In his Sunday message to the faithful gathered in St Peter’s Square, March 5, Pope Francis urged the people to carry and read their Bible as diligently as they do their smartphones. Protestants, and the civilized world in general, applaud that this dark-age “church” has seen the light. As head of an institution that tried for centuries to stamp out the Bible, this appears like a miracle.

Unfortunately, there is a darker side of the story. The Bible that he is talking about is a very different Bible from the one which dozens of popes tried to obliterate. But it wasn’t that the popes wanted to do away with all Bibles, they just had to stop one Bible. Even during the Inquisition the popes had their own approved Bible.

For most of Christian history, there has been a struggle over which Bible should be used. When the Revelation 17-18 counterfeit church was burning all the Bibles, (and Bible believers) during the Inquisition, they also had a counterfeit Bible they were promoting. Of course, “promoting” is hardly the right word when their “Bible” was chained to the pulpit and written in Latin, a language few could read. 

God’s counterattack was the invention of the printing press. Soon, copies of the right Bible began to flood the Western World. But His enemy did not give up easily. Satan’s plan B was to “fix” the supposedly “archaic language” of the real Bible. If it could be subtly altered to begin to match the counterfeit, maybe no one would notice. The astounding success of that plan is why the Pope can now urge his people to read the Bible.

Using modern research techniques, linguist David W. Daniels has uncovered the details of this epic war on God’s words. The move to “fix” the Bible involved forming “Bible societies,” bringing together linguists, translators, publishers and sophisticated marketing. Satan used the opportunity to infiltrate those “societies” with unbelievers and men dedicated to his agenda.

Rather than updating the language, a whole new basic Greek text was formed. Instead of using the thousands of manuscripts supporting the real Bible, a few new ones were faked as “oldest and best.” And, coincidentally, their readings often supported the unbiblical doctrines of the counterfeit church, including the Apocrypha folktales used by Roman Catholicism to support purgatory, worship of angels, and worship of Mary.

Today, that bogus text, known as the Nestle-Aland/United Bible Societies Greek Text, is nearly universally accepted by translators of modern Bible versions, including foreign language versions prepared by Wycliffe Bible translators. Fake manuscripts like the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were “discovered” by men like Constantin Tischendorf. From them, Westcott and Hort prepared their Greek New Testament that became the foundation text for most modern versions.

The next step was a broad marketing campaign to “sell” the church on the new Bibles. Part of that was an intensive effort to discredit the real Bible in English, authorized by King James. This hugely successful effort has effectively persuaded churches, denominations, Bible colleges and seminaries to “speak evil” of the KJV in favor of the altered Bibles.

So pervasive is this shift that even the Pope no longer worries about people learning the truth about his prostitute “church” from those who teach from the only true Bible in English. Of course, because of the confusion of doubt created by the multitude of different Bibles, few Christians trust their bibles. They turn, instead, to their pastors (or priests) to interpret it for them.

This is precisely what the popes have taught all along, that the Bible is too hard for the common man to understand. He must rely on the “church” and its priests for reliable interpretation through the “Magisterium.”

Daniels has chronicled his research in a series of books and YouTube vlogs. For more information, visit the Bible Version Information Center.