I never met the man, so I have no personal knowledge. Do you have such knowledge? If so, please share.

Blessings,

Green Cochoa.

The online EGWhite index lists 489 times where Ellen White quotes the RV.

I never met the man, so I have no personal knowledge. Do you have such knowledge? If so, please share.

That is why the title of the thread is "Why the King James Version is Superior...", not "You are going to hell if you use the RV or NIV". We have to look and see what text is the most correct and true. Even Ellen White quoted the Apocrypha, so should we add it to our Bibles, of course not. With the facts we have before us today, we must decide what is best, and I think that is not too hard to discern.

Why would Ellen White prefer the wording of the RV here - a rendering which eliminated the words "without a cause" in this particular verse?

How could Ellen White get away with that if this is not permissible today?

In instance after instance throughout the book the author violates the primal laws of evidence by taking statements out of their setting, and by the introduction of testimony of an extraneous nature, as will be seen hereafter. There are many half-truths stated, and unwarranted impressions are thus left in the mind of the uninformed reader. These charges will be abundantly proven in the pages which follow. The removal and use of a brief statement from it is context may conveniently serve a purpose, but it is an unsound and unscholarly procedure,—unless there be scrupulous and unbiased care exercised to see that it never violates the intent of the writer and the context of the excerpt.

B. G. Wilkinson's Our Authorized Bible Vindicated
A Critique by Alden Thompson
March 24, 1995


The author and the times

The Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia describes Benjamin G. Wilkinson (1872-1968) as "dean, administrator, evangelist, and author," a man who gave 56 years of active service to his church. Born in Canada, he served in a number of positions of leadership: dean of theology at three Adventist Colleges: Battle Creek College in Michigan, Union College in Nebraska, and Washington Missionary College (Columbia Union) in Washington D.C.; leader of the work in Canada and in Haiti; for four years president of the Latin Conference (Southern European Division), starting work in Rome, Paris, and in Spain; president of local conferences in Kansas and Pennsylvania, and for ten years, president of the Columbia Union (1909-1918). His 24 years of continuous service at Washington Missionary College included 10 years as president (1936-1946).

Wilkinson was one of only a few Adventists of his era to have earned a PhD (George Washington University, 1908). But his two major books, Our Authorized Bible Vindicated (1930) and Truth Triumphant: The Church in the Wilderness (1944) , are both marked by an evangelistic fervor that transcends mere academic interest. Indeed, a few lines in the "Foreword" reveal that urgency took precedence over precision. Producing the book under "great pressure" while continuing as theology professor and pastor of a city church, Wilkinson states that he wrote "in response to urgent requests." And then the tell-tale admission: "It may be possible that there are a few technical mistakes." But he goes on to say that he has "strong confidence" that "the main lines of argument are timely, and that they stand on a firm foundation."

As discussed below, Wilkinson had good reason to fear the presence of "technical mistakes." But this review moves beyond the mere technical and suggests that there are weighty reasons for questioning his "firm foundation" as well.

His book is dominated by a vigorous two-pronged attack against Catholicism and "modernism." Ironically, writing at a time when official Catholicism was as strident in its opposition to modernism as Wilkinson himself, he portrays Catholics as a major force in the modernist plot. In Our Authorized Bible Vindicated, he argues that the cornerstone of that plot is the attempt to replace the King James Version with revised versions of Scripture.

Wilkinson's anti-Catholicism is rooted in his Adventist heritage. Envisioning a Catholic-Protestant coalition that would enforce Sunday-keeping on pain of death, Adventists had watched with high interest as the United States Congress debated Sunday law bills in 1888 and 1889. Senator Blair, author of the 1888 bill, declared before Congress that "only a homogeneous people can be great. No nation can exist with more than one religion."

And the problem went beyond rhetoric: between 1885 and 1896, American Adventists spent a total of 1438 days in jail and 455 days on chain gangs for working on Sunday. Ellen White's The Great Controversy no doubt fueled the sense of alarm with its vivid portrayal of the aims of the papacy. The 1888 revision, for example, quotes Pope Pius IX as saying in 1854 that liberty of conscience was a "most pestilential error."

Given the threat to Adventism from the prevailing culture, Wilkinson had good reasons for his keen interest in the "wilderness" church, an interest evident in both his books. Furthermore, when he enrolled in Battle Creek College in 1891, he was in a position to be influenced by W. W. Prescott, President of Battle Creek College, and A. T. Jones, a leading religious liberty spokesperson, both powerful rhetoricians and outspoken critics of Catholicism.

By the time Wilkinson published Our Authorized Bible Vindicated in 1930, another significant factor had a bearing on his work: Fundamentalism was leaving its mark on American culture and on Adventism. The appearance of the Revised Version in Britain (1881-1885) and the American Standard Version (1901), though both cautious revisions of the 1611 King James Version, had contributed to the turmoil. Those believers who wanted no changes at all in their Bible blamed the revisions on the "modernists." And for Wilkinson, the Catholics were among the chief culprits.

According to H. H. Meyers, one of Wilkinson's modern admirers (1993), the mainstream Adventist community in the 1920s endorsed the new versions. Meyers cites a booklet entitled "Doctrines for use in Seventh-day Adventist Colleges," published in 1926 by the Berrien Springs College Press, which says that the American Revised Version is "more accurate, more scholarly, more valuable" than the King James Version.

Wilkinson, however, was of quite a different opinion. When he privately published Our Authorized Bible Vindicated in 1930, the church was quick to reject it. To quote Meyers: "Incredibly, although his book enjoyed wide acceptance among his ministerial colleagues, it was rejected outright by a `Committee of Review' set up in 1930 by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists."

It is possible that W. W. Prescott had influenced Wilkinson toward verbal inspiration and Fundamentalism. W. C. White, in a 1928 letter to L. E. Froom, credits Prescott with presenting the views of Francois Gaussen, a flamboyant defender of verbal inspiration, to the students at Battle Creek when Prescott was president there. According to White, Prescott's "very forceful" presentations had "resulted in bringing into our work questions and perplexities without end, and always increasing."

Can one edit, indeed, "improve" writings that have come as a result of inspiration? Prescott himself was forced to adopt a more moderate position on that question when he was asked to update, improve, and annotate the historical quotations for the 1911 edition of The Great Controversy. The minutes of the 1919 Bible Conference reveal that Prescott had worked his way through the crisis to a settled, "practical" position. But if Prescott had moderated his position, it evidently had no effect on Wilkinson, for Our Authorized Bible Vindicated constitutes a vigorous defense, not only of the King James Version, but of verbal inspiration as well. We turn now to a closer examination of Wilkinson's defense of the King James Version.

Unfortunately, I do not have the rest of the document listed above.