Fred Butler: Royal Deceptions — Revisiting King James Onlyism

The first time I ever had Fred on the show was seven years ago, in May of 2014, to discuss King James Onlyism. Since then, Fred has updated his writing on the subject and put it into book form. He recently released Royal Deceptions: Exposing the KING JAMES ONLY Conspiracies Against God's Word. He returns for this episode to revisit the subject, and get into some of the particulars of the book.

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Outline of the Discussion

Since our first episode on KJVO, back in 2014, Fred has expanded his blog writings on the subject and put them in book form.
In Episode 73, Fred shared quite extensively how he got into KJV Only, and how he came out of it.
It was problems with Gail Riplinger's teachings that started Fred on the road out of KJV Only. The rejection of Calvinistic soteriology was another big issue for Fred.
The six main arguments given by King James Onlyists that Fred interacts with in his book are:
1. The Exclusivity Argument
2. The Promise Argument
3. The Textural Argument
4. The Purity Argument
5. The Scholarship Argument
6. The Historical Argument
Fred's favorite argument to interact with is the Textural Argument. It's the longest chapter of his book.
An excursus to this is the argument that somewhere in Church History, heretics crept in and corrupted our Bible.
A King James Onlyist makes arguments for modern translations akin to the New World Translation (Jehovah's Witnesses,) seemingly assuming that most Christians would be aware of the problems with the NWT, but not “heretical” teachings snuck into other translations.
Fred explains that Bibles in countries where the Muslims took over, in many cases, haven't been used in centuries because the Muslims took them out of circulation. Christians hid their Bibles in those countries in order to preserve them, not because they contained heretical teaching.
Dismissing the textural transmission work of an entire group of people simply because of their doctrinal issues (such as Roman Catholics) would be to commit the simple logical fallacy of guilt by association. A Roman Catholic may hold to doctrinal views that we, as protestants, disagree with, but he's also very likely to be faithful in his work of copying the Biblical text.
The manuscripts in question don't delete anything from the original. In fact, there is typically more text in the copies than in the originals. If there were any question about an original, the best attempt at a faithful copy was made, and a note was made in the margins, often preserving both copies of two texts that disagreed with each other.
Modern methods of investigation of texts are finding that what we have in our Bibles is faithful to the original.
The Church recognized the inspiration of Scripture immediately. The Canon was never voted on by Church Councils as certain sects would claim. You can see yourself by looking up non-canonical writings. They don't read like the Scriptures we know and revere.
The Exclusivity Argument says that only the King James Version is the Word of God. This is not speaking only of English translations. They believe translations in other languages are not faithful either.
The translators are regarded as near-apostles.
One subset of King James Only that is more Reformed in its' views perceives the KJV as being the closest to the Reformation era.
There were political reasons for King James to commission the Authorized version.
Despite rejecting the King James version as the ONLY translation that is faithful to the original, Fred has great love and respect for the KJV.
Fred discusses an Appendix to the book responding to Chris Pinto's DVD claiming that the oldest complete manuscript we have of the New Testament (the Sinaiaticus) is a forgery. Fred shares the story behind the manuscript and the claims against it.