Dr. Greg
Lanier made an x post back on Nov. 2, 2025, just a few days after his co-edited book
(with William Ross) titled The Authority of the Septuagint was
officially released at the end of October. In this post, Lanier was bemoaning
the fact that the first amazon review posted for the book was a 1-star
evaluation by a reviewer complaining about the book’s misrepresentation of the
Confessional Bibliology (CB) position. Lanier despaired, “At this rate we'll be at negative infinity
stars before long.”
The 1-star reviewer had focused on a footnote in the opening pages of
the book’s introduction as an illustration of how the CB position was
misrepresented in the Lanier/Ross book. The reviewer pointed out that in this
opening footnote the editors lump in the CB position with writers and works
with whom actual CB advocates have no association. Furthermore, the editors
also failed in this footnote to offer any citations of actual works from CB
advocates. Rather than offering a fair and objective presentation of the CB
position, the footnote seems to offer a dismissive “guilt by association” smear.
Indeed,
there is only one chapter in the Lanier/Ross book that is not either a positive
presentation of scholarly research or a positive advocacy presentation
concerning usage of the LXX (for the latter see Roman Catholic scholar James B.
Prothro’s article “A Roman Catholic Approach”).
That one out-of-place chapter is the excursus by Mark Ward on “The
Septuagint and Confessional Bibliology.” Far from being a sympathetic advocate
of the CB position (as Prothro is for the RCC position) Ward has been a
persistent and termagant critic of CB who has often misrepresented our position
(including by repeatedly suggesting we hold to KJVO or are “cousins” to KJVO—though
this is a position we have repudiated). On a recent podcast Lanier defended the
decision to invite Ward rather than an actual advocate of the CB position to contribute
to the book, because, he suggested, no one holding to the CB position was
capable of writing an academic essay presenting the CB viewpoint with
sufficient scholarly rigor.
What Lanier
might not have picked up on relating to the 1-star review was the irony which
was likely intended by the reviewer. Here is some of the background to this
story that Lainer might have missed:
Back in 2022
the 1-star reviewer and I co-edited a book titled Why I Preach from the
Received Text. This book consists of 25 short articles written by various confessionally
Reformed church officers (Presbyterian, Baptist, and Independent) who have
advocated for retrieval of the traditional Protestant text of Holy Scripture in
the life of confessional churches.
In the
Introduction to Why I Preach from the Received Text, we (the editors)
made plain that though all the contributors had great respect for the King
James Version and the overwhelming majority of us (though not all) made nearly
exclusive use of it in our public ministries, we were not advocating a KJVO
position. In fact, we wrote the following in that introduction:
The reader should not, however, be confused about this book’s
primary focus. Critics of the traditional text, in fact, often confuse our
position, whether intentionally or unintentionally, with “King James
Version-Onlyism,” a position which is inconsistent with WCF and 2LBCF 1:8. We
did not ask our authors to address, “Why I Preach from the King James Version,”
but “Why I Preach from the Received Text.” The primary purpose of this book is
a defense of the traditional original Hebrew and Greek text of the Bible (p.
17).
Our book was officially released on Friday, July 22, 2022. Just 48 hours later and although he had no
advance copy of the book, on July 24, 2022, Mark Ward posted a caustic review
of this 276-page book to his personal blog and “plastered” it to several other online
sites including amazon and goodreads, where he also gave it a very low review
rating.
Ward’s review consisted
of over 3,700 words, meaning it was much longer than any of the 25 individual
chapters in our book, which were limited to c. 2,500 words each. In Ward’s review
the term “KJV” appears 93 times. Based on Ward’s review one might think that
the primary purpose of Why I Preach from the Received Text was to promote
the readability of the KJV, rather than retrieval of the traditional Protestant
text of Holy Scripture. The bulk of the “review” came under a section titled “KJV
Readability” and included 8 subpoints each of which has the words “KJV” or “KJV
Readability” in its title. There was even more. Ward intentionally misrepresented
and demonized one of our authors such that it created problems for him in his
church and presbytery.
Ward ended his “review”
with these words, “…I cannot
recommend this book, and I am dismayed that the tiny Confessional Bibliology
movement has gathered enough strength to publish it. I pray that its days will
be few.”
Perhaps
Lanier and Ross were unaware of the animus that Ward had expressed against the
CB position. Maybe this will help them understand why we were dismayed and
disappointed when they accepted Ward’s gracious “offer” to contribute this excursus
on CB to their book. It came from a man who has literally prayed an imprecatory
prayer that the days of the CB movement would be few. Thankfully, the Lord has
not been pleased to answer the petitioner’s prayer in the way that he hoped.
Sadly,
Ward’s article in the book continues the misrepresentation of our position. He once
again makes the claim that the CB position is the “fraternal twin” of KJVO. Here
are just a few of the other problems with Ward’s review of 2024 Reformation
Bible Society Conference in his excursus: He chooses only to review three of
our four plenary lecturers in our conference and then critiques our conference
for not covering the topic (apologetics) addressed in the plenary lecture which
he omitted to review. He claims that our 2024 conference on the LXX represented
a distinct shift or turn in emphasis for CB by focusing on the OT, though we
have from the beginning had a whole Bible (OT and NT) emphasis and concern (see
the quote shared above from our 2022 book). He states that CB holds that there
are singular extant “perfect manuscript
copies” of the Bible. We do not.
The sad
thing is that when Myrto Theocharous offers her synthesis of our position in
the book she does not actually interact with our position but with Mark Ward’s
distortion of it. In reality we are simply contending for the retrieval of what
Levi Berntson calls in his article “the old view” of the Protestant orthodox
fathers. Sadly one will not encounter this in Ward’s review but only a straw
man of our position.
Finally,
let me encourage Dr. Lanier. The first review was 1-star but I’m sure this will
eventually level out. After Ward posted his low review of our book, the next dozen
or so were 5-star reviews and readers have continued to find it useful. Perhaps
the same will happen with their book.
JTR
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