Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Benjamin G. Wilkinson, the first generation King James Onlyist


 

All writers who embrace the KJV-only position have derived their views ultimately from Seventh-day Adventist missionary, theology professor and college president, Benjamin G. Wilkinson (d.1968), through one of two or three of his spiritual descendants. In 1930, he wrote Our Authorized Bible Vindicated, a book of several hundred pages, which attracted almost no attention in its day (no doubt chiefly because it was awash in a vast ocean of error). In that book, Wilkinson attacked the Westcott-Hort Greek text, in large measure by attacking Westcott and Hort personally (the common but fallacious ad hominem method; I exposed and refuted his line of argument in "Erasmus and His Theology," The Biblical Evangelist, vol. 19, no. 20, October 15, 1985, pp. 3,4).
 
https://ibri.org/RRs/RR032/32erasms.htm

He also expressed strong opposition to the English Revised Version New Testament (1881), in particular objecting to it because it robbed Adventism of two favorite proof-texts, one allegedly teaching Gentile Sabbath-keeping (Acts 13:42 ), the other misused by the Adventists to teach soul sleep (Hebrews 9:27 ). I documented some of Wilkinson's grosser errors in "Wilkinson's Incredible Errors," Baptist Biblical Heritage, vol. I, no.3, Fall, 1990.
We recognize that Wilkinson’s grossly errant theology is not sufficient grounds for rejecting his views on the text and translation of the Bible. And this was not our basis for casting aside his writing as unacceptable. As we shall show, not only was Wilkinson’s doctrine aberrant, his “facts” and presentation of information were grossly inaccurate, distorted, imprecise, or just plain wrong. From his pen flowed a torrent of misinformation on nearly every subject he touched. This is not hyperbole. As I read Our Authorized Bible Vindicated (hereafter, OABV), I compiled four pages of page references to his errors, and didn’t begin to list all the inaccuracies I found.


Wilkinson was the first to misapply Psalm 12:6, 7 specifically to the KJV as though the passage were a promise to preserve the words of verse six (when in fact the promise is the preservation of the persecuted saints of verse five, as I demonstrated in my essay, "A Careful Investigation of Psalm 12:6, 7," The Biblical Evangelist, vol. 17, no. 21, October 14, 1983, later issued in booklet form as "Why Psalm 12:6, 7 is not a Promise of the Divine Preservation of Scripture").
Wilkinson also manufactured the erroneous idea that the medieval Waldensian Bible was based on the Old Latin version and not the Vulgate, and that the Old Latin version was Byzantine in its text-type (all of which is demonstrably false, as I showed in "The Truth about the Waldensian Bible and the Old Latin Version," Baptist Biblical Heritage, vol. II, no. 2, Summer, 1991). Thus Wilkinson, the first generation.

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