Holdeman attempted to reply to the accusation that his prophecy of the church split had not been fulfilled. Apparently he and his father had at first maintained that their departure was no split. He argued that "at the time (he had) little experience concerning such matters, and did not properly consider, what it takes to make a division." The two soon had agreed that this was the division he had foretold "and he who is so stubborn that he will withstand it and say that it is not the division, shall examine himself what kind of an ignorant and erroneous Spirit he possesses." He held up the example of Jonah in the Old Testament, who erroneously prophesided that Nineveh would be overthrown in forth days. Neither Jonah nor he had understood the true meanings of their prophesies, he said. So then, "if you can hold Jonah as a true prophet, though Nineveh was not overthrown, why must I be a false prophet though it came true what the Spirit of God spake through me; nevertheless not according to my own perceived meaning of it." In additional support of this, he quoted other Biblical instances where revelations and prophecies were misunderstood.

Jacob A. Loewen, a translation specialist, was hired to assist in the translatng. In a letter to the writer he recalled some of his experiences in the 1940s in the translation of Ein Spiegel Der Wahrheit under the direction of a Holdeman minister. "Translation attempts had been made by a number of ministers in Canada and other places in the U.S. Most of these ministers, when they found passages that just did not jive with modern-day thinking, were quite generous in the way they re-wrote the material. In fact, it was re-written so extensively in some parts that you just couldn't recognize from where it came... I could see that they definitely were not translations, but re-writes. It was this experience with their own ministers which led them to ask Mrs. A. E. Janzen to do the translating since she was a purist. Inasmuch as she didn't know German as a first language, she translated literally. "When we met certain points that were definitely "off" either in theology or in interpretation or even in misquotation from the Scriptures, the translater-in-charge would always call it a printing error and then we would proceed to "correct" the error because he wanted the modern-day interpretations. This type of adjustment was made except in some cases of a few doctrines, such as avoidance. Here he would tell me that this was spiritually discerned and that I would probably not understand it, and we would then leave the passage as it was.