Debunking the Myths of Sacred Namers #2

Carl Franklin—December 27, 1997

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Many people have thrown away the Hebrew calendar for their own calendar, not realizing that the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Babylonians or the Persians ever developed a substantial lunar/solar calendar that worked properly. Only the Israelites did, and that calendar has been passed down to us through the Levites who made it public in the late 300s, only to save it from oblivion and to allow the scattered Jews at that time to keep the Festivals at the right time so they could calculate them.

There's a great deal of trouble over Passover; that hasn't gone away, and now the fall Feasts, since Samuele Bacchiocchi has gotten involved by through his 'two cents' into the fray. What he's doing is bringing in and superimposing Adventists doctrine on the Holy Day seasons.

If you look at his book on the spring festivals, toward the end you will see the little Haggadah book for celebrating Passover. He combines Christian elements, Jewish elements and throws them all together in this 'soup' he calls 'the Passover ceremony or liturgy.'

He also mentions that the Passover, in his estimation, is a 'Holy Communion.' Where have I heard those words before? You can tell the direction that they're headed.

The third problem that most of our people are having is with sacred names. The sacred names issue is what I'm going to talk about. It's a very hot issue, hot ticket item in the sense that people who get involved with sacred names are very emotional about the names. They're very evangelistic, and there's a lot of material out there that seems good to them, and they bring it into our fellowships and begin to evangelize. Either you have to stop it at that point or it will take over the entire fellowship.

There are former CGI fellowships out west that are actually going into Judaism so much now that they have their own Passover Haggadah book. They're also keeping Hanukah. Some are going into what they call 'praise dancing' where they dance in services to 'get closer' to God.

What our brethren don't realize is that sacred names is the essence of esoteric religions. It has been for millennia. The heart and core of all pagan religions—whether it's 'Christian' or Jewish or just pagan, pagan—is the concept of sacred names. This concept is applied by Mithras to call down special blessings from their god, the god of this world. The Jews use the same name in their services. The early Christian gnostics used the same name, and that name was Yahweh; it wasn't Jehovah.

These papers Debunking the Myths of Sacred Namers #s 1-3—these papers are in defense of the name Jehovah, showing you that the name is legitimate, nothing wrong with Jehovah. We don't use Jehovah as a sacred name, however. We don't use Jehovah in our prayers. It's not wrong to mention the God of the Old Testament in our writing, but when He came He gave us a new name.

The Father gave Him a new name, and His name is Jesus. There's nothing wrong in using the name Jesus, but that's not the element of these papers at this time. I've identified about 20 or 21 myths so far that these people have gotten into. They get back essentially to the history of the text and that's what these study papers are about. I'll try to make it as simple as possible, because I realize that this is new material and there's a great deal of information here.

Let me first introduce the terms Masoretic, Masoretic Text, Masorites. I'll be using those terms quite a bit. I brought some material/books: Masoretic Codex—a Hebrew text—put together in northern Italy and completed in 1105A.D. Some of these texts are very old and still extant and in very good condition. This is not the Ben Asher text; the Ben Asher family produced the best texts, but this was of that quality. The philosophy behind this is the vowel pointing is a bit different, and this was not the text that God chose to use to underpin the Hebrew Old Testament that was translated by Tyndale for the King James Bible.

God chose the very best, and what He chose was a newly printed Bible in 1494 called the Brescia Bible, printed in Brescia northern Italy in the Republic of Venice. That Bible was smuggled over the Alps by a monk by the name of Konrad Pellikan. He was supporting Luther at this time, because the Dominicans had for centuries on a campaign to purify the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church had been drifting for years into the 'paganism once delivered': magic and all the good things of the ancient religions from which it grew and out of which it came.

The Dominicans wanted to give back to the faith once delivered as far as the latter Catholic fathers in the 500-700s as it had been defined by several centuries. They wanted to clean up the Church and take out the sinful acts of the popes, cardinals and the bishops, the licentious lives that the popes in the 1500s—from the 1400s on, but it got very bad by the early 1500s—that led partially to the Reformation under Luther.

The popes could be seen in Rome walking down the streets of Rome with their mistresses. It was very open, very open about their sexual activities; or even with their misters. I have a book on same-sex marriages of the early Catholic Church. The early Catholic father—most were homosexuals—was hidden from us, but this book was written by a scholar and published by the University of Chicago that documents these facts.

You know what Paul said in Rom. 1; the end result of a reprobate mind is homosexuality, which is in a great many churches, not just ours, but Catholic, Episcopalian or Anglican. They're all having trouble with it being brought into the Church and demands being made that they be allowed to be members in good standing, or be allowed to be priests or ministers and preach. That's a little bit off the subject, but it's part of the whole mix that we're getting into.

This is the Masoretic text. There are a few marginal notes, the it basically took ten years to put together and was put together by three types of Levitical scholars. I'm sure most of these men were Levites and had passed it on from generation to generation. After all they had received the responsibility for the text from the very beginning, from the time of Moses. In the temple and out of the temple they were the only ones who had the knowledge and had passed on their own pronunciation and the accentuation of the text that is marked in these Bibles. It took three basic skills to put this together:

  • those who wrote the script were called sopharim
  • those who pointed the Script were called pointers

They pointed the vowel markings and they eventually isolated 17 vowel sounds, and used sort of a Morse Code of dots and dashes that absolutely locks in the pronunciation. There's no way to fudge on that pronunciation. There are also accent marks that were used musically as well as logically and the two go very much together in the Hebrew Old Testament. Without the proper breakdown where a thought begins or ends, and your logic breaks down.

There's an incredible pattern that God built into the Bible that guarantees, for example the debate over Passover, that shows that the manner of the Hebrew text as that particular point—whether it be Exo. 12, Num. 10 or any of the problem Scriptures that we're having with people not knowing, not being able to the discern or teaching falsehoods about when Passover ends and the 15th begins. Some keep an afternoon Passover because they use the word evening as we do in the English and they slap over some of the Passover activities into the 15th. When they get into the Hebrew and the way that it was put together by the Masorites, it is structured so that no Passover events can be taken over into the 15th once the sun has set. There's no question in the work Fred Coulter did on The Christian Passover book, that days begin and end at sunset. There's no problem with that.

There are problem Scriptures that others have turned to in the last three years and we exegeses. So, there's no possible way, it doesn't matter how you reason, that you can have Passover in the evening, because the Hebrew doesn't allow that. {that is after 14th ends and goes into the 15th} It has the beginning of the 14th—shortly after sunset. There is no way any of those events can be taken over into the 15th.

The same applies with all the basic doctrines that we're having trouble with. There is a calendar in Scriptures, there's no question about that, and we have the Masorites to thank for all of that. It was the Masorites who spent their lives, gave their lives at various times, and did so that the Hebrew Old Testament would some day be given to the entire world, and this they write many times at the end of the ten years when they sign off.

This was signed by Reuchlin, the codex, and the prayer that the Levite placed at the end of the Brescia Bible, that this would go to the entire world, that the whole world would have this Scriptures and be able to carry it with them; be able to read it in the morning, the evening seven days a week, and read it to their children.

When that Bible was smuggled over the Alps and given to Reuchlin, a scholar at that time, and then gave it to Martin Luther who used it to translate the Old Testament. Luther's good friend William Tyndale used that very same Bible to translate from the Brescia into the English. Within a few years of 1494 the whole world thousands and thousands of copies of the Hebrew Old Testament printed in English and German, and the Hebrew was printed and their work was done. There was no longer a need for the to hand write it and put in the accent marks this kind of thing. Their work was basically done. And God has preserved it for us.

This is not the full Masora. Ginsburg was unable to complete a lifetime work. Christian Ginsburg worked in the 1860-80s, and he gathered together, by traveling around Europe. I don't think he got very far into Russia, I'm not sure, because many of the manuscripts are there. Ginsburg brought together the marginal notes. The third person who worked on these Scriptures are called Masorites. In the 1500s the greatest grammarian of all came out of Masoretic heritage and passed on this information to Protestants, not to Catholics. So, they bypassed the Jews, by passed the Catholic Church and came straight into Protestantism, and has been preserved by our Protestant cultures for the past several hundred years.

The Masora gives us comments about every word in Scripture. It's sort of mathematically organized where they knew the exact middle point of every book and have counted every consonant. They knew the rhythm involved, made comments about words that would just lock the spelling in forever. As you see, they wrote so much they couldn't even hold in four volumes.

This is an old Bible that I picked up for 50 cents at a yard sale. It goes back to the Revolutionary War, I believe it's the bishop's Bible. It's very, very old and has the old script. It looks very much like the old German and old English where the 'S' looks like 'F'. It hasn't held up as well as the works of the Levites.

These were pioneers who brought the Bible with them when they came into this region down the Ohio River and it's bound in deer hide. Some of the sewing is coming out of it. I haven't touched it in years. You will find records in the middle of it—some birth and death records—and there's a schedule for buying lumber to build a barn or a house.

I brought this (another Bible) to give you a really good text that will give you a great deal of information about the Old Testament. It was written by a German then translated into English and published by William Erdman out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. In the back he has page after page of facsimiles with the description of the various translations. He discusses the pointing systems and here's a lot in here about sacred names, showing how sacred namers treated Scripture way back when.

As part of my research, I went back through some of the old Good News articles (WCG) and the one of the articles was a reprint. In looking for information on sacred names, I felt it was important in the work that I'm doing. This is about 100 pages of material that I pulled out of the old Good News magazines.

They did the best they could with the information they had in 1972, and a lot more information has come down the pipe since that time that has been published. There is a simple index in the back by page. I grouped them by mythologies, whether they were passed on by the Worldwide or sacred namers wherever. By the way, the sacred name movement started in 1930 in Detroit.

Then the Scriptural index shows you which Scriptures were used by the work at that time to combat the sacred names doctrine. I'll try to make this as simple as possible.

There are four mythologies that are discussed in these papers: Debunking the Myths of Sacred Namers (1-3). The first paper discusses three myths:

  • Myth # 1: There was no letter "j" until about five hundred years ago
  • Myth # 2: There is no "J" in Hebrew
  • Myth # 3: The name Jehovah was invented

The second paper discusses:

  • Myth # 4: Jehovah is Pointed with the Vowel Markings of Adonai

The third paper discusses:

  • Hebrew ios a Sacred Language

This approach is to defend the name Jehovah from the standpoint that it is a legitimate name; there's nothing wrong with it, and not only can we use it—it's not a sacred name, of course—but if Jehovah, and it is…

This is not all the material that we have, but this is the essence of the argument so far. There's more, and there's different approaches that we can take.

  • if Jehovah is a legitimate name
  • if the vowel markings were never faked
  • if the pronunciation was never lost
  • if the name wasn't invented
  • if it truly is a proper pronunciation, a transliteration out of the Hebrew

That leaves sacred namers with a major problem! Yahweh doesn't fit and is not the God of the Old Testament. Yahweh is a sacred names, to the pagans. And the practice that sacred namers are using—to one degree or another—in their liturgy is very similar to the esoteric practices of the Mithraites in Rome in the second century. I have a copy of the literature and they use some of the same sounds.

They would go into ecstatic speaking, like speaking in tongues and break into ecstatic dance and go through a particular magical ritual in which they would pronounce in this context of all that they're doing. At the right time they would throw their little seeds out and drop the flowers crushed and go in circles—like voodoo—move up and down and go through all the rigmarole, because they were told to do so by the priests in these religions so they could call upon the name of their god. If they went through all the ritual just right and used the right name with the right pronunciation, and got to that god, then they could call that god down like a genie and use that god to curse their enemies or bless their family, protect them in war, whatever. To give them children, take the enemy out—like voodoo!

One of the names that the Mithraites use was the vowels IAO, which happens to be three of the characters in JHVH; so there's a tie there.

The Gnostic side of Judaism, the Gnostic side of paganism that merged at Alexandria, Mithraic paganism coming out of Persia and coming down through the Hasidic, today we know them as the Pharisees. I wrote about that in The Two Jehovahs of the Pentateuch. When you put that all together you have one common element, and that is a sacred name that is pronounced by the scholars—though not by the ancients—with the 'Y' sound as in Yahweh; it's more like the sound 'Java.'

When you see in the text it will be JAVE or different spellings like this. But basically it was 'J' sound that went clear back to the Persians, Arabs and down through Judaism and those cultures. The 'J' sound is not sacred, nor is the 'Y' sound sacred; no sound is sacred; no characters are sacred.

The essence of all of these characters is that we want the right pronunciation and the right combination of consonants and vowels so that we can draw meaning from them. But we don't worship the name.

The sacred namers make a big deal out Myth #1, so I began with this little introduction:

Debunking the Myths of Sacred Namers #1 (truthofgod.org}

Myth #1: There was no letter "j" until about five hundred years ago

Without the symbol there is no sound. This is basically what they're arguing. They don't say I that way, but in reality the sound came before the symbol. Notice that there is a 'j' sound before the 500s. Is it the same symbol we have in English? No, it wasn't! The 'j' sound was transmitted at that time for hundreds of years with a capital 'I' at the beginning of a word. At the beginning of a word, if it was a consonant it preceded a vowel as in Jehovah, because there's a vowel sound there: 'e'; then you go into the Hebrew consonant 'h'; then the 'ovah.' So, you have three vowel sounds in there.

Sacred namers argue that because there was no symbol then Jehovah could not possibly been a legitimate term, I had to be invented because it was impossible, they argue, since the 'J' symbol wasn't used or invented until the 17th century—the late 1600s going into the 1700s. Well, that's a false argument; it's the sound that's important. Yes, there was a symbol for 'j' and it wasn't the same one that we have, it was a capital 'I' at the beginning of a word.

You can also turn this argument around and say—if you're arguing with a sacred namer—assuming you're right and there was no 'j' before the 1500s because there was no symbol, so therefore there wasn't any sound. 'All right, my friend, there was no lower case 'a' until the 1500s; it wasn't invented. The lower case 'a' in the form that we have wasn't invented until 1500s by the printers.

The lower case 'h' also wasn't there. The 'w' had only been in existence for a couple of hundred years as a symbol. The 'e' that we have it wasn't invented, it was very open, it wasn't closed. The 'a' was open and the 'e' was open, so what do you have left of Yahweh? 'Y'! that's all you have left.

So, you can take their argument, which is not a legitimate argument. But until they realize that and repent of that, you can throw the argument around and give them a headache. Do it as a Christian and in the right spirit.

From William Tyndale translation of the Pentateuch out of the Hebrew {see Debunking the Myths of Sacred Namers #1—Myth #1} It's hard to read, but we tried to make it as easy as possible without totally gutting the argument. Keep in mind that all of these are in defense of the name Jehovah. So yes, there was the sound 'j' long before Tyndale came along and transliterated in four places Jehovah as a single name in his 1530 translation. That takes part of the argument away.

Myth # 2: There is no "J" in Hebrew

They really 'make hay' with this one. The simple answer to this is yes, there is a 'j' in Hebrew! It was the little jod. It looks like a coma or accent mark; it's the smallest character in the Hebrew.

There was a 'j' sound in Hebrew in Sephardic, the Biblical Hebrew. Sephardic was the language from which the grammarists came, from which this material came from. This did not come out of the Yiddish community. The grammarists, the pronunciation is part of the grammar, did not come out of the Yiddish community.

You do find the 'y' sound among the Yiddish. Until the turn of the century the Sephardic pronunciation was used in the grammarists. I'm convinced that it was diabolical plot, a stronger word, by whomever the scholars were working with, because they changed the pronunciation of the phonic system of the Hebrew from Sephardic to Ashkenazi at the turn of the century.

There's no question about it, they changed the phonics system, and certainly before them came out with new grammars, with new lexicons, and made an effort at that point to turn to America to target Protestantism.

The whole effort—whether it's out of Judaism or Catholicism—is to discredit the English Bible. The Catholics have to destroy the English Bible and Protestantism before they can bring everybody back under the wings of the pope. This is part of what's been going on by the Jesuits and the rabbis who work together at various times, and have throughout history and still do in various ways, to destroy the veracity of the English Bible.

If we don't even know how to pronounce God's name, if Tyndale mistranslated in the transliteration of the name JHVH, what else is suspect? Well, a lot of other things are suspect from this point of view, and this was the beginning of higher criticism, where they came to a Scripture and criticized the King James and Tyndale and all the Bibles. They tried to undermine the Masoretic text in particular to bring in the rabbinic text if nothing else, which is quite corrupt. The rabbinic text has a totally different history from the 1500s down to the present as opposed to this.

Even though they both sprout from Judaism, they have different tracks going back into history, different uses. The Hasidim of Judaism didn't respect Scripture at all. They viewed their vision from their god and their manipulation of the Hebrew and their reasonings as much higher than God's revealed Word. They had no respect for God's Word, no respect at all! They don't care what God says in here, they want to do their own will!

So, they have tried to destroy the Hebrew, but God has preserved it. The Catholics also have tried to do so, because they both have sacred languages. The Hebrews, the Cabalists in particular, believe that the Hebrew is a sacred language, just as much as the Catholics believe that Latin is a sacred tongue. So, they both want the Hebrew spoken or the Latin spoken and that somehow gets you closer to God, because it's a 'sacred' language. Nonsense!

Part of that information in Myth 2, that there is a 'j' in Hebrew is written down for you. It's a little bit technical going into the phonics—the 'fricative' sounds. You can find these terms in any dictionary, and it's an interesting study to go to a dictionary and—the larger the dictionary the better, of course; an unabridged dictionary—you will find a section on the pronunciation of the English, Latin, Greek and any number of languages. English comes from those languages as well as Anglo-Saxon, the German.

You'll see from Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar—and I don't why they didn't edit this out:
The pronunciation of Hebrew by Christians follows the latter [Sephardic] (after the example of Reuchlin), in almost all cases" (Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar)

It does not follow the Yiddish at all.
Several years ago I was confronted, so therefore there was a confrontation, at the Feast of Tabernacles by a woman and she had just received a copy of The Two Jehovah's of the Psalms. She was very offended of my use of the term 'Jehovah.' I was accused by her of not knowing anything about German, because there's no 'j' sound in German, nor is there any 'j' sound in Yiddish.

There is a 'j' character, but it's pronounced 'ya.' It's soft, not hard, it's not a fricative. You form your tongue differently and with the roof of your mouth to pronounce it. The 'y' sound is sonant sound, totally different. You'll find that in the dictionaries, as well. It does make an interesting study to read that information and be consciously aware of where you're putting your tongue.

If you're swallowing it for guttural sounds, or if you're pushing it up at the back of your mouth for certain sounds, then clipping it up toward your teeth, or putting your teeth together with the tongue and your lips and getting labial sounds like 'va'; 'ja' is putting tongue up at the back of your teeth at the top of your mouth and release the air. In the middle of word is like in English—hallelujah—so it depends on where it is and how it's used in the word.

Myth # 3: The name Jehovah was invented

The name 'Jehovah' was not invented. In the last section shows that it was not. The argument here is that 'if Jehovah were invented by Galatinus in 1520 there should be some historical evidence of that.

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the fact that Galatinus invented Jehovah is not historical evidence. Quoting a Biblical scholar, whether he be Christian or otherwise—Catholic or Protestant—does not constitute historical information. It's just a man's opinion. Where did he or she get the opinion? So, in tracing it back through the Catholic Encyclopedia, one of the earlier versions, I did not find the Latinized version of the man's name, but the Italian version. That's why I couldn't find him for a long time.

I had no idea that in the 14-1600s that these men took two or three or four different names. They would take a Greek version, a Hebrew or Latin version of the names and times; a Latin version—the same person; German name, Italian name, you name it! They would have four or five different aliases for the same person.
Galatinus showed up in the Catholic Encyclopedia as Galatino, the Latin pronunciation. He happened to come from the Colonna family, an Italian family that was very rich and powerful. He was a respected scholar within the Catholic Church. He was called upon in 1716 to write some information in defense of Reuchlin. There was a great scandal at that time. There were those who wanted to burn all Jewish works, and the Talmud included. This was begun by a Jew who had converted to Christianity in Germany and set about to reform Judaism by destroying all their literature.

There were humanists, scholars that came out of the Renaissance who defended Judaism and their writings from the standpoint of just scholarly knowledge that we can glean from it. Not that they agreed with it, but there was value here so don't destroy it, keep it. Reuchlin was one of those German scholars, a humanist, who was Hebraist; in other words he understood the Hebrew very well and wrote the first grammar in the Christian world in Hebrew.

He argued in favor of saving the Talmud. This went before the new court of the Inquisition. Reuchlin was called before the court as well as the another fellow who was that went all the way to the pope. Galatino wrote as the pope's emissary in defense of Reuchlin. It's a long story but the whole question was dropped when Luther split away in 1517 from the Catholic Church and it became a moot issue and it all died down.

But within the works of Galatino are quotes using the form Jehovah, not Ya or Yahweh or anything else. The argument by the sacred namers is that he invented the name. But the name was known and used and accepted by German scholars who grew up speaking German. It was known, accepted and used by German Jews, who were scholars, and used by Sephardic scholars out of Spain and used by Italians out of Italy. The same form was also used by scholars in England.

So, the entire scholarly world at that time either had to be in the conspiracy though they were out to kill each other: Catholic, Protestant; the world was splitting up at that time. There was no possible way that Tyndale, who was running from the authorities of King Henry VIII—they eventually found him and burned him at the stake in 1536—had no time to send a message to the pontiff at that time in Rome, and find out what Galatino had invented. He had no contact with Galatino, with Reuchlin or Buechelin, great scholars at that time.

Tyndale was running for his life. The only contact he had at that time was with Luther for a short period of time and then he was on the run again. He was hidden by the Dutch underground for most it, out of which Erasmus, the great scholar out of Holland, who belonged to a Church of God group that home-schooled. Read his background and it's very much the experience that our people are having now. He came out of a very, very independent fellowship where he believed that we were to study and read the Bible—the Old and the New—and that's where he got into the Greek and the Hebrew. They believe that we were to grow and develop in the stature of Jesus Christ. You read their doctrines and it's almost like something out of our history.

Those people hid Tyndale, but eventually he was betrayed and burned at the stake. Not only all of the scholarship at that time—whether Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or otherwise—whatever their language was that they had grown up with, they also described the form of Jehovah going back into the 1100s in the 10th century. That's very significant, because the second paper goes back in history and brings the Masoretic side of it, and brings it up to the 10th century and makes that complete link, that the pronunciation was never lost.

So, for a hundred years before Jehovah was common. It couldn't have been invented by Galatinus then. I don't care who you are as a scholar, I don't care about your religious background, and you can have so many letters after your name that you have to have a truck to carry them, it doesn't matter.

The historical evidence is that the name was not invented by Galatinus or Galatino. Who said it was invented? That's the rest of the story and it brings us down from the time of Galatinus to the present and how this information got into the Jewish Encyclopedia, how it got into the Brown, Driver and Briggs. Two of them were American scholars outside of Princeton who were part of a conspiracy. Driver was an Oxford scholar. Oxford has long since been taken over by Jesuits.

I won't go through that history, but that's the essence of what the rest of the story is coming down to the present time. Basically everything is there. That's the first three myths in a nutshell.

(go to the next track)

The other side of the argument is that Jehovah is pointed with the vowel markings of Adonai. Both Jehovah and Adonai are legitimate Hebrew names for God; both are transliterations out of the Hebrew. But if you look in the Hebrew text, as you would see in here as four characters.

There's a consonant that's in the middle of JHVH that's pointed above and that gives the 'jo' sound: 'Jeho…' So the argument among sacred namers is that the vowel points—and they got this from scholarship—have been faked. So, this paper, part 2 of Debunking the Myths of Sacred Namers—Myth #4—is about the impossibility of the faking of those vowel points.

Myth # 4: Jehovah is Pointed with the Vowel Markings of Adonai

The history of the Masoretic text in summary form is the first part and then the technical data, getting into the nature of the linguistics of the language, showing it was absolutely impossible for any faking to have taken place.

To make a long history short, the Masorites began to point the consonants in the 5th century in the late 400s. So, they began their pointing very early. The Jerusalem Talmud had been completed by this time. The Babylonians Talmud was still being written in the academies of Babylon, not just as a city, but as in the country of Babylon. It wasn't completed until about 500. so, the Masorites began their pointing at the time that certain of their kinsmen were still writing as rabbis finishing up their mythology called the Talmud. Their commentary on what they felt about the Hebrew, about God, about the Old Testament, about their experience.

The Talmud was broken up in to various subjects. They have an entire book on women and women alone: what they should do, how they should think, dress, what happens during their monthly, every little detail. Others deal with the Holy Days, trying to remember what the temple service was like that was destroyed and commenting on it.

So, they have these various topics that they working with, arguing and debating, for hundreds of years and it was finally codified in the 500s. I had to ask myself: Why did the Masorites begin their work? To preserve an oral tradition that would have been lost otherwise or perverted!

Who was perverting their oral tradition? The average Jew who was scattered around the countryside who couldn't read the Hebrew! They spoke Greek and Aramaic, the official languages of the Parthians, Israelitish kin until they were broken up in 250 or so. The Parthians spoke Greek, and Aramaic secondarily. So did the Palestinians and everybody else from Britain all the way over to India, clear up into Russia and way down into Iran. Greek was the official language in which business and commerce was conducted, and all the way up into what is now Pakistan.

I ask myself why they began to preserve the pronunciation exactly as they possibly could. The true pronunciation had not been lost. It doesn't prove that it hasn't been lost, it just shows their intent and their work.

Secondly, the early school's work, even thought they tried to preserve the pronunciation, it was no sufficient. In other words, the philosophy behind and their understanding of the vowels, there was something about it that wasn't sufficient to properly retain an exact pronunciation.

Another school took over in the 700s and those Masorites were known later on as the Tiberian Masorites, the Tiberian school. That school was very active until the end of the 900s and they stopped about 980 when the last Ben Asher texts were produced and then taken up into Europe. Basically because of Richard III who mounted a crusade to the Middle East and that stopped the work of the Masorites they could no longer work in Palestine because they were working right there at Tiberius and had been for a good many centuries.

The work was done by the time the Catholics came in with the Crusades to regain the area. The Masorites were leaving or heading across North Africa or by boat through what is now Turkey or Italy and up into Spain. Their culture at that time had been, for centuries, Arabic. The Arabs captured Jerusalem in 666A.D.—an interesting date!

That whole culture in which these Masorites worked and traveled in, across North Africa all the way across that region on into Iran was Arabic. So, their early works were written in Arabic, not in Hebrew, even though they were working with the Hebrew. That's very good, because the Arabs were great grammarians, and the basis of our grammars today in any language comes from the early works of the Arabs out of Islam.So, it's quite a world that we live in.

It's really silly for anyone to think that there's a pure language; that Hebrew is a sacred language because it's pure and 'it's a language of angels and was spoken in the Garden of Eden and wasn't corrupted until Babylon came down to us…' to worship a language, to worship sound or worship a name opposed to worshipping God! It's really silly.

Although people believe it religiously and they may want to kill me for saying that, as a 'Christian' act, take out this infidel, run him through with a spear because he's condemning our god. All we're doing is defending ourselves, legitimately so! Whether we make fun of some of their arguments or not. They certainly don't hesitate to make fun of us! They're not bashful at all; they're very forward. In their writings they condemn and ridicule and belittle—whether it's a personal letter or something they're writing for an official publication.

This is going to come into your congregations, too, and you need some way to defend yourselves. Take this information and whittle it down to whatever argument… You can come up with whatever argument, and far better than mine.

Once I give you the ammunition you decide what size 'gun' you need. This is the powder, load your own ammo and blast away and defend God's people and our scattered brethren.

The history basically runs through the Masoretic experience for 500 years, from 500s to 1000. Then it's other than preservation it's copying it over and describing it over and over for centuries. Can you imagine being forced to travel around the world a various times because of war, famine, lack of support or whatever, because these men who did this had to have support. Some were rich Jewish capitalists or whatever who were sponsors for this.

It took ten years to produce another copy of the Word. These were not used in the synagogues. The synagogue material was quite different, treated differently by the rabbis who controlled the synagogues. They used the material in a much different way. This was textual transmission only. From this others would take information and pass it on. So, we can show that their effort was not only pure, but they were most diligent in their work.

As is typical of our fellowships over the last few years, there are times when brothers and sisters in God's Church get into heated arguments or debates, and sometimes there doesn't seem to be much Christianity there.

Well, in the history of the Masoretic text, all the grammars that was produced, most of this material would not have been preserved or would not have been developed had there not been this disagreements. Men got stirred up emotionally and they were supercharged and their gills got red and their hair started to stand up. They went at it verbally 'tooth and nail.' At some point actually where someone would, once in a while, be 'taken out' for the Lord. It was taken too far sometimes.

Out of the conflicts that we're having now, material is being produced, and it wouldn't have been produced otherwise. It's not easy; it's not how we picture Christianity. It doesn't seem like it's the way that it should be, but here we are. We have to live with it and do the best we can and be as Christian as we possibly can through this whole experience and go ahead and do the work that God has given us to do, however He moves us, in whatever capacity.

Hopefully, out of this experience today will come better material that than we've ever produced in the past, and I mean the Church of God experience over the last hundred years or so. That it will help defend what we believe. What God has revealed to us through those whom He called first, and passed it on to us.

I was called at age 15 as a hotheaded teenager, and when I began to read the material I was just on fire! I was in love! There was the history of the Old Testament, which day was the Sabbath, and the Holy Days. There was material from Dr. Hoeh and others and Herbert Armstrong. It just stood me up and made me take such notice. I would to take it to school and read it in study hall and pass the Plain Truth around. I was on fire!

Then I went to Pasadena, and a couple of years of working with some of the ministers sort of took the fire out of me and I had to regain it. I actually felt at one time that I was losing God's Spirit because the ministry was so… You don't want to work with ministers! Especially old ones. Sometimes they were terrible to be around. But that's history!

The last part of this study gets into the philology, which I think you will find the most interesting. That's just a big word that covers a lot of different disciplines among which would be etymology of a word, the origins of a word and how it's passed down. Also morphology, to morph, to change. The morphology of a word is to study how words change their form. Of course there's orthography—not a study of birds, but sounds very similar. Orthography is just a study of how words are spelled. So, we have the physical changes within the words: how they changed, pronounced, etc. etc. It's part of linguistic studies.

The last part covers some of the major elements of that effort. As you'll see we have no reason to doubt and every reason to believe that in the word Jehovah the vowel pointings are legitimate, we can also find out a little bit more of how the rabbis at the time of the Masorites began their work were actually trying to pervert Scripture.

In an exegesis of Exo. 3 you'll see what the Masorites were up against because remember that the Babylonian Talmud was still being written. The material from Exo. 3 is taken from the Babylonian Talmud and finally codified in the 500s. What the rabbis were doing was taking God's name, among other names—God's name in particular—that it wasn't pointed at that time, and were beginning to use it in different ways, or they were beginning to write it in different ways.

When they went to Exo. 3:15, some of the rabbis began to preach that God's name was to be hidden. Not to be a memorial forever, but to be hidden. The long and short of that argument is that when a unpointed language, with the vowel sounds not locked in, you change the vowels and the consonants, you change the meaning of a word:

If you change 'bit' to 'bet' you change the sound. Take any of our words and change the vowels around, and you'll have vastly different meanings. This is what the rabbis were doing with the Pharisees. Some of them were of the tribe of Judah, and some of the tribe of Levi. The Masorites were combating this. The evidence that they combated was doctrine, which by the way, was the beginning of the doctrine that scholars call perpetual reading.

This is the doctrine that was used by Gesenius in the late 1700s and early 1800s when he began to do his work on the Hebrew language, his grammars. He brought this out of Judaism and then wrote that the vowel markings under Jehovah were not he legitimate vowel markings, they were faked!

This is when that lie began. Gesenius picked up on it hundreds of years later as the great German Jewish scholar put that into his grammarists, it's been passed on ever since. It's mythology! There's no history behind it. It's false, a lie! There's nothing there to back that up. But like the king who had no clothes, we keeping marching down the street thinking we're in our Sabbath best, when you're naked and blind.

So, the evidence that the Masorites were not in agreement with the rabbis has been locked into the Masoretic text forever. If they had believed that rabbinic lie and agreed with those rabbis who were writing the Talmud, they would have changed the noun to verb and marked it as such. But it's used as a noun, whereas to be hidden is a verbal phrase.

So, I get into some of the Hebrew grammar to show that's an impossibility that they didn't believe that doctrine, they didn't mark it so, therefore, the vowel pointings are not faked. They marked it as they heard it. Whether they pronounced as Jehovah is irrelevant.

In English, going back to the 1500s when Tyndale did his translation and transliteration, Jehovah is legitimate, Yahweh is not. We've got all the evidence on our side. We have nothing to be bashful about; we don't have to be afraid of sacred namers no matter how much they jump and shout.

If they start going into exotic dance and tongues and shouting, pull an Elijah on them. 'Shout louder! Maybe your god isn't hearing you! Dance a little higher!' Whip your pocketknife out and say, 'Here, cut yourself and maybe the blood on the floor will make him appreciate you more. Go on, I'll bring you a better band.' None of that works! It's all vanity! They're not accomplishing anything except entertaining themselves and each other and wasting their time.

If they really become unlucky and do link up with a demon, and he comes down to visit them, then they'll wish they never gotten into this. Remember the story in Acts where the man fell on his sons and the demons beat him up. Unless you approach the demon just right way with the right words, with the right name, then maybe they'll give you favor; otherwise they'll beat you up. It's in all the magic literature; you've got to do it just right.

There's a story out of Bohemia in the 15-1600s where a rabbi was trying to conjure up something, and he set the ghetto on fire by calling down demons to set fire to their little village. We end showing that this comes put of paganism.

The whole idea of sacred names goes back to Nimrod, Semiramis, Horus, Isis and Osiris, the 'religious' names and it goes back to the Garden of Eden. Remember what Satan told Eve? God hasn't told you all the story! That's what we call Cabalism—take religions of all sorts—at which the center is sacred names. What they're getting into is very pagan, very wrong, very evil, every sinful and they're trying to bring this into the Church of God. We don't need to allow that and shall not!

I would like to present something else: When did the arguments first develop against the name Jehovah? We know that Tyndale transliterated into JHVH—Jehovah—in 1530, but the arguments begin about 30 years after this in Paris, France. A young man who taken his doctorate from an academy in Paris in 1567, a young Catholic scholar.

What had happened a few years before the Reformation 1517? Virtually all Europe and England had deserted Catholicism and broken away clear up into the Scandinavian countries way over into what we call Russia today. England had broken away because King Henry VIII wanted another wife.

By the way, for theological justification he used a little booklet that Tyndale wrote against hierarchy. That convinced Henry VIII that he had legal grounds to break away from the pope and start his own church, the Anglican Church, which he and all the rest of the monarchs are supposed to be the head.

So, why would he start this campaign against Jehovah? Because the Jesuits were trying to destroy the English translation out of the Hebrew! They say so in the introduction of the Douay-Rheims Bible version, part of which was published in 1682. the rest of the New Testament was published to 1618 or so.

The Jesuits were out to discredit the Hebrew text, underpinning the Rheims translation. They were out to destroy the scholarship, out to bring England back into the fold. If you don't believe so, just study the history of the Jesuit activity that was centered up at the Douay-Rheims area—the area of Flanders—where they were most active, right across from England.

Most all of them were English-speaking Jesuits, but when Catholics in England under Queen Elizabeth outlawed Catholicism, and you could be burned at the stake for practicing Catholicism in England, and many, many hundreds were, both Catholic and Protestants, because it went back and forth. Mary Queen of Scots was Catholic. Hundreds lost their lives in this battle over God's Word.

That's how important this Word is. Not only did the Jesuits try to do so intellectually—they invoked the help of the head of Judah, the Jewish rabbis, they asked scholars in that realm who wanted the English destroyed as well.

They supported Luther until the Reformation got out of hand, because the Jews felt—unlike the Dominicans—that the Catholic Church wasn't just being reformed, it was being destroyed. And to bring in their Messiah and their one-world rule—which they looked for from the time of the temple being destroyed—the new world order, as the rabbis called it. They've got that in their writings.

Christianity had to be destroyed! So now not only is Catholicism not destroyed, but there's a greater enemy called Protestantism. Catholics and Jews alike were horrified at this prospect, and joined hands—Jesuits and rabbis—at whatever level to destroy the Protestant Bible: The King James Version in particular!

Now something else happened, but the English colonies opened up from 1620 and the Bible, such as this, was brought over by the hundreds of thousands to a new land where they had no control at all. They had no Catholic schools here until the Sisters of St. Mary showed up at the South Bend of the St. Joseph River and established Notre Dame in 1837. St. Mary's is the girls school. That was the beginning of their effort to bring in schools by which they could train Jesuits and bring down Protestantism to bring them back into the fold.

Not only did they work on the intellectual side, but the Jesuits controlled and coordinated the work of Philip II… By the way, all the work at that time in the area of Flanders, the Douay-Rheims area was in Spanish Netherlands. They had been under Spain's control for a long time and remained so for a long time after this. They also coordinated the building of the Armada. So, there was a two-prong effort to bring down Protestantism, the hard core of which was England. This was their greatest worry because they were making inroads into other parts, France in particular, and other parts of Europe already.

Germany was a pushover compared to England. England was on fire for God, and Tyndale's prayer was answered. Not only was the king's eyes opened, but all England and it spread around the world. They built the Armada against England and tried to bring her back militarily. When the Armada successfully brought England back into the Catholic fold then they would have a Bible to replace it, and they would add to discredit the English Bible as well.

That never worked, but for centuries they have been doing everything they can to invent lies and mythologies into works that are just passed along with Catholic, Protestant and Jewish works, like the Jewish Encyclopedia. This material was invented without any good scholarship behind it. It just came from lies and is now picked up by our people who go to commentaries and encyclopedias or by people who have never been in our fellowships. They form groups—whether they're ex-WCG, ex-CGI, ex-UCG, Global/Living whatever—that are sacred names oriented.

The sacred names movement is part of the whole effort to discredit and bring down the Truth of God's Word. So, sacred namers inadvertently are helping the Jesuits to bring down true Christianity. They're doing their work for them. They're also doing Satan's work by another means, they are living examples of modern Gnostics. They place their revelations over God's Word.

How many times in the last few years have you talked to a brother or sister and tried to reason with this person whom you may have known for years? You may have fellowshipped with them for a long, long time and all of a sudden they've got this new emotion, this new insight and you cannot reason with them. You can't go into Scripture and make any sense with them. They have a 'greater revelation.' That is Gnosticism!

They will tell you—they have written me and told me that I was vain for getting into the grammar, the Hebrew and looking at the Greek. That Fred and I are vain. That 'your sermons are long, dull and too technical.' That we get into the grammar and all this stuff, 'we don't need that; we have direct contact with God. God loves us and we love God, we don't need scholarship. We don't need teachers; all of us are teachers.'

And they will go off and live 'happily ever after' in this 'la la land' called 'Christian fellowship.' Well, the 'la la land' leads further and further into paganism to the point where they begin to speak in tongues. I mentioned that in a sermon some years ago that it was sun-worship in the modern Church of God. You get into speaking in tongues, get into sacred names, even into the dress, the dance and into all this stuff that if all of a sudden the Gnostics could be resurrected in plunked down into services and they would feel right at home.

The ancient Mithraic worshippers would be just taken from their liturgy in the first and second century Rome and plunked down wherever this is happening in any given Sabbath, they would be right at home, because it's the same worship of the 'god of this world.' Not our God who is coming to take over this world in a few years and free mankind from the tyranny of Satan the devil.

How do we get from the 1560s to the end, the present time? It ties in with this and there are still a lot of pieces missing. The Jesuit work that was begun by Jobert was carried on by other scholars who were quoted, who as Jesuits—English or otherwise—went back into England and took over Oxford. This is a real thumbnail sketch, but will give you something to look forward to when you read the material online (truthofgod.org.

Oxford was basically taken over a hundred years ago, and for a hundred years Oxford has not been Anglican at all. That's not know to most of the western world. In 1830 a movement was begun by Cardinal Newman, an Oxford scholar who was actually Catholic in disguise—a Jesuit—who began what is called the Oxford Movement. Out of the Oxford Movement came the work of Westcott and Hort who were mystics and tied up with Madame Blavatsky.

Newman links all of these scholars up and shows that they're part of a plot. He has not axe to grind; he's not a Sabbath-keeper, he's just tracing paganism in the western world and how it got into Christianity.

These are the scholars who wrote the material to discredit the New Testament. There's an effort going to discredit the New Testament Greek and the Old Testament Hebrew. The greatest work they've been able to do so far is to bring in new translations and call them the New King James. There's quite a bit in there that probably should be avoided, but it's truly not a 'new' King James. It's not just modernizing of the language of the King James. There have been some changes. The RSV, the NIV, etc.—all those different translations—is part of the effort to discredit the King James English, the Truth that's being taught here that we need to preserve.

I think you can see from the brief history that I've given you that a lot of people spent a lot of time over the past few centuries to bring this Word of God down to us. A lot of sacrifice has been made to give us the Truth. God help us if we just 'willy-nilly' throw it away.

God preserved it! God's Word will always be around, even if it just gets down to a few copies; He's not going to let it fall to the earth and not be here.

In history, as soon as it would look that way then it would spread out like some kind of virus throughout the countryside. The Internet has done that now. There's a very bad side of the Internet, but there's also a very good side of the Internet. Information is being spread around now, and people are getting in contact with each other and keeping things going.

What we see now that's discouraging, is that the scattering of the brethren is going to end up for the good of God's people and for His Body. We're being purged. God's testing and trying us! We're all to stand up on our feet and answer the call wherever we are, whomever we know, wherever we find ourselves in this. Ask for God's strength and His help and His wisdom to answer according to His will, to do His will.

Don't do as I did. I was so tired and sick of Christmas, I was in a store to pick up some water and milk and there were some kids rearranging the oranges and he whipped around and took my hand and said, 'Merry Christmas.' I said, 'I wish I could tell you the same, but I can't. Your phony Christmas is wrong and I wish you would stop all this nonsense.' It just sort of blurted out!

Pray that you have wisdom. Maybe that was the right thing to do, I don't know. I know 'Santa' didn't like me. These things will happen to you and you'll go home and pray and ask God if you did the right thing. Maybe you did; maybe you didn't, but at that time it's too late anyway.

Pray for each other that all of us will have the wisdom and the courage for the sake of God's people and the spreading of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of Christ that's being lost to this world and being squished back down to little bitty flames here and there called Christians in the Body of Christ. Pray that we can go forward in greater strength and positiveness and help, and that we can get our act together so God can bring new people into our fellowships. They're out there! As our Lord said, 'The harvest is great!' It's still great!

Scriptures referenced, not quoted:

  • Romans 1
  • Exodus 12
  • Numbers 10
  • Exodus 3:15

Also referenced:

CF: bo
Transcribed: 9/17/17

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