Lesson 10 - Theological Error Analysis of the Q&A

Here is a "theological error analysis" of the Q&A posted on https://www.truthbpc.com/v4/main.php?menu=resources&page=resources/vpp_10

This is a sharp, theological refutation of the doctrines presented in the article. The text outlines the position known as Verbal Plenary Preservation (VPP), specifically a form of Textus Receptus (TR) Onlyism.

From the perspective of orthodox, historical Protestant theology and textual scholarship, the panelists (Jeffrey Khoo, Quek Suan Yew, Das Koshy) promote several grave errors. These teachings conflate preservation with perfect identity, elevate a specific 16th-century text above the original autographs, and employ fallacious arguments to sustain a sectarian divide.

What follows is not a disagreement over tone or emphasis, but a substantive refutation of false doctrines, false dichotomies, and logical failures taught by the three speakers in this article. I will move question by question, identify the specific false teaching, explain why it is false, and then give a biblically and historically correct answer at the end of each section.

What is at stake here is not “preferences,” but the nature of God’s providence, the definition of preservation, and the legitimacy of the historic Christian doctrine of Scripture. Much of what is taught here collapses under scrutiny.

QUESTION 1

Is VPP a personal conviction, and is it serious enough to leave a church?

False Teaching #1:

VPP is a “doctrinal truth” equivalent to inspiration, and denial of it makes a church doctrinally dangerous.

Koshy explicitly states that VPP is “God’s truth” and not a theological opinion .

Koshy and Quek teach that if a church denies VPP (i.e., admits the KJV/TR has scribal errors), members should leave that church. They claim that staying makes one complicit in teaching that "the Bible has mistakes" and that tithes are used to promote error.

By making a specific 17th-century translation theory a litmus test for orthodoxy, they cause division in the Body of Christ over non-essentials. They encourage rebellion against church leadership  based on a false doctrine of textual perfection.

This is false.

VPP (Verbal Plenary Preservation as defined here) is not a doctrine taught explicitly in Scripture, nor is it confessed as such in the ecumenical creeds, the Reformed confessions, or by the Reformers themselves. What Scripture teaches is God’s faithfulness, the endurance of His word, and the sufficiency of Scripture, not that a single identifiable printed text must exist without textual variation.

They have illegitimately elevated a theological inference into a test of orthodoxy.

Scripture distinguishes:

Inspiration: a completed, once-for-all act (2 Tim 3:16)

Preservation: God’s providential care across history, not mechanical perfection in one stream

Nowhere does Scripture say:

all copies will be identical

all variants are corruptions

believers must identify a single perfect manuscript tradition to remain faithful

False Teaching #2:

Teaching non-VPP positions equals teaching that “the Bible has mistakes”

Quek repeatedly claims that rejecting VPP means teaching that “the Bible has mistakes” and that children are being taught error .

This is a strawman.

Historic Christianity has always affirmed:

textual variants exist

none affect any doctrine

God’s word remains fully authoritative and sufficient

Textual variation ≠ doctrinal error.

This false equation poisons the conscience and weaponizes fear.

Correct Answer to Question 1

Belief in VPP is not a biblical requirement, not a Reformed standard, and not a test of faithfulness. Christians may disagree charitably on textual theories without breaking fellowship. Leaving a church over this is not biblically mandated, and labeling fellow believers as undermining Scripture is sinfully divisive.

Unity in Essentials, Liberty in Non-Essentials. The doctrine of Inerrancy applies strictly to the original Autographs. Copies and translations are the Word of God insofar as they faithfully represent the original. Christians can use the KJV, NASB, or ESV and still possess the Word of God. To divide a church over the use of the Textus Receptus is to violate the biblical command for unity.

QUESTION 2

Is VPP a new doctrine?

False Teaching #3:

VPP is as old as the Bible itself

Quek claims preservation “is as old as the Bible” and merely refined by adjectives .

This is historically false.

The church never taught VPP in this form:

No Father

No medieval theologian

No Reformer

No confession prior to the 20th century

The Westminster Confession affirms providential preservation, not verbatim identity of a specific manuscript family.

Khoo’s claim that critics “explain away” Matt 5:18 is misleading . The passage teaches the permanence of God’s law, not the immutability of every copy across transmission history.

False Teaching #4:

Rejection of VPP equals rejection of preservation

This is a false dilemma.

One may affirm:

God preserved His Word

textual transmission involved copying, variants, and correction

the church has always lived with this reality

Correct Answer to Question 2

The doctrine of preservation is ancient.

VPP as defined here is modern, reactionary, and historically unsupported.

QUESTION 3

What is wrong with believing preservation exists in the total manuscript tradition?

This section contains the densest concentration of error.

False Teaching #5:

Manuscripts exist in two moral streams: “Preserved” vs “Corrupted”

Khoo invents a dualistic manuscript cosmology.

This is not textual criticism, not church history, and not theology. It is sectarian myth-making.

Manuscripts are:

geographically diverse

textually mixed

historically layered

No manuscript family is morally “pure” or “evil.”

False Teaching #6:

Westcott and Hort were unbelievers, heretics, Marian worshippers, Darwinists

This is libel, repeated without evidence and long debunked by historians.

Even if it were true, it would be irrelevant. Truth is not decided by genealogy or guilt-by-association.

The reliability of a manuscript (like Codex Sinaiticus or Vaticanus) depends on its date, scribe, and transmission history, not on the personal theology of the men who collated it in the 19th century. Even if W/H were heretics (which is a distortion of history), the manuscripts they used exist independently of them.

Scripture itself was preserved through:

sinful scribes

corrupt priests

persecuting empires

God does not need morally perfect agents.

If personal theology invalidates a text, the VPP advocates have a problem: Desiderius Erasmus, the compiler of the Textus Receptus, was a Roman Catholic humanist who dedicated his work to Pope Leo X and never left the Catholic Church. If W/H’s alleged "Mary worship"  invalidates their work, then Erasmus's actual Catholicism must invalidate the TR.

False Teaching #7:

Textual criticism is “playing God” and “diabolical”

Quek calls textual study “deadly” and “arsenic” .

This is a theological overreach.

The Reformers themselves practiced textual criticism.

So did Erasmus.

So did Calvin.

To condemn it wholesale is to condemn the very process that produced the TR itself.

Correct Answer to Question 3

God preserved His Word through the entire manuscript tradition, not by hiding it in a single stream. Textual criticism is a servant, not a master, and does not undermine faith when practiced reverently.

Truth is determined by weight of evidence, not the biography of the scholar. The "Critical Text" is not the "W/H text"; it is an eclectic text based on the oldest and most reliable manuscripts available today. The differences (such as the omission of the long ending of Mark or the Pericope Adulterae) reflect the earliest available witnesses to the Autographs, not a conspiracy to delete doctrine.

QUESTION 4

Can users of non-TR translations believe in VPP?

False Teaching #8:

True belief in VPP should logically lead to abandoning modern translations

Khoo states that anyone who understands VPP will reject W/H-based translations .

This turns VPP into a practical litmus test, contradicting earlier claims that it is merely doctrinal.

It also:

invalidates global Christianity

binds conscience where Scripture does not

elevates English textual history above the catholic church

Correct Answer to Question 4

Faith in Scripture does not require allegiance to one textual tradition or translation. God’s Word is not hostage to English history.

QUESTION 5

How do we know which preserved text is correct?

False Teaching #9:

"Logic of Faith” replaces evidence

Appeal to E.F. Hills’ “Logic of Faith” is circular:

The panelists argue that we identify the true text not by examining historical manuscripts, but by the "Logic of Faith". They claim that because God promised to preserve His word, He must have done so in the specific text used by the Reformation church (the TR). They explicitly reject the need to "check every manuscript" and dismiss the "reverse engineering" critique as "too technical".

God promised preservation

therefore the TR is preserved

therefore variants elsewhere are corrupt

By rejecting historical evidence (manuscripts) in favor of a "faith" construct, these teachers insulate their claims from truth. If evidence shows the TR adds words (which it does), they simply deny the evidence. This turns faith into a shield for error.

This is theological reasoning detached from history.

Faith is trust in God, not selective immunity from evidence.

The Contradiction: Khoo admits the TR was "identified" later and relies on the "Ben Chayim" and "Scrivener’s text". Scrivener’s Greek text was created in the late 19th century specifically to match the King James Version. To claim this late, back-translated text is the "definitive reading"  is to canonize a text created after the translation. This is not preservation; it is retroactive canonization.

Correct Answer to Question 5

The church recognizes Scripture through historical transmission, communal discernment, and God’s providence, not by asserting a conclusion first and forcing history to comply.

God has preserved His Word in the totality of the manuscript witnesses (over 5,800 Greek fragments and codices). No single manuscript or printed edition is free from copyist errors, but the entire body of evidence allows us to reconstruct the original text with extreme accuracy. We trust God’s providence in history, which includes the discovery of older manuscripts (like the Papyri) that bring us closer to the Apostles' writings than the late medieval manuscripts used by the KJV translators.

QUESTION 6

Is 1 John 5:7 authentic?

False Teaching #10:

The verse must be original because it supports the Trinity. Khoo defends the inclusion of the "Three Heavenly Witnesses" in 1 John 5:7, claiming it is found in the TR, the Latin Vulgate, and has "Greek manuscript evidence". He argues it must be right because it "glorifies God".

This is a theological fallacy.

Truth is not validated by usefulness.

The Trinity stands without this verse.

1 John 5:7 is absent from every known Greek manuscript prior to the 14th century. It is not quoted by any early Greek Church Father during the Trinitarian controversies (when it would have been their strongest weapon). It appeared first in Latin manuscripts.

Claiming grammar “doesn’t work” without it is demonstrably false and rejected by Greek grammarians.

Correct Answer to Question 6

1 John 5:7 in its longer form is not part of the original Greek text, though the doctrine it teaches is fully biblical.

1 John 5:7 is a later Latin addition (gloss) that crept into the text. It is not part of the inspired Word of God. Removing it is an act of faithfulness to what John actually wrote. We must defend the Trinity using the authentic texts (e.g., John 1:1, Matthew 28:19), not fabricated ones.

QUESTION 7

Is the TR a “reverse-engineered” text?

False Teaching #11:

Dismissing the problem instead of answering it

Calling the issue “too technical” avoids the real concern: the TR was compiled, not divinely dropped from heaven.

Faith does not require denial of process.

Correct Answer to Question 7

The TR is a historical reconstruction, valuable but not divinely guaranteed in every detail.

QUESTION 8

Does “closest” imply imperfection?

False Teaching #12:

Semantic coercion

They redefine “closest” to mean “exact” by assertion, not logic .

Words mean things.

“Closest” necessarily implies comparison.

Correct Answer to Question 8

The Bible is fully authoritative and sufficient without requiring textual absolutism.

QUESTION 9

Has the TR existed since the first century?

False Teaching #13:

Retroactive existence

Claiming the TR “existed” but was “unidentified” is category confusion.

Books can exist unidentified.

Compiled printed texts cannot.

Correct Answer to Question 9

The TR is a post-Reformation compilation, not an eternal artifact.

Summary of Correct Doctrines

1. On Preservation: God has providentially preserved His Word in the plurality of manuscripts (Critical and Majority), ensuring no essential doctrine is lost. He did not re-inspire a 16th-century printer to create a perfect text.
2. On Manuscripts: The Alexandrian texts (used in modern Bibles) are older and often more reliable witnesses to the original than the Byzantine texts (TR). Textual criticism is a valid tool to discern the original reading.
3. On 1 John 5:7: This verse is a Latin addition and not part of the original inspired Scripture.
4. On Christian Fellowship: Belief in the perfection of the KJV/TR is not a fundamental of the faith. We should not separate from Bible-believing churches that use modern translations

FINAL CONCLUSION

This Q&A teaches:

sectarian exclusivism

historical revisionism

fear-based theology

circular logic

false dilemmas

moralized manuscript mythology

It replaces confidence in God with confidence in a system, and substitutes faith with certainty theater.

God preserved His Word.

He did not promise to preserve our theories about how He did it.

That distinction matters.