XIX An Example of the Downward Course that Accompanies Criticism and Rejection of the Authorised Version

This is not an issue that you can put a fence around.  You cannot expect that other areas of the Faith will not also be affected.  Such an example is Dr. Daniel Wallace, a prominent professor at Dallas Theological Seminary.  Dallas, during its earlier days, was typical of many otherwise sound schools: No inconsistency was seen in using the Revised Text in the classroom and the King James Version in the pulpit and private study.  Though there were some dissenting voices (i.e. Zane Hodges), this was the common practice, with very little interest shown in the matter.  We do owe a debt to the “old” Dallas.  In the years following WW II it was at the forefront among institutions in producing a vast amount of material on the Premillennial Return of Christ.

Dr. Wallace, as his website will show, has taken the rhetoric at Dallas against the Traditional Text and AV to a higher level.  His short paper Why I Do Not Think the King James Bible is the Best Translation Available Today is typical.  After giving some of the above arguments, he concludes:

I trust this brief survey of reasons I have for thinking that the King James Bible is not the best available translation will not be discarded quickly. 

For his own good and those who follow him, his reasons should be discarded quickly.  It is a downward course.  After announcing that he no longer accepts passages as John 3:13; John 7:53- 8:11; I Timothy 3:16, he says:

I find it difficult to accept intellectually the very passages which I have always embraced emotionally. 

Yes, other areas will be affected!  The following is from a 9/12/94 article in Christianity Today where Wallace praises the neo-orthodox Karl Barth and utters a typically liberal expression in bemoaning bibliolatry.

One of the chief legacies Karl Barth left behind was his strong Christocentric focus.  It is a shame that too many of us have reacted so strongly to Barth, for in our zeal to show the deficiencies of his doctrine of Scripture, we have become bibliolaters. (O Timothy, Oct. 94).

In Wallace’s The Synoptic Problem, (available on his website), he supports the redaction approach to the Gospels.  This theory teaches that the Gospels were given, not by direct inspiration, but rather by copying from each other, and from a common secondary source. (See O Timothy, vol. 15-7, 98).  Wallace says:

It is quite impossible to hold that the three synoptic gospels were completely independent from each other.  In the least, they had to have shared a common oral tradition (p.1).

We shall see later that before the Gospels were written there did exist a period in which the gospel materials were passed on orally, and it is clear that this oral tradition influenced not only the first of our synoptic Gospels but the subsequent ones as well (p. 4).

The majority of NT scholars hold to Markan priority…This is the view adopted in this paper as well (p.6).

One argument concerning Mark’s harder readings…is the probability that neither Luke nor Matthew had pristine copies of Mark at their disposal…An intermediate scribe is probably responsible - either intentionally or unintentionally - or more than a few of the changes which ended up in Luke and Matthew (note 49).

This is characteristic of the kind of scholarship that produces and backs the modern versions.  When the Standard Bible and Text are rejected.  When verbal preservation is abandoned: a denial or weakening of verbal inspiration will soon follow.