Battle of the Bibles - Present Truth

various Protestant denominations in both Old and New Worlds were convinced by the
signs given in Matthew 24 and other parts of the Bible, that Christ's promised return was
close at hand. Among such people were members of the Methodist and Baptist
Churches who decided that they should lay aside all preconceived beliefs and creeds
and turn prayerfully to a thorough study of the Bible and the Bible only.
Naturally, the Bible which they studied was the Protestant King James Version.
Having determined to follow only those things revealed in God's Word and to let the
Bible be its own interpreter, they soon found themselves in a dilemma. For one thing,
they found that the "law of the LORD is perfect" (Psalm 19:7), and that Christ has said
that he had not come to destroy the law but to fulfil it and that it would remain as long as
heaven and earth should last (Matthew 5:17, 18). Why had they then, along with other
Christian churches, ignored one of God's Commandments - the fourth - by keeping holy
the first day of the week instead of the seventh? (Exodus 20:8-12). Why had Jesus
closed His Revelation to John with the words:
"Blessed are they that do His commandments, that they might have right to the
tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city"? (Revelation 22:14).
As these inquiring people continued in prayer and study, they were greatly
impressed by the message of the three angels found in Revelation 14:6-11, followed by
verse twelve which says:
"Here is the patience of the saints; here are they that keep the commandments of
God and the faith of Jesus".
In the first angel's message (Verses six and seven), they came to see that at the
time of the end "the everlasting gospel" was to include a call to prepare the world for
Christ's imminent second advent and its attendant judgment. This was to be
accomplished by emphasising the importance of returning to the true way of worshipping
the Creator by keeping holy the day on which God rested from His creative work - the
seventh day of the fourth Commandment.
In keeping with their earlier resolve to follow the Bible only, they decided to keep
holy the Biblical day of rest (Saturday) and eventually, in the year 1860 the name
Seventh-day Adventist was formally adopted, the name being expressive of their beliefs.
How then, some seventy years later, could the leaders of the Seventh-day Adventist
Church reject the work of B. G. Wilkinson, one of their own educationalists who upheld
the purity of the very Bible from which SDA pioneers had discerned their beliefs? In fact,
his church had already smeared the integrity of the King James Version, at least within
its own theological curricula.
In 1926, the SDA's Berrien Springs College Press published a booklet,
"Doctrines for use in Seventh-day Adventist Colleges", in which it claimed the American
Revised Version to be "more accurate, more scholarly, more valuable" than the
Authorised Bible (p 59).
The author has had the opportunity of examining the SDA General Conference's
review of Wilkinson's book. He has to agree with Wilkinson that it is more of an attack
than a review, for his unnamed reviewers entirely ignored the historical aspect which
involved the papal led intrigue, conceived at the Council of Trent, to replace the
Protestant Bible with Rome's counterfeit, the 1881 Revised Version.
So patently devoid of common logic and scholarship is this so-called "Review",
that the main reason for rejecting Wilkinson's book is adequately summed up by the fear
expressed therein by the reviewers themselves:
"We would become the laughing stock of the reverent Christian scholarship of the
world" ("Committees Review", Section I p 39).
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