on behalf of the General Committee of the Trinitarian Bible Society in London, and also on behalf of the Northern Ireland Committee of the TBS, I would like to thank your Minister, the Reverend John Greer, and the officers of this church, Ballymena Free Presbyterian Church, for being most willing to host this, the fifth of our commemorative lectures regarding the 400th anniversary of the Authorised Version. We are grateful to you for making your church available for this meeting. Outside you will see in the entrance hall a book table with various items for sale from the Trinitarian Bible Society, but I want to draw your attention in particular to what I call an artistic timeline, painted by a young lady in the north of England, Martha Mahon, showing the history of the English Bible. and the TBS are hoping to produce that in various formats so that churches and Sunday schools and Christian schools might purchase it and have it on permanent display. But please, if you have time, take time to look at the information on that artistic timeline. And also, as you leave, you will be presented with a small carrier bag in which you will find various items which are free, and I want to draw your attention to one that will be in that carrier bag. It's the authorised version, A Wonderful and Unfinished History. It's been well written by our colleague Peter Hallihan who is a regular contributor to the TBS quarterly record and it's a wonderful and unfinished history because contrary to what many are saying today, the authorised version is not finished. This year marks the 400th anniversary of it. It's been greatly used and blessed of the Lord over all of those 400 years and we believe the Lord will continue to bless the authorized version of the Word of God. So please make time to read that book in the coming days. There is also a copy of our quarterly record and within the packet there will be a membership form for joining the Trinitarian Bible Society. And if you can agree to the principles of the society and tick the boxes in the correct place, then for a minimum of £5 per year you can become a member of the society and you will receive each quarter a copy of our quarterly record. And if you love the authorised version then I suggest that you ought to become a member of the society. There is also a commemorative bookmark within each pack. Now, I want to turn you first to the Word of God. Whilst the subject tonight is more of a historical lecture, nevertheless I pray that our hearts will be warmed as we trace the development of the Authorized Version and see that the Authorized Version is a truly Protestant Bible. And we are privileged to enter into the inheritance produced for us by our Protestant forefathers. But turn with me to the Psalms and to the Psalm 100. It's entitled, A Psalm of Praise. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before his presence with singing. Know ye that the Lord, he is God. It is he that hath made us and not we ourselves. We are his people and the sheep of his pasture. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise. Be thankful unto Him and bless His name, for the Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endureth to all generations. And our Protestant forefathers believe those words that we have just read, His truth endureth to all generations. The subject then before us is the Authorized Version, a Protestant Bible for all the people. In 1857, J.C. Philpott, anticipating the mischief that was shortly to be thrust upon the church by men such as Westcott and Hort, he wrote these words, be desirable to have a new translation of the Bible? And then he answers the question. It would unsettle the minds of thousands as to which was the Word of God, the old translation or the new? And what a door it would open for the workings of infidelity or the temptations of Satan. What a gloom, too, it would cast over the minds of many of God's saints to have those passages translated in a different way, and how it would seem to shake all their experience of the power and preciousness of God's Word. But besides all this, there would be two Bibles spread throughout all the land, the old and the new. And what confusion would this create? in almost every place. Instead of our good old Saxon Bible, simple and solid, with few words obsolete and alike majestic and beautiful, we should have a modern English translation in the pert and flippant language of the day. Besides its authority as the word of God, our present version is the great English classic, generally accepted as the standard of the English language. The authorized version has been blessed to thousands of the saints of God. And not only so, it has become part of our national inheritance, which we have received unimpaired from our forefathers and are bound to hand down to our children unimpaired. It is, we believe, the grand bulwark of Protestantism. the safeguard of the gospel and the treasure of the church. And we should be traitors in every sense of the word if we consented to give it up, to be rifled and ransacked by the sacrilegious hands of concealed papists, German hierocritics, infidel divines, and the whole tribe of the enemies of God and of godliness. Well, they were strong words, written some 24 years before the revised version of 1881 was printed. And Philpott makes four assertions concerning the authorized version. He says it is part of our national inheritance. He says it is the grand bulwark of Protestantism. He says it is the safeguard of the gospel. and it is the treasure of the church. Now we shall examine our subject tonight in three ways. We shall look at the texts which underlie the Authorized Version. And then we shall look at the translations upon which the Authorized Version was used. And then we shall look at the translators or at least two of the translators So the texts, the translations, and the translators. First of all then, the Authorized Version is a Protestant Bible from the point of view of the underlying Hebrew and Greek texts from which it was translated. Our Protestant forefathers believed in the Word of God. Indeed, the Protestant Reformation, though it arose over a dispute over the doctrine of justification by faith alone in Christ alone, yet the formal cause of the Protestant Reformation was the dispute over the doctrine of Scripture. And our Protestant forefathers believed that the Word of God is inspired, that holy men of God spake as they were moved, driven by the Holy Ghost. so that all scripture is given by inspiration of God. And because the Word of God is inspired of the Holy Ghost, it follows necessarily that the Word of God is pure. It is without error. It is infallible. It is inerrant. Indeed, in Proverbs 30 and verse 5, Aguirre says, every word of God is pure. Every word from Genesis 1 in to the last Amen at the end of Revelation 22, every word pure, holy, infallible, without error. And our forefathers believed that. And because the Word of God is inspired and pure and infallible, it follows that it is authoritative. For the Lord has magnified His Word. above all his name, but more particularly, our Protestant forefathers believed what the vast majority of evangelicals do not believe today. They believed in the doctrine of the preservation of the word of God, that the word of the Lord endures to all generations. Indeed, in the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord in chapter 59 at verse 21 says this, As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the Lord, my spirit that is upon thee and my word which I have put in thy mouth. shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, saith the Lord from henceforth and forever. And Mr. Calvin says concerning that verse, here the Lord promises two things. The church will never be without the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit. and to the church will never be without the pure, uncorrupted Word of God. And our Protestant forefathers believed in the inspired, the pure, the infallible, the authoritative, and the preserved Word of God. Now when we compare the Authorized Version New Testament with all the modern English versions, One thing we need to realise straight away is that we are not comparing like with like. In spite of what all the editors of these modern translations try to tell us, they try to tell us that it's just a matter of a difference in language, but my friends we need to realise we are not comparing like with like. The authorized version of the New Testament was translated from a family of Greek manuscripts known as the Byzantine, referring to the Greek-speaking world of Asia Minor, the Byzantine, or the traditional text. And that represents a family of over 5,400 Greek manuscripts, which many of them had their origin in Antioch, the third city of the Roman Empire. The best printed representation of this Byzantine text type is known as the Textus Receptus, or the Received Text, and I hold in my hand a copy of the Received Text from which the authorized version itself was translated. As I say, the vast majority of those Byzantine manuscripts can be traced to the city of Antioch, and what do we know about Antioch? Well, we know of Nicholas, a proselyte of Antioch, one of the deacons of the early church. He was a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost. We know also from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 11, that the Holy Ghost was outpoured on Gentile believers at Antioch. We know also from the same chapter, chapter 11, that Paul and Barnabas taught the saints at Antioch for over a year. We know the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch. And from Acts 13 we know that the very first missionary journey in the history of the church began from Antioch. Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. In other words, the received text can be traced to the center of the apostolic labors of the Apostle Paul to the very birthplace of missionary endeavor. And the translators of the authorized version used the received text by and large. They used Bezos' Greek New Testament, especially his fourth edition of 1588-89, but there is evidence that they also consulted the editions of Erasmus and Osteophanes. the received text, which underlies the Authorized Version New Testament, also underlies all those great European Reformation Bibles, Luther's German New Testament of 1522, the Flemish New Testament of 1526, Tyndale's New Testament of 1526, Olivetan's French New Testament of 1535, the Geneva Bible of 1560, and so on. It underlies all those great Reformation Bibles. But the New Testament of the modern English versions, they are based upon, or as in the case of the so-called New King James Bible, are greatly influenced by a handful of 4th and 5th century Greek manuscripts which had their origin in Alexandria in northern Egypt. And in particular they rely upon two so-called ancient manuscripts known as Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. which Dean John Bergen dismissed as two of the most unreliable manuscripts known to scholars. Those two manuscripts, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, which lie at the basis of all modern translations, they disagree with each other more than 3,000 times in the Gospels alone. Indeed it seems to me their only point of agreement seems to be that which they omit and that which they change. This critical text which I hold in my left hand was cobbled together by Westcott and Hort in the middle of the 19th century. And the 20th century has witnessed various attempts to improve this critical text And its most common form today is known as the Nestle-Aland or the United Bible Society's eclectic Greek text. It can be traced to Alexandria. Alexandria is also mentioned in the scriptures. It's mentioned in the very same chapter that Antioch is first mentioned, Acts chapter 6. But there is a significant difference. For in Acts chapter 6 when we read of Alexandria it was men from Alexandria who suborn false witnesses against Stephen. They stirred up the people against Stephen, set up false witnesses against him. Alexandria, the second city of the Roman Empire founded by Alexander the Great. It was a great cultural center containing a library between 500,000 and 700,000 manuscripts. It was a center of pagan philosophy. But in the early second century a catechetical school was established there. Now that's a posh word. I suppose we would say a Bible school or theological seminary. And the first principle of that seminary was a man who went by the name of Flavius Clement. He was more of a moralist than a theologian because he taught his pupils that Jesus Christ the Son is subordinate to God the Father. He was therefore teaching that there was a graded hierarchy in the Trinity. That Jesus Christ is not co-equal with God the Father. And he had a pupil. by the name of Adamantus Oregon. And Oregon taught that Jesus Christ derived his deity from the Father. Therefore, he is only divine in a very subservient and secondary sense. And he also taught that the Son and the Father created the Spirit. And he had a pupil by the name of Dionysius who was to become the bishop of Alexandria and he denied the son's eternity and the oneness of the Godhead. So that Alexandria in northern Egypt became a center of heresy relating to the person and to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior and our Redeemer. In particular there were two heresies, Arianism and Gnosticism. But with regard to Arianism, I suspect that you have Arians knocking on your door in Balaamina. They have a different name today. They are, well, I call them the JFWs, the Jehovah's False Witnesses, because they believe what the Arians believed, which is very little. They denied the eternal deity of Jesus Christ, the Son. They denied the doctrine of the Trinity, the three persons in the one Godhead. They denied the eternal torments of the damned in hell. And that heresy of the Arians was centered in Alexandria from the 2nd century on into the 7th century, the very period when these so-called most ancient and reliable manuscripts are dated as coming from Alexandria. And there is clear evidence that a man like Oregon tampered with those Greek manuscripts. Now, if we compare the two families of Greek manuscripts, we are told by the editors of the modern translations that no major doctrine has been affected by the thousands of changes that they have made. But I ask the question, what about the doctrine of the inspiration and the infallibility of Holy Scripture? Is every word of God pure? You see, there are 140,521 individual Greek words in the received text. But there are only 137,635 individual Greek words in that Westcott and Hort type text. That's a difference, my friends, of 2,886 words. This has 2,886 words less than that. And yet, and yet, we are expressly warned about tampering with the inspired and the pure and the infallible and the preserved word of the one true and living God who cannot lie. For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book. If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book, how we ought to tremble, my friends, as we handle the word of the living God. They say no doctrine is affected. The very doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture is affected. But what about the doctrine of preservation of the Holy Scriptures? I've referred you already to the prophet Isaiah 59 and what the Lord says there, that the church will never be without the Holy Spirit and never be without the pure and the uncorrupted Word of God. And there we have it also in the Psalm 100, His truth endureth to all generations. And our forefathers, our Protestant forefathers, believed in the divine and the sovereign preservation of the Holy Scripture. Indeed, those who frame the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1646, they stated it like this, the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek being immediately inspired by God and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages are therefore authentical. Here they were stressing the authenticity and the purity of those manuscripts that were in existence, those faithful, those accurate, those reliable copies of the original scriptures. The Protestant Reformed theologians who constructed the confessional statements were so convinced of the Bible's textual purity They referred to the copies of Scripture, the Apographa, as the original texts. But the modern evangelical and reformed view was first promoted in the 19th century by Professors A. A. Hodge and Professor B. B. Warfield. And their view was that the scriptures as originally given are inerrant. By that, they mean that only those handwritten manuscripts upon which Moses and David and Solomon and Isaiah and Jeremiah and the prophets and the evangelists and the apostles, only those handwritten manuscripts with the handwriting of those men of God moved by the Holy Spirit, only they are inerrant, not the copies, not those reliable, those accurate copies. Indeed, Warfield wrote, He says, we cannot despair of restoring to ourselves and the Church of God His book word for word as He gave it by inspiration to men. My friends, that is an astonishing statement. He is concerning the doctrine of Scripture moving away from the classical, reformed, Protestant position of the preservation of Scripture. He is now talking about the restoration of the Scriptures. In other words, the Church did not have the pure, the uncorrupted, and the preserved Word of God from the 16th century. through to the 19th century, the orthodox doctrine of verbal inspiration assumed that the received text was the original text of the New Testament. Warfield and others clearly did not. Indeed, B.B. Warfield began a crusade against what he called the uninspired apographer, the uninspired copies. For him, only the original handwritten text was inspired and inerrant. And Warfield's view, though he has many good things to say on other aspects of theology, but on the doctrine of Scripture, Warfield's view is the one which is widely held by evangelicals today and lies at the basis of all the modern translation. Their view is that the copies have mistakes, but through the labors of a man like Westcott and Hort and Tregellis and Tischendorf and the textual critics of the 20th and 21st centuries, the scriptures which have been lost to the church for 1,500 years will eventually be restored to the church. I ask the question, does his truth endure to all generations? our Protestant forefathers firmly believed the Word of God endures to all generations in 1643 there was the publication of a six-volume work called Walton's Polyglot when for the first time the textual variants found in the Alexandrian text were incorporated into Holy Scripture and the Puritan John Owen the following year took up his pen And this is what the great Puritan John Owen said, The whole of scripture, entire as given out from God, without any loss, is preserved in the copies of the originals yet remaining. In them all, we say, is every letter and tittle of the word. These copies, we say, are the rule, standard, and touchstone of all translations, ancient or modern, by which they are in all things to be examined, tried, corrected, amended, and themselves only by themselves." And also Francis Turretin, who succeeded Theodore Beezer in Geneva, he also argued, he says, the question is forced upon us by Roman Catholics who raise doubts concerning the purity of the sources in order more readily to establish the authority of their Vulgate and lead us to the tribunal of their church. By original text, he says, we do not mean the very handwriting from the hands of Moses, the prophets, the apostles, which are known to be non-existent. We mean accurate copies, because they record for us that Word of God In the same words into which the sacred writers committed it under the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit, faithful and accurate copies, not less than the autographs, are norms for all other copies and for translations." And again, Owen wrote, this spurious brood that has now spawned itself over the face of so much paper that ought by no means to be brought into competition with a common reading to create a temptation to the reader that nothing is left sound and entire in the word of God. At the Council of Trent in 1562, and I have a first edition copy of the minutes of the Council of Trent, the plan was conceived to counter the Reformation in England. by undermining the infallibility of the English Bible in order to drive us back to the pretended infallibility of the Roman church. And Owen saw the danger. Would that men today would see that danger. Owen said, we went from Rome under the conduct of the purity of the original. I wish none have a mind to return thither under the pretense of their corruption." This critical Alexandrian text, coming from a center of heresy, omits the following reference to the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ in Luke chapter 2 verse 33. It changes a clear statement concerning the eternal deity of Christ in 1st Timothy 3.16, great is the mystery of godliness, God was manifest in the flesh. It changes that statement of Paul in Romans 14.10, for we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, where Paul goes on to show that as we stand before the judgment seat of Christ, we are standing before the one spoken of in Isaiah 45, the Lord beside whom there is none else. It removes that tremendous declaration of faith of the Ethiopian eunuch, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. It removes that title of our Lord in Revelation 1.11, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. And it changes Micah 5 to beyond recognition. The text which underlies the authorized version is the Greek text which our Protestant forefathers believed had been preserved by God and kept pure in all ages. Whereas the advocates of the modern translations, including the New King James Bible, whether they acknowledge it or not, they are declaring that God has not been able to preserve his inspired word, his infallible word. If we are truly Protestants, then we need to stand where our Protestant forefathers stood and believe that in the Hebrew Masoretic text of the Old Testament and this received text of the Greek New Testament, we have the pure word of God preserved in every generation. The Authorized Version is a Protestant Bible from the point of view of the underlying Hebrew and Greek texts. Secondly, it is a Protestant Bible from the point of view of those English translations which preceded it and of which, in a sense, the Authorized Version is a revision. The first printed edition in English from the Greek text was that of William Tyndale. one of England's first Protestant martyrs. It was on the 6th of October, 1536, that William Tyndale, having spent a very uncomfortable year in Veelvoorde Castle near Antwerp, Belgium, was escorted to the stake. And there they tied him to the stake and strangled him to death. And then in that public place, they burned his body. And if you love the authorized version, well, under Almighty God, humanly speaking, 90% of this wonderful, this glorious, this majestic translation of the New Testament comes directly to us from the pen of William Tyndale. He was a great and a mighty Bible translator who said, For I call God to record against the day we shall appear before our Lord Jesus to give a reckoning of our doings, that I never altered one syllable of God's word against my conscience, nor would this day, if all that is in the earth, whether it be pleasure, honor, or riches, might be given to me. He was a man who was captive to the word of God. who believed every word of God is pure so much so that he would not alter one syllable of God's word against his conscience. And yet, and yet, the modern translations based on the Alexandrian text think nothing of removing 2,886 words. Tyndale, like Calvin and Luther, had been brought up in the Roman Catholic system. brought up in a country in which the church was at its lowest ebb of spiritual vitality. And the county of Gloucestershire where Tyndale lived was a hive of potpourri. The clergy and the people of Gloucestershire were shrouded in a mist of superstition. The Bible was an unknown book, but somehow there developed within Tyndale's heart a burning and a compulsive burden to translate the scriptures into our mother tongue, and that against the prohibition imposed by the Convocation of Canterbury. Tyndale entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, 1505. But even there, the study of scriptures was discouraged, for we find Tyndale writing They have ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture until his nose be buried in heathen learning for eight or nine years and armed with false principles with which he is clean shut out from the understanding of the Scriptures. But the ten years he was to spend in Oxford before his graduation in fifteen were years, thank God, of transition from medieval Romanism to the doctrines of the Reformation. And at Oxford, Tyndale grew and increased in the knowledge of Scripture so much so that he began to expound the Word of God to the fellows of Magdalen Hall. Everything to Tyndale had to be brought to the touchstone of Holy Scripture. And it was this attitude to the authority and to the sufficiency and to the absolute supremacy of the inspired Word of God which characterized the strength and the vigor of this man's intellect. John Fox in his book of Martyrs tells us of William Tyndale that his mind was singularly addicted to the knowledge of Holy Scripture. He left Cambridge in 1521. That was a glorious year, was it not? In that year, 1521, Martin Luther was summoned to Worms. And on that wonderful occasion, Martin Luther stood before the Diet of Worms and made that wonderful stand against the might and the tyranny of Rome. You remember the words of Luther? I am bound by the scriptures I have quoted. And my conscience is captive to the word of God. And I cannot, and I will not retract anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise. Here I stand. May God help me. Amen. And that cry of Luther's was heard throughout Europe. Here I stand. I am captive to the word of God. In that same year, 1521, William Tyndale left Cambridge and God led him to a little sodbury manor near Bristol. It was the manor house of Sir John Walsh, and William Tindall was asked to be chaplain to Sir John Walsh's children. Gloucestershire was the stronghold of the Roman church, having six mitered abbeys within its borders, and possessing the most famous relic in the whole of Christendom, the blood of Hades. Said by the Romanists, to be the very blood of Christ contained in a file preserved in the Abbey of Hales near Winchcombe, the very site of which was guaranteed to ensure the salvation of the beholder, provided you paid sufficient to have a look. John Fox, in his Book of Martyrs, says that Sir John Walsh kept a good orderly house, and there resorted unto him sundry abbots, deans, archdeacons, with divers, others, doctors, and there, together with Master Tyndale at the table, they entered into theological discussion. Tyndale had many a conversation with these dignitaries of the Roman church. Let me quote you part of such a conversation. It comes to us from that same year, 1521. A priest across the table turned to William Tyndale and said, your scriptures only serve to make heretics. Tyndale very graciously turned to the priest and said, on the contrary, the source of heresy is pride. Now the word of God strips a man of everything and leaves him as bare as Job. Then the priest turned rather angrily upon William Tyndale and said, oh, the word of God? Why, even we don't understand it. How can the common people possibly understand it? Tyndale replied, you know who taught the eagles to spy out their prey? Well, that same God teaches his hungry children to spy out their Heavenly Father in his word. Christ's elect spy out their Lord and trace out the paths of his feet, and they follow him. On another occasion in that same year, 1521, a very high-ranking priest indeed turned rather angrily upon William Tyndale and said that the Pope's word was more important than God's word. My, that did it. In that same year that Luther stood before the Diet of Worms and uttered those glorious words, so William Tyndale responded to that ignorant priest. He says, I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life, ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth a plough to know more of the scriptures than thou dost. Thereafter, the priests raged and railed against Tyndale. They brought a charge of heresy against him. He was brought before the chancellor. But Tyndale was now a man of one book, and he was to give his life because of his love for the word of God, and because of his love for the Lord Jesus Christ. Tyndale was a scholar. but a scholar with a warm and sanctified heart, with a concern for the ordinary people, people like you and I. He once said, I have foreseen by experience how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the scriptures are plainly laid before their eyes in their own mother tongue. And that was Tyndale's great desire, his all-consuming passion in life. It soon became evident that little Sodry was no longer safe. And so he went to London and spent a few months in the home of Sir Humphrey Monmouth. But fearing he was putting Monmouth's life in danger, there was only one thing he could do. And so it was in May 1524, the greatest of all Englishmen, left the country and the people he loved. And he never saw either again. He went to Europe. He arrived at Hamburg. He began the work of translating the scriptures from Erasmus' Greek translation of 1522. And by the end of 1525, some 6,000 copies of Tyndale's New Testament were printed at Worms and were ready for distribution. They came into England, smuggled through the customs in bales of cloth, in sacks of flour, in barrels, in cases of every kind. They came up the River Thames to Sir Humphrey Monmouth's wharf. Tyndale made the Bible speak for God straight to the hearts of the common people. It was widely circulated to the joy and to the comfort of many who had long walked in darkness and in ignorance. Tyndale was skilled in seven languages, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, French, and whichever language he spoke, you would think it was his native tongue. But justly famed as Tyndale's New Testament was and is, very few people acknowledge Tyndale's scholarship and contribution to the English Old Testament. When he left England in 1524, Hebrew had not been taught in either Cambridge or Oxford, and no doubt his knowledge of Hebrew came from the many Jews in the German towns along the Rhine. But by 1530 he had started upon the Old Testament from the Hebrew. He had done the whole of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. By 1531, he had translated the whole of Jonah. By 1534, he had revised Genesis. And in that same year, he made his final revision of the New Testament. The extent of his work is described in a journal of 1548. because there were many books that he had translated which in his lifetime had not been printed. He had translated, for example, from Judges through the books of Kings to Nehemiah, a total of another 11 books that had not yet been printed. It therefore means that Tyndale's contribution between 1525 and 1535 amounts to 47% of the whole Bible. And that unprinted portion was to be incorporated into Matthew's Bible by John Rogers, friend of Tyndale. In May 1535, Tyndale was arrested, taken to Veelvoorde Castle in Belgium, where he spent his final year. In that cell, awaiting death, he wrote his final letter. Let us hear a true Protestant. In that letter he says, I believe that you are not unaware of what may have been determined concerning me. Wherefore, I beg your lordship that by the Lord Jesus Christ, that if I am to remain here through the winter, he will have the kindness to send me from the goods of mine which he has, a warmer cap. For I suffer greatly from the cold in the head, and I'm afflicted with a perpetual catarrh which is much increased in this cell. A warmer coat, also, for this which I have is very thin. A piece of cloth, too, to patch my leggings. My overcoat is worn out. My shirts are also worn out. He has a woolen shirt, if he will be good enough to send it. I have also with him leggings of a thicker cloth to put on above. He has also warmer nightcaps, and I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening. It is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark. But most of all, I beg and I beseech you to be urgent with the commissioner that he will kindly permit me to have a Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary that I may pass the time in that study. How beautifully reminiscent of the words of the Apostle Paul, do thy diligence to come shortly unto me. The cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest bring with thee and the books, but especially the parchments. There is no glass in the windows of Tyndale's cell. The rain and the snow blow in. no central heating, no fire in the corner of the room, and no doubt over your feet there would run a rat or two. His coat is thin, he has a perpetual guitar, he is extremely cold, but uppermost in his mind remember the words of the Apostle, this one thing I do. Here was a man freezing, this one thing I do, there is work to be done to the end, and in that cell right up to the eve of the day upon which he was martyred. He translated from the Hebrew, the books of Joshua, through to the end of the book of 2 Chronicles, whilst awaiting death. That's the measure of the man. At the end of July 1536, Tyndale was condemned as a heretic, degraded from the priesthood, and handed over to the secular power for punishment. On the 6th of October, 1536, he was brought to the place of execution. He was tied to the stake, an iron chain around his waist, a piece of hemp in a noose around his neck, a pile of straw around his feet and logs. It was then that he lifted up his eyes, crying unto the Lord at the stake, Lord, open the King of England's eyes. The rope was wrenched tight from behind, the straw was lit, and the logs blazed around his strangled body. A martyr's crown made a fitting end to such a life as his had been. Time does not permit me to speak of Myles Coverdale, friend of Tyndale and his translation of 1535, nor of John Rogers, another friend of Tyndale and the Matthews Bible of 1549, another man who was martyred in 1555. Nor can I mention the Geneva exiles who translated the Geneva Bible in 1560. but the Authorized Version draws extensively upon the scholarly and godly learning which produced these earlier translations throughout the 16th century, so that the Authorized Version alone is truly a Protestant Bible, first with regard to the text, the Hebrew and Greek which underlies it, the very text recognized by our Protestant forefathers as having been preserved, uncorrupted, and which endureth to all generations. And second, it is an English Bible, a Protestant Bible from the previous 100 years which preceded it. 90% of our New Testament, 40% of the whole Bible is the work of William Tyndale. It is truly a Protestant Bible, a Reformation Bible, a martyr's Bible. And thirdly, The authorized version is a Protestant Bible from the point of view of the 47 translators themselves. The 47 translators were organized into six companies of men. The first half of the 16th century when the King James Bible was completed was the golden age of biblical and of oriental scholarship in England. Never before or since have those studies been pursued by scholars with such zeal and industry and success. And that, I believe, is a remarkable proof of the providence of God in caring for His Holy Word. There has never been a group of men of the caliber of our translators who had not only exceptional linguistic skills, but were truly spiritual men as well. For such a high and holy work, it is doubtful whether any other age could produce such a body of men equally qualified. I mention but two. I want to mention a high churchman, not to be confused with a high churchman in the Church of England today, and a Puritan. The representative of the high church, I take Lancelot Andrews, who was born in Barking, North London, in the year 1555. And I just pause to make this observation. 1555 was the bloodiest year of Mary Tudor's reign. And Andrews was born in 1555. and 11 and possibly as many as 18 of those 47 translators were actually born during the reign of Mary Tudor when she was doing her best to wipe out the cause of Protestantism in the land the Lord was raising up men who in the process of time would be instrumental in giving to the English-speaking peoples of the world the finest translation of the Word of God. Andrew's In one of his greatest sermons, following the defeat of the Armada in 1588, he proved to be a staunch defender of the doctrines of the Church of England over and against Romanism and quoted Master Calvin with much praise and with warm and deep affection. In another sermon preached in November 1600 on the theme of justification by faith alone in Christ alone, he demolished once and for all the Romish myth of the real presence in the wafer and the wine. In 1601, he became the dean of Westminster Abbey and the headmaster of Westminster School. This learned bishop, he was fluent in 15 modern languages and 8 ancient languages. Following the gunpowder plot of the 5th of November 1605, when half a dozen violent Papists conspired to blow up King and Parliament and our translators, Andrews preached at Whitehall in cheerful jubilation from the Psalm 118. This is the Lord's doing. It is marvelous in our eyes. And during the course of that sermon, he points out that the Lord had saved our Protestant land from the tyrannical forces of papistical darkness. And thereafter it was to be consecrated to perpetual memory by a yearly acknowledgement throughout all generations. And right up to his death, 23 years later, he preached an annual sermon praising God for exposing that failed gunpowder plot. A high churchman, yes. A bishop, yes. Wearing clerical dress reminiscent of Rome, yes. but a man who was captive to the word of God, a man who believed in the inspired, the infallible, and the preserved word of God, a man who believed in the doctrine of the new birth, undeniably a staunch Protestant and a Calvinist and a godly man. Now let me introduce you to another translator, Lawrence Chatterton, a staunch Puritan, brave and godly man, He was part of the first Cambridge company translating from the book of First Chronicles through to the end of Song of Songs. He was born in Bolton in Lancashire in 1537. His family, well, they were addicted to potpourri. And Lawrence Chatterton was carefully nurtured in the Roman religion. He was destined to the bar. He was sent to the inns of court at London, where he spent some years in the study and the practice of law. But whilst there, he heard someone preaching of the unsearchable riches of Jesus Christ. He heard someone pointing sinners to a Savior, to one who has made sin for us, who knew no sin. And he was converted to Christ. and he became a staunch Protestant, and he forsook the law and entered as a student at Christ College, Cambridge at the age of 26. He then wrote to his father asking if he would support him through his university with some financial help, and his father wrote back, Son Lawrence, if you will renounce this new sect, you may expect all the happiness which the care of an indulgent father can assure you of. Otherwise, I enclose a shilling, buy a wallet, and go and beg. Disinherited of a large estate, Lawrence Chatterton resolved to continue his studies at Christ College. He never had recourse to beg. His mind was sustained by the promises of the Savior, for whose sake he had endured the loss of all things. He was skilled in Latin, in Greek, in Hebrew, and all the rabbinical writings. He was appointed lecturer at St. Clement's Church in Cambridge, lecturer or preacher. He was renowned as a grave, pious, and excellent preacher. He started a series of afternoon lectures or sermons that continued for 50 years. His biographer and fellow translator, Dr. Dilligan, recounts how his sermons were timed by an hourglass on the right-hand side of the pulpit, which on one occasion he turned twice during the course of his sermon. And fearing that he had wearied his congregation, he was about to finish his sermon when the entire congregation shouted out, carry on, carry on! And he did. For another hour. He preached at St. Clement's for 50 years. And when he finally intimated he was about to resign, some 40 clergymen who had been converted under his preaching ministry pleaded with him to reconsider. Which he did. In the year 1584, Sir Walter Mildmay, one of the Queen's noted statesmen, founded Emanuel College, Cambridge, and Chatterton was appointed as the first master of Emanuel College. And it was during his mastership of Immanuel College that Dr. Chatterton was engaged in Bible translation. By then he was in his late 60s. His right knowledge was fully digested and matured by experience. His natural force was not abated. His faculties burned with an inextinguishable blaze. Immanuel College then was a truly Puritan foundation and through the influence of Chatterton, Many, many godly and zealous preachers were trained within its doors. Men who were to carry the light of the gospel of Christ to the new world, to New England. Chatterton was a resolute Calvinist. Oh, he stressed the sovereignty of divine grace, but at the same time, human responsibility. In 1622, having reached the ripe old age of 85, he resigned his office as master of Emanuel. Dr. Preston, the champion of the Puritan, succeeded him, but Chatterton outlived him. The aged saint was always consulted about the affairs of the college, and right up to his death, at the age of 103 in 1640, he could still read his small print Greek New Testament without the aid of spectacles. I would just mention two of those translators. There was a great variety among the translators. Some, such as Reynolds, were Puritans. All the men of Emmanuel College were Puritans and of Calvinistic persuasion. Some of those men were deans and bishops, men like Lancelot Andrews. Some were outstanding scholars and linguists, men like Chatterton, Boyes, Downes, Lively, But all 47 of those translators named were staunch Protestants, and 45 of them were Calvinists. As I draw to a conclusion, the same cannot be said of Westcott and Hort, nor of Kurt Alland, and the spurious brood of versions they have spawned upon the Church of Christ. One wonders what kind of Protestantism it is that is found grubbing about the dusty shelves of the Antichrist library in Rome or ferreting amongst the rubbish bins of a monastery of Greek idolatry, St. Catherine's Monastery. Was it coincidence that the two of the foremost Greek scholars stumbled across these two musty parchments? Or was that discovery a Jesuit plot? If you read the minutes of the Council of Trent, you will come to the same conclusion that I have come to. Westcott and Hort and Tischendorf were not Protestants at all. Westcott wrote to his fiancee from the continent in 1847, he was touring the continent, and he wrote to her, he said, after leaving the monastery, we shaped our course to a little oratory which we discovered on the summit of a neighboring hill. Fortunately, we found the door open. It is very small, with one kneeling place, and behind a screen, a paella. the size of life, that's a statue of the Virgin and the dead Christ. He says to her, had I been alone, I could have knelt before her for hours. Does that sound like a Protestant? Hort wrote to Westcott in 1865, he says, I have been persuaded for many years that Mary worship and Jesus worship have very much in common in their causes and their results. Are those the words of a Protestant? He writes to Westcott on September 23, 1864. He says, I remember shocking you and Bishop Lightfoot not so long ago by expressing a belief that Protestantism is only parenthetical and temporary. Perfect Catholicity has been nowhere since the Reformation. He was saying that Protestantism is only a parenthesis. Just a short interlude, but temporary, until we return to the Roman church. Hort wrote to Ellerton in 1848, he says, the pure Romish view of the sacrament seems to me nearer and more likely to lead to the truth than the evangelical position. No, these were not Protestants at all. Both Westcott and Hort rejected the substitutionary and the vicarious atonement of Christ for the sinner. And therefore it is of no surprise that the verse in 1 Corinthians 5.7 and 1 Peter 4.1 have been significantly changed. 1 Corinthians 5.7, for even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Those two little words for us are not in that Greek manuscript from Alexandria, not to be found in the modern versions, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. Our Protestant forefathers declared that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, who has made sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. The Authorized Version is a truly Protestant Bible for all the people, true with regard to the underlying Hebrew and Greek text, true with regard to those translations of Tyndale, Covedale, Rogers, and the Geneva, and even the Bishop's Bible. The Authorized Version is not one translation among many, but the distillation and consolidation of the godly and scholarly labors of Tyndale, Rogers, and the Geneva exiles. It is true with regard to the translators themselves. I end and conclude with a quotation from Bishop J.C. Royal, the first Bishop of Liverpool. He says, we owe to the Reformation, an English Bible, and liberty for every man, woman, and child in the land to read it. Of all the agencies which brought about the overthrow of popery in this country, The translation of the Bible was the earliest and most powerful. It struck a blow at the root of the whole Romish system. Before a free Bible and fair play for all who used it, the Pope's champions could not long stand. The huge fabric of potpourri cracked, shivered, and came to the ground like a pack of cards. With a Bible in every parish church, every thoughtful man soon saw that the religion of the priests had no warrant of Holy Scripture. It is a striking and instructive fact that of all the agencies which combined to win the English Reformation, hardly any called forth such bitter opposition as the translation and circulation of the scriptures. The priests knew and felt their game was up if people once saw the inside of the Bible. Its leading contents and principles ran through the land like fire and from that period, the Pope's cause in England was shaken to the center. You that read the Bible, and delight in the law of the Lord, never forget you owe your Bible to the English Reformation, the authorized version, a truly Protestant Bible. Amen.