SUFFERING WITH THE KING JAMES BIBLE

 There's a text in the King James Bible that has provided fodder for the critics of Scripture and needlessly so. The verse concerns an incident in the life of the great prophet Elisha just after the translation of his mentor Elijah to heaven without seeing our ancient enemy physical death. 

We read in II Kings 2 these words: "And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go

up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them." (KJV)

Wait. What? "Little children" being cursed by the prophet for a harmless teasing and they get ripped apart by bears for that? Did not the translators see something wrong with that scenario? Did they not connect any dots back to the Exodus and realize that God did not hold anyone under the age of 20 responsible for the rebellion on the way to the land of promise. That text alone would have told them that something was amiss with the translation, "little children."

Had they only turned back to Genesis 37:2, they would have figured it out. In that text, they would have found the same Hebrew word that they translated "little children" and found that it specifically referred to a young adult of 17. Hardly a "little child." It was a word used of those young men in Israel who were qualified for the draft, again, hardly a "little child." 

Elisha was confronted with young adults, pagans, who were threatening him, mocking the translation of God's prophet by chanting, "Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” They were a pagan, idol-worshiping mob, outnumbering him and capable of killing him. This incident occurred in Bethel, a center of idolatry in Israel; it was one of the places where the golden calf was. 

Elisha's approach triggered a mass demonstration against him by many young men.  "Baldhead" is a term of disrespect. The idolaters challenged Elisha to "go up" to heaven as Elijah had done—if Elisha could!

These youths were typical of a nation that mocked the messengers of God, hated God's Word, and belittled His prophets. Elisha wasn't motivated by personal pride but by a desire for God's glory, He pronounced God's curse on them for their disrespect of His prophet and Himself. 

They had been warned that God is not to be mocked and that warning came in Leviticus 26:21-22: "Yet if you show hostility toward Me and are unwilling to obey Me, I will increase the plague on you seven times according to your sins. I will also let loose among you the animals of the field, which will deprive you of your children and eliminate your cattle, and reduce your number so that your roads become deserted."

The translators of the King James unwitting wrote a disastrous translation, that has caused a misunderstanding for hundreds of years.

THE BALLAD OF THE TEENAGE QUEEN

"There's a story in our town
Of the prettiest girl around
Golden hair and eyes of blue
How those eyes could flash at you."

(From "The Ballad of the Teenage Queen")

 So goes the first verse of the song, "The Ballad of the Teenage Queen," made popular in 1958. We might use that first verse as a metaphor for those pretty stories that float through our churches in all their sermonic glory. These stories have golden hair and eyes of blue which make them irresistible to the homelitician in a Saturday night search for the inspiring illustration that carries an emotional impact. Here is one of those stories:

"Shortly after Dallas Theological Seminary was founded in 1924, it almost folded. It came to the point of bankruptcy. All the creditors were ready to foreclose at twelve noon on a particular day. That morning, the founders of the school met in the president’s office to pray that God would provide the desperately needed funds to keep the school open. 

 "In that prayer meeting was Harry Ironside. When it was his turn to pray, he said in his refreshingly candid way, 'Lord we know that the cattle on a thousand hills are Thine. Please sell some of them and send us the money.'

"Just about that time, a tall Texan in boots and an open-collar shirt strolled into the business office. “Howdy!” he said to the secretary. 'I just sold two carloads of cattle over in Fort Worth. I’ve been trying to make a business deal go through, but it just won’t work. I feel God wants me to give this money to the seminary. I don’t know if you need it or not, but here’s the check,' and he handed it over.

"The secretary took the check and, knowing something of the critical nature of the hour, went to the door of the prayer meeting. and timidly tapped. Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer, the founder and president of the school, answered the door and took the check from her hand. When he looked at the amount, it was for the exact sum of the debt. Then he recognized the name on the check as that of the cattleman. Turning to Dr. Ironside, he said, 'Harry, God sold the cattle.'” 

The story is lovely; it qualifies because of its hair of gold and eyes of blue. Irresistible to the max. However, it's a glurge. It's been circulated all over Christendom from pulpit to pulpit. The problem is, it's a fabrication. (The one part that is true is that Chafer, having stubbornly copied the financial policies of George Mueller, had driven the school into a huge debt that left faculty members unpaid and creditors knocking at the door.) 

 According to a 1978 letter from Dr. John F. Walvoord, in answer to an inquiry regarding this story, he dispelled the answer to this prayer as saving the day at DTS and set the record straight. He wrote:

"Actually, he (Dr.Ironside) made a remark about the cattle on a thousand hills belonging to the Lord and he hoped that someone would donate cattle to the seminary. Out of this, however, the seminary received one steer which was used in our dining room to help feed our students. I was not there at the time, but I understand that this was the response. It had nothing to do with paying off our debt, as the story was told.

"The story was circulated around the country, and in the process of circulation it accumulated some additional points that were not exactly correct." 

There are stories like that and they're glurges--stories such as the football player and his blind father in the bleachers, NASA's computers and Joshua's longest day, the atheist professor and the failure of the dropped beaker (or chalk) to break, and the camel's going through the Camel Gate in Jerusalem. 

The telling of these stories that sound too good to be true, once discovered to be fallacious, put a dent in the speaker's credibility, what Aristotle said was one of the three essential traits a persuasive speaker must have, his ethos. 

So the moral is that there are enough true stories of faith and prayer moving mountains that we ought not give skeptics glurge tales which can be easily discredited. Before repeating such stories, check them out as best you can.

 

 

THE AUTHOR WHO DIDN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT HE WROTE

 

Russell Kirk (1918-1994) authored thirty-two books on political theory, the history of ideas, education, cultural criticism, and supernatural tales. Both Time and Newsweek described him as one of America’s leading thinkers, and The New York Times acknowledged the scale of his influence when it wrote that Kirk’s 1953 landmark book, The Conservative Mind, “gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement.”

One of those 32 tomes is a massive one that chews up 475 pages of wood pulp titled "The Roots of American Order." At the back of the book there's a "Suggested Reading List" for each of the twelve chapters. The list begins on page 479 and ends on 503. That's a lot of books for supplemental reading. Even the casual reader can see that we're not dealing with a dummy. Au contraire, we're dealing with Russell Kirk, a scholar's scholar. 

But yet, one might wonder if he really understood what he wrote in "The Roots of American Order." The reason we ask is because of what he wrote on page 149 in contrast to what he wrote on page 151, a scant three pages later. In the chapter titled, "The Genius of Christianity," he quotes from the book of Acts so the reader can listen to Paul's conversation with Agrippa. 

Paul is giving his account of his Damascus Road experience, a testimony which Paul ends by telling Agrippa what the resurrected Christ told him the purpose of his calling was, ". . . to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by faith in Me."

That statement is clear: to turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, to have forgiveness of sins and an inheritance requires only faith in Christ. (Acts 28:16). Paul mentions nothing other than that. That's what Kirk copied from his New Testament. The problem is, did he understand what he copied from the Bible? 

When the reader casts his eyes on the last sentence of the second paragraph, on page 151, Kirk writes, "Through repentance and obedience, and the operation of God's grace, redemption is possible." The reader notes that "faith in Me" has dropped out since being inscribed three pages earlier. But that's not all.

Kirk cited Paul as saying that redemption is "by faith in Me [Christ]." The alert reader has to ask, "Which is it? From whence does this redemption come? Through faith or "through repentance, obedience, and the operation of God's grace? 

As that famous line in a movie says, "What we have here is a failure to communicate." On one page, redemption comes in one way and then three pages later it comes another way but by the rules of sane logic, both can't be right. If it's by faith, it can't be by obedience and if it's by obedience, it can't be by grace. We have a train wreck of logic here. 

And this brings us to the point: Russell Kirk was a scholar extraordinaire. But he's like everybody else: when scholars leave their field of expertise, they're as dumb as the rest of us.