By Dr. Peter S. Ruckman 

Bible Believers' Bulletin, Apr. 2011

kjv1611.org

Of course, when I talk about “the Book,” I am not talking about any lost “original autographs” or “original manuscripts” that no one has ever seen or read. I am not talking about any set of Greek or Hebrew manuscripts or any editions of any Greek or Hebrew texts.

I am referring to the King James 1611 Authorized Version of the Protestant Reformation. I am talking about the Book which I have in my hand and the Book I’ve been teaching and preaching now for 62 years. I’m not talking about any other translation or version, whether it is “reliable” or not.

I call it the “Monarch of the Books” because it is the “King of the mountain.” It is superior to any other book you have ever read or know of, no matter if the author was a “good, godly Fundamentalist” or if he was a wicked, ungodly reprobate. That includes all 23 million books found in the Library of Congress.

Now what I am about to give you is a series of lists or “charts” on what is known in theology as “Bibliology,” the study of the Book (the Bible), so this article is being presented in a different format than what we normally publish in the Bulletin. These are basic outlines, and much of the “meat” will have to be filled in with further study (we recommend chaps. 39–42 of Theological Studies, Vol. II as a start).

The External Proofs for the Superiority of the Bible

1.  Outstanding men have been made better by conversion to it. 

2.  Bad men can change completely “overnight” by reading it.

3.  It elevates pagan societies where it is introduced. This elevating influence manifests itself in those who could not read, write, or dress properly (Africa), or who practiced unjust laws and cruel customs (India), until missionaries showed up preaching and teaching the Bible.

4.  All the wrong done in any community is done by those who do not obey the Bible. It is disobeying the Bible (not reading it) that drives a man insane.

The Internal Proofs for the Superiority of the Bible

1.  Its rational but profound picture of God.

2.  Its purity of ethics. (This is denied by all people who don’t understand that the ethics of the Old Testament were for a theocratic nation, not for individuals after the resurrection of Christ.)

3.  The unity and consistency of its teachings. (Again understanding the difference between the theocratic kingdom of the Old Testament and the individual salvation of the New Testament.)

4.  The historicity of its names, dates, and places.

5.  Its relevancy to the needs of human beings (in any age on any continent).

6.  Its peculiar universal appeal to all genders, ages, and classes. (Little children, women, and the poor enjoy it just as much as adults, men, and the rich or middle class. This phenomenon cannot be found in any of the other “sacred writings” of other religions.)

7.  The mathematical odds involved in the fulfillment of its prophecies. (Peter Stoner, a professional mathematician and statistician, in his book Science Speaks, figured that the chances of the 48 prophecies on the First Coming of Jesus Christ coming to pass would be one out of ten with 157 zeroes after it, and there’s not that many electrons in three universes the size of this one. Moreover, if the odds of a thing taking place are greater than one out of ten with fifty zeroes after it, that event will never come to pass naturally.)

The Canonicity of the Bible

1.  It is genuine and authentic.

2.  Every book in the Bible conforms to its own doctrine or shows you where there’s a change in doctrine.

3.  It is always a safe and reliable rule when “rightly divided” (2 Tim. 2:15). (Not when wrongly divided, subtracted from, added to, or taken out of context.)

4.  There is evidence of supernatural inspiration in its structure. (E.g., see the introduction to Ezra in the Bible Believer’s Commentary on Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther in regards to the order of books from 2 Chronicles–Psalms.)

What the Bible Says about Itself

1.  It holds the universe together (Heb. 11:3, 1:3).

2.  It contains everything that God wants you to know (Rev. 22:18–19).

3.  It can give you spiritual light and understanding (Psa. 119:130, 99).

4.  It can judge human motives and analyze “thought patterns” (Heb. 4:12–13 cf. Jer. 6:19; Ezek. 11:5).

5.  It can judge and correct the false teachings of all Popes, Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, Priests, Nuns, etc. (Isa. 5:20, 8:20 cf. Psa. 69:8; 1 Tim. 2:5; Jer. 44:17–19, 25; Mark 7:6–13).

6.  It can draw absolute judgment against anything that any man, nation, or group proposes (Zeph. 3:8; Isa. 5:20–24, 14:9–27; Psa. 2:1–12; Matt. 25:31–46).

7.  It can correct all Greek and Hebrew scholars, all Bible translators and revisers, and all commentators and expositors (1 Thess. 2:13; 2 Cor. 2:17; Rom. 1:18, 25; 2 Tim 1:13; Jer. 8:8–9, 23:36; 1 Cor. 1:19–30, 2:7–14; Luke 10:21).

Symbols of the Bible

1.  A sword (Heb. 4:12). 

2.  A fire (Jer. 23:29). 

3.  A hammer (Jer. 23:29). 

4.  Seed (1 Pet. 1:23). 

5.  A mirror (James 1:22–25). 

6.  A lamp (Psa. 119:105). 

7.  A goad (Eccl. 12:11). 

8.  Nails (Eccl. 12:11). 

9.  Apples (Prov. 25:11). 

10.  Milk (1 Pet. 2:2). 

11.  Bread (Matt. 4:4). 

12.  Honey (Psa. 19:10, 119:103). 

13.  Water (Eph. 5:26). 

14.  Meat (Heb. 5:12–14).

The Bible is complete “survival gear”; with the equipment given above, any man could survive anywhere on this earth.

The Sufficiency of the Bible

1.  It is able to save a man’s soul (James 1:21). 

2.  It is able to give a man the New Birth (1 Pet. 1:23). 

3.  It can help a convert to grow (1 Pet. 2:2). 

4.  It can build up a believer (Acts 20:32). 

5.  It can strengthen the believer (Psa. 119:28). 

6.  It can cleanse a believer (John 15:3). 

7.  It can sanctify the believer (John 17:17).

The Bible can tell any man, woman, boy, or girl on the face of this earth how to live forever (John 6:63, 68), how to make a living down here on earth (Rom. 12:11; Eph. 4:28), what to do with his income (2 Cor. 9:6–7), how to handle health, family, social, economic, religious, and educational problems (Prov. 3:5–12), how to respond to fair and foul treatment (Rom. 12:10–21), how to get through sorrow, famine, persecution, sickness, bereavement, poverty, and what to do on this earth besides feeding your face and raising your family (Phil. 4:4–9, 11–13).

The Authorship of the Bible

1.  Good men or angels could not have dictated or written the Bible because they would have to lie about their source the whole time. 

2.  Bad men or demons could not have written the Bible because it devotes more than 6,000 verses to exposing or attacking them. 

3.  The Bible could not be just a mere Jewish book because it is the only book ever printed about a nation that constantly condemns its own authors. The greatest anti-Semitic literature in the world is the Holy Bible (Old or New Testaments), written and preserved by Jews.

The Value of the Bible

1.  People have paid as high as $50,000 for a copy of the Bible (1911—the Gutenberg Bible); in 1987, a copy of the Gutenberg Bible sold for $5.4 million. (The current estimated value is $25–35 million.) 

2.  People have paid as high as $151,000 for just one book of the Bible (the Bay Psalms). 

3.  The Bible is the best-selling book of all time, having to be excluded from the New York Times Bestsellers List because it would be number one every single week. The King James Version has gone into one billion copies, more than any three other versions combined.

4.  Bibles are banned in nine countries that allow nuclear weapons; four of these countries grow poppies (for heroin) and marijuana.

The Bible is the most sought after book in the whole world. People in Communist countries have offered up their houses just to get a copy. You couldn’t get anybody on this earth with the sense God gave a brass monkey to pay $150.00 for a Koran unless all he wanted it for was to show it off to someone.

Attitudes toward the Bible

1.  Roman Catholics say it is just one of several authorities, two others being Papal decrees and Catholic tradition. These are adopted in order to get rid of every passage in both Testaments that doesn’t agree with Catholic Priests, Bishops, Cardinals, and Popes. 

2.  Lutherans say the Bible can be judged by “the word of the Gospel” bearing witness in man. In other words, modern Lutherans are Neo-orthodox; that is, when they say “the Word of God,” they don’t mean any words in any book. They mean the Holy Spirit bears witness to certain passages as a message from God. 

3.  Calvin’s position was: “the Bible is divine truth that is completely fulfilled in the past tense except for the Last Judgment.” Then he decided that three-quarters of the Bible (i.e., the Old Testament) was figurative and not to be taken literally. 

4.  The position of Mohammed was that only ten books of the Bible were from God (the five books of Moses, the Psalms of David, and the four Gospels), but they had been changed by Jews and Christians and were no longer reliable. You had to have an illiterate, urine-drinking, sex-obsessed, fornicating, child-molesting, slave-owning, epileptic, sadistic murderer give you what a 600-winged angel told him “the god” (“Allah”) supposedly said (“Allah” never said one word directly to Mohammed). The Mohammedan position is that the Bible lied when it said that Jesus Christ was God’s Son and that He died on the cross for anyone’s sins. 

5.  The position of all Hindus, Buddhists, Humanists, and pagans is that the Bible didn’t know what it was talking about in regards to one God, the Trinity, God’s Son, Heaven and Hell, good and evil, the Second Coming, the resurrection, or absolute truth; so they had to substitute a pantheon of gods that produced one of the most diseased, ignorant, starving populations of earth (India), or else an atheistic Communist State that couldn’t even take care of its own people (Russia and China), or a society of animism, Satanism, and witchcraft which enslaved its people to ignorance and superstition (Haiti, Africa, the South Sea islands). 

6.  The position of the Bible-believing Christian is that the Bible is absolute truth. It is completely accurate, without historical or scientific errors of any kind in it. It is the final authority in all matters of faith and practice.

Apologetics for the Bible

1.  There are grounds in the Scripture for defending the Bible itself (Isa. 1:18, 41:21; Acts 17:2, 17, 18:4, 19:8; 1 Thess. 5:21, 1 Pet. 3:15; Jude 3). 

2.  Anybody who would stop to think rationally would realize that mankind does have a real need for special revelation.

(All children need special revelation from their parents, and all parents give it to their children constantly. Children cannot find out what’s going on without help from outside themselves. Anybody who knows history knows how many times people have been killed because they didn’t have special revelation about something.)

3.  Everybody must face the possibility that if there were a God, He would have to give a special revelation to His creatures. If He didn’t, what kind of a God would He be?

4.  If it were possible for God to give a special revelation to His creation, would it not be highly probable? Of course it would; it would be absolutely certain.

5.  The Bible always runs ahead of science (see 1 Tim. 6:20; Heb. 11:3; Job 26:5, 28:25; Isa. 40:22 cf. Luke 17:31, 34; Nah. 2:4; Eccl. 1:6–7; Lev. 15:13 [that’s less than half of them]).

The Enemies of the Bible

1.  Honest doubters. 

2.  Dishonest skeptics. 

3.  Infidels. 

4.  Humanists. 

5.  Atheists. 

6.  Heretics. 

7.  Political and economic tyrants. 

8.  Roman Catholic Priests, Bishops, Archbishops, Cardinals, and Popes. 

9.  Moslems, Satanists, Hindus, Buddhists, Animists, etc. 

10.  Any sinner living a wicked life who wants to justify his lifestyle.

Men are against the Book because it’s against them. Men are against the Book because it knows all about them and tells it.

The Weakness of Infidelity

1.  Infidelity raises doubts and never has been known to solve any vital problem that man ever had. 

2.  Infidelity offers no motive for proper conduct, leaving a man at the mercy of his own animal instincts. 

3.  Infidelity has never produced any great arts, music, or literature; it has never founded any great charitable institutions such as hospitals, asylums, orphanages, etc. 

4.  Infidelity saps the moral foundation of any society, and in the end, it must always resort to armed warfare to obtain its ends. (Since 1917, there have been seven governments that have killed more than 100,000,000 of their own people. Every one was a country that threw the Bible out the window before it took to killing its own people.)

The Dedication of the Bible’s Followers

1.  Biblical Christianity produces more real martyrs than any other religion. (Every suicide terrorist in Islam is called a “martyr” by his Moslem buddies because he commits MURDER by killing others with himself; not one of them is being persecuted for “Islam.”) 

2.  Christian martyrs die because they’re preaching Jesus Christ. They are stoned, crucified, burned alive, buried alive, etc., because of the Book (and it isn’t the Koran). (Moslem “martyrs” all died to gain Paradise by works; i.e., by MURDER—they blow themselves up to kill other people.) 

3.  The Christian dies by faith because it is the will of God for him at the time to get a reward at the Judgment Seat of Christ (Rev. 2:10). He doesn’t kill anyone else in order to get to Heaven.

The Dishonesty of the Bible’s Critics

All unregenerate and all apostate scholars are jealous of the Bible. They want to transfer the authority from that Book to themselves.

1.  They refuse to follow their own rules of grammar and syntax while translating (I’ve checked them out on at least a thousand occasions). 

2.  They invent rules as they go along in order to justify a violation of rules. 

3.  They insist on a mythological LXX that was never written before the time of Christ. 

4.  They refuse to discuss the fruits of the Authorized Version. 

5.  They lie, continually and pathologically, about “early” and “late” manuscripts. 

6.  They lie continually about King James and Erasmus. 

7.  They lie continually about “THE Greek text” and “the originals.” 

8.  They apply the word reliable to their versions on the basis of the “fundamentals” instead of the text. 

9.  They call text types “families,” which they are not. 

10.  They refuse to translate their own “best manuscripts” (Vaticanus and Sinaiticus), which are two of the worst. 

11.  They have an irrational bias against “Liberals” who use the same text. (They will tell you how bad the RSV and NWT are when those translations use the same text as the NASV, the NIV, and the NKJV, which smuggles the readings of the RSV back into the AV text.) 

12.  They switch “dynamic equivalence” with “formal correspondence” to get rid of the AV text (i.e., they alternate them depending on what the King James says. If it uses “dynamic equivalence,” then they change their translation to “formal correspondence” and vice versa.) 

13.  They invent fairy tale nonsense like “Lucian recensions” and “conflate readings” which never existed and were proved to be nonexistent on dozens of occasions (see any work by Dean John Burgon or Edward Hills). (The outstanding characteristic of “recognized,” “godly” scholarship since 1880 has been a fanatical obsession with Disneyland mythology. It’s not based on science fact or science fiction.) 

14.  They refuse to discuss the extreme corrupt nature of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, or to answer more than 400 arguments presented against them by Burgon, Miller, Scrivener, Hills, et al. (They haven’t answered them yet with more than 120 years to do so.) 

15.  Finally (and more importantly), they refuse to talk about the fruits of 233 “updatings” since 1880 that produced nothing but apostasy.

The Book will prove itself to any man who believes it (John 7:17). The only real argument against it is a bad life.