PUFFING THE SUCKER CHAPTER TWO Pufflng The Sucker 11 Innocently enough, the student starts with rudiments that need little explanation. He must learn the alphabet and how to pronounce it. Greek teachers differ as to the force of the Ger- man "llmlaut" when pronouncing Upsilon; a modern Greek will give it a full ''EE'' sound, but as far as that goes, he will put a full "EEE" sound on Epsilon, Eta, and lota. Greek teachers differ on the dipthong "ei,'' some giving it a "height" sound (like long "i'') and others giving it an ''eight" sound (like long "a"). The student is shown the difference between Uncial (block capital) and Cursive (lower case) letters, and notes that there are "long'' and "short" vowels. Muted, palatal, and guttural consonants are marked, and the student learns about breathing marks, accent marks, and punctuation marks (for ex- ample, the semi-colon is used for a question mark, etc.). The student learns his first ''declension" of a noun, and he learns that Greek, like many other languages, is not a uni-sex, Women's-Lib, language. Greek has masculine, feminine, and neuter words exactly as the Germans have them. A "five case'' system is usually taught so that if a noun is a subject of a sentence, it is called ''NOMINATIVE. " If it has an "of" before it, it is "GENITIVE, " and if it has a "to" or "by'' or "in" before it, it is "DATIVE. ' If it is a direct object, it is ''AC- CUSATIVE. " Each of these uses displays a different ending on the noun. A detailed discussion will be found in Robertson's grammar on pages 205-246 (Robertson uses an EIGHT case system adding the ABLATIVE to the GENITIVE, and the LOCATIVE and INSTRUMENTAL to the DATIVE. The eighth addition is called ''Vocative, which is a seldom used term of direct address; viz "? ?V?p(?7?œ" (Rom. 2: 1). The student is then given a verb conjugation, which simply means that a Greek verb changes its spelling when one says, 12 HOW TO TEACH "THE ORIGINAL'' GREEK TEXT "I speak, You speak, He speaks, We speak, They speak,'' etc. The German has the same phenomena. After learning how ac- cents (grave, acute, circumflex) shift around from ultimas to penults and antepenults, he begins to memorize Greek vocabulary, both nouns and verbs. So far, there are no prob- lems. Nothing taught, so far, is going to radically destroy his faith in the Bible, unless, of course, the instructor suddenly decides to give the sucker some ''Greek nuggets'' and inserts a remark that the Greek word for "oath's" in Matthew 14:9 is a PLURAL, not a SINGULAR. You see, the sucker has now learned that the plural endings in the noun declension given him-he will start with masculine nouns-were oi, on, ois, and ous, while the singular were os, ou, o, and on. Ah! "LIGHT FROM THE ORIGINAL!" It should have been ''oaths" in Mat- thew 14:9 and not "oath's sake"! Progress. The AV failed to translate its own Textus Receptus Greek correctly. Ah! what a find! Ah, what a great spiritual truth. Boy, are we ever going to have revival now that we know the truth, for ''the truth shall make you free!'' See how its done? You are now free from authority. Broadus, Scarborough, Robertson, Wuest, Hort, Kutilek, Sumner, Hutson, Schaff, Wiersbe, Willmington, Farstad, Hodges, Price, Combs, and Wemp did not lose their faith in the BOOK until they sat down at the feet of a Greek teacher. The classroom attacks against the Holy Bible will begin in the fourth week of Greek classes and will continue for four years, at an accelerated pace, that will eventually convince the stu- dent that the only reason for preaching the King James Bible is to keep control of his income, attendance, and enrollment. The student is now given a 'paradigm'' of a Greek verb; first of all, in the present indicative active. Later, the other ''tenses" are taught (the imperfect, the future, and then the first and second aorist, with first and second perfect, the pluperfect, etc). He is taught the difference between first, second, and third declension nouns; Robertson goes into much detail (op cit., p. 60-109), including the declension of pronouns and adjectives. But your instructor deceived you again. He short-changed you again without you knowing it. You see, he knew you PUFFING THE SUCKER 13 wouldn't dare oppose him back there on Matthew 14:9 because you would not know that every translator who revised and up- dated the King James Bible, since 1880, translated the plural of Matthew 19:12 as SINGULAR, though it was written by the same author as Matthew 14:9. Furthermore, he forgot to in- form the gullible neophyte that no Bible corrector, revisor, or translator since 1880, has ever translated Matthew 28:1 as a plural (?BCiTCl?V), although it IS a plural. Now these deadly omissions, these calculated gaps, and intentional evasions of THE TRUTH, form the bedrock foun- dations of modern Fundamentalism in the realm of Higher Chris- tian education. They also produce termites in the studs and joists that make the building unfit to live in. The student is confined in darkness by his teacher and kept there; he is kept there for a purpose. The Greek teacher's GOAL is to get rid of the authority of ONE Book, and that Book is not ''the Greek ma- jority text'' or the "Greek Textus Receptus.'' Satan is not wor- ried about a dead language that died out more than 1,800 years ago. You see, the Greek teacher is DEDICATED. He is sold out. He is a "reverent Biblicist' (Bob Jones III's terrn) who is totally and completely given up to one task; he can truly say "this one thing I do!" That one thing is to replace the Holy Bible in YOUR MIND with the final authority of a Greek gram- mar, or a Greek grammarian. That is his ''ministry.'' How well most of them succeed can be judged by their detrimental af- fects on men like R.A. Torrey, John R. Rice, and Charles Had- don Spurgeon. At the point of singulars and plurals, it was a God-given mandate of the Holy Spirit for the teacher (at that time) to alert the student to the fact that "Elohim'' (God) is a plural word, translated as a singular over four hundred times; and that o? pavoi (heaven) is a plural word translated singular more than one hundred times. The student was not alerted. He was left in darkness to think that if anyone translated a singular as a plural it was an ERROR. This is the exact position taken by Gary Hudson and Doug Kutilek in l991 (see the work titled King Jomes Onlyism vs. Scholarship Onlyism). The deception was one of omission (see John 16:9); it was calculated and in- 14 HOW TO TEACH "THE ORIGINAL" GREEK TEXT tentional. It was to deceive the young man, and add one more reason to his arsenal of doubts to quit trusting the English Bi- ble of the Protestant Reformation. On goes the class in ''the original tongues!'' The ''moods'' and ''voices'' of the verbs must be learned, as well as their ''person'' and 'number,'' (Robertson calls the moods, ''MODES''). They are the Indicative, the Imperative, the Subjunctive and the Optative. Now the student will be get- ting into deep water. Having mastered Adjectival participles (predicate and attributive), Supplementary participles, and Cir- cumstantial participles, he must distinguish such forms as the Genitive Absolute, the Hebraistic Intensifying participle, the Periphrastic conjunction, the Accusative Absolute, and so forth. My studies in these matters were under Dr. William Brunner, a graduate of Louisville Theological Seminary, who was a private pupil of Dr. A.T. Robertson for eight years, and had memorized all five thousand-plus vocabulary words in the Greek New Testament (Nestle's). Throughout all of this (say the student sits in a Greek class for five years, like I did), the prospective infidel is memoriz- ing Greek vocabulary words and learning the "luo'' table. The latter is a vast chart containing all the endings for the Greek verb including the infinitives, participles, modes, contract verbs, and the ''mi" conjugations. (These were from ''mi" verbs, which means that some verbs were ''athematic" [the first per- son, singular active ended in 'mi (MU, IOTA)]; examples are ??????, and ?. And now he is prepared to get rid of the King James text, once and for all. He has the foundations and ''shell'' for a building which will nest enough demons to give the Holy See in Rome a ''run for their money.'' 1. He has become inflated. 2. He has become a man follower, who believes men. 3. He has abandoned the Book by which he was saved, as his final authority, and, henceforth, will alter everything in it that he cannot understand or DOESN'T LIKE. (''Baptism" for example; see Curtis Hutson or Bob Ross!) 4. He is convinced that the King James Bible is filled with errors. PUFFING THE SUCKER 15 5. He is convinced that he himself has the power and authority to correct them. 6. He will, henceforth, use a dead language to correct a living language. 7 But he will use the English Bible in the living language to ''con'' the suckers who are dumb enough to think that he believes it! This is the twentieth century product of PCS, BJU, LBC, TTS, etc. The Greek teacher, in a Greek class, is given a young Christian called to preach; in two to four years, he converts him into an egotistical hypocrite that would shame Demas and Herod. You see, while he learned the "basics'' given above (we have not gone into Anacaluthon, Aposiopesis, Asyndeton, Spirants, Syllabic Augments, Partitive Genitives, Paratactic Conjunctions, Itacisms, Hyuperbaton, or Pleonasms, etc.), the Greek teacher GUIDED him "into all truth," by pointing out specific instances where the AV translators mistranslated a word (say Matt. 23:24 or Matt. 27:44), or failed to omit articles, add articles, or to properly render tense or rnode. This lovely ''il- lustrated'' course in destructive criticism concerned ONE BOOK, and only ONE BOOK, which was to be attacked: it was the King James Version, 1611 version. (See the absolute first-hand, eye-witness account in The Last Grenade, op cit., pp. 156-159). We will now take a dozen actual cases as they are taught in class at Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, and Liberty Univer- sity in Lynchburg, Virginia.