Appendix F
What This Book Used, and How to Check It
Any book that weighs another man's teaching owes the reader a page like this. Here is mine.
Everything listed below is something I actually opened. If I quoted Finis Dake, I quoted from a copy in front of me. This appendix names that copy. Where a page carried a printed number, I gave the number. Where it did not, I say so here, and I tell you what I gave instead.
That matters because Dake's books do not all survive in the same shape. Some of the copies I worked from still carry their printed page numbers right in the text.1 Others have none at all. Several titles now circulate as modern digital editions from Dake Publishing, reformatted for Bible software, with the original page numbers stripped out.2 So my citations shift as the evidence does. A page number when the page shows one. A lesson heading or section title when it does not. The name of the work when nothing else is there. I would rather give you a soft citation than a made-up one.
The Study Bible deserves its own word. Its text is not stable across printings. Dake died in 1987, and the editions that followed are not all identical to the ones he approved. Chapter 22 tells that story, and Appendix C lays the changes out edition by edition. So every citation to the Study Bible in this book names an edition. Where I could not name a printing year, I described what the page itself showed me. I never gave a printing a date its own pages do not carry.
Plain Words: Edition, Printing, and Witness
An edition is a version of a book whose text has been reset or changed. A printing is one press run of that same version. Two printings can be identical. Two editions are not. A witness is the actual copy I read: a scanned page, a photograph, a digitized text file. The witness is what I can show you. Everything else is a claim about it.
This is the book on the kitchen table. It is also the hardest one to cite cleanly, for a simple reason: no dated title page or copyright page of any printing was available to me.3 What I had were photographs and scans of the pages themselves, in two different settings of type.
So I labeled by evidence. Pages from the older, compact, three-column setting are called pre-1988 printing. I can say that much because those pages still carry the segregation note at New Testament page 159. Printings from 1988 onward removed it.4 Pages from the newer, larger setting are called newer typeset edition. Those carry a running head with two numbers: the new page and the old page it replaced.5 Where the head was visible, I recorded both. Where it was not, I cited by the note heading.
Dake's own publishing house issued the Bible. The 1977 God's Plan for Man title page calls him "Author of Dake's Annotated Reference Bible" and gives the imprint as Dake Bible Sales of Lawrenceville, Georgia.6
How This Book Cites the Study Bible
Every Study Bible citation in this book carries three things: the testament and page number, the note or verse it sits under, and the edition label. Quotations taken from a photograph say so. Race-related material is quoted only from pre-1988 sources, except in Chapter 22 and Appendix C, where the change itself is the point and both editions appear side by side.
The other pillar. This is Dake's course book, and it says more about his doctrine of God, at greater length, than anything else he wrote. The copy I used is the one-volume 1977 setting. Its copyright leaf reads:
Copyright 1949 by Finis Jennings Dake
Copyright renewed 1977 by Finis Jennings Dake
All rights reserved in the U.S.A, and other countries. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man, copyright leaf.
It started as a mail-order correspondence course. Its foreword says it first went out in twenty-six loose-leaf books, two lessons in each, mailed to enrolled students through the Bible Research Foundation.7 Fifty-two lessons. Four parts. One lesson for each week of the year.8
That origin matters. A course written to be mailed to laymen is a course written to be believed, not debated. The lessons answer questions. They do not usually argue with someone who might push back.
The copy I worked from is a digitized text with the printed page numbers kept inline, running from the front matter through page 1008.9 Every citation in this book gives a real printed page. The digitization has small imperfections. I proofread each quotation against the scan and fixed obvious spacing damage without changing a word.10 The advertising claims about Dake's hours of study, which come from this book and from the back of another, are weighed in Chapter 2.
His early prophecy book. It matters here for one reason above the rest: in its preface, Dake tells you where his method came from. He tells it as a young man's decision. He says the manuscript was written in 1926, when he was twenty-four.11 Chapter 4 works through that preface line by line.
The copy I used carries this imprint:
Dake Bible Sales, Inc. P. O. Box 173 Lawrenceville, Georgia 30245
Enlarged edition copyright 1950
by Finis Jennings Dake
Printed in the United States of America Finis Jennings Dake, Revelation Expounded, or Eternal Mysteries Simplified, title leaf.
Two details are worth noticing. The copyright line says 1950, but the address carries a ZIP code. ZIP codes did not exist until 1963.12 So the copy in hand is a later printing of the 1950 enlarged edition, issued under the Dake Bible Sales imprint. Which year? Its pages do not say, and I will not guess. The printed page numbers survive in the text, so citations give a page.13
A single 1950 volume, and the sharpest window into Dake's teaching on prayer, faith, and the believer's authority over Satan. Chapter 18 leans on it heavily. Its copyright leaf reads:
Copyright 1950
By
Bible Research Foundation, Inc.
P. O. Box 4446
Atlanta 2, Georgia, U. S. A.
Printed in the United States of America Finis Jennings Dake, Bible Truths Unmasked, copyright leaf.
Notice the address. This one was published out of Atlanta, not from the Lawrenceville imprint that issued the later books.14 Its page numbers survive too.15 So do pages of back-matter advertising for his course, his charts, and his other titles. That advertising is evidence in its own right. Chapter 2 uses it.
A booklet from a series of "Truth About" titles that his other books advertise.16 Chapter 14 uses it. The copy I had is a modern digital edition with no copyright leaf and no page numbers. Citations give the Roman-numeral section heading as the booklet prints it.17
Background support for the chapters on the world to come. Not a main source for the case this book makes. Its foreword is signed at Lawrenceville in 1977 and opens by noting that Dake was born in 1902.18 Again a modern digital edition, again no page numbers. Citations give the numbered chapter and its title.
These two need a warning label. Both carry Dake's name as author. Neither is a book he actually wrote. Both were assembled after his death from material in his other works. Chapter 19 uses the first for angels and demons. Chapter 15 and Chapter 16 use the second for background.
I am not guessing about how they were made. The editor says so himself:
Dake's Publishers in Their Own Words
"The thoughts are Dake's own, as is a significant portion of the text. However, because the material is a compilation from his other writings, portions of the narrative have been constructed in order to provide a necessary flow from point to point. . . . All in all though, this is a book by Finis Jennings Dake."
David Patton, editor, preface to Heavenly Hosts, Dake Publishing, May 1995.
That is both fair and honest. The publisher says plainly that some connecting prose is not Dake's own. He also says the thoughts are. I take both halves at face value. So this book treats the compilations as real evidence of what Dake taught, but labels them as compilations every time, and never rests a hard claim on a sentence that might be an editor's bridge rather than Dake's own words.19 Where a compilation and a book Dake published himself say the same thing, I cite the book he published.
Neither carries printed page numbers. Both are cited by section heading.20 The Heavenly Hosts copyright is held by three of Dake's children, and the preface is dated May 1995.21
The pre-Adamite book, and the main source behind Chapter 15. It is a compilation too. Mark Allison and David Patton edited it. Dake Publishing released it in 1997. Its title page describes it as based on Dake's writings.22 The copy used here is the second printing of March 2000. It carries no printed page numbers. Citations give the section heading.
Beyond the books, this project rests on images. Two kinds.
The first is photographs and scans of Study Bible pages. These are what let the doctrine chapters quote the notes at all. The Study Bible was not available to me as searchable text, so the photographs did the work. They come in two groups matching the two editions described above. The older group captures the pre-1988 pages, covering the whole web of verses the segregation note touches, from Genesis through Revelation and on into the concordance.23 The newer group captures the reset edition, sorted by subject: the Godhead notes, the attribute notes, the notes on God's body, the pre-Adamite notes, and the revised Acts 17 page.24
New Testament page 159 gets its own count. Nine distinct photographs of that one page were available to me, and I read every disputed word against all of them.25 Appendix B carries the plates, the full transcription, and a record of which photograph settled which reading. If you want to check one thing in this book, check that page.
Why the Photographs Matter
You cannot search a photograph. That is exactly why it makes good evidence. A typed quotation can drift as people copy it, and page 159 has drifted badly online, in both directions. A photograph does not drift. Every image-based quotation in this book was transcribed by eye, cross-read against every other shot of the same page, and marked [illegible] wherever a word could not be read with confidence. Nothing was filled in from memory.
The second kind is the newspaper record of the 1936 federal case. Those documents are hosted on this site and listed individually, with paper, date, and headline, in Appendix A. Chapter 3 tells that story and asserts nothing the documents do not carry.
A few published articles and reference works helped me place Dake's influence and understand how his Bible has been received. I should name them and say plainly how they were used.
Two articles did the heaviest work. Perucci Ferraiuolo's news report in Christianity Today (January 1994) is a journalist's account of the growing scholarly concern over the Dake Bible in the early 1990s.26 Jeff Spencer and Steve Bright's longer study in the Christian Research Journal (2004) is footnoted to primary sources, including page-level citations of Dake's own works, which is why I lean on it more than on undated online material.27 Both were retrieved and read in full at drafting. Both are used in Chapter 23 for the facts they report and the sources they cite. Their judgments are labeled as theirs.
Stanley M. Burgess and Gary B. McGee's Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (1988) has an entry on Dake. I know its wording only through Spencer and Bright, who quote it, so I paraphrase its assessments rather than quoting them directly.28
Dake Publishing itself issued a public statement titled "Answering the Charge of Racism." I cite this from the version Spencer and Bright reference and from an archived reproduction consulted at drafting.29 Chapter 22 and Appendix C deal with what that statement says and does not say.
I should be clear about what these articles are and are not. They are not the spine of my argument. Dake's own books are. But these published sources helped me verify sales figures, trace the study Bible's reception, and confirm facts about its publishing history that Dake's own pages do not address. Where I could not verify wording from a secondary source, I paraphrased at the level of what it reports, and I said so in the footnote.
Two more sets of texts do the answering work in this book. Both deserve to be named openly.
The creeds come first. I quote the Apostles', Nicene, Chalcedonian, and Athanasian creeds directly, by name and article, because their exact wording is often the whole point.30 They are old enough to be public property, so quoting them costs nothing and hides nothing. I do not treat them as a second Bible. They are the church's summary of the first one. Chapter 7 shows the Scripture underneath every line it quotes. Where a confessional document outside the four ecumenical creeds helps make a point (the Westminster Shorter Catechism on the attributes, or the Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths on God as "almighty"), I cite it by name in the footnote and identify the tradition it comes from.31
Then the Bible itself. Scripture in this book is quoted in the New King James Version unless a footnote says otherwise. I chose the NKJV for Dake's readers. His study Bible is now published in both the King James and the New King James, so the NKJV meets them in a text they already trust. Where the English Standard Version says something more clearly for a modern ear, I use it and say so. And when Dake quotes Scripture inside his own notes, he is quoting the King James. I reproduce his wording exactly as he printed it.32 His italics, his spelling, his punctuation. That rule holds even where the old wording is what carried his argument.
"These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so." (Acts 17:11, NKJV)
That verse sits four chapters and one column away from the note this book examines longest. I did not choose it for the irony. I chose it because it is the instruction.
Four books. One for each thing a reader of this book is likely to want next. I have kept the shelf short on purpose. None of them are mine. None are linked, sold, or promoted here.33
For a study Bible you can trust, from inside your own tradition, look at the Fire Bible. It was first published as the Full Life Study Bible under general editor Donald C. Stamps. Stamps was an Assemblies of God missionary who wanted a study Bible written from a Pentecostal perspective. His notes give you that without giving you a redefined God.
For the Trinity, Michael Reeves wrote a short book called Delighting in the Trinity. It is the rare treatment that makes the doctrine feel like good news instead of homework. That is exactly what a reader leaving Dake's Godhead notes needs to hear.
For the attributes of God, Matthew Barrett's None Greater walks through the very perfections this book has been defending: God's simplicity, His changelessness, His presence everywhere, His power, His knowledge. J. I. Packer's older Knowing God covers similar ground more devotionally. It has fed ordinary Christians for over fifty years.
For learning to read the Bible well, Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart wrote How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. Fee spent his career as a Pentecostal New Testament scholar. The book teaches the one skill Dake's method never taught his readers: how to tell what kind of writing you are holding before you decide what it means.
What Naming a Book Here Does Not Mean
I have not read every page of every book above. I do not agree with every line in them. Naming a book is not endorsing it without qualification. The point of this list is the opposite of the point of Dake's notes. Read these the way I am asking you to read me: with the Bible open and your own judgment awake.
That is the apparatus. It exists to be used against me.
Every quotation in this book has a citation. Every citation names a source I actually opened. If I gave a page number, a page carries it. If I could not give one, I told you why. If I read a word off a photograph, I said which photograph. Appendix B records the readings that were hard to make out. Appendix D gathers Dake's redefined terms with the quotations behind them. Appendix E maps every doctrine back to the chapter that argues it.
So go check. Pull the Dake Bible off your own shelf and look up the pages. Compare your printing to Appendix C and see which edition you are holding. If I have gotten something wrong, the apparatus above is how you will find it. I would rather be caught than be trusted blindly. That is the same courtesy I have tried to give Dake: quote him exactly, then weigh him fairly.
The Bereans did not take Paul's word for it. Paul is not on record complaining. Chapter 25 ends where this appendix does. Keep your Bible. Test every note. The God who is actually there can handle your questions. He is greater than the notes ever let Him be.
↑ 1. The copies of God's Plan for Man, Bible Truths Unmasked, and Revelation Expounded used for this book are digitized texts in which the printed running heads survive inline, so the original page numbers can be recovered exactly.
↑ 2. The Truth About the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, The Rapture and the Second Coming, Heavenly Hosts, and Ages and Dispensations survive in the working library only as modern Dake Publishing digital editions. Each is saturated with Bible-software reference links in place of plain verse citations (1,211; 3,941; 1,390; and 1,030 such links respectively), which marks them as recent electronic settings rather than scans of printed pages. None carries printed pagination.
↑ 3. No dated title page or copyright page of any printing of the Dake Annotated Reference Bible is present in the working libraries. The one resident title-page scan is the bare Old Testament title page, undated. This appendix therefore names editions by physical and textual evidence only.
↑ 4. Finis Jennings Dake, Dake's Annotated Reference Bible (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales), N.T., p. 159, note on Acts 17:26. The presence of this note dates a printing as pre-1988; see Chapter 20, Chapter 22, and Appendix B.
↑ 5. The newer setting carries a dual-pagination running head on notes-continued pages, in the form "490 (280) 1 JOHN NOTES CONTINUED," meaning that page 490 of the new edition carries the notes that stood on page 280 of the older one. Citations in this book record both numbers whenever the head is visible in the image. The printing year of this edition is not established by any page available to me and is not asserted anywhere in this book.
↑ 6. Finis Jennings Dake, God's Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, 1949; 1977 printing), title page: "Published by Dake Bible Sales, Inc. P. O Box 625 Lawrenceville, Georgia 30246," and, of the author, "Author of Dake's Annotated Reference Bible, Revelation Expounded, Bible Truths Unmasked, and other books dealing with the Word of God."
↑ 7. Ibid., Foreword: the work "was first published in loose leaf form. There were 26 books with 52 lessons in all"; and, of its origin, "First publisher of the work was Bible Research Foundation, Inc." The same foreword describes the lessons as a correspondence course mailed to enrolled students.
↑ 8. Ibid., title page. The four parts are given there as Lessons 1–8 (the origin of all things), 9–18 (God's historical dealings with man), 19–36 (God's present dealings with man), and 37–52 (God's future dealings with man). Citations in this book give lesson and page together where the lesson is relevant.
↑ 9. The digitized text arrives in three sequential files whose embedded running heads cover pp. 2–344, 345–708, and 710–1008 respectively. Page-number coverage was verified by direct measurement of the running heads rather than assumed.
↑ 10. The digitization was produced by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from the Kahle/Austin Foundation, and carries the usual optical-recognition artifacts: split words, stray characters, and broken hyphenation. Repairs are silent and limited to spacing and rejoined hyphenation; no wording is altered, and any word that could not be read with confidence is marked rather than guessed.
↑ 11. Finis Jennings Dake, Revelation Expounded, or Eternal Mysteries Simplified (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales; enlarged edition copyright 1950), Preface. The same preface identifies the volume as a second edition and states the author's governing rule of interpretation, which Chapter 4 examines in full.
↑ 12. The United States Post Office introduced ZIP codes in July 1963. The title leaf of the copy in hand gives "Lawrenceville, Georgia 30245," so this copy cannot be a 1950 impression, whatever its copyright line says. This is offered as physical evidence about the copy, not as a claim about any particular printing year, which its pages do not disclose.
↑ 13. Running heads in the form "Revelation Expounded [page]" survive through p. 326 of the digitized text.
↑ 14. Finis Jennings Dake, Bible Truths Unmasked (Atlanta: Bible Research Foundation, Inc., 1950), copyright leaf. The digitized text renders the box number as "P. 0. Box," with a zero for the letter O; that obvious recognition artifact is silently corrected in the quotation above, per this book's practice of repairing machine-reading damage without altering a word. The printed title reads Bible Truths Unmasked, plural, and this book follows the printed form. The same title page carries a list of Dake's other works and an epigraph from Charles G. Finney.
↑ 15. Running heads in the form "Bible Truths Unmasked [page]" appear through p. 127, with page numbers marked in the text from p. 5 through p. 128.
↑ 16. The title page of Bible Truths Unmasked lists, among Dake's works, "The Truth About Anglo-Saxonism," "The Truth About Eternal Security," "The Truth About God," and "The Truth About the Baptism in the Holy Spirit," which places the booklet within a series. Not all of that series was available for this book, and nothing is claimed here about titles I did not read.
↑ 17. Finis Jennings Dake, The Truth About the Baptism in the Holy Spirit (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Publishing, modern digital edition; no copyright leaf resident), cited by section: e.g., "I. The Fact of a Spirit Baptism," "II. The Spirit Baptism is for All Believers," "IX. The Words 'Baptize' and 'Baptism' Defined."
↑ 18. Finis Jennings Dake, The Rapture and the Second Coming (modern digital edition; no copyright leaf resident), Foreword, signed "Finis Jennings Dake, Lawrenceville, Georgia, 1977," and opening, "Having been born in 1902, I have now had time to witness the coming and going of quite a few prophetic students."
↑ 19. This is a working rule with real consequences. Where Chapter 19 presses a claim about Dake's angelology, it does so from material the compilation attributes to him, and wherever possible corroborates the claim from God's Plan for Man or the Study Bible notes. Where corroboration was unavailable, the chapter says so.
↑ 20. Heavenly Hosts is cited by chapter and section heading (e.g., "An Introduction to Angels"; "Angels Have Spirit Bodies"). Ages and Dispensations is cited by its Roman-numeral sections (e.g., "III. The Pre-Adamite World") and by named subsections such as "The Plan of the Ages."
↑ 21. Heavenly Hosts, copyright leaf: "Copyright 1995 by Finette Dake Kennedy, Annabeth Dake Germaine, Finis Jennings Dake, Jr."; preface signed "David Patton, editor, Dake Publishing, Inc., May, 1995." The same preface acknowledges that Dake "never actually wrote a book exclusively on this theme."
↑ 22. Another Time... Another Place... Another Man, ed. Mark Allison and David Patton (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Publishing, Inc., 1997), described on its own title page as based on the writings of Finis Dake; the copy used for this book is the second printing, March 2000. This volume is not held in the same working library as the titles above; its citation details were established from its own copyright page in the library that holds it.
↑ 23. Twelve photographic archives holding sixty pre-1988 pages: the Genesis creation and kinds notes, the Deuteronomy 7 intermarriage note, the Leviticus 13–14 note on separating the leper, the Joshua, Kings, Ezra, and Nehemiah pages, the John and Acts note pages, and several concordance and cyclopedic-index pages. Chapter 21 quotes from these rather than paraphrasing them.
↑ 24. Eleven subject archives of the newer setting, including the "89 Proofs of A Divine Trinity" note, the omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence pages, the notes on God's bodily form, the pre-Adamite notes, and the revised Acts 17 page with its replacement note. The last of these is the load-bearing witness for Chapter 22 and Appendix C.
↑ 25. Nine distinct photographs across the two working libraries: five in one and four in the other, with one further copy that duplicates an existing shot. All are of the pre-1988 setting, and several carry the running head "NOTES ON ACTS OF THE APOSTLES CONTINUED 159." No post-1988 photograph of that page exists, for the reason Chapter 22 explains.
↑ 26. Perucci Ferraiuolo, "Scholars Scrutinize Popular Dake's Bible," Christianity Today, January 1994. A news report, not a scholarly study; it is used in this book for the facts it reports and the sources it names, and its judgments are attributed as the reporter's own.
↑ 27. Jeff Spencer and Steve Bright, "Dake's Dangerous Doctrine," Christian Research Journal 27, no. 5 (2004). The article is footnoted to primary sources, including page-level citations of God's Plan for Man and the Dake Annotated Reference Bible. Both Spencer/Bright and Ferraiuolo were retrieved and read in full at drafting, and their secondary citations (Keel Germaine, "Dake Bible Fills Niche," CBA Marketplace, January 1997, 12; Richard Love and Jennifer Bryon Owen, "The Pentecostal Study Bible," Charisma and Christian Life, January 1988, 39) are used only as those articles report them.
↑ 28. Stanley M. Burgess and Gary B. McGee, eds., Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids: Regency Reference Library, 1988), s.v. "Dake, Finis Jennings." Not resident in any project library; its wording is known here through Spencer and Bright (see note 27), who quote from it.
↑ 29. Dake Publishing, "Answering the Charge of Racism," a statement issued on the company's website. Cited by Spencer and Bright at their note 66; the version consulted at drafting was an archived reproduction rather than the live page. See Chapter 22 and Appendix C for the full edition record.
↑ 30. Cited by name and article in the traditional English text, e.g., "Athanasian Creed, art. 15–16." The Athanasian Creed does the heaviest work in Part II of this book and is owned by Chapter 7. The creeds are in the public domain and are quoted in full where their wording is at issue.
↑ 31. The Westminster Shorter Catechism is cited, for example, at Q. 4 ("God is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth") in the omnipotence and immutability chapters, and the Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths is cited where it confirms the same attributes from Dake's own denomination. A Reformed catechism and a Pentecostal confession making the same point underlines that the teaching this book defends is not one tradition's hobby. It is what every branch of the church has always said.
↑ 32. Two places where the underlying language is itself contested are handled in the body of the owning chapters rather than here: the Hebrew echad, "one," in Deuteronomy 6:4, treated in Chapter 7; and the reading "one blood" in Acts 17:26, treated in Chapter 21. In both cases the original-language point is given in English first, then transliterated and glossed.
↑ 33. These four works are named at the level of author and title only. None of them is quoted anywhere in this book, and none is linked, in keeping with this book's practice of linking only to documents hosted on this site. Readers should also know that Chapter 24 engages published defenses of Dake by the same rule in reverse: quoted only where the wording could be verified, and represented in careful paraphrase otherwise.