Ah yes, the vexed Greek word "aeon" which the King Hames often translates"world," as in "end of the world," while the Revision of 1881 prefers "age" as in "end of the age." Sproul compares these different translations in the teaching about the tares amont the wheat in Matthew 13, where the New King James has "age" and the King James "world." He accepts the Westcott and Hort translation of "age" and says the Kiog James translators were wrong to uses "world."
Makes me want to cry. Already been crying about the political situation this morning, also the evolutionist worldview, also some personal stuff, wasn't that enough to cry about in one day? Anyway, it's sad to hear Sproul going along with what I consider to be the biggest hoax on the Christian Church going on today. Not that it's a surprise. Some of the very best preachers, most of them I suppose, have fallen for it.
OK I'm prejudiced. I accept the judgment of my own chosen authorities over those who dominate today's pulpits. The scholarly and spiritual qualifications of the King James translators far outstrip those of WestCott and Hort, and the scholarship of Dean John William Burgon who denounced them soundly rises far above theirs in my estimation. Since I have no official qualificatios to make such judgments myself, feel free to dismiss my opinion and be wrong to your heart's content.
Burgon denounced Westcott and Hort for imposing on their Bible Revision what he knew to be corrupted Greek manuscripts, which now enjoy legitimization as the "earliest" manuscripts to which everyone bows and genuflects, and for their translation into English, which he assessed as "schoolboy" level scholarship.
Their incompetence at Greek led them to prefer the literal translation of "aeon" as "age" to the rendering from the far greater experience with Greek of the King James transaltors. And today's preachers, who probably have even less of an education in Greek than even Westcott and Hort, put their schoolboy rendition above the scholarship of the King James committee, that in those days was developed from childhood immersion in Greek literature.
The same problem has blighted their rendition of the Greek aorist tense as well, or in this case it's more of an inferior tgrasp of English rather than Greek. Greek has this special tense for expressing ongoing action as opposed to one-time action. English doesn't need the awkward phrasing they give for this Greek tense, it conveys it effectively in most cases with the simple past tense, but being klutzes at both Greek and English they bequeathed to today's preachers their execrable unmelodious and stupefyingly babyish literalism.
Oh I suppose I'm being hypercritical. I guess it shouldn't matter all that much that they managed to destroy the English language on top of handicapping the Church with so many absolutely unnecessary versions of the Bible we can hardly talk to each other about any given scripture passage any more, not to mention introducing doubts about the authenticity of the King James based on their heretically corrupted manuscripts. Naa, minor problems at best, and the wonderful increase in a range of possibilities for each word, golly gosh isn't that a boon?
It's "the end of the world." "The end of the age" is an utterly meaningless concept in the Biblical contexts, and it gives a false impression that raises distracting questiohns.
The other time Sproul got tripped up by the modern versions was when he was dsicussing the Beast of Revelation 13 and the meaning of the number "666." Of course he gets lost in the red herring dead end trails this number has inspired, doesn't mention the true meaning that clearly identifies the Pope as the bearrer of that number, and then gets sidetracked by the fact that the "eareliest and best" Greek manuscripts contain the number "616" rather than "666." And we have to take this seriously because Westcott and Hort got away with their hoax and now wellmeaning seminary teachers accept that their currupted manuscripts are really "the earliest and the best" and that the manuscript tradition that underlies the King James is the one we are to doubt.
How well the devil knows his job and the people he wants to mislead.
And all we get as argument against the idea that the Pope is the Antichrist is the mention that the Reformers thought so but "few" today think so. Only too true. Gosh the devil and his Jesuits know their work.
The point of this post was to show that the Westcott and Hort hoax has consequences that are more than small annoyances. It's one of the many ways Protestantism has been undermined and the Roman Church unrecognized as THE great evil in the world that it is. The true Bible's credibility has been underminjed, heresies elevated, the English languages has been deumbed down, cacaphony introduced into the churches and the Antichrist is shrugged off or mistaken for an angel of light.
