Which Bible, Which Version?
Just as a reminder, since we shall be quoting on many occasions herein, all emphases and words in [brackets] are mine unless otherwise noted.
You will recall from our discussion of Dr. Constantine Tischendorf his “great” discovery of the Sinai manuscript scrolls in the trash can at the Egyptian monastery in the 1800s. Tischendorf was motivated, or we might even say he was obsessed with finding the true New Testament.
This obsession was brought about chiefly because he was troubled by the work of the Higher Critics in Germany whose humanistic approach to the Scriptures had cast great doubt on the authenticity of the Bible, particularly the New Testament.
This was in much the same manner that the so-called “Jesus scholars” of the “Jesus Seminars” are doing in our day, along with many other Bible destroyers posing as textual critics.
Likewise, the Higher Critics from Germany had made many destructive inroads into England by the time Westcott and Hort came on the scene.
Hort was born in 1828 and died in 1892. Westcott was born in 1825 and died in 1901. Both men attended Cambridge University in England, and very early on in their undergraduate days displayed their disdain for the Textus Receptus.
Along with it, they rejected a number of major doctrines of orthodox Protestant Christianity.
Shortly, I will be quoting from those two books which I mentioned briefly in our last essay, but I want you to understand that when I do, it does not really matter how old they were when they wrote these letters.
We shall be quoting their letters from the time of their undergraduate days all the way to the end of their lives. Someone might say, “Well, that’s not fair…because, you know, they might have changed their views.”
...Except, no, they did not. Now, you can accept my word for that, or you can read through those 1,900 pages and see for yourself, or you can let Mr. Hort tell you, because he does. This is in a letter he wrote dated November 4, 1865.
“During the last 15 years, my thoughts and pursuits have grown and expanded, but not considerably changed.” (Volume 2, Life of Hort, p. 63)
As we commence our scrutiny of Westcott and Hort, the next several chapters will be structured in the following manner. First, we will examine some of the major doctrinal positions of Westcott and Hort.
From there, we will move on to analyze their textual theory. That textual theory was the basis for Westcott and Hort’s new Greek text, supplanting the Textus Receptus. Their new Greek text is what the Bible Revision Committee was handed in order to “revise” the King James Version.
We shall then discuss Westcott and Hort’s influence on the Revision Committee: how it was organized, who was on it, and what rules they worked under, and what the results were.
Following that, we will show you that Westcott and Hort were heavily involved in the occult world… along with some rather important persons in the political world. And we will show you how this is all related to what is today called the New Age Movement.
Let us now take a look at Hort’s position on a number of key Christian doctrines. Westcott’s position was nearly identical.
We find in The Life of Hort that his son, Arthur, traces his father’s religious development from the deeply-ingrained evangelical faith of his mother, which his mother had taught him, to his days at Cambridge, where Hort’s son says that his father “outgrew the evangelical teaching”.
Writing about his grandmother, (Hort’s mother), Arthur writes: “The mother, who, unconsciously perhaps, was a woman of great mental power, which she brought to bear on every detail of daily life. She had been extremely well educated… Her education had given her the thoroughness and scrupulous accuracy which she transmitted to her son…
“Her religious feelings were deep and strong. Circumstances had made her an adherent of the Evangelical school, and she was to a certain degree hampered by it; the Oxford Movement filled her with dread and anxiety as to its possible effect on her son. She was unable to enter into his theological views, which to her school and generation seemed a desertion of the ancient ways; thus, pathetically enough, there came to be a barrier between mother and son….
“She studied and knew her Bible well, and her own religious life was carefully regulated.”
We shall have much more to say about the Oxford Movement further in this series. Arthur continues outlining his father’s religious path:
“Before long, he was to come under other influences, especially that of F. D. Maurice. Maurice’s teaching was the most powerful element in his religious development, satisfying many a want which had hitherto distressed him.” [p. 42]
Clearly then, this Rev. F. D. Maurice is very crucial to the story. He was Hort’s mentor on spiritual and scriptural matters. Frederick Denison Maurice was an influential English Anglican priest, theologian, and founder of Christian socialism.
Do you think it might be critical to note that F. D. Maurice had been into a Unitarian family? Most readers know that the Unitarians deny the deity of Christ. I have done an eight-part lecture series (now in a series of 21 blogs) proving the deity of Christ from the scriptures, so I trust we do not need to go further on that point of doctrine.
The doctrine of redemption and the blood atonement of Christ was especially hard for Hort to accept. So, he looked to his Unitarian minister, the Reverend F. D. Maurice, for answers.
In one letter he wrote, “The fact is, I do not see how God’s justice can be satisfied without every man’s suffering in his own person the full penalty of his sins.”
Later, in the same letter, Hort wrote this. [from Life of Hort, volume 1, page 122.] He is writing to Maurice:
“May I take this opportunity of asking what you mean (in Kingdom of Christ, first edition, vol. i, p. 45) by the phrase, ‘the satisfaction offered to the evil spirit [emphasis by Hort] by giving up to him all that he can rightly claim, while all that is real and precious is redeemed out of his hands.’”
A long paragraph later, Hort says, “[L]anguage cannot accurately define the twinge of shrinking horrour [sic] which mixes with my thoughts when I hear the popular notion asserted…”
Let me explain. What gives Hort a twinge of shrinking horror? The popular notion of Christianity that Christ’s blood was shed for us in vicarious atonement, that is to say, that Christ’s blood paid the penalty for our sins... Which is an utterly basic doctrine of Christianity.
Hort cannot accept that. He thinks every person must pay the penalty for his own sins. Some years later, in August 1860, he writes to Westcott, [vol. 1, pp. 427, 428]: “Surely the essence of the atonement must consist in the forgiveness itself and not in the abolition of such suffering…”
Let me pause to explain that by “suffering,” he means each person’s suffering in proportion to his own sins. Continuing the quotation:
“…whether it involves at all any such abolition, I cannot yet make up my mind. Perhaps we may be too hasty in assuming an absolute necessity of absolutely proportional suffering.
“I confess I have no repugnance to the primitive doctrine of a ransom paid to Satan, though neither am I prepared to give full assent to it. But I can see no other possible form in which the doctrine of a ransom is at all tenable; anything is better than the notion of a ransom paid to the Father.” [italic emphasis by Hort!]
Let me read that last part again. “I confess I have no repugnance to the primitive doctrine of a ransom paid to Satan.” In other words, he is saying, I do not see anything wrong with that. I am not fully ready to accept it, but I do not see anything wrong with that idea.
Then he ends by saying, But I can see no other possible form in which the doctrine of a ransom is at all tenable; anything is better than the notion of a ransom paid to God, the Father.
In other words, Hort found it more reasonable to believe that a ransom, a redemption price, ought to be paid to Satan rather than to God the Father.
What does the Word of God say? Isaiah 53, of course, is a very key passage of prophecy about Christ, 800 years in the future from Isaiah’s time.
Isaiah 53: 3 He [Christ] is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to His own way, and the LORD [Yahweh] hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
Next, we find this conclusive teaching in the letter to the Hebrews.
Hebrews 9:14 How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?
Hort’s thinking would have the verse to read: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to Satan!
For heaven’s sake! To whom is the ransom offered? “Offered Himself without spot to God.”
Hort’s defenders admit that he was a little weak on the atonement. A little weak? That’s the biggest understatement since Noah said, “do you think it’ll rain?”
There’s more. In this letter to Westcott, Hort refers to a man named Coleridge. That is the English poet, Samuel Coleridge. If you are not familiar with him, file that name in your memory bank. We will run across him again. Here is a brief synopsis:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was an influential English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian, and a founder of the Romantic Movement in England. He is best known for his collaboration with William Wordsworth on Lyrical Ballads (1798), which helped launch the Romantic era. He struggled with health issues and opium addiction throughout his life, dying in Highgate, near London, on July 25, 1834.
This is Hort writing to Westcott, from The Life of Hort, vol. 1, p. 120:
“Oh, that Coleridge, while showing how the notion of a fictitious substituted righteousness, of a transferable stock of good actions, obscured the truth of man’s restoration in the man, meaning Christ, who perfectly acted out the idea of man, had expounded the truth.”
Let me stop right there for a moment because I realize that the way they wrote and the way they spoke in the 1800s is a little difficult for us listening to it in our day to understand.
So if I can squeeze his syntax together here, Hort is saying to Westcott: I wish that Coleridge, now I’ll continue the quote, “had expounded the truth, for such I am sure there must be, that underlies the corresponding heresy, as it appears to me, of a fictitious substituted penalty.”
Hmm… the heresy of a fictitious substituted penalty. In other words, Christ’s blood shed on our behalf did not work! It is heresy and it is a fiction, says Hort.
Now, as I am quoting Hort’s own words of what he believes, I ask you, am I making an ad hominem attack? Or do you agree that his own biases and personal religious beliefs might just have some bearing on his work in constructing a new Greek text for the New Testament? Do you allow for that possibility? The answer is quite obvious.
One would be a fool to think that Hort’s beliefs would not have had an influence on how he puts together a new Greek text. From The Life of Hort, we read this in volume 1, page 130. On October 15, 1860, Hort wrote:
“My dear Westcott, I entirely agree, correcting one word, with what you say there on the atonement, having for many years believed that the absolute union of the Christian, or rather of man, with Christ himself is the spiritual truth of which the popular doctrine of substitution is an immoral and material counterfeit.
“But I doubt whether that answers the question as to the nature of that satisfaction.
“Certainly nothing can be more unscriptural than the modern limiting of Christ bearing our sins and sufferings to his death. But indeed that is only one aspect of an almost universal heresy.”
Yet we read the Bible’s answer to Hort’s befuddled mind here:
1 Timothy 2: 5 For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;
6 Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time.
In other words, no one else is needed to do any ransoming or any redeeming. Christ did it all.
(To be continued.)
~END~
