Apologetics Session 5 - The Bible - Part 1

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Apologetics Session 6 - The Bible - Part 2

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So I'm just gonna open up in a word of prayer. Lord God, I just thank you so much for this day.

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I thank you for all these men who've come out to learn more about how to make a defense for what we believe,

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God. I just ask that you would bless this time that we would all learn and have a good discussion.

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God, I just ask for your presence in our midst. I pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.

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Amen. All right, so the topic has changed. We are going to talk about the

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Bible today. So we've already discussed, Ivan has led us through what is faith.

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And so we wanted to start this apologetic series with sort of some foundational things and build our way up into things like Christian doctrine.

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And so Ivan led us through what is faith for a couple of sessions so that we could understand belief.

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And then Drew has led us up through truth. What is truth? Can there be such a thing as absolute truth?

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And sort of the implications of that. What I'm gonna try and tackle, and this has been a learning experience for me kind of diving into this.

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So I may have answers, I may not have answers for everything, but I've compiled a lot of information about the

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Bible. And so we're gonna talk a bit about how we got the Bible, why it's important that the

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Bible be inspired or textually or historically accurate, how we got the canon.

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I'm gonna dive into a bit of textual criticism and go into some of the evidences for it.

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So I wanted to start by basically asking a question. Is it important that the

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Bible is textually, historically accurate or inspired by God?

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Russell? Yes. Yeah? Absolutely. Why? Why is that important? I mean, so what?

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Let's say that it wasn't historically accurate or it wasn't, there were textual differences or discrepancies in it.

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What implications would that have? You can't hold the rest of its truth, part of its form.

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But you did the truth. Right, right. I'm gonna talk a bit about what inspiration means later and kind of how the word itself is a bit watered down, both the

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English word, I should say, has watered down. So we'll talk a bit about that. But one of the things that I thought would be a good idea, and I'm gonna ask you guys to whip out your

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Bibles here. One of the things I thought would be a good idea would be to see what the Bible has to say about the

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Bible. What do the writers have to say about it? What does Jesus have to say about the Bible? So if somebody could look up 2

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Peter 121 for me. And then moving on to the next one, if somebody else could look up 2

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Timothy 3, 15 through 17 for me. Who's got 2

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Peter 121? Go ahead, Jack. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of men, but men spoke from God as they were carried along the

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Holy Spirit. Right, so this scripture clearly says that God is speaking through the

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Holy Spirit to men to write the scripture. This gets to the inspiration. Who's got 2

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Timothy 3, 15 through 17? Okay, go ahead. This is from the Amplified Bible.

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Sure. And how, from your childhood, you have had a knowledge and have been accompanied with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you and give you the understanding for salvation which comes through faith in Jesus Christ.

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That is through the leaning, learning of the entire human personality on God in Christ Jesus in absolute trust and confidence in his power, wisdom, and goodness.

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Every scripture is God breathed, given by his inspiration and profitable for instruction, for reproof, and conviction of sin for correction and discipline in obedience and for training in righteousness that is in holy living and conformity to God's will in thought, purpose, and action so that the man of God may be complete and proficient, well -equipped, and well -fitted and thoroughly equipped for every good work.

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It's a bit expansive. That is very expansive. That is very expansive. The key parts here is,

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I think, the word sacred writings and the term breathed out by God which is what the

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ESV says. It says that all scripture is breathed out by God. And that really is the term that is, in some translations, translated as inspired.

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But it's not inspired in the way that, say, a song is inspired or a work of literature is inspired where you read it and you're moved and you're just sort of moved emotionally by it.

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The word that is usually translated there is, it's a Greek word.

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It's theonustos, which the first word in that is theo, meaning

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God, and the second is pneuma which means that which is breathed or blown.

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And so it is literally translated, and that's why translations like the ESV will translate it as God breathed because it's literally

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God breathed the word of scripture out. And so inspired,

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I think, sometimes is watered down where people can kind of conflate that with the inspiration that we get that is a bit more human.

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All right, what about Acts 10, 23? Can someone turn to Acts 10? And then somebody else turn to 2

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Peter 3, 15 through 16. Jacob, you take 2

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Peter. My sons are here so I get to call them. Somebody got

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Acts 10, 23? To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.

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2 Peter 3, 15 through 16, Jacob. And count the patience of our

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Lord as salvation. Just as our beloved brother

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Paul also wrote to you, according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters.

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There are some things in them that are hard to understand which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction as they do the other scriptures.

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Yeah, so here you can see that the writers are saying that the words here are

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God -breathed, that you can look to them for, the prophets are bearing witness that everyone who believes in him receives salvation.

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You can see that it talks about how God enlightens our hearts and minds to understand the scriptures and that those who would seek to twist it, and you'll see this a lot when you look at atheists that are debating

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Christians and they'll actually twist things. There'll be examples of that later in this session, much later in this session, where I'm gonna go through some of those sort of atheistic biblical scholars and some of the things that they say to try and twist what the

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Bible says or try and prove that the Bible is fallible. So I thought since we're all

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Christians, it's probably a good idea to see what Jesus says about the scriptures as well. So I've got four scriptures here for Jesus.

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So Luke 24, 44 is the first one. I'll read this one.

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Then he said to them, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.

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So Jesus clearly had a picture that the scriptures were about him. Talks about the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms being fulfilled in him.

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So he clearly had a particular view about the scriptures. John 5, 46 says, for if you believe

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Moses, you would believe me for he wrote of me. Again, a reference to the scriptures being about himself.

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Matthew 5, 18, for truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.

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And Matthew 24, 35, heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

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So Jesus is saying that God is going to allow the scripture to persevere through time, right?

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That it won't fade away into obscurity. And we're gonna talk a lot about manuscripts.

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We're gonna talk a lot about evidence for the Bible. And I think that these words will come back when you see the overwhelming tsunami of evidence that there is for the historicity and accuracy of the

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Bible. So going back to my first question, why is it important? If the

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Bible is not the inspired, infallible, inherent word of God, then both the writers and Jesus are liars, right?

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They're not telling the truth in these statements that they're made.

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And it really undermines the very core of our faith, because if we don't have the Bible to believe in, we have no instruction from God on how to live our lives.

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I like the way R .C. Sproul, some of you are fans of R .C. Sproul in here, like the way R .C.

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Sproul put it in a video that I watched. He said, the Bible is inspired, therefore it is infallible, therefore it is inerrant.

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So it's inspired, it's breathed out by God, therefore it can't have any fault, and therefore it has no error, right?

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And again, going back to the Greek word theonoustos, it truly means God has breathed these words out, and is very different, right?

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It's written by human writers, right? Not as automatons, but as instruments that God used to record his words.

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So the Holy Spirit was instrumental in helping its construction. All right, so I'm breaking this study up.

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We're gonna just cover how we got the Old Testament today, because there's a lot of information, and we're gonna go through much of the

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Old Testament today. Hopefully we'll get through all of it, but we may or may not. And then we're gonna go into the

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New Testament, we're gonna go into the canon, we're gonna go into other evidences for the historicity of the

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Bible. So the first thing that we're gonna go through is the Old Testament. Before I put the slide up, who knows how many books do we have in the

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Old Testament? The Bible, the Bible books, 39. Would it surprise you if I said the Jewish Bible, which is the

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Old Testament, doesn't have 39 books? What is it, 24? It's 24 books. We're just gonna do the answers today.

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Yeah, it's 24 books. Does anyone know why that is? Because we broke them up into like one kings, two kings, when there was just kings.

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Yep, so essentially there's 39 books in the Christian Old Testament. The Jewish Tanakh, which is the

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Jewish Bible, has 24 books. The Jewish Bible combined things like Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah are combined together.

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The 12 prophets are combined together. So when you actually look at the 24 books that the Jewish Bible has, they equate to the same 39 books that we have.

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The Jews also organize the Bible differently, whereas the Christian Bible is organized into three sections, primarily being history, poetry and prophecy.

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You've got the Jewish Tanakh, which is organized as the Torah, which is the first five books of Moses, so Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

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You have the Nevi 'im, which is Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the 12 prophets.

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And then you have the Ketuvim, which is called the Writings, which is Psalms, Proverbs, et cetera, et cetera.

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You can see it up on the screen there. There's some statistics in the

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Word document, which I'll share with everybody when we get to the end of this series, which has got statistics about the number of verses, what languages they're in, whole bunch of stuff that would probably make everybody's eyes roll in the back of their head.

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So while we get to sort of the historical evidence for the Bible, we need to talk about some vocabulary.

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The first bit of vocabulary is the term manuscript. So a manuscript is a handwritten copy of a text, right?

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And there's also the term autograph. Most people, when you hear autograph, you think of like a sports celebrity or a movie star who's like giving you an autograph, but autograph just refers to the original text.

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So the actual text that was written by the original author is the autographed manuscripts are essentially a copy of an autograph or a copy of another manuscript.

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There's a term called extant manuscripts, which just means the manuscripts that we have today. And then there's a term called scribe.

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You probably all know what that means, but a scribe is essentially just a person whose profession was to actually copy manuscripts.

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The Bible originally was written on papyrus, which is a plant that they would cut into strips and they would mash it together and dry it in the sun so that they could write on it.

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And being a biological plant, it would degrade over time, so there was a need for scribes to actually make copies of the scriptures.

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And the Jews were very, they revered the scriptures and really wanted to preserve them throughout time, so they made lots of copies, basically, of the scripture for future generations to enjoy.

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The Jews also had, and this is something I learned in this study, the Jews had a tradition for how they would discard old texts.

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So when a text was degrading and they needed to make a new copy for the younger generations, they would copy the text.

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And then they would go through a ceremony where they would literally bury, like a funeral almost, they would bury the old copies, the old texts.

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The places that they buried them were called genizos. And so this is from a book called

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Sacred Trash, The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. We'll talk about the

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Cairo Geniza in a bit. But a geniza, I'll just read word for word here, is a nook near or under a synagogue's arc, a basement room, a cubbyhole, all could and did function as a genizot,

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I'm gonna probably mess up the pronunciation of some of these things. The fragments that required this sort of treatment became known as shamat or names.

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They were considered sacred because they bore the name of God. Since the name of God was in these documents and the

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Jews revered the name of God so much, they had to bury these because they contained the name of God, they were still considered sacred.

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In some towns and cities, the geniza materials were taken out of their receptacles on designated day and buried in an elaborate ritual that was part funeral and part carnival.

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Depending on local tradition, the papers and books often discarded ritual objects that included or had contact with a written text, such as a mezuzot, phylactery straps, and the like.

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Phylactery's those boxes that Jews would put on their heads. Coffins draped with decorative fabrics were sometimes used to hold a no longer valid Torah scroll and the privilege of pallbearing was bestowed upon those who had donated money to the synagogue.

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Songs were sung, cakes were eaten, an erak was drunk as a procession set out for the ceremony.

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This act of inhumation served, in fact, as a kind of twin ritual to the dedication of a new

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Torah scroll and after the old scroll was buried, pilgrimage to the grave, quote unquote grave, would be performed just as they were made into tombs of certain holy men.

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So the Jews revered the scriptures, right? These were holy documents. They contained the holy name of God and so they were treated with a tremendous amount of reverence and respect to the point that they were actually buried and there were ceremonies around all of this.

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So knowing that these traditions existed, right? Scribes were there to copy texts.

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God was using the Jewish people to preserve his word throughout time and these genizahs that these texts were buried in are in some cases where we find a lot of old scriptures, old manuscripts of the scripture.

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The Old Testament, for the longest time, prior to around 1947 or 48, our

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Old Testament, our Christian Old Testament was based on a set of manuscripts called the Masoretic Texts.

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So you probably have heard of the Masoretic Texts. The Masoretic Texts were named after a group called the

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Masoretes. The Masoretes were active between about AD 500 and AD 1 ,000, so for about 500 years after Christ to 1 ,000 years after Christ.

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They were Jewish scribes centered in Tiberias, which is on the Sea of Galilee.

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So these were Jews in Galilee that were meticulous in copying texts.

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When they made copies, what they did, they went to the extreme trouble of adding vocalizations, accents, cantillation marks, and other marginal notes.

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I'll actually show you an image of what this looked like. And these notes were written generally in the margins, and they employed incredibly reliable standards for copying the text.

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So there was a book, Old Testament Textual Criticism, second edition, by Ellis Bronsman and Eric Tully.

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These are biblical scholars. On page 54 and 55, this is a quote.

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The Masoretes added a system of specialized notes on the text, the

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Masora, which actually is made up of three components. The Masora Parva, which is just translated small

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Masora, refers to notes written in the side margins of the text. These notes refer to certain word use statistics for the

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Old Testament. So as they're copying this, they're actually annotated in the margins how many times this word is used.

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They went through such excruciating detail to say this word is used X many times in the

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Old Testament. The second part is the Masora Magna, which is the large

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Masora, which was traditionally recorded at the top and bottom margins of the text. These notes contain particular details.

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For example, if the Masora Parva, this is the stuff in the side margins, notes that a word occurs only three times in the

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Masoretic text with a particular spelling, the Masora Magna will provide the references to those three instances that can be found in the text.

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So can you imagine, you're copying this Hebrew manuscript and you're actually making note of the amount of times, they're like keeping statistics on the side of how many times words are used and all the references to those words and their usage.

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They didn't have computers. They couldn't index this stuff and have a computer kind of roll through the text.

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They had to do all of this by hand. The amount of care and reverence that they took was frankly mind -boggling.

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I got a question. Yeah, go for it. Was there any discussion of how they assured that the copies were absolutely accurate?

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Yes. Was it down the lane kind of? I'm gonna get to that here in a second because there's actually, they were,

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I'll just answer now, they would have the manuscripts reviewed by another scribe and if there was any error, the entire thing would be thrown out and they'd start over, right?

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If there was any error, they'd chuck the whole thing and they would start over copying it.

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Did they talk about how they washed their hands before they wrote the name of God? Yes, so it was like ceremonial.

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This act of copying was ceremonial. In some cases, there was even particular care taken to when they wrote the name of God, right?

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Where they would actually have to ceremonially clean themselves to write the name of God in these books.

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So the Mazorra Magna was top and bottom and it was giving you the instances.

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There's also something called the Mazorra Finalis or the final Mazorra which is found at the end of a biblical book or at the end of a section of the

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Old Testament. The Mazorra Finalis contained specialized information about the number of words in the book or section, the middle word of the book, the middle consonant of that word, and so forth.

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So they were really particular about, about, yeah, very meticulous.

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So they were not only meticulous in accurately copying it, but they revered the scripture and were so meticulous with counting words and gathering statistics and preserving these holy documents for their posterity.

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So some of the Masoretic texts are here. We've got Codex Cairnsis which has, it was written in 896

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AD. It's got the complete prophets. It was available to the

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West, to us, around 1983. We have a whole bunch of other ones. There's a Petersburg Codex, there's the

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London Codex, and so forth. You can look in the origins. Many of these are many hundreds of years after Christ.

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This was the best that we had. These were many hundreds of years even further from the origin of the

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Old Testament as well, which dates back much further. But a lot of these are fairly recent by our standards.

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So there was a lot of questions. One of the big questions was around certain scriptures pointing to, prophesying basically about Jesus.

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And so one of the arguments was that these texts were so late that that was written back into the

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Old Testament, right? So just to give you a sample of one of the

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Masoretic texts. So I don't know if you can see that, but these marks in the centers of the columns are some of those markings.

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It's really kind of hard to see here, but you can see there's actually a website that has a lot of this stuff on it.

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You can see some of the cantillation marks and summaries of some of that stuff.

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And this text down at the bottom here would be some of the Mazorah magna, yeah.

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Did they write from right to left? Yes. Okay, so obviously. This is all Hebrew, because we're talking about the

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Old Testament. It's primarily Hebrew. So we write from left to right. They wrote from right to left.

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And their pages go backwards, too. Right. And to piggyback on that is each word, each alphabet in our word, they're

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Hebrew, designate a time, a date, and an era that they were in.

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So the way we are taught to read the Bible is verse by verse. The way they're taught to read the

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Torah is the time and the circumstances that are underneath that. So it's a different way of looking at the way the

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Bible is. So as I was saying, I'll go back one slide here.

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Given the sort of late origin of these Masoretic texts, a lot of the criticism of Christianity back in pre -1947 was that some of these texts were altered to write

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Jesus into the Old Testament rather than Jesus actually being prophesied. Because if you look at things like Isaiah 53, it's pretty clear the prophecies of Christ in there.

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And they discovered that the scrolls - That all changed in 1947. You got it. So in 1947, until 1947, our primary source was these

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Masoretic texts. And so the

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Masoretic texts originated anywhere from 896 AD to the 16th century, which is many, many centuries after they were written.

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But in 1947, a Bedouin went looking for his goat near some caves, and he's chucking rocks into these caves to try and,

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I guess, spook his goat out of the caves. And this was in some caves near Qumran, which is a very, very dry and hot place that's near Jericho.

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And it's about a mile from the shore of the Dead Sea. So that's kind of where he was.

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And he's throwing stones into this cave, and then he hears this clay pot shatter. And so he goes in and investigates, and he finds seven of the scroll clay pots.

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So he wanted to make some money, so he took these scrolls, thinking they were probably valuable, and decided to sell them.

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They were purchased initially by a Hebrew university professor, and then four of them were also purchased by the archbishop in charge of the

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Syrian Orthodox Monastery in Jerusalem. On April 11th, 1948, it was announced that these were the oldest

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Hebrew manuscripts ever found. In 1949, they found the original cave and found more fragments.

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Between 1951 and 1956, another 10 caves were found. In 1955, the

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Israeli government bought four scrolls and united them with the other three that they had gotten from that original

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Hebrew professor's purchase. Cave four found 15 ,000 fragments.

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Wow. Cave 11 found the Temple Scroll, which is the largest scroll. There was over 900 documents found in these

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Dead Sea Scroll caves. The Isaiah and Psalms Scroll are full scrolls.

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It's the full book of Isaiah and full book of Psalms. Most of them are fragments, with the exception of things like the

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Isaiah and Psalms Scroll. But, I mean, that's an amazing find, right? The entire book of Isaiah in a scroll that was preserved.

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Between the fragments and scrolls were dated to 250 BC through 68 years after Christ.

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So this means that the text on these fragments, on these manuscripts, predated

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Christ's birth. They predated Christianity. They predated anyone being able to write anything back into the text.

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And 215 of the 900 fragments are biblical scrolls. So there's all kinds of other documents in the

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Dead Sea Scrolls. And some other fragments were also found in Judea. But the fact that these predate

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Christ, right, mean that nobody coming after Christ, no later

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Christian could have gone back and altered the text to make any of the prophecies that are in the

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Old Testament look like they were pointing to Jesus after the fact, right?

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And it turns out that the Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed the accuracy of the

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Masoretic text. It turns out that they were coming from the same source. And so these fragments and scrolls predated

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Christ and confirmed that nobody had altered what was preserved through the

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Masoretic texts. And so our Old Testament was, in fact, accurately.

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Do you think God had something to do with that? I think so, I think so. The fact that these were put in clay pots, sealed in a cave, in a very dry and hot place where there wasn't a lot of moisture to eat away at the papyri and things that it was written on,

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I think is a miracle. It's a miracle that they found 15 ,000 fragments in a single cave.

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So the Dead Sea Scroll types consist of Proto -Masoretic texts, which just means pre, you know, it has the

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Samaritan Pentateuch, which we're gonna talk a bit about the Samaritan Pentateuch, which is pre -Samaritan text.

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And it contained instances of the Septuagint. The Septuagint is a

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Greek translation of the Old Testament. And we're gonna talk about how the Septuagint came about as well.

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So in the Dead Sea Scrolls, you can see that we've got manuscripts.

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So look at that top row there. This is the books of the Old Testament and, you know, various pieces that were from those books in the

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Dead Sea Scrolls. So we have like 20 instances of Genesis, 16 of Exodus, and so forth.

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Some of the earliest Hebrew manuscripts, though, we have, one of them was from the

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Cairo Gemeza texts, which was 900s to 1900s.

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So the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, anything written in Hebrew, anything written in Hebrew, a shopping list, like anything written in Hebrew was what went into this

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Geneza in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, another dry, hot place.

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And it was never emptied for 1 ,000 years. So from 900s to the 1900s, it wasn't emptied.

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So 10 centuries worth of scraps, hundreds of thousands of scraps of Hebrew texts were in this.

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And in 1896, a guy by the name of Solomon Schechter got access to this

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Geneza, found it, saw that all these valuable texts and was given permission to take 200 ,000 of them home to translate.

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And some of the scraps had scripture on them. And so given that Cairo is this dry and hot place, these fragments were very well preserved.

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A second place, which is the Ein Gedi Scroll, which was found in 1970, was found in the ruins of a burned -down synagogue between the first and fourth century.

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It sat until 2015 when the University of Kentucky was able to use software.

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So this scroll couldn't be unrolled because it was too delicate. So they had this scroll.

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They couldn't see what was in it. They knew it had to be important, but they couldn't see what was in it. And so in 2015, the

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University of Kentucky was able to use software to image the scroll and virtually unroll it to see what was inside it.

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They were able to see what it was written on there. So they virtually unwrapped the scroll, which had a portion of Leviticus in it.

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The Nash Papyrus, which is a small document that has the Ten Commandments on it, along with the Shema, which is

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Deuteronomy 6, 4 -5, was dated to the second century BC. So that's 200 years before Christ.

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It's the earliest known Hebrew document outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls we've talked a bunch about.

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The Ketef Hinnam Silver Scroll, which is older than even the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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It dates back to 650 to 587 BC. That's 650 years before Christ.

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It has number six and the priestly blessing written in Proto -Hebrew.

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So we've got some of these. We've got some of these here in this.

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So sixth century BC was that silver scroll that I was just talking about. Dead Sea Scrolls, 250 BC to 60

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AD. The Nash Papyrus, which is 100 BC, so that's 100 years before Christ.

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You've got the Ein Gedi Scroll and then the Cairo Gediza Fragments as well.

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So lots and lots of manuscripts, right? I'm kind of hitting you with a lot of information here, but the point of all of this is to show just the sheer volume of textual documents that we have dating way back into history before Christ to serve as a foundation for our

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Christian Bible, which is the Old Testament, right? The Old Testament is an important part of our Bible. A lot of people like to focus on the

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New Testament, but the Old Testament has a ton of prophecy. And Jesus, when he talked about scripture, was talking about the

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Old Testament because when he was around, they didn't have a New Testament. It hadn't been written yet. Matt?

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Yeah. Norman Geisler said we have 66 ,360 manuscripts of the

35:28

Bible whereas ancient pagan documents, we only have 1 ,800. I actually have a chart in here that talks about just the differences in the amount of textual documentation that we have in the

35:41

Bible versus other ancient documents as well. So that leads us into,

35:47

I talked about the Masoretic texts a whole bunch. We talked about some of the places that these documents were found.

35:55

We brought up the Samaritan Pentateuch, right? The Samaritan Pentateuch. So everybody who has read any part of the

36:04

Bible knows the Jews and Samaritans, they didn't like each other very much, right? And one of the coolest things

36:10

I learned is I always knew that and people said, oh, well, because the Samaritans were of mixed blood, right?

36:16

They were part Jew, part Gentile. It was intermarrying and so there was this rift between them.

36:25

But I learned some interesting things about the Samaritan Pentateuch and also why some of these other issues arose with them.

36:36

So the Samaritan Bible consists only of the Torah, right? So the Samaritan Pentateuch is just the first five books of Moses, that's it.

36:46

So you can kind of think of this almost as a layering, right? So you've got the Samaritans only have the first five books.

36:53

Then you've got the Jews have the first five books plus the Nevi 'im and Ketuvim, right?

37:00

And then you've got, which is the Tanakh. And then you've got the Christians who have that whole

37:05

Old Testament plus the New Testament, right, so it's kind of like this layering. So the Samaritans only recognized the first five books of Moses.

37:13

It became sort of known to the Europeans in the 17th century from Samaritans that lived in Damascus.

37:21

We have about 150 manuscripts now with the earliest from the ninth century but most of them from about the 15th century.

37:30

The Samaritan Pentateuch was written in modified paleo -Hebrew and the

37:36

Samaritans, actually this is kind of a key thing with the rift between the Jews and the Samaritans.

37:41

The Samaritans didn't believe that Jerusalem was the place that God had put his name.

37:48

Instead they believed that a mountain called Mount Gerizim was that place, which resulted in differences between the

37:55

Hebrew Torah and the Samaritan Pentateuch. One example is Deuteronomy 12 .5.

38:01

I'll read you what our Bible says and what the Jews would have read and then

38:07

I'll tell you what they substituted. So Deuteronomy 12 .5,

38:13

thanks. Deuteronomy 12 .5 says, "'But you shall seek the place that the Lord your God "'will choose out of all of the tribes "'to put his name and make his habitation.'"

38:24

So the Jews believed that place was Jerusalem. Now when this was written, David hadn't conquered

38:31

Jerusalem. So this is why it said the Lord your God will choose, because it hadn't been chosen yet.

38:42

And then centuries later, David captured Jerusalem and the

38:48

Jews believed that God put his name there and that's where he would make his habitation. But the

38:54

Samaritans believed it was Mount Gerizim. So what their says is, "'Seek the place the

39:00

Lord your God has chosen.'" This is a textual difference between those two versions of that passage.

39:11

And so we were actually in my Thursday night small group and we were talking about when

39:19

Jesus was, and I told Ivan about this, because I was like, oh my goodness, I know why this was.

39:25

When Jesus was in a Samaritan town, he was talking to them. They said they rejected him because his face was towards Jerusalem.

39:34

His face was towards Jerusalem. And everyone was like, oh, the

39:39

Samaritans and the Jews, they didn't like each other, that's why they rejected him. But I believe that they also said because his face was towards Jerusalem because they thought his face should be toward Mount Gerizim.

39:51

And so that was another reason why I think they rejected his teaching. So there are other differences with the

40:02

Samaritan belief regarding Mount Gerizim. So like Deuteronomy 5 .18 also has some differences as well.

40:08

But that's the Samaritan Pentateuch. So again, first five books of Moses doesn't include the other writings of the

40:18

Old Testament and has some textual differences between what's considered to be the

40:24

Jewish Torah. Now, again, we don't have documents that predate the documents that we have for the

40:31

Tanakh. So we, you know, it only goes back to about, only goes back to about like 600.

40:41

All right, so we also have various translations. How am

40:47

I doing on time? You have 15 minutes. 15 minutes,

40:53

I know I'm hitting you guys with a lot of information. There is a final, yeah, there's a test.

41:04

There is, the point of all of this is to really hammer home the fact that there is just an overwhelming amount of evidence for the textual accuracy of the

41:19

Bible, right? That there wasn't any modifications, that what we have is what the authors wrote.

41:25

So we do have some translations of the Old Testament as well.

41:30

The first translation is the Septuagint. So I talked about this before being a Greek Old Testament.

41:37

So this particular writing, so Septuagint, by the way, is a Latin word for 70.

41:43

There was a funny kind of myth about how the

41:50

Septuagint was created that like 70 scribes went into different rooms and came out with the exact same document.

41:56

But there's no like proof that that actually happened, but the Septuagint is the Latin word for 70, and I guess that's why they named it that.

42:04

It's an early manuscript that predates the Masoretic texts. It's the most ancient translation we have today.

42:13

Its origin comes from Jews that found refuge in Egypt after the Babylonian captivity.

42:19

No, it's not true. So around Alexandria, there grew up a population of Jews, and they spoke

42:27

Greek, because that was, I guess, the trade language of the day there in Alexandria. And so they wanted their scriptures in the tongue that they spoke.

42:37

So they decided to translate the Old Testament from the original

42:43

Hebrew into Greek so that they could have a Greek version of the Old Testament.

42:49

The Torah, which, again, the first five books of Moses was completed around 285 to 246

42:56

BC. So this, again, was before Christ. It was during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus.

43:02

I added that in because we live near Philadelphia, so I'm always gonna add it in. The rest of the

43:08

Old Testament was finished by about 100 BC. The Hebrew text used during the translation would have been the best text that they had, that they had available to them on hand.

43:24

And so those Egyptian Jews would have selected the best thing that they had. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, they validated the texts, both the

43:36

Samaritan Pentateuch and the Masoretic texts along with the Septuagint. Second translation we have is the

43:44

Aramaic Targums. These texts were from the time of the

43:51

Babylonian exile and forward, when the Jews learned Aramaic. Again, you can see how

43:58

God used people wanting to translate these texts into their own tongue to help also propagate his word throughout time because we have so many of these different texts.

44:13

And they would read, they would actually, in the synagogues, read in both languages, the original

44:19

Hebrew and the Aramaic. The Targums, though, have expansions in them. This was kind of cool.

44:26

They would have expansions in them to explain the text, but they were injected into the text seamlessly, so you can't tell that they're an expansion, right?

44:34

So they're like, it was kind of like, I guess, the expansion that Rich was reading earlier when he had that expandable, where it just added text in as if it was literally part of the text and you couldn't tell that it wasn't.

44:48

But it's explanatory. In that case, it was explanatory. So was this. This was to try and explain the text.

44:54

One such expansion was the story of Cain and Abel. The Aramaic Targums injected an entire dialogue between Cain and Abel that were explaining why

45:04

Cain killed Abel. So it was almost like they took artistic license, like they were making a documentary or a movie, and they injected this artistic license to inject this dialogue that wasn't in the original text.

45:16

Spirit of Hollywood back then. Yeah, even back then. The next translation we have is the

45:22

Syriac Peshitta. The word Peshitta means simple, and the Syriac Peshitta contained both the

45:28

Old and New Testament, so it was probably written by one of the early Christians and not the religious

45:34

Jews. The translation was in the common language Syriac script, and it was from a

45:41

Hebrew source very similar to the Hasidic text. And then the last translation that we have is the

45:50

Latin Vulgate. And this was a translation from Jerome, who was a

45:55

Christian around 390 AD to 405 AD. This one was written on vellum, which is different than papyrus.

46:01

Papyrus was that plant that you would cut into strips and you'd kind of mash it in like a tic -tac -toe pattern, right, over each other, and then dry it.

46:09

Vellum was actually made from calf skins. There was a whole process through which they would thin it out and be able to make it into scrolls that they could then write on.

46:21

The Vulgate just means vulgar tongue, or tongue of the people. So the Latin Vulgate, Jerome had to go to, this was funny,

46:28

Jerome had to go to Israel to learn Hebrew so that he could perform the translation, which at the time was fairly controversial.

46:37

And the Latin turns out to be, the Latin Vulgate turns out to be an accurate translation of the original

46:43

Hebrew. So this is a lot of information. I feel like I've been kind of rushing because I want to try and get as much of this stuff out so that we can get to the meat of why we think the

46:54

Bible is both accurate, both textually, both historically, and is also inspired.

47:03

And again, I go back to the word inspiration, meaning theonustos,

47:08

God breathed, God actually breathing the words out through the men that actually wrote it.

47:16

And that being the actual inspiration. Rather than sort of an inspirational song or an inspirational movie or what have you.

47:28

So let's see. So I actually got through all of the

47:34

Old Testament. So yeah, I got through all of the Old Testament.

47:39

So next time what I want to do, next time, we got 10 minutes so we can have questions and talk a bit more about this.

47:46

But just as a preface, next time what I want to do is go through the New Testament and the canon.

47:53

We're gonna talk about the origins of the New Testament, all of the textual evidence that we have for the

48:02

New Testament. Let me just go to my table of contents here. We're gonna go through the various types of documents that we have.

48:13

We're gonna go through the various papyri, unseals, minuscules, lectionaries, writings of the early church fathers, and other ancient translations, as well as the canon itself and how it was formed.

48:24

There's a lot of controversy about that as well. A lot of people like to say that it was the Council of Trent or something like that.

48:32

But what I want you to take away from today's session with the Old Testament is that God used people, used instruments like us to both preserve and propagate his word through time.

48:48

That the ancient Jewish scribes had such reverence for the text of scripture and these practices ended up preserving these documents so that we could find them.

49:03

And that there really is no leg to stand on when folks say that Jesus Christ and the prophecies about him in the

49:12

Old Testament were written back into the Old Testament after Christianity was formed. That is just factually untrue.

49:19

It is something that is proven by the Dead Sea Scrolls. We didn't know it until 1947 when those were discovered, but those prove without a doubt that those prophecies were written as we read them today and did, in fact, prophesy to the coming of Jesus Christ.

49:39

And we'll get into, obviously, a lot of that in the New Testament as well. So those arguments are dead.

49:48

Those arguments are dead. They're meaningless because those texts predate, by hundreds of years, they predate

49:54

Christ's birth. And so if you take anything away from today, as my father -in -law likes to say,

50:01

I use too many big words, but if you take anything away from today, take away that God has preserved and we have an accurate representation of what the

50:13

Bible, what the authors actually wrote in the Old Testament. We'll talk about that with the

50:18

New Testament next time. But there's an overwhelming amount of documentation that we have of the

50:25

Old Testament, and we can be confident that what we have is, in fact, what was originally written.

50:32

Amen. So with that, yeah, go. Yeah, so I wanna add something to what you're talking about.

50:38

So right at, right around 600, all the way through to the

50:46

Reformation, the church, when it was being changed, we had the spread of the scriptures coming out from the

50:54

Greek and from the Hebrew coming out there, and then all of a sudden, it stopped with the Latin folgate. So it stopped there because the church took it over and they used it as a political weapon and they basically made, if you can think of it, the dark ages of scripture, and it only came from their mouthpiece until Martin Luther came with the

51:13

Reformation. So there's hundreds of years where this was, this is how Satan works, closing it down, making it go through one single communication pipeline, and the people didn't know, and so there was a lot of blindness of what was happening because then they were forced to just lean on the church, not lean on scripture anymore until the

51:39

Reformation started to happen, when we had a rediscovery. So while this was all coming out, all of a sudden, it's gonna go down, but I'm not gonna add too much sugar to your story.

51:48

No, no, it's fine, it's fine. Anybody have any questions? No. No? Just a comment.

51:53

I've done that good a job? I think you guys are all confident? Yeah, it was a good job. So they've written nothing new in the 19th century, so they've got nothing at all new from the previous version on the back?

52:03

No, what they found in the Dead Sea Scrolls actually confirmed what they had in the

52:08

Masoretic Texts, right, and that was the thing that defeated the argument, right, that Christ was written back into the

52:17

Old Testament, was the fact that these texts, which clearly predated Christ, actually confirmed that the

52:23

Masoretic Texts were accurate in their representation of what the Old Testament had said.

52:30

And so, yeah. Now, the question is, what if we find, I mean, we're constantly finding new things, right?

52:36

Like I said, that scroll, the scroll that in 2015 the University of Kentucky was able to virtually unravel through software, right?

52:45

They had the scroll for years, but it sat unopened until 2015 when technology allowed us to actually virtually image the whole thing through various types of imaging technology and then virtually unroll it to see what it said, right?

53:03

So we are still discovering some things, but nothing that contradicts anything that we've discovered historically.

53:12

That refutes. And what was the, you said about the translation was 200, that was 8th or BC?

53:19

I mean, because I would think that would have confirmed it, too, if that was translated. Yes, yeah, so the Greek, yeah, the

53:25

Septuagint. Yeah, the Septuagint was in 285 to 246. And again, a lot of these were found in the

53:31

Dead Sea Scrolls. So the Dead Sea Scrolls had Septuagint, had

53:37

Proto -Masoretic texts, and as well as the

53:42

Samaritan Pentateuch as well were all part of that find. So the Dead Sea Scrolls was a monumental find, right?

53:49

It was monumental in the sheer amount, like 15 ,000 fragments in one cave, right?

53:57

It was a monumental find, and it was also important in that it was dated back further than we had ever dated anything before.

54:06

So that was just a miracle. It was a miracle. And it was all found because a

54:13

Bedouin was searching for his goat and just throwing stones into a cave, and hears a glass shatter, and, or not glass, but a clay pot, but he hears it shatter, and he goes in and finds these scrolls, and it opened it up to just a wealth of information, right?

54:34

So what was the new explanation then after 1947 for Jesus being written into the

54:40

Old Testament? Well, it was the Jewish, well, what was their stance? It was defeated.

54:45

At that. Yeah, the - So those people that were arguing it, then did they change their - No, they came back.

54:50

Now they still argue. They came back and said that wasn't real, or was there a new argument? No, it's just that argument was no longer valid.

54:56

It wasn't no longer valid. They couldn't use that - What they said was Carpentanian was no longer accurate anymore. That's what they started coming up with. Those weren't the dates that -

55:03

Right. They kept what they say, and they're just saying that those aren't the right dates. Right, but we're using the same method for dating all of these things, right?

55:09

The issue, there's lots of arguments for whether or not

55:17

Jesus is God, and we'll get to a lot of that in the New Testament, and some of the prophetic evidence and so forth later on, but as far as the idea that Jesus was written back into the

55:32

Old Testament, that argument didn't hold water anymore, so they just couldn't employ that in their arsenal twice. Right.

55:37

Satan's minions still repeat it. Yeah. They do keep the Isaiah 53 out of the

55:43

Jewish Bible, I think. Yeah. Yeah, most of the Hebrews don't. Oh, right. Rabbis don't want that.

55:51

Although, some, and I'm gonna, at the end of this, so probably not even next week, but probably the week after that, maybe next week, depending on how far we get,

56:01

I'm gonna show you guys a video of Bart Ehrman. Bart Ehrman is a biblical scholar who was a

56:11

Christian - He's a liberal. And is now an atheist, and tries to argue, he argues in many cases for the accuracy of the

56:21

Bible, but argues against the interpretation of the Bible by Christians.

56:28

So he's kind of a weird animal, to be honest with you. An atheist biblical scholar, but he actually talks a bit about Isaiah 53 as well, and says that it doesn't actually say, we're interpreting it wrong, basically, and that Jesus wouldn't have thought some of the things that he clearly says in the

56:50

New Testament. But that's all for when we get into the New Testament. Good job. Any other questions about the

56:56

Old Testament? Just one comment. Jesus said in the three synoptic Gospels that heaven and earth will pass away, but my word will never pass away.

57:04

We read that at the very beginning, right? We read that, it's

57:10

Matthew 5, 18, right? For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until it is accomplished.

57:19

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away, Matthew 12. He wrote it all. Yep. Old and new.

57:26

All right. Well, Ivan, you wanna close this out? Absolutely. Father, we thank you so much for this band of godly brothers that have come together today.

57:37

We thank you so much for Matt, who brought such important information, the foundational truths, the foundation that our believership is under.

57:46

We thank you, Lord, that you are God, that you are holy, that you are the one that no matter what happens,

57:51

Lord, you were from the beginning, and you'll be here till the end. And no matter what happens, you are constantly true.

57:58

And we thank you, Lord, for that. We thank you so much that we have the opportunity to study and be more grounded in what you've done with this.

58:07

So we ask that for the remainder of this week, take these godly men home, keep them safe. God bless them.