Do Modern Versions Delete The Truth in Luke 9:56? Responding to KJV Only

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:01]Do modern versions delete the truth in Luke 9:56?

[00:00:06]I have a video on my channel from a couple years ago where I address this meme.

[00:00:12]Well, halfway anyway.

[00:00:14]In that video, I addressed the controversy over Matthew 18:11.

[00:00:19]I had planned to do another video on the other verse that's mentioned on that graphic, but I never got around to it.

[00:00:25]And a few weeks ago, someone called me on it. A commenter asked why I never address Luke 9:56. So, I want to do that today.

[00:00:35]First, I like to be thorough. So, we need to expand our discussion to include nine Luke 9:54 through 56. It not only gives us some context, but the variations in the pericope or passage really begin with verse 54 and records the accounts the account of James and John wanting to call down fire on a Samaritan village that had rejected the Lord.

[00:01:02]So, let's dive into that text.

[00:01:05]Luke 9:54 through 56 in the King James reads, "And when his disciples, James and John, saw this, they said, 'Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven and consume them, even as Elias did?'

[00:01:23]But he turned and rebuked them and said, 'You know not what manner of spirit you're of, for the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them.' And they went to another village."

[00:01:34]Now, here we see two notable what some scholars call expansions, the phrase "even as Elias did" in verse 54 and the verse and the full explanatory rebuke that we see in verses 55 and 56.

[00:01:50]Now, many King James Version Only advocates point to both as places where modern versions simply remove precious truth.

[00:01:59]The New King James Version agrees with the King James here and includes both of those additional wordings.

[00:02:07]But when we turn to other modern translations, the the picture changes.

[00:02:12]In fact, the Legacy Standard, which is my personal favorite, and the New American Standard handle the main variant with transparency by placing those disputed material in brackets.

[00:02:25]Let's look at it here.

[00:02:27]Luke 9:54 through 56 in the Legacy Standard says, "And when his disciples, James and John, saw this, they said, 'Lord, you Do you want us to command command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?' But he turned and rebuked them and said, 'You do not know what kind of spirit you're of, for the Son of man did not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them.' And they went to another village."

[00:02:54]The NASB does the same thing. You have brackets around the longer reading in verses 55 and 56 while keeping the shorter reading in verse 54. Now, that approach acknowledges that there is a textual question there without removing the words entirely from sight.

[00:03:13]And personally, I think that is the right way to handle that. Now, if we contrast that to translations like the ESV or the CSB or the NIV and others, they simply present the shorter text without brackets. Let's look at the NIV again, verses 54 56, chapter 9.

[00:03:34]It says, "And when his disciples, James and John, saw it, they said, 'Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?' But he turned and rebuked them and they went on to another village."

[00:03:50]Now, as I said, the CSB and the NIV follow the same shorter reading as the ESV. So, we see a spectrum here. The King James, the New King James include both what I'm going to call expansions. They include them fully.

[00:04:06]The LSB and the NASB, they bracket the longer rebuke while using the shorter verse in verse 54.

[00:04:13]And the ESV, CSB, and the NIV present the shortest form and they do not include anything in brackets. So, the real question before us is this, did modern editors take inspired words out of the Bible or were these phrases most likely Sorry, [clears throat] added later by early Christian scribes or copyists? So, understanding that some of them were certainly not professional scribes.

[00:04:41]Well, to answer that, this is where we turn to manuscript evidence. Now, this is a phrase that my King James Only friends are going to balk at, but the earliest Greek copies of Luke that contain this section are two papyri from Egypt, P75 dated to around AD 175 to 225, and then P45, which is dated to around AD 250.

[00:05:08]Now, both of these preserve the shorter readings in verse 54 and consume them with no reference to Elijah.

[00:05:18]They also, like the longer material in verses 55 and 56, the great fourth and fifth century uncial manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus, and others follow those same shorter readings. Now, these are the oldest nearly complete Bibles that we possess and they consistently support the shorter text.

[00:05:43]The longer readings appear more strongly in the later Byzantine manuscripts that dominate from the fifth century onward, no doubt about it, no question. That textual stream that eventually produced the Textus Receptus used by the King James translators, and we can even observe the longer readings developing in stages. For example, Codex Bezae from the fifth century includes only part of that rebuke where Eli- the Elijah phrase and the full saving clause become standard in the medieval Greek majority text.

[00:06:18]The The early translations confirm that pattern. The oldest Syriac and Sahidic Coptic versions omit both the Elijah reference and the longer rebuke.

[00:06:30]Those And I keep saying it, those expansions, they surface later in the in the Syriac Peshitta, in the Bohairic Coptic, and in the Latin Vulgate. Now, among the church fathers, clear quotations of the expanded forms appear later than the oldest Greek papyri that we've just mentioned. Now, when all of this evidence is weighed, the conclusion of many careful textual scholars, conservative scholars at that, as well as critical scholars, is that the shorter readings are what Luke likely originally wrote. Both "even as Elias did", that phrase in verse 54, and the explanatory rebuke in verses 55 and 56 are, according to them, almost certainly later expansions.

[00:07:22]So, why would early Christians add these words? Well, certainly not out of malice, but out of love and out of a desire to help readers understand. In verse 54, the disciples' request already echoes the story of Elijah calling down fire in 1 Kings 18. Now, a scribe or a reader familiar with the Old Testament likely and natur- naturally added the explicit comparison "even as Elias or Elijah did" to make the allusion clearer. And in verse 50 verses 55 and 56, the text >> [clears throat] >> likely said, "Jesus rebuked them", but it probably did not record the content of the rebuke. Scribes, pastors, and readers naturally wanted to know why the Lord rebuked James and John. Now, this kind of explanatory expansion is a documented scribal habit across the New Testament. The added words are theologically true and they are beautiful, but many scholars believe that they simply were not written by Luke. Now, this has led to accusations that modern translators, dating all the way back to Westcott and Hort, were creating the word they wanted when they simply wanted to know what Luke wrote.

[00:08:40]The same accusation is often made of these early manuscripts that they were created by carnal men who corrupted God's word.

[00:08:49]And that brings us to the more difficult part of the discussion.

[00:08:53]How should How we should respond to the strong claims made within King James Onlyism and textual absolutism?

[00:09:01]Many sincere believers prefer the King James Version for its majestic language and long history of use.

[00:09:08]That preference is understandable. It is respectable. And it can be a matter of personal conviction.

[00:09:14]But a more extreme form promoted by men like Peter Ruckman and the Ruckmanites that follow him, Gail Riplinger, Samuel Gipp, Jack McElroy, Phil Stringer, the KJV Research Council, and others goes much further.

[00:09:29]These voices routinely accuse modern translators and textual critics of deliberate corruption.

[00:09:36]They speak of in satanic conspiracies, New Age infiltration, Gail Riplinger, and men who hate the word of God and who are intentionally removing vital doctrines.

[00:09:50]And you hear those things said and parodied at almost any KJV Only church.

[00:09:57]Sad, but it's true.

[00:09:58]And this rhetoric is harsh. It is it's accusatory and it is mean-spirited. It turns faithful evangelical scholars, men who affirm the full inspiration and inerrancy of scripture into unsaved heretics, enemies of the faith, and pawns of Satan.

[00:10:18]We have to reject that conspiratorial and divisive spirit.

[00:10:23]It fractures the body of Christ.

[00:10:25]It breeds unnecessary suspicion of modern translators and people that use modern translations. And it poisons the conversation among brothers and sisters who all love the word and his and the Lord who gave it to us. And instead, we should We have a rule in my house.

[00:10:48]A general rule that sometimes I even forget. And that is that we should assume positive intent on all sides. The early copyists who added the explanatory the explanatory words in Luke 9:54-56 they were trying to pervert the text.

[00:11:06]They were trying to make the allusion to Elijah clearer and the Lord's rebuke more understandable so that readers would grasp the point and that they would obey.

[00:11:18]In the same way, the scholars who produced the modern eclectic text are not trying to take out scripture.

[00:11:25]They're doing the painstaking believing work of comparing the thousands of preserved manuscripts and they're weighing the earliest and the most careful witnesses and they're seeking to present the text as close to what God actually breathed out in history.

[00:11:41]That's their goal. They may have a different philosophy than the translators of the past or may use different manuscripts, but their goal is still I'm going to say genuine in most cases.

[00:11:51]We'll assume positive intent there.

[00:11:54]But look, God does not promise to preserve his word by making every scribe infallible or by preventing every helpful gloss from ever appearing.

[00:12:02]He has preserved it by giving us such a rich, abundant abundance of manuscripts from different regions and different centuries so that we can compare them and we can identify the additions, the omissions, and the changes and we can recover the original wording with remarkable confidence. Now, whether you like that concept or not and you may reject reasoned eclecticism. But that's the same method that the King James translators, well, and their predecessors who were working on the TR, that's what they used. The different ones who were working on the TR, Erasmus, Stephanus, Beza, they were comparing manuscripts and they were comparing omissions, additions, changes, and trying to recover the original wording. What are the King James translators doing? The exact same thing, but instead of working with manuscripts, they are working with printed editions of the Greek New Testament in this case and so they're working with different TRs, mainly Stephanus and Beza's and Erasmus, but they are going back and forth and deciding. Do they follow Beza's reading?

[00:13:12]Do they follow Erasmus' reading? Do they follow a Latin reading? And so they have to make these same decisions. And that is not unbelief.

[00:13:21]That is a humble stewardship of the evidence that the Lord has entrusted to his church.

[00:13:29]The doctrine at the center of these variants is in absolutely no danger whatsoever.

[00:13:35]The truth that the Son of Man came to save and not destroy is stated plainly in passages that every manuscript tradition agrees upon. Luke 19:10, John 3:17, 1 Timothy 1:15, and many others.

[00:13:49]The message of Luke 9 is still clear.

[00:13:52]Jesus rebuked the vengeful spirit of his disciples whether they explicitly named Elijah or not.

[00:14:00]And he calls us to walk in the same spirit of salvation rather than obstruction.

[00:14:08]So whether you read the fuller text in the King James or the New King James or even in the Greek Textus Receptus the or in the majority text, the bracketed text in the LSB or the NASB or even the shorter text in the ESV, CSB, NIV, and others, the Lord's rebuke still stands. The savior who came to seek and to save that which was lost still calls on us to learn the difference between a spirit of fire and judgment and the spirit of grace and mercy.

[00:14:40]So my encouragement to you is simple.

[00:14:43]Study the evidence honestly.

[00:14:46]Assume the best of your brothers in Christ and reject any teaching that traffics in conspiracy and accusation. The word of God is not fragile. It has been preserved for us in the totality of the manuscript tradition and it still speaks with full authority today.

[00:15:04]We need to receive it with gratitude.

[00:15:07]We need to proclaim it with clarity and we need to live it with the same saving love that marked our Lord.

[00:15:15]It it seems to me like those who believe versions outside of the King James have somehow taken out details about the mercy and compassion of Christ.

[00:15:25]Could do a little better at demonstrating the mercy and the compassion of Christ.

[00:15:31]So if you made it this far, show some compassion and leave me a heart emoji and I'll see you next time.