Some people seem to make up their own Bible version. I call it the "DEV", or Doubter's English Version. A sample passage: Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the literary device prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist this allegorical figure, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. (apologies to St. Peter) Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the allegorical character. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against literary symbols of evil. (apologies to St. Paul and the former church at Ephesus) Maybe the acronym for this Bible version needs to be expanded to "DEVIL" for Doubter's English Version, Inherently Ludicrous.
The MEV (like the NKJV) is a Baptist-sponsored update of the KJV. There are varying degrees of KJV Onlyism, some less strict than others, but they’re all built on the premise that there’s something terribly wrong with both other modern translations as well as the more ancient texts on which they are based. Those are precisely the arguments you are making here. You do not know that the Byzantine texts were copied “more faithfully”, only more uniformly. The fact that more of them have survived (which we would have expected anyway), does not mean that they are closer to the originals than the more ancient copies. I, too, rather enjoy the use of the KJV for liturgical purposes, in part because the language is prettier and more dignified. Having a familiarity with the KJV helps tremendously when reading the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and Shakespeare. The KJV was the required translation at the religious school I attended as a child, and we had to memorize rather large chunks of it as part of the curriculum. The older translations, for some reason, are often easier to commit to memory. All that to say, I’m not against the use of the KJV. I’m against the denigration of more accurate - if less beautiful - modern translations, as well as conspiracy theories that try to find some malevolent supernatural cause for what has simply been an improvement in knowledge and scholarship. I don’t interact with ad hominem or guilt-by-association arguments. Such are beneath the standard I would expect to be met by thinking adults.
It's exactly this kind of irrationally literal, and superstitious statement which brings the Holy Scriptures into ridicule and disrespect by the ignorant. There is no reason whatever to assume that Matt.4:1-11 is a series of Hollywood style, filmed takes, of the Devil physically visiting and holding a verbal conversation with Jesus. That scenario is all in the imagination of the reader. Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread."" The tempter probably came to Jesus in exactly the way he comes to each of us. Why change his modus operandi when tempting The Son of Man. When we are tempted it is entirely an internal struggle of the mind and soul, a wrestling of the spirit of man with what feels like an outside spiritual agency operating upon our consciousness, it's not a physical manifestation, not a walking, talking physical reality. Jesus Christ was clearly confronting the various options open to him in how he would approach His ministry on earth, from calling his disciples right up until His crucifixion. How can it be imagined that such a physical Satanic manifestation be construed from what actually appears in the text of the scripture? This must surely be the product of a literalist, concrete thinking mind, influenced by watching too many Hollywood Horror Films into believing that such physical manifestations are commonplace. But he answered, " It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.'" Exactly how we should deal with temptation when it comes. By the correct and judicious application of The Word of God, IN OUR MIND and in our actions. Then the devil took him to the holy city, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you,' and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.'" There is no necessity to have to believe that Jesus Christ actually went to the temple in Jerusalem. (Do you think Satan could physically transport The Son of Man against Jesus of Nazareth's will and subject him to a vertiginous experience, I don't think so). Much more likely that it was a vision of the mind of Jesus Christ, as real as any dream, at the time, but while he was still in the wilderness, not actually having flown physically to a pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus said to him, "Again it is written, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.'" Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, "All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me." There is no mountain anywhere in the whole Middle East from which it is possible to see "All the kingdoms of the world", but it is absolutely possible, in fact utterly probable that Jesus Christ thought about the possibility of conducting his future ministry on earth by impressing everyone with His supernatural powers and using force in the way the "kings ruling kingdoms on earth" are used to doing. Just the methods of Satan himself, (we can even see an example of it in Vladimir Putin). Then Jesus said to him, "Begone, Satan! for it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve. '" Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and ministered to him. The final ministry option, i.e. rule as Satan rules, has now been contemplated and then dismissed by Jesus, on account of it being ruled out by the words of scripture, just as we should be doing when temptation comes, assuming we know the scriptures as well as Jesus Christ did. To suggest that a fellow poster is ill equipped to debate this issue merely because he does not have visions in his mind of a physical entity dancing round Christ in the wilderness, prodding Jesus with a pitch fork and whisking Him away to Jerusalem or the highest mountain in the world, is tantamount to suggesting that members on this forum can't debate anatomy because they don't believe in Frankenstein's Monster, (a product of human ingenuity), whom we have all SEEN in a Hollywood movie.
There is no reason whatever to assume that it didn't happen just as it says. See, you are assuming that this Bible passage didn't happen the way it says it happened. Why do you make such an assumption? Is it because you just can't believe it? That is the same mistake people make when they read of (or hear about) Jesus rising from the dead. They assume something other than what the Bible says. As a matter of fact, plenty of people assume that the entire birth, life, and death of Jesus is a fabrication, because they simply can't believe it or don't want to believe it. Just like you don't want to believe the plain statements made in Matt. 4:1-11. There is no reason to assume that Jesus never told this story to some disciple or other, resulting in Matthew (or whomever you choose to assume penned this gospel) including it as something that truly occurred. It doesn't say, "Jesus was having a vision," or anything similar; the Bible says it in the same manner that it tells of any actual events. And there is no reason to assume that Satan did not or could not appear to Jesus and converse with Him verbally; after all, don't you think Satan would recognize who Jesus was? Why wouldn't the devil pull out all the stops to try and get Him when He was at His weakest? I'm tired of people playing "pick and choose" with the Bible. They pick out the parts they don't like, pick them apart, make up ideas in their heads about what else it could mean, and pretend all along that they are not in doubt and unbelief. And then they have the unmitigated gall to label as "irrational" those who accept the Bible's message at face value, when they are the ones being biased, hubristic, and unfaithful.
I believe each of these objections has already been answered in the posts above. Context is key. One need not assume that God has the form of a bird simply because the Psalms ascribe feathers to him. In the case at hand, there is no mountain, in the Middle East or anywhere else, from which it is possible to literally view “all the kingdoms of the world”. One would have to be a Flat Earther to interpret the passage that literally. The text is clearly describing something akin to a dream or a vision, and this would have been just as apparent to an ancient interpreter as it is to modern readers of the Bible. There’s nothing controversial in that view.
Right, but Sinaiticus is not missing those fragments because it left them out by error. They're just missing. So it's not cause for concern. We know the pages it is missing, and we can also literally see the pages that are incomplete. That doesn't compromise the passages that are complete. This is Genesis 21 in the Codex Sinaiticus: It's safe to say no one will mistakenly believe Sinaiticus, as it exists today, is a reliable representation of 4th Century copies of Genesis. Overall Christian bible manuscripts missing chunks of the OT are not very disruptive because we have other sources for the OT comparatively old, but also in Hebrew. The NT was written in Greek so the Greek NT manuscripts won't contain translation errors. The Septuagint and the big three codices are not particularly useful as a check for mistranslation of the OT as they are also translations and may contain errors. When I said I liked to check with the big 3 codices I meant for NT questions. For every book, and in some cases every chapter there is always a more optimal fragment. The reason I cross-check with all 3 of the codices is because it's easy. If they all contain complete fragments of a verse, and they all say the same words, then it's a pretty safe bet that's how that verse was read in the 4th Century, and it saves me several hours every time I want to check something. The Peshitta is not a document. It's the pre-Orthodox Syriac version of the bible (like a Syriac KJV or RSV) that was thought to have first been written in the 2nd century. It is not a Greek text, it's Aramaic. It is a closer translation of the OT than the Septuagint, but the NT has all the same translation concerns we have translating a Greek text into English, except perhaps worse because obviously translators are quality checked now. There are no extant copies of it from the 2nd century. The oldest copy is from the 6th century (still very old), although also contains edits made by its owner in the 9th century. For that reason it's hard to trust with certainty some of the other verses because they could also be younger, but the editor just got better at making it look the same. You don't want to use the Peshitta. It excludes numerous epistles (not missing, intentionally removes them) and completely changes Matthew. Its differences may have a theological agenda, and not be reflections that those books had not yet been canonized in the East. It also pushes an agenda I suspect you may be uncomfortable with. If modern Anglicans giving side-eyes to the literalness of Revelation makes you uncomfortable, the old Syriac tradition says John made it all up. If people start basing modern translations off the pre-orthodox Syriac bible then you're going to have a lot more to complain about. It might be more similar to the Byzantine text-type, but it's still very different, more different from it than the Byzantine text-type is from the Alexandrian. I assume by 'Old Latin' you mean the Vetus Latina. That is not a manuscript, it's another text-type like the Byzantine or Alexandrian types. It's the grouping of all the bibles written in Latin before the Latin Vulgate. The oldest Vetus Latina fragments are about as old as the codices, but none of them are complete. Same problem we have with the even older papyrus fragments that predate the big 3. It's way too much effort to sort through them all. They are also in Latin, so have the same opportunity for translation errors that the KJV has. Augustine actually wrote that they suck and if that's all you've got you should just learn Greek instead. It's the whole reason Jerome started working on the Latin Vulgate - because all of the Vetus Latina bibles were inconsistent and shoddily translated. The Byzantine text-type did not exist in the 4th century. There are not more 4th century copies, there are no copies. The Byzantine text-type emerges out of the Alexandrian text type in the early 5th century in hybrid documents, and then becomes its own thing in the late 5th century. Some scholars think it might have been a Greek attempt to mimic the efforts of Saint Jerome in standardising the Latin text. By the 8th century it becomes the official Ecclesiastical text in the East and all alternative text-types are either modified to become compliant or burned. This is why we have almost exclusively Byzantine text-type manuscripts after the 5th century. Because anything older tended to have been lost/in forgotten storage, whilst younger manuscripts were known and corrected. If we really stretch the definition of the Byzantine text-type to also include Alexandrinus (the youngest of the big 3), then we can say John Chrysostom almost certainly used the Byzantine text or something close enough to it. No other Church father used the Byzantine text, there is no archeological evidence Byzantine text discrepancies exist prior to the 5th century, and every year we find more and more papyrus fragments from the 2nd and third centuries. Not one of the fragments is byzantine in type.
Modern "scholars" agree that Mark 16:9-20 was never in the earliest versions of Mark's gospel, and it is deleted (or else footnoted, casting a cloud of doubt on it) in a great many of the popular, modern Bible versions. But I have shown that Irenaeus quoted the 20th verse, proving that the "long ending" was known, present, and accepted in Mark's gospel as early as the middle of the 2nd. Century. This passage is one of the few that tells of Jesus' ascension, and one of the few that records the giving of the Great Commission, so it is very significant. Despite its importance and despite the availability of the evidence in Against Heresies, modern "scholars" are either so careless or so biased that, to this day, Mark 16:9-20 is denigrated and left out of those newer versions, and the lie told against the "long ending" is perpetuated in the minds of laity and clergy alike. This is beyond irresponsible of the editors of those versions; it's downright dishonest. Here's another contested passage: Joh 5:3 In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. Joh 5:4 For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had. Compare the ESV: In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. (v. 4 entirely deleted, v.3 shortened.) Modern Bible "scholars" have decided, based on the so-called "oldest and best manuscripts," to delete a chunk of information from the Bible. Now, look at the evidence they ignore: "If it seems a novelty for an angel to be present in waters, an example of what was to come to pass has forerun. An angel, by his intervention, was want to stir the pool at Bethsaida. They who were complaining of ill-health used to watch for him; for whoever had been the first to descend into them, after his washing ceased to complain." (Tertullian, "On Baptism," I:1:5) Tertullian cites the gist of John 5, verses 3b and 4, showing that this information was known in his day. This is strong evidence for inclusion when combined with the fact that those verses appear in a large number of manuscripts. But Westcott, Hort, and all the rest of the modern "scholars" decided for you that it doesn't belong in your Bibles. So it doesn't appear in ESV, NASB, and most other new versions. And another: Act 8:36 And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? Act 8:37 And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Once again, the modern "scholars" (or dummies?) delete verse 37 from the major new versions. But genuine scholars should know (if a layman like me can find this, why can't they??) that Cyprian quoted the verse in the mid-3rd Century! "In the Acts of the Apostles: Lo, here is water; what is there which hinders me from being baptized? Then said Phillip, If thou believest with all thine heart thou mayest." (The Treatises of Cyprian I: 1:17) Doesn't it strike you as disingenuous (or at the least, faulty scholarship) that erroneous deletions like these have never been corrected in the many modern versions? With examples like these, how can we trust those modern Bible versions for accuracy? I could provide more examples, but before I do that I want to know if I'm just wasting my time. My question is, how many examples do you need of this faulty (or possibly dishonest) "scholarship" before you change your minds? Is 3 enough, or do you need 10? 50? 100? Or will you stubbornly cling to your inferior Bible version no matter how many examples are provided?
Not an equivalent comparison of what we are considering here. There is EVERY GOOD reason to assume that it didn't happen, (as you are insisting), in a crudely explicit literal way. The way that a simplistic understanding of the way the information is conveyed to us, the way the sentences, are understood by an individual reading them. The Bible does not actually say anything, to anyone. The Bible you and I are reading or quoting is just a translation of sentences of words on pages. Any speaking that is going on is only happening in your or my mind by the processes of cognisance, i.e. we make up our OWN meaning to what we believe the words on the page suggest to us. To me they suggest the following: "In HIS MIND mind, Christ Jesus, being in the form of God, struggled internally with the options open to him of, on the one hand, using robbery to be equal to God, or emptying himself, taking the form of a servant, - having found himself in the likeness of men. He was tempted to strive for equality with God, just as Satan does. Instead of succumbing to this mental temptation he humbled himself, agreeing with God to become obedient unto death -- even a humiliating death on a cross," Perhaps you can see where I am coming from when I frame the temptation of Christ starving in the wilderness, related to us in the words of scripture at Matt. 4:1-11, with the additional textual information provided for us, also in the words of scripture from Phil.2:5-8. Jesus struggled in the wilderness with how He should approach his future ministry upon earth, minute by minute, right up until the hour of his death on a Roman torture stake. The text I am reading implies that Jesus confronted the issue of to what extent he could legitimately use his Divinity to achieve his objective". Consider this: There were only two possible witnesses to the entire conversation and encounter related to us in the words of the sentences of the scripture at Matt. 4:1-11. Witness one = Jesus Christ. Witness two = Satan. So whence did this information come to Matthew and hence to us, the reader? How did it get into our mind. Well, I don't believe Satan would have had a hand in relating this information to us, therefore it can only have come to Matthew, and also possibly to some of the other disciples, directly from Jesus himself, during his three and a half year ministry. The scripture therefore has already been filtered through the mind of Matthew from HIS understanding of what Jesus had related to him concerning what had happened to Jesus, in the wilderness, during his forty day fast. Matthew will have made certain assumptions as to how the information Jesus related to him, should be written down, in his original document, recording what he had been told by Jesus concerning Jesus' experience. Jesus would have related his experience to Matthew in words that would best convey the truth of it, as Jesus had experienced it. It is therefore no surprise to me at all that the language used to describe what Jesus experienced is couched in the terminology and conceptual imagery in common usage of people at the time. I have just explained my reasons for believing that Matt. 4:1-11 is not recorded in scripture for the express purpose of convincing us that the devil is a reality that can physically appear on earth to harass human beings. I can only guess what you may think the purpose of Matt. 4:1-11 actually is for us, in the scripture, but your comment I have quoted immediately above implies it might be there to convince us all that Satan can pop up before us anywhere, at any time, hold a conversation with us or even and literally physically accost us. If I'm right about that, ( and I fully accept I may be wrong ), I think it would be an over literalising of the text, born out of a modern media or superstition influenced, overactive imagination. .
This would convert the word of God from an objective standard for mankind, to a subjective one. Every individual reader's mind becomes the formulator of "truth." This is asinine. This concept divorces the Bible's words from its divine source. The power of the Holy Spirit working in and through the writers to convey truth in absolute terms is being disregarded in the interpretation provided by puny, finite, human brains. But all of this is a rabbit trail to distract from the subject introduced, namely, that most modern Bible versions are less complete than certain other versions and are therefore inferior and not to be preferred.
Modern Bible versions are not "less complete"; they simply call attention to, and on very rare occasions omit, a small number of passages that were almost certainly later additions and not part of the original text. Just because surviving texts of Tertullian or Cyprian cite a particular passage a certain way, and Tertullian and Cyprian lived in the 3rd century, does not mean the texts of Tertullian and Cyprian we possess are also from the 3rd century (in most if not all cases, they aren't). Whatever interpolations were made in the biblical text were also made in the later copies of Tertullian and Cyprian. One therefore cannot use the Church Fathers to reconstruct what the biblical text might have been in their own century unless the text of their work itself was also from that century. Fortunately, laymen need not go about doing this from scratch. All one has to do is consult a Critical Apparatus and it will indicate exactly what the manuscript support is (including from the Church Fathers) for every single uncertain passage. Most interlinear translations have this. There's no conspiracy here; textual critics are just normal historians trying to determine to the highest degree of accuracy possible what the original biblical text was based on the current state of the available manuscript evidence. This is a normal, well-established discipline that is used for every historical text, not just the Bible. Manuscript evidence is used to determined which works of Plato, for example, are authentic and which ones aren't (which is a fascinating story all by itself). Scholars haven't always agreed with one another regarding individual works traditionally thought to be Plato's, but they certainly didn't accuse each other of being agents of Satan over it. In this case, the Hackett edition of the Complete Works of Plato includes both the disputed and undisputed works, noting which is which. Likewise, most modern versions of the Bible include disputed passages in brackets or footnotes, rather than omitting them altogether. For example, the NRSV includes the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11), but adds the following footnote: The NIV also includes the text in the main body, but in italics, with this header immediately before the passage: Likewise, Mark 16:9-20 is included in the main text of both the RSV and the NRSV (and the NIV, in italics), but with the following footnotes in the case of the NRSV: The Johannine Comma is excluded from the main body of the test in modern translations, but is still included in the footnotes, as in, e.g., the NRSV: To reiterate, there is no conspiracy here, and no Satanic attempt to remove or destroy passages as though they were never there. This is simply academic honesty, on full display for all to see. Not only are statements to the contrary in fact KJV-Only contentions that have been around for decades, and have been debunked over and over again, but more importantly, such a stance has literally nothing to do with actual Anglicanism, which has always promoted and supported biblical scholarship as well as updated translations of the Bible. Westcott and Hort themselves were both Anglicans: Westcott was (eventually) the Bishop of Durham, and Hort was an ordained priest. The Revised Version (1881), to which Westcott and Hort contributed, was authorized for use in both the Episcopal Church and the Church of England. Personally, I don't care for the Revised Version. But that stylistic preference doesn't negate the fact that the Anglican hierarchy in both England and America endorsed an updated Bible in English and the academic work that supported it, just as they have endorsed revisions/supplements to the Prayer Book from time to time on identical grounds. We aren't even talking about higher criticism here; determining what the original text actually was has nothing to do with theories regarding its prehistory. This is just normal textual criticism. The Apostles themselves emphasized the importance of sifting through sources and using their best judgment to determine which were reliable and which weren't (cf. Luke 1:1-4). I would expect to see these kinds of (frankly uninformed) arguments about established textual criticism (which conservatives and liberals alike accept) on a fundamentalist forum, not one that purports to be "Anglican". It seems breaking away from the original tree matters after all. Choose knowledge, not fanaticism.
It is actually asinine to assume that one's own understanding of the meaning of what may be read from a page of the Bible is actually what it is intended to mean to us, by God, and not just what the reader thinks it must mean. Everything that is read is understood subjectively by the reader, including that read and supposedly understood by Biblical-Literalist-Fundamentalists. That understanding may or may not agree with what God intends the reader to understand by what is actually written. Anyone can be profoundly wrong in their interpretation of the meaning of scripture. God was not compelled to inspire the writers of scripture only and exclusively to express themselves literally, using no figures of speech, similies, metaphores or allegorical devices. In fact the Second Person of The Trinity, God, used very little else but figures of speech on earth, when addressing or teaching his followers and everyone else, it would seem, according to scripture itself. Quite a few human brains fit your description but they may also be inclined to be unable to understand figures of speech, similies, metaphores or allegorical literary devices. I would be inclined to agree that we should keep the whole text as it can be perceived from all ancient and not so ancient manuscripts, included, (as footnotes and marginal information), rather than only printing a translation of the most ancient ones, with all additions removed altogether. However I disagree that versions of the Bible not containing the additions that crept in over 400 years + of copying, are less complete, than those that contain all of them. I believe that the original ancient manuscripts contained everything that God intended was necessary for the ongoing salvation through the ages, of everone who read marked, learned and inwardly digested their contents. All the extra stuff that may have crept in is only icing on the cake, not essential to the salvation of anyone at all. In fact the whole Bible is not essential to the salvation of anyone. The church got on without large chunk of it perfectly well until 360 or thereabouts. .
The real objection to versions of The Bible which honestly say which parts of the Biblical text are (1) Questionable, (2) Not in the earliest known copies, (3) Slightly different wording or placed in different positions within the Book or even in different Books in the New Testament corpus, is almost entirely coming from those who promote Biblical Inerrancy as virtually a tenet of the faith and a shibboleth separating believers from unbelievers, making themselves the gate keepers of 'true Christianity' as over against 'false apostates'. It irritates Biblical Fundamentalists to have the plain honest facts that not all of the copies of the Holy Scriptures actually agree one with another word for word or even sentence for sentence. If such information becomes generally known by all and sundry, how then can anyone be convinced by them that the floppy black leather bound Bible they wave in people’s faces and thump with their right hand, declaring it to inerrantly be God's written Word to humankind, to be obeyed unquestioningly under THEIR supposedly inspired supervision. .
I agree. It just baffles me that this stuff continually bubbles up to the surface here, on an Anglican forum. Fundamentalist assumptions about the biblical text simply don’t have anything to do with Anglicanism, and part of what made Anglicanism attractive to me in the first place is the fact that Anglicanism doesn’t hold those assumptions and instead respects the role of learning and scholarship. The fundamentalist position has all kinds of problems, which are summed up well here: https://www.crivoice.org/inerrant.html
Are you two finished yet with the 'mutual admiration club' back-slapping? You make yourselves out to represent the Anglican mainstream; I sincerely hope you aren't, or else maybe I need to start shopping for a good Baptist church or something! It's all subjective, eh? All the rest of us can now see clearly why @Invictus and @Tiffy are so loosy-goosy in some of the other beliefs they've weighed in on around here. The faith is whatever you make it to be in your own intellect, if one subscribes to that way of thinking. Just one small step further, and we can re-imagine Almighty God and mold Him into the image we like best.
An hour and a half of concentrated reading certainly pays off for those granted the diligence to persevere. Good article.
I sometimes wish there was a 'dislike' button to press. A 'shopping quest' in search of an oxymoron looks to possibly become a wild 'loosy-goosy', chase. .
You really don't see how this statement strains credulity, do you? Why, it sounds as if someone conspired to fool us by making corresponding alterations in multiple documents, just to make us think we should add an explanatory verse about angels and a portion of a conversation about baptism! You've argued that conspiracy theories are nonsense, yet you advance a conspiracy theory on trivia. Go figure.
You seem to think it's impossible to copy an error from an erronious copy you are copying from. Any error of omission or addition may be faithfully copied, by a faithful copyist, surely? It's pretending it just couldn't ever have happened, which really strains credulity. .
I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, and I think you've crossed the line here. Here is the text of the Apostles' Creed, which we in the Episcopal Church recite twice a day in Morning and Evening Prayer: I BELIEVE in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again. He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen. I believe every word of this Creed, as stated, according to its plain meaning (i.e., the virginal conception and birth of Jesus, his bodily resurrection from the dead, etc.). Here is the text of the Nicene Creed, which we recite every Sunday at Holy Eucharist: WE BELIEVE in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen. I believe in every word of this Creed also, as stated, according to its plain meaning (i.e., in addition to the above, Jesus' essential equality with God the Father according to his deity, the reality of his humanity, etc.). The object of our faith as Anglicans is God and what He has done for us, in order to save us. The Creed summarizes this faith as it is taught to us in the Scriptures. Acknowledging our need for redemption and our dependence on God for it, and praising him for having made such provision through his Son and by the work of his Spirit, by means of the Sacraments, is what Anglican worship is all about. This is what I believe and I have never said anything here that should give anyone any reason at all to doubt that. I absolutely, 100%, will not abide the sincerity of my faith and my baptismal vows called into question by un-Anglican fundamentalist or charismatic litmus tests being superimposed on historic orthodoxy as a way to negate the legitimacy of my own contribution to the engagement of the Gospel with the world around us. Nope. The source of the error could very well have come from the copy of the patristic writings in the first place. The copyist might have expanded the quote based on what he/she heard in the liturgy. In any case, the fact would still remain that a word or phrase or sentence common in later manuscripts is entirely absent from earlier ones. If copies of patristic writings that date from later centuries also contain the interpolation, that means the copyist had to have been relying on something other than the older version of the text. No "conspiracy" need be involved. How can you not see this? If you could just bring yourself to think through these issues with an open mind, you would see that the KJV-Onlyist objections are downright silly and that there are perfectly reasonable and evidentially grounded answers to each and every one of them. And again, those objections haven't a blessed thing to do with Anglicanism. On top of being relatively recent in origin, from an Anglican standpoint they are an outside importation and a corruption of the Gospel message.
And when I post a 'Like' on something, it's not a mutual admiration thing. It is an indication that I substantially agree with what has been posted. When I don't post a 'Like' it most probably means I just haven't read it. .