That is the logical fallacy of circular reasoning. You have just assumed your conclusion – not provided evidence. While pointing out your fallacies can be sporting for a time, it does grow old. Again, the KJV is based upon manuscripts of the Byzantine tradtion produced by the imperial church at Constantinople. That’s why it’s called Byzantine. You cannot have it both ways. As I said many comments ago, I will listen to any defense of that manuscript tradition but the fact is that the manuscripts are post-Constantinian and produced by the imperial church. If you have some startling evidence of their earlier existence, I am sure there are papyrologists somewhere willing to take a look at your find. But let’s not claim its origin as something it is not.

If you were claiming that the manuscripts used in the KJV were based upon manuscripts that were pushed aside while different ones were substituted, then you might have a case for priority. But just the opposite is the case. The Byzantine tradition evolved in the context of the imperial church at Constantinople as the Bible was copied by both hired scribes and then monks. The variations contained are usually are largely the harmonization of parallel accounts in the synoptics. There are no doctrines derviable from one tradition and not the other. Thus, there really is no major doctrinal concern. The only reason for newer translations is to have a text that conforms closest to the originals and the earliest texts are from other manuscript traditions. The Byzantine represent a far more polished form that is the product of centuries of development.

Oh yes, the 50 million figure. Interesting considering how loosely it is cited without any supporting evidence. It began to be thrown about in the post-Reformation period without any evidence of any sort (of course, Catholic sources had their own equally virulent and unsupported claims going the other direction). If you check around, you will find that neo-pagans also claim the Catholic Church killed 50 million witches. Given the population of Europe in the medieval period, the high natural mortality rates, and the scourge of the Black Death, all this kiling must have eliminated the population….oh, but it didn’t. Reality dioesn’t quite match the myth.

The text of the apostles. Interesting that you can’t see this. To you God’s Word is what it is based on the authority of man, preserved in ‘text traditions’ of man.

As for remnant, the context is the tyranny the Beast of Rome was imposing on ‘Christendom’. And, again: 50 million Bible-believers martyred by the filthy satanic Beast church of Rome. To know God’s preserved Word look to the Bible those Martyred were holding, and defending, and dying for.

May you one day find the Holy Spirit residing in your heart. If that happens: defend God’s Word. The devil is very active and never-tiring in attacking it. But God has the victory. Don’t get stuck on the wrong side forever, pilgrim.

I see you still have no further evidence. You do realize ad hominem argumentation is the sure sign of someone without a leg to stand upon. The funny one is that I am accused of being both a James White devotee (I am not and have criticized him as much as I have praised him) and also Catholic (also not true) – an odd combo considering White is a critic of Catholicism. Then again, self-consistency seems not to be a major concern of yours.

It is rather typical how you can simply dismiss anything written by any opponent of yours (whether Protestant or Catholic) by a mere insult. Is the source Catholic? Obviously a ruse of the Beast. Is the source Protestant? Must be some “higher critic” who undermines the Word of God. Yet you cannot refute anything offered. Every scholarly work on the subject comes to the same conclusion. The only ones who disagree are a small cadre of people clinging to dog-eared copies of Hislop and Carroll that have no supporting evidence.

You claim your evidence is the Holy Spirit. Yet the Holy Spirit does not call one to bear false witness. You merely cite it to use as a club because you have set yourself up as your own standard. Nice work if you can get it.

Furthermore, you still have avoided the question of how you can possibly consider the textual tradition of the imperial church at Constantinople to be that of some underground remnant. Why not take the library card you allegedly possess and work on resolving that for awhile.

Just check any library at a local universtiy for some source material on the Waldensians and you will find what I have above. You might also check the book “Baptist Successionism” by James McGoldrick reviewed at this site. Next time try real evidence rather than mere name calling.

Not to mention desperately googling Vaudois and eating Roman Catholic reference works (my goodness, what a scholar this CT boy is)…

By the way, don’t call yourself a Christian until you can discern the Beast from Bible-believers. The blood of Christian martyrs is not a small thing to the King of those martyrs.

But the group is of medieval origin and its early tenets were basically identical with Rome. For example, an early confession of the group was as follows:

“”In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and of the Blessed and Ever-Virgin Mary. Be it noted by all the faithful that I, Valdesius, and all my brethren, standing before the Holy Gospels, do declare that we believe with all our hearts, having been grasped by faith, that we profess openly that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three Persons, one God….

We firmly believe and explicitly declare that the incarnation of the Divinity did not take place in the Father and the Holy Spirit, but solely in the Son, so that he who was the divine Son of God the Father was also true man from his Mother.

We believe one Church, Catholic, Holy, Apostolic and Immaculate, apart from which no one can be saved, and in the sacraments therein administered through the invisible and incomprehensible power of the Holy Spirit, sacraments which may be rightly administered by a sinful priest….

We firmly believe in the judgment to come and in the fact that each man will receive reward or punishment according to what he has done in this flesh. We do not doubt the fact that alms, sacrifice, and other charitable acts are able to be of assistance to those who die.

And since, according to the Apostle James, faith without works is dead, we have renounced this world and have distributed to the poor all that we possess, according to the will of God, and we have decided that we ourselves should be poor in such a way as not to be careful for the morrow, and to accept from no one gold, silver, or anything else, with the exception of raiment and daily food. We have set before ourselves the objective of fulfilling the Gospel counsels as precepts.

We believe that anyone in this age who keeps to a proper life, giving alms and doing other good works from his own possessions and observing the precepts from the Lord, can be saved.

We make this declaration in order that if anyone should come to you affirming that he is one of us, you may know for certain that he is not one of us if he does not profess this same faith.”

In an extant letter between factions of the group, they write:

“To the question they [the Poor of Lyons] raised concerning baptism, we replied as follows : We affirm that no one can be saved who refuses the material water of baptism and that unbaptized infants are not saved. This we called on them to believe and profess….

One point of difference between us and the companions of Valdes…concerned the breaking or sacrifice of the bread. As we have verified, their judgment differs from ours…

In the first place, some of the companions of Valdes maintain that the substance of the bread and wine is transformed into the body and blood of Christ by the Word of God, adding that the power comes not from men but from God.

To this we objected, saying that, if the bread and wine are transubstantiated…by the mere mention of the Word of God, it follows that any person, Jew or pagan, could pronounce the Word of God on the bread and wine, and, according to this opinion, it would be transformed into the body and blood of Christ.

This is absolutely impious and cannot be sustained by any valid authority and is unreasonable….They have acknowledged that the sacrament cannot be performed by women or laymen, but only by the priest. They also said that no one, good or bad, but only He who is God and man, that is, Christ, can transubstantiate the bread and wine into the body and blood.”

Does this sound like your remnant church? I didn’t think so. But still, what has any of this to do with the KJV? The Waldensians used vernacular translations by Catholic priests of the Latin Vulgate. They had nothing to do with Byzantine manuscripts in Greek and nothing to do with the TR.

You seem to want to cling to this “remnant church” idea but still cannot answer why you are then using the New Testament not of an underground remnant but of the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople. What has the Byzantine manuscripts to do with some underground church when in fact this family of manuscripts was very much above ground. If anything, you should be arguing for the Alexandrian family since they are the ones that was phased out by the imperial church. Your position is riddled with endless contradictions.

>What groups constitued this underground church and why have we no evidence of them?

Again, what groups did the Roman Beast massacre? You don’t consider them to be real apparently. The Vaudois would be a good place for you to start.

Again…the Textus Receptus is based upon a collation of manuscripts of the Byzantine tradition available in the Western Church around the time of the Reformation by the Catholic monk Erasmus. There was no such thing before then. Erasmus had about a half-dozen texts available to him. The translators of the KJV supplemented this with other English and Latin translations.

You keep bringing up some alleged “remnant” church but so far have failed to supply one smidgen of evidence of them. Even the most ardent backers of the KJV agree the manuscripts used are from the Byzantine family. That means it was produced by the church at Constantinople – the imperial capital. More importantly, the particular manucripts used were largely those of the Byzantine family that had been preserved in Western Europe by the Roman Church.

Again I ask you what is your evidence? People who back this bizzare conspiracy theory usually quote each other’s secondary sources but never a primary source – mainly because there are none. Produce the evidence so we all can see. rather than rattling off insults that only prove your position is without any foundation.

How can the KJV be from some undergound church when the manuscripts are Byzantine? What groups constitued this underground church and why have we no evidence of them? Why can you not produce some of their writings so we can judge for ourselves? How can a collation of Byzantine manuscripts in Western Europe by a Catholic monk be considered evidence of some underground church? If you want to use the KJV, by all means do so. If you want to make a reasoned argument for the primacy of the Byzantine family, by all means do so. But this “remnant church” idea is just a fabrication and to try to use it as the origin of manuscripts produced by the church at Constantinople merely takes it from ignorance to absurdity.