Live at Nine from London, February, 2010

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Hi, good evening and welcome to Live at Nine. Tonight our subject is the reliability of the New Testament.

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And we are going to be looking at the importance of how the New Testament has come to be in our possession today.

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There is so much discussion, there is so much argument, there is so much debate on the authenticity of the New Testament. And today we are going to be looking at this very, very important subject.

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And tonight we have a very, very special guest with us, Dr. James R. White. James, welcome to the program.

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It's great to be with you. James is the director of the Alpha and Omega Ministries based in Phoenix, Arizona. He is a professor of taught

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Greek and systematic theology. Dr. White is also engaged in over 50 debates, debating all kinds of people from Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and everybody in between.

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And he is an elder of the church there, Reformed Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona.

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So a warm welcome to you, James. It's great to be back here. I just want to say, you know, we were talking about, I can't believe with an accent like that, you said you've got

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Scottish origins. I love going back to Scotland, the land of my roots. Unbelievable.

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I actually have a picture of my great -grandparents in Broken Bow, Nebraska in 1889.

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And yet I know they were married in Dundee in 1885. So somewhere between 1885 and 1889 they emigrated to the

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States. And that's just one of the lines I've traced. Traced back all the way to 1590s in Scotland. 1590s?

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1590s, yes. There's also, your name is quite famous. There's a lemonade or lemon pop named after you.

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I don't think it is, actually. No connections? No connections at all. Folks, he's not lemon when it comes to the subject at hand.

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And we're going to be looking at this subject. And I hope many people out there have got questions to ask.

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And you can do that. You can join. It's an interactive program. So you can text us 07781472647 or email us live at talkgod .com.

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Make your questions succinct to the point and don't give me half a page full of information.

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I won't be able to read it. So make sure that it's pointing to the program that we are doing tonight. And join with us as we explore this very, very important topic.

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Thank you for joining us. And God bless you to watch the program. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

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And you've already done it, but a little bit about your Christian experience. Well, I grew up in a

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Christian family. I had the blessing of having, well, as I said, as far back as we can trace, on my father's side, ministers all the way back to Scotland.

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And so I heard the gospel at a very, very young age. And as a very young man, the

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Lord had mercy upon me. I remember very clearly the little church in Minneapolis, in the

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Minnesota area, where I gave my heart to the Lord. In fact, just only right at about seven weeks ago, my mother passed away.

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And I had the recollection of seeing her as my dad picked me up as a young boy in that church service, looking over his shoulder and seeing her playing the piano and weeping away as she did.

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So a wonderful thing to have a Christian family and that kind of Christian upbringing. I live in Phoenix, Arizona, which is about as unlike London weather -wise as you can possibly have.

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And consider that home. I've been there for coming up, getting close to 40 years there now.

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And we've seen 50 degrees C in the shade there, which is a little bit on the warm side, but I love it there.

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And I'm an elder in the church at the Phoenix Foreign Baptist Church there. My wife is a native there.

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Both of my children have been born there. And so it's a beautiful place to live. Well, I had the privilege of visiting

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Phoenix. I understand exactly what you mean by the 50 degrees. I remember taking about four showers on the day.

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Now, let's get to the serious matters. You mentioned about faith. You talk about your encounter with Jesus or Jesus' encounter with you.

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Romans 10, 17 tells us that faith comes by hearing and hearing the Word of God. How can we be sure that the very words of Jesus and the teachings of the apostles which followed are accurately documented in the

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New Testament and therefore reliable? There are two things that I think we need to emphasize.

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First, since we're going to be talking a lot about history and manuscripts and translations, sometimes people get the feeling that there's not a spiritual aspect to these things.

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But there is. In Luke chapter 24, when the Lord Jesus is meeting with the disciples after his resurrection, it specifically says that he opened their minds so that they might understand the

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Scriptures and specifically what the Scriptures had said about him. So there is a spiritual aspect that I'm afraid is very frequently missing in the public discussions about the

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Bible. There is an unprecedented attack upon the reliability of texts in the New Testament today on both sides of the pond, shall we say.

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There are so many people that are given free reign in most of the media to say anything about the

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New Testament and very rarely do the mainstream outlets want to allow any response from a

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Christian perspective on this. That's one of the reasons we do debates on these subjects. I've debated John Dominic Crossan, one of the co -founders of the

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Jesus Seminar on the historical reliability of the Gospels. Last year I debated Bart Ehrman, who's probably the leading critic of New Testament Christianity in the

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United States today, again on the subject of the reliability of the text in the New Testament. So we can go toe -to -toe in the public arena.

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We're just not given very many opportunities to do it. And certainly today believers need to understand where their

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Bible came from and why they can trust that when you read Romans chapter 10, or when you read

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John chapter 6, or Matthew chapter 11, or whatever it is you're looking at, that what you're reading has been preserved by God over time for us so that it is an accurate representation of what the original authors wrote and what was transmitted from those disciples to us today.

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That's extremely important, especially because there's so many people that are trying to... I don't know if over on this side of the pond you remember an actress by the name of Shirley MacLaine.

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But Shirley MacLaine in the United States went off into New Age mysticism and things like that, and she started going around telling people that when the

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Bible was originally written, it used to promote reincarnation. And then a certain council came along and took it all out.

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And we need to, as Christians, recognize those kinds of arguments and understand why those things are completely impossible.

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Not only did it not happen historically, but why it is impossible that it could have happened in a historical sense.

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Because the internet especially has made it possible for every kind of wild -eyed theory to be given a tremendous voice that couldn't have happened only 20 years ago.

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And so we need to know the history of the New Testament. We need to know where it came from, why we can trust it. And when we take the time to learn those things, then we learn that we can truly believe that that's what

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Paul wrote to the Romans, that's exactly what he meant to write to the Romans, and we can understand what he said. Time and time again what we get is from the people that you mentioned and others who are sympathetic to Christian ideas, and they use this whole argument of where are the original texts?

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How was it transmitted? It's all Chinese whispers. We can't be sure as to do we have the very words of Jesus, or has it been tampered with?

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It's coming from all angles, religious angles, there are those who say this is not reliable, you can't trust it.

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So when people say I believe, that's the question they ask. They need to have a good foundation. A lot of people when they are introduced to the faith assume that the

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Bible has always existed in a leather -bound copy with gold edges and thumb indexing, and that's not really how the

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Bible came to exist. In fact, that's a fairly modern version of the Bible. Once Christians come to understand that God has always worked with his people in bringing his word into existence, in the

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Old Testament through the prophets, his people Israel, very, very carefully preserving those texts, and it was primarily a text written to the people of Israel.

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But then we come to the New Testament, the fact that these authors are writing at multiple times, they're writing to multiple locations.

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The New Testament was not written by one group of men at one time to where they could edit, control, these are written by multiple authors at different times going to different places.

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Now that bothers some people. Some people wish that sort of like a modern computer manual, the

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New Testament was very closely edited and controlled by one small group so that you could make sure that there's no differences in style, but there are differences in style.

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Anyone who reads 1 John and then reads Hebrews knows that there's a tremendous, huge difference in style there.

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That is one of the problems of some of the English translations we have today that simplify the text so much is you don't see as much of that when you actually read it in the original languages.

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There's a huge difference between 1 John and Hebrews or Luke or something like that, and that sometimes troubles people.

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That's actually a wonderfully positive thing because you see most of the accusations that are made against the

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New Testament have to do with controlled editing, putting in doctrines that were not there originally, taking out doctrines that were there originally.

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The only way that you could do that is if you had a man or more likely a group of men who could control the text as it's being written and then as it's being, in essence, sent out to the world.

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Once it's sent out and people start making copies, it's no longer under anybody's control, and so you'd have to have that kind of centralized editing, and unfortunately you see things on television all the time alleging exactly that.

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You'd have these hooded monks in dark rooms, and they're making things up as they go along.

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The fact of the matter is that's not how the New Testament ever existed. It's not how it was written in any way, shape, or form.

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There's never been a man or a group of men that controlled the text of the New Testament.

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Paul is traveling from city to city to city, and when he has need to write to the church of Corinth because they're having some problems, he writes to the church of Corinth.

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When he's in prison in Rome, he writes to other churches. These are simply letters that were folded up or rolled up and stuck in a leather pouch.

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A man walking along roads or maybe riding a horse or a donkey or something like that and riding on a ship took these letters to those various churches.

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It was not carried by angels. It didn't glow in the pack. These were the ways that God worked with his people, and those letters went out, and they were then copied.

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You may notice in Colossians 4 .16, for example, Paul says to the church there that they are to be looking for a letter that's going to be coming to them.

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We've always wondered, well, what letter might that be? That was probably Ephesians, which was a letter that was circulated around the

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Lycus River Valley, and so they would have that one. They would then have another, and then maybe someone comes through, and they have a copy of Paul's letter to the church of Philippi.

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Well, we'd like to have that, too, so they'd make a copy. These copies began to go all over the

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Roman Empire very, very quickly. We have some ancient, ancient papyri of these letters from a very early time.

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Papyri is... The early church wasn't filled with rich people, and they used the cheapest kind of writing material available, which was made from taking the leaves of the papyrus plant, putting them at 90 degree angles to one another, and there's a drawing process.

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It makes a fairly, fairly smooth surface, and so they would write on this material, and they would want to make copies, and so we have found some of these ancient, ancient copies of Paul's letters, of the

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Gospels, of all portions of the New Testament from the second century, which is within 100 years of that important initial period of time, and some of those have been buried in the sands of Egypt for forever.

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Now, think about it. Let's say 300 years after the time of Christ, some

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Roman emperor does decide that he wants to change something about the New Testament, and so he gathers up what he can find in Rome and makes a bunch of changes and puts out a new version.

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Then 500 years, 1 ,000 years later, we start digging up these other papyri.

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The changed versions, which come later, are going to stand out by comparison with these earlier manuscripts, but that's not what has happened.

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As we find the earlier and earlier manuscripts, and you have a number of them right here in the

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United Kingdom, some of the earliest papyri available right here for study, they show us that those kinds of things never took place, and so, for example, remember how popular

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Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was? I was going to come to that, too. Here you have this fictional work, and it's a work of fiction.

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Unfortunately, many people think that it's not a work of fiction, but this work of fiction... He does say it's a work of fiction, doesn't he, in his book?

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Well, actually, the first page, when it was originally printed, said that all the factual information in this book is true, and that's just not the case at all.

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In fact, Dan Brown had most things exactly backwards. For example, he talked about the Gnostic Gospels and how they presented

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Jesus as just a regular man, and then Constantine comes along and writes Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and turns

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Jesus into a god. The exact opposite is the case. The Gnostic Gospels are the ones that present Jesus as not having a real physical body, just sort of floating around and doing miraculous things, and not only that, but we have manuscripts of, for example, the

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Gospel of John that predate Constantine by over two centuries, that clearly proclaim him to be

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God. So that type of stuff, unfortunately, when people take their history of the

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Bible from works of fiction, it produces some real problems, but the reality is that when you compare the

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New Testament to any other work of antiquity contemporaneous with the New Testament, for example,

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Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius, these are Latin historical writers. When you compare the

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New Testament to them, what do you discover? Well, the average time frame between the writing of a classical work and our first copy is between five and nine hundred years.

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Five to nine hundred years. There's a gap. There's a gap between when it was originally written and the first copy we have of half a millennium to almost a full millennium.

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That's average for works of that time period. What about the New Testament? Better or worse?

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Actually, we have at least twelve, maybe thirteen papyri fragments dated to the second century of a number of the

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New Testament books. Not all, but a number of the New Testament books. Because remember, the New Testament was not written as a single body.

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It was written as multiple works and collected together over time. And so, five hundred to nine hundred years, one hundred years for major portions of the

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New Testament. So, in my debate with Bart Ehrman in early 2009,

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I asked him a question. He had been on a radio program here in London, in fact, and had talked about the enormous time period between when

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Paul wrote Galatians and our first copy, which is only about a hundred and fifty years. And so,

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I asked him, if that's enormous, what would you describe as the time period between when

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Suetonius was written and the first? And he said, very enormous. Because Ehrman is a believer.

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Oh no, he's not. He used to be a believer of some sort. He's an apostate and that's not an insult. Well, he's not here to defend himself.

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He himself, in his books, says that he was once a believer. Let me just track back a little bit, because you mentioned the fact that the papyri used and then we get the codex kind of book situation.

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Because the New Testament writers were Jews, apart from Luke being maybe Gentile or virgin, would they have not used the scrolls as the

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Old Testament people? Very interesting question. We have found very few New Testament manuscripts in a scroll format.

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Some have found that to be so compelling that they theorize that Christians actually in the West invented the codex format.

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One of the reasons for that might be ease of finding certain references in the teachings of Jesus.

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It's a whole lot easier to find something in a book than it is in a scroll. I mean, you can get huge forearms working with a scroll, but it's pretty difficult to find things quickly.

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The other more likely possibility is that it was much less expensive. Most people only wrote on one side of papyri because you'd sort of have the backside would be much more rough, but almost every

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New Testament papyri manuscript we have is written on both sides. Because remember, as Paul said, the early

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Christians, what were they? There were not many wise among you, not many well -born. They were the lower classes, and so they wouldn't have money to be buying a whole lot of extra paper and things like that when they were hand copying the text.

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So they may have been the ones who actually originated the codex format. The reason I ask that, because there's a scribal tradition among the

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Jews. It's also the oral tradition, and they were very good. They were much better at listening because they didn't have the distractions of internet and microwaves and televisions, and they were very good at remembering or retaining information and repeating them verbatim.

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I've been to India and other parts of the world. I've seen people who are illiterate, who could just listen to the word of God and actually speak it out, and astonishing.

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I met people who can do the whole of the book of Romans. They're in their 80s, and they still can do that. So if modern man can do that, how much more the ancient people who were very astute in these things.

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So could there be something about the way that they preserve these things in oral traditions? Well, the oral tradition issue primarily comes up when you're talking about how especially the

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Gospels themselves were written. And the question becomes, when were the

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Gospels written? Now, many in scholarship today opt for rather late dates on the writing of the

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Gospel. Personally, I have found the theory that, as you know, Luke writes

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Luke and Acts together. I have a feeling that there's fairly decent support for the idea that Luke wrote that as what we might call an amicus brief for Paul's trial in Rome.

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He was demonstrating that Paul was not a revolutionary, why the Jewish people were opposing him the way that they were.

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And if that's the case, and his trial is around 60 -ish, then if that puts

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Luke around that point, it would probably put Mark earlier than that, into the 50s or even late 40s.

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And so, I don't see any reason not to view it that way. And yet, people would still say, well, let's say

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Mark was in 50. That's still 17 years after the time of Christ.

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What about that intervening period? How can we know that that information is passed on accurately?

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And as you well know, a Scottish New Testament professor,

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Dr. Richard Balcombe here in the United Kingdom, has written a tremendous book called Jesus and the

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Eyewitnesses, where he reminds us that the eyewitnesses remained an extremely important part of the early church for many, many decades, and certainly all through that period when the oral traditions would be being passed around.

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It wasn't just simply, I whisper something in your ear, you whisper it in somebody else's ear, like the old phone game, where it gets to the fourth or fifth person.

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It's no longer even the same language. That's not how the traditions of Jesus' teaching would have been possessed within the congregation.

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It wouldn't have been just one person. There would have been maybe some eyewitnesses, but it would have been many people passing this along.

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And that provides a very good control, shall we say, for the accuracy of those stories as they are passed along.

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Can I throw in something else also? The 27 books of the New Testament, and there are those who argue that these were written, completed before the 1780s, because there's no mention of the destruction of the temple in these.

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And also the fact that John being the one to die naturally, i .e. in the island of Papnos, he wasn't martyred like others.

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He would have been a person to attest to many of the writings about even the gospels.

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So there's a living apostle who can look back and correlate and maybe go through it, if you like.

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And then there are his disciples, Polycarp and others, who lived on further than him, that they were able to attest to the

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New Testament documents and say, this is good, this is wrong. And could you tell us a little bit about the canon?

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You mentioned about the fact that these were all over the place, going all over the place. Was there an attempt?

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I mean, I know Dan Brown talks about the Constantine coming together and all that, and all that.

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Maybe you can address that. But before that, because you're coming to 325, 320 there. So can you just mention the fact, is there any argument for the fact that because the persecution had broken out and the church was persecuted, so any document they had would have been subversive because it spoke against the system of Labanus, so to speak.

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And obviously, mentioning that Jesus is Lord and Caesar being God and all of those tensions. So they were risking their lives with the document.

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So is there an argument for these things? How about an entire history of the

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Roman Empire from the time of Christ to Constantine? Well, how long have we got? How much time do we have?

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There's so much there in regards to the canon as well as I'll put it as succinctly as I can.

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It is important to remember that the early Christian movement was a persecuted movement.

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This is especially important in regards to New Testament manuscripts because we know that the Romans, especially in the later persecution from about 260 through 313 when the persecution ended, that was the most severe portion of it, empire -wide, and they were focused upon the destruction of manuscripts.

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Thousands of manuscripts were destroyed during that time period. And so in light of that, keeping that in mind, when

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I look at those ancient manuscripts, I think of these fellow brothers and sisters in Christ who risked their lives to possess the

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Word of God. We can go down to a bookshop and buy multiple translations, but those folks had to hand copy what they had.

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I wonder how much most of us would have if we had to hand copy the only portions of Scripture we would have.

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They truly loved those Scriptures. But when it comes to the issue of the canon of Scripture, you need to recognize that the

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Council of Nicaea had absolutely, positively, nothing to do with the canon of Scripture.

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I cannot tell you how many groups believe that the

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Council of Nicaea added this book or took that book out. Dan Brown hasn't helped with that, but that's something that comes up all the time.

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The Council of Nicaea had nothing to do with the canon of Scripture. In fact, around 180, 185, we have what's called the

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New Testament. This is a fragment that contains, depending on how you read it, as much as 95 % of our modern

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New Testament. Now remember, they didn't have fax machines back then. They didn't have the internet.

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Thankfully, there was a discernment process that went along. You're probably aware of the

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New Testament book that had the hardest time gaining eventual full support of all believers, and that was the book of Revelation.

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I'm thankful for that because any book that talks about seven -headed creatures, I want it to be examined very carefully before it's put into the canon of Scripture.

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It wasn't like the Christians were just going, oh, does it say something about Jesus? We'll take it. That's not how they operated.

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In fact, it's very common for people to say that there are all these Gospels running around, and it was not until the

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Council of Nicaea, they voted on it, and they kept only the four, and they got rid of the Gospel of Thomas and all the rest of it.

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That's just simply not the case. The reality is that there are no

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Gospels that are meaningfully capable of being traced to the first century other than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

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There are fringe scholars who would say that, maybe there's some tradition in the

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Gospel of Thomas or something that might go back to the time of Jesus, but they have absolutely no documentary evidence of this whatsoever.

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The reality is that the viewpoints expressed, especially in the Gnostic Gospels, clearly come from the second century, and they come from a completely different worldview than would have been present in first century

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Jerusalem or Galilee, where you used to have clear evidence that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are firmly rooted in that historical setting.

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What you see is the same kind of process between the time of Christ, and normally the

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New Testament is considered to be fully recognized by the end of the fourth century.

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The first list we have of all the New Testament books like we have them is Athanasius' 39th Festal Letter, and I believe it's 367.

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Then you have some councils at the end of time, but remember, those councils, first of all, they were not worldwide councils. Secondly, there was never a council that sat around and said, well, shall we have

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Matthew or shall we not have Matthew? That never took place. The church never thought it had the power to create the canon of Scripture.

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Instead, just as in the Old Testament, there was a period of time where God's people passively recognized what was

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Scripture and what was not. The 39 books of our Old Testament, they counted them as 22 back then because the minor prophets were considered one book and Lamentations was in with Jeremiah and so on and so forth.

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Those were laid up in the temple and considered holy as much as 200 years before Christ.

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So it took about 200 years for that to be seen. The Muratorian Fragment is about 200 years after the time of Christ.

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Very similar time frames that we have for both the Old Testament and the New Testament as far as the recognition of the canon.

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It was never a matter of, oh, we had all these other books, the Gospel of Thomas or the

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Gospel of the Egyptians and those mean, nasty bishops took them out or something like that. That's just wishful thinking as far as church history is concerned.

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Okay, let me just throw this at you because it keeps coming up. I mean, wherever I go, this comes to me as well.

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So I'm going to try this on you. The whole area of this, the movement of the texts, the ones that is going south to Alexandria, the ones going to Antioch, then later becomes the

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Byzantium texts or the received texts or the Texas Receptus versus, there's a thinking that says that the ones that went northwards and the ones that went southwards, there's a difference between them.

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The one being corrupt, the ones being going to the south being corrupted through Gnostic ideas and people messing about with it, twisting the words, adding, taking away, whereas the ones that went northwards were true to the original language in Greek, et cetera.

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And this whole debate with the King James Bible, and there are those who promote that the

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King James only is the true version. Of course, we're not talking about English here. There's two arguments to that.

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If you can address the both things, if possible, one is the route in which these translations come from.

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And then there's a Westcott and Haught debate of 1881 and all that. And the new versions has come out of it.

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I'm giving you a big question because people like Marcus is talking about, and Carol is talking about all these kinds of things.

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They're talking about the apocrypha. What's that doing in the Bible? And it's talking about our Roman Catholic friends having the apocrypha, including into that text.

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Which one do you want to handle first? Because those are two very different. If you can talk about the movement of the text and are there any that are variants, obviously, we'll come to that because some of the questions are talking about the different variants.

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So if you can just touch on that subject. Very, very quickly. You have manuscripts that are found.

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The most ancient manuscripts are found in Egypt. The reason for that is primarily climatological. That is, that's one of the few places in the world where papyri could last for 1800 to 2000 years because it's so dry.

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You just are not going to find ancient papyri manuscripts in Italy. It rains too much. So what has happened is the earliest manuscripts have been identified as the

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Alexandrian manuscripts. And there are those who claim that there are particular biases and in fact corruptions in these

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Alexandrian manuscripts, especially allegedly denying the deity of Christ and things like that over against what's called the

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Byzantine manuscript tradition, which primarily flows from around Byzantium, ancient

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Constantinople, modern day Istanbul. The problem with these theories are many.

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First of all, just simply as one who studies these variations in depth. I mean,

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I debate with Muslim apologists all the time. I need to know those variations intimately.

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The reality is that the Alexandrian text is not in shape or form corrupted. It very plainly teaches the deity of Christ, etc.,

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etc. And in fact, interestingly enough, in history, those who denied the deity of Christ, called

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Arians, were primarily focused in the area around Byzantium. And the great man who defended the deity of Christ, in fact kicked out of his church five times for doing so, was the bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, Athanasius.

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And so there needs to be some care taken in just knowing your church history and things like that.

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But in the modern times, what has happened is we have a text today called the

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Textus Receptus. It's called that because of an advertising blurb in 1633, the

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Elsevier brothers had printed an edition of this Greek text. And back then, even advertisements were done in Latin.

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Can you imagine if they were done in Latin today? And so they called it the text that has been received by all.

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Actually, that was a text based upon the work of Desiderius Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist scholar, who put out the first printed and published

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Greek New Testament in 1516. He did five editions. Stephanus, in the middle of the century, did an edition.

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And Theodor Beza, Calvin's successor at Geneva, did an edition at the end of the century. The King James translators, between 1604 and 1611, as they translated the

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New Testament especially, drew from those printed texts primarily using the 1598

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Beza. The blue case -bound Textus Receptus that you can buy here in London today is actually a

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Greek text based upon an English text. What happened was a man by the name of Scrivener went back.

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He looked at the choices that the King James translators made between those various printed editions of the

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Greek New Testament, Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza. He saw which ones they chose and he created a

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Greek text based upon the textual decisions made by the King James translators. There is no manuscript in the world that reads exactly like that TR.

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It is a text based upon the choices made by the King James translators. But there are those who argue against that, obviously.

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Well, I don't think they argue against its history. Its history is well known. What they would argue is that the

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Byzantine manuscript tradition as a whole is superior to the Alexandrian manuscript tradition.

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Because you mentioned the fact that it's older. But just because something is older doesn't mean it is reliable.

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That's the argument. I'm aware of that. The problem is, first of all, I think we need to recognize there are at least 1 ,800 differences between the

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TR and what's called the majority text, which is the text that you would create if you looked at all the Byzantine manuscripts.

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Erasmus only had about half a dozen to a dozen manuscripts to work from. So the TR is different than that. So even if we put the

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TR aside for a second, just look at the Byzantine manuscript tradition versus the Alexandrian manuscript tradition.

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Yes, the Byzantine does contain ancient readings that are a part of all modern English translations.

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However, the prevailing viewpoint amongst the vast majority of scholars is that if you have manuscripts that come from the second century, that they have far fewer generations of copying between them and the original than manuscripts that are from the 7th to the 10th to the 14th century.

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Now there may be, there are, for example, 1739, 1881 are 10th, 11th century manuscripts that we know were copies from very ancient manuscripts.

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There weren't a lot of generations between them. So there are some that are older, but they don't tend to agree with the

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Byzantine text. The Byzantine text tends to be a text that has been smoothed out over time.

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And so there's a lot of reasons why we need to look at the text and not take a dogmatic stance.

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We need to allow all the information to speak. We have over 5 ,000, almost 5 ,760 manuscripts today, catalog manuscripts of the

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Greek New Testament today. They had far fewer than that in the 16th century when these texts originally derived.

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We have a tremendous amount of information, more than any other work of antiquity by far. That leads us into the issue of the textual variance, because obviously if you only have one text, only one copy of a text, how many textual variants are you going to have?

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None. But you also have to trust that one copy is it. That person had to do a perfect job.

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Obviously, it's far better to have many copies of a book, especially in a handwritten form, to be able to determine and understand what the original text actually said.

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And there is no work of antiquity that has a greater textual witness than the

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New Testament, earlier or more widespread than the New Testament. And I think what people need to understand is if someone like a

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Bart Ehrman, and this came up in our debates, and he admitted, I have a video clip of him saying, oh yes, the New Testament is by far the earliest tested work of antiquity that we have.

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All right. What that means is if you're going to question the validity of the

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New Testament text and say we really don't know what was originally written, then you need to be consistent and say, we don't know what anyone ever wrote in history.

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We don't know what happened in history. In fact, I would argue that if you take Bart Ehrman's position to its logical conclusion, he would have to argue that we couldn't know anything about history until 1949.

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Because 1949 is when we invented the photocopier. Because his argument is if there's any variation, it can't be inspired.

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God cannot have anything to do with that. Every work of antiquity has handwritten variations in it.

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Every work of antiquity. And the more manuscripts you have, the easier it is for you to recognize what the original text was.

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Well, I'm going to give you an opportunity to drink some water. Thank you for joining us tonight on Live at Nine with me,

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Tom Chacko and Dr. James R. White. We've been looking at the reliability of the

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New Testament documents. And some of you have been emailing us and texting us. Thank you very much.

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And I'm trying to incorporate your emails and texts into our discussion. And as I said, this is a subject for a tremendous debate because there are many people who have different views on it.

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But tonight we are looking at the whole importance of how this comes to us. Because we don't want to play with these things.

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We need to be real as to what these arguments are about. We want to make things up. And if it's not there, we have to say it's not there.

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But we can see there's a lot more than just a piece of paper necessarily that goes on behind the scenes and how

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God transmits his word to us. So thank you for joining. And keep your texts and emails coming.

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And I'll put them to James as it comes. Thank you. God bless you. Again, the apocryphal things come up because you talk about the

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Jerusalem Bible, the Jerome Bible and all that. How come the apocrypha got into that? And there are

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Bibles with a lot more chapters in it that they take it as canon.

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And could you address that? The apocryphal books are intertestamental books. That is, books written between Malachi and Matthew.

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They're written during that intertestamental period by primarily Jewish writers. Some written in Hebrew.

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The vast majority are not written in Hebrew. The books themselves recognize, some of them recognize, the pre -existence of the

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Hebrew canon already. Some of them already recognize the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im and the

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Ketuvim, the law, the writings and the prophets, prophets and writings.

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And so they even recognize that they are not canonical. Some of these books contain egregious historical errors, saying, for example, the book of Judith that Nebuchadnezzar reigned in Assyria rather than in Babylon.

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And they put the building of the temple a hundred years too early and all sorts of things like this.

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Those books were known to the New Testament writers. They were known to, they would have been known to Jesus.

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They would have been known to the apostles. They never quote them with the all -important saying, thus saith the

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Lord. They never quote them as scripture. The Jews in Jerusalem never accept them as scripture.

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And even though you'll find older books that say that the Alexandrian Jews did, that's not the case either.

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The reality is that those books were not accepted by God's people. The ones that Paul said to whom the oracles of God had been committed,

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Romans chapter three, they never viewed them as scripture. The apostles did not view them as scripture.

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There was a broad swath, even popes in Rome, such as Pope Gregory the Great, did not view them as scripture.

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And what you need to realize is the Roman Catholic canon was not dogmatically fixed until April of 1546.

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That's a long ways down the road. And so if someone really wants to dig into the issue of the

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Apocrypha, there is an excellent book by Roger Beckwith called The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church that goes very in depth on that.

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And I've done a number of debates at Boston College and other places on the subject of the canonicity of the Apocrypha with Roman Catholic apologists who are defending it.

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So that way you get to hear both sides. And you have a website? Yes, www .aomin .org.

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A -O -M -I -N -D -O -R -G for Alpha and Omega Ministries. So lots of information people can get. You'll be able to find all sorts of information on the

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Apocrypha there and other issues. Okay, I mean, I'm just throwing this out to you because we had texts coming in on that.

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Of course, we're looking at the whole area of, let's come back to the Texas Receptors and the critical texts and the modern translations, because there are those who are asking the question, they have footnotes.

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They say ancient manuscript or this manuscript doesn't say this, it doesn't say that. It kind of confuses people because what do

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I believe? What's going on here? Are the foot margins? I've been directed elsewhere.

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You know, Carol is asking that question. Why do we have all this? Let me say to Carol, Carol, you are blessed to have those footnotes.

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Why do I say that? I just did a debate on Monday night with an

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Islamic apologist and there is no such thing as yet,

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I hope someday there will be, but there is no such thing as yet as a critical edition of the Quran. The Quran is put together primarily by Uthman approximately 20 years after the death of Muhammad.

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He enforces his text upon that and then he burns the manuscripts from which his people worked.

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Now that creates a very easy, nice version to copy, but it also means you can't go back any farther than that.

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We have critical editions of the Greek New Testament and those footnotes are providing you with that information.

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The King James Version, I recall, had over 8 ,000 such notes. Most King James today don't print them, but they were there when the translators did that.

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That's always been a part of how the Bible translations. The 1611 had them.

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Many of them had them for a long, long period of time and they were only dropped out in a fairly recent time period.

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And everybody who does Bible translation, and I should be straight up front. I've worked for the Lockman Foundation, the

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New American Standard Bible for quite some time on this particular area of textual criticism. We include notes because we want people to have the entirety of the information.

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In fact, in the debate Monday night, I gave my Islamic opponent a critical edition of the

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Greek New Testament that in one volume has a huge amount of information on the text of the

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New Testament. And one of the reasons I do that is to show the contrast between Christians who are open with this.

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We publish this. We want people to have the freedom to examine these things. When I prepare to preach a sermon,

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I'm preaching through the book of Hebrews right now at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church where I'm an elder. When I am preparing to preach a text,

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I examine the text to see if there are going to be any differences in some of the translations amongst the people that are sitting in front of me.

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You see, you have the advantage and the privilege of having all these different texts over because Auntie Ethel down the road with her little

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Bible, you know, she's confused. This is where it's coming in. Right. Well, but Auntie Ethel should be part of a church where she would have access to men of God who can explain what those issues are.

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And the most important thing is you want to know what was originally written. But when there has been a textual variant, you need to be aware of that or the enemies of faith will trip you up on it.

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Let me give you an example. One of the most popular stories in the Gospels, Dan Wallace of Dallas Seminary likes to say it's his favorite story that's not in the

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Bible, is the story of the woman taken in adultery. John 7 .53 through 8 .11

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is one of the two major textual variations in the text of the New Testament, the story of the woman taken in adultery.

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Every translation, almost every translation, is going to have some type of a note. It's going to have brackets. It's going to have a footnote.

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It's going to have something that is going to say this is not found in the most ancient manuscripts of the

45:00

Gospel of John. And even more important than that, in some ancient manuscripts, it's found in the book of Luke, in at least two different places in the book of Luke.

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Now, that is clear evidence of the fact that while it's an ancient story, it was not a part of the original writing of John or Luke.

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The important thing is I want to know what John wrote. I don't necessarily, I might find it interesting to know what someone 100 years, 200 years, 300 years later thought

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John wrote, but I first and foremost want to know what is it that John wrote.

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And so I think it's vitally important that we include that information and recognize the history of the text and that this is how

45:46

God has chosen to protect the text. You might be saying, how can you say protect the text when you're saying there are these handwritten variations?

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This is the result of how it is that God preserved the text. Remember what I said at the beginning. From the very start,

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Christians let anybody have the scriptures. They wanted the gospel to go out into all the world.

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And that means it spread out all over the place so there was never any one person or group of people that could gather it up, change doctrine, et cetera, et cetera.

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Now at the same time what that meant was, let's say you were traveling and you went into a church and you hear them reading from First Peter and you've never heard of First Peter before.

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You don't have that in your church. I'm thinking of manuscript P72, which is exactly what that is, the earliest manuscript of First, Second Peter and Jude.

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And you might say, you know, would you allow me to copy this? Because the folks back in my church would love to have this.

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Well, they didn't look at you and go, all right, show us your credentials as to your handwriting and your ability to make copies.

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No, they said, certainly, go ahead. Well, you may not have had the best handwriting and so maybe you did a good copy, but then somebody would have a hard time reading your notes or something like that when they're copying you later on.

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That's why there are variations in the manuscripts. But what that does is that keeps us from having the concern that there were people running around going,

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I'm going to take the deity of Christ out or I'm going to put the deity of Christ in or I'm going to take reincarnation and stick it in the

47:17

Bible. That type of thing could never have happened because of how widely distributed the text was. Well, there's a question about the

47:24

Dead Sea Scrolls and how it's thrown any light on the New Testament or the Bible as a whole in a minute. But someone is confused watching the program tonight and listening to tonight's show is enough to put people off being a

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Christian. There's a lot of confusion being discussed. It's come to the point,

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God is not the author of confusion. He's promised to preserve his word and he has in the English language.

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It's the King James Bible version, which has just been used and brought by millions of people to Christ during the last 400 years.

47:57

The KJV translation put their filter words into italics. No modern translation today does the same thing.

48:03

I also haven't heard anything in tonight's show about the Holy Spirit being the actual author of the

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New Testament, not the apostles. Well, actually, I've written an entire book on this subject and I emphasize the fact that Scripture itself teaches that all

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Scripture is God -breathed. That is, it comes forth from God. I have the highest view of Scripture.

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I believe in its full inspiration and inerrancy, but it is a far cry to believe that and then leap to a 17th century

48:35

Anglican translation. Not only to a 17th century Anglican translation, but the vast majority of people are not reading the 1611

48:43

King James Version. They're reading the 1769 Blaney Revision, which has two different versions of that, the

48:48

Oxford and the Cambridge, and they differ from one another. I fully understand why someone wants to say,

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I don't want to know about variations. I don't want to know about the history. I want something black and white.

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That's exactly what the Muslims have with the Quran. And what I'm saying is that's not the way that God has communicated his word to us.

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And what it does is it actually undercuts the method of preservation that he did use.

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That position cannot defend itself in the marketplace of ideas today.

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That position cannot defend itself against the Bart Ehrmans and the Jesus seminars of the world today to give people a solid foundation for believing that we can trust what the

49:30

New Testament says. Okay. I think you made yourself clear your position. Now we have another,

49:36

Carol, I'm so sorry if I don't think James has not yet answered your question. I want to put it to him again, especially for Carol.

49:44

It says here, Mark 17, she's reading the John MacArthur Bible. Mark? 716 says, it comes in two parts, so just bear with me.

49:55

If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear. The footnote states that this verse does not occur in the best manuscripts.

50:02

Can you please explain which

50:08

Bible have these verses? What does it mean? She's asking the question. So I need to know specifically what text she's looking at.

50:16

She's mentioned Mark 716.

50:22

Okay. Well, what normally happens... You can generalize. There are many verses like that, as you know, in footnotes.

50:30

There's a very specific number. Generally, when you have a text like that, and you specifically said there that was

50:37

Mark 716? Yeah. Okay. I'll look it up and I can provide you, and this is a wonderful thing.

50:44

I have a little computer here in front of me, and I can provide you with the actual information right in front of us as to exactly which manuscripts contain the text and which ones do not.

50:55

Frequently, what happens right here, you have this specific text is not found in Codex Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, a number of other manuscripts.

51:06

It is found in Codex Alexandrinus, which is here in London, as is Sinaiticus, and it's found in the majority of texts.

51:12

Someone might ask, well, why wouldn't it be included? Normally, what this is, is this is a parallel to either

51:19

Matthew or Luke, where an early scribe, knowing the form in, say,

51:24

Matthew, inserts it in Mark to harmonize the two together. And so, when you find it in the earliest manuscripts, it's missing, and then it shows up at a later point.

51:33

That is normally a harmonization. If you'll look at the parallel text in Matthew or Luke, you'll find that that phrase is there, and that's why scholarship would say, later scribes, you and I, memorize verses.

51:46

And in Colossians 1, for example, and Ephesians 1, they're very parallel to one another in a number of places, but there's one important text in Colossians, in Ephesians, says, through whom we have redemption through his blood.

52:00

In Colossians, it just simply says, through whom we have redemption, and Paul moved on. Well, a scribe in the 9th century harmonized the two together, probably just because it was how he had it memorized, and that's what ended up in the

52:13

King James Version of the Bible. But for 900 years, no one quoted it that way. Well, Natalie says, great program, very informative.

52:20

Thank you for the knowledge. I'm very blessed. Well, there you go. There you go. Now, you talked about Codex Sinaiticus, and you talked about Codex Alexander Vaticanus, and there are so much omissions in both of these texts, in between these two texts, aren't there?

52:41

Well, I mean, the reason I mentioned that is because of the fact that many of the translations that we have today, because we haven't mentioned the fact that Greek was written in Koine Greek, you know, today that's not been spoken, so that people can make things up or twist words or bend

52:57

Greek words to make it sound whatever they want. This is happening in certain translations or, what do you call it, translations of translations we see.

53:07

There are some people play with words, don't they? Well, Koine Greek is a very well -known language, and we have very rich resources as to what it means, so I'm not sure what you mean by twisting meaning to things like that.

53:20

Well, this is what people are saying, and the fact that there are translations today with various...

53:26

Well, I don't want anyone to hear me wrong. I'm not saying every English translation is a good translation. There are some lousy translations out there, no question about it.

53:35

It doesn't generally have to do with the text they're translating. It has to do with the principles they use in translation, so there are some lousy translations out there

53:43

I could never, ever recommend, but that doesn't have a whole lot to do with Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. These are two manuscripts that probably date back to the

53:52

Council of Nicaea, and when you talk about variations between them, I don't think if you saw a

53:58

New Testament translated from Vaticanus and compared it with one from Sinaiticus that you'd even be able to detect what the differences were.

54:06

We're coming to the end of the program, so very quickly, there are people asking which Bible would you recommend? Well, I think that a modern translation such as the

54:17

English Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible, I know the NASB isn't popular over here because of its name, but those are the two that I most highly recommend to people, both textually and translationally.

54:29

The New King James is a fantastic translation, but it's a translation of the

54:34

TR, which does not take into consideration a lot of the modern textual information that is available to us, which is extremely important in defending the veracity of the text in the

54:44

New Testament, it truly is. Finally, let's bring it all together if we can and uplift the program.

54:50

Some people may be confused. No, we weren't meant to confuse you. We mentioned the fact that the Holy Spirit, the Word of God is breathed, and that God is able and is capable, and He says, not only transmitted

55:01

His Word down to us, we can believe. Heaven and earth may pass away. Jesus said, My word shall never pass away.

55:07

Scripture cannot be broken. The Lord has lifted His Word above His own name. These are the testament of the

55:12

Scriptures itself, and He says God has breathed it. This is not going to go away. Remember what

55:17

I started with. That's right. What was the first thing I mentioned? I said we're going to have to talk a lot about history and things like that, because those are the things that people don't know about, but I started with the assertion.

55:25

Jesus opened the minds of the apostles to understand what the Scriptures said. There is a spiritual element here.

55:31

I believe in the inspiration and inerrancy of the Word of God. I have defended that against some of its most vociferous opponents.

55:38

Peter says that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. What they spoke, they spoke in their own language.

55:46

Paul said, Bring me the parchments and the cloak. He was cold. Those were his words, but they were

55:51

God breathed. They were exactly what God desired them to be, and that is exceptionally important.

55:58

People must differentiate between this issue of how God has preserved the Word and how

56:03

He inspired it initially. Well, you're going to be around in the UK until when? Saturday. Okay, you got any more programs at the moment?

56:09

I'm not. Okay, this is your last program. This is my last program.

56:18

Jesus said the

56:27

Scriptures cannot be broken. It was His purpose to give us His Word. He has preserved it, but we need to make sure we understand how

56:35

He did it and not force our traditions of that methodology on history.

56:40

Christians are to be people of truth. We have to be honest with history, and then when we're honest with history, we can defend that history.

56:47

When we do so, God blesses His Word to the salvation of His people. Thank you so much for being my guest tonight.

56:55

It's been absolutely unbelievable that we can talk about these things because it's an important issue. People need to get a hold of it and study it.

57:03

Visit your website. What's that again? Aomin .org. A -O -M -I -N -D -O -R -G. And the folks out there, if you want more details on Dr.

57:12

White's ministry, his website, his articles or whatever, it'll be available in the office.

57:19

The information will come up, or you can go to the website and you can get hold of it. Please study the

57:25

Scriptures. The Word of God is powerful. It's sharper than a two -edged sword, the Bible says. It doesn't say it is a two -edged sword.

57:31

It is sharper than a two -edged sword. It's more like a laser. The more you can get close to the Word of God, it's going to change you.

57:38

This book is the biggest selling book in the world, the Bible. The second biggest selling book in the world is the

57:43

Ikea catalog. So what does that tell you? So you have God and the Mormon addressing each other.

57:49

So God bless you, and thank you for watching tonight. Thank you, Dr. White, for being with us tonight.