Dear Pastor Phil Stringer:

7-18-10

Perhaps it was best that your morning talk to the Dean Burgon Society at 9 AM on 7-15-2010 was not able for some reason to be streamed on the internet. It was later in the afternoon put on sermon audio, but not in time for viewers to look up the things claimed and send in questions by email. You gave no specific written or internet locations where she claims inspiration for her works. If you had the interviews you mentioned you could have shown and played them to your listeners on the screen behind you. You also, as Dr. Waite, do not and can not know all the details of her life’s history or her illness.

You made comparisons of her beliefs to Joseph Smith, Charles Taze Russell, Ellen White, and even Victor Paul Werwille, who is not a Trinitarian and did not believe that Christ was preexistent. You also made a comparison to Moses David Berg, who was a universalist and denied the existence of hell, believed in communication with the dead, and that the Holy Ghost was feminine. You even compared her to Katherine Kuhlman, stating only that Kuhlman was a creationist. But it turns out that Kuhlman was an out and out Pentecostal faith healer and preacher, who said very little about creation and was certainly not in the same league as Ken Ham. Watching Kuhlman for 10 seconds on the internet will clearly show her differences from Dr. Riplinger. You also compared her to the Cooneyites, who were Unitarian. I wonder how many of your listeners at the meeting or elsewhere even knew of the existence of the obscure Cooneyites and Kuhlman, and you provided no adequate explanation of all their beliefs.

There are indeed, as you said of those who believe the KJV did not lose its inspiration, three possibilities for your statements, demon possession, being “crazy as a loon,” and lying. But is a lie telling a direct untruth or only part of what you know to be the whole truth? You made no mention of Dr. Riplinger’s discoveries about Scrivener, his beliefs and true alliances, the reasons he did his Greek text, or the many problems with it. (see attached review) You made no mention of his admiration of Richard Bentley, who in 1715 attempted mightily, but failed, using Vulgate manuscripts from a Benedictine monastery in Paris and a collation of the Vatican codex, to do exactly what the English Revised Version committee accomplished in 1881. He openly stated he wished to produce “the true exemplar of Origen.” You also failed to mention the alterations to the ben Chayyim codex by Elias Levita and Christian David Ginsburg. You also failed to explain that the vowel points in the Hebrew text were not the addition, in about 500 AD, of the Tiberian Masoretes, but that the Jews, even at the time of the reformation, believed that the points went back at least to Ezra. John Gill believed they were much older that that. See the internet articles on the vowel points by Thomas Strouse, a former DBS executive committee member. Elias Levita in 1525 was the first “scholar,” and kabbalist as well, as was Ginsburg, to argue that the vowel points were added by the Masoretes.

You also failed to mention the proven moral degradation of Charles John Vaughan, who hired Westcott to Harrow and was brother in law to the host of the revision committee, the Dean of Westminster A. P. Stanley and later became a member of the New Testament committee himself. Explanations of these things have never been done at a DBS meeting and would not be allowed. Scrivener must remain to them an orthodox opponent of Westcott and Hort. These two weak legs of the DBS, Scrivener’s Greek TR and the Masoretic Hebrew text, have now been shown to be insufficient to support the Society’s point of view.

The DBS was organized in a single day in 1978 at an airport conference room in Philadelphia. David Otis Fuller was there, but so was Theodore Letis. The decision to avoid calling the KJV inspired was not done after a period, days or weeks, of thought, fasting, and prayer but was a political decision decided by secret ballot on that day.

So the lying you spoke about last Thursday was done by your not telling the whole truth about the Trinitarian Bible Societies’ Greek TR and the British and Foreign Bible Societies’ “Masoretic” Hebrew text to the many young Christians and preachers in your audience. Your entire discussion was perhaps the most articulate, or should we say the slickest, given at the meeting but also the most devious and deceptive.

Yours,

James H. Sightler, M.D.

7-18-2010

www.sightlerpublications.com