Is It Just to Slander Westcott & Hort?

From Peter Montoro (2/10/24):

“In the interest of avoiding the very slander we talked about, I need to issue a correction of one of my statements. In the video at 14:41, I said that Gail Riplinger is someone ‘who knows better, who has been called out, and who has publicly said she doesn’t care.’ Though I remembered at the time having read an article (possibly from David Cloud’s CD-ROM database of back issues of O Timothy?) that quoted her as saying something along these lines, when I went to look for it, I couldn’t find it. Especially given the topic, I shouldn’t have made such a strong statement without verifying it first. This was an error on my part for which I would like to apologize and for which I take full responsibility. I would also like to thank the commenter who pointed this out.”

From Mark Ward (2/10/24):

Peter has clearly acknowledged that he misspoke, but I want to show that he was still awfully close to being right. What he should have said is that Riplinger is someone “who knows better, who has been publicly called out, and who has kept repeating statements she had to know were false.”

One concrete example of this is her conflation of B.F. Westcott with the much younger mortician W.W. Westcott, who was indeed a spiritualist. In the original edition of New Age Bible Versions from 1993, Riplinger identifies the two, though she admits that this is a “speculation” (page 677). Yet though she has been repeatedly corrected on this matter, the latest edition of the book (2018) continues to speak of Westcott in terms that are only correct if the two are indeed the same person.

Riplinger wrote:

“New versions (and the ‘new’ church they are producing) owe their occult bend [sic] to their underlying Greek text, a novelty produced in the 1870’s by B.F. Westcott, a London Spiritualist. Secular historians and numerous occult books see him as ‘the Father’ of the current channeling phenomenon, a major source of the ‘doctrines of devils’ driving the New Age movement.”

There is simply no reasonable way in which Christian scholar B.F. Westcott, whatever his flaws, can be described in this way. This is a clear description of the other Westcott.

James White revealed this error many years ago here:

Dan Wallace reveals this error starting at minute 10 in this video, which has been freely available online for multiple years:

KJV defender Bryan Ross discusses the reliability of Riplinger’s charges more generally here:

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