Endorsement to Dr. Gail Riplinger’s new book
Hazardous Materials
James
H. Sightler, M.D.
Sightler Publications
I am happy to give my complete endorsement to Dr. Gail Riplinger’s
new book Hazardous Materials, Greek and Hebrew Study Dangers, The
Voice of Strangers.
This new hardback book, with 1203 pages, very well illustrated, is
an admirable extension of New Age Bible Versions and In Awe of Thy
Word. It is much more detailed and incorporates new information and
analysis not available when those books were written. The reader
should not be hesitant to delve into these details, which give a
clearer and much more complete picture of that great Victorian Web
of characters, most English but some American, who shaped biblical
criticism and worldviews in the mid 19th century. Unbelief we have
always had with us, but it seems to have reached a zenith in the
Victorian Web. The Web sometimes involved theologians, philosophers,
poets, novelists, academicians, and political figures; sometimes by
personal contact and friendship, sometimes government service,
sometimes philosophical agreement from reading the writings of other
members of the Web, sometimes only correspondence between members
who were not acquainted, or even an osmotic taking up of the beliefs
of other members of the Web. Not all its members had exactly the
same beliefs, but there was a basic similarity between them. In
order to understand how revision came about in 1881, how unbelief
infiltrated the churches, how that unbelief persists today in many
places where it should have been rejected, believers must know in
detail the Web and the nature of its members and understand its
structure and the unorthodox and often morally wicked principles it
put forward. The Victorian Web has been the foundation of the new
age movement, and its intellectual descendents from that day forward
have always promoted revision of the King James Bible. Dr.
Riplinger’s new book expounds the 19th century problems clearly,
while it also points out the history of unbelief in much earlier
days. We also now know that it was indeed Westcott and Hort and
Lightfoot, the Cambridge Triumvirate, who introduced not only text
criticism but Higher Criticism as well to Britain between 1850 and
1900.1
Why is there today a body of fundamental, believing Christians and
churches whose theology and practice is exactly the same as that of
the early New Testament churches? It is because the true church has
always had the scriptures, in translated vernacular form, to search
and study and draw sustenance from, to bear witness to and provide
the guidance of the Holy Ghost who gives understanding to believers
in the true churches.
In 1925 Kirsopp Lake, a text critic trained in the Victorian Web,
candidly admitted:
Fundamentalism is…survival of a theology which was once universally
held by all Christians. How many were there, for instance, in
Christian churches in the eighteenth century who doubted the
infallible inspiration of all Scripture? A few, perhaps, but very
few. No, the Fundamentalist may be wrong; I think that he is. But it
is we who have departed from the tradition, not he, and I am sorry
for the fate of anyone who tries to argue with a Fundamentalist on
the basis of authority. The Bible and the corpus theologicum of the
Church is on the Fundamentalist side.”2
What was the outlook of that Victorian Web? The foremost
characteristic was unbelief in the verbal plenary inspiration of
scripture and its literal truth, whether Hebrew or Greek manuscript
or any translation. This leads at once to the denial of the truths
of the first 11 chapters of Genesis and to espousal of an
evolutionary view of everything: society, law, language, religion,
morality, the creation of the cosmos, and biology. It brings about
the denial of the primacy of Hebrew language (with vowel points
given by God at least as early as Moses if not before the flood) and
Hebrew civilization and promotes the view that Egypt and India were
the first civilizations with Indo-European or Sanskrit the earliest
language. With respect to the evolution of religion, A. P. Stanley,
Dean of Westminster, host and organizer of the English Revision
Committee, believed, with the German higher critic Bunsen, that the
intended sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham was a relic of early Jewish
worship of Moloch, and that his failure to carry it through was an
illustration of the evolution of Judiasm from Cannanite worship of
Moloch to worship of Jehovah3 and not a prefigure of God’s plan of
redemption through his Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,
the Lord Jesus Christ.
It denied the first institution God gave, the family, consisting of
a man and his complementary helpmeet, woman, and children, the man
being the leader of the family but loving his wife as Christ loved
the church. It denied the existence of Satan and of the fall of man
which resulted from questioning of what God had commanded. It denied
or gave no importance to the Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ.
It denied the transcendence of God and his existence separate from
his created universe. This in its turn means that God is in
everything or that everything has proceeded from the substance of
God. Therefore there is no distinction between good and evil and God
is within every man. No religion can be exclusively the only way to
God and redemption; therefore we have the universalism of the Broad
Church and pagan monism, if you will, which is the belief that all
things are one; as Westcott put it so often “the one life.” Today we
hear the same concept referred to as “the circle of life.” To
Westcott the one life was the life of Christ in every man rather
than in those who have been saved by grace by the blood of Jesus who
is the only begotten Son of God. Evolution is inherently monistic
and was the prevailing philosophy of the Broad Church and the
Victorian Web in the mid-19th century.
If the transcendence of God is denied, and there is no distinction
between good and evil, then there is no absolute truth and no
foundation for God’s schoolmaster, His Law, and no need for
atonement and grace if there was no fall. No absolute truth means no
absolute basis for a rational and stable lexicography to be employed
in translation of any biblical manuscript. Dynamic rather than
formal equivalence becomes the preferred method of translation. We
are then doomed to continual revision of the Bible and to an ever
increasing separation from the ancient doctrines of the church. The
new NIV scheduled for 2011 is likely to be gender neutral. We must
not heed the voice of these strangers whether they are the wicked,
some even perverted, Greek and Hebrew lexicographers of the
Victorian Web or their modern day academic disciples.
Socialism is one more inevitable result of monism. If, as monists
believe, there is only one reality, one life, then the natural
expression of that belief is collectivity in the practices of daily
life and de-emphasis of individuality. Westcott was the leader of
the Christian Socialist movement in Britain. The Bible in contrast
upholds individuality and individual liberty and responsibility. The
Magna Carta is based on Deuteronomy 17:14-20 and circumscribes the
behavior of a king and any other elected representative of the
people. The right to life, liberty, and property are firmly
established in the Bible, and that is why they are held to in the
American Declaration of Independence. Both of these documents
fortunately predate the Victorian Web and its influence and our
Declaration is the result of the orthodox Christianity of our
founding fathers.
Mysticism and the occult beliefs of many members of the Web are also
natural consequences of monistic philosophy. Dr. Riplinger shows how
mysticism or critical text unbelief have characterized many famous
Biblical critics and lexicographers; from Cardinal Bessarion to
Reuchlin and his kabbala in the Renaissance, to the liberal Liddell,
Ginsburg the kabbalist, Thayer the Unitarian, Moulton, Milligan,
Trench, George Ricker Berry (Interlinear Greek-English New
Testament) and C. A. Briggs in the time of the Victorian Web, and
down to Bauer, Kittel, Danker, Zodhiates, and Bruce Metzger in the
present day.
Perhaps the most infamous of the 19th century lexicographers was
Henry Liddell, author of the Liddell-Scott lexicon and Dean of
Christ Church at Oxford. He was director of the Oxford University
Press and with Prime Minister Gladstone agreed in 1871 to have the
Oxford and Cambridge university presses pay for revision and then
publish the ERV in 1881. His closest friends, all members of the
Web, several in the Broad church party, were George Eliot (nee Mary
Ann Evans), A. P. Stanley, John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, Benjamin
Jowett, Max Muller, C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Robert Scott, who
was one of the revisers, and Cecil Rhodes. Dodgson never married and
held a mathematical lectureship at Christ College, Oxford, from
1853-1879. He was supposed to become a priest in 1862, but he
admired F. D. Maurice and theosophy and was a friend of George
MacDonald, who was also a follower of Maurice, Emerson, and the
occultist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Liddell decided in 1862 not to bring
the matter before the Oxford board and so allowed Dodgson to remain
on the Christ Church faculty as the only member not ordained.
Liddell then tolerated an outrageous pedophilic attraction of
Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) to his daughter Alice Liddell, who became
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The idea for Alice began in 1862
during a rowboat trip Carroll and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth
took with Alice and her 13 and 8 year old sisters. It was George
Macdonald who insisted on publication of Carroll’s stories begun
during that trip.4 Carroll took provocative photographs of Alice
partly clothed and of at least 5 other young girls who were nude.
About half of his many photographs were of young girls. He asked to
court Alice in 1863 when she was 11 and he was 31 but the
relationship seemed to end shortly after. Dodgson knew John Ruskin,
whose marriage was annulled in 1854 after 6 years for lack of
consummation. After 1863 Ruskin, who also knew George MacDonald, was
attracted to Alice Liddell and 4 years later to a 10 year old girl.
One of the worst consequences of unbelief in the truth of the Bible
that the Victorian Web gave us is a denial of the distinction
between man and woman, a distinction founded in God’s creation. God
made a basic difference in the genetic constitution of men and women
and ordained their proper relationship in the Bible. But androgyny
is pagan and is another consequence of monism. Some in the Victorian
Web, such as Professor Benjamin Jowett of Oxford, unwisely and
wickedly taught the toleration or acceptance of ancient Greek sexual
practice as a Platonic intellectual ideal, and many in the Web let
that teaching progress to openly aberrant sexuality-sodomy and
pederasty. These hazardous and horrible things appeared in mid-19th
century private and exclusive English educational institutions at
both preparatory and college levels and were engaged in by a
chaplain to the Queen and prominent future member of the English
Revision Committee of 1881, Charles John Vaughan. He began his
pederasty as early as 1851 with an 11 year old student. Sodomy was
also frequently practiced among the students themselves. Vaughan,
headmaster of Harrow School and the brother in law of Dean of
Westminster, A. P. Stanley, hired Westcott as a teacher at Harrow
School in 1852 when he was 36 and Westcott 27. His behavior was
known and tolerated by a number of Greek scholars who were to become
members of the New Testament committee while the Westcott-Hort Greek
text was being compiled, long before revision began in 1870. Dr.
Riplinger shows us the close friendship and collaboration between
Vaughan, Westcott, and those later leaders of the committee. Finally
after 8 years his pederasty became known to some students and to an
upstanding and influential contemporary physician and father of a
student who, by threat of public revelation of the scandal, forced
Vaughan to resign as headmaster of Harrow in 1859 and become vicar
of Doncaster in Wales. Westcott for a time took Vaughan’s place.
Prime Minister Gladstone knew Vaughan’s problem but in 1869 plucked
him out of the well deserved exile his behavior had brought about,
giving him a prominent ecclesiastical position, Master of the Temple
in London.5 This carried with it a seat as First Baron of the Realm
in the House of Lords and paved the way for his appointment as a New
Testament reviser.
Today we witness the admitted lesbianism of an adviser to the NIV
translators and see about us here the movement for homosexual
marriage, for repeal of the defense of marriage act, for open
homosexuality in the military, and the introduction and teaching of
homosexual behavior to children even of kindergarten age. These
developments in our society may be traced directly back to the
beliefs of many members of the Victorian Web. The line runs from the
present day czar of the “safe schools program”, Kevin Jennings, back
to Harry Hay, to Edward Carpenter, to Walt Whitman, to C. J.
Vaughan, and many others.
Many things never before documented in any book defending the King
James Bible are directly and strongly given in this new book. In the
Preface to the King James Bible, in a section entitled ‘Translation
Necessary,’ the KJB translators plainly describe Hebrew as the “the
ancientest” tongue with no indication that their view was ever
controversial. They believed, as did John Gill, the early origin of
the vowel points as well as the primacy of the Hebrew language. So
much for Max Muller and his Sanskrit. So much also for Elias Levita,
who spent 13 years privately teaching the kabbala to Cardinal
Egidius Viterbo, and just after in 1527 displaced ben Chayyim from
the Bomberg press. Levita argued, in opposition to ben Chayyim and
Bomberg, that the vowel points began with the Tiberian masoretes
about 500 AD. So much also for C. D. Ginsburg, one of the higher
critics on the ERV Old Testament committee, who also held to
Levita’s arguments. Ginsburg denied, with the higher critics, that
Solomon wrote the book of Ecclesiastes. He was as well a mystical
kabbalist admirer of Madame Blavatsky. He even said that the late
Masoretic origin of the vowel points was consistent with the
Kaballah of the Sohar. But the great George Sayles Bishop, 19th
century defender of the KJB, believed in the early origin and
originality of the vowel points. Actually it is incorrect to speak
of a Masoretic text at all because the masoretes were not the first
to add vowel points to the text. The Jews would have considered that
adding to the word of God.
Now Dr. Riplinger has shown us that all currently available Hebrew
Masoretic Texts from the Trinitarian Bible Society and the British
and Foreign Bible Society, edited and corrupted by Ginsburg and
Letteris, contain omissions or changes in the Old Testament. The KJB
translators using the “originall tongues,” both Hebrew and
vernacular, did not fear to use other sources when they knew that
the ben Chayyim text was in error or incomplete. The ben Chayyim
Hebrew Bible omitted Joshua 21:36-37 and Nehemiah 7:68. Dr.
Riplinger gives us 8 other examples of words or phrases where the
KJB differs from all the available Hebrew texts but agrees with
vernacular translations.
Dr. Riplinger gives a timely and long needed demonstration that F.
H. A. Scrivener was not truly conservative but favorably disposed to
critics such as Semler, Griesbach, Lachman, Tischendorf, and
Tregelles. Scrivener denied verbal plenary inspiration, accepted
concept inspiration, predicted the demise of the KJB, followed many
of the rules of the Westcott-Hort theory, and was not a true ally of
Dean Burgon. Scrivener favored the “old” uncials and used the
critical text in 47 doctrinally important New Testament verses,
omitting Acts 8:37, omitting the pericope of adultery from John
7:53-8:11, omitting God from I Tim. 3:16, omitting broken from I
Cor. 11:24, omitting the doxology of the Lord’s prayer in Matt.
6:13, mutilation of the Lord’s prayer in Luke 11: 2, 4, with many
other changes. Neither Scrivener nor Burgon ever contended for the
inclusion of the Trinitarian Johannine Comma at I John 5:7-8.
Scrivener edited an edition of the Greek text by and for the English
Revision Committee of 1881, which many have thought to be a back
translation of the English and identical to that of the KJB. But it
is deeply flawed. Scrivener wrongly assumed that the KJB translators
had access only to printed editions of the textus receptus. He
admitted that his Greek choices in many places were subjective. Dr.
Riplinger gives us 20 examples of his Greek errors. In 59 verses he
claimed the KJB translators used Latin Vulgate readings. But in the
preface to the KJB translation they express contempt for the
Vulgate. In those 59 places they followed the “Originall Greeke,”
both printed editions and handwritten Greek manuscripts, and
vernacular editions such as Tyndale’s, which even Scrivener admits
“had been founded on the text of other Greek editions”6 Dr.
Riplinger readily gives Greek support for 24 of his 59 verses, and
shows us that Scrivener also had access to these same Greek readings
which matched the KJB rather than the Vulgate. The Trinitarian Bible
Society’s New Testament Greek textus receptus and Jay P. Green’s
Greek-English New Testament, the only ones available to students
today, but both without Scrivener’s original preface, are
Scrivener’s text alone and not at all the true Greek text of the
KJB.
As early as 1861, ten years before revision began, Scrivener showed
his true colors when he called Richard Bentley, who in 1716 became
Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, the greatest scholar
England had produced. Bentley, in cooperation with Wetstein and the
Parisian Benedictines of St. Maur in the 1720’s, using old Vulgate
manuscripts from their monastery at St. Germain des Pres and the
Vatican codex, tried but failed to do exactly what Westcott and Hort
finally did in 1881. He wanted to bring back “the true exemplar of
Origen” but faced opposition of colleagues and a lack of money and
dropped his project in 1729. But by cooperation with the
Benedictines Bentley set New Testament criticism on the Romanizing
course from which it has never deviated. Westcott and Hort had
neither serious opposition from the Victorian Web nor, thanks to
Gladstone and Liddell, a lack of funds.
The KJB translators did not exclusively follow any of the numerous
editions of the textus receptus available to them in 1611 but
prayerfully chose readings from all of them, both printed and
handwritten, and from vernacular editions in several languages as
well. Our only authority is not any Greek or Hebrew text but the
King James Bible.
The last section gives a wonderful defense of vernacular scriptures
and how they have contributed to the preservation of the words of
God from the very beginning of the preaching of the gospel to all
nations. Some of the “originals” may not have been in Greek, and
some Greek manuscripts have been made from vernacular scriptures.
The last chapter gives seven great proofs of the inspiration of the
King James Bible with which any believer should agree and which I
endorse. It is good that this book is now on the record, and it is
well worth the time and diligence of any reader interested in the
truth.
James H. Sightler, M.D.
Greer, SC,
October 10, 2009
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Class of 1968
1 Treloar, Geoffrey D., “The Cambridge Triumvirate and the
Acceptance of New Testament Higher Criticism in Britain, 1850-1900,”
Cambridge University Press Vol. 4 (2006), pp. 13-32.
2 Lake, Kirsopp, The Religion of Yesterday and Tomorrow (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1925) pp 61-62.
3 Carpenter, Edward, My Days and Dreams (London, George Allen and
Unwin, 1916) p. 53.
Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, Lectures on the History of the Jewish
Church, Vol. I (London, John Murray, Albemarle St., 1865) pp 39-52.
4 Macdonald had to resign his church for preaching universalism and
denying eternal punishment. His book, Lilith, had an introduction by
Henry David Thoreau. MacDonald became a kabbalist, writer of
children’s fantasies, and influenced J.R.R. Tolkien.
5 The Temple is a round stone church built in the twelfth century by
the Rosicrucian Knights Templars. It is a church for law students
and their professors residing in Lincoln’s Inn, the famous London
school for lawyers, near Parliament. This was a Royal Peculiar
church, so that the Master was responsible not to the Archbishop of
Canterbury but the monarch, and the appointment required consent of
the Prime Minister. It was a lifetime position which gave the kind
of leisure necessary to be able to work on the revision. The staff
of the grand master of the Templars displayed a curved cross of four
splays, or blades, red upon white. The eight-pointed red Buddhist
cross was also one of the Templar ensigns.
6 Scrivener, F. H. A., ed., The New Testament in Greek According to
the Text Followed in the Authorised Version Together with the
Variations Adopted in the Revised Version (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1881) preface, pp. v.-xi.
