EDITORIAL

 

          First of all, a reminder.  Subscriptions to The Biblical Astronomer expire with this issue for most readers.  Be sure to renew now, before you forget. 

          Second, we have received this year a couple of books and a CD-ROM set which we think worthy of your attention.  Below is a brief review of each.

 

Polyscience and Christianity by Russel Moe, 508 Forest Blvd., Wildwood, FL 34785; 8.5 by 11 inch format, 260 pages, with bibliography, footnotes, and illustrations. $19 postpaid US.  From the announcement:

          “The book addresses a neglected perspective on the conflict between reason and faith.  Disputes over Creation vs. Evolution or Intelligent Design are certainly involved.

          “This perspective reveals wrong ideas latent in the fabric of mathematics and astronomy, which remain integral to the framework of reason in our time.  Such a blemish on reason surprises most people, who may not be aware that many present-day “facts” are built on layers of assumptions, especially “facts” requiring a large expenditure of reasoning to comprehend.  The book shows that this ancient blemish still tarnishes science, scholarship in general, and Christian faith.

          “Flooded with facts, yet suspicious of their objectivity, cultured people secretly worry that they substitute a wordy subjectivity for science and Biblical faith.  Polyscience and Christianity affirms their worries, yet provides the conceptual landscape of a chastened science, which prunes and purifies faith and reason.

          “A retired world traveler, the author writes from a background of extensive reading in the history of science and mathematics, the philosophy of science, the social “sciences,: history and apologetics of the early Church, history and ideology of Western civilization, and related topics.”

 

In Awe of thy Word by G. A. Riplinger, AV Publications, Box 280, Ararat, VA 24053.  1200 pages, hardback, $24.29 postpaid US.  Orders can also be placed on the web at www.avpublications.com.

          The book is two books in one, the first dealing with the mystery of the King James Bible and the second with its history.  The first focuses on what translators and past generations knew --- exactly how to find the meaning of each Bible word, inside the Bible itself.  The second gives the documented history of the words of the Holy Bible.

          The mystery section deals with topics that enable the reader to understand what translators, such as Erasmus and Coverdale, meant when they spoke of the vernacular Bible’s “holy letters” and “syllables.”  Riplinger shows how these holy letters and syllables work as God-set alphabet building blocks to build a word’s meaning and automatically define words for faithful readers of the King James Bible—which alone brings forward the fountainhead of letter meanings discovered by computational linguists from the world’s leading universities.  Find out how only the King James Bible teaches and comforts through its “miraculous” mathematically ordered sounds.  Meet the KJV’s built-in English teacher, ministering to children and over a billion people around the globe.  Finally, see that only the KJV matches the pure scriptures preserved “to all generations” and “to all nations,” including the Greek, Hebrew, Old Italia, Italian, Dutch, German, French, Spanish and others.

          The historical part derives from a word-for-word and letter-by-letter analysis of a vault of ancient, rare and valuable Bibles.  Ten thousand hours of collation rescued echoes from these documents almost dissolved by time.  It shows the unbroken preservation of the pure Holy Scriptures, from the first century to today’s beloved King James Bible.  “Watch the English language and its Holy Bible unfold before your very eyes,” says the advertisement.  This is done by showing in red, the letters and sounds which bind the words of each successive Bible from the Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, pre-Wycliffe, Tyndale, Coverdale, Great, Geneva, and Bishops’ to the King James Bible.  The book also presents word-for-word collations, aided by the KJV translators’ newly discovered notes, revealing exactly how the KJV translators polished the sword of the Spirit.  The book lives up to its hype. 

 

In Awe of thy Word CD, also available from AV Publications, costs $39.95 postpaid in the U.S.  It, is a 3 CD set with a searchable version of the above book plus the Nuremberg Polyglot of A.D. 1599, a parallel Bible in Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, Danish, German, English, Polish, and Bohemian. 

          As if that were not enough, the set also includes both volumes of the Erasmus commentary on the New Testament, Tome of he Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the New Testament, with parallel text from the Great Bible of 1540.  There is also a copy of the King James Bible searchable by letter group (see above), word, or phrase.  Finally, there is a copy of The Acts and Monuments by John Fox, all eight volumes—nearly 6,000 pages—of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.  Originally written in 1563, this is from the 1837-49 printing.