Dr. Wilbur Pickering has been a linguist and Bible translator for over 50 years. His parents were American missionaries working in Bolivia, and he was born in Brazil in the 1930s. He earned his undergraduate degree from William Jennings Bryan College in Tennessee in the 1950s. He earned a master's degree in theology from Dallas Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Toronto. He labored in Brazil as a missionary in the field of Bible translation for over 40 years.

Dr. Pickering has written several books on linguistics, and on the identity of the authentic original text of the New Testament. Since the year 2000, Dr. Pickering has done unprecedented, painstaking research in a quest to identify the precise wording of text of the Greek of the New Testament as it appeared in the original manuscripts.

We often refer to Dr. Pickering as "the Erasmus of the 21st century." 500 years ago the Roman Catholic scholar Desiderius Erasmus undertook the painstaking work of examining and comparing ancient New Testament manuscripts in the libraries and monasteries of Europe. Erasmus was on a quest to identify the authentic original wording of the New Testament in its original language, Koine Greek.

Dr. Pickering has compared hundreds of Greek manuscripts of every book of the New Testament, word by word, letter by letter, with access to a far larger body of manuscript evidence than Erasmus had in the 16th century. Pickering's work is the extension and refinement of the Received Text legacy of Erasmus, Burgon, Scrivener, and others. His work demonstrates the validity Manuscript Family 35 of the Received Text as the text that is fully faithful to the autographs.