By Dr. Peter S. Ruckman 

Bible Believers' Bulletin, Jan. 2011

kjv1611.org

I am making this article a “personal” column because the attitudes and positions expressed in it are mine. I am telling you exactly how I feel about the subject, and I’ll make it real personal. I think it is time to say something about it, and the timeliness of the topic is evident.

The King James Bible has been perverted more than 233 times since 1880 without producing a perfect Bible yet—even according to the perverters. Every generation of stupid Americans since World War II was taught that the King James Bible couldn’t be “relevant” to their times. “Their times” evidently changed so badly that the Bible couldn’t keep up, because, on average, a new translation has hit the market once every six months (that’s two a year, every year, for over a hundred years). Yet it has been my experience that the Authorized Version is so far ahead of any daily newspaper or monthly magazine that the news media couldn’t catch up to it flying an X-15.

The main issue with mankind from 4004 B.C. to A.D. 2010 has always been one issue: absolute authority. That has always been the issue in every home, in all schools, in the sports world, among the nations and governments, and even in the universe itself (see Isa. 14:12–14).

There are three religions that claim some book as their final authority: those would be Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. But when you examine the teachers and leaders of the Christians, you find they believe nothing of the kind.

You will find the Jewish Rabbis overruling their Old Testament with the Talmud dozens of times. And the Moslems are the worst of all: after bragging about the Koran coming from Allah to Mohammed through a 600-winged angel (“Gabriel”), they have another series of books on the life and sayings of Mohammed (the “Holy” Hadith) which corrects the Koran over and over again.

The news media (TV, radio, and newspapers) is the final authority for all unsaved intellectuals, not the King James Bible. The job of all higher education is to replace the King James Bible with scholarly guesswork, whether it be secular or sacred. The scholars have all been at work to get rid of the Authorized Version since 1880.

Of course, the Christians talk about the Bible being the “Word of God,” but they lie like a dog. The phrase “Word of God” (with a capital w) is a Neo-orthodox designation for the message of the Bible, never the written Scriptures containing the words of God. You can have no “Word of God” or even “word of God” (the Scriptural designation) without words. The question is: “What about those words?” You see, they don’t believe the words are infallible at all, let alone an absolute authority.

Now that is Ruckman’s “besetting sin”: I profess to have God’s words. I profess to have the Holy Scriptures (see 2 Tim. 3:15) in my language, in my hand, when I preach, when I teach, when I read, and when I memorize the “Bible.” The Bible to me is the Holy Scriptures (see Rom. 1:2), and I profess to have a copy in English.

Because of that, I get a lot of ridicule from the “brethren.” An apostate Fundamentalist (a preacher from Tennessee Temple) wrote an article one time that said: “Ruckman says Paul preached the King James Bible.” He’s a liar, and so his boss, Lee Roberson, along with his faculty members, James Price and Cliff Robinson. I have never said Paul preached the King James Bible. What I do teach is that the text of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures Paul read, preached, and wrote was the same type as that of the Authorized Version (see our work on The Monarch of the Books). God only wrote one Bible, and it isn’t the “Bible” you find in Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, the Jesuit Rheims Bible of 1582, the RV, the ASV, the NASV, the RSV, the NIV, the ESV, etc.

Now the first reason I believe the King James Bible is the Holy Scriptures is because of the time of its publication. Notice that I am not discussing the translators at the moment; I’m talking about the time when they published their work. The AV was published during the Philadelphia church period. What fool doesn’t know that in Revelation 3:8, the Philadelphia church was the only one of the seven churches that kept God’s word. Didn’t you ever read John 14:23? “If a man love me, he will keep my words.”

The King James Bible was put together before British Deism showed up, before French atheism showed up, and before German rationalism showed up. All the “big-time” philosophers and critics of the word of God came up in Europe after 1611—all of them. The King James Bible came up while the Popes were approving the torture and murder of Bible-believing Christians (that would be 1500–1800). It came out when God the Holy Spirit could get some men who believed the Book, despite persecution, because all of that other stuff wasn’t going on.

You take those new “Bibles,” all the members on their translation and revision committees are shot through with infidelity: they don’t believe any book—even their own works—are the perfect, infallible words of God. When I hear the NIV is going like wildfire, I say to myself: “I hope that means people are burning them.” You say, “What is the NIV about?” It’s about ten bucks, I think. I tell folks: “You can’t put it down until you’ve read the introduction.” I call the NIV the “Nutty Idiot’s Version”; I call the RSV the “Reversed Standard Vision”; I call the NASV the “Nutty Asinine Silly Version.”

Christ said, “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matt. 7:20), and the “fruits” of the new versions reflect the time when they came out. What are the fruits of the RV, the ASV, the NASV, the RSV, the NRSV, the NIV, the NKJV, the ESV, etc.? Why, that’s easy: abortions, divorce, international drug traffic, cannibalism, sex perversion, two world wars and 177 more since the UN showed up, international terrorism, 55 million civilians murdered by their own governments after gun control laws were put through, and an ignorance of the Bible so appalling that it could only be matched by the Dark Ages. That’s the fruits of 233 modern English versions.

Next, I believe the King James Bible is the Holy Scripture because of its lack of copyright. Anyone can publish a King James Version any time they want, anywhere they want, without having to get anyone’s permission or pay anyone for the rights to do it. The copyrights which began to appear in King James Bibles after 1960 (after my material began to circulate throughout the United States and England) have nothing to do with the text. They apply to the typesetting, the notes, the maps, etc.; anybody can reproduce the text. No copyright was ever enforced on the text of the Authorized Version one time in 400 years anywhere on this earth.

The so-called “crown copyright,” the cum privilegio found in Bibles printed in Great Britain, has nothing to do with anybody else being able to print the King James Version; it just gave the King’s printer the right (cum privilegio—“with permission”) to print it. No permission was ever needed to copy or sell any King James Bible as is necessary with the NIV, RSV, NASV, etc. A fellow put out a work on the crown copyright one time, and it was a lie from start to finish. The crown copyright never applied to anyone outside of the British Empire and was even occasionally overlooked there. It was not binding to the King (or Queen), and no British monarch ever got a dime from the sales. All it did was give permission to print the KJV; it was not a bar against printing it.

Further, I believe the King James Bible is the Holy Scriptures because of the honesty of its preservation. For instance, the translators were honest enough to use italics for words for which they couldn’t find manuscripts.

When the AV translators sat down to their work, they had four Hebrew texts, four Greek texts (Erasmus, Colinaeus, Stephanus, and Beza), three “polyglots,” two Syrian texts, at least eleven European translations (several of them Waldensian Bibles), six Latin texts, and six earlier English translations (Tyndale, Coverdale, Matthew, the Great Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, and the Geneva Bible; see “The King James Translators at Work,” King James, His Bible, and Its Translators, Laurence Vance, 2006, pg. 41). In addition to all of that, they had the Jesuit Rheims Bible of 1582 (an English translation) and Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, which means they had all the readings found in the RV, ASV, RSV, NASV, NIV, NRSV, ESV, etc. That is, they had all the material you find in the Sinaitic manuscript (Aleph) and the Vatican manuscript (B), and they ignored much of it.

The apostate Fundamentalists say: “Well, the King James translators didn’t claim inspiration.” Well, neither did Matthew, Mark, or James. The writer of the book of Ruth didn’t claim inspiration for his work; nor did the writers of Judges or 1 & 2 Chronicles.

When did Paul say that anything he wrote was inspired by God? Show it to me. You couldn’t if your soul depended on it. Peter classifies the Pauline Epistles as “scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:16), but Paul himself doesn’t. Paul doesn’t confess to having the breath of God on him (“inspiration”—2 Tim. 3:16) when he wrote Romans or Galatians or Ephesians or even 1 & 2 Timothy. Does that mean those books weren’t “given by inspiration”? Of course not!

I believe the King James Bible is the Holy Scriptures because of its chapter and verse numbering; especially when dealing with the numbers three, five, seven, ten, twelve, and thirteen. A professional gambler wouldn’t take odds on the phenomena involved with those numbers being “accidental”; he would have better sense than that.

All of the rubbish about who invented the chapter and verse numbers, and when and where they were invented, is brought up by the apostates simply in order to get rid of the fact that they can’t explain them being there. How did Isaiah know there would be 66 books in the canon when it was complete? Why, the Old Testament wasn’t even finished when Isaiah wrote. That phenomenon is so glaring that even the most Liberal scholars talk about a “Deutero-Isaiah”; i.e., one “Isaiah” wrote chapters 1–39 and another “Isaiah” wrote chapters 40–66. That is exactly how your Bible is laid out. The Old Testament ends at 39 books, and John the Baptist shows up in book 40 (Matthew cf. Isa. 40:3). The Bible ends at book 66 with “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1), and Isaiah ends at chapter 66 with the same thing (Isa. 66:22).

Now what do you make of that? Do you think the King James translators intentionally fixed it up so it would look that way? Why, it wasn’t even discussed in any of the meetings of any of the committees!

Back there in the book of Exodus, you’ll find the Table of Showbread sitting there in the Tabernacle. The bread is put on there fresh every morning, daily (just like the manna). It is laid out as twelve freshly baked loaves: six on one side and six on the other. That bread in the New Testament is a picture of the word of God (Luke 4:4), the Bread of Life (John 6:48–57, 68). Now look at that showbread. Twelve loaves—that’s twelve tribes of Israel. Paul wrote that “the oracles of God” were “committed” to the Jews (Rom. 3:2). Six loaves laid out beside six loaves—that’s two sixes together (66), the number of books in the Bible. How did Moses get ahold of that back in Exodus? Why, he couldn’thave! Do you think Paul and Moses figured out that thing before they decided what numbers to use? No? Then was it an accident?

What is going on in 1 Kings 8 where a picture of the end of the Millennium and the beginning of the New Heavens and New Earth shows up “on the EIGHTH DAY” at verse 66? Doesn’t that Bible lay down a pattern of seven and then you start over again at eight (Lev. 23)? Doesn’t Peter say: “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Pet. 3:8)? Doesn’t the eighth millennial “day” begin in the 66th book in your Bible (Rev. 21–22)? How is it that Solomon knew to put that picture in chapter 8 and verse 66 of 1 Kings? Did he know how many books would be in the Bible? Did the King James translators “jimmy” up that one? No? Then who did? 

Not only that, but I believe the King James Bible is the Holy Scriptures because of the pride and inconsistency of its critics. You can tell as much about a man by his enemies as you can by his friends. All English “Bibles” compare themselves with the King James—all of them; they don’t even compare themselves with each other.

Every rotten imitation that comes out professes to be an updated, “clearer” version of a Book 380 years out of date. Why, that’s the profession of a charlatan; that is a businessman trying to make a fast buck by lying. Imagine these people telling you that the King James Bible had to be “updated” into modern English more than 233 times (since 1880) before you could get a copy you could understand.

Every corrupt “Bible” that’s come out since 1901 in America has professed to “update” a Bible that was more than 300 years old. How come it never got updated? In his book A Brief History of English Bible Translations, Dr. Laurence Vance lists 186 “updates” made between 1901 and 1991, with thirty more that have come out since then. Do you know what these apostate Bible sellers are telling you? They are telling you that the “King’s English” (or American English) gets obsolete once every six months, every year, for 400 years. Now who would believe a lying jackass like that except a Ph.D. or a Doctor of Divinity?

They all knew to what book to compare themselves: it was the standard—the King James Version of 1611. They finally had to come out with a “New” King James Version. I have written books and pamphlets and articles about it since 1982. The New King James Version put the readings of the Revised Standard Version into the King James text. The RSV was put out by the National Council of Churches, one of the greatest Liberal, Bible-denying, Communist outfits on earth. That’s the “New” King James Version recommended by Jerry Falwell, Curtis Hutson, Wally Criswell, and James Price, along with Harold Ockenga, the founder of Neo-evangelicalism.

Finally, I believe the King James Bible is the Holy Scriptures because of the promise of preservation found in Psalm 12:6–7 and Matthew 24:35.

“The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever” (Psa. 12:6–7).

“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matt. 24:35).

Two hundred-thirty-three corrupt translations since 1880 have altered Psalm 12:6–7 to get rid of the preservation of God’s “words” (not just His word or Word), but I see that promise fulfilled in church history. That Bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Old Syriac, Old Latin, German, and English—that’s seven. When the Bible came out in modern English, it came out in Tyndale’s New Testament, Coverdale’s Bible, the Matthew’s Bible, the Great Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, the Geneva Bible, and finally the Authorized Version of 1611—that’s seven times. I am told in Psalm 12 that those “words” go through “a furnace of earth … seven times” to get it cleaned out and get it pure: that turns out to be seven in the main languages of the Scriptures and also seven in the English translations.

When I preached in the Ukraine, my interpreter and translator into Russian, Major Taras, a former KGB agent, told me, “Your Bible is better than our Bible.” When Mark Landolt preached in Romania, and when Jim Lince and David Peacock went over there, they were told by those Romanian Christians: “Your Bible is better than ours.” When I preached over in the Philippines, those Filipino pastors (100 at a time with their associates) told me it would be better for them to stick with the English Bible than to get translations into Filipino dialects because there were too many dialects (around eighty) and they could all get together on the English.

The apostate Fundamentalists try to get rid of the AV by saying the words in English don’t match the words God gave in Greek and Hebrew. Well, Christ’s four biographers (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) don’t match in the “originals” (e.g., the story of the rich young ruler, the ministry of John the Baptist, the inscription on the cross, etc.). Psalm 18 and 2 Samuel 22 don’t match in the “originals,” and they were the same psalm written by the same author. So what?

I believe you have the words right now that God wants you to have in English. Now, my “buddies” in the ministry used to believe that before they went into apostasy.

I am going to quote you what they said. You have to understand that what I am about to give you was said after J. Edgar Hoover (former head of the FBI) said “The Bible is the unfailing guide which points the way for men to the perfect life,” and after General Douglas MacArthur said “I never go to bed so tired but that I read the word of God before I go to bed.” Here I am quoting my buddies when they were in their right minds and had good sense.

Wally Criswell said: “The preacher who starts with the word of God in his hands stands upon an invincible Rock. When you come to my church, it’ll be a message from that Book. The Bible is the infallible word of God. God writes it down, and we can open the sacred Book and read his holy words.” Don’t you believe a word he said. When he got on the New King James committee, he changed those words by the thousands.

Here’s Jerry Falwell in 1980, before he lost his shirt and his common sense: “No human being has the right to change what God said. Our faith, our ministry (you understand he’s talking about his church and his school), as the New Testament church, finds its premise in this Book (and here he holds up a King James Bible). Whenever you are reading something besides this Book (he holds up the AV again), be sure that it agrees with this Book (and he holds up the KJV again), or it is not worthy of your reading time.” That’s one of my buddies when he was sane; he fell away later.

Billy Graham was a buddy of mine once. Do you know what he recorded when he began to lose his faith in the King James Bible by fooling around with the apostates in Wheaton, Illinois? Billy went out in the bushes and prayed: “Father, I cannot understand everything in this Book. I cannot come intellectually all the way, but I accept it to be the authoritative, inspired word of faith—the inspired word of the living God.” He said that in August of 1943, before he “fell off the stack” and went along with the apostate Fundamentalists.

Now there you have Jerry Falwell, Wally Criswell, and Billy Graham shoulder to shoulder with “Ruckman.” Somebody broke ranks. Was it “Ruckman”?

Go take a long walk on a short pier. Keep on collecting their tithes, offerings, and tuition, and act like you’re spiritual.