God made man in his own image. Man fell. Men still retain a shell of the image of God but it is perverse. One of the advantages to having a perfect Bible is that God can perfectly teach us. I weary of my brethren who boast that they believe a King James Bible, but in reality, do not form their doctrine from its words. The word "spirit" is a word that is mostly unexplored and yet one of the advantages to the Pure Cambridge Text of the Bible is that every application of the word "spirit" can be trusted to bear either a capital or lower case "s" that can be trusted.
Almost the first thing thrown out of the window when every man begins doing what is right in his own eyes in regards to printing and editing the King James Bible, is the capitalization or lack thereof, of the word "spirit". In doing so they exalt their own sense and education above two of the translators, (Ward and Bois) in the 1638 Cambridge, FS Parris in the 1762 edition, Benjamin Blaney in the 1769 edition, and AW Pollard in the WWI edition currently referred to as the Pure Cambridge Text.
They defend their actions by squinting their eyes just right and claiming that they are following the printing of the original 1611 King James Bible. I say squinting because whereas they claim to adhere to the original printing done by Robert Barker when they capitalize the "s" in I John 5:8, they conveniently ignore the fact that Barker also capitalized the word "Blood" in the same verse. That, they don't do. They stick in their thumb, they pull out a plum and say, "what a good boy am I".
They have three other justifications for capitalizing that "s". Scrivener who at the same time that he was messing with the Cambridge Paragraph Bible (forerunner to the RV), was preparing to work on the Revised Version of the Bible much to the scandal of Dean Burgon. Scrivener did two wicked things in I John 5. First, he italicized I John 5:7 to illustrate his belief that it was a conjecture inserted into the Bible by the translators. Secondly, he capitalized the "s" in I John 5:8 because he could not understand the sense of the whole passage having castrated it in the verse preceding.
I John 5:8 is not dealing with the Holy Spirit or an inward working of God as verse 6 is in the same passage. It is not dealing with the Holy Ghost, the third person of the trinity as verse 7 is. It is discussing the personal spirit of Jesus Christ that was yielded up from an earthen vessel of flesh at the same time that that flesh yielded water and blood. When the centurion saw those things he said, "Truly this man was the Son of God", Mark 15:39. The Apostle John had just given a trinity of proofs that Jesus is the Son of God. It is proven in the inward parts of believers, Verse 6, it is proven in heavenly witness, verse 7, and it is proven by the earthly witnesses. Scrivener emasculated the whole passage.
Every time the personal spirit of Jesus Christ is referred to in the gospels it is a small "s" spirit, Mark 2:8, Mark 8:12, Luke 2:40, Luke 10:21, Luke 23:46, John 11:33, John 13:21. That is the spirit of I John 5:8 until Scrivener's lead is followed. The next proof text for the modern day correctors is the Oxford Text. Oxford is wrong in every other place it differs from the Cambridge. Look at Joshua 19:2, Nahum 3:16 or Mark 1:12. Why don't they follow Oxford's lead there?
The third other justification is the Jerry Hooper letter written by a bureaucrat at Oxford who in the other communications he made on the subject claimed ignorance. In a subsequent post I will post that letter that has recently done as much damage as the famous Letter to Aretaeus did for the Septuagint controversy. It has been dangled like a worm on a hook for otherwise knowledgable brethren who have swallowed it whole.
Keep in mind if you try using an original 1611 printing to substantiate how certain passages should be rendered, the translators were disheartened by the sloppy job that Barker did when he printed their manuscript for the first time, and eventually Barker was sued for his sloppy printing, and eventually died in debtor's prison unable to pay his fines for poor printing. His poor printing is one of the reasons that Ward and Bois collaborated on the 1638 Cambridge Bible which stood head and shoulders above the 1611 for accuracy.
In subsequent posts we will examine the seven spirits of carnal man. They are the spirit of bondage, Romans 8:15; the spirit of the world, I Corinthians 2:12 and Ecclesiastes 3:11; the spirit of slumber, Romans 8:11; the spirit of fear, II Timothy 2:11; the spirit of error, I John 4:6; the spirit which now worketh in the children of disobedience, Ephesians 2:2 and of course, a man's own personal spirit, Proverbs 2:27. A man's carnal nature is composed of those seven spirits. As a result, fallen man will be spiritual and lost. It is these spirits that cause fallen man, or the carnal man within a believer to exert his own intellect over the Word of God itself.