- 4 months ago
John and Chino discuss how cult leaders like William Branham and Hobart Freeman misuse the Bible to claim exclusive authority while dismissing scholarship. They explore how higher education, textual criticism, and historical understanding reveal the complexity and richness of Scripture instead of undermining faith. Together, they show how the Bible was written by many voices over centuries, why overlapping prophets dismantle Branham’s claims, and how manuscript families expose the dangers of the “pinned by God” myth. With examples ranging from Adam’s “rib” to scribal errors, they explain how studying history, language, and archaeology makes faith stronger and more grounded in reality. This episode challenges shallow teachings, debunks King James Onlyism, and shows why critical scholarship is essential for those leaving high-control religious groups.
00:00 Introduction
00:31 The Myth of a Single-Session Bible Author
02:12 Cult Leaders Claiming Special Knowledge
04:19 Overlapping Prophets and Historical Context
06:22 The Role of Higher Education and Scholarship
09:03 Human and Divine Aspects of Inspiration
13:04 Reading the Bible as a Library of Books
15:00 Struggling with Fundamentalist Expectations
18:03 The Immense Scope of Scripture
21:18 Why We Need Scholarly Expertise
25:14 Archaeology, Measurement, and the Bible’s Credibility
28:12 Language Barriers and Shifting Meanings
31:02 Misunderstanding “Rib” in Genesis
33:06 Copying, Variants, and Textual Families
39:22 Reconciling Apparent Contradictions
44:45 Evaluating the King James and Other Manuscripts
48:01 Redactions and Scribal Notes
53:02 Why Textual Criticism Strengthens Faith
58:05 From Ancient Manuscripts to Modern Translations
1:00:00 Encouraging Lifelong Learning and Critical Thinking
1:01:05 Closing Thoughts and Future Discussions
______________________
Weaponized Religion: From Christian Identity to the NAR:
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735160962
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCGGZX3K
______________________
– Support the channel: https://www.patreon.com/branham
– Subscribe to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSpezVG15TVG-lOYMRXuyQ
– Visit the website: https://william-branham.org
– Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WilliamBranhamOrg
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00:00 Introduction
00:31 The Myth of a Single-Session Bible Author
02:12 Cult Leaders Claiming Special Knowledge
04:19 Overlapping Prophets and Historical Context
06:22 The Role of Higher Education and Scholarship
09:03 Human and Divine Aspects of Inspiration
13:04 Reading the Bible as a Library of Books
15:00 Struggling with Fundamentalist Expectations
18:03 The Immense Scope of Scripture
21:18 Why We Need Scholarly Expertise
25:14 Archaeology, Measurement, and the Bible’s Credibility
28:12 Language Barriers and Shifting Meanings
31:02 Misunderstanding “Rib” in Genesis
33:06 Copying, Variants, and Textual Families
39:22 Reconciling Apparent Contradictions
44:45 Evaluating the King James and Other Manuscripts
48:01 Redactions and Scribal Notes
53:02 Why Textual Criticism Strengthens Faith
58:05 From Ancient Manuscripts to Modern Translations
1:00:00 Encouraging Lifelong Learning and Critical Thinking
1:01:05 Closing Thoughts and Future Discussions
______________________
Weaponized Religion: From Christian Identity to the NAR:
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735160962
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCGGZX3K
______________________
– Support the channel: https://www.patreon.com/branham
– Subscribe to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSpezVG15TVG-lOYMRXuyQ
– Visit the website: https://william-branham.org
– Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WilliamBranhamOrg
– Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@william.m.branham
– Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wmbhr
– Buy the books: https://william-branham.org/site/books
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00:30Hello, and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast.
00:00:36I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research
00:00:41at william-branham.org.
00:00:43And with me, I have my co-host, minister, and friend, Cheno Ross, pastor and the voice of
00:00:48the Understanding Scripture and Truth by Cheno D. Ross YouTube channel.
00:00:53Cheno, it's good to be back and to step on a bunch of toes today.
00:00:58Today, you and I were talking a little bit beforehand of what we were going to be discussing.
00:01:04And it's interesting because this is highly fascinating to me and also to Bob Scott, who
00:01:10does the podcast talking through the Kansas City Fellowship years, thinking a little bit
00:01:17outside of the box, a lot outside of the box of what the cults teach, but even just outside
00:01:23of the box of what normal tradition, in some cases, has trained us to believe.
00:01:29There are, as you and I were just discussing before this, there's this worldview that whenever
00:01:35we read a book in the Bible, somebody has sat down and penned that entire thing from start
00:01:41to finish from one sitting.
00:01:43And it is a book written like it is written in today's world, but that doesn't at all match
00:01:49the ancient cultures and not just in the Judeo-Christian world.
00:01:54We're talking the ancient cultures of other civilizations.
00:01:57That's not the way that they wrote the books is not the way in which we write and read them
00:02:02today.
00:02:03So I wanted to talk through, as your idea, but wanted to talk through a bit about the
00:02:09cult leaders and their claim to have this divine knowledge that exceeds and excels far
00:02:15beyond what every other scholar has known.
00:02:19And I want to add a caveat to that.
00:02:22Most scholars will tell you that they're still learning because there's so much to know.
00:02:26In one lifespan, you can never know it all.
00:02:30But a cult leader will say, I know it all.
00:02:32I know everything.
00:02:33And I've mentioned this before in the podcast.
00:02:36I've mentioned it to you right before this.
00:02:38The shock for me came whenever William Branham, who oddly, he would say things like, I don't
00:02:46know the book real well, but I know the author, meaning he doesn't know the Bible, but yet
00:02:51he's going to proceed to teach it, to claim that he knows the exact meanings behind every
00:02:58statement in between the words and where we should look in between the lines of the Bible
00:03:02to find his secret knowledge.
00:03:05He's saying, I don't know the book real well, but I know the author.
00:03:08And one of his sayings was, in reference to himself, God only sends one prophet per age.
00:03:17He's done it all through time, read through the Bible, read through the Old Testament.
00:03:21And the shock for me, I'm leaving the cult and I'm reading the Bible over and over and
00:03:26over again.
00:03:26And I'm reading one of the prophets and it says, lo and behold, in the years of King
00:03:32Darius.
00:03:33And then I'm reading another prophet in the years of King Darius.
00:03:36And I have on my website, if you type in prophets, you can see I sketched together this timeline
00:03:41of when prophets began prophesying and began, you know, the Bible books, et cetera.
00:03:48We have clear mild time markers in the Bible because of the names and the events that they
00:03:54mentioned.
00:03:54So I started piecing all this together and I created this timeline.
00:03:57Well, there are numerous prophets that overlap each other.
00:04:00And this is being taught as though that's not the case, incorrect history given.
00:04:06And I'm certain that if Branham was doing it and Branham laid the foundation for all of
00:04:10this mess we see today, that I'm certain, you know, Hobart Freeman was doing the same.
00:04:16Yeah, good lead in, John.
00:04:17You and I talked off the record a couple of weeks ago after we had finished a podcast about
00:04:22maybe doing one along the line of today's.
00:04:25And I think today is the day to do it.
00:04:27And what we were talking about then is we were just discussing what is the role of higher
00:04:33education?
00:04:33And what is the role of professional theological training in Christian ministry?
00:04:41What should we expect?
00:04:43I would say in the broad charismatic part of evangelicalism, the answer would be very
00:04:49little.
00:04:50What would we expect of very little?
00:04:53And very little is what you get.
00:04:56And that's not a good thing.
00:04:59You were just talking about the fact that some of the prophets overlap each other.
00:05:03And they obviously do.
00:05:04And you can, and just, you know that just by reading your Bible, if you read Jeremiah
00:05:10and Ezekiel and Daniel, you'll realize they all lived at the same period of time when the
00:05:16Neo-Babylonian empire was just coming onto the scene in Mesopotamia.
00:05:22The Assyrian empire had ruled prior to that.
00:05:24Um, and then the Babylonian empire under Nebuchadnezzar, uh, crushed the Assyrian empire.
00:05:32And you've got three different, uh, Hebrew prophets, two of which end up in Babylon, Ezekiel
00:05:39and Daniel and Jeremiah stays with, um, stays with the, uh, refugees in, in Southern Palestine.
00:05:48Um, but I think that when we ask what's the role of higher education?
00:05:54I think so many people in the charismatic part of evangelicalism and not even, not just
00:06:02the charismatic part, I'd even say a lot of the independent, uh, non-charismatic part
00:06:08of evangelicalism would say, you know, we don't really have any need of, um, higher education
00:06:15or professional theological training.
00:06:18And I think that these people, they're often very critical of it.
00:06:23It's often, um, talked about in a very discouraging manner and they will find, you know, passages.
00:06:33They'll say, well, Amos, the prophet, um, you know, God called him to be a prophet, but he
00:06:41was just a herdsman and a gatherer of sycamore fruit.
00:06:43So he didn't really know anything.
00:06:45You know, he just, uh, in other words, just a, a farmer, a country bumpkin, or they'll look
00:06:51at what the Sanhedrin said of the apostles, Peter and James and John in Acts four, where
00:06:58after they had healed that man at the gate, beautiful, we read in Acts four that the, their
00:07:03opinion of them was that these men are unlearned and ignorant men.
00:07:09And so how is it they're able to do the things they're doing and say what they're saying?
00:07:14So I think it's very easy to look at maybe the King James translation of those words and
00:07:20not realize exactly what the criticism was.
00:07:24The criticism wasn't that these men can barely tie a fishing knot and catch a fish.
00:07:30That's what their living was.
00:07:32They were fishermen.
00:07:33Um, that was not the criticism.
00:07:36The criticism was that those particular men didn't have the rabbinical training that the
00:07:42religious leaders did that were on the Sanhedrin council when it says they were ignorant and
00:07:47unlearned read first and second, Peter, Peter wrote that, um, read James's, um, his address
00:07:56to the church at Jerusalem in Acts 15.
00:08:00These are very well scripted, very intelligent, uh, very well written pieces of work.
00:08:08Um, the language is, is excellent.
00:08:11The Senate's structure and composition is excellent.
00:08:16I think that we probably just in the broader evangelical world have a misunderstanding of
00:08:23who the writers of scripture were.
00:08:25We know we have people like the apostle Paul, who was a highly trained rabbinical scholar before
00:08:32his conversion.
00:08:34Um, but all of these other people that wrote the Bible don't discount them as being some kind
00:08:39of country bumpkins, uh, barely able to get their nouns and verbs to agree with one another.
00:08:46And that just somehow the Holy Spirit came on them and actually dictated through them the
00:08:52very words of scripture.
00:08:53The biblical understanding of inspiration is that truly the Holy Spirit did come on them
00:08:59and superintend their mind and their words, but at the same time, and it's a mysterious, um, cohesion that happened.
00:09:07At the same time, he used that person's life, their background, their training, their vocabulary, um, their ups and downs in life.
00:09:18It is a mysterious way in which the Holy Spirit was able to use all of the authors of the Bible, get God's word in print for us.
00:09:27And yet it's not just dictated by the Holy Ghost from heaven.
00:09:31If it was, we would have the, you know, the exact same metaphors, the exact same style and figures of speech throughout scripture.
00:09:40And, and, and we simply don't have that.
00:09:43So I'm thinking that probably it was maybe a couple of hundred years ago that in the Western church, this anti-education, anti-knowledge idea crept in.
00:09:58Back during the days of the reformers, back during the days of the Puritans in, uh, these, these were highly intelligent and educated men.
00:10:07Martin Luther, who, as we all know, more or less began the Protestant Reformation in the beginning of the 16th century, um, AD, he was a trained Roman Catholic priest.
00:10:20He had gone through all the classes that your normal, normal Roman Catholic priest would have gone through.
00:10:26Uh, his Swiss counterpart, uh, John Calvin was trained to be an attorney.
00:10:32Um, and so were the leaders that came after them.
00:10:35And so were the Puritans.
00:10:37I don't think we really saw a shift in this anti-schooling and anti-education idea come into the church until 19th century liberalism.
00:10:51Um, up until then, I mean, even schools like Princeton Theological Seminary, believe it or not, but in the early 20th century, Princeton Theological Seminary was a, um,
00:11:03was a bastion for conservatism and fundamentalism.
00:11:08It, it, it wasn't until the inroads of higher German criticism and liberalism from the European continent came across the Atlantic and began to infect schools like Princeton, um, like Harvard, uh, like Union University, uh, schools in Chicago, schools in New York.
00:11:28That then people began saying, now, wait a minute, if this is what's going on in all of our institutions of higher learning, where we're actually being talked out of the Bible, where the inspiration of Scripture is being assailed and the deity of Christ is being denied, then we need to stop all of this education.
00:11:50But I think that's probably an overreaction because, yeah, for sure, there were and there still are really educated people.
00:12:01I mean, highly educated who don't understand, in my opinion, who don't understand the teaching of the Bible very well.
00:12:09But it's not like they have a monopoly on the market.
00:12:12We've got people who have no education, no higher formal theological training at all, and they don't know anything about the Bible either.
00:12:20So it's not, were you educated or were you not?
00:12:24It has to do more with, are you going to be faithful and diligent and really studious in your approach to understanding Scripture?
00:12:33And there's a lot to understand.
00:12:35I've learned this, I'm self-taught to this point, I've actually thought about maybe going and becoming a little bit more than this, but the whole study fascinates me.
00:12:45I have, I keep on my desk next to my cult research, this book called Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, because Lord of the Rings is a nice fantasy tale, as are most of the lures that are told in the cult theologies.
00:13:01This book, and this is a thick book, you can see it's like three inches thick, it's massive.
00:13:08People who read this book understand that it's actually, there are multiple sections to it, and this is not really one book, it's three different, I think three different writings.
00:13:19Well, when they hold the Bible, interestingly, some of those same people see it as one book, and it's not, it's actually a library of books.
00:13:28And the concept that was indoctrinated into me, which it wasn't just solely the Branham cults that taught this, major fundamentalist groups taught this.
00:13:40They taught that the Bible was literally penned by God, and somebody sat down, God inspired them, inspired their pen, and that way you have books by people who weren't really scholars, written in a way that everybody can coherently understand them, because God is penning the book.
00:14:00And that's just simply not how it happened, not at all.
00:14:04And it would be like, I'm reading Tolkien, and I know the voice and author style of Tolkien, because I'm reading the book.
00:14:12Well, if I were to pick this other book by Scott Adams of Dilbert, all dressed down and nowhere to go, I can tell you clearly that the voice style in this book does not match Tolkien.
00:14:24Well, after you read the Bible a few times, you begin to realize the different voices that are in the Bible.
00:14:32This is one thing that hit me like a brick wall.
00:14:35Once you can understand the linguistic styles of each book, this idea that it's penned by one single author, you know, literally penned by God, and it's all one voice,
00:14:47all of that really goes away, because there are distinct voices in the Bible.
00:14:52This is something that, like I said, it hit me like a brick wall.
00:14:56And what it did for me goes against what I was taught that it would do for me.
00:15:03I had heard some of this argument while I was in the cult, and they said people who go that way, they just completely abandon all of the Bible.
00:15:12Because what is happening is, in essence, they're not abandoning the Bible, they're abandoning the fundamentalist view of the Bible.
00:15:19And in the fundamentalist view, there are significant problems when you understand the actual history of the Bible canonization.
00:15:28It can't work with the fundamentalist view.
00:15:31And things that you begin to understand, which you and I talked briefly, I won't go too far with this,
00:15:37but there are, what's a better example than we talked about, the Pauline epistles.
00:15:43There are books that every scholar certainly agrees was written by Paul.
00:15:48There are others that are debated, and I'm not saying either side is right or wrong, but it is debated.
00:15:58There are enough questions as to whether Paul wrote it that scholars disagree.
00:16:03And for a fundamentalist, this is a problem, because if it's all penned by the same author, you can't have this sort of debate.
00:16:11And so they see the whole debate as an issue.
00:16:14I see the debate as healthy because you begin to learn more about the books than you would have ever known had you stuck in this fundamentalist view of the past.
00:16:24Yeah, I totally agree, John, that the sheer depth and breadth of the Bible precludes anyone ever knowing it all.
00:16:33And that's, you know, that's kind of sad news, because we really, I love God's Word.
00:16:39I love to read it, and I wish I could know everything in it.
00:16:43But I often tell people around me, what makes me sad is I don't have enough time in my lifetime to learn it all, to know it all, or to certainly to be an authority on it all.
00:16:56So it's very interesting when anyone comes along, and of course our podcasts that you and I do together are more focused on Dr. Hobart Freeman, and he was one who came along who said so many times that he knew and taught the whole counsel of God.
00:17:16We preach the whole counsel of God.
00:17:19We don't leave anything out.
00:17:20You know, we believe it all, we preach it all, which presupposes that you know it all.
00:17:27But as you just intimated with what you said, John, I do believe there is one divine author, and that is God behind it all.
00:17:37But God, the Holy Spirit, did not pen the Bible himself, nor did he get a hold of the wrists of prophets and apostles and force them to write his words.
00:17:49It is what I said earlier.
00:17:51It's a very mysterious confluence between God, the Holy Spirit, and the authors of Scripture, the human authors, to have given us just this incredible, incredible book.
00:18:05Look, it is a book to us today.
00:18:08I mean, here's my Bible today, and it's small print, and you know these micro-thin pages the Bible is on.
00:18:18And just in my Bible, there are 1,300 pages.
00:18:25There are 66 individual books, 39 in the old, 27 in the new, that make up this Bible.
00:18:32There are 1,300 pages in my Bible written by approximately 40 different authors over a period of approximately 1,500 years.
00:18:45And it contains approximately, in the Hebrew and Greek, 2 million words.
00:18:53That is the breadth and depth of Scripture.
00:18:58And so as you and I have talked about off the air, and I just talk about it all the time,
00:19:04the need we have for scholarship and for scholars.
00:19:09You know, I know this might be, I hope it's not talking over the head of anybody in the audience,
00:19:14and I hope, I really hope that it's not offending anybody in the audience.
00:19:20But we just have this, we have a partial view that anybody can just pick up the Bible and know what it's saying.
00:19:28And I think there is some truth in that, and there is some error.
00:19:31I think that the Bible, God's Word, is written in such a way that those things that we do need to know
00:19:37for our salvation and for our life as a follower of Jesus,
00:19:41I mean, if you are 10 years old and above, you can read that.
00:19:47You can read the Bible, and you can figure out what you need to know.
00:19:51So part of that statement, and any of us, any person can pick the Bible up and read it and understand it.
00:19:56You don't need formal training.
00:19:58You don't need a professional degree.
00:20:00Part of that is true.
00:20:01The elements in Scripture that we need to know for our salvation are clear enough that any of us,
00:20:10without any formal training, can definitely, if we will be sincere, it does require things.
00:20:15It requires sincerity.
00:20:17It requires honesty.
00:20:19It requires humility in order to approach the Scriptures and read it and understand it the way God wants us to.
00:20:26But no, it does not take any advanced professional training.
00:20:30But that's only to understand parts of the Bible.
00:20:34The Bible is, as I said, it's just, it's so deep and so broad and so wide and so full of the wisdom of God,
00:20:44and it touches on so many historical and cultural and geographical issues
00:20:52that if you don't know them, then you don't know them.
00:20:56There's no way the Holy Spirit's going to tell you all this stuff.
00:20:59He might help you understand the simple things of how you walk with Jesus.
00:21:04But no, the Holy Spirit doesn't give you a class in geography and archaeology as you're reading the Bible.
00:21:10That's something you have to do on your own.
00:21:13So just to give you one example, or maybe a couple of examples,
00:21:16this summer and this fall, I have just, in my personal study,
00:21:23really devoted myself to studying the prophet Ezekiel.
00:21:27So I've got 48 chapters, and I have read it, and read it again, and then read it again, and then read it again.
00:21:35And you have to do that to, as you said earlier, John, to kind of pick up,
00:21:39who is this author, what is his psyche, what is his background, what is he all about,
00:21:47what are his experiences, what's a general outline of what he's trying to say.
00:21:53So that's where you begin, by reading and reading and reading.
00:21:57But if you don't know Hebrew, which I'm not a Hebrew expert,
00:22:03then you're dependent on an English translation, for better or for worse.
00:22:07You are dependent on an English translation.
00:22:10That's not the end of the day, however, because God knew that when the scriptures were written in Hebrew and Greek,
00:22:16and he knew that people down through the centuries wouldn't be able to read those languages.
00:22:21So I believe that he also has superintended the translation process well enough.
00:22:26It's not perfect, but well enough, where you can pick up Ezekiel,
00:22:31and apart from a few disputed passages, I think you, as an English reader, can understand what Ezekiel has said.
00:22:39However, after I've spent all this time reading it, then I go to someone like Dr. Block,
00:22:46who I don't remember what year he wrote it, but he wrote his magnum opus.
00:22:51He wrote a massive commentary on the book of Ezekiel.
00:22:54Well, it's actually in two volumes.
00:22:57Volume one covers the first half of Ezekiel, chapters 1 to 24.
00:23:02These are all prophecies of judgment against the city of Jerusalem and the remaining people in Judah.
00:23:09And then the second volume is covering chapters 25 through 48,
00:23:14and it's giving us the glorious promises of Israel, Israel's future.
00:23:20My point in saying this is Dr. Block spent 13 years of his life before he wrote these two commentary volumes.
00:23:32That's a big section of your life.
00:23:35He knows more about Ezekiel than I know.
00:23:38He knows more about Ezekiel's book than you know.
00:23:41He knows more about the book of Ezekiel than most any person out there.
00:23:48Why?
00:23:48Because he's become an expert on it.
00:23:50And how did he do that?
00:23:52By devoting 13 years of his life.
00:23:55I don't have 13 years of my life to devote to one book.
00:23:58And I'm so grateful for the scholarship that exists out there because there's not enough time in all of our lives to devote the amount of time we would need to come up with this.
00:24:12And it wouldn't even be exhaustive, but close to or semi or I wished it was exhaustive knowledge of this book.
00:24:18And I could give so many other examples.
00:24:22A professor that taught at the seminary that I attended, Gordon-Conwell Seminary outside Boston, Doug Stewart.
00:24:29He was a professor there at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary for 40 years.
00:24:34And listen to this.
00:24:35He's an expert in three different languages, Hebrew, Assyrian, and Babylonian.
00:24:43He's an expert in those three languages.
00:24:46I mean, how would you like to be able to write a birthday card to your wife in Assyrian or in Babylonian?
00:24:54And then you're going to have to translate that for her.
00:24:56You say, well, what difference does that make?
00:25:00Here's the difference things like that make.
00:25:03There is a trickle-down effect to all normal lay people out there in the world.
00:25:09There is a trickle-down effect.
00:25:11So here's an example.
00:25:13People who've read the Old Testament remember that there were people in the Old Testament referred to as Hittites, the Hittites.
00:25:22Well, for centuries, there was no proof that any people called the Hittites ever existed.
00:25:29We knew the Egyptians existed.
00:25:31We knew the Romans did and the Greeks and the Assyrians and the Babylonians.
00:25:35Why?
00:25:36Because we have inscriptions.
00:25:37We have archaeological records that let us know those civilizations existed.
00:25:43But there was no proof the Hittite nation existed until archaeological discoveries were made.
00:25:52And it was confirmed that the Bible was true.
00:25:55After all, there really was an ancient people called Hittite.
00:25:59If you don't have people like Dr. Stewart who can read Assyrian and Babylonian and all these other languages,
00:26:10so what if you have an archaeological find?
00:26:13It simply does you no good.
00:26:15So I'll give you even a more practical way of understanding how helpful this is.
00:26:20We know that in the Old Testament, they didn't measure things in yards.
00:26:25They measured things in cubits.
00:26:27Well, how long is a cubit?
00:26:29Well, actually, there's a shorter and a longer cubit in the Old Testament.
00:26:33But still, how long is a cubit?
00:26:34We don't measure cubits today.
00:26:36You know, we have rulers like this.
00:26:39We have yardsticks.
00:26:40We have tape measures.
00:26:41So how long is a cubit?
00:26:44And how can we be certain of how long is a cubit?
00:26:47Here's how that works.
00:26:48When Hezekiah's tunnel was discovered, and this wasn't that long ago either,
00:26:55Hezekiah's tunnel is a place that Hezekiah in his day and age,
00:27:00King Hezekiah actually had tunneled out of sheer rock to bring water from the Gihon Spring into the city of Jerusalem.
00:27:11And at the end of the tunnel, they have written on there how long the tunnel was in cubits as they tunneled their way through.
00:27:22Well, that's wonderful.
00:27:23Now that we have this archaeological find of Hezekiah's tunnel, and we know that it's X number of cubits,
00:27:30Now, all you've got to do is stretch a tape measure on that, and then you convert that to cubits, and presto, you have the answer.
00:27:38This, John, and many other things are things about the Bible you will never know.
00:27:44Just by reading the Bible, we need professional scholarship and higher education.
00:27:50Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started, or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic, and other fringe movements into the New Apostolic Reformation?
00:28:04You can learn this and more on William Branham Historical Research's website, william-branham.org.
00:28:11On the books page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others,
00:28:21with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book.
00:28:25You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements.
00:28:32If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the Contribute button at the top.
00:28:39And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching.
00:28:45On behalf of William Branham Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support.
00:28:50You know, you mentioned that you wished you had more time to learn it.
00:28:54I'm convinced, just based off of my past 13 years of experience trying to learn it,
00:29:00that a person who devoted their life fully to learning the Bible through the entire course of their life could never learn, fully learn the Bible.
00:29:09It is impossible.
00:29:10One of the reasons I say this is because the language barrier.
00:29:14And I know I'll offend a lot of people, especially the KJV-only crowds, but language is a funny thing to me.
00:29:22I grew up in a world where we were KJV-only, and we condemned everybody who had these different beliefs of what passages meant,
00:29:31because their new language of their new version was different.
00:29:34And they would say, that's of the devil.
00:29:36You can see the devil is clearly seeding the new versions with something that's polar opposite of what it says.
00:29:42And then I began to work with other cultures and other languages, and I was really given shell shock,
00:29:50because the things that I commonly say that are English, some of which came from slang that I have learned,
00:29:58doesn't translate in other countries.
00:30:00And so I'm having to explain myself very carefully.
00:30:02At the same time, in those other countries, they've learned English, the ones interacting with me,
00:30:08and their culture has new things of slang and new terms that they're using freely, not knowing that I don't know it.
00:30:16So we have this language barrier that kind of crosses over.
00:30:20So in a person's lifespan, you start to see the language itself take different meanings.
00:30:26And if you go a few lifespans, it can develop into an all-new language altogether.
00:30:30If you don't believe me of this, go down in Louisiana and try to have a conversation with somebody.
00:30:35I've done it.
00:30:36And some of the things they say, I'm like, can you repeat that, please?
00:30:40And it's just the way things are.
00:30:43It's the way that the cultures kind of interact with each other.
00:30:46And some great event in one part of the world will sway the language in a direction that the other part of the world didn't get swayed.
00:30:53And where I'm headed with this is the funniest example of this that I can mention, and there's thousands of examples in the Bible.
00:31:01But the very funniest thing is I grew up singing this song about Adam's rib and how the females came from Adam's rib and all of this stuff.
00:31:11And Branham had this weird notion that he had a divine revelation that men had one less rib than a woman because Adam had had it ripped out, which isn't true at all.
00:31:24Once I went to college and I'm learning anatomy, I'm like, wait a minute.
00:31:29We have the same number of ribs.
00:31:31That's not right.
00:31:32Why did he do this?
00:31:33Well, and then take it a step further, I started studying the language, and I'm reading a new version, and it doesn't use the word rib.
00:31:39It uses the word side, and I can't remember what version that is.
00:31:43So this troubled me.
00:31:45I went to look it up, and sure enough, in the ancient, you know, ancient is the wrong word, in the old Queen's English, the word rib was commonly used to mean side.
00:31:56And it literally meant the side of Adam.
00:31:58And what's funny is that same word, as I was looking it up, that word is used like 40 places throughout the Bible, not to mean a physical rib, but to mean a side of something.
00:32:09I think one of the examples was the side of the ark.
00:32:12It used the same word that was used for rib.
00:32:14So whenever you're thinking of Adam and Eve, and there's this being that is both male and female, the side of this being was taken apart, and then there was Adam, and then there was Eve.
00:32:26If you understand kind of what the language is saying, but it's all based off of the word rib, which in modern language has very little usage as the word side.
00:32:36So people literally thought that a rib was ripped out of Adam.
00:32:40I don't know what you believe on this or not, but as I'm going down this study, this is just one of probably a thousand different things that I found where the language itself created a barrier for me to truly understand what it meant.
00:32:53Yes, that's definitely true, John.
00:32:56And, you know, because the Bible is foundational for all of my beliefs, for all of our beliefs, when I first got in the ministry within a couple of years of me being a pastor and teacher, so we're talking about 40 years ago, I began a series, believe it or not, that I call biblical and extra biblical literature.
00:33:17Here I am like a 22 or 23-year-old, at that time self-taught.
00:33:21I went to seminary after that individual, but I just wasn't happy.
00:33:27Just like what you're saying you experienced, John, I was not happy with the way I was hearing Dr. Freeman explain things.
00:33:36There were too many inconsistencies.
00:33:40I knew there were gaps in his reasoning.
00:33:43There were holes in his arguments.
00:33:46And I knew that everything goes back to the Bible.
00:33:49So now that goes back to the original languages.
00:33:53And then you've got to start studying, which we did for five years.
00:33:56I ended up with more than 240 or 50 messages where we literally covered everything.
00:34:03I began with what were the methods and materials of writing.
00:34:07They didn't have computers, typewriters, ink pens, paper.
00:34:11What were the methods and materials?
00:34:13How were those manuscripts preserved?
00:34:17How were they transcribed?
00:34:20I just took our group of people through an exhaustive study of all that.
00:34:24And it gives you such an incredible foundation of confidence as you read the Bible.
00:34:32Because then when you see a new translation and it has something different than the King
00:34:36James Version, you're totally okay with that as long as you understand something about the
00:34:43family of manuscripts.
00:34:45So we don't have any of the autographs.
00:34:47The actual letter that Paul wrote to 1 Corinthians when he wrote it on a piece of papyrus or on
00:34:53a piece of parchment, it's called the autograph.
00:34:56We don't have that.
00:34:57We don't have any of the autographs.
00:34:59We have copies of copies of copies.
00:35:02That's what we have.
00:35:03And for us today, we have translations into English of copies of Greek, of copies of Greek,
00:35:11of an original Greek manuscript or Hebrew manuscript.
00:35:14You know, I talked to someone on the phone the other day, someone who was a dyed-in-the-wool
00:35:23Freeman follower.
00:35:25And he is no longer following Freeman, but then he went further and began to share with
00:35:34me how he has now thrown out some of the most important and cardinal doctrines of the Christian
00:35:41faith.
00:35:42And it was, and I told him, I said, he said, now, will you still talk with, I said, of
00:35:47course.
00:35:47I said, I talk with any about it.
00:35:49I don't judge anybody based on anything.
00:35:51I think, do I think you're wrong?
00:35:52I'm 100% I think you're wrong.
00:35:55But I love you the same.
00:35:57And I'm happy to talk to you.
00:35:58And I'm happy to discuss and dialogue and debate.
00:36:01You know, I'm happy to do that.
00:36:03But you know what his, what had caused the problem for him, John, it goes back to manuscripts
00:36:08and the tradition of the translation of manuscripts and what we call textual variants.
00:36:16It's a whole study in itself.
00:36:18But if people could simply think of it like this, when Paul wrote Corinthians, he wrote
00:36:25it in Greek.
00:36:26Okay.
00:36:26And so probably a couple of copies of that were made and they were scattered around.
00:36:30And then maybe later, a couple of more copies were made.
00:36:34And then pretty soon that autograph, the original manuscript, it no longer existed.
00:36:40And for good reason, people would be worshiping the original manuscripts if we had them.
00:36:44But that original manuscript is no longer in existence.
00:36:49And so what someone had to do is they had to make their own copy of a copy.
00:36:55So now you've gone from an autograph to a primary manuscript, now to a secondary manuscript.
00:37:01And over time, those wear out.
00:37:04And so then now that one, before it wears out, we're going to make another copy.
00:37:08Now that's called a tertiary copy.
00:37:10And what happens is there are scribal errors that enter into the picture.
00:37:16They're minor.
00:37:17They're very minor.
00:37:18It's not like a new doctrine has been introduced because the people who were doing the transcribing
00:37:23loved the Bible, loved the manuscript, and were doing to the best of their ability
00:37:29to copy it accurately and faithfully.
00:37:33But I've given students this opportunity.
00:37:36I said, I'll just give you Matthew.
00:37:38And I want you to sit down and just read Matthew and just write it.
00:37:42I can 100% guarantee you'll misspell a word.
00:37:48What happens often is when the scribe is writing, he writes the word.
00:37:53You know, he sees the word.
00:37:54He writes it.
00:37:55Then he looks back.
00:37:57And you know what he does?
00:37:58He writes the same line again because his eyes went up to what he had just written.
00:38:03It's called ditography.
00:38:05So you actually have a duplication of that.
00:38:08Those kinds of errors are relatively easy to spot spot because we do them all the time
00:38:14ourselves.
00:38:14We know why that word was written twice.
00:38:17It wasn't in the original manuscript.
00:38:19And it wasn't in the primary copy.
00:38:22And it might not have been in the secondary copy.
00:38:25It's in that third or tertiary copy.
00:38:28And then anybody who's copying that manuscript, this is how you end up with a family of manuscripts.
00:38:34Anybody who's copying that one says, wow, it says the word mouth twice.
00:38:39It said he opened his mouth mouth.
00:38:41So that's what I have to write.
00:38:43And so that's how that ended up in that family of manuscripts.
00:38:47So this individual I was talking to found some contradictions with numbers back in, you know,
00:38:55Kings and Chronicles.
00:38:58And so he said, so, you know, I can't believe God's word because in one case it said, in
00:39:03one passage it said 3,000, in another it said 30,000.
00:39:07And they can't both be right.
00:39:09And I said, you know, what makes me sad is Hobart Freeman should have spent time dealing
00:39:15with textual variance and less time on divine healing and all of his crazy anti-medical
00:39:21stuff.
00:39:22And you would not be having the problems you're having reading and believing God's word today.
00:39:28One of the funniest text variances that exists in the Branham cults, I'm sure is the Freeman
00:39:33cult and many of the charismatic Pentecostal world.
00:39:36And if you, you cannot be given the number 666.
00:39:40And in fact, if you go to a hotel, you, you go to the sixth floor, you'll find there is
00:39:45never a room 666 because the reason is it's, it's the number of the devil, except for some
00:39:52manuscripts had 606, which makes it really funny because if you don't know the number
00:39:57of the devil, is the number really that important?
00:39:59That's one of the questions I had, but the study of, I'm glad you went to text criticism.
00:40:05The study of text criticism is not, for me, it's one of the most fascinating studies of
00:40:10all that we're talking about, but I see it as one of the most important if you came out
00:40:16of one of these cults.
00:40:17Simply put, there are more variants of text in the New Testament than there are words in
00:40:23the New Testament across all of the families.
00:40:25And this is something that, because of that mindset that I came out of, this was the most
00:40:31troubling thing for me.
00:40:33I was like this guy, I've got to throw the whole thing out.
00:40:36This can't be.
00:40:37Because we were taught the pinned by God method.
00:40:40If you're taught the pinned by God method, this doesn't work.
00:40:43How can there be more variants than there are words if it was pinned by God?
00:40:48Well, complicate what you said, further complicate it with this fact, which I don't know if you
00:40:53know this one or not.
00:40:54But in the ancient world, you do know that there were many people that could not read
00:40:59or write.
00:41:00And so, statements like, forsake yourself not to gather together for the reading of Scripture,
00:41:06I can't remember the exact words, but people had to do this, because most of the people
00:41:12couldn't read.
00:41:13And most of the people didn't have the Bible for themselves, so they had to come together.
00:41:17But what I did not know until I went through the study of text criticism, there are actually
00:41:23people who were in the ancient world who could write but could not read.
00:41:29And I thought, how can this be?
00:41:31And I'm listening to different ideas of why this was.
00:41:34Because the one that made the most sense to me, if you look at the Greek language, they're
00:41:39all a bunch of symbols, and they're very easy to duplicate.
00:41:42Some of them are like squares with ticks, and you get one of those ticks in the wrong
00:41:47place, it means an entirely different thing than if you had the tick in the right place.
00:41:51And so, there were people that could literally look at a tick and a square and a symbol, whatever
00:41:55it was, and replicate the symbol.
00:41:57And so, they were doing this.
00:41:59So, you had families of scrolls where, I can't think of an example off the top of my head,
00:42:04but a very reputable Christian scholar was explaining, this tick sent this variant down a path where
00:42:10this meaning is not even the same thing.
00:42:13And again, there's more variance than there are words in the New Testament.
00:42:17If you're in the fundamentalist mindset where it's pinned by God, well, how do you carry it
00:42:22a step further than this?
00:42:24If it's pinned by God originally, well, what about the translations?
00:42:29Don't they have to also be pinned by God?
00:42:31Well, what about the King James Version?
00:42:33Doesn't it have to be pinned by God?
00:42:34Well, what about the variants in language as the language change?
00:42:37And you can go on and on to infinity with these types of questions, and it comes out about
00:42:43the same way as this.
00:42:46There was this unique problem that existed in Islam.
00:42:50The very first time that Islamic people started to leave the earth and go into orbit to the
00:42:57space station, because you're supposed to pray towards Mecca.
00:43:01Well, if the world's spinning and it's round, which direction do you pray?
00:43:06And it's kind of like this.
00:43:07Which direction do you go with the text criticism if you're taught this thing that is totally
00:43:12and fully incompatible with reality?
00:43:15Yeah, John, I think this is our 60th interview we've done together, and I don't think I've
00:43:21ever advertised myself yet, but I'm going to do it for the first and maybe the only time
00:43:25here.
00:43:26This is a fascinating study.
00:43:29And on my YouTube channel, Understanding Scripture and Truth by Chenow D.
00:43:34Rawls, I do have some exhaustive teachings about the doctrine of the canon of Scripture,
00:43:40about the early manuscripts.
00:43:45I mean, so exhaustive.
00:43:47If you just look, just go down the title.
00:43:49You have to go to the playlist entitled Biblical and Extra-Biblical Literature.
00:43:54We exhaustively studied the Apocrypha, which are the books you'll find in the Roman Catholic
00:44:00Bible, but not in the Protestant Bible.
00:44:02We looked at the Pseudepigrapha, which is another group of books that made it in neither.
00:44:08There are books like the Gospel of Thomas and things like that, but we primarily looked
00:44:14at the early manuscripts and the family of manuscripts.
00:44:18And as you and I have just indicated how where a scribal mistake happens in, let's say, a certain
00:44:26geographical region, then what you find through history is that the manuscripts that come from
00:44:33that area oftentimes include that same scribal mistake.
00:44:39And that's how we come up with the different families of manuscripts.
00:44:42So, for instance, I am a lover of the King James Bible because I was brought up on it.
00:44:48All my scriptures are memorized out of it.
00:44:51However, I am not a KJV-only guy.
00:44:54That is the most insane argument that anyone could possibly argue.
00:45:00The KJV-only guy people literally think that the King James Bible, which is in Elizabethan
00:45:07English, is inspired by God.
00:45:10And it is not inspired by God.
00:45:13It is a translation that comes from a family, a textual family called the Byzantine family
00:45:19of manuscripts that I don't even think is the most reliable family of manuscripts.
00:45:27I don't.
00:45:28But I'm able to go, because I'm pretty knowledgeable about all of this stuff, I am able to go through
00:45:33my King James Bible, which I have done, and make the corrections and make the notations
00:45:39myself.
00:45:42Westcutt and Hort, you know, I probably better not go down that path.
00:45:46That is the textual critic path that's probably going to lead you to the best manuscripts because
00:45:55they go back to some of the earliest manuscripts.
00:45:57But again, the tape series, the messages that I have in the past are exhaustive, dealing with
00:46:03Coptic manuscripts, which means they came from Egypt, dealing with Syriac, like the Peshitta,
00:46:10like Taysan's Dioteseron.
00:46:11I mean, I know all these things off the top of my head, because that was a field I studied
00:46:16and studied and studied.
00:46:18And I did it for one reason.
00:46:20I think similar to the journey you've been on, John, I did it for one reason, to give
00:46:25me confidence in this book that I call the Bible, the Word of God, when I pick it up.
00:46:31But I wasn't foolish enough to think that just because I believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch,
00:46:42I wasn't foolish enough to think that he wrote the last three verses of the Pentateuch, which
00:46:46record his death.
00:46:48So when you say, I believe Moses wrote the five books of Moses, yeah, I do believe he wrote
00:46:54the five books of Moses.
00:46:55But there are some exceptions.
00:46:56An editor after him had to have added that as a postscript about Moses' death.
00:47:03Now, if you are one of these super weird people out there, I guess you could believe God told
00:47:11Moses how he was going to die.
00:47:13So Moses wrote it all in there, and then he died afterwards.
00:47:17There are probably people out there in the cults that believe that happened.
00:47:21That is nonsense.
00:47:22I'll give you one other example, and then I know you're just dying to talk, John.
00:47:27When you go back into Genesis 14, it's talking about Abraham battling some kings, and it said
00:47:36he chased them, I think, up as far as Dan, D-A-N.
00:47:40Well, wait a minute.
00:47:41Dan is one of the 12 sons and 12 tribes of Jacob.
00:47:45He's not even born.
00:47:46He's not even on the scene yet.
00:47:48So there can't be a Dan.
00:47:49Dan doesn't come for many years after that.
00:47:53So most scholars understand that that's an editorial redaction in Genesis 14 that a later
00:48:01editor post the time of Jacob and his 12 sons wrote the word Dan in there so that the readers
00:48:09post that time would understand where in the world is he talking about.
00:48:13He might have called it some other name that no one would know because that place has now
00:48:19been renamed Dan.
00:48:20The earlier place no longer exists.
00:48:23That is no negative reflection on the Bible being the word of God or it being the inspired
00:48:30word of God.
00:48:31It's just there are a lot more mechanics that go into that than people realize.
00:48:38This whole podcast was your idea, but I was building to a climax that you beat me to.
00:48:43So I mentioned that the text criticism is one of the things that I strongly recommend
00:48:49most and there's a reason why this is so and this is a kind of a funny story side story.
00:48:55But when I began to find all of the fallacies with the legends behind William Branham, one
00:49:04of the guys who was in the call, he came up with he apparently had been going through some
00:49:11of the same exercise while in the call and apparently was greatly troubled by many of the things
00:49:17that he thought were contradictions in the Bible.
00:49:19And so they published this newsletter, which they've now taken off of their website, but
00:49:25the newsletter was literally five to seven pages of where the Bible contradicts itself and
00:49:31how the summary of this publication was you can't trust the Bible.
00:49:36So therefore, if you can't trust the Bible, then you also can't trust William Branham's
00:49:42statements to align in the same way.
00:49:44And therefore, brothers and sisters, we must believe it anyway.
00:49:47That was literally the summary, which if you're not brainwashed, you look at that and you think,
00:49:53well, what in the world was that for, you know?
00:49:55But the funny part about it was at that point in time, I had gone through the stages of my
00:50:01journey in way past the contradictions into the text criticism.
00:50:07And the irony is the things that they were mentioning as contradictions in the Bible,
00:50:12I had been doing apologetics for like two years and I understood the reasons why these
00:50:18statements were not actually in conflict.
00:50:20There are many things in the Bible that are, they seem to be in conflict, but if you really
00:50:26understand the history, why it was written, how it was written, it's not actually so much
00:50:31a conflict.
00:50:32There are other things that are unexplainable and those are the ones that, as I'm talking
00:50:37with the apologists, they just simply say, well, we don't know.
00:50:40We don't understand it.
00:50:41But these other things you're mentioning, they're not conflicts.
00:50:44So I, as I was saying, the text criticism is very critical for this one reason which you
00:50:52just mentioned, and I'm going to build on what you said, if you understand the Bible as a
00:50:57thing that is penned by God, word for word accurate, and then you suddenly come in contact
00:51:03with something that a different family has a different word or some, you know, something
00:51:08that defies what you believe, the whole religion falls apart.
00:51:13You're building it on, it's basically a false religion.
00:51:16If you build your religion on this false idea, you have a false religion because your foundation
00:51:20is incorrect.
00:51:22When you read the Bible and you understand it for the meanings of what is being said,
00:51:27not individual words and phrases that might have problematic areas between the copies,
00:51:33it turns into a different book because you're understanding the message that was to be relayed.
00:51:39And if you think penned by God in your way of saying it, your words are different from mine
00:51:44of how you say that, but I think we're saying the same thing.
00:51:47If the entire idea is coming across and the idea is coming across from God and you understand
00:51:53the concept that is being given you, this is a much greater thing than trying to invent
00:51:59rules by little verses and phrases and trying to piece together the mystery of these things,
00:52:06which is ridiculous.
00:52:07And another example of this, which I don't think you gave in what you just said, I'd have
00:52:13to go back and listen to it, but one of the things that hit me that was kind of funny,
00:52:18you mentioned the redaction.
00:52:20So along with redaction, there are sometimes scribal notes.
00:52:25Somebody's reading, they take a note because it's their copy.
00:52:29And what happened is...
00:52:30That happens a lot.
00:52:32What happened was the guy who copied it, sometimes who can't read, well, he's copying
00:52:36the scribal notes, and suddenly now the text has a new thing in it that wasn't in the original.
00:52:42If you're believing in this archaic way of trying to say that it was penned by God, well,
00:52:48what do you do with the scribal notes that are in your King James Bible?
00:52:51It doesn't work.
00:52:52It doesn't work.
00:52:54And so there are...
00:52:55The idea of text criticism, people get hung up on the word.
00:52:59They think that that's critical thinking, critical against the Bible.
00:53:02It's actually a way to further prove what was original.
00:53:05By comparing and criticizing the two words of two different families, you can suddenly
00:53:11realize and recognize which is what's more true to the original.
00:53:15Because it's not like today's world where you go, you take your book to a printing press
00:53:20and then it's stamped book by book by book.
00:53:22Every page is exactly the same.
00:53:25And within each one of these families has all these variances.
00:53:27The only way to go back to understand what was original is to critically examine the words
00:53:33and phrases used in both.
00:53:35And that process teaches you that it reminds me a lot of like the old philosophers.
00:53:43If you read a philosopher, the guy who's trying to tell you something isn't where you learn
00:53:48it.
00:53:49It's the other ones who are asking questions and it turns into a dialogue.
00:53:54And the dialogue, the combination of all of it, gives you the meaning.
00:53:58Well, if you read the Bible as a dialogue, as a way to understand the concepts that are
00:54:03being relayed, it's much like the ancient philosophers.
00:54:06I didn't know we were going to end up with a whole podcast on textual criticism, but that's
00:54:11basically where we ended up.
00:54:13We've got some more.
00:54:14We'll do another one on another topic.
00:54:17And I hope everyone, this is probably new terminology, I would think, John, to people,
00:54:25textual criticism.
00:54:26And when they hear the word criticism, they think, oh, something evil or bad.
00:54:30You just explain no.
00:54:31All textual criticism is, is a comparison of the different manuscripts.
00:54:39You can pick any book of the Bible, whether it's Jeremiah or 1 John.
00:54:45We have different manuscripts of, in the original languages of those books, Hebrew for the Old
00:54:54Testament, Greek for the New.
00:54:56We have different manuscripts.
00:54:58Those manuscripts don't look exactly the same.
00:55:03We didn't have Johann Gutenberg in 1453 in the printing press.
00:55:08Once the printing press, that was the marvel of the printing press, that you can have an exact
00:55:14copy, assuming the type is set correctly.
00:55:17You can have an identical copy.
00:55:20You can have thousands of them.
00:55:21But you are definitely right in the other note you just mentioned, John, that sometimes the
00:55:27scribes, Old and New Testament scribes, would write a note or a notation in the margin or,
00:55:33you know, between two lines.
00:55:36There were no chapter divisions in the autographs.
00:55:38There were no verse divisions.
00:55:40None of that existed.
00:55:41All of that is artificial, and it's okay because it helps us find things in the Bible.
00:55:47I've had some of my students, we've given them this test.
00:55:51When Jesus, his first sermon, he stood up, and he was going to read something from the
00:55:56prophet Isaiah.
00:55:57Well, they don't have a book called Isaiah that you can turn to page 37.
00:56:01It is this long scroll that you have to open, and there are no chapter divisions, and there
00:56:08are no verse divisions.
00:56:09How in the world are you going to find the passage you're looking for?
00:56:14He found the passage that he was looking for, and he read it and handed the scroll back to
00:56:20the minister, and he said, today, this scripture is fulfilled in your ears, and he sat back
00:56:25down.
00:56:26And I said, I challenge any of you.
00:56:28I can give you a book of the Bible, and if it doesn't have chapter and verse divisions,
00:56:32you'll never find that little phrase that you're looking for.
00:56:36So it's good for us to have those.
00:56:38So our encouragement to everyone, my encouragement personally, John, if anyone wants to further
00:56:45study this, go and listen to some of the earlier messages I did.
00:56:48They are really, really good.
00:56:51And I say that even though they're mine, because they're not doctrinal.
00:56:55They're not my opinion, her opinion, their opinion.
00:56:57They're just a formal study on textual criticism and on manuscripts.
00:57:04And even understanding what's an uncial, what's a codice, what are these things?
00:57:11All of that is explained.
00:57:13And I know I came away from all of my years of studying that just on a firm, happy, joyful
00:57:22footing as I read the Bible.
00:57:24And as I said earlier, even though I quote from and carry the KJV, you know, I'm very
00:57:30familiar with all the arguments for and against it.
00:57:33I'm totally up to date on that.
00:57:35And the KJV only debate, as I said, it's just a silly, silly debate.
00:57:40The King James translation of the Bible is a beautiful translation, will probably never
00:57:46be surpassed just because of the poetry of the language.
00:57:50But that doesn't mean it's accurate.
00:57:52It just means that it's beautiful.
00:57:54And where it is inaccurate, you will need the help of some other manuscripts.
00:58:00And so after we talked about the textual variants, we went through early translations into other
00:58:08languages like Syriac and like Coptic.
00:58:11And then we finally worked our way through the Latin, like Jerome's Vulgate.
00:58:16Then we finally worked our way all the way up to Coverdale and Tyndale and the early English
00:58:23translations and the Bishop's Bible and the Geneva Bible.
00:58:27And then finally, you get to 1611 and you get to the men of the Hampton Court who translated
00:58:33the KJV.
00:58:33And then you have this plethora of translations that happened during the 1900s, and they're
00:58:39still happening today.
00:58:40People will always be translating the Bible.
00:58:45So hey, let me end with a little cute quote.
00:58:49I don't even remember where I heard this, and I don't know if it was in high school or college,
00:58:54but I use it all the time in my teachings.
00:58:58And it's called, I Had Six Faithful Friends.
00:59:00I don't know if you've ever heard this before or not, John, but I just, you know, it goes
00:59:05down the path of encouraging people to be inquisitive.
00:59:12Don't believe something because some human being told you.
00:59:15After all, he's just a human being.
00:59:18He could be a scholar.
00:59:19He could be a layman.
00:59:20He could be right if he's a scholar.
00:59:23He could be wrong if he's a scholar.
00:59:25He could be right if he's a layman.
00:59:26Again, do your own research, and it goes like this.
00:59:31I had six faithful friends.
00:59:33They taught me all I knew.
00:59:34Their names are how and what and why, when and where and who.
00:59:38I had six faithful friends.
00:59:40They taught me all I knew.
00:59:41Their names are how and what and why, when and where and who.
00:59:45That's funny.
00:59:47You know, I'm sorry I hijacked your podcast.
00:59:49I know I did, but this is something, like I said, this is one of the most important topics,
00:59:54in my opinion, for people who've left the cults.
00:59:57It's a journey that I'm still, I wouldn't even consider myself 1% into.
01:00:03This is something, for the rest of my life, I will be going through this pathway, and I
01:00:07welcome anybody else who has left the cults, try it.
01:00:12And you'll find, even if you don't end up in the same place as Chinno or myself, I think
01:00:17we're probably in slightly different places in some cases.
01:00:20Even if you don't, you'll end up in a place where you're more solid in your footing, because
01:00:25you'll understand more about what it is you're claiming that you believe.
01:00:29And I'll end with this.
01:00:31After going through just 10% of diving into text criticism and understanding what it meant,
01:00:39many of the pastors that I was listening to, especially the pastors in the cult, but
01:00:43even some of the new ones in the modern churches I've attended, I don't really think that they
01:00:48understand what it is they're preaching, because they don't understand what the book
01:00:52actually means in certain cases.
01:00:54But if you go through this exercise, you do, and it puts you on a ground where your footing
01:01:00is more solid than even the minister who's behind the pulpit.
01:01:03So thank you for doing this.
01:01:05Yeah.
01:01:06We'll do another part next go around.
01:01:08Awesome.
01:01:09Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on
01:01:12the web.
01:01:13You can find us at william-branham.org.
01:01:15For more about the dark side of the new apostolic reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion
01:01:20from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.
01:01:45I'll see you next time.
01:02:04Bye.
01:02:05Bye.
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