W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest

NEW TESTAMENT TRANSLATION
When the Commentaries began to circulate throughout the country, and the people reading them found the
original Scriptures, which I always read and use in all my expositions, so much plainer and more easily
understood than King James' translation, which not only contains two thousand errors in the New Testament
alone, but, as it is nearly three hundred years old and the English language has undergone much change in that
time, much of the phraseology has become antiquated, so that it no longer reveals the blessed truth so clearly
and vividly to the mind of the student as does the verbiage now in current use.
Therefore people began to plead with me to translate the New Testament out of the critical original into plain,
current English. The reason why we have the two thousand errors in the English Version is because they had
crept into the Greek during the long roll of the Dark Ages, which intervened between ancient and modern
civilization, when barbarism actually captured the world, hovering over all nations like a nightmare. As the
Roman Empire was the upholder of ancient civilization, When she fell under the invasion of the Goths, Huns,
Vandals and Heruli, the barbaric ancestors of great Russia, after a three hundred years' war, in 476 A. D., ancient
civilization passed away, followed by that dreary period of a thousand years, historically epitheted the “Dark
Ages,” during which not one man in a thousand could read or write. Of course the perpetuation of the Bible by
transcriptions would necessarily involve the introduction of much error, both by the omissions, as many
beautiful passages rich in saving truth slipped through the fingers of the transcribers, and by the additions, as
still more were added, first in the form of bracketed explanations, which eventually found their way into the
body of the text, as transcribers overlooked or inadvertently neglected to perpetuate the parenthetical clauses.
The predilection in favor of addition transcended the subtraction. Antecedently to the art of printing, A. D. 1551,
the only possible chance to procure a Bible was to have it written off by hand, a work of immense labor and
incalculable responsibility.
During those fifteen centuries of course a vast amount of error incidentally found its way into the blessed
Scripture. The printing of the Bible by Stephanus, in London, in 1551, was a sunburst on the English speaking
world, as it forever did away with the necessity of transcribing, which was not only so immense a labor but was
constantly fraught more or less with deterioration from the precious truth, thereby transmitted from age to age.
One hundred and twenty-five years ago an institution denominated “Biblical Criticism” sprang up in
Christendom, having for its object the recovery of the Scripture precisely as the Holy Ghost gave them, thus
restoring to the Bible all of the lost passages as fast as they could find hem, and eliminating all of the
interpolations which, along the rolling centuries, had found their way into the inspired volume. The result has
been that a number of Greek Testaments have been printed, exhibiting the achievements of the critics, e. g.,
Scholtz, Lachmann, Griesbach, Tischendorf, and Westcott and Horb [sic]. At present Westcott and Horb is the
standard, as it is the youngest and consequently contains the benefit of all antecedent researches. It is, however,
identical with Tischendorf, as they continued to publish his Testament after his death, giving their own names to
it. Tischendorf's Testament, which I have used ever since it was published, has for its basis the Sinaitic
manuscript, so called because Tischendorf discovered it in the convent of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai, in 1859,
the very year I graduated in college. Hearing the wonderful news of the greatest discovery of modern times, in
the providence of God I procured from Germany a copy of the first book which was made from the parchment
roll.
This great scholar and critic, Tischendorf, spent his whole life in constant toil, for forty years in Palestine and all
of the Bible lands hunting everything that would throw light on the living Word.
Meanwhile noble and generous King William of Germany paid all of his expenses, a princely fortune, as he
often had fifty to one hundred men laboring excavating the ruins of cities, that he might find everything that
could possibly throw a ray of light on the vital fact of just what constitutes the inspired volume. Finally, while
searching in that venerable monastery which was built in the second century to commemorate the giving of the
law, he got his eye on an old parchment roll, externally indubitably demonstrative of its great antiquity, and the
blessed Holy Spirit revealed to him that it was His Word. Then he at once proposed to the monks in charge of
the monastery to buy it from them; soon, by his persistent effort, finding it necessary to tempt their cupidity with
a really extravagant sum, as they are jealous of relics, and generally hold them with a tight grip which filthy