A consistent application of Gail Riplinger’s very broad-sweeping, generalized accusation that all lexicons and all Hebrew and Greek study tools “are corrupt” would also seem to include or apply to the actual Hebrew and Greek lexicons used by the KJV translators (Hazardous Materials, pp. 29, 37, 38). Could the Church of England translators of the KJV have been blinded by “Catholic-touched Latin-Greek lexicons” (p. 216)?
It is known that the Hebrew-Latin lexicons and Greek-Latin lexicons available to and used by the KJV translators sometimes or even often had Latin definitions for Hebrew words or for Greek words that were borrowed from the Latin Vulgate of Jerome, which would be classified a corrupt translation according to typical KJV-only reasoning or according to the KJV-only two-streams-of-Bibles argument. Other Latin definitions in those Hebrew-Latin and Greek-Latin lexicons would have likely come from commentaries by unsaved Jews and from commentaries by Roman Catholic church fathers. In 1847, The Churchman’s Monthly Review maintained that “the Thesauraus of Santes Pagninus [1470-1541] was one of the earliest Hebrew Latin lexicons” (p. 129). This source noted that Pagninus was “a Jesuit” and that his lexicon “contains the Latin Vulgate translation of every word in the Hebrew Bible” (Ibid.). It also indicated that this lexicon by Pagninus was used by Protestants as well as by Roman Catholics. Bishop Grindal is said to have had a copy of an edition of the Lexicon of Pagninus printed in 1577 that he left to the library at Queen’s College at Oxford. David Norton observed that KJV translator Edward Lively had a copy of “Pagninus’s Thesaurus Lingue Sanctae” (KJB: Short History, p. 69). Jones, Moore, and Reid noted that KJV translator “Henry Savile himself gave to the library a copy of Pagninus’s Thesaurus Linguae Sanctae” (Moore, Manifold Greatness, p. 96). The author of Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation asserted that Reuchlin in his Hebrew-Latin dictionary or lexicon “gives the equivalent Latin expression, generally more than one, for every Hebrew word and then adduces examples for each meaning. These examples are naturally taken from the Old Testament; they are not quoted in Hebrew but in the Latin of the Vulgate” (pp. 76-77). David H. Price maintained that Johannes Reuchlin’s Hebrew-Latin lexicon in his Rudiments of Hebrew “rejected Jerome’s text in several hundred places” (Johannes Reuchlin, p. 61), which would suggest that it gave Jerome’s Latin renderings as definitions of Hebrew words in the thousands of other cases. R. Cunningham Didham contended that the “Hebrew lexicons of those days rather perpetuated the errors of the Vulgate than the sense of the Hebrew” (New Translation of the Psalms, p. 7). Didham added: “Even the Lexicon of the celebrated Sebastian Munster was no more than that, as Wolf assures us, the Latin words of the Vulgate” (Ibid.). Herbert Marsh noted: “When Sebastian Munster composed his Dictionarium Hebraicum, he added to each Hebrew word the sense in Latin. And whence did he derive those Latin senses? From the Vulgate” (Lectures, p. 521). Munster also compiled a Latin-Greek-Hebrew dictionary. Henry Kiddle and Alexander Schem maintained that until the 1800’s “the Greek language was studied through the medium of the Latin, and there were no Greek-English, but only Greek-Latin lexicons” (Cyclopaedia, p. 224). Paul Botley wrote: “Many scholars learnt Greek through the Vulgate, and compiled their elementary Greek-Latin lexica from a collation of the Vulgate Bible with its Greek equivalents. Consequently, the equations of the Vulgate often formed the basis of the lexica” (Latin Translation in the Renaissance, p. 96). Gail Riplinger admitted: “The few lexicons the KJB translators did use were generally in Latin, not English” (Hazardous Materials, p. 1187).
Would a consistent, just application of the reasoning in Riplinger’s book suggest that the KJV translators were wrong to use any lexicons that borrowed any definitions from a Bible translation [the Latin Vulgate of Jerome] placed on the KJV-only view’s line of corrupt Bibles and any from secular pagan authors, unbelieving Jews, or Roman Catholic Church fathers? Is Riplinger in effect implying that use of any lexicon with definitions from a corrupt translation such as the Roman Catholic Latin Vulgate of Jerome would have contaminated the KJV? Would tracing any KJV readings or renderings back to the Latin Vulgate by means of Hebrew-Latin or Greek-Latin lexicons prove them to be correct or incorrect?
Riplinger’s apparent use of fallacies to attempt to smear all lexicons and modern translations is misleading and wrong, and a consistent application of her inconsistent, faulty reasoning would even condemn the actual lexicons and original language texts used by the early English translators including the KJV translators.
Along with indirect influence on the KJV through use of Hebrew-Latin and Greek-Latin lexicons, an edition of the Latin Vulgate of Jerome was one of the varying sources directly consulted by the KJV translators. In addition, the 1582 Rheims New Testament translated from an edition of the Latin Vulgate of Jerome was also consulted and used in the making of the KJV.
