Sluice Box Adventures
Believing Bible Study in the 21st century
End Of Age Messages
Not surprisingly, gnat strainers try to take attention away from their sin by attacking Matthew 23:24.
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Straining At Gnats
Daryl R. Coats
"Looking for that blessed hope," (Titus 2:11-14)
Not surprisingly, gnat strainers try to take attention away from their sin by attacking Matthew 23:24. Typical of such attacks is this one: "There were printing errors [in the first edition of the Authorized Version], most of which were removed. One printing error remains to this day and confuses the meaning of Matthew 23:24. ‘Stain at a gnat’ should have been ‘strain out a gnat,’ i.e., filter out."
How the supposed "numerous revisions" of the AV from 1611 to 1769 managed to overlook this one "printing error" is a mystery—unless it is not a printing error and no one regarded it as one until witless "Bible scholars" came along and parroted claims they heard from others but didn’t investigate themselves.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "strain at" is not a printing error at all but rather an idiomatic English expression: "It has been asserted that ‘straine at’ in the Bible of 1611 is a misprint for ‘straine out,’ the rendering of the earlier versions. But the quotations [from] 1583 and 1594 show that the translators of 1611 simply adopted a rendering that had already obtained currency. It was not a mistranslation, the meaning intended being, ‘which strain at the [liquid] if they find a gnat in it.’"
Overlooking the irony that today’s critics, in this instance, prefer an "archaic reading" to a modern reading that had "already gained currency" by 1611, I point out that the expression "strain at" appeared in print thirty-eight years before 1611 (Green’s Mamillia, 1583), and that even Shakespeare used it in Troilus and Cressida (Act III, scene iii, line 112) in 1609, two years before the first published edition of the AV.
It’s too bad that the critics of the AV aren’t as adept in their own language as they claim to be in Greek, nor as skilled in the use of a dictionary as they claim to be in the use of a lexicon. The Lord Jesus Christ described them perfectly as "hypocrites" and "blind guides, which strain at a gnat and swallow a camel" (Matthew 23:23-24).
Don’t swallow the camels they dish out as "theological truths"!
The LORD'S Messenger
A Message To The People
“Then spake Haggai the LORD'S messenger in the LORD'S message unto the people, saying, I am with you, saith the LORD.” Haggai 1:13