Why The word "Hell" doesn't appear in the Old Testament of the 1960 Reina Valera

by Pastor Emanuel Rodriguez

Eugene Nida's 1960 edition of the Reina Valera omits the word “hell” 41 times.  The KJV and RVG says “hell” 54 times.  Instead of the word for “hell” which is “infierno” the RV1960 leaves it untranslated as either  “hades” or “sheol”.

In fact, the word "hell" (infierno) doesn't appear AT ALL in the entire Old Testament of the RV1960. All 13 times that the RV1960 does mention "hell" are in the New Testament.

There are 2 reasons why the word "hell" was totally removed from the Old Testament of the Reina Valera Bible in the 1960 edition produced by the apostate American Bible Society.

First of all, the word "hell" was omitted from the RV1960 due to the influence of two corrupt English Bibles: the Revised Standard Version and the American Standard Version. The word "hell" doesn't appear in the Old Testament of either of these two Critical Text based English Bibles either.

Dr. Jose Flores, one of the men who worked on the 1960 revision of the Reina Valera, revealed that they used the ASV and RSV to make changes in the Spanish Bible.

“One principle added to the first list of the Reina Valera [1960] revision committee was that wherever the Reina Valera Version [1909] has departed from the Textus Receptus to follow a better text we did not return to the Receptus. Point 12 of the working principles states: in cases where there is a doubt over the correct translation of the original, we consulted preferentially The English Revised Version of 1885, The American Standard Version of 1901, The Revised Standard Version of 1946, and the International Critical Commentary.”  El Texto del Nuevo Testamento, by Dr. Jose Flores, P. 323,

photocopy of the evidence

The 1901 American Standard Version was the American version of the 1881 Revised Version of Westcott and Hort. The ASV was headed up by Phillip Schaff. Mr. Schaff was a Catholic-friendly Ecumenist.

The ASV, as well as its British equivalent by Westcott and Hort - the 1881 RV, was heavily criticized for allowing Unitarians to participate as part of the revision committees. Unitarians are modern day heretics who revived the ancient heresy of Arianism, which denies the Trinity and the Deity of Christ. Due to this heretical, modernistic influence, Fundamentalists for many years harshly rejected the RV and ASV.

Despite the strong stand that old-school Fundamentalists took in times past against modernism and modernistically influenced Bibles, in recent times Fundamentalists in the Spanish-speaking world have compromised the stance of their Fundamentalist predecessors, whether they realize it or not, by embracing a Spanish Bible revision, the 1960 Reina-Valera, that was made with the exact same influence of these modernists and apostates.

In regard to the Revised Standard Version, Fundamentalists especially recognized this one to reflect the influence of modernism that they fought against. The 1946 RSV was based upon the Critical Text Greek New Testament edition of Eberhard Nestle, who updated the Greek text of Westcott and Hort. Nestle's Critical Text editions were being used for all Bible translation and revision by the American Bible Society by that time. Eugene Nida served as the ABS's executive secretary for translations beginning in 1943.

On November 28, 1952, in a radio discussion, a Fundamentalist pastor named Mark Buch strongly denounced the RSV when he said:

"It is the product of the will of the National Council of Churches of Christ in America. With me is a full page advertisement from LIFE advertising the new Bible. In it is a picture of Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdic who says the New Bible is in a real sense the authorized version of the Protestant churches. This is the snearing Dr. Fosdick who says: "I am a liberal in theology, of course I do not believe in the Virgin Birth nor in that old-fashioned salvation doctrine of the Atonement." Another noted leader of this group insinuates the Old Testament God as a "dirty bully". Yet another leader scoffs at the "slaughter-house religion" and thanks God the Sunday School is dying. Can a translation of the scriptures sponsored by such rank liberals be untinted? No, this RSV of the Bible is indeed not an improvement, but rather another Bible slipped over on an unsuspecting christian public, untried and unread to the terrific advertising tune of half a million dollars for the first million copies."

According to the November 8, 1952 edition of a newspaper called "The Vancouver Sun" this Fundamentalist preacher, Mark Buch, called the people behind the RSV "false prophets". Pastor Buch and his church led multiple public protests against the RSV. Years later Buch remained firm in his position when he stated:

"...twenty-five years after the RSV appeared on the market, the battle of the Bible has raged with a flood of false Bibles from spurious manuscripts. Several of them one might say fairly are irreverent, crude and vulgar. I see it now clearly, the RSV was the first to uncork the bottle of this stream of Biblical pollution and apostasy in the end times."

Even Dr. John R. Rice, who unfortunately endorsed the ASV, recognized the RSV to be a liberal Bible, when he wrote:

“It is a new translation in modern speech by liberal translators." P. 384, Our God Breathed Book the Bible by Dr. John R. Rice

“So in the sense of a translation being often a paraphrase and not a literal translation, and in the sense that the revisers did not regard the Scriptures as verbally inspired and did not feel obligated to represent the words of the Scripture but their own interpretation of the words, the Revised Standard Version is a liberal translation, and thus unreliable." P. 385, Our God Breathed Book the Bible, by Dr. John R. Rice

The fact that the RV1960 omits the word "hell" entirely from the Old Testament, exactly like the ASV and RSV, confirms the influence of these modernistic, liberal, corrupt Critical Text-based English Bibles in the Spanish Bible still being used by many Fundamentalists in the Spanish-speaking world.

Secondly, the question must be asked - why would modernists want the word "hell" removed from so many places in the Bible, and removed entirely from the Old Testament? The answer is that theological liberals began redefining the doctrine of hell which developed into a denial of the teaching of eternal punishment in a literal hell.

In an article entitled "We Have Seen All This Before: Rob Bell and the (Re)Emergence of Liberal Theology", the writer Albert Mohler explains:

"As historian Gary Dorrien of Union Theological Seminary — the citadel of Protestant Liberalism — has observed, it was the doctrine of hell that marked the first major departures from theological orthodoxy in the United States. The early liberals just could not and would not accept a doctrine of hell that included conscious eternal punishment and the pouring out of God’s wrath upon sin.

Thus, they rejected it. They argued that the doctrine of hell, though clearly revealed in the Bible, slandered God’s character. They offered proposed evasions of the Bible’s teachings, revisions of the doctrine, and the rejection of what the church had affirmed throughout its long history. By the time the 20th century came to a close, liberal theology had largely emptied the mainline Protestant churches and denominations." Read the rest of the article here.

Also according to Mohler in his article entitled "Air Conditioning Hell: How Liberalism Happens":

"Novelist David Lodge dated the final demise of hell to the decade of the 1960s. “At some point in the nineteen-sixties, Hell disappeared. No one could say for certain when this happened. First it was there, then it wasn’t.” Read the rest of the article here.

Even the late Billy Graham fell for this apostasy when he began to preach in the latter years of his ministry that hell was not a literal place of fire and brimstone but simply a state of eternal separation from God.

Many theological liberals, such as Bart Ehrman (who is now an agnostic), teach that “hell” isn’t an O.T. doctrine at all.  He wrote a book on this called Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. In a promotion for this book Ehrman wrote:

"The idea that a person dies and goes to... hell for everlasting punishment is never taught in the Old Testament. Even more surprising, it is not what Jesus himself preached.  Or his earliest followers." his article found here

Jesus contradicted the liberal view with His own description of hell in Luke 16:19-31 and Mark 9:43-48, which was still O.T. at the time Christ taught on hell since according to Hebrews 9:17 the NT didn’t begin until Christ died on the cross.

So what you have in the RV1960 is a Spanish Bible that became contaminated with the influence of modernistic liberals. The sad thing is that because many Fundamentalists in the Spanish-speaking world have not done their homework, they have been duped into using an edition of the beloved Reina Valera Bible that strayed from the old paths of historic fundamentalism due to the involvement of apostates like Eugene Nida, and apostate Bible societies (British Foreign Bible Society and American Bible Society, today unified into The United Bible Society).

What is even sadder is that whenever true fundamentalist preachers, like the members of the RVG Bible Society, try to point out these bad influences and the evidence that prove these things, many react emotionally rather than intellectually and take offense to any possibility of having been misled. The reason why some, even Independent Fundamental Baptist preachers, refuse to see what is plain and obvious is because they have allowed Calvin George to do all their thinking for them when it comes to Bible text issues. They fail to realize that Calvin George's intellectually dishonest way of justifying plain error by appealing to other imperfect, flawed texts is shallow, psuedo-scholarship. It's not scholarship at all. It is lazy, irresponsible, and shallow thinking.

Thank God for the many preachers throughout the Spanish-speaking world who have done the homework for themselves and can therefore see right past the misinformation and misguidance.

Thank God for the Reina Valera Gomez Bible (and the King James Version) that is true to sound doctrine and the important warning of hell in all 54 places that the word "hell" belongs. In addition to returning the word "hell" to the Old Testament of the Reina Valera Bible, the RVG has brought the Spanish Bible back to its original Textus Receptus foundation upon which the original Reina Valera Bible was for the most part based upon. (For the evidence on this read the article written by Dr. Jose Martinez here.)