GLEANINGS FROM THE SCRIPTURES The Magnified Word By Keith L. Estes There has been a remarkable recent discovery that made front-page news in the London Times. The oldest remains of any New Testament manuscript were discovered. Using a high-magnification device and the epiflourescent confocal laser scanning technique, the small fragment was dated A.D. 66. Close examination shows that it contains the King James Bible’s reading from mat. 26:22, “hekastos auton,”- “every one of them.” It proves wrong the reading in the NIV, NASB, and all new versions which are based on the Critical Greek text which reads, “heis hekastos,” “each one” or “one after the other.” Dr. Carsten Thiede, author of Eyewitness to Jesus remarked, It is self-evident that this original reading, preferable on the grounds of internal criteria and now corroborated by the oldest papyrus of St. Matthew’s Gospel, must replace the text in the two most widely used versions of the Greek New Testament, that of the United Bible Societies (at the present in its fourth revised edition) and the so-called Nestle-Aland, the Novum Testamentum Graece now in its twenty-seventh edition, as of 2002. At the Munster Institute, which looks after this text, a rearguard action is being mounted, not surprisingly in view of its vested interest in the controversy. One of its staff members, Klaus Wachtel, recently published an article that refuses to acknowledge the change…In any case, it is a form of intellectual resistance which can not last; the facts are now beyond dispute. (pp. 61-62) The King James Bible and its underlying Greek Textus Receptus have had the correct reading all along. History repeats itself. When the other New Testament papyri were discovered, the Nestle-Aland 26th edition was forced to go back to the KJV reading approximately 500 times. New versions have not yet caught up. The more we magnify the Lord and move closer to him, the more lovely and true he proves himself to be to us. As we move closer to this gem, the word of God, and it is magnified (Ps. 138:2) studied (2 Tim, 3:16), meditated upon (Ps. 119:148), and glorified (2 Thes. 3:1), we are at once humbled and awe struck by the purity of its many facets. G.A.Riplinger, in her book, The Language of the King James Bible, [from which this article comes from] attempts to examine closely some of the facets of this gem. It also attempts to answer the questions of those who would too quickly exchange the “fire” (Jer. 23:29) of this diamond for a counterfeit, subtly carved out of this spiritual ice age. More than one billion people speak English. The pages of the King James Bible are written with “the point of a diamond” for “the table of their heart” (Jer. 17:1). The research presented in this introduction to the language of the Bible was prompted by a story of one Christian prisoner’s phenomenal leap in reading test scores, as a result of reading the King James Bible. He was advised that he was reading at the fifth grade level when he put his name on a long waiting list to enroll in the prison’s high school equivalency program. He then began reading the King James Bible daily. Re-examination the next year showed that he was now reading at the 17th grade level- post graduate! How did reading one book, which some falsely claim is difficult, manage to help him, rather than frustrate him? Her book answers that question. The unique thing that Riplinger discovered is that in her examination of the 1000 most difficult words in the KJV reveals that God defines all of them, in the context, in their first usage, using the very words of the Webster’s or Oxford English Dictionary. The KJV is a looking glass, looking back at 1000 years of the history of our culture’s thinking and beliefs. The Webster’s and Oxford dictionaries match the KJV’s definitions exactly, because the KJV preceded them. God created the meaning of the words in the Bible itself. People read the Bible and picked up those meanings. The dictionaries merely reflect the culture. Note: All editions of the NIV, NKJV, and NASB are not the same. Ref. A.V. Publications Corp. P.O. Box 280, Ararat, Va. 24053 USA Return to Home Page Return to Current Edition Contact us