A Response to Nick Sayer's Review of My Article on Latin Readings in the KJV

by Pastor Emanuel Rodriguez

Nick Sayers is an intelligent defender of the KJV. He is an author but he is probably more known for doing lengthy videos on his YouTube channel (which you can find here), in which he meticulously reviews and critiques many arguments on both sides of the Bible version debate. He is very thorough and careful in his investigations.

To the time of the writing of this response, his latest video was a review of one of my articles which was recently posted on the website of the King James Bible Research Council (the article can be found on the KJBRC website here). The title of the article is Calvin George Falsely Accuses the King James Version of Departing from the Textus Receptus (located on our RVG Bible Society website here.) The purpose of my article was to refute Calvin George's claim that the KJV has departures from the Textus Receptus. I unapologetically take to task false narratives like this because Calvin George uses misinformation like this to justify Critical Text corruption in Spanish Bibles, especially the 1960 edition of the Reina Valera. His misinformation is leading too many good people astray, which is why I'm grateful that the work and influence of the RVG Bible Society is growing and making an impact.

Nick Sayers entitled his video review Did the "evil LATIN" make its way into the Greek TR and English KJV (the video is posted below). The video review is over 3 hours long. People have complained about me being long-winded. Brother Sayers makes me feel better about that! All kidding aside, I appreciate his work.

Brother Sayers supported the point of the article when multiple times he explained that this idea that anything being Latin-based is corrupt, Roman Catholic, and therefore "evil" is a common misconception. I pointed out in the article that Jerome's Latin Vulgate was not the only Latin source that the KJV translators were working with. They also had in front of them the good Textus Receptus Latin translations of Erasmus, Stephanus (who simply reproduced Erasmus's translation), and Beza. Therefore, Calvin George's claim that the "sprinkling of Latin readings" in the KJV were TR departures is false.

As I mentioned in the article, anything that may had possibly been influenced by a consultation of Jerome's Latin Vulgate would not had conflicted with the collective evidence of the Textus Receptus. Thus, Latin-based readings in the KJV are not departures from the TR. They are simply word choices that are Latin based but in agreement with the TR, despite whatever differences in nuance word equivalents may have from one language to another. Anyone who is bilingual should know better, unless they have an agenda, which Calvin George clearly does.

Mr. Sayers reinforces the argument with additional information from his own personal research. For example, I especially loved how he pointed out that Beza authored what became the definitive Latin translation used by the Reformers as their go-to text in Latin for about 300 years. This further demonstrates that what the KJV had available to them in Latin to work with was not anything bad. I'm glad Brother Sayers brought that up and I am now inspired to become more acquainted with Beza's Latin text. Dr. Laurance Vance speaks a bit about Beza's Latin text in his latest book entitled The Text of the King James Bible.

Another very good point that Mr. Sayers brought out is the need to put Jerome's Latin Vulgate in proper, or better, perspective. He pointed out that Jerome's Latin Vulgate in its ORIGINAL form, back in the 4th century, was most likely not as bad as we think it is. This is a good point and I probably should have included a statement regarding this in the article.

For many years KJV defenders have characterized Jerome's Latin text as bad since it became the official Latin Bible of the Roman Catholic church. But as Brother Sayers mentioned in his video, the RCC did not really come to full development until about the 6th century. In other words, the "church of Rome" back in Jerome's time was not what the RCC is today. Although the seeds of what the RCC would eventually become were sown as early as 325 AD with Constantine's Council of Nicaea, much of the heretical nature that the RCC has become infamous for had not yet developed when Jerome was asked to provide a Bible for the Roman church. A lot of the Latin-speaking Christians in the area that would have benefitted from Jerome's work would have been pretty sound Christians at the time; albeit led astray later.

Perhaps the most questionable thing about Jerome's Latin Bible was the inclusion of Apocryphal books throughout his text. Outside of the Apocryphal books, which we obviously disagree with, Jerome's Latin text in its original form was probably much more in agreement with the KJV and the Received Texts than we realize. Any corruption that may be found in later editions of Jerome's Vulgate would have been the handiwork of the apostate RCC, probably many years after the death of Jerome.

In fact, Dr. Hugh Houghton, a prominent Latin Bible researcher (but not a TR or KJV man of our stripe), acknowledges a theory among some Latin scholars that there was perhaps a complete Latin Bible translation, containing all books of the Bible, in circulation among Latin-speaking churches back in the 3rd century. This theory is disputed among scholars but its possibility is not farfetched. You can read about this in the first chapter of Dr. Houghton's book The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts. Having noted this, since the Latin Bible was well acquainted with back in his day, it is possible that Jerome's effort may not had been to really change much in the Latin Bible other than the addition of the Apocryphal books. The inclusion of the Apocryphal books alone may had been enough to distinguish itself from other Latin Bibles in circulation at the time. (But this is something I need to look into more. Right now, I'm just thinking out loud.)

Brother Sayers also pointed out that Latin was such a common language for so many centuries that it really should not alarm anyone that many word choices in the KJV were Latin-influenced and Latin-based. This is something that I have been trying to point out for years. Many languages are Latin-based. Much of English is Latin-based. Of course Reformation era Bible translators heavily considered Latin for word choices. There is NOTHING wrong with this. There is definitely nothing anti-TR about this. What a ridiculous notion to imply something negative just because it is Latin-based!

To dismiss something simply because it is Latin-based is shallow and unscholarly. Many fail to realize the importance of Latin. They forget that the superscription on the cross which mocked Christ for being the King of the Jews was written in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin (Luke 23:38), demonstrating Latin's antiquity.

I find the history and involvement of the Bible in Latin to be fascinating and therefore I hope to look into the role of Latin in Bible history more profoundly going forward. I believe such information is undervalued yet extremely useful in the ongoing and controversial Bible version discussion. So I appreciate the commentary Brother Sayers added concerning the Latin Bible which gives me more to chew on.

Since Nick Sayers is an objective researcher he also offered a friendly critique of some things in my article, for which I appreciate. For example, he questioned the prudence of quoting the works of J. J. Ray and Benjamin Wilkinson. Wilkinson has been under fire for years by those on both sides of the fence because he was a 7th Day Adventist. (And therefore J.J. Ray has been under fire for perpetuating much of the same information presented by Wilkinson.) I've been well aware of this for many years. In fact, I wrote an article many years ago, which Dr. D. A. Waite published on the Dean Burgon Society website (back when I was a member of the Dean Burgon Society), in which I address Wilkinson and the attempt by those of the opposing viewpoint to use this against us. That article is entitled Guilt-By-Association Arguments and the KJV (read it here).

Honestly, I also questioned whether or not I should quote Ray and Wilkinson when I wrote the article. In my defense, the reasons I did were twofold.

First, part of the premise was to show how Calvin George was misrepresenting Dr. Jack Moorman concerning his statement on Latin readings in the KJV. To do this I wanted to allow Dr. Moorman to elaborate on his perspective on Latin readings in the KJV. In Dr. Moorman's writings on this, he quotes Ray and Wilkinson. So I wanted to let Dr. Moorman's own perspective, and the resources he used, expose Calvin George's twisting of information.

Secondly, as questionable as Benjamin Wilkinson is for being a 7th Day Adventist, and as wrong as his legalistic theology is, I believe his information concerning Latin Bibles is correct. That information was not a matter of theology but one of history. Can someone who is unreliable in theology provide good information in regard to history? What exactly is the theology of many of the historians that we glean history from? Can I learn mathematics from someone who is wrong theologically? I appreciate Brother Sayers' comments in which he explains that the truth is still the truth no matter who says it. Although I do also agree with Sayers that it would probably be prudent to quote other sources who can give the same information, so as not to give our opponents something they can exploit against us. I get that.

Dr. Jack Moorman is now with the Lord. In his defense, I think it should be pointed out that much of the scrutiny of Benjamin Wilkinson was not quite as public and common back when he penned his excellent treatises in defense of the KJV. Dr. Moorman was a brilliant advocate of the KJV. If he had access to the technologically advanced tools that we enjoy today, there's no telling how much more of an impact he would have made. A lot has been brought to light in this modern age of information access.

Again, I repeat, however, that though there are better sources to quote from, the information is still correct. For example, I would consider Theodore Beza's attestation to the early existence of the Italic church to be very reliable when looking back in history on how instrumental he was in the development of the TR, something of which Wilkinson presents in his material.

Nevertheless, I appreciate Brother Sayers' scrutiny of my article and other suggestions he made for how he perhaps would have worded a few things a little differently were all respectfully noted. Sayers said some things that were very encouraging. I was happy to hear him use the word "accurate" toward the end of his assessment of the article because seeing the meticulous way by which he has scrutinized other works in other videos he has done I'm sure if there was anything inaccurate in my article he would not have hesitated in pointing it out. He did say there was a thing or two that he wanted to investigate more. I'll allow that inquisitiveness to hold my feet to the fire to dig deeper as well.

Perhaps what I appreciated the most were the following words verbatim of Nick Sayers:

"Emanuel Rodriguez, he is the president of the Reina [Valera] Gomez Society... I listened to something of his recently and I think these guys do a fantastic job.

...I really appreciate what these guys have done with the Spanish Bible. I think that is what we need is more proactive Textus Receptus people. I actually didn't want to get into this situation where I'm constantly defending the Textus Receptus. I'd already settled it in my heart. It's like, okay, well, obviously it's the Textus Receptus. [The] King James is the best translation that you can get from the TR. And it's like okay, let's move on. There are millions of people out there. They need Bibles. Let's do Bible translation work. Let's encourage people who are doing this. Let's promote Bibles in other languages. And so that's been my heart for years and years and years.

What they've done in Spanish is brilliant and a lot of people are saying it's a great translation. And I think the thing is too, these guys are constantly looking at things, looking at arguments for and against. And as time goes on, this this will probably be one of the most important things that has happened in the Spanish-speaking world in the last, you know, 200 years.

And I know that people will go, "Oh, you know, it's just a Bible translation." No, this is so important. That's how important I think this issue is that the true Bible gets out there. Having these Bibles with errors and with mistakes. This causes doubt. This causes confusion and the well is so poisoned."

I also appreciated his word of encouragement for the RVG Bible Society in response to the part of my article where I wrote: "Calvin George is not counting on people to think things

through and scrutinize his false claims. We at the Raina Valera Gomez Bible Society are not going to let him get away with it." To this Brother Sayers said "And good on you guys for doing this."

Brother Sayers' comments demonstrate that people get it. Those who are objective and honest, and especially those who are willing to do the research, see the importance and the sincerity of what we're trying to accomplish with the RVG Bible Society. The kids today say "Real recognizes real." God knows our hearts that our sincerest desire is to simply get the pure words of God out there, not just in English, but in Spanish, and every other language as well. It's all for God's glory and the well-being of His people. Thank you Nick Sayers for your objective commentary and scrutiny of the article.

To anyone wanting to learn more about these important issues at a higher level of understanding, I recommend the work of Nick Sayers. Check out his YouTube channel and subscribe to it. Also, his website is a tremendous wealth of information: http://textus-receptus.com/wiki/Main_Page