My personal history with the KJV-only cult
http://mcclare.blogspot.com/2006/04/my-personal-history-with-kjv-only-cult.html
April 20, 2006
(Howdy!
It has been a few weeks since my last blog entry. No particular reason,
just a busy couple of weeks for a number of personal reasons, plus the usual
Easter-season busyness. So I'm going to pretend nothing happened, and just
pick up where I left off at the beginning of the month.)
Dan Phillips said, in a comment on my previous
post on KJV-onlyism: Candidly, and just 'twixt you and me -- of all
the false notions that too many Christians hold, just about the most embarrassingly
baseless and indefensible is KJV-onlyism. It just shocks my brain into numbness
that otherwise functional folks can not only hold this view, not only publicly
hold this view, not only publicly hold and defend this view, but publicly
hold and defend this view and vilify others who don't. Maybe I'm missing
something, but I simply can make no sense of it.
Neither can I. Over the years, I have learned how irrational KJV-onlyists
can get. What's more, I think they are actually getting worse. The standard
KJV-only treatment of Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort,
two 19th-century Anglican clergymen and textual critics, is almost paradigmatic
of the downward spiral of KJV-onlyism.
The first time I ever heard of KJV-onlyism was early in 1992 - not long
after discovering the pleasures of American shortwave radio, not surprisingly.
In those days, the late M. H. Reynolds, pastor of the
Fundamental Bible Church in Los Osos, California, had a radio program
titled What Does the Bible Say?. In general, what the Bible usually said
was to keep clear of a lot of stuff - including, I soon discovered, my own
Bible, which at the time was the New International Version. This was all
new to me, and I was skeptical in any case, but Reynolds was offering a
pack of tracts anyway, so I wrote a letter, asking specifically about KJV-onlyism.
The tract package included articles on the NIV, New
King James Version (NKJV), New
American Standard Bible (NASB), and one on "modern
Bible versions" in general. It was in these tracts that I first
heard of B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort. They were named as the men who
published the edition of the "corrupt" Greek text on which modern
New Testaments are based. However, little (if anything) was said about them
personally.
It got worse.
A
year or so later, I ventured onto the Fidonet BBS network and the OPEN_BIBLE
"echo" (message forum). For the first time I discovered the disciples
of the bombastic psycho-fundy preacher Peter S. Ruckman and a more radical
(and ridiculous) form of KJV-onlyism. It was about this time I began to
research the history of the Bible for myself. I do have to credit the KJV
controversy for influencing me to do this, as I probably would not know
the Bible as well otherwise.
On the echo, I began to encounter lists of "heresies" that Westcott
and Hort were involved in. They were sympathetic to the Roman Catholic church.
They were racists. They were Darwinists. And so forth. Usually these allegations
unravelled with a little bit of research; for example, the letter used to
"prove" that Westcott was a Mariolator actually says the exact
opposite when you read it in its entirety. And it was a bit amusing to watch
American KJV-onlyists, in trying to claim Westcott thought black people
were inferior, citing a letter in which he advocated the then-progressive
idea of equal access to education for blacks - in a day when, in the KJV-onlyists'
own country, they were still bound in slavery!
It got worse.
At the
time, all the Ruckmandroids were gushing about a new book on the market,
titled New Age Bible Versions, by G. A. (Gail) Riplinger. This ponderous
volume is hackneyed, illogical, and ridden with factual errors, and the
conspiracy theory it presents - that all modern Bibles are tools of the
New Age movement's agenda to usher in the One World Religion of the Antichrist
- strains all credulity. But trying to get hardcore KJVers to even admit
there was a mistake in the book was like pulling hens' teeth, and from the
vitriol it would create, you'd think I'd said the Virgin Mary was a crack
addict.
NABV is also infamous for the way it dialed up the Westcott and Hort-hate.
Gail the Ripper claims that they were occultists: that while at Oxford they
were part of a group called the Ghostly Guild, in which they participated
in séances and other forbidden arts. (In our reality-based universe,
the Guild existed for the scientific investigation of ghost lore.) The Hermes
club, which they joined to share papers on classical Roman and Greek culture,
becomes a nefarious secret society. (You can only imagine what underhanded
dealings they were up to in their presentations on Roman ball games, the
Latin aorist tense, or the theology of Aristotle!) Riplinger even claims
that B. F. Westcott was secretly William Wynn Westcott, one of the three
founders of the occult Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. (This important
historical fact isn't argued on such nonsensical trivia as actual birth
and death dates, of course: no, she draws this conclusion from a quirk in
B. F.'s signature.1)
Riplinger's book has probably been the most influential with respect to
how KJV-onlyists view the life and times of Westcott and Hort. But it got
worse.
A few years down the road, around 1998-99, I heard an episode of a shortwave
radio program called "The Prophecy Club" featuring a man named
Les Garrett, then
an almost unknown KJV-onlyist from Australia. As far as I know, Garrett's
only prior claim to fame is the classic praise chorus "This is the
Day," which we all sang to death in Sunday school in the 70s and 80s.
I was already aware of The Prophecy Club's KJV-only propensities, having
heard them feature Gail Riplinger previously. Garrett buys into the same
Westcott-and-Hort-were-occultists theory that Riplinger does (one of his
books is titled Westcott and Hort: The Occult Connection), but he took the
character assassination one step farther than her, claiming that they were
personal friends of Charles Darwin. Now, in addition to having their hand
in crypto-Romanism and necromancy, they helped out with the theory of evolution
too.
But it got worse.
Most recently, on a Fundamentalist forum, a KJV-onlyist pulled out all the
stops, claiming:
A bunch of simple greek [sic] does not make you a biblical expert. The fellows
who translated MY BIBLE spoke and wrote between 7 and 16 different modern
and ancient languages...all of them were FLUENT in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic...yet
you hold to "versions" which were translated by a couple of reprobate
homosexual lovers (Wescott and Hort by name) who cuckolded thier wives with
each other, denied the resurrection, and basically lined up with everything
else Origin [sic] said, and were at best able to muddle through thier [sic]
Hebrew and Greek (sort of like some other "greek [sic] scholars"
I know).
This is the intellectual pinnacle of psycho-fundy argumentation: When all
else fails, accuse your enemy of being a homo.
I fully expect that the character assassination of Westcott and Hort will
continue unchecked. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me that, ten years from
now, if someone claimed that Westcott and Hort held secret occult meetings
where they brutally sodomized Baptist women while their babies burned slowly
on a fire fueled by KJVs, at least one psycho-fundy will believe it and
repeat it with a straight face. This is what happens when ignorant men revel
in their own ignorance: they love to hate Westcott and Hort, and they value
"defending" the KJV more than they do the truth, and so they continue
to outdo each other in telling lies about them in the name of God. Pascal
was right: men never do evil so cheerfully as when they do it out of religious
conviction.
Footnote
1
Gail the Ripper does admit that this is mere "speculation" - but
she buries this important revelation in one of her myriad of footnotes.
Kind of like I'm doing right now.
