[TruthTalk] Christ and the Law

[Judy Taylor]

Bill writes: I couldn't help noticing that the entire polemic is but the words of yet another man arguing for a particular "correct" translation of Scripture over against other translations -- the very thing he censures, he does -- replete though it may be with his assurance to us that we can trust his scholarly acuity, having "confidence that 'every word' in the King James Bible is the pure word of God."   To begin with the author is not a man Bill and the argument is against removing and changing rather than one of promotion. The irony IMO is that scripture itself exhorts us to be "doers" of God's Word rather than "hearers only" in which case we are deceiving our own selves. Yet you and your scholarly friends (most especially Lance) make the claim that an ordinary person (a plain old vanilla Christian ignorant of Greek) can not know God's Word for one reason or another - the corrupted transcripts being one ... reformation thinking being another ... so what are we to do.  Did God in His foreknowledge miss this one??   Irony aside, one of his criticisms, and thus Judy's, is against those whose "exegesis ... has been too influenced by ... [the] use of a corrupt Greek text." The point is, however, that I am not using the "corrupted" text to argue that "Be ye therefore perfect" is not the best, or even the correct, translation of Matthew 5.48; I make my argument from the same text the KJV translators used. In other words, there is no variance here between the TR and the UBS texts: they are both in agreement; both use the future indicative of the "to be" verb to state that Jesus was speaking of an as-of-yet unrealized perfection or completion or fullness or maturity -- whichever way you would like to think of it -- that is, "Therefore, you will be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect." Bill   Jesus wasn't saying anything different than what had already been written in Lev 19:2.  God's nature, character, and holiness is the same in every generation and His desire is for us to want to be like Him and once the desire is there He empowers us to make it happen. Using Gk grammar to make everything future is what the author of what you call "the polemic" was speaking of.                                              judyt                                        He that says "I know Him" and doesn't keep His Commandments                               is a liar (1 John 2:4)