. You're not allowed to say that. Only I can. Fred, you're not allowed to laugh either. I'm not allowed to say anything about that.

It's like a confirmation laugh, though. Like, yes. Yeah, you're not allowed to laugh at me about this at all. But so you have basically three major text types among New Testament manuscripts. You have the Alexandrian, you have the Byzantine, and kind of the minor one is the Western. Sometimes you'll also hear the Caesarian mentioned.

There are scholars who say, look, there really is no Caesarian text type. And some other scholars would even say, hey, there are no text types at all. We need to kind of go beyond that. But the big three you're going to hear are Alexandrian, Western, and Byzantine. And it's the Byzantine manuscripts that became the most copied due to historical circumstances.

And that is something that Fred covers in the book. I think Fred might be better qualified to talk about that more at length. So when we're looking at textual problems and we see, okay, a majority of the manuscripts say this and a minority of manuscripts say these other things, one method that folks will advocate is going with the majority text. Let's go with the Byzantine text type.

Let's go with the one where more manuscripts say this. And that's not necessarily the way we want to go when we consider the history of these manuscripts. Right. So, so when you say that what you mean is like, when, when people are deciding what the Bible said, the original. they have we'll say they have like 10 manuscripts in front of them of of john 11 and and maybe six of them say jesus wept and then maybe a couple say he wept and maybe a couple say and then he wept or something like that and and you're saying that the majority view would be oh we'll just take the one where there's the most right yeah that's what like this considered like the uh the most eyewitnesses or in there i guess the textual witnesses if you want to call them that yeah well you've got 50 of them that say these things over here but then you've got these other ones maybe smaller ones a smaller group of them might say something slightly different and what's important in sort of evaluating manuscripts is you want to you know textual criticism has just developed because when the King James was translated, textual criticism was really in its infancy.

I mean, they just were starting to rediscover these things and everything had been in Latin for years and years and years because of the Roman Catholic church and, you know, all of that sort of thing. So they, when you want to look at those manuscripts, you want to evaluate them, the quality of them too. So you might have a whole bunch of them that might say the same thing but if they're old if they are like a thousand years removed from the you know the age of the apostles who would have written those things whereas this other handful 10 or 12 are written like within 100 years and they're you know they circulated in and around where those apostles would have lived and you know that sort of thing that well obviously you would want to okay well maybe these ones are more original because they haven't had a lot of time to accumulate changes and damage and all that sort of stuff and when you sort of trace through the history of textual criticism you see that there's you know manuscripts will gather all kinds of you know changes in the in the margins and in the text itself because you have copyists that copying these things and they're like reading something and maybe their version is that they're copying from is smudged in an area or it says one thing and they're like wait a minute that doesn't really sound right so they want to help out god by maybe adding a word or so there to make it clearer or make it more precise or whatever and these things get transmitted and transmitted as they're getting copied and copied over the centuries and so the whole idea of a textual critic is to try to ascertain by looking at all the available manuscripts and evidence that we have which are in the thousands and trying to say okay we can kind of see here how these manuscripts developed and they are they come from this area they have these we see these changes over there we can see how these changes happened well maybe these ones here are going to be closer to the original And so they going to develop sort of a translating apparatus sort of a base text from those best manuscripts That the idea The best readings from all the available manuscripts are going to develop a text that we can translate from and then we can use that they believe clearly refers back to the original authors and what they intended to say. and King James only us are going to insist like what Garrett was saying if you have the majority of these manuscripts you know saying one thing well we need to go with that majority uh they're going to tell you that well this little minority over here that might say something slightly different well they're giving you an entirely different understanding of who Jesus was or they're introducing some kind of heresy or those manuscripts circulated in and around areas that were known for heretics living there among the christians that sort of stuff and so they'll say you can't trust those manuscripts and that's the most modern translations you know are going to be translated from that apparatus or that greek text that's translated from those you know those particular family of manuscripts or whatever that's over here it's not in the majority that kind of makes sense glared garrett could probably help me uh clarify if i need to that needs to be clarified yeah that was that was good and you're gonna talk a little bit about this in your book the royal deceptions book people are going to get i give a very simplistic simple sort of uh lay level understanding of textual criticism for both the old testament and the new testament as it relates to king james only us and how they present the material I do have references to other sources that Christians want to grow and learn a little more about that they can take a look at.

So here's my understanding. So you guys can either expand this or correct it. So my understanding is, you know, King James, there's a couple flavors of King James only. But one flavor of them is that there are these are people who believe that God's word that God promised he would preserve his word. And that in in the early 17th century, when the King James Bible was was created, it was it was literally like inspired by God. you know all scriptures given by inspiration of God and and and thus that version itself is not so much a translation as it is an inspired copy of the scriptures in English and then to make any modification for any reason is to pervert it and right and that's been my experience so so I've I've had the privilege of meeting I think some of the more extreme King James only is I've also met like textist receptus onlyists, where they're people that they only like translations that come from the received text that the King James came from.

Which aren't very many. Yeah. But so what happened when I was at a Super Bowl one year doing evangelism, I was with a group of men and there were these guys and they seemed like solid guides. I mean, they were ready to get up and preach and they were hardcore. Jesus is the only way. And I'm, and I'm standing there talking to these guys and I must've been holding my Bible.

And I just, and one of them just says, Oh, I see you have one of the devil's versions of the Bible. Is that a common way that, that King James only is look at things? That's the way I look at things. When I was a King James only, I was like, what are you doing with that perversion yeah it's a perversion and and so i but so i can understand why people would would think that um but what's the like what's the problem why is it well maybe i'm not asking the question right but i was gonna say why is why is it impossible to believe that god preserved his word and gave us a a perfect english version like or or why do we know that's not the case no i that's that can be kind of a long question but the the or a long answer to that question but they will do it concisely well concisely yeah well number one there really isn't uh you know scripture tells us that god's going to preserve his word and it's not telling us if it's going to be translated in a particular language i mean English didn't even exist when God revealed his scriptures.

It was, you know, it was Hebrew and Greek and then some Aramaic and the Hebrew that they are in the Old Testament that they used and spoke in. And as language fluctuates, you see God and changed and that sort of thing over history. Christians and well, just God's people took it upon themselves to preserve the words of the original revelation by giving us new and clear translations of that message of that revelation king james only is going to insist that well it's got to be every exact word but god doesn't necessarily say that he's we can trust that he's going to move his people to preserve his words and i think you can see that if you look at the evidence that we have of the bible being preserved for us it's pretty much you know 99.9 percent what we know it is there might be some you know areas where we're kind of questioning okay it could say this or it could say that and there could be some variants that are sort of important to look at and that sort of thing but honestly it doesn't change the message king james only just want to give you this impression that if you're reading a modern bible somehow it's going to give you a totally different revelation than what was originally given to God's people through the Holy Spirit, through the Old Testament and New Testament.

And they're going to say, well, heretics have corrupted this. And you just don't see that when you look at the history and the preservation of the text. It just doesn't exist. Okay, so I have a question then for both of you. If I was talking to somebody... who was not maybe such a hardcore King James only, somebody that's trying to learn about translations.

And they ask a question like, well, you're telling me that I shouldn't read the message because it is a perversion of God's word, but then you're telling me I can read the ESV or the NASB and those are okay. How does somebody decide, are we just like King James only, but we just allow more versions or like how does somebody decide that a translation is acceptable um oh garrett's done some good work on that because he's been publishing articles about some of that very issue put garrett on the spot without yeah no i wasn't prepared to be put on the spot with that one but uh it's a matter that that's less of a matter of textual criticism and more about the actual translation being a faithful translation. So we could go through whether a translation is formal, that is word for word or dynamic, which is more thought for thought, and how much actual interpretation is going into a translation.

How much is the translator trying to interpret the scripture for the reader rather than trying to basically bring out the original language into readable English, but only just to the point where the reader has to do the actual interpretation. Right, right. So what would be an example of something, maybe you guys can each share your favorite, like something that if I was looking at a King James Bible with someone where I could show them, hey, here's, and I don't like the word mistake but here's where the king james either gets it wrong like we know for a fact this isn't correct or at least here's where the wording of the king james is not conveying the right thoughts to the reader that that a modern translation maybe does better at what do you have any like a favorite example well i think the probably the ones that everyone's familiar with are going to be And this is particularly seen in the book of Mark and in the book of John, those two gospels, where in Mark you have 12 additional verses that are added to Mark's ending.

So in Mark's account of the resurrection and the Easter morning, it just kind of abruptly ends where a lot of people claim it abruptly ends. and I believe John's last expositional message that he did you know when he finished a whole New Testament in his preaching career was on that very text and he talks about this in some to some degree but the last 12 verses have historically been kind of questioned because it's like okay well they they're there but they seem to be out of place it's just sort of like they're abruptly tacked on to kind of bring out some ending to mark's gospel what appears to be you know to the reader to be an abrupt ending like it's been cut off and then there's all kind there's actually several different versions of mark 12 i think there's one that even has 13 or 14 verses as opposed to just 12 extra verses but and that's just one area where you can say okay we can look at this and if you add it or if you take it away it doesn't change mark's message he doesn't have jesus still in the grave unresurrected you know if you look at the context of mark he's not saying that and he and when you but if you look at if you're going to insist on keeping them all that does is sort of add on some you know cut and pastes from matthew and Luke and some other passages that would probably have been in church tradition at the time, talking about Jesus and his ministry among his apostles, the whole aspect of picking up snakes and handling them, which I think is kind of interesting that snake handlers take that literally, and then they'll actually be groups of snake handlers that will do such a thing, and then they'll get bit by a rattlesnake and die, which is why textual criticism is important if you think about it. but these would you look at those just to interrupt real quick you're talking about mark 16 where where it's in brackets and and starting in verse 9 right and all the way down to the end and and what you're saying i think it goes down to verse 20 or something like that is that right yeah and and so what you're saying is that the king james included mark 16 yeah it includes all of those verses but you're saying that somehow we know that those aren't supposed to be included in the bible because they aren't part of the well older manuscripts the older ones don't include it yeah now there are people on the internet you know probably some that will listen to this very podcast and challenge my assertion but there's no genuine when you can't say for certain that those last 12 verses were originally part of Mark's gospel. It can be damaging, though. So when I read about these hillbillies in West Virginia drinking poison and handling snakes and dying, that's because they're reading this, they're believing that it's God's word, and they're obeying what they think they see commanded.

Yes, and that's an example of how it can be a bad thing. thing it's a fringe small very little group of people that do it but yeah i mean but if anything it's going to affect people's confidence in god's word one way or another like you're saying these verses are not part of my bible well yeah i'm saying that and that's where you as a faithful believer using your gift of discernment need to come forward and give a defense or give a reasoning for the hope of why you believe that and why it not going to destroy the God word and the consistency of God word Another um some another example is in uh revelation i think it in and it escapes me at the moment but it like in revelation 16 if i'm not mistaken somewhere in that area there there's a handful of passages and verses in the book of revelation that are exclusively unique to the king james because erasmus who gave us the Texas Receptus, well, the Greek New Testament that was translated by the translators in the Reformation and eventually the King James. He did not have those verses in his manuscripts and he had to reverse translate the Latin Vulgate into Greek and then translate it into, and then everybody else translated it into English or German or whatever they translated it. And he put readings that are in the text that are not really there.

Because later we did find manuscripts that had those verses, and they don't read like the way that Erasmus created them. Now, it doesn't destroy doctrines in the Bible or anything like that, But if we're going to be serious Christians, don't we want to know exactly what, you know, John wrote in his revelation rather than sort of a guest of Erasmus, who's reverse translating Latin into Greek? Absolutely.

You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. Garrett, what do you think about those two? I definitely agree with Fred. And the verse that I'm looking for right now was basically, I've got a story of a wedding where the pastor was a King James onlyist, basically. And he found out that I was going to Dallas Seminary at that time that we were there for this wedding.

My wife, the bride was my sister-in-law. and he challenged me on in particular Ephesians 3 9 which is one of those weird ones because it's not even a majority text issue it's actually a variant that appears only in the text receptus and not in any of the other Byzantine manuscripts if I'm recalling everything correctly um the King James in the in the part where the issue is reads and to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery and if you look at a modern translation like the nas you have and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery so you have the difference between fellowship and administration right there you look in the greek and it's basically the position of the letter kappa or k if you want to call it that way so it's either oikonomia which is the word from which we get economy um in most manuscripts it's the majority of manuscripts in this case and you have koinonia in the texas receptives which means um fellowship so it's a bit of a litmus test seems for a very strong king james onlyist okay what's what's your position on you know ephesians 3 9 um because at that point okay are you are you saying this because you have like a principled position on how these manuscripts were copied over the period of time, or you're really just kind of sticking to the Texas Receptus. And at that point, you know, one, the argument kind of falls apart. And two, what other basis are, do you have for Christian apologetics if you're unable to reason through the transmission of the text like that?

Oh, yeah. Yep. And that one looks even, you can look at it and you can kind of maybe see okay i can see how there could be an error if you had just uh you know a couple of letters that got went missing because someone didn't write them correctly a copyist didn't correctly write them or the text he was he was copying from was damaged or whatever or someone even decided well i don't think that's what he's really saying he could be saying this and he adds this he changes it a little bit to make it clearer you know whatever the uh and then you have this big chain fellowship and administrations is a pretty big difference even though the words are sort of similar in the greek um yeah you know what i mean so if a if a person believes that kjv is you know the inspired and and they really like it better you know they can still be saved by grace through faith i was at least i hope i was yeah yeah so so but what what about if if somebody's a king james onlyist and they think that in order for another person to get saved that person has to like agree with them about the king james being being the true word of god are they putting a stumbling block before people oh yeah because what they're doing is they're if you're saying if you're saying that you have to be saved by believing what the king james presents the gospel and that you as a christian must then uh read the king james exclusively as your translation you know in order to grow spiritually that's adding a works oriented sort of view of salvation because it's the gospel message that's translated into any language.

I mean, obviously, people that I speak with in some kind of Native American language or French or whoever it might be, I'm speaking to them in a non-English, Elizabethan English translation of God's word. Are we saying that God can't save those non-English speaking people? Well, of course not. I mean the gospel is saving a person So yeah I encountered those individuals too that were they like look if you not using the king james in your gospel presentation you know you can't have any confidence that a person's going to hear the gospel clearly well that's just not true i mean what did they use before you know english was even developed as a national language and how do other non-English speaking nations hear God's word and translate it and all that other sort of stuff.

I mean, it gets to where you are beginning to bind up the Lord away from these people because you're putting all these little hoops and roadblocks, like you're saying, in the way of the gospel unnecessarily. And that's just something we don't want to go down that road at all. Garrett, what do you think? Definitely agree with Fred in terms of putting roadblocks in front of the gospel.

And there's a bit of a conflict that I see from my own history where I mentioned earlier that I was to the right of a lot of my Christian brothers when I was, you know, leaning towards this King James only position, you know, basically King James only slash new King James being okay. And my fellow Christians were not able to explain why my position was wrong. And there was seemingly no one who could kind of slap me in the face and go, you know, okay, this, this is kind of damaging to the rest of the body.

So to that end, you know, one, I was sort of a stumbling block at that point, even though I was more conservative in terms of inerrancy and in terms of my theology, although, like I said, my soteriology definitely was not there in terms of election. And at the same time, it also led me to look down upon a lot of my Christian brothers who are using these modern versions kind of going okay on whom can I lean for teaching if they're not using the right bible there's a lot of good Christian teachers out there not using the King James and you know if some if someone feels kind of alone and this goes back to what I was saying about Japan before we started if think about a U.S. Navy sailor who's from a King James only background he joins the military because he wants to do the right thing, wants to serve his country.

And not only is he among some of the only Christians aboard the ship, but he could very well be the only King James onlyist, or maybe one of two King James onlyists, and that's it. You're really going to isolate that guy with a doctrine like that, not being able to fellowship with some others who can really help him out. Right, right. Hey, we can't hear you.

I'm muted. Oh, there you go. Now I'm back. It's like a bunch of boomers doing this. It's terrible. I try to mute myself when I'm not speaking so that all the other noises and then I forget.

For me, I didn't encounter this issue from the perspective of ever being a King James onlyist or from the perspective of learning textual criticism. For me, it was meeting people who believed this. And so like when I first got saved, I read the King James. That's just what that. So for me, it was it was economical. I had an iPod like with the little spinning wheel and and I could get a King James Bible for free on it.

And so that's what I did. and so I was reading the Bible and that was also the version of the Bible that I would have always had growing up I grew up as a as a Catholic we weren't a real Bible-centered home but there were Bibles at church I I knew what the Bible was I remember reading the Bible in in high school English class not the whole thing but I remember reading from the Bible and it was King James and And so that was what I was familiar with. And so when I got saved and I was just reading God's word, I started to like the King James. And then what would happen was, and I'm a rather educated person.

And so I could translate the King James to modern English in my mind. And I can understand a little bit of what it said, but I still find myself, I still found myself having difficulty with the the word order which was always different and then some of the like like fred calls it the elizabethan english and i and i you know but i had done shakespeare and i remember reading shakespeare in school and you were basically translating oh yeah is what it felt like and so when i met people that that wanted to say well we have to used the King James, my immediate response was like, well, why would I speak to somebody in a language that they don't know? Because to me, it's like a different language.

And when I talked to people in 2020, I mean, this was 10, 12 years ago, I was figuring this stuff out when I first got saved even. But when I speak to people who they haven't studied Shakespeare, they haven't read literature, maybe even from the 20th century. Or if I'm speaking to somebody who English is their second language, and they didn't learn using the King James.

I felt like I was making it harder for them to understand God's truths than if I had just used plain language that was what made sense to me So is that I don know maybe I was just telling the story I don really have a question It was just that was my experience was I wanted to give people the gospel and I, and I was willing to use biblical language, but for me, I needed to use biblical language that I knew that they could understand. Otherwise I was just going to have to put it all in my own words anyway and so I tried to learn verses that that were in uh you know I I just I don't even think 17th century English resembles modern English enough to call it the same language sometimes I'm not a language expert but you know yeah you're you're right about that there's I was in sort of the same conundrum I think when I was a younger guy and um and I was a King James only list i remember being at college and a friend of mine and myself were in the library and there was an exchange student and i wanted to say he was he might have been malaysian i'm not entirely sure where he was the asian guy but he pretty much came from a an atheistic background he was non-religious or at least he's just a basic buddha or whatever background and just explaining to him the gospel was hard enough in my normal english because you were talking to them and caught with concepts that they weren't familiar with god creator uh sin i mean they didn't understand those i mean they understood them but i mean it you had to really struggle to kind of get the concepts around them and uh to try to do that with a king james bible would have been just a terrible and i probably had a king james bible with me but i'm i'm taking the king james bible and i'm reading to him the gospel but i'm having to sort of retranslate it you know as i'm reading it so that this guy will understand it because he's the second english language guy to begin with he's from a background that's buddha buddhists and they have no concepts of what we're talking about. He's his first time in America.

He's encountering Western Bible believing Christianity for the first time. And, you know, and I'm going to try to give him, you know, Elizabethan English from my King James. And regrettably, there's King James only that would believe that they would say that you have to, yeah, you need to train them to learn English first before you give them gospel.

And I'm just thinking, you got to be kidding me. there's just no way you can learn or do world missions you know let alone any kind of serious evangelism if you got to take that approach because you know the rest of the world is not there and you know the message of the gospel god's made it so that we can communicate it we should be able to translate the word of god into any language and communicate the gospel absolutely you know he doesn't limit it to you're only going to do it in this language well that wasn't the point of that you know and i think one time we might have been speaking before just talking about the whole aspect of just when you look in the book of acts you know they were trans they were speaking in tongues and part of the gift of tongues was communicating the gospel the message of the gospel in their native language yep so he wasn't making them sit there and listen to him in hebrew even though they probably understood it or or it was in their angelic prayer language you mean yeah i know it wasn't yeah i know it comes from heaven and nobody would understand because you know it's you're talking angel things or but that's yeah it's just it's just bizarre to think that way yeah i mean when paul when paul visited heaven it's clear that the reason why he didn't want to talk about it afterward just because he had no idea what was going on and they were speaking King James English and he's like what is this like you know I don't know what to talk about yeah the things and vows that's why it was unspeakable for him when I was in Minneapolis for the Super Bowl with these guys they they would get up to preach the gospel that these were bold men like and it was hard to doubt their salvation because of their boldness although the more I got to know them, the more I doubted it because of this, you know, pet doctrine of theirs that was more important than anything else. But they would preach about Jesus and the gospel, and then their whole gospel presentation would include repeated references to the King James Bible. And they were particularly, and I've got a couple of dispensational guys on my blog post or whatever you call a podcast, they were particularly into proclaiming the new world order that was coming.

These guys were, I would call them hyper-dispensationalists, and they were also hardcore Arminians. Is that something that comes with King James-onlyism? Yep. Okay. It is. Because they told me they would let me teach them Calvinism from the King James Bible, And I said, sure.

And, you know, it was good enough for Calvin, right? The odd thing about that is that a number of the key translators of the King James were reformed Calvinists. And and I think probably the one pioneering King James apologist in the 20th century was Ed Hills, Edward Hills. And he wrote, I think, called a book called King James Defended or something. And he was a Presbyterian Calvinist.

Okay, so it's like it is kind of funny that that's the one little hobby horse that they are all hung up on And that's prime and as I note in my book when I sort of recounting my you know My journey and away from King James only your faith your faith my faith journey. Yeah that when I was learning more about scripture and I was learning more about God and I was coming to face to face with his revelation as, you know, the holy sovereign Lord of the universe. Um, and I was becoming basically a Calvinist though.

I was just sort of learning those terms as well. I noticed that a lot of my King James only literature that I subscribed to in either magazine form or whatever, they would rant against Calvinists. Calvinism was as bad as modern perversions to these guys. And if you were a Calvinist, you're a heretic kind of thing. Yeah, it was terrible. It was the most contentious time of my Christian existence this weekend.

And it was horrible. And we were there for a purpose, and that was to preach the gospel. and these guys spent the entire time on the street trying to argue with us about Calvinism and then the entire time when we weren't on the street arguing about King James and Calvinism and and and then people couldn't sleep I mean it was horrible uh so we finally we really we really split up from these guys and and it was like I will never I I will never again deal with this. I decided, and I haven't to that day.

If you are a King James onlyist, you are possibly one level above a black Hebrew Israelite in my mind, and worthy of about the same amount of my time. Or a flat earther, you know, one of those guys. I'll make a distinction there between a King James onlyist who's, you know, merely a congregant versus one who is a teacher who should be studying to show himself approved and to put it in very modern English ought to know better.

I wanted to tag on the dispensationalism side for a sec because of my degree at Dallas Seminary, because if you think about it, there really shouldn't be a connection between dispensationalism and King James onlyism. It's like, how does that come about? And I think a lot of it has to do with Dallas Seminary's previous position in terms of their theological journal, Bibliotheca Sacra.

It's one of the major peer-reviewed theological journals. And the previous position that they had, I'm told, is that once someone takes a position and it's published, none of the other professors could come in and put in a view that disagrees. And so in basically late 20th century, you know, second half of 20th century up until maybe 1990 is where I'm going to guess it is, 1990 to 2000.

The position being, okay, we can't conflict with the majority text position, not quite King James onlyism. Okay, nobody else could come in and say, okay, actually, Alexandrian text type is okay, reason to collecticism, which is the, you know, modern method of textual criticism, that's okay. And so one, there's this perception that Dallas Seminary, oh, they're King James onlyists.

Oh, they're majority text onlyist. And indeed, you have the New King James Version that basically came out of Dallas Seminary Providence being led by Zane Hodges and Arthur Farrstad. that Zane Hodges, by the way, is not a Calvinist. And going on from there, I think that's where that dispensationalism to King James only-ism slash majority text really comes from, rather than kind of going, okay, there's a dispensational doctrine that says that you should only follow these manuscripts or something like that, and that's not really what's going on.

I was kind of was guessing that it bounced around in a lot of the independent fundamental Baptist churches, which have this historical pedigree that, you know, dispensational new world order kind of stuff. I mean, they talk. That's how you read their literature. That's how they would talk and write. and everything is against modernism, which in some ways rightly should be against modernism.

But yeah, it just essentially comes from that whole swamp. So when I was saved and that's where I went, that's where God put me, and it took a good 10 years for me to get out of that and for God to bring me to a right understanding of his word and doctrines of grace and all of those things work together for my good, I guess, bringing me away from that and having now what I believe is the right way to have confidence in God's word, not to be afraid of modern translations and having some wisdom about dealing with those aspects of textual criticism and so forth. if you could tell us about your journey fred um what were some of the unhelpful things versus the helpful things you heard when you were a king james onlyist and you had uh fellow christians trying to bring you out of that movement um i think most of the okay so when i got saved um i had a friend that the first thing he did was he gave me a king james only book written by a pastor in Oklahoma. And this pastor argued for this, the integrity of God's word, which is obviously in his mind is the King James.

And I was absolutely convinced, oh man, this is what, I can see what he's saying here. I had a Ryrie study Bible at the time. He's another Dallas guy. And he was telling me that when you look at these differences between various texts that you're looking at, like say something in first Samuel, as opposed to first Chronicles, It might be a different numbers of horses in a battle or whatever it is Well you don have to claim that those are copious errors like my Ryrie study Bible did But I needed to see that as well this is God telling you something about his you know he giving you a different perspective and you need to have a believing Bible study when it comes to that And this King James only is did that he used this Bible to sort of give solutions to these so-called copious errors.

And so that really impressed me. And that got me interested in the topic. And I even called that guy and he gave me authors to write to and listen to and guys to, you know, their books to read, started getting a library. I think what was really unhelpful was probably my leadership at my Baptist church, the Southern Baptist church, that, in my opinion, just did not take me seriously enough to really refute me or to rebuke me. because I think I was being kind of a pest and I was being a troublemaker in my, in my group, because I would, you know, I would argue people with people.

I was like those evangelists that Michael was with. I was wanting to argue, always argue that stuff. And, uh, and just was contentious and was, you know, always, you know, just a problem and nobody could really refute me. I think my pastor could have, but he just didn't do it because, well, I don't want to be, I want to be a nice guy and I don't want to discourage this young man.

And I was like, well, you need to discourage this young man. Looking back on it, it's like I really needed to be hosed down with some cold water or something because I was just disruptive. And I bet your fellowship group didn't have any peace until after I left, you know, and came out here to California. but you know and as i was growing in that um i think the next thing that this was actually helpful was i got a hold of gail ripplinger's big old book um new age bible versions where she's trying to argue that there's this satanic conspiracy with all these new versions that are going to usher in the antichrist and all that and uh so if you're reading a new by a new version well then you're a you know you're a sympathizer with the antichrist and you're going be a new ager and uh but her stuff uh was what really got me into looking out more i was reading her research and her footnotes and in her bibliography and i was trying to find the source material that she referenced and when i did i soon discovered i mean within a matter of moments of reading it that she was utterly misquoting people and taking things out of context and reading her weird stuff into people's writings and that began to open my eyes to say well maybe these people are not as not as solid as i thought they were and uh then and then it was the calvinism as i was growing in my knowledge of god um i also found out these king james only hate calvinists and i was like well i i love this doctrine it's resonating with my heart and I feel the truth of it.

And, and I see this being taught in scripture as I'm looking at the word of God. And it's just a matter of just slowly these things coming to sort of fall into place, these little pieces that I realized, you know, this is maybe this King James only ism stuff is not as what I thought it was. And, and eventually just renouncing it altogether, just getting out of it and seeing the errors.

There were some other men that I started learning from. I think his name's Doug Cudlick, who's a independent fundamental Baptist guy. He kind of comes from these, he might be deceased now. I haven't gotten an email from him in a long time, but I was on his little newsletter and he spent a lot of time refuting King James only arguments. And he did so really well.

And just learning from him and just people like that, that just sort of reoriented my thinking about God's word. And, you know, it just that's what was really helpful for me as I was going through my journey. Finally coming out of that and when you write about it and finally are like, oh, OK, I can now write about this and help other believers. That's when you know it's for real.

And, you know, God's brought you through that little fire. I guess we wouldn't call it that, but that was sort of my journey as I was going through it. Did you have more questions, Garrett? I thought you'd have some technical stuff. Or any more comments? I didn't have any more questions at this point.

I was trying to come up with some more. No worries. We're doing a legacy translation now at Masters College. So Masters University. So what's the legacy translation? I wish I wouldn't call it translation because they're not translating anything.

They're basically taking the New American Standard 1995 text. And they're basically, this sounds kind of derogatory, but they're Mac-ifying it. No, they're trying to make like a really good translation that sort of reflects the language as better than what they felt that the New American Standard did. The men who are involved in it are good, solid guys.

I think one of the things that they're going to do is where you have the capital L-O-R-D for Lord, it's really it's the Yahweh is there. they're going to actually transliterate Yahweh, you know, in the text instead of Lord. I'm actually kind of a fan of the Lord because it's just the reverence thing that I have just kind of come to know. And you can explain the capital L-O-R-D when you preach the text.

You don't have to see it there. They're doing stuff like that. I think they going to change tongues to languages to kind of sort of take out the zip of the charismatics as it were I trying to think of some other stuff that they trying to do They going to have at the Shepherds Conference this next year I think like, I don't know if it's the New Testament, it might be the New Testament and Psalms that they've completed.

Did Governor Newsom say you could have a Shepherds Conference? I don't think anyone cares what he says. so we're gonna do it anyway if we're gonna if it happens he would probably be more bumping in uh button heads with barbara freer and la county health before we button heads with gavin newsome he's too busy at his wine winery up in napa valley oh okay interested in stuff coming down down in la but yeah as far as i know we're still on i mean that's just a couple of months away yeah think about it and you know i'm sure this surge is it going to be slowing down anytime soon uh so i don't know we'll see as far as i know we're still going i'm going i'm looking forward to it all right so how do people get your book you can go to amazon and you can uh google well it's google i guess you have a search on amazon uh royal deceptions fred butler and it'll come right up it should be the first thing that comes into your box there because the kindle version and a lovely paperback version which i would all recommend because my friend josh comstock did the he did the cover and it's really well done what's um what's the uh price of the book um i think it's like 12.99 or something i can't remember 13 or so for the book paperbacks 179 pages or something like that okay so it's not a terribly long read then no it's not only yeah it's kind of yeah you could probably read this in a few yeah there's 165 print pages and then the blank pages and all the other fluffy stuff you got to put in the front end uh so it comes up to 179 or something like that i can't remember what but yeah you know something um i've really enjoyed learning how to do that it was it was not a it wasn't easy but it wasn't hard either so you know i would encourage folks i think the only cost that i spent was like getting an isbin number and paying to have the you know put a good cover on it and you know it just i had some friend help me with the type setting and all that stuff and I was very pleased with what it come out looking like. So you don't have like a garage with 10,000 of these books sitting there?

No, that's one of the great things about Amazon is you can, if you've got something like that, you can put it up on their site. I would honestly, the hardest part was kind of, for me, was sort of pulling together the manuscript to make it look nice in a PDF and then submitting it and setting up everything on Amazon. And it was like, they'll do it though. they print like a handful but they pretty much print for as you order it they'll print print you a copy so it's not like a you don't have to you know commit to 10,000 first run copies that they're going to send out and you got to go through them in order to update your problems or anything because i as soon as i got my first copy here i was like oh man this thing is not spaced correctly and this word is misspelled most people don't see that stuff but if you're a If you wrote it and put it together, it's the first thing that jumps off the page.

It looks terrible. So I've already corrected all that stuff. So they're seriously printing like one copy? As I understand it, their system, depending on the popularity of the book. So if you like, if my book, I think there was maybe 25 people that really jumped on it the first few days that it was out. and they probably printed maybe 30 copies of it so that they could have it ready to send out you know to make their two-day you know amazon prime stuff but then what they'll do again they just they kind of watch that you know they're they're the best in the business at capacity planning like logistics i it is i'm sure they have a system that's doing it well predictive analysis and things like that but so you don't sell the book so if somebody ordered it you're not shipping it to them it's coming no no amazon will ship it to them okay so so the signature is is just fake no i'll say yes you have to come to the shepherd's conference you have to bring your books to the shepherd's conference i'll be happy to sign them for you okay i've only done it for two people so far i felt all proud and everything for just a moment it's like wow what a yeah what a blessing and i try to make my signature legible not like one of those lame you know squiggles christian yeah those uh big eva celebrities it just sort of scribbles her name on there anyhow that's what the peasants get yeah you know us peasants i come from the little people So I understand being a little person myself.

Well, do you, Garrett, you're going to publish a book, right? That's been on hold for quite a while. I'm probably going to go through the whole thing again, because what I originally did was do all my own translation. And now I'm kind of going, OK, you know, maybe I should just kind of stick with one. And, you know, we've got this Legacy Standard Bible coming out soon.

So once I'm able to evaluate more of that text, I might go, okay. What's your topic? What are you going to write about? It's basically a giant gospel tract. Like okay based on the conversations that I had at my work and I never had a more ripe place for evangelism than inside a trailer unloading packages because you got some 18 to 22 who not quite sure what he doing with his life And he literally stuck with me for an hour while we unloading packages because you got some you know 18 to 22 year old who not quite sure what he doing with his life And he literally stuck with me for an hour while we unloading packages together And I can you know just kind of guide the conversation into the gospel and you know, so it was, you know, back, back when I was an unloader at my employer, you know, that, that was a huge part of my life, being able to, you know, share the gospel while, working in a not so awkward on the street, hey, come over here.

If I talk about, oh, no, no, I want to do your survey. I don't want to buy anything. That kind of thing. It's basically an evangelistic book. Did you just call my entire method of evangelism awkward? Do you do one of those survey things?

No way. The Southern Baptist has some of the... I somehow doubt Michael does the whole, hey, I'm doing a survey. Oh, no, not the survey. I just meant like grabbing people on the street and making them talk to me. Yeah, the Southern Baptists have some of the cringiest evangelistic, you know, starter things.

And that was one of them I just hated is you have this fake survey that's asking them about, I think at the time when I was a kid, it was like asking about what's your view about the war in Iraq? and you talk to them about that, but then you do this weird transition to, okay, so if you were to die tonight and you were standing before Jesus, what would you say to him? And it's like, okay, where did that come from? It's out of nowhere.

So is the modern version of that, hey, what do you think of Donald Trump? That's a real way to get people to open up. Yeah, I guess so. That would be the... I would have to spend more time teaching people that there was a war in Iraq than the gospel. So that's not a good one.

Yeah, I've never liked all those hooks. Personally, I know it's off topic now, but I've never liked all the weird hooks to get people involved. The whole Ray Comfort flashing money deal and stuff. I never liked that stuff. and uh so i just i've just always gotten up and preached and well what garrett's saying is the best way i mean he's there just it's his regular life he's loading the truck yeah the guy i mean you kind of bill you probably see him every day or at least you know around you know whenever you're getting help you're getting help together and it's actually the i won't say it's the hardest evangelism because I suppose within your own family can be really hard for the same reason, but going to work and giving the gospel to people while you're working and you do it in a way where you're not not working.

But it hit me. I remember it hit me one day that I had given the gospel to everyone I worked with and months had gone by and I was like, okay, they're still, they're still watching me though. You know, there's, they still see my behavior and they hear my phone calls, you know, with my wife and they, they know the kind of person I am when, when my church people aren't around.

And in fact, I was reading, I was reading this morning, I think it was Matthew Henry about first Peter three talk about wives, conduct and how it'll attract their husbands ultimately to to the the gospel itself uh unsaved husbands and it and it was saying and and one thing he said he said he i don't remember exactly but non-believers are are always keeping an eye on the religious people around them to to find any like chink in their armor basically you know yeah that's true and so you start giving the gospel to other guys at work uh they're gonna miss something there but they're gonna they're gonna start keeping their eye on you and your behavior and they're going to start um coming to you for help too when they need it right because then they're going to know like oh you're the guy that that has the religious answer when they really do want one yep that's that's one that you learn that quickly is that people if you're going to claim christ people are going to watch you so if you do so inconsistently or hypocritically i think that's probably one of the i wrote an article a long time ago about why kids leave the faith or something like that and it's i mean obviously it's always these um hysterical sort of uh apologetic ministries it has these articles about why your young people are walking away from the faith and it's always some kind of that you didn't do apologetics right or you emphasize young earth creationism too much or something stupid like that and i was like no i didn't doing it because they're not saved they're unregenerate they're unregenerate and their parents are probably hypocritical and they make church and the youth group plays stupid games and they don't teach him the bible i mean there's lots of reasons why people those are the key ones and and um but i just said look you know as parents as young people you're going to have to realize your kids are watching you and they want people want parents are going to be consistent show them that they love them and they care about enough about them to give them the gospel and to tell them the truth and this is the same with your unbelieving co-workers and if you do mess up you know how do you respond to that you know if you get an angry response to one of your co-workers you're getting some kind of you punt you punt somebody's cell phone at their door yeah do you come by or do you come later hey you know that was really wrong for me because i think when you if you actually reach out and try to ask you know ask for forgiveness and apologize and for something you might have done wrong they're going to be like yeah okay we're all good they do that awkward sort of, you know, I'm just, I'm uncomfortable. this you know you being all open with me and everything they're thinking that in their hearts and they're trying to be all nice oh yeah it's not a big deal but it was a big deal so that's going to talk to them though they're going to say what that guy came back and apologized these other people never did you know whatever it is and so they're right they definitely watch you and they want to see how you respond to things and how do you respond to trials in life and And that comes part of it. With respect to King James only is an intellectual criticism. We touched on how apologetics can be made very difficult by King James only is and when you don't have a big, you know, a solid foundational basis for how we got our Bible.

But that was, you know, textual criticism is a topic that's come up in my evangelism at work. You know, ask any random person. OK, why? What do you think about the Bible? Well, it was translated a bunch of times. So clearly we don't have what was originally said.

So there's a few gotcha questions you put in there. Okay, which manuscript do you not like? Okay, they can't name one. Or two, okay, what if it were accurate? Or okay, if I could show it to you to be accurate. Or three, okay, what if some scholars did some work and they really did arrive at the accurate text, would you then follow it?

And then it goes right back to what Fred was saying about regeneration. Okay, the reason you're really not following is because you're unregenerate and you're a sinner and you love your sin, etc. It's not so much of these other reasons that you're bringing up. I'm happy to give you those answers and to show you why that's not the reason. Yeah, the other one that I think I remember seeing a guy a long time ago that had like a series of articles on the internet about apologetics.

And, you know, you always have that person's like, well, it's full of errors. Oh, yeah. Well, can you tell me what is the one? it you're absolutely convinced it makes the bible unbelievable because it's an error can you what is it well you know they never have those that never have an example and if they and then you just challenge them hey well give me the one example if i can give you a reasonable rational response to why that problem is and you can give an answer to that problem would you believe christ and turn from your sin and believe the scriptures and then there's uh well uh probably not you know so yeah that's exactly right it's it's it those little gotcha questions i think yeah it's basically the whole the bible came about by the telephone game it is really most people's argument you know the bible's been translated so many times they say you know like what do you mean translated so many like i think it's wonderful it's been translated a lot what they mean is that's how it was transmitted right like they think the message has been lost yeah they think it was greek and then hebrew and then aramaic and then uh and then volgate and then king james and then it you know it's like it went through google translate you ever see that one girl that would take Disney songs, and she would put them through Google Translate six or seven times and then bring it back to English, and then she'd sing it.

You know, that's what people pretend like. And no, that's a good point, Garrett, that by studying to show ourselves approved, which is especially what pastors ought to do, which is why it's inexcusable when pastors get this wrong we can actually help people And when people say something about the Bible where it like okay obviously you read six headlines on Facebook by atheists in your life Why don we dig a little deeper? Why don't we read it?

Or why don't you read this chapter? Tell me what you think it means even. And I probably don't do enough of that. I'm more of a stand and preach guy. and especially with uh the covid situation i'm i'm not co cohabitating is not the best word i'm i'm not co co-locating with so many people at work anymore right my my my involvement with people at work is all zoom uh it's not zoom it's what do we use microsoft teams but it's all remote conversations it's all quick and then we're off to the next thing and and i don't have as many of those water cooler conversations that i used to so it's a little it takes a little more effort to try to give out the gospel to people you were doing like a series of uh podcasts i think at one time just sort of going through it was like the 40 objections to yeah i have to christianity that was really well done for the most part and we my kids um i have teenage boys in particular and i actually went to that document and we talked about this guy's objections we sort of do that for like little devotionals yeah uh just uh okay what is he saying here and i was uh you know and after probably maybe the 10th one he's like you know this is he's already kind of objected to this it's a lot of this is repetitious and it's not really thought through.

And, and why are they holding this guy up? Like he's some sort of expert or some, you know, guy has really just put the hammer down on Christianity because a lot of this stuff is silly and petty. It's, it's kind of funny how my kids reacted to it, which I was grateful that they did, you know, that they saw that they saw through that. Yeah. Of course I try to remind them, look guys, if you're saying this is true or if you're saying that this guy is wrong you're accountable to the truth that you know is right that refutes him what are you going to do with that you can't reject it when you get out there so I try to hold them accountable to the gospel that's good that's good well I think that this was a good discussion and hopefully I don't want to spoil your book, but also we didn't talk a ton about the book either.

So I hope really what I wanted was that people would be interested in you from a good discussion and that we'd satisfy whatever curiosity Garrett had about King James and translations. I know he kind of geeks out about translating Hebrew and Greek and doing the word studies. And so I really enjoy I enjoy both of you. So I encourage people to buy your book and help get Fred a better microphone.

But that one's pretty nice looking. And also, you know, go to thingsabove.us. And Garrett, you probably have at least a dozen articles now that have gone into some kind of detail of either comparing different English versions or, you know, talking about critiquing, you know, how people have translated for a particular version. And it always very interesting His stuff gets circulated big time too by big names I don know if you knew that or not I think Phil tweeted out stuff from you I didn't know that.

You didn't know that? You didn't see any traffic? There was one point he replied endorsed, but it was a post concerning – Andy Stanley. Frank Turek and Andy Stanley. No. What was that about?

I vaguely remember that too. It was basically the view of inerrancy that's more – what's the word? Basically the view of inerrancy where you have to find evidence outside of the Bible for inerrancy rather than it's inerrant because God wrote it. Okay. It basically turns into a house of cards. You find one little fact that could possibly be wrong in the Bible. where we find a little bit of historical evidence that appears to conflict, and therefore the entire Bible is wrong.

I'm kind of going, no, that's not inerrancy. It couldn't be the evidence, or it couldn't be the little points wrong, misunderstanding the Bible. It never goes the other way. It's always the Bible is the one that's completely wrong. Well, it could be that your science is wrong. You have to argue to the Bible and prove the Bible, and just kind of build it up instead of, you know, God inspired it.

No, you did something on ESV. I can't remember. There was some stuff that you've done, and I've seen people. tweet out and that's like wow okay you've got some so you get some big people that come to your to tweet you out every once in a while i'll try to alert you the next time that that happens okay okay i had eric metaxas sarcastically call me super righteous once is that good i don't know why were you super righteous uh because i implied that that the pope was a blasphemer well yes i don't know there you go well i'll tell i'll let metaxas know what you think of uh that as well then her her metaxas so that was that was my brush with uh i didn't know who the guy was i was just i i remember this guy and a guy kind of argued online and i didn't know who he was it's just like okay you know he's just one of these guys that's kind of a catholic uh I don't know.

He's just like a guy. Is he Catholic? No, he was like a Catholic apologist in this argument we had, though. You know, he was kind of defending things. And I thought, well, you know, he's just one of these guys that doesn't seem to understand Roman Catholicism. And then later I found out that he was, I don't even know what you'd call the guy.

Is he semi-famous or something? He's a radio talk show host. Yeah, I know. I understand. Yeah, there's some politics. I started writing for the blog, I started writing for Things Above Us, and I listened to the audiobook version of his biography on Martin Luther, and my opinion of it was originally positive, you know, save for like one point where I was like, okay, kids can't listen to this, and I'll leave it at that, but then I started seeing what he was tweeting out about Roman Catholicism, and I'm kind of going okay what did I miss Yeah you know maybe I need to hold off and I never wrote that review I didn put any words on a page and i probably dodged a bullet with that one you know before i endorsed a book and then the rug pulled out from under me yeah no well you criticized his bonhoeffer book on your blog fred yeah well i think i was getting that from somebody there were some other people who know about bonhoeffer's life bonhoeffer wasn't necessarily an orthodox guy we can we commit we We're permitted.

We're I guess we could say we we can bless his works where he's trying to stand up for the church during a very hostile situation with the Nazis. But I mean, overall, I think he was one of these sort of liberal, higher critical sort of theologians when you kind of boil down to it. And just because he was an anti-Nazi doesn't mean that he's some kind of theological hero that we need to emulate.

I mean, he said some good stuff. We appreciate his backbone and his willingness to want to stand up against the awful political regime. But why people would want to rush to him as some sort of biblical hero that we need to promote, I just don't get it. It just, it's the same with C.S. Lewis. I mean, C.S.

Lewis wrote a lot of good stuff and I've enjoyed reading his novels, his kid novels, Chronicles of Narnia stuff, but he's not, he had a lot of unorthodox views of scripture and to look at his as some sort of master apologist that we need to like learn from and, you know, sit at his feet. I don't get it. Solid believers. There might be some things you can kind of go, okay, I can get that.

But to look at him like, oh, if you haven't read this part about C.S. Lewis, and you haven't read C.S. Lewis on this one, then somehow you're missing your calling as an evangelist. It's just like, okay, whatever. Yeah, I hear you. It's good to talk to you guys. we'll have to have Garrett keep cranking out good content for the seminary types and I enjoy it too it's sometimes I have to let me put it this way I read all the posts of things above us and I have to read Garrett slower than than all the other ones because he's the more technical one and he uses you use more words that that are just not familiar to me on a regular basis because you're using technical jargon a lot of times and there's nothing wrong with that it's actually educational.

Well, he presents it rather entertainingly. I mean, I like that. Except for the Formula One stuff. I can't trudge through that. Oh. Well, Fred, thanks for coming on.

And Garrett, thanks for coming on. I appreciate you guys joining me on my podcast here. It was a joy. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to Be a Berean. with your host, Michael Coughlin. I am a writer at thingsabove.us and I also have a personal website, michaelcoughlin.net You can contact me by emailing me, michael at thingsabove.us I hope that you have been encouraged to search the scriptures.