The New Testament of the Bible was written in Greek. (Some people don’t think so, but that’s how far confusion and unbelief have covered this topic.) Anyway, let’s say we are at the time of the Reformation, we have a Latin Bible which has meanings, and Greek, and we want to make a translation to English, so we have to know what the Greek means in order to make a better translation than if we just went from Latin to English.

Say now, you are one of a group of men under the reign of King James I, and you can see various translations having been made into English, you’ve learned Greek in regards to classics and religious literature in Greek, and you know Latin and information from Greek and Latin Church Fathers too.

You are involved in a massive project to make a new translation. Now the question is, do you believe:

1. You are handling the very words of God in Greek?
2. God has moved in history to providentially supply you with the knowledge and resources you have?
3. The others you are working with a believing Christians and you are collaborating and cross checking with them?
4. You are producing a really good and improved English translation?

The answers of course are yes. So the results, as we know them, are an accurate English Bible which has been accepted and widely used as the standard.

So, then, is the King James Bible’s translation based on human standards, that is, since men made it, is it not therefore limited and subject to error? And further, as a human work, it would then be theoretically possible that other learned men would have come to a different outcome? The answer to this is a resounding no, in that, if we believe in providence, then we are believing that God got the right people to make the right “human” decisions but they were in line with truth. So, essentially, it must be that the King James Bible is what God wanted, but He did not resort to robotic or puppetry “inspiration” to make it happen.

So far we have established the reliability of the King James Bible’s translation, but what happens is that Christian teachers use this for interpretation. The study and principles of interpretation are called hermeneutics, but the practice of interpretation, to actually find out what the Scripture means, is called exegesis.

Since I believe that the King James Bible is precise, accurate and exact to the very nuance, and since I believe that the Holy Ghost is present to lead people into all truth, then I believe we can know how to interpret the Scripture and come to understand what God is communicating to mankind.

I think it is easier to show the modernist and unbelieving techniques, approach and theology as being called “hermeneutics” and “exegesis”, while the believing approach is better called “sound teaching” and “proper doctrine”, etc. We can therefore contrast the fancy scientific words with the practice of good teaching.

You see, something has happened. People departed from a believing view about the Bible and the Holy Ghost. Higher Critics took on the foundational world view of the Enlightenment, and even good Christians like Granville Sharp erred in their approach. This has led to centuries of attacks on the King James Bible and much waywardness in beliefs (including unbelief, shallowness and confusion).

If we fast forward over the years, past the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, we notice something very different about Bible translation and Bible interpretation today.

First, the divine has essentially been kicked out of translation, so the whole approach and methodology is done based on science. Science is good, but science that is absent from the divine is foolish. The science of modern translation can be practiced by an atheist, and in effect, is done by Christians who are really taking deistic assumptions.

(In fact, the whole of how present day Evangelical Bible scholarship works is to only believe that God intervened in history with the making of the autographs of Scripture, and not really in the copying, nor really in the translating and, as we shall see, not really even with the interpreting of Scripture.)

So let us take a blinded person today, who does not recognise that the King James Bible is right, and they are wanting to make their own translation, or to change or adjust the King James Bible in some ways. This could be a person who actually uses the King James Bible, but is wanting to (in their mind) “correct” it.

So this modern translator or modern adjuster gets a lexicon. Specifically, they would get the modernist one which is most respected by them called “BDAG”.

BDAG is based on the idea that all usage of the Greek language is human, that there is no special divine use of Greek by God, that there is no “Biblical Greek”. BDAG instead takes a Greek word, and then supplies all the different ways or meanings that word could have, based on examples of usage. This is called the Empirical approach, because it is looking for real and existing examples of word usage from all manner of literature of history. They have a maxim which is, “Usage determines meaning.” In other words, how Greek words have been used by people outside of the Scripture will determine what the apostles and evangelists were meaning when they wrote with Greek words when writing Scripture.

It should be pretty evident there are a lot of flaws right there: you don’t have to believe in inspiration, and you are making present day documentary evidence (with present day determinations on what meaning was there) the authority to what you would supply in the BDAG under every word entry.

So, BDAG uses the historical-critical method in how it applies meanings to words for translation, it will claim to not start from any theological bias or position, but will try to be neutral and scientific and descriptive only.

Of course, we only have limited data as to how Greek words were used in all of the literature and documentary evidence we have today. And being objective is still a human measure, we cannot be infallibly objective. And further, having a secular bias is still a religious bias, it’s just a bias against religion or the strand of true religion. Thus, the method to compile the BDAG lexicon, that is, a catalogue like a dictionary of meanings, is not based on any tradition (i.e. pre-Enlightenment) and is based on an anachronistic method of trying to suppose what a word meant to an apostle using that word, as determined by a modern, western, critical and secular perspective.

This all can be shown as well by the people who made BDAG, specifically, the founder of BDAG, a German philologist and higher critic named Bauer, who was heavily influenced by the approach that one should view the Bible just like any other text. He was not known to have believing evangelical beliefs.

Another maker of BDAG was Gingrich, a liberal arts teacher, again, connected to higher criticism and not believing evangelicalism. Next also was Arndt, who had higher critical tendencies. Fourth was ecumenist Danker, who embraced historical-critical approaches and maintained theological neutrality.

So now, a modern translator uses BDAG and says, “Words don’t have meanings, they have usages. Words have a range of meanings, and the intended meaning will be determined by context.”

So, they will seek to choose the right meaning for a word, doing complex grammatical analysis. Is the word being used literally, metaphorically, theologically or idiomatically? What is the genre? Is the human author being metaphorical, polemical or pastoral? How does that human author usually use that word? How was this Greek word used in 1st-century Greco-Roman or Jewish literature? Are there are syntax limitations with the grammar that limit or point to a meaning? Is there a parallel passage?

Notice how far in the realm of human intellect is being employed to decide how to translate a word. Given that there are numerous pre-existing English translations, one could derive consensus and also consider theological implications too.

How far in the realm of utter unbelief this foolishness exists in, where the Bible is being treated as a human book, written by humans, translated by humans to be understood by humans. It hardly deserves to be called God’s word, but that is exactly what antichrist appellation they apply to their abdominal workings.

And so modern translations differ and be subjective in their translation. And we have not even come to interpretation.

Consider now a person who says that they accept the King James Bible is a legitimate translation, but perhaps they use their BDAG to move the meaning, or perhaps they are now trying to interpret the King James Bible under the influence of modernist hermeneutics.

You can start from the King James Bible, but misread it. This is because the same false assumptions behind BDAG are also the kinds of false assumptions used in modernistic methods of interpretation. Those modernistic methods have seeped into evangelicalism, confessionalism and Pentecostalism and are even the edges of fundamentalist belief.

If someone wants to argue that some Christians should know Hebrew and Greek to better interpret and understand the King James Bible, then they have been mislead. The very “Greek” to learn is itself a tainted source. Where do you get the “Greek” from? Strongs, Youngs, Thayers and BDAG? Such lexicons are all corrupt in different ways.

If we believingly interpret the English of the King James Bible, we are going to be far better set than taking anything from the “Greek”. Greek itself is not evil or wrong, it’s this whole modernist approach of assigning meaning to Greek words.

Instead of believing what we see in the King James Bible as an accurate translation from Greek, and then interpreting the English, some people are mistakenly thinking that they can go to “the Greek” to better understand what the King James Bible is saying. That approach is a huge mistake. We ought to have a believing respect towards the English itself, and interpret that properly.

It is the Holy Ghost who determines meaning, not mere usage. We can understand God’s meaning from usage, but the meaning is still from God, not from what ancient (or 17^th century) minds thought.

Unless we are tapping into the Holy Ghost’s meaning, and understanding from good teachers and good church tradition, we are going to be led astray. Yes, there is bad tradition, there are mistakes from teachers from history, but that is not corrected by the modernist historical-grammatical approach of interpretation, but by proper believing study and understanding.

PROVERBS 1.

5 A wise man will hear, and will increase learning; and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels:

6 To understand a proverb, and the interpretation; the words of the wise, and their dark sayings.

23 Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you.