By David Daniels

"The Bible came through the Catholic Church."

Today this statement is universally accepted both in the church world and in secular history. Author Gail Riplinger, in her new book "In Awe of Thy Word", spends several hundred pages proving that this is wrong.

Even a casual look at the evidence discloses that there were two streams of scripture that flowed from apostolic times. Most history books follow just one stream that flows from Jerusalem down through Alexandria, Egypt and up into Rome.

Along the way the stream became polluted with heretical teachings. The corrupt Vaticanus and Sinaiticus manuscripts are products of that stream. The Bible produced from these manuscripts is the Bible that the Vatican claims to have given the world. These provide the basis for all the modern Bible versions.

But when this polluted stream of scripture arrived in Rome, it became mired in the political bog of what we now call Roman Catholicism. For over a thousand years, superstition, ignorance and organized corruption locked this Bible away from the common man.

But Riplinger's research uncovers another stream that flows up from Jerusalem through Antioch in Syria where the disciples were first called Christians. (See Acts 11:26.) Citing hundreds of passages from documents largely ignored by historians, she proves that a pure version of the Scriptures was agreed upon as early as 100 AD and copies began to follow the trade routes north and west as missionaries took up the great commission.

Rome did everything within her power to stamp out the Christians who had these pure Scriptures. During the dark ages the harlot church burned every copy she could get her hands on. But God had promised to preserve His Words.

When the printing press became available, men like Wycliffe and Zwinglie took the manuscripts from that stream and translated them into the common languages. The ignorance of God's Word was broken. The result was the Reformation that shattered the bondage of the popes.

Riplinger pieces together scraps of history proving the existence of a Gothic Bible as early as 350 AD and the text almost exactly matches the textus receptus that formed the basis for the KJV. Studies reveal that it was a word-for-word, literal equivalence translation from the Antioch stream of Greek scriptures.

Riplinger traces this northern stream of scripture from the Goths, through the Visigoths, Anglo-Saxons, Old English, into the time of Wycliffe and on to King James.

At the same time, Riplinger provides dozens of charts of specific scriptures where the original Gothic version matches the KJV while the same verses are either missing or differ in meaning in the modern versions based on the other, Alexandrian/ Roman Catholic, stream of manuscripts.

Riplinger's evidence is powerful, early testimony to the purity of the KJV. The sterling agreement of the northern stream of manuscripts stand in stark contrast to the muddled confusion found in the southern, Alexandrian/ Vatican manuscripts.

It is technically true that the Catholic Church gave us a Bible. But it is a Bible based on flawed manuscripts full of contradictions and inconsistencies. The confusion in the church today caused by the gaggle of versions was birthed by an attempt to "fix" the "archaic" language of the KJV. But that fix was dipped from the southern stream of corrupt manuscripts. The Bible that was "given" by the Roman Catholic Church is a counterfeit Bible, designed to sideline and eventually eliminate God's preserved Words in the King James Bible.

Riplinger's new book is a weighty volume but provides more overwhelming evidence how God went about preserving His Words in the KJV. It presents damning testimony against the pope's claim that God's preserved Words came through the Vatican institution identified in Revelation as the prostitute church.