THE BOOK OF HEBREWS
* Bible Believer’s Commentary Series
* Beginning and Advanced Bible Study Material
* In-Depth Apologetics
* Numerous Pamphlets on Selected Topics
* Variety of Gospel Tracts
* Audio Cassettes
* Video Cassettes
* AV 1611 Bibles
* Study Helps
* Concordances
* Biographies
* Evangelism Material
* Material by Other Authors and Speakers
For FREE Current Catalogue write:
P.O. Box 7135 Pensacola, FL 32534
B.A., B.D., M.A., Th.M., Ph.D.
President and Founder of Pensacola Bible Institute
P.O. Box 7135 Pensacola, FL 32534
Copyright © 1986 by Peter S. Ruckman All rights reserved
The Scripture quotations found herein are from the text of the Authorized King James Version of the Bible. Any deviations therefrom are not intentional.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage, retrieval system, multimedia, or Internet system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Introduction................................................................. vii
Preface....................................................................... xvii
Chapter One................................................................. 1
Chapter Two.............................................................. 43
Chapter Three............................................................ 73
Chapter Four.............................................................. 91
Chapter Five............................................................ 115
Chapter Six.............................................................. 139
Chapter Seven........................................................ 167
Chapter Eight........................................................... 183
Chapter Nine........................................................... 193
Chapter Ten............................................................. 239
Chapter Eleven....................................................... 287
Chapter Twelve........................................................ 349
Chapter Thirteen..................................................... 403
Afterword.................................................................. 443
Throughout the years we have received many letters from Christians who desired to have a “Bible Believer’s Commentary" on the Book of Hebrews. This would be expected as there is not one single commentary on the market today, in Europe or America (nor has there been in the last 400 years), that treated the Authorized Text of Hebrews with any serious or faithful consideration. There are, of course, many devotional commentaries on Hebrews by men like Dr. DeHaan, Harry Ironside, and Oliver Green, and these have many commendable qualities; but exegetical and doctrinal commentaries that deal faithfully with the so-called “Greek texts” and the scholarly corrections and conjectures derived from these texts are entirely lacking. Every major work on the Book of Hebrews (Pink, Lowrie, Hoffman, Milligan, Riehm, et al.) turns out to be nothing but the destructive comments of some Bible-rejecting Conservative who had no final authority higher than his own opinions or the opinions of his friends. When faced with the terrifically complicated verses in Hebrews—and there are plenty of them in Chapters 1, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, and 12—all of these men, in one accord and with one consent and with a perfect ecumenical spirit, unite to attack the words of God and alter them in any way possible so that they might be forced to “teach” what the Bible perverter wants them to teach. The comments on “Hebrews” by Kenneth Wuest or Spiros Zodhiates or James Freerkson, for example, will show the reader what is meant by such a statement, and when he gets to Hebrews 4, 6, and 10 he will find all the members of the Alexandrian Cult
(Freerkson, Willmington, Dobson, Feinberg, Kroll Af man, Price, Dollar, Martin, Bleek, Alford, Vincent" Thayer, et aL) doing a “break dance” that Michael Jackson couldn’t keep up with. All the gyrations and flip-flops will be to get around the AV text, as usual and to avoid the real truth at any cost so that the reader will wind up as much “in the dark” about the truth as the commentator.
What most readers want is a nice, smooth-running commentary of a devotional nature: Matthew Henry, for example, or at least Adam Clarke. Christians these days want only the orange without the peeling or the apple without the core. For this reason our Bible Believer’s Commentary on Revelation has always been our “best seller,” and our poorest seller has been Problem Texts. The first work was transcribed from tapes where the book had been expounded “cold turkey” without notes; it was done “on the wing,” as the Vaudeville actors used to say. It contains little or no scholarly material and no exegetical or critical analysis of the works done on the text by its enemies. This makes for beautiful READING, but it leaves the door wide open for the reader’s faith to be destroyed by A GRADUATE OF A CHRISTIAN COLLEGE OR SEMINARY as soon as he closes the book. It also constitutes some sort of SIN against God for refusing to go into matters that have been responsible for the spiritual destruction of more than 50,000 Christians a year in the United States since 1900. These matters have to do with what is wrong with the Fundamentalists and Evangelicals who attack the King James Bible. A reader who confines himself to devotional reading and inspirational material (as in the Bible Believer’s Commentary on Revelation) will find himself in a first-rate jam when he is confronted with three things which he will certainly be confronted with at some time:
1. His CHILDREN, who are sent off to a Christian school to “learn the Bible” but come back as pro
fessional Bible critics as competent as any unsaved Liberal in the NCCC. They have been given material that the parent was not aware of.
2. His PASTOR, who will continue to correct the AV text, and when confronted with the “commentary” will alibi that since the commentator could not deal with “the original Greek” and knows nothing about “the oldest and best Greek manuscripts” that the commentary is to be discarded.
3. The entire modern Charismatic movement (which is moving back to Rome), which thinks nothing of correcting the Holy Bible more than fifty times per chapter (see any edition of the Living Bible or Today’s English Version).
To limit a Bible commentary, then, to devotional and inspirational remarks, or even doctrinal teaching, without going into the reasons for believing the Biblical text and the reasons for rejecting the critic’s opinions about the text is to do a half-hearted work (Ecc. 9:10) that violates the spirit of New Testament teaching (see Rom. 12:7, 11; 2 Cor. 2:17; Col. 2:8; and 2 Tim. 2:15). For this reason, we are including in this volume (as we have included in the Bible Believer’s Commentary on Galatians-Colossians) the critical and exegetical material that the Fundamentalists and “Evangelicals” (same crew when it comes to destructive criticism) have used to overthrow the Truth of God. This material may be tedious to the average reader, but the average reader could just as well be satisfied with a commentary on Hebrews by Ironside, Newell, Green, or Matthew Henry as one by that great arch-heretic Ruckman.
The material which we will give here is primarily for the benefit of those students and teachers of the word of God—principally pastors and Bible teachers— who desire to “sack” and “rack out” the sissified cultured Fundamentalists in their own groups who are always messing with the Book and destroying the faith
of young people in it. A presentation of the truth without a presentation of error is absolutely valueless in this field. You learn Biblical truth by seeing its contrast to ERROR. You only know the genuine by comparing it with the counterfeit. God didn’t just “so love the world”; He prayed “NOT FOR THE WORLD” (John 17:9). Jesus Christ is not the only “Christ.” The Devil is a “Christ” (Ezek. 28). You cannot know the teachers that God approves of (1 Cor. 11:19) without heresies being laid alongside their teachings (2 Tim. 2:3-4). You cannot defend what you believe (Peter, James, John, Paul, and Jude all went to great lengths to do this: see Rom. 5; 1 Cor. 15; 2 Pet. 3; Jude; 1 John, etc.) or even know what it is that is so unless you know what is NOT so and why it is NOT so.
This has been the big loophole through which the Alexandrian Cult has slipped through more than eighteen centuries (although in the last twenty years we have put enough pressure on them to make hundreds of them swap their Nestle’s text for a Receptus, and even forced Nestle [in Germany] to reconstruct his text and re-admit seventy Receptus readings he had omitted for ninety years).
The scholars have set up a mass of exegetical and critical material (well over 50,000 volumes before 1970) and a maze of comments and conjectures (well over 1,000,000 before 1970) to cast doubt on the Holy Bible, and they have gotten away with it in every decade because they profess to believe in the “verbal, plenary inspiration of the original autographs” and the "historic Fundamentalist positions.” By those two sheep-like professions, they pass off as “Bible believers” and enter the flock. Inside, they tear the sheep apart, limb from limb. The average reader would be simply swamped by their tons of material and their pious professions unless he had time to dig into their material and find out how many times they misrepresented the text, how many times they lied about manuscript evi
dence, how many times they covered up correct readings with false readings, and how many times they lied openly and blatantly about the possibilities for translating a word.
When we first began to write the Bible Believer’s Commentary Series, we had no intention of furnishing “the average Christian” with a nice little armchair set of Bible studies that he would enjoy reading. Our intention was to ARM every pastor, student, and teacher in America against the SATANIC RAVAGES of Biblical criticism that came from Tennessee Temple, Pacific Coast Bible College, Dallas Theological Seminary, Bob Jones University, Wheaton, Moody, Fuller, Cedarville, Northwestern, Midwestern, Kings College, Pillsbury, Piedmont, BIOLA, Maranatha, and Springfield. The idea was to place into a Bible-believing pastor’s hands a weapon whereby he could teach his own people every verse in the Authorized Version without altering one word in the English text, and at the same time he could justify this conduct on a scholarly level by answering any smart-aleck in his church (or classroom) who thought that he had some higher source of illumination than the Holy Spirit; principally, the conceited and deceived eggheads who taught him to correct the Bible with THEIR scholarship. We wanted to arm the pastor with a weapon whereby he could DECAPITATE these deluded upstarts.
So, in this volume you will find not only the running comments which were made in the classrooms and taped, but also the critical and exegetical work done on the text of Hebrews by the Alexandrian Cult. Let not the reader think for a moment that this destructive criticism died out in the Fundamental colleges and universities in 1900, or even in 1950. To the contrary, the modern apostate Fundamentalists today (1999) who teach at Liberty University are just as anxious to destroy the Reformation text as any Liberal was in 1880 or even in 1780. To prove this, we will use the 1982
Liberty Bible Commentary published by the Old Time Gospel Hour at Lynchburg, VA.; this is the work of Hindson, Dobson, Kroll, Willmington, Freerkson, and other dead orthodox apostates who helped sponsor the New King Jimmy Version (NKJV).
Of course, we cannot cover every comment by every commentator and corrector of the God-honored text of Hebrews, but so as to give the reader a thorough (“in depth” is the hackneyed cliche) grasp of the power and fanaticism of the Alexandrian Cult, we will use at least six twentieth-century versions of the English text, at least four “eclectic” Greek texts, eight twentieth-century commentaries, plus the comments of Kuene, Alford, Bleek, Nicoll, Dods, Dewette, Vincent, Davidson, and Hollman. This should give the “serious student of the Bible” (a dead-orthodox, hackneyed cliche) a comprehensive grasp of the intensity and momentum of degenerate Fundamentalism in America and show him what really is behind such Laodicean gobbledy-gook” as the “Living” Bible and the New RSV.
The commentaries we will refer to will be The New Bible Commentary (Eerdmans, 1970), The Wycliffe Bible Commentary (Moody Press, 1962), Jamieson, Fausset and Brown (Zondervan, 1961), An Exposition of Hebrews, Arthur W. Pink (Baker Book House, 1964), One Volume Commentary, Dummelow, (McMillan, 1943), Notes on the New Testament, Barnes (Baker Book House, 1949), Hebrews, James and Peter, Ironside (Loizeaux Bros., 1932), and the Liberty Bible Commentary (Old Time Gospel Hour, 1982). Throughout we will correct all commentators (and all of their sources and friends) with the AV Holy Bible.
Along with these destructive critics we will refer to Nicoll’s Expositor’s Greek New 1 estament (Eerdmans, 1961) under the abbreviation “GENT which contains mainly the comments of Marcus Do s, Vincent’s Word Studies (Eerdmans, 1946), and A.
Robertson’s A New Short Grammar of the Greek Testament (Baker Book House, 1931).
For “the original Greek” (a hackneyed, dead-orthodox cliche) we will refer to Nestle’s standard editions published for eighty years (1898 and 1978) and his hypocritical “new” edition (1980) which smuggled back into it the Receptus readings that should have been in it the previous eighty years. (Nothing like brilliant German scholarship, is there!?) We will also use the United Bible Societies extremely corrupt “Aland and Metzger” text (1966, 1968), plus the standard Greek text constructed by the AV translators (The New Testament According to the Received Greek Text, British and Foreign Bible Society, London) and the Catholic Greek text of those two princes of darkness (Westcott and Hort) called The New Testament in the Original Greek (McMillan, NY, 1885).
Naturally we will correct all Greek grammarians, all Greek lexicons, all Greek teachers, all Greek scholars and all native, Greek-speaking Greeks with the Holy Bible. They might fail us, but the Book will certainly never fail us.
Since there are now on the market more than fifty “updated” pieces of useless trash that profess to be revisions of the Authorized Text (and are NOT), and everyone of these became a museum piece or a pile of discarded junk in less than fifty years, we will not waste the reader’s time with all of them; many of them were obsolete in ten years. Instead, we have picked out the six worst corruptions we could find and will use these six corruptions to demonstrate how mentally sick modern scholars become when attempting to destroy the Holy Bible and replace it with their own private interpretations. These six fake “Bibles” will be:
1. The “Bible” recommended consistently by every major Christian college, seminary, and university in America since its debut: the bankrupt ASV (1901) that couldn’t even sell with every recognized scholar
in America pushing it twenty-four hours a day.
2. The “Bible” which supposedly replaced this flop, and consequently, was recommended by all of the staff and faculty of Tennessee Temple and Bob Jones for more than twenty years: the New ASV (1963), often wrongly (and blasphemously) referred to as the New American Standard “Bible.”
3. The New International Version (NIV, 1978), which is the standard Roman Catholic Jesuit Rheims’ Greek text translated into dead orthodox language for modern apostates. It is recommended by nearly all of the Charismatics, Wycliffe Translators, Wheaton, Fuller, Moody, and other dead orthodox branches of the Alexandrian Cult.