The Textual Criticism Series Rolls On

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the United States.

It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is James White.

Why Textual Criticism Matters in a World of Internet Confusion

And welcome to The Dividing Line on a Tuesday morning, I guess it is. Whatever it is, we continue with our textual criticism seminar, our textual criticism introduction. There are a number of things we didn't get to last time that we sort of need to get to before we move into things.

If, by the way, you are listening live and you haven't looked at the website this morning, then you need to get hold of it and you need to download the PDFs. And if you're on dial-up, probably not going to work to try to listen to the program and download the PDFs at the same time.

One of them is about, I don't know, two or three megs. This is 12 megs. So pull down those PDFs because they will provide you with what we're going to be looking at eventually over the course of this hour, but not right at the start because there are a few issues we still need to take a look at before we can get into actually looking at some textual variants.

And looking today at the UBS fourth text, the first file, the smaller of the two files, has the UBS fourth material in it. And if you want to take a look at that, and I suppose, yes, if you're listening via archive and you want to get these things, they are linked on today's date, which is, well, I think I posted the first ones last night, 5th or 6th of November, 2007.

You can find them in the blog archives at that point and grab them that way.

Of November?

Did I say November or February? February of I was looking at 11 down here. February 2007, 6th, 7th, somewhere around there is where you'll find the links to the PDFs, and those will provide you with what we'll be looking at in the context of the program today.

But before we get there, I didn't get a chance to finish up some of the information that we sort of need. I suppose you could get away without it, but honestly, it's helpful if you have this information available to you in the context of what especially what you read in the internet today.

There's just so much stuff that floats around the internet that I would say that in some ways, last night as I was surfing around for high-quality images of manuscripts and stuff, that was really neat to find how much stuff is out there.

That image I pulled down from the British Museum, 12 megs, just a massive resolution. That kind of stuff is going to be available in a much more general format in the future that you'll be able to utilize.

That was neat. But aside from those positive aspects, the internet has done more to confuse people about the subject of textual criticism than it has done to help people. That's because I get people coming to the channel all the time, hey, I just read this on a website.

Is that true? Frequently, what they're asking about is just plain silly. I mean, it's just so far removed from reality. I mean, well, remember, we have an example of this. Remember what happened when the Breean Call, when Dave Hunt put out his own version of What Love Is This? with the first 15 chapters of Ack's Hebrew original argument?

And when people started challenging him, they go surfing, they go Googling through the internet until they find a cultic webpage with something about Hebrew and Matthew, and they're quoting from a cultic webpage to try to defend this whacked-out thing that slid into What Love Is This? somewhere.

It gives you an idea. People come in, and since churches don't talk about this, and it seems most Christians don't think they could even ask their pastors about this, and you know what? They're probably right because I know my experience.

I was the only person, and I minored in Greek in college. I was the only person who really found textual criticism to be fascinating and interesting and pursued it and read about it and read outside of class about it and stuff like that.

Most folks are just like, oh, please. The last thing you want to be talking about is something like this in church. And so I understand why people would be pretty naive when it comes to any claims concerning the Bible and things like that.

I heard somebody say that the whole New Testament was written in Aramaic. Yeah, that's exactly what Paul's going to do. He's going to be writing to the Ephesians in Aramaic. Yeah, right. That's like I'm going to be speaking at a church in New York someplace, and so I make my arrangements by writing to them in Italian.

Yeah, that's brilliant. It's just a lot of dumb stuff floating around the Internet. And as long as someone says it with confidence, well, then it must be true. So there's a lot of stuff out there, and I understand that.

That's why we sometimes have to discuss things that maybe, you know, wouldn't technically be a part of normally the discussion anyways. But because we live in the age we live in, we have to talk about those things.

Codex Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and the Myth of the Trash Can

For example, I mentioned last time that I have frequently been identified by King James only advocates as the high priest of the Alexandrian cult. Which still makes me chuckle. And if these folks didn't break up churches and ruin ministries, the whole thing would be exceptionally laughable.

And the fact that last week someone could do what they did with Ruckman denying the existence of Greece and putting out a map demonstrates just how weird some of this stuff can actually become. But when you talk about things like the Byzantine manuscript tradition, the Alexandrian, the Western, the Caesarean, and then you start talking about the texts that come from them.

You start talking about the Textus Receptus. You start talking about specific manuscripts such as Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Vaticanus. Oh, no. It's just, you know, I understand that, you know, especially for fundamentalists, for certain fundamentalists.

Sorry, sorry. But for certain fundamentalists, if a codex is found in the Vatican library, it must be corrupted. You know, just so quick on the conspiracy theories.

The Vatican library is huge.

I imagine all my books are in the Vatican. I bet you they have all of Peter Ruckman's books in the Vatican library. They've got the comic section, but they've got the Vatican library. So does that somehow mean something?

I mean the genetic fallacies and all the fallacies that people come up with on this stuff is just enough to make the you know, again, it becomes rather humorous. But people take this stuff really, really seriously and just don't even think really clearly.

For example, I posted this morning, and this, of course, for some people proves just how terrible and horrible I am. I posted this morning part of that super high resolution, and I had to cut the resolution down.

I mean it's 4 ,000 by 5 ,000 resolution on this one image. Again, a graphic from Codex Sinaiticus that is indicated in for example, even if you're looking if you happen to have already opened up the UBS .pdf on the first page, if you look down at the textual variants, start with 34A.

If you go down the line, you will find a P75, and then you'll find the Hebrew letter Aleph, in this case, the one next to it. That is the sign for Codex Sinaiticus. And Sinaiticus is detested, detested not only by King James Only advocates but by others as well because of the role that it's played in history.

And I'll never forget when you hear someone saying that Sinaiticus was found in a trash basket, you know that person is not serious in what they're saying. And why do I say that? Well, because it wasn't.

There's no evidence that it was. Instead and I've had to correct a number of people on this over the years. I remember at the same meeting in St. Louis where I first saw What Love Is This from Dave Hunt.

He was one of the plenary speakers. I was one of the plenary speakers, ironically speaking, on the King James Only issue and giving my presentation on that. And we were at this restaurant having a dinner.

Frequently, they'll have a dinner for the speakers. You go into one of the little backroom things, and everybody sits around and talks. And it was a fascinating conversation. But as we were leaving, somehow I don't remember how a Codex Sinaiticus came up.

And Dave Hunt, as he's standing up to leave, goes, yeah, well, what do you expect for a manuscript found in a trash can? And I, in front of everybody, said, well, of course, Sinaiticus was not found in a trash can.

That is a popular myth, but it is just that. It is a myth. And he's like hubba, hubba, hubba, hubba, hubba. But you hear people saying this all the time. And myths in this area, for some reason, tend to take on a life of their own.

As long as you hear somebody you trust saying it, then it absolutely must be true. And Dave Hunt says this, and then somebody hears Dave Hunt say that. And since they trust what Dave Hunt said about the Word Faith Movement, then they trust Dave Hunt about Codex Sinaiticus and so on and so forth.

In reality, the story of the finding of Codex Sinaiticus is fascinating. We need to realize that we can sit around in the comfort of our homes and see high-quality images of these manuscripts. But that was not the case 150, 160 years ago when individuals primarily of British origin are traveling the world searching for such manuscripts, looking to where they can find these things to find older and older manuscripts.

And the man who found Sinaiticus at least brought Sinaiticus to light. It's hardly fair to say he found it. It's not like it was lost, but brought it to Western attention, I guess, would be the appropriately political way of saying it.

The man who found it was a man by the name of Count von Tischendorf. Constantine von Tischendorf obviously had the funding to be able to be gallivanting around the world looking for such things. And when he first went to St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai, the story is told.

This, by the way, is where the trashcan story comes from. One day he sees the monk, a monk walking by with a container, what we might call a trashcan, but some sort of a basket. And he is able to see as the man goes by and he's heading for the kitchen, he's going to burn these scraps in the ovens.

And he stops the man and he recognizes by looking at what's in the in the basket that these are very, very old manuscripts from the Greek Old Testament. Now, to the monks, these were just old, unused Old Testaments to them.

That's that's all it was. I mean, when you live amongst ancient stuff all the time, is this well, you know, remember books back then. Have you ever like gone through the the let's say your your grandma, your grandpa dies and you're going through their their personal belongings or something like that.

And you find some of their old, old books and you pick the book up, pages fall out. Well, that's always been a problem with books, and especially in the books, a thousand years old, it's quite likely to have pages fall out.

And once enough pages fall out, it's sort of like the hymn books we have at BRBC in this Bible study room. You know, sometimes Durden hymn 105. I don't have hymn 105. I think we'll have to look for another hymn here.

You know, sometimes stuff falls out and once a few pages fall out, it's the usefulness of the book becomes greatly diminished, shall we say. And so, you know, they weren't it's not like they were trying to destroy massively important things and there was no conspiracies or stuff.

They're just they're just stoking their fires, man. I mean, papyri burns well or leather burns well, especially when it's real old and dry and crusty. So anyway. He he asks if he can put yourself in the position of these monks.

You got this foreigner, dude, you know, and he freaks out about your trash cans. OK, if we if we had anybody doing that, we wouldn't think a whole lot of this guy. And he's saying, look, you can't burn this stuff.

This is this is valuable. So you've got some whacked out guy from England going. Your trash is really valuable. All right. So you understand why he sort of sort of got the monks a little bit unhappy and a little bit confused.

And so he warned them, don't burn any more of this stuff. But because he got all excited about it, they became, shall we say, somewhat less than cooperative in showing him anything else. And this isn't, as I recall, 1844 went off top my head here, but in 1844.

And he doesn't get anything more, but he also has had his his interest whetted a good bit. And so he goes back a number of years later, doesn't find him finally 15 years later, 1859. He's back again and he's been there for a while, hasn't found anything.

And so the last night he's going to be there. He has had an edition of the Greek Septuagint, the Greek translation, the Old Testament published back in his homeland. And so to say thanks to the steward who has been taking care of him and providing him with what he needs while he's staying there.

He gives him a copy of the Greek Septuagint that he has had published. And the monk says, oh, I have one of these, too. And he takes him to his room and from his what we would call a closet. He pulls out a very large book that is wrapped in red cloth.

It is not in a trash can. It is he doesn't pull it out of a trash can next to his bed. He pulls it out from his prize belongings, wrapped in red cloth. OK, let's keep that one straight. This is the historical evidence.

OK.

And he takes the red cloth off and von Tischendorf finds himself staring at what certainly in his day was the oldest existing biblical manuscript, containing a large portion of the Old Testament, all of the New Testament.

At that time, it was at least 1500 years old. And this time von Tischendorf is 15 years older and much wiser. And instead of going, wow, instead, he's like, oh, OK, yeah, well, that's interesting. Hey, you mind if I take a look at that?

And so he retires to his room for the evening and, of course, does not sleep at all because he is simply turning the pages of, at that time, the oldest biblical manuscript known to anyone. And, of course, the next day he tries to buy it.

They won't do it. So that's the story of how it eventually ends up today in the British Library. When I wrote the King James Only Controversy, it was in the British Museum, but it's been transferred since then.

And some of you may recall when I was there a couple of years ago, I got to see both Sinaiticus and Alexanderus right next to each other at the British Library. And so that story is a fascinating one.

And, of course, the reality is very different than the critics in regards to Sinaiticus. But people will vilify a manuscript just because it disagrees with what evidently they think the Bible should say, which in of itself should tell you a little something about the lack of balance of many who address this particular subject and the sad level of emotion that frequently takes over.

Another term that you need to understand. Oh, by the way, back up the truck now. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus probably, especially when you look at them and compare them with one another, they do not have an identical text.

They disagree with one another. Given the size they are, that's not unusual for handwritten manuscripts. But two things. They seem to date from around the time of the Council of Nicaea, 325 A .D. And as I mentioned, we know that Constantine used imperial money to fund the copying of a certain number, about 50 copies of the Bible in light of the fact the Romans had been destroying scriptures for so long.

And a lot of folks think it certainly seems probable given the quality of the handwriting. It's very consistent, very consistent handwriting. That these probably, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, are probably both from that batch, that printing, if we could call it that.

Of course, remember these are handwritten, of the Christian scriptures that were made at that particular time, which would put them getting close to 1700 years of age at this point in time from 325. And so that gives you some indication of the value that these texts would have just as far as their age is concerned.

But the primary reason that they're hated is because they represent what's called the Alexandrian text type primarily. And when the papyri were discovered, the papyri are, I mentioned what papyrus was, when papyri started being discovered, especially in the 1930s, the papyri demonstrated that the readings of those ancient manuscripts, where they disagreed with the later Byzantine text, are what are generally found in the papyri as well.

And so the Alexandrian text type is very ancient and has been proven to be ancient in that particular fashion. And so that's why they are detested. Now people say, yeah, well, there's all these corrections in them too.

There's all these, you know, multiple hands. And if they were so good, then why would there have to be multiple hands? Well, think about it for just a second. An ecclesiastical text type developed over time, a text type that was familiar with the church.

And we know this historically. We know what happened with the Latin Vulgate, for example. Latin Vulgate translated the beginning of the fifth century. For a thousand years, it's the text of the church.

And it took on its own form over time. And anyone who would question the Latin Vulgate, you were questioning the very Bible itself. I mean, there's so many parallels between Vulgate-only-ism, as you see in Roman Catholicism, and King James-only-ism, as you see it in Protestant churches today, that it's not even funny.

But it became the default text. Well, there was a default Greek text as well, the Byzantine text type. So if you're looking at Sinaiticus, you're looking at Vaticanus, and these are texts that are in use, not just buried in the sand someplace, but they are in use for literally a millennia of time.

And they differ from the standard text that's developed outside, then people are going to make emendations. And it would sort of be like taking your New American Standard and trying to put notes in it to make it read like your New King James.

Okay, there's going to be a lot of notes if you're going to do that. And so when people say, oh, there's all these changes, that's because it's been used for a thousand years. Let's see what your Bible looks like in a thousand years.

You know, there's a brother church that's been using the same NIV hardback study Bible, which is unusual in our circles anyways, for I don't know how many years. We call it Codex Ricatonius because it's been around so long.

Well, that ain't anywhere near a thousand years. And so people forget about these rather basic little things in making their attacks upon these particular manuscripts. No one's claiming that this is an exact copy of the original.

But at the same time, these are extremely valuable sources, and to dismiss them just because you have a prejudice is not how you do textual critical study. So keeping those things in mind, Codex Vaticanus, like I said, very similar to Sinaiticus, and it's in the Vatican Library.

And, you know, that's why everybody, oh, that doesn't mean absolutely anything whatsoever, but they are there and they are exceptionally important witnesses. Vaticanus is B in the textual apparatuses as we look at it.

What the Textus Receptus Really Is

So another term we need to get to before we turn to the UBS text is the term Textus Receptus. Textus Receptus is a Latin term that was used in an advertising blurb in 1633. And, yes, that does mean that people used to advertise in Latin.

In case you're confused, we did not see any Latin advertisements during the Super Bowl this year. And I don't think they would have gone real well had they happened. But in those days, people, even widely read people, regular people, people who weren't necessarily scholars, were often trained in Latin.

And so in 1633, there is an advertisement by the Elsevier brothers for an edition of the Greek New Testament, and they called it the Textus Receptus. Now, what is the Textus Receptus? Well, no one really knows, to be perfectly honest with you.

As much as you hear people talking about the T .R., as much as you hear people defending the T .R., as much as you hear people trying to turn the T .R. into the ecclesiastical text, the received text of the Church, as if the Church one day in glorious plenary session all got together and said, ah, yes, this is the text of the Church.

It never happened.

That's wishful thinking. It's woo-woo thinking, but it's not historical thinking. The Textus Receptus refers to a body of printed manuscripts, all sharing particular aspects of the readings. In general, in general, what you have, especially amongst fundamentalists, fundamentalist schools, especially King James only schools, is you will have the little blue case-bound Trinitarian Bible Society's edition of the New Testament.

And that's what people think the Textus Receptus is, the T .R. is. I forgot to bring mine in today. I'll have an extra one sitting here next to me. Anyway, it's the blue case-bound version of the New Testament.

It doesn't have any textual variants listed. And people say, ah, this is the T .R., this is the received text, this is the text that underlies the King James Version of the Bible. Well, sort of, but not quite.

And here's the problem. If you want to try to locate inspiration in the T .R., and there are people who do. There are people who say, this is God has preserved the T .R. Okay, which one? Art Farstad mentioned in the John Ankerberg series we did that there are about 105 versions of it.

And in reality, what you need to recognize is what happened with the initial publication. Remember, I told you what happened in the Book of Revelation, the last few verses of the Book of Revelation, when Erasmus is rushing to put his text out.

Well, Erasmus puts five editions out. And his five editions all disagreed with one another. He made changes in every one of them. And so you've got five editions of Erasmus. And then in the 1550s, Stephanus puts out his text, which, as I said, I keep lobbying a certain good friend back in New York to put me in his will, so I get his 1550 Stephanus text.

And not that I would want him to pass away before me or anything, or that he's that much older than I am, but should something happen, we wouldn't want that 1550 Stephanus text to fall in anybody else's hands.

Then Theodor Beza, Calvin's successor at Geneva, he puts out a text in 1598. So basically the fundamental materials that the King James translators have, remember, you don't have one translator. You have a whole group of translators.

They're working in different places. There's certain people doing the Gospels, certain people doing the Pauline epistles. And they're not going back to handwritten manuscripts. They're basically using these editions of the New Testament, the five editions of Erasmus, Stephanus' text, and Beza's text.

But there are differences between all of those, too. And so there has to be some textual critical study being done by the King James translators. And so if you're one of those King James-only folks that thinks that just by accepting the King James, you can avoid all this messiness of making choices between readings, you're totally naive.

All you're doing is closing your eyes and entrusting the decisions made by Desiderius Erasmus, a Roman Catholic priest, Stephanus, a convert from Roman Catholicism, Theodor Beza, Calvin's successor, Calvin's successor in Geneva, and then all those nasty Calvinist King James translators.

They still had to do textual critical studies. They had to make decisions between variant readings. And even the King James translators then had to make decisions between the printed editions that were available to them.

And what most people don't understand is that that little blue case bound Greek New Testament that people are running around with is not really a Greek text. And you go, what do you mean? It's not really a Greek text.

What do you mean? Of course, it's a Greek text. It's a Greek New Testament. But there is no manuscript in the world that reads like that text. I've run into so many of these, the TR is the preserved text people, who think that by running around the Trinitarian Bible size text, they have the text chosen by the church.

There was never a Greek manuscript written by man that reads like that. And you go, well, then how did it come into existence? Actually, Scrivener came up with it. Scrivener, a great scholar, went back to the King James version of the Bible, compared the Greek texts that they were using, charted out which decisions the King James translators made based upon the differing texts that they had, and created the Greek text that's in that little blue case bound Texas Receptus based upon the textual decisions made by the King James English translators.

So it's a Greek text based upon an English translation. Now, that's a historical fact. That's where it came from. That doesn't stop folks from turning it into the final authority in all things, but that's where it came from.

Can you imagine if I stood here, or sat here as I'm sitting here, and I decided that I was going to, I came up with a text based upon a Dutch translation of, well, I've used this illustration before, the Constitution of the United States, originally written in English.

And so I come up with a, I say we must use this version of the Constitution, which actually is translated from a Dutch version of the Constitution. And so it has differences from the English of the original writing, but I insist that we should base it on this Dutch translation.

I mean, that's as silly as what King James-only-ism is really all about when it tries to make a defense of itself these days. But people don't recognize that, and most Americans are monolingual. They don't know any other foreign languages, any other foreign language.

They don't know any foreign language at all. It wouldn't be an other foreign language because if it was an other foreign language, then English would be a foreign language too. Okay, anyway, so, you know, people buy into this stuff and go, oh, that makes sense to me because it can give us powerful preaching.

There's no questions here. And that's what I call trading truth for certainty. Trading truth for certainty. That's when you decide you're just going to make one text type. This is it. I'm not going to defend this.

I'm not going to provide you with any reasons for this. But I've heard God speaking in this translation or these manuscripts, and therefore they are the be-all and end-all of all things. And you just go, well, you've just given up all basis for defending the Christian faith against attacks upon it because your choice is irrational, and you cannot defend irrational choices.

That's really all there is to it. So textus receptus. Ask somebody who uses the phrase, what is it? What is the textus receptus? Are you talking about Erasmus' first, second, third, fourth, or fifth edition?

Are you talking about Stephanos? Are you talking about Beza? Are you talking about Scrivener's eclectic text, where he goes back to the King James translators and uses their textual choices to create a Greek New Testament?

And why should I feel that I am under any obligation to consider these as originals at all? That's what I want to know.

How to Read the UBS Apparatus and Manuscript Symbols

All right.

With that said, now we know something about Sinaiticus and Vaticanus and Alexandrinus and some of the great texts there. We know what the TR is. As I was looking at providing images, now if you have your UBS fourth edition Greek New Testament, then I would obviously point you to the fact that the best way to get started using UBS fourth is to read the introduction.

I know for guys that's not how you're supposed to do it. You're supposed to just open it up and go for it. But in this case, it really is okay. In fact, it's manly to read the introduction. Otherwise, you're going to be completely lost.

And beginning on page 6, you have listed for you, and the same information, we'll look at the Nessie Olin text later, but the same information is available there. You will have, for example, the listing of the papyri.

You have a little fractur. That's a very formal German script P with a superscript number next to it. For example, papyri 1. And the next column says contents E for evangelist. That is gospels. It's located in Philadelphia, dates from the third century.

That's very old, obviously. Papyri 2 also has the gospels. Florence, that comes from the sixth century. That's pretty late for a papyri manuscript. And then you can just go down through the list, pages 7 through 9.

You have the 97 papyri listed where they are located. The date, and, of course, dates. Until you get into the minuscule period, you don't have people actually putting dates on stuff, so you don't necessarily know.

Once you get into the minuscules, you'll actually find specific years listed on some of the minuscules. Like on page 17 of the UBS fourth, you'll see, for example, minuscule 826. I'm sorry, 2050 has the Book of Revelation.

It's dated to 1107. We know exactly what date it was because they dated it, but that's pretty unusual. Generally, you have to guess by orthography where it was found, where their books was found, stuff like that.

Anyway, you can look at the papyri here, and you can see the listing, and you can see what they contain, and you can see that only a few contain anything more than a particular section of scripture. Most of them contain the gospels.

P45, for example, has the gospels and Acts. But remember, that doesn't necessarily mean it has Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts in totality. There are other listings, and Nestle Elan gives you more specific listings at that point of exactly what they contain, and it will tell you there's a lacuna, a hole.

Let's say these chapters are missing in Luke, or these chapters are missing in John, or something along those lines. And that's normally not because they didn't originally contain those things, but because the book is old, and stuff falls out of books.

And the rest of their pages might exist someplace else, and no one's ever made the connection between the two, something like that. But there's your papyri manuscripts. Then next, beginning on page 9, you have the unseals listed.

And I would have liked to have scanned all this stuff, but it would have been huge. It just would have contained a lot of material. And so I only did the two variants that we'll be looking at here in a little while.

But the unseals begin on page 10, and they go for quite some time. And they go all the way to page 16, before the minuscules start. And remember, we talked about the difference between unseal text, minuscule text.

Most of these are written on vellum, leather, things like that. So, for example, you have on page 10, Sinaiticus. Its number is 01. It's content is EAPR, which would be the Gospels, Acts, Paul, Revelation.

Found in London, called Sinaiticus. Dated to the 4th century, which would be around the time of the Council of Nicaea. A, Alexandrinus, manuscript number 2, also EAPR. Also found in London. It was sitting right next to Sinaiticus when I saw it.

Dated to the 5th century. It's a little bit older. It has a slightly different text outside the Gospels than the others. And so it's dated a little bit older than that. B, Codex Vaticanus. Notice something here.

If you're looking at this on page 10 in the UBS 4th edition, EAP. No Revelation in Vaticanus. Which may be why certain folks who don't want to be left behind don't like that. But that's one of the reasons that I gave you a little bit of an inside story a number of months ago.

About the role I had in editing the Bethany House version of King of the Cults. Was I had caught a mistake on Walter Martin's part. Because he listed Vaticanus as having a certain reading in the Book of Revelation.

Well, Vaticanus doesn't contain Revelation. So you couldn't know what it's reading was if it ever had it in the first place. There you have the listing of it. And it goes down from there. And of course, there's a little bit more information provided in the appendices in the Nessie Olin text we'll look at later.

And this is where you might want to pick up certain elements, certain books at Amazon that go into more detail. Metzger's put out some real nice books that provide some pictures and background location, special characteristics.

There are certain manuals you can buy. Kurt Ahlund's in English translation is available in German as well, of course. It's his original language. You can buy these books. Some are very expensive. The Ahlund text is about $100.

But you can buy less expensive versions of those. It'll give you more of the background. It'll tell you something about the manuscript. What textual affinities it has. Some interesting aspects of it. You can buy these types of books.

If you really want to get into looking at them and getting an idea. I, for example, you have Bézé's Codex Bézécatabrigiensis, which is D, manuscript number five. It's got a lot of really weird readings in it.

I mean, it's so frequently off by itself. It's a Greek and Latin manuscript. And it's way out there. And the enemies of faith like that. They love to cite that one because it's frequently way out there.

And so I have it in transcription form in my library. So you can sort of look stuff up if you have to, stuff like that. This stuff is available. Codex Washingtonius down there at the bottom. I was noticing just last night that the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts has Codex Washingtonius available in image.

You can download images of that and take a look at it. Then after the unseals, which once you dump using letters to represent them, Greek or Arabic letters, you go to just numbers like 0, 4, 8, 0, 5, 0.

The unseals always start with a zero at the beginning. And you'll notice those extend for quite some time until the miniscules begin on page 16. And those just have a number, 1, 6, 13, 230, 23, 44. And you notice there's a minimal listing of miniscules.

And that's because there's so many of them. Now you're starting to get into the Byzantine manuscripts of 1 ,000 years and more beyond the time of Christ. And therefore, again, you can buy listings of all of them.

You can find out what all of them are. But most of the time, since they have very similar text types, they're just listed under the big M majority text or the BYZ. On page 18, you're also given some information.