From the mind of God to the mind of man

 Brief (and mostly negative) comments about this book.

From the Mind of God to the Mind of Man: a Layman’s guide to How We Got Our Bible, James B. Williams, editor. Greenville, SC: Ambassador-Emerald International, 1999.

Authors: James B. Williams, Ernest Pickering, Mark Minnick, Randolph Shaylor, Paul W. Downey, John E. Ashbrook, John K. Hutcheson Sr., John C. Mincy, Mark R. Simmons, William H. Smallman, J. Drew Conley, Keith E. Gephart.

The Committee on the Bible’s Text and Translation: J. Drew Conley, Paul W. Downey, John K. Hutcheson Sr., Mark Minnick, Randolph Shaylor, Mark R. Simmons, James B. Williams.

This book purports to be sort of “central” or “neutral” in the King James controversy, “with the goal of healing the wounds” and “To expose the two extreme positions on the King James controversy: KJV Onlyism and KJV Discreditism.” (Introduction: The Issues We Face, pp. 8-9)

In the “Introduction” to this book, J. B. Williams first approvingly cites James White’s inflammatory and inaccurate KJVO categories that have hung on far too long in the fray (p. 2). He mentions a group he calls “KJV Discreditors,” who make extreme statements against it. Williams asserts that the “extremes have produced a deplorable condition in Fundamentalism.” He calls the defense of the King James Version a “cancerous sore” that has resulted in “a deplorable condition in Fundamentalism...” (pp. 2-3). It seems quite clear to me that the focus of this book is primarily on and against “King James Only” advocates. The word “Discreditism” is used only once (p. 8) and “Discreditors” is used twice (p. 3). Williams names one “discreditor” in the text of his “Introduction” (p. 3), Jack P. Lewis, author of The English Bible from KJV to NIV (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1982).[i] While the authors may sincerely wish to avoid the extreme of “KJV Discreditism,” it certainly does not come into balanced focus in this book.

Williams sets up four points (pp. 5-6) as the so-called “Historic View” about the Bible, the Christian Faith, and the King James Version “of all the recognized Christian leaders of the Christian Faith for the past three hundred years.”[ii] 

• 1. Only the originals are verbally and plenarily inspired, and the KJV is a translation of copies of the original documents.[iii]
• 2. The KJV was revised in 1612, 1613, 1616, 1629, 1638, 1659, and 1769, indicating “that it is impossible for the 1611 translation to be verbally inspired and inerrant.”
• 3. The “KJV was free from theological errors” but not “inspired in the same sense as the original documents.”
• 4. An accurate translation is God’s way of speaking to men.

With this myopic set up, Williams alleges “The first noticeable deviation from the accepted and historic agreement was published in 1930 by a Seventh Day Adventist, who wrote Our Authorized Bible Vindicated.”[iv] Like Doug Kutilek, Williams also states that Wilkinson’s book “was unknown and unused until a Baptist minister, J. J. Ray, published God Wrote Only One Bible in which he heavily plagiarized Wilkinson's book...” (p. 6)

Interestingly, both Kutilek and Williams acknowledge that they know that Ray believed there were some errors in the KJV that should be corrected! (See J. J. Ray, pp. 30-31) Yet they do not let that get in the way of a good polemic exercise.

In the “Conclusion” Keith Gephart claims “We need to be preaching Christ, not beating our drums for or against the King James Bible!” However, like the “Introduction” and points in between, his primary focus has been against “King James Onlyism.” 

This book fails to be what it purports to be, and fails to do what it purports to do. In the end, it adds one more screed in the long line of “Fundamentalist” books against “King James Onlyism” – in the “polite and kind” way of the times, of course.

---

[i] Williams also quotes Adlai Loudy, Sake Kubo and Walter F. Specht, and the Preface to the Revised Standard Version on page 3 in his “Introduction.”
[ii] Are we truly to believe that Williams is aware of “all the recognized Christian leaders” in this time frame. Of course not, it is the leaders he recognizes, and he does not recognize leaders who held a higher view of the King James Bible, some of which history I have pointed out in various blog articles.
[iii] Rather than “300 years historic,” this terminology is specifically Warfieldian. This book even mentions B. B. Warfield “is well known for his defense of the position that the autographs are inspired and inerrant” (p. 25). Rather than defend the positions, Warfield basically created it, shifting from apographs to autographs and from infallibility to inerrancy. See The Ecclesiastical Text: Criticism, Biblical Authority, and the Popular Mind by Theodore Letis, pages 72-81.
[iv] Of course, he must avoid mentioning the earlier pro-KJV book by Philip Mauro, an author who contributed essays to the 12-volume The Fundamentals: A Testimony to The Truth.