Lesson 9: Typos and Types, Part 1

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Death and Judgment, Part 2 - Hebrews 9:27-28

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We are in lesson nine, Typos and Types in your workbook. I see some of you squinting as you're looking at the screen.

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If you can't read it, that says please sit so you can read this. So if you can't read that, you're gonna need to move up.

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All right, let's begin with the word of prayer. Father, our confidence is in your word and in your providence and sovereignty to get us your word and we do not need to be convinced that your word is true and that in your word you have revealed all that pertains to life and godliness, all that is necessary for us.

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We don't need to be convinced that we have in scripture all that you have ordained for us and appointed for us for we know that that is true and we would just pray that you would help us to understand how it is that you have delivered to us such a fantastic gift in your word.

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We pray that our understanding of history and what has transpired to give us your word may be increased today and that you'd be glorified through our study and our time here.

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We give this time to you and pray your blessing upon it, our conversation, our questions, the teaching and our understanding of it we ask in Jesus' name, amen.

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All right, so last week we looked at the chocolate chip cookie recipes and hopefully today you'll see why that whole enterprise was hopefully worthy.

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We're in lesson nine. First, under the existence of errors, did anybody remember how many manuscript or manuscript fragments we have of our

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New Testament? Remember what that was, that number? Off the top of your head. What was it?

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Somebody said 24 ,000. Okay, that was it, 24 ,000 manuscripts or manuscript fragments of New Testament documents.

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That doesn't mean 24 ,000 complete copies in Greek of the New Testament. Some fragments might be a paragraph that is survived or some of them might be a codex or some of them might be a scroll.

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Some of them might be just a page or two but we have in total 24 ,000 different manuscripts and then we add to that 86 ,000 quotations from the early church fathers between the years of 100 and 400 and I want you to remember what we said about those 86 ,000 quotations from the early church fathers.

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Sir David Dalrymple was asked, suppose the New Testament had been destroyed and every copy of it lost by the end of the third century, could it have been collected together again from the writings of the fathers of the second and third centuries?

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So he writes this, quote, that question roused my curiosity and as I possessed all the existing works of the fathers of the second and third centuries,

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I commenced to search and up to this time I have found the entire New Testament except 11 verses.

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So that's to say that if we got rid of all the codices and all of the parchments and all of the papyrus and everything, all the

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Greek manuscripts that we have, Latin manuscripts of New Testament documents from the first century and we just use the quotations of the early church fathers, we could recreate the entire

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New Testament except for 11 verses. So 24 ,000 New Testament manuscripts that we have to compare and contrast with one another.

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Does anybody have any idea how many variants there are? Now a variant would be a spelling change, it could be a word order change, it could be a missing word, it could be a verse that is in one manuscript that's not in another manuscript.

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Does anybody know how many variants there are? 1611 is the wrong answer,

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Josh says. That's his independent fundamentalist Baptist King James only background coming out for you.

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It's not 1611, you have another guess? Sorry, what?

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14 ,000, no, it's 200 ,000. Does that sound like a lot? Sounds like a lot, doesn't it?

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It's not a lot and they're not significant variants as we're gonna see in the weeks ahead. So I want you to keep that number in your head, 200 ,000, don't be panicked by that because of the way that you count variants, if they have the same variant in five different manuscripts, that doesn't count as one variant, that counts as five variants.

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Okay, so that puts it in a little bit of a different perspective, doesn't it? And you're gonna see, we're gonna talk about today how those variants came to be, how it is that we have footnotes in our

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Bible that says some early manuscripts do not contain this verse or do not contain this phrase. We have those notations in our

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New Testament. So how do we get those variants? How do we get those variations, those, yeah?

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Oh, you're pointing up at the screen. My loser, what's this about? Go ahead. Okay. Yes, that is true, none of these variants have anything to do with essential

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Christian doctrine. For instance, the deity of Christ does not rest upon some variant that we find in a 15th century manuscript.

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Okay, the eternality of God does not rest upon some lone textual variant somewhere that we dug out of a cave in a 7th century manuscript.

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You're gonna see later on exactly what type of variants they are, we're gonna begin to discuss some of that this morning and the significance of them.

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Yes, is this what people use when they say there are contradictions in the

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Bible? Typically not, because people are not thinking of variants when they think of contradictions. Usually, atheists that raise contradictions, they're just taking the

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English text and they're saying, well, it says this here and it says that there, and usually when you look at both of them in their context, the contradiction goes away.

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These are the things that Bart Ehrman would use to say we don't have any idea what the original New Testament said or what the original authors wrote because there are 200 ,000 variants, so how can you possibly know what was really said when you have 200 ,000 variants and only 24 ,000 manuscripts?

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Bart Ehrman likes to make it sound as if we have 10 different completely contradictory copies or versions of Mark's Gospel, and we don't have that.

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The type of variants that you're gonna look at here in just a moment, we're gonna look at part of them this morning, you'll see how insignificant they really are.

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All right, the entrance of errors into these copies and the transmission of the text is inevitable.

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I wanna give you a scenario. I want you to imagine that I gave you a copy of Shakespeare's work, not all of his completed work.

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Let's just pick one. Hamlet, what was it? Macbeth. Let's say that I give you a copy of Macbeth, and your job is to, and it's a handwritten copy, written 50 years ago by somebody that you've never met.

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Your job is to make an exact duplicate, an exact copy in handwriting with a quill on paper of Shakespeare's Macbeth.

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What's that? In cursive, Nathanael wants to do this in cursive. So since we brought that up, you know how difficult it is to read the previous generation's handwriting sometimes, isn't it, right, or even two generations ago?

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Sometimes that can be very difficult, but imagine you have a copy, let's say it's in cursive, of Macbeth, and your job is to read that and to make an exact copy of Macbeth.

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And I ask you to copy it word for word. Do you think that you would get it 100 % correct? You wouldn't.

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You wouldn't. If I asked you to copy down that sentence up there by hand, could you get it 100 % correct?

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Yeah, so why is it that you could get that 100 % correct, but you couldn't get Macbeth 100 % correct?

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Why is that? What's the difference between them that allows for almost the inevitability of errors coming into the transcription of that, yeah?

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It's in cursive, that's right. You get the prize for the day. That's why cursive should die the death of the

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Latin language, yes. It stands out, okay?

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So let's imagine that I gave you Macbeth in print and your job, and it's not in cursive, but it's in print, is your job is still to copy

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Macbeth word for word and get it correct. Could you do it?

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It's too long. Okay, that's really the difference between it, isn't it? The length has everything to do with this because in the copying of something of that length, there is an opportunity for all kinds of errors to be made in the copying of it, no matter how diligent we are in trying to get it exactly, perfectly correct.

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Yep, yeah, very difficult to get through one page.

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Okay, now I wanna give you a different scenario. I want you to imagine that you, well, let me give you a personal scenario.

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I sit down at my desk in a well -lit room, and I have a little thing that I can prop open a book on, and I'm going to copy out an extended passage of this book because I'm either writing a sermon,

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I'm quoting Spurgeon, or I'm writing a book, and I'm quoting somebody else, so I have several paragraphs there, and I prop that open on my desk, and I set it up in a well -lit room, and I am in a comfortable chair, and my eyesight is very good at that range, and I can sit down on a keyboard with spell check and with grammar check on a computer, and I can sit there, and I can type out an entire paragraph as I'm looking at the book that I'm copying.

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I don't even have to look away from the book because I can actually transcribe without my eyes ever even leaving the page, and I'm a fairly good typer, typist, typist, thank you.

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I'm a fairly good typist. Even when I get the typist right, I can't get the other words right.

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I'm a fairly good typist, so my eyes don't even have to leave what I'm copying, and I can be writing with my keyboard.

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Am I prone to make mistakes even doing that? Yeah, now take that same scenario, and I want you to imagine that it is not a clearly printed book that I have to copy, but instead it is a handwritten document, and the lighting is not a well -lit office, and I'm not sitting in a comfortable chair, and my eye has to go from what

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I'm copying to what I'm writing, and I'm doing it by hand with a quill on parchment or papyrus, and I'm doing it hurriedly because the entire government is trying to extinguish everything that I'm copying, and all of the people that I'm associated with are being persecuted, and what

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I'm doing is illegal, and I could be hunted and hated and even executed for doing it.

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So I might even be doing this in a cave. I might even be doing this in a cellar, in a basement, in some place where the conditions are not ideal.

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Does that not even exacerbate the problem that I'm faced with in trying to make an accurate copy of what it is that I'm copying?

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Now imagine even further the scenario that the handwritten document that I'm making a copy of, that I'm writing out by hand, imagine that it is in some way deteriorated.

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It's a little worn and worse for wear because of either how old it is or how far it has traveled or even the conditions that it has had to endure in people hunting for it and hating it and wanting to extinguish it.

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See how many different variables there are that create variances in what we are copying from what we are creating?

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All right, what are the kind of mistakes that we make? Give me a few of them. We're gonna look at a bunch of them here in just a moment, but what are the kind of mistakes that we make when we're making copies of other things?

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Punctuation, we make spelling errors, correct, yep. Yes? Oh man, skip a line.

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Right, I might even repeat a line. Yeah, I could skip a line or repeat a line because my eye is going from what

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I'm copying to what I'm writing, it's going back and forth like this and my eye, every time my eye lands on what it is that I'm trying to copy, it runs the risk of landing in a space that is not quite where I left off the last time that I was writing, correct?

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Like I've had this happen where I'm typing out something and my mind is somewhere else and I'm in a book and I'm typing out what's there and my mind and my fingers go and they skip a line and I leave out an entire line of what

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I'm typing and I don't even catch it in what I'm doing and I go back and I re -read and I think that doesn't make any sense, oh, I left out an entire line because my mind is thinking about something else.

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So what other kind of errors do we make? Transposing letters and words, yep, we can flip the word order sometimes, to two and two, there's homophone, is that the right word?

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Yeah, errors. Grammarly wouldn't correct it, that's correct.

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All right, so does the presence of an error mean that you cannot know what was originally written?

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Okay, let me give you this scenario. Let's say that it's not just you, but everybody in this room was given the task of copying

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Macbeth. So all of you had a copy to go from and all of you, let's say that all of you are using the exact same copy, the exact same original and all of you are making an exact copy in handwriting of Macbeth.

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Is there anybody in this room that would get it perfectly correct? I would almost guarantee nobody in this room could get it perfectly correct.

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Lanny's gonna make a spelling error, okay? Vince is gonna make a letter transposing of letters and a switching of the letters.

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Somebody else is gonna flip the order of words. Somebody else might leave out a line. Somebody else might get a name wrong, put the wrong name in for somebody who says this line.

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Somebody else might add the same line twice or accidentally copy the same paragraph twice. So all kinds of those errors could be made by everybody in here.

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Everybody's gonna make a different kind of mistake, a different group of mistakes, a different, amount of variance in the copying.

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Would I be able, if I destroyed the original of that Macbeth, would I be able to take all 60 of those copies and put them together and be able to come up with almost 100 % certainty exactly what is written?

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I'd be able to do that, wouldn't I? Because I'd be able to take Lanny's copy, where he's got, it's littered with spelling mistakes and I'd be able to compare all of Lanny's spelling mistakes with everybody else's non -spelling mistakes and say, you know what,

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I can judge from Lanny's copy that he's got the gist of this right but the spelling is wrong but all these other people spelled this word exactly right.

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I'd be able to know what was written in that case, wouldn't I? If I just had one or two copies that kept getting the words mixed up or the name

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Macbeth switched with somebody else and every time that they used it, I would be able to look at all the rest of them and be able to say, at this point, this particular copy seems to have missed a line here but nobody else that copied this missed this line.

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I'd be able to look at that and tell that, wouldn't I? So that is basically what we have with New Testament documents.

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Let's go into the type of errors that we have in the New Testament. This is under number three. Sorry, not errors in the

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New Testament. That's the wrong way to say it. The type of errors that we have in the variants, the manuscripts, the copying errors is what we're talking about.

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Not errors in the text, not errors in the original, not errors in doctrine. We're talking about copying errors only.

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I wanna be clear about that. Okay, so there is, first of all, errors of the eye.

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This is under, sorry, unintentional is letter A. I'm not sure what you have to fill in or what you have written in. So letter

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A, we're gonna talk just today about unintentional errors. These are errors that arise from some imperfection of a human faculty, an imperfection of human faculty.

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First, we have errors of the eye and under this, letter A, the wrong division of words, the wrong division of words.

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Do you remember how the unsealed text looked like when we read that passage from Hebrews where all of the words were just at the end of every line.

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It was broken off. Do you remember that? There were no spaces between words and no punctuation. It looked something like this.

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Romans 1, one, two, three. Okay. Early manuscripts, remember, this is why we covered this earlier.

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Early manuscripts didn't make breaks between words. They didn't make punctuation. They didn't put things in quotation marks.

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They didn't use that and the unseals would look very much like this. They didn't separate the words and when they did divide words, sometimes in copying out the words, they would divide the word differently.

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So what does that say? He is nowhere.

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So some of you got that and some of you got that. He's nowhere.

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Now how do you know what the original author meant by that up there? Context, right?

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What if the context doesn't tell you if he's here or nowhere? You gotta choose if you're gonna divide that word up, right?

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How about this? What does that say? Did you ever see abundance on the table?

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How many of you saw that? Now that's kind of ridiculous. Nobody would write that in a

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New Testament document, right? But that is a possible word division, is it not, of that sentence? Okay, some of you got that.

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What's that? Abundance. All right, so that is called the division of words, the wrong division of words.

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That counts for some textual variance in our New Testament where a word is divided and it could read this or it could read that, but it has to do with how those unsealed texts are divided, how those words are divided.

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All right, then there is letter B, homeotelioton.

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And this is the omission of a letter, or word, or even a whole line. And this is what Lanny mentioned where your eye goes up and in copying, it misses a particular line.

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Maybe the ending of two lines is exactly the same, and so your eye goes back to the ending of one line that ended a certain way, or you left that line that ended a certain way, and then you wrote that down, and when your eye jumped back up, it missed a line below it that happened to end there.

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And the exact same way, and you picked up there in the writing of it. That accounts for some textual variance.

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Your eye jumps from one group or another with a similar ending. For instance, you may be copying sanctification, justification, glorification, information, and propitiation, and all of those end the same way.

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So if your eye leaves off on one of those shuns and your eye returns to the shun, you might leave out one of the shun words.

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Or two lines of the text may end with the same word. We just talked about that. That accounts for probably this textual variant in 1

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John 3, verse one, where the King James reads, "'Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed "'upon us that we should be called the sons of God.

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"'Therefore the world knoweth us not because it knew him not.'" Does anybody know what your NASB or what a modern translation would read there?

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Modern translation would read this, "'See how great a love the Father hath bestowed on us "'that we should be called children of God, "'and such we are.

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"'For this reason the world does not know us "'because it did not know him.'" Now, there are some manuscripts that leave out the words, and such as we are, or such we are.

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How does that come about? How did they miss that? Well, here's that word in Greek. Do you see the common endings there?

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Feu kleithomen, kai esmen. So that common ending, that kai esmen is and we are, or such we are.

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Now, if you're copying that and your eye misses the esmen and you leave that kleithomen, and you go write that down and your eye returns to the original and you catch esmen there, that ending, and you jump to the next word, you could leave out those two words simply because your eye missed those two words when it returned back to the document.

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That's called a homotelioton. Yeah. Okay, so that's a good question.

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If the NASB has that in there, are we to assume the oldest manuscript has that in there? That's not something I can answer because the

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NASB, the King James is gonna be translated from later manuscripts with the Texas Receptus than some of the other ones, the more eclectic texts that the

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NASB and other modern translations are made from. So now a King James only person would look at the contrast between those two translations and he would say, look, see there, the

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NASB added something to the text. Well, did the NASB add something to the text or should that have been in there?

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But then the manuscript that the King James was translated from didn't have that in there. So we might go back and find out that not only did the majority of manuscripts have that, the majority of the early manuscripts have that in it.

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And that the text that the King James was translated from didn't have that in there. It's not theologically significant, no.

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So it doesn't really make a difference? It doesn't make a difference. But the question is we'll see in the weeks to come when we talk about King James only -ism, the question is not do the modern translations take things out of the

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Bible because that's what modern translations are always accused of doing. You've removed the deity of Christ.

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You've removed the blood of Christ. You've removed the name of Christ. That's always the accusation. And of course, the assumption behind that accusation is that the

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King James is the standard and that the NASB or any modern translation that might not translate it the same way or that might not have that phrase in there has some conspiracy behind it to remove some essential doctrine from the text of Scripture.

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If the NASB was trying to remove the deity of Christ from the text of Scripture, they did a horrible job, a horrible job because it's all over the text of the

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New Testament. So the question is we would have to look at what manuscripts have those words in it and are they earlier?

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Are they the majority of the manuscripts? And that's the job of a textual critic is to determine is that likely part of the original.

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The King James may have been translated from a group of manuscripts that left that out because Lanny, when he was translating it, missed that phrase or when he was copying it, missed that phrase.

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And so that's the manuscript tradition that the King James took off on. And then we've discovered earlier manuscripts that all contained that phrase.

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And so we would say it's more likely that that phrase was originally there in the original and that it was skipped over by an error of the eye in the copying of it.

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All right, any other questions about that one? Okay, another error of the eye under number

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C is hyplography, which means a single writing.

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And a single writing is like I may be copying the word Mississippi and I leave out one of the

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ISS's. So I do M -I -S -S -I -P -P -I instead of M -I -S -S -I -S -S -I -P -P -I.

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And hypography is when you leave out one of the things that you should have included because your eye skipped it or you missed it.

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The opposite of that is a tautography, tautography, and that's when your eye picks up the same letter or the word twice.

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So you include it twice. Instead of writing Mississippi as M -I -S -S -I -S -S -I -P -P -I, you transcribe it

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M -I -S -S -I -S -S -I -S -S -I -P -P -I. You add another one in there. That's a tautography. There's one type of, that's a type of error that created a manuscript that reads this at Matthew 27, 17, whom do you want me to release?

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To you, Jesus Barabbas or Jesus? Okay, so there's a manuscript that reads that. Now, we know it's

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Barabbas or Jesus. It wasn't Jesus Barabbas, but this picking up of something and including it twice instead of once is a variant that works its way into a manuscript.

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There's a manuscript that reads that way. Letter E, any questions before we move on?

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Letter E are transpositions, and this is the reversal of a position of two letters or words.

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It's technically known as a metathesis, and it happened a lot in Hebrew numbers, in Hebrew, because Hebrew uses letters for numbers.

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Letters are used as numerals, too. English examples would be, and this is more of an issue of the ear, but the word comfortable.

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Is there anybody that really says comfortable? Comfort -able? We all say what?

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Comfortable, is that how it's spelled? Not even close to how it's spelled, right? But it is the switching of letters and sounds in the spelling out of a word.

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Another one is Brett Favre's name. Brett Favre, how do you spell Brett Favre? It's not

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F -A -R -V -E. It's F -A -V -R -E. Now, somebody either spelled it wrong or they pronounced it wrong, but that is the transpositioning of two letters.

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Or the word tired, how do you spell tired? T -I -R -E -D.

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It's not T -I -E -R -D. It's not tired. It's tired. Any of us gonna be tired before church is over today?

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No, we're all gonna be tired by the time church is over today. So that is the switching of sounds with letters.

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The same thing happens in some manuscripts and in the spelling of some words when you simply switch letters around based upon how something was pronounced and not necessarily how something would have been written.

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Okay, before we move on to errors of the ear, any other questions, any questions? Do any of the errors that we've talked about so far, could any of them destroy the credibility of the

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New Testament documents when you find one of these in a passage? No, that's why I started with the

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Hamlet illustration. Sorry, not Hamlet, Macbeth. That's why we started with the

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Macbeth illustration and how that might play, how errors that we all make. These are all the kinds of errors that we would make in writing through Macbeth.

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Okay, number two, errors of the ear. Errors of the ear. This happened when manuscripts were copied by a scribe listening to a reader, and this sometimes happened.

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We talked about this last week with the chocolate chip cookie recipe with granulated and granulated. You remember that?

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And what was the other word? There was an uncreased, ungreased. Okay, so those are errors of the ear that creep in. Somebody is dictating something and somebody else is writing it out, and words that sound alike are sometimes confused.

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So in English, for instance, we have the word effect. Spell that for me. Well, that's a good question, but I just said it's effect.

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So you're gonna transcribe that out. You're gonna write affect or effect. It might depend on the context, right?

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But if you're not necessarily listening for the context, but you're simply dictating what I'm saying, you might not be thinking about whether this particular word choice works in the context or not.

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You might simply just be trying to transcribe exactly what you heard. It's an error of the ear. And we do this so often in English where we use words that sound alike, there, there, and there, to, to, and to, affect, effect.

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We do this so often in English that we don't often even think about how it is that it might sound or what other people might be thinking that we mean by that because we use words that sound alike so frequently in our own language.

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Is there a question? Yeah. If they were reading it that way to begin with.

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Yeah, that's a good point. In that situation, you're trusting that the person who's reading it is getting it exactly right as it was written.

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Okay, this creates a textual variant, this error of the ear creates a textual variant in Matthew 19, 24, where we read, again,

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I say to you, it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. There are some manuscripts after the fifth century that read, again,

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I say to you, it's easier for a rope to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Camel and rope, now those are two different things, aren't they?

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But that's a textual variant. What creates that? Well, it's the

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Greek word kamalos and kamalos. That's affect and effect, by the way, the difference, those two pronounced almost identically, even though they're spelled differently and they mean something different.

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Okay, I'll give you another example. Romans 5, one, let us have peace with God.

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We have peace with God. Okay, ekamen, ekamen.

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One of those is a long O, one of them is a short O, and it's the difference between let us and we have peace with God.

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Okay, so that's an error of the ear. There's some manuscripts that would read one way, there's some manuscripts that would read another way on that, yes?

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When did they do the reading and the transcribing of it? That we don't know, we just know that it was a manner or a method of making copies of New Testament documents.

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It was one of the ways that they would use, sometimes a scribe would do it from one original to a copy. We know that sometimes there were scribes who did this in schools where one person read the document and others transcribed it.

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It's a very efficient way, by the way, of doing it. You could get five or six copies made at the same time from one document, so it was an efficient way of making copies, but it opens up the opportunity for errors of the ear to creep in in the transcribing of this, which creates a textual variant.

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There was a question over here, yes? Yeah, they could have pronounced the word differently.

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We have that in our own area. Yep, yes? You don't natively speak

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English? Yeah, cinnamon is what you put on your toast.

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You're saying synonyms, okay. Yeah, yes, yep, yeah, very good.

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For non -English speakers, your point was that you have words that sound exactly alike, like sail and sale. Yes, sure.

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Yeah, so that's a good, Paul used an amanuensis sometimes, which was somebody who took down what he dictated to them.

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He makes indication of even names as amanuensis at the end of a couple of his letters, I think. So then the challenge is, is it possible that their error could have crept in between what

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Paul said and what the person who wrote it said? And that would be possible if, what?

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Yeah, if Paul didn't read it, but also, if God had not promised to inspire those documents.

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So our doctrine of inspiration goes back to, again, I'm not trying to convince you that scripture is the word of God. It is, we know this, we understand it.

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So it's our presupposition. I'm trying to show you how it is that he has preserved scripture for us. So we go back to the doctrine of inspiration where God has promised to reveal himself and that he has preserved these documents for us.

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And that would preserve, that would prevent error because our doctrine of inspiration and fallibility says, not that the transcribing or the copying of these documents is infallible and inerrant, but our doctrine of infallibility and inerrancy says that the original autographs were inerrant and inspired.

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So therefore, what God preserved or what God guaranteed was that what Paul wrote, what that amanuensis copied down, and what

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I would assume got read back to Paul and probably read several times before it went out, I would assume that.

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I would not assume that if I was aware that I was writing scripture that I would just send something out without looking it over first, especially if it had been written by somebody else.

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I would read it through or I would have it read to me a couple of times before it went out. I do that with the things that I wrote.

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I would assume that Paul would do that with the things that he wrote as well. So if somebody's gonna raise that issue, yes, but then we go back to what we covered with inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility in the beginning, that God has promised that what he has written and preserved for us is in fact infallible and inerrant in that original copy.

33:35

I think Paul did know at the time he was writing scripture. I think we covered this in one where you were absent. You weren't here because there's evidence that Paul demanded that his writings be read in the public worship of scripture.

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And Paul says, the things that I write to you are not from me, they're from the Lord. Paul was aware in some sense that he was writing authoritative documents of the

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New Covenant. And Peter, who lived at the same time as Paul, called Paul's writings scripture. Paul referred to Luke's writings as scripture when he says the workman is worthy of his hire.

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He quotes there Luke's gospel of the words of Jesus in, I forget what chapter it is in Luke, but Paul refers to that as written scripture.

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So Paul refers to the gospel of Luke as scripture. Peter refers to Paul's writings as scripture. And Paul himself was aware that his writings and the writings of the apostles should be read, preached, and exhorted, and encouraged in the congregation in the same way that the prophets of the

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Old Testament were read. Yeah, so that was, we did cover that, yep.

34:29

Again, the theology is there. Right. God's essential theology he wants is there, whether there's a variant or not.

34:39

Right, right. Okay, let me give you a couple more examples of these errors of the ear.

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We have one at 1 Thessalonians 2, seven, where the variant is we were babes among you or we were gentle among you.

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And it's hapioi and napioi. Those are the two words that are used there. Again, that's an error of the ear.

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1 John 1, four, that your joy may be full, that our joy may be full.

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That's the difference between homone and haemone. Very similar sounding words.

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That accounts for a textual variant. Revelation 1, five, he washed us from our sins or he freed us from our sins.

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Lusante is the pronunciation of that word. That is a homophone. Those words sound alike, though they are spelled differently and they mean different things.

35:29

But again, that's another error of the ear. Okay, any questions about that before we move on?

35:36

To errors of memory. Yeah, Mike. I have this amazing. They're open the camel, yeah.

36:08

Right. And then when you look at the words one letter or.

36:21

Right. Yep, sometimes it could be an accent mark. Yeah, that's correct.

36:31

Okay, errors of memory is another one. These are less common. This is when a scribe would forget the precise word and substitute a synonym.

36:37

These are rare, but they do account for some textual variants. They may insert wording by habit that comes from another similar passage.

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For instance, I was trying to memorize Titus 1, one through four one time and the introduction to Paul's letters.

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Ever try and memorize the introduction to Paul's letters? They all sound very similar, but they also can be a little bit very, it might be

36:57

Christ Jesus and Jesus Christ or Christ our Lord or Jesus our Lord, depending on which one you're memorizing. Okay, they can be very similar.

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We have parallel passages in the Gospels. We have parallel passages in Paul's epistles. The book of Ephesians and the book of Colossians sometimes use the same sentences or similar sentences that even has a similar structure to the books themselves.

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And so if there are two very similar passages and you're very familiar with one, sometimes when you are copying from an original document into another document, you can make the error of leaving there and writing something from memory that you thought was there, but it's not.

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It was actually in a parallel passage or a different passage that you were reading, but the wording is very similar. And so you might, in copying that, add the wording or even transpose the word's order in a different way because of an error in your memory.

37:42

Back when Shepley was in Awana, he was having to memorize that phrase and it was in Luke's Gospel where Jesus said, this is my body which is given for you.

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Do this in remembrance of me. He was memorizing out of Luke's Gospel. But he was, as a kid, he was so used to hearing me say, this is my body which is broken for you, he could not get that right.

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He had memorized what I say before every communion service. This is my body which is broken for you. And he was trying to memorize

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Luke's Gospel. He said, this is my body which is given for you. And every time he would try and recite it, he would work in that word broken instead of given.

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And he struggled with that so much. Why? It's an error of the memory. Well, if you're copying Luke's Gospel, do you see how very easy it would be to simply rely upon what you had memorized in your head from a different passage when you're making that copying down?

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And you might even put that word in there without even thinking about it and then go back and pick up and continue on. That creates sometimes a textual variant.

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Then there are errors of judgment. Dim lighting, poor original copy to work from, poor eyesight, tiredness, bad handwriting, hurried copyists all contribute to errors of copying.

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And even in a day when you have computers and fact checkers and spell checkers, it's very difficult to get things perfectly right.

38:54

Even, by the way, even in the Bible that I have, there are typographical errors in my

39:03

Bible that I notice every year when I'm reading through it. Right, now this is in a document that saw more eyeballs before it was ever published than any of my books will ever see in all of the time that they're ever published.

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Before they were ever published, they went through review after review and then typesetting and editing and all of that.

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Dozens of people, dozens and dozens of people saw those things before it ever went to print. And yet typos still exist and still come through.

39:33

All right, let me give you an example of another, let's see, we got time for this. Yeah, all right, we'll go through this.

39:42

We're on letter C under number four, actually. You have letter C under number four? Okay, don't worry,

39:47

I'm just adding numbers as the letters would go along. Okay, let me ask you a question. Do you ever write down in the margin of your

39:53

Bible something, a note, an explanation, a saying, something that this means?

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Some of the wording might, that might elucidate or explain the meaning of something that's a little bit unclear to you in the original text.

40:05

Do you ever do that? Well, I want you to imagine that your Bible is a handwritten scroll, parchment or papyrus. Your Bible is handwritten and you have written down something in the margin of that and then you've shut it up and you put it in your library and then you die.

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20 years later, your kids are going through your stuff and they discover in this jar this parchment that dad had or mom had and you unroll it and you think, man, this is fantastic.

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This is pretty good condition. We should make a copy of this before it deteriorates any further. You go about the business, set about the business of making a copy of that or your kid does.

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Remember, you're dead in this scenario. I've got to remember who my first, second, third person. So your kid goes about the business of making a copy of your copy of the

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Bible with a note in the margin, handwritten and then he or she comes to the place where you wrote that note in the margin and they have to wonder something.

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What are they wondering? Should I add it or if I put that in there, am

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I really adding it? When dad made a copy of this, did he skip that line or phrase and make an error and then later on notice it and go back and put it in the margin so that it belongs there because you don't have, your kid doesn't have dad to ask.

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Is this your explanation of this or is this something that you skipped over when you made this copy and later out found out and added into the margin?

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They don't have you to ask and they don't have a copy of the original that you were copying from. So now they're faced with two choices.

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Either that little marginal note is added because dad missed it when he originally made the copy of this and so I should include it or that was just dad's marginal note.

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And I don't know if it belongs or not. So what do you do? Now again, imagine that you're not the dead person, that you're the person making the copy.

41:59

What do you do with that marginal note? What are your options?

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Add it or leave it out? You could add it and footnote it, yeah.

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Or you could leave it out. Do you wanna leave it out? You wanna cut that out?

42:23

Maybe it should be included. Maybe you work it into the text because you assume in that moment, because it fits in the text, maybe you assume in that moment that you know what, it would look really good here.

42:32

This seems like it's reasonable and you include it in the text. Maybe you include it in the text with a little asterisk to mark or you set it off by brackets or something to mark that it was in the footnote at some point.

42:42

But then when somebody else gets to that and they're copying that document where you included what was a marginal note in generation one, you included that.

42:50

So now they're copying that out and they come to that and it's got a little asterisk by that. What does that mean to them?

42:57

Right? This is, yeah, Paul? That would be my take on the

43:05

Yohannian comment in 1 John 5. So there is that passage in 1 John 5 and I don't have it here to spell it out but it talks about the water.

43:15

You know which one I'm talking about? Somebody could bring it up. John 5, verse seven and eight.

43:23

1 John, sorry, not John, right? 1 John 5, seven and eight. I'll let somebody read that real quick.

43:33

So that is, I think, the best explanation for that textual variant in 1 John 5, seven and eight.

43:45

Yeah, there are three that testify, the spirit, the water and the blood and the three are in agreement. It's a very Trinitarian verse.

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There's some people would accuse you of being a non -Trinitarian if you didn't include the Yohannian comma in your translation of the text but our doctrine of the

43:59

Trinity does not hinge upon 1 John 5, seven and eight. Okay, so that would be my explanation for how 1

44:06

John 5, seven and eight, which all of you should have a footnote in your Bible that says the earliest manuscripts don't contain these verses.

44:13

Yeah, Garrett? The marginal note could be in a different hand.

44:21

That's right. What if it's in the same hand? Then you might assume that the person who was copying it left that out and kept it in there.

45:00

I have read that entire explanation of that passage except for the part about the Babylon library. Yeah, so this is a marginal note that was probably creeped in.

45:09

I don't think Erasmus wanted it in his translation. I did read that and hear that. According to what

45:14

I have studied and found out, there's no manuscript dated earlier than the 16th century that has that verses seven and eight in it.

45:21

So the best explanation is probably that it was a marginal note that crept its way into the text. Yes, Nathel?

45:27

In this NASB that I have, verse eight, a few late manuscripts add, in heaven the fault of these three are one, and there are three that testify on it, but it adds that whole section.

45:44

Yeah. That some manuscripts have. Yeah, and you have to put that in there because there are late manuscripts that have those words in it.

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But we footnote it and note it because we have no early manuscripts that have that, nor would we say it's the majority of manuscripts that have that reading in it.

45:59

All right, and then there are, I wanna get to the, let me just give 60 seconds here on the rest of these, the typos.

46:08

All right, we have a textual variant that deals with 1 Timothy 3 .16. By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness.

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He who is revealed in the flesh was vindicated in the spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among nations, believed on in the world, taken up into glory.

46:20

That's the NASB. The King James says God was manifested in the flesh. And so they would say, the critics of the

46:25

NASB would say, see there, they are taking the deity of Christ right out of the King James translation, again, attacking the deity of Christ because the new translations don't cover that.

46:34

Well, that comes back to a textual variant. Remember I talked about in unseal forms, one of the things that they would do is they would take the name of God and remove the vowels and it would become that capital theta and capital sigma with a line above it would represent the vowels.

46:48

And that was a shorthand way of referring to God. And that's what it would look like in unseal form.

46:54

Well, the word he is Omicron with that C. And so that's what it would look like in a document if you were trying to copy it, that would be the difference.

47:03

One would be God in unseal form, one would be he in unseal form. And how would you copy that and translate that if you were trying to do that?

47:16

Gotta make a little bit of a judgment call there, right? Thankfully, the doctrine of the deity of Christ does not rest on 1

47:22

Timothy at all. I can absolutely solidly say,

47:28

I have no doubt that God was manifested in the flesh, even if the original document said he. God was manifested in the flesh.

47:35

All the scripture is clear about that. Our doctrine of the deity of Christ does not hang upon that one manuscript and whether that is the name of God or the word he in unseal form.

47:44

So these variants are not significant in that way. Yes, go ahead. Yeah. Does that mean that they don't honor

48:03

God? No, so with this question, we'll close and then that is it for, that's it.

48:11

Next week, we'll pick up with the intentional changes. Intentional changes, yeah, there were a couple. So the question that Nathael has, when

48:19

I quote other people and they don't capitalize the pronoun he for God in their writings, does that mean that they don't believe in the deity of Christ or the deity of God?

48:28

No, that's not it. The capitalizing of pronouns in reference to God is more of a modern convention.

48:34

If you go back and you read the Puritans and other older writings, they didn't do that. They didn't even capitalize pronouns that related to Jesus.

48:40

I'm a stickler about doing it whenever I'm referring to God. I capitalize pronouns so it's absolutely clear who

48:46

I'm referring to when I'm writing. But even modern writers like Priscilla Schreier and I don't know,

48:51

Charles Stanley, I don't think Charles Stanley does it. Even modern writers who do that, they're not denying the deity of Christ. It's just more of a later convention that not all writers would pick up and do.

49:04

Blackaby doesn't capitalize them either, yes. Not correct,

49:09

I'm not recommending those authors. Those are the authors I critique in my book, so. All right, let's pray together.

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We're over time and I apologize for that. Father, we are thankful to you for your many rich blessings and again for your word.

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We are convinced that it is true, accurate, authoritative, infallible, inerrant, inspired, for you can speak nothing that is in error.

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You can speak nothing that you do not preserve for us in written form, so we are grateful for that. We are thankful that you have loved us and that you have given us such a treasure in your word, a treasure of wealth, of wisdom and knowledge, a treasure of revelation concerning who you are and your redemptive plan.