If you start from Scripture, you will believe that God’s truth must be present today, and that we can and should have access to His words perfectly. There are plenty of verses to show this.

But many Christians have been told to think otherwise, that the transmission of Scripture should be viewed as a mere naturalistic process. In that approach, they will decided what words belong in Scripture by a rationalistic argument about empirical evidence. In other words, they are rooted in what they see (i.e. old manuscripts and fragments) and a seemingly plausible story made about them.

Here is but one passage showing that we should have God’s words properly today:

Ro 16:25 Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began,
Ro 16:26 But now is made manifest, and by the scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations for the obedience of faith:

No passage says that the New Testament is locked in Greek, none says that the real Scripture is to be supplied in the old Greek manuscripts alone. What we are seeing is, in reality, the influence of Enlightenment based philosophy in Christianity, that is, the leaven of Modern Infidelity, in the areas of Bible versions, translation and interpretation.

There are plenty of Christians who believe all kinds of proper doctrines, such as about creation and the historical miracles and so forth, and yet, when it comes to having God’s words today, take a completely deistical approach. God inspired the Scripture, they believe, but God was not able to keep it properly through time. Even the Westminster Confession of Faith speaks of God’s providential and singular care of Scripture, and the same also speaks of the Scripture being made known by translation (e.g. in the English tongue).

No doubt such folks wishing to retort to these claims will try to make out the purely “natural” and “evidence based” approaches of Erasmus, Stephanus and Beza. They could even point out how Beza “reasoned” about how Revelation 16:5 should read. The problem is not the use of the mind, the problem is the primary starting point of the modern versionist. If they are not starting from a Scripture-based doctrinal position which understands that the Scripture promises the supply of God’s words perfectly, then, of course, they are not going to be ready to expect or accept it.

Conversely, by starting from a natural view, and with the assumption about the interference of error in the historical transmission of Scripture, their doctrine of Scripture preservation will be one that will accommodate error and will try to justify it. They will say that no work of man can be free from error, and all textual criticism and translation is done by men, and therefore cannot be perfect. Such a view is not in line with the work of God in history, because the Bible is actually God’s Word, not merely the work of men. Therefore, the providence of God is at work fulfilling the promises of God that God’s words must be known and correct today. God’s promises override human fallacy and ensure the fulfilment of these prophecies.

So, while detractors will try to point out human aspects and supposed flaws in the King James Bible (for example, James White has written a whole book trying to undermine the perfection of the KJB), their efforts are actually found to be in contradiction of Scripture as properly interpreted.

Pr 22:20 Have not I written to thee excellent things in counsels and knowledge,
Pr 22:21 That I might make thee know the certainty of the words of truth; that thou mightest answer the words of truth to them that send unto thee?

The opposite is at work where a person will not hear, where the person who shuts their heart to these promises wants instead to make out (as James White does) that the KJB somehow undermines the Deity of Christ. (His flawed reasoning is based on the false rules set up by Granville Sharp, who attacked the KJB’s translation saying that it did not clearly present the deity of Christ in several passages. Sharp even invented a whole series of rules about Greek grammar in an attempt to make out that the KJB was not clear in certain places. The KJB, of course, is precise in those passages, but it actually violates the accuracy of Scripture by saying that you have to translate imprecisely to over-emphasize one correct doctrine to the detriment of the actual wording at those passages.)

Either the Scripture is right, and we have God’s words properly today, or else, human scholarship is right, and we need modern versions to just get as best as humanly possible God’s words.

The modern versionist therefore accuses the believer of being a fideist or having “blind” faith or “magic thinking”. They will accuse that it is just a presupposition held by us that the KJB being correct is the only consideration of such a “narrow” “bigoted” view. (Apparently, it is even racist to say that the English Bible is the best according to some of these people.) The KJB is wrong, they say, because their authority is is in imperfect standards, like the fact that there is no single perfectly correct Greek manuscript extant. (Notice that they made no appeal to Scripture for their position, but to scholarly theory.)

But the view that no version and translation can be correct is itself a circular argument and presupposition, because it places complete trust in a human-based, material-based view of things, and then tries to ascribe a fatalistic veneer, that somehow the way and how and reason why we have things the way they are is just because that must be God’s (mysterious) will. In other words, they will assert that there is no real doctrine of a divine plan of perfection coming out of transmission, but rather they will say there is only imperfection. They are imperfection onlyists who find that they are compelled by the very error they espouse to interpret every passage as not promising in any way that the King James Bible should be right.

And they say that this imperfection and their error is God’s will.

The Bible shows that their kind of belief is actually an antichrist deception. It is the thin end of it for many good Christians. It is a foothold for the devil in, to then corrupt all kinds of doctrine and to undermine holiness.

1Jo 4:6 We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.