 One of the issues that I have with Mark Ward’s argument against the KJV is that Ward is operating from a position of willful ignorance. Thomas Jefferson once contemptuously observed of Thomas Paine that he “thought more than he read,” and I’ve found the same sentiment to be true of Mark Ward. His arguments often reveal a lack of genuine study and a contempt for the more laborious requirements of true scholarship. Ward’s video on the word excess in Ephesians 5:18 stands as a glowing testament of this shortcoming.
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 I wrote my first book about fifteen years ago, and I've written another nine since then. Most of them have done fairly well compared to other self-published books, and I've had one of them really take off with sales comparable to the average traditionally published book. I'm still honing my craft, and over the years, I've listened off an on to several podcasts that have helped me improve both as an author and as a marketer for my books. Here's a list of thirty eight podcasts in four different categories to help you succeed as an author. (Note that not all of these podcasts are explicitly Christian. They were selected for their writing and marketing content, not their religious affiliation.)
 In my book The Birthright: A History of Citizenship in America, I devoted three separate chapters to the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" found in the Fourteenth Amendment. With all of the present controversy surrounding this phrase, I thought it would be good to make those three chapters available here. The first two are from the section dealing with the debates in the senate, and the third chapter is from my analysis of the Supreme Court case United States vs. Wong Kim Ark. These three chapters provide a clear explanation of this phrase supported by historical documents.  President Trump likes to pretend that he's the first person to ever think of denying due process to illegal aliens, but that's far from the case. America's history is sadly replete with attempts to deny immigrants the equal protection of the law. Fortunately, this is one area in which our Supreme Court has a remarkably good track record. The Court has touched on the question of the rights due to illegal aliens on many occasions, and I've put together a small sample of their findings to help with refuting the claims made by Trump and his supporters.  In one of his “false friend” videos, Mark Ward attempts to prove that modern versions do a better job than the KJV of translating I Corinthians 15:19. The KJV translates this verse as: If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. The NKJV translates it as: If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable. Ward claims that pitiable is a better word choice here because miserable has supposedly changed over the years to mean something different today than it meant when the KJV was translated in 1611. Unfortunately for Ward, his attempts to prove this claim failed miserably (pun intended). Every single piece of evidence he presented actually argues against him.  President Trump’s denial of due process for non-citizens is not without precedent. The same thing was attempted by President Van Buren in the mid-nineteenth century. In that case, a group of about forty slaves were being transported from Cuba when they rebelled against the ship’s company and attempted to sail back to Africa. The former slaves strayed into American waters where they were captured and taken ashore. Van Buren attempted to circumvent the courts and send the escaped slaves back to Spanish Cuba without trial. His plans were foiled, and John Quincy Adams defended the rights of the former slaves before the Supreme Court. The arguments made by Adams have direct bearing on President Trump’s current immigration policies, and I’ve compiled the following excerpts from a speech that was more than eight hours in length.
 Over the years, I’ve had many people share a video with me that claims to use gumballs to illustrate the problem with allowing large numbers of immigrants into America. I watched the video several years ago and wrote out some thoughts to share with a friend. I’ve shared basically that same response many times since then, and I’ve finally gotten smart enough to copy and paste it into a blog article. Here is my response to the video Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs featuring Roy Beck and produced by NumbersUSA:  My entire life, I've heard arguments over the words "modest apparel" in I Timothy 2:9, so I decided to do my own study of them. I started with the Liddell and Scott lexicon entry for katastole (apparel) and followed it through with the entries for katastello, kata, and stello. I compared the various concepts with as much of the context of the examples as I could find, and then cross checked everything with several other lexicons.
 In March of 2019, Personhood Alabama made headlines worldwide when a judge granted their request to allow a father to represent an aborted child in a wrongful death suit against the clinic that had killed her. The suit was eventually dropped at the request of the father who faced an incredible amount of backlash from the community, but it remains the only case in American history to win the right for an aborted child to sue her killers.  I originally thought this article would have a different title. When I decided to do an article on the word prevent, I fully expected my title to be something like “Prevent Is an Actual False Friend in the KJV.” I chose that as my working title because everyone that I have ever read or listened to regarding the word prevent in I Thessalonians 4:15 has claimed that it doesn’t have the same meaning that we ascribe to that word today. However, the more I studied this word and the underlying Greek word, the more convinced I became that prevent is the best word to use both here in I Thessalonians and in every other passage where it occurs in the KJV. |
Bill Fortenberry is a Christian philosopher and historian in Birmingham, AL. Bill's work has been cited in several legal journals, and he has appeared as a guest on shows including The Dr. Gina Show, The Michael Hart Show, and Real Science Radio.
Contact Us if you would like to schedule Bill to speak to your church, group, or club. "Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser: teach a just man, and he will increase in learning." (Proverbs 9:9)
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