Gary, the text corrector

   Last month (January) we sent a letter to the author of "Why I Left
Ruckmanism." We do not accept any mail from him, at least not up until
now, but the thought occurred to me that if the child is dead set on
devoting his life to correcting the Holy Bible and Ruckman--he views
them both as errant and mistaken--we might as well put him to work
doing something constructive, where both of us could benefit from it.
The thought that came to me was simple: we would pay him to proofread
our publications. This has been needed badly for a long time, and since
all of the works were written in "post tearing haste" (as the British
say), between classes, meetings, visits, trips, conferences, and hockey
games, they do contain many "errata." (Our last publication had about
twenty in two hundred pages.) Of the sixty-one books I have written,
those that number over two hundred pages I am sure have at least ten
errors in each of them, and one of them has nearly forty-two errors in
it. Unlike the Holy Bible, we are fallible sinners, and we have no
protection of the Holy Spirit when writing our opinions about various
things. The AV translators didn't either, when they wrote their
opinions: that is why we never deal with their opinions about their
translating methods but deal rather with what God produced THROUGH them
in HIS Book--not theirs.

   I wrote Gary and offered him fifteen dollars per copy to correct,
and sent him the money ahead of time for the first book (The Pastoral
Epistles). I told him if he could handle it easily--and I am sure he
thinks he can--we will send him the "heavy stuff" later. I offered to
pay postage and handling charges both ways, and only requested that he
make his corrections legible and double spaced. (Since he was going to
correct the material anyway for nothing, I thought we might make it
worth his time and hire him as a proofreader.) Up till now I have had
to write these books on a typewriter: only the last one was done on a
"word processor." When I finished typing them I had to proofread them
once for spelling (and I am not a good speller), once for grammar (and
I am not much of a grammarian--most hockey goalies are not!), once for
bold face print, again for italics, again for scriptural cross-
references, and yet again for capitalized words and quotations. This
meant that in doing the Bible Believer's Series alone (eleven
commentaries), I had to go through more than five thousand pages seven
times each, with the eyesight I had after I was forty-two years old. It
wasn't easy.

   The first three books written before 1962 were not only typed, they
were typed on a mechanical, stationary Underwood, and then I had to
"set the type" myself on an ancient substitute for a Linotype machine
called a "Varityper." You had to figure "increments" to get the lines
to "justify." You can imagine how many blunders got into this type of
work while I was raising seven children, five to ten grandchildren,
pastoring two hundred to five hundred people, and holding conferences
two weekends a month in California, Washington, Ohio, Michigan,
Tennessee, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida,
Kentucky, Indiana, and Wisconsin. I am surprised that anyone with any
"eye" for mistakes can't find at least TEN in every commentary we
wrote, and possibly TWENTY in some of them. Since no one has
volunteered to undertake such a massive task, we figured Gary Hudson
(the one who "Left Ruckmanism"--he did NOT leave Ruckmanism: he left
Bob Gray's church and school in Jacksonville!) would be delighted to do
it. He could get paid for demonstrating how smart he was. Not everyone
gets such an opportunity, especially when devoted to tearing up the
King James Bible with the NON-ORIGINAL "Greek."

   Gary will be with us on April Fool's Day this year in an "Open Bible
Forum," which will be available to anyone who wants a videotape of it.
We have the best recording studio in the country for this kind of
thing, having had to work for nearly two years to produce a high
quality color film presentation of Drawing Men to Christ. Gary, at this
time, will demonstrate how well he knows the ENGLISH BIBLE, the one he
has devoted his life to correcting. Until then we are going to try to
help the kid to make a few bucks.