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England vigilantly resisted the Jesuit strategy of persecution and infiltration of the Protestant Church until the 19th century when Cardinal Wiseman, an Englishman went to Rome to study under Cardinal Mai, editor of the Vatican Manuscript. Cardinal Wiseman would skillfully direct the Counter-Reformation, at first from Rome and later from within the United Kingdom. Dr. Samuel Gipp describes the remarkable success of this influential figure: "Wiseman had a desire to see England return to the fold at Rome . . . While in Rome, he was visited by several Neo-Protestants. He was instrumental in 'weaning' these men back into subjection to the Pope… (One) visitor was Anglican Archbishop Trench, who returned to England to promote a revision of the Authorized Version and even joined the Revision Committee of 1871. Still another was John Henry Newman. Newman was the brilliant English churchman who was a leader of Oxford University and the English clergy." (20) In 1845, John Henry Newman left the Church of England and formally joined the Roman Catholic Church, following the steps of another Oxford professor named Ward, who had written a book teaching the worship of Mary and ‘mental reservation.’ Mental reservation is the act, condoned by the Roman Catholic Church, of lying to keep from revealing your ties to Rome… "Thus the author of Lead Kindly Light passed over to Rome, and within one year 150 clergyman and eminent laymen also had joined the Catholic Church." (21) Meanwhile, Dr. Gipp has recorded… "In 1836, three years following Newman and Froude’s visit, (Cardinal Wiseman) had moved to Ireland to supervise the Oxford Movement through his paper the ‘Dublin Review.’ Wiseman was described as, ‘a textual critic of the first rank,’ and assisted by the information seemingly passed on to him from the Jesuits, he was able to finish the facts well calculated to combat confidence in the Protestant Bible." (22) Dr. Fuller has identified the ultimate triumph of the Oxford Movement, which in the aftermath weakened not only the doctrinal foundation of the Church of England, but also confidence in the Authorized Version of the Bible: "By the year 1870, so powerful had become the influence of the Oxford Movement, that a theological bias in favor of Rome was affecting men in high authority. Many of the sacred institutions of Protestant England had been assailed and some of them had been completely changed. The attack on the Thirty-nine Articles by Tract 90, and the subversion of fundamental Protestant doctrines within the Church of England had been so bold and thorough, that an attempt to substitute a version which would theologically and legally discredit our common Protestant version would not be a surprise." (23) |
The New Greek Text |
In 1851, publisher Daniel Macmillan suggested to two Cambridge professors they take part in an interesting and comprehensive "New Testament Scheme" that is, to undertake a joint revision of the Greek New Testament. Privately and without authorization of the Church of England, Fenton John Anthony Hort and Brooke Foss Westcott, who later became an Anglican bishop, (24) proceeded to create, not a revision, but an altogether New Greek Text. (25) According to Dr. Hort, the intention of the revisers was to radically alter the Traditional or Majority Text. "Our object is to supply clergymen generally, schools, etc., with a portable Greek Text which shall not be disfigured with Byzantine corruption's." (26) The correction of "Byzantine corruption's" by Hort and Westcott was, in fact, the substitution of corrupt Alexandrian manuscripts for the Textus Receptus, the text that was used and accepted for nearly two millennia of church history and which agrees with the majority of manuscripts extant today. Secular historians, and also the sons of Drs. Westcott and Hort, have documented the unorthodox doctrines and occult affiliations of these two clergymen during the thirty year period in which they edited the New Testament Greek Text and guided the English revision Committee. Excerpts from The Letters of B.F. Westcott and F.J.A. Hort present some of these extraordinary revelations which demonstrate the heretical bias of these men who served as Bible translators and/or revisers. Drs. Westcott and Hort were also pioneers of Spiritualist inquiry during The Nineteenth Century Occult Revival, having founded the Cambridge Ghost Society, which was the parent organisation of the present day Society for Psychical Research. |
The Westcott and Hort Theory |
In 1853, Dr. Hort wrote, "He (Westcott) and I are going to edit a Greek text of the New Testament some two or three years hence, if possible. Lachmann and Tischendorf will supply rich materials, but not nearly enough; and we hope to do a good deal with Oriental versions." (27) Karl Lachmann (1793-1851) was professor of Classical and German Philology in Berlin, and also a German rationalist and textual critic who produced modern editions of the New Testament in Germany in 1842 and 1850. Lachmann began to apply to the New Testament Greek text the same rules that he had used in editing texts of the Greek classics, which had been radically altered over the years. Having also set up a series of several presuppositions and rules which he used for arriving at the original text of the Greek classics, he then began with these same presuppositions and rules to correct the New Testament which he assumed was hopelessly corrupted. (28) Lachmann’s theories laid the foundation for the German school of higher criticism which rejected the authenticity of the Gospels, particularly the miracles, and also the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith. The widespread acceptance of Lachmann’s work furnished the critical authority for Drs. Westcott and Hort in their formulation of a method of Textual Criticism, known as the Westcott and Hort Textual Theory. Drs. Westcott and Hort hypothesised that that the original New Testament text had survived in near perfect condition in two manuscripts other than the Received Greek Text and that the early church used these manuscripts to edit the Textus Receptus. The Westcott-Hort Theory, which maintains that the true text of Scripture was lost by the true Church for approximately 1600 years, has since been discredited for lack of historical evidence. (29) Constantin Tischendorf (1815-74) was a German textual editor whom Dr. Frederick Scrivener of the English Revision Committee ranked "the first Bible Critic in Europe." Tischendorf travelled extensively in search of ancient documents and was responsible for finding the two manuscripts most relied upon in the Westcott-Hort Greek Text, the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. Tischendorf discovered (c. A.D. 1844) the Vaticanus B manuscript in the Vatican Library and Sinaiticus Aleph in a waste basket in a Catholic convent at the base of Mt. Sinai. (30) Psalm 108:5 promises that God will preserve His Word "unto a thousand generations." For this reason, He would never allow it to be suppressed or withheld from His people as the Roman Catholic hierarchy did for 1400 years. It is reasonable to assume that God removed these manuscripts from circulation because they were not His Word. Pursuing their self-serving revisionist hypothesis, Westcott and Hort used the Codex Vaticanus (B) and the Codex Sinaiticus (Aleph) manuscripts as the basis for their New Testament Greek Text, which in turn was the basis for the 1881 text adopted by the ERV revisers. (31) Dean John Burgon, who led the opposition to the English revision, described for his English readers the corrupt character of the manuscripts primarily used by Westcott and Hort, not to revise the Textus Receptus, but to create an altogether new Greek Text. "It matters nothing that all four are discovered on careful scrutiny to differ essentially, not only from ninety-nine out of a hundred of the whole body of extant MSS, besides, but even from one another. This last circumstance, obviously fatal to their corporate pretensions, is unaccountably overlooked. And yet it admits of only one satisfactory explanation: viz. That in different degrees they all five exhibit a fabricated text. . .We venture to assure [the reader] without a particle of hesitation, that Aleph, B, D, are three of the most scandalously corrupt copies extant: -- exhibit the most shamefully mutilated texts which are anywhere to be met with: -- have become, by whatever process (for their history is wholly unknown), the depositories of the largest amount of fabricated readings, ancient blunders, and intentional perversions of Truth, -- which are discoverable in any known copies of the Word of God." (32) |
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