Orginal Text

How can the SAME hebrew word have two OPPOSITE MEANINGS? Am I too ignorant on this topic, did the translators mess up that much? This is a distress to me.Check out this link to the whole confusion.http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/words/4/1117833893-4625.htmlI hope and pray that this doesn't cause ANYONE to stumble over this, misconception. God bless

Thanks, and im not gonna say some stuff that i've heard about the KJV. But im glad we have a few good versions to compare. I just hope that everyone one day would have A version in their language. And that truly helped me out with God or god, ya thanks. I didnt think about that. VERY GOOD!

Exactly, who was Erasmus?This is from the book "Which Version is the Bible" by Floyd Nolen Jones. I have this entire book in zip format. If you want send me an emaim request and I will send it to you for free----sgoltra@socal.rr.comERASMUS RESTORES THE RECEIVED TEXT (GREEK)The Greek upon which the King James translation was based was first printed in A.D. 1516 at Basle, Switzerland, under the editorship of the famous Dutchman, Desiderius Erasmus. As a Scholar, Erasmus was without peer – the intellectual giant of Europe in his day. Erasmus was ever at work, visiting libraries, collecting, comparing, writing and publishing. Europe was rocked by his works which exposed the ignorance of the monks, the superstitions of the priesthood, and the general bigotry and wickedness within the Roman church.He classified the Greek manuscripts and read the "Fathers" (letters etc. written by the early Church pastors which taken as a whole contain almost the entire New Testament). Today, many who deprecate the pure teachings of the Received Text sneer at Erasmus and pervert the facts in order to belittle his work. All this by men who could never have intellectually tied Erasmus' boot straps. While he lived, Europe was at his feet. Several times the King of England offered him any position in the kingdom, at his own price! The Emperor of Germany likewise. Indeed, the Pope offered him the position of Cardinal. Erasmus resolutely declined not being willing to compromise his beliefs or conscience. France and Spain beckoned him to their realm while Holland proudly claimed him as her most distinguished son.Book after book came from his labors. The demand for them was overwhelming. His crowning work was the New Testament in Greek. At last, after one thousand years, the New Testament was printed in its original tongue (A.D.1516). Astonished and confounded, Europe – the intellectual, civilized cradle of the world – deluged by superstitions, coarse traditions, and monkeries, read the pure story of the Gospel. In a letter dated 13 August, 1521 to Peter Barbirius, Erasmus wrote:"I did my best with the New Testament, but it provoked endless quarrels. Edward Lee pretended to have discovered 300 errors. They appointed a commission, which professed to have found bushels of them. Every dinner-table rang with the blunders of Erasmus. I required particulars, and could not have them." (Edward Lee afterwards became Archbishop of York)Consider and reflect upon this – the foremost scholar in the entire civilized world said the work was his "best". Such men have both egos and detractors. Erasmus would never have put his name on an undertaking which would have left him exposed and defenseless before his enemies and critics.When Erasmus came to Basle in A.D. 1515 for the purpose of assembling a complete Greek New Testament, he had only five Greek cursive minuscules of the New Testament at his disposal. For the most part, he utilized a 15th century manuscript for the Gospels but used an 11th or 12th century manuscript on occasion. He used a 12th or 13th century manuscript for the Acts and the Epistles. Erasmus had a 15th century manuscript of the Acts and the Epistles which he also used occasionally, and he had a 12th century manuscript of Revelation. The last six verses of the Revelation manuscript were missing so he used the Latin Vulgate version to complete the chapter.Erasmus' Greek New Testament has been often criticized on the grounds that he had so little data at his command from which to draw and that they were "late" copies. However, Erasmus did not go to the task unprepared. Although he had only five late minuscules, he had already translated a Latin New Testament and in preparation for this labor had collected and gathered variant readings from many Greek manuscripts. He journeyed all over Europe to libraries and to anyone from whom he could gather readings from manuscripts. Erasmus organized his findings and made notes for himself concerning the different readings. These travels brought him into contact with several hundred manuscripts and Erasmus divided them into two camps, i.e., those he considered spurious and those he deemed genuine and trustworthy. The spurious group was a small percentage of the whole and mainly agreed with the Latin Vulgate readings. Of the several hundred, between 90 to 95% had the same text. This group Erasmus judged to contain the true God given text.Naturalistic critics think that the presence and availability for Erasmus' use of these five Basle minuscules was merely an unhappy accident. But these men do not reckon sufficiently with the providence of God – that God has promised to overlook His Word. The text which Erasmus published was really not his own. It was taken virtually without change from these few manuscripts which God providentially placed at his disposal. The text contained in these manuscripts eventually came to be known as the "Textus Receptus" (the Received Text).To emphasize and demonstrate the above, we quote the late Herman C. Hoskier. Hoskier gave thirty years to the task of collating a majority of the available manuscripts containing the text of Revelation. His conclusion, based upon the 200 plus extant manuscripts he examined, was:"I may state that if Erasmus had striven to found a text on the largest number of existing MSS in the world of one type, he could not have succeeded better ... " As Moorman relates, this is truly a powerful example of God's guiding providence in preserving the true text though but one late mss containing the Revelation was available to Erasmus at Basle. God bless,SteverYeshuaIsMyGd wrote:Thanks, and im not gonna say some stuff that i've heard about the KJV. But im glad we have a few good versions to compare. I just hope that everyone one day would have A version in their language. And that truly helped me out with God or god, ya thanks. I didnt think about that. VERY GOOD!

This is a final "assessment" of Erasmus from the book "Which Version is the Bible" AN ASSESSMENT OF ERASMUS Erasmus was a "Christian" humanist, the illegitimate son of a Roman Catholic priest, and was himself an ordained priest. He taught Greek at Cambridge University from A.D. 1510 to 1514. He was not a "great" man of faith – but he was completely committed to the truth and reality of the Christian faith. Moreover, compared to Westcott and Hort (and a few others to be mentioned later) Erasmus was a giant of faith in that he humbled himself and his intellect, professing that the Bible was the absolute Word of God.As to the criticism that Erasmus was a Roman Catholic – in his day, almost all of Christendom was Roman. He flourished before and at the onset of the Reformation. He did not oppose the teachings of the Roman Church, but he vehemently protested the abuses within the Church. Erasmus decried the emphasis on ritual as opposed to a simple godly life as wrong and believed that such could be corrected by placing into every man's hand the Bible in his own language. He did not want to do away with the ritual of Rome, but he wanted a genuine spirituality to accompany it. He disapproved of Protestantism, viewing it as an evil because of all the division it brought.The Christian humanistic elements in Erasmus' thought were completely dissimilar from the contemporary connotation of "humanism", meaning instead "men eminent for human learning" – especially in relation to the revival of learning in literature and language (notably Latin and Greek). In his day the term "humanist" designated a member of a distinct 'international intellectual club' that was dedicated to studying the humanities or liberal arts. Due to his great erudition, depth of thought, elegance of style and biting irony, Desiderius Erasmus stood forth among these intellectuals as the unrivaled "prince of humanist". Erasmus' humanism found expression in his insistence to return to the original sources in order to uncover truth. Thus, his edition of the Greek N.T. was a natural manifestation of his Christian humanistic bent. By means of this text he hoped to see the Roman Church renewed from within. As a Christian humanist, Erasmus was naturally not always consistently Christian in his thinking, nevertheless, we maintain that God providentially used Erasmus – much as God used Erasmus' contemporary Martin Luther even though Luther became bitterly anti-Semitic in his latter years. At least Erasmus was not untrue to his ordination vows as were Westcott and Hort. They neither believed nor held to the thirty nine articles of the Anglican church in which they had been ordained. They actually espoused the cause of Romanism and modernism.Moreover, neither Erasmus' theology nor his being a Roman Catholic has anything whatsoever to do with his Greek text. In producing it, he merely followed the manuscripts which had been preserved by the usage within the Greek Orthodox Church. He knew the Vulgate was corrupt and his humanist values led him to believe that he was getting to the source of God's truth by turning to the manuscripts of the Greek Church.One of Erasmus' greatest mistakes was his belief that the Roman Catholic Church could be reformed from within. The Lord Jesus said that you cannot put new wine into old wine skins. If Jesus the Christ could not reform the religion of Israel which originally had been the only God-ordained religion on the earth, who are we to think we can change for the better the traditions of any denomination or religious organization? By the power of the Holy Spirit we can influence and cause a positive change in the hearts of individuals be they priests, preachers or laymen – but organizations – organizations are married to their doctrines and traditions!One recent example of such a change of heart is that of Dr. Frank Logsdon, Co-founder of the New American Standard Version (NASV), who stated before his recent death:"I must under God renounce every attachment to the New American Standard Version. I'm afraid I'm in trouble with the Lord...I wrote the format; I helped interview some of the translators; I sat with the translator; I wrote the preface. When questions began to reach me, at first I was quite offended...I used to laugh with others...However, in attempting to answer, I began to sense that something was not right about the New American Standard Version. I can no longer ignore these criticisms I am hearing and I can't refute them...The deletions are absolutely frightening...there are so many...I wrote my very dear friend, Mr. Lockman, explaining that I was forced to renounce all attachment to the NASV. The product is grievous to my heart...I don't want anything to do with it. [T]he finest leaders that we have today...haven't gone into it [the new version's use of a corrupted Greek text], just as I hadn't gone into it...that's how easily one can be deceived. [Y]ou can say the Authorized Version [KJB] is absolutely correct. How correct? 100% correct!...I believe the Spirit of God led the translators of the Authorized Version. If you must stand against everyone else, stand..." God bless,Stever

Stever wrote:One recent example of such a change of heart is that of Dr. Frank Logsdon, Co-founder of the New American Standard Version (NASV), who stated before his recent death:"I must under God renounce every attachment to the New American Standard Version. I'm afraid I'm in trouble with the Lord...I wrote the format; I helped interview some of the translators; I sat with the translator; I wrote the preface. When questions began to reach me, at first I was quite offended...I used to laugh with others...However, in attempting to answer, I began to sense that something was not right about the New American Standard Version. I can no longer ignore these criticisms I am hearing and I can't refute them...The deletions are absolutely frightening...there are so many...I wrote my very dear friend, Mr. Lockman, explaining that I was forced to renounce all attachment to the NASV. The product is grievous to my heart...I don't want anything to do with it. [T]he finest leaders that we have today...haven't gone into it [the new version's use of a corrupted Greek text], just as I hadn't gone into it...that's how easily one can be deceived. [Y]ou can say the Authorized Version [KJB] is absolutely correct. How correct? 100% correct!...I believe the Spirit of God led the translators of the Authorized Version. If you must stand against everyone else, stand..."Do you have any referances to this statement?? Cause i've never heard that before.