‘For we are not as many, which corrupt the word of God’ (2 Corinthians 2.17).

In these words the Apostle Paul was inspired by the Holy Spirit to acknowledge the divine authority and origin of the sacred Scriptures and to expose the dangerous deceptions of those who were prepared to adulterate the Word of God. From its earliest days the Church of Christ has been assailed from within by rationalistic philosophers to whom the eternal deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, the miracle of His incarnation, the mystery of His vicarious atonement, the reality of His resurrection and the sufficiency of His grace, were incredible, unpalatable and unacceptable.

Those who have rejected these truths have endeavoured to the force of those Scriptures which reveal them, thus weaken the Word of God and handling it deceitfully. The actual words used by the apostle are very illuminating. The word κάπηλοζ originally signified any kind of huckster or vendor but especially a pedlar of wine. The adulteration and dilution of wine by the pedlar were so prevalent that in common usage the word frequently implied ‘to adulterate’ — as in the Greek translation of Isaiah 1.22 ‘Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water’. The pedlar was so often dishonest that his name became synonymous with corrupt dealing, cheating and roguery.

This meaning is accurately preserved in the text and margin of the Authorised Version, but in the ‘New English Bible—New Testament’ it is weakly rendered, ‘hawking the word of God about’. Alford retains the full sense—‘adulterating the word of God’. The English Revised Version of 1881— ‘making merchandise of the word of God’, loses part of the meaning, and the same must be said of the American Revised Standard Version— ‘pedlars of God's Word’.

The original passage is a warning that some would corrupt the word of God as the pedlar adulterated his wine. The new version exhibits many examples of corrupt translation in passages relating to the Virgin Birth, the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, the atonement and the divine inspiration of the Scriptures. These adulterated renderings are the intellectual fruits of a philosophy entirely alien to the ‘mind of Christ’.

The chairman of the translators has affirmed in writing that our Lord ‘evidently shared the views of His contemporaries regarding the authorship of the Old Testament and the phenomena of “demon-possession”—views which we cannot accept without doing violence to our sense of truth … We readily recognize that so far He was a man of His time … Some of His sayings are simply not true in their plain meaning, or are unacceptable to the conscience or reason of Christian people … others, we are convinced, were not worthy of Him’ (Dr. Dodd—Authority of the Bible, p. 233, 237).

Thus the words of the Son of God are weighed in the balance of human reason and found wanting. In the new translation the influence of this rationalistic philosophy, which characterizes much of the Christian scholarship of our day, is lamentably evident. This is becoming increasingly apparent to discriminating readers throughout the world, but many have been deceived.

‘Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ’ (Colossians 2.8).

This article was first published in Quarterly Record no. 399.