“Church” isn’t a Greek word. “Baptize” isn’t a translation. For fifty weeks, we read what the text actually says.
Unless you’re reading in Biblical Hebrew or Greek, you’re reading a translation — and every translation involves choices. Understanding this journey honors Scripture.
Translation is not decoding — it’s an act of interpretation. After fifty years with the King James, Ernst discovered that tenses, parts of speech, and grammatical structures were consistently smoothed over.
The Greek word ekklēsia means “called-out assembly.” Yet every major English Bible translates it as “church” — not because of the Greek, but because King James ordered it.
No king oversees the NIV or ESV today — so why does every modern translation still use “church”? Ernst traces kuriakon and reveals what English erased: the difference between a building and a living community.
Three Greek words describe what people do: watching over, being mature, and serving. But English Bibles turned them into institutional titles the Greek never intended.
What does the New Testament actually describe when believers gathered? Through Acts 2, 1 Corinthians 14:26, and Acts 20, Ernst traces assembly life that looks nothing like Sunday morning — and everything like a family around a table.
The most widespread technique of all: importing a word’s sound while leaving its meaning behind. Ernst traces baptizō, Christos, and apostolos — three words where transliteration hides what the Greek plainly says.
The argument, one beat at a time.
Before we examine specific words, translations, or frameworks, we start with a simple question: how did this Bible get into your hands? Twenty minutes. No assumptions. Just the journey every Bible makes from manuscript to print.
A translation is a series of choices. Every choice opens some doors and closes others. Once you see the choices, you can never unsee them.Ernst von Harringa · Reading Scripture Clearly
Every translation is an interpretation.— the premise of this series
This series doesn’t argue from popular commentary or denominational tradition. It argues from the text — in the languages the text was actually written in, using the tools scholars have refined over centuries.
Every English Bible is a second-order document. To examine what Scripture says, we go to the Masoretic Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Textus Receptus Greek of the New — not as a gatekeeping move, but because the questions we’re asking can only be answered there.
Bomberg–Ginsburg · Textus ReceptusWhen we reference an English translation, we use the KJ3 Literal Translation as our working text. Produced with formal-equivalence rigor, it preserves grammatical structures and word choices modern paraphrases smooth over — the places where translation decisions actually happen.
Jay P. Green Sr. · formal equivalenceRather than relying on Strong’s numbers, we work with TWOT — the standard scholarly reference for Hebrew semantic ranges. Two Hebrew New Testaments then let us trace Greek terms back to their Hebrew semantic roots: the Salkinson–Ginsburg edition and Ezekiel Margoliouth’s translation (the only fully cantillated Hebrew NT). Together they recover continuity that English often erases.
TWOT · Salkinson–Ginsburg · MargoliouthThe goal isn’t to install a new system to replace the one you inherited. It’s to equip you to examine Scripture yourself — to distinguish what the text says from what traditions and frameworks have added on top of it. What matters is that you read for yourself, not that you read me.
your study, your conclusionsTo help you distinguish between what Scripture says and what we’ve built on top of it — and to give you the tools to keep doing that work long after this series ends.
How did you get your Bible? What is translation? Why does “church” appear where “assembly” should be? Before we can examine anything else, we need to see the ground we’re standing on.
An estimated 45,000 denominations, each claiming biblical support for its distinctive positions. How did we get here? What does the fragmentation itself teach us about how we read?
Scripture interpreting Scripture, typology, numerology, allegory — these tools can illuminate or obscure. We examine each on its own terms, with honest attention to where each helps and where each misleads.
Dispensationalism is enormously influential in modern evangelicalism — and relatively recent in church history. We examine its appeal honestly, and its problems honestly, alongside its principal alternative.
1844. 1914. 1988. 2011. Sincere believers, using elaborate biblical frameworks, calculated the date of Christ’s return. Each failed. This final section — shaped by Ernst’s own experience in the 2011 Camping predictions — asks what we should learn.
Interactive research terminals that complement the series — for when a single word deserves ten pages instead of one line.
An investigation into the Tetragrammaton — Yod-He-Waw-He (יהוה) — tracing the Name from the Kethiv through Adonai vowel points to its English transliteration. Ten research stages explore the gematria, verbal aspect, and semantic foundations that shape every Name-reference in Scripture.
Open StudyA study of the three-language world Paul carried into every letter he wrote — Aramaic at home in Tarsus, Greek in the marketplace, Hebrew under Gamaliel. Ten stages trace the Semitic categories beneath Paul’s Greek, and why reversing the translation through the Salkinson-Ginsburg Hebrew New Testament reveals what his first readers would have heard.
Open StudyA twelve-stage anatomy of the most consequential transliteration in English Bible history. Traces βαπτίζω from the Greek source through its lexical definition, the political reasons no English Bible ever translated it, the pattern of institutional words built the same way, and what every passage reads when the meaning is restored.
Open Study“This series is the consolidation of what I wish someone had taught me when I first opened my Bible as a young man. Every word matters. Every choice has consequences. You don’t need a seminary degree to see that — you need patience, and the right tools.”
Ernst is the founder and president of Bible Ministries International, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit he co-founded in 2002 with his wife Lindy. He has been studying the Hebrew and Greek of Scripture for more than fifty years, with long attention to Masoretic textual traditions, biblical cantillation, and translation philosophy.
His work begins with two source texts: the Bomberg–Ginsburg Hebrew Old Testament and the Textus Receptus Greek New Testament. For cross-Testament word study he leans on the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament rather than Strong’s numbers, and on two Hebrew translations of the Greek New Testament — the Salkinson–Ginsburg edition and Ezekiel Margoliouth’s, the only fully cantillated Hebrew NT. He knew Jay P. Green Sr. personally, and the KJ3 Literal Translation remains his cornerstone English reference.
Five questions Ernst hears most often from people considering the series. Short answers here — longer answers in the episodes themselves.
Not at all. Ernst brings the Hebrew and Greek into every episode and explains each word as it comes up. The series isn’t expertise handed down — it’s an invitation to look at the text together, weigh the choices every translation has to make, and leave room to be wrong in little ways and big ones.
The goal isn’t to arrive at Ernst’s conclusions. It’s to let the truth unfold as you read for yourself. By the end of the series, many listeners want to look at the Hebrew or Greek directly — and the Biblical Tools interactive Bible Reader makes that possible without any language background.
No. Every major English translation is the work of careful, faithful scholars. This series isn’t about dismissing them — it’s about seeing the choices that every translator has to make, and what those choices do to meaning.
When you understand why “church” appeared where “assembly” could have, you’re not rejecting your Bible. You’re reading it with more precision.
The KJ3 Literal Translation by Jay P. Green Sr. It’s the most word-for-word English rendering available, preserving the grammatical structures of the original texts.
BMI offers it free in both formats: the interactive Bible Reader — click any word to see the Hebrew and its semantic range — and the KJ3 audio player for listening.
No. Part 2 examines claims made by several traditions — Catholic, Orthodox, Presbyterian, Baptist, and others — but with the same honest attention in each case. The goal is not to argue for one denomination over another, but to help you see how each builds its distinctive claims from Scripture, and where those claims stand up to the text.
Ernst is deeply skeptical of any framework that claims to have it all figured out — including his own. The series asks questions, traces the text, and trusts you to weigh the evidence.
Please do. Every episode is free, and the series is designed to be discussed. A group can listen together in advance and then meet to talk through what challenged or clarified — that kind of shared reading is exactly what this series is built for.
If you’d like, you can also point people to the Biblical Tools website, where this series sits alongside the Sunday Bible Study, Friday Seminar, Light for Your Path devotionals, and the interactive KJ3 Bible Reader — all free, all free of advertising, all supported by BMI’s all-volunteer staff.
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