Keep sharing good news without ads.
No description available
Comments are turned off for this media
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.
Let's jump in the Wayback Machine, let's go back to 1994, as I recall, Austin, Texas. Listen to this.
TexMars. Tex, are you there?
I am, Dale, and it's been good to hear your voice on the radio.
Thank you.
You know, I enjoy seeing your television program as well, and Wanda sends her best also.
Okay, that's right. TexMars used to go to our church, and what church are you going to now, Tex?
Well, we have our own group now. As you know, we live way on the other side of town, but I still have great love for Christ Memorial, Charles Bullock, the pastor there, he's doing great things. And I just want you all to continue in your great success.
Okay, and your comments to the debate here?
Yes, Dale, I just want to compliment Dr. White on defending God's Word, the King James Bible. Maybe he could let people know how to get his book, because I have a copy of it, and it's tremendous. But my specific question, and one of the things that I'm heartbroken about the new versions and what they've done to pervert God's Word, three things that are specific maybe Dr. White could comment on.
Is it true, Dr. White, that the new versions have totally eliminated the statements by Jesus, for example, get thee behind me, Satan? Another one, when Jesus told us to take up the cross and follow me.
Evidently those are missing from the new versions. And also, what about the Lord's Prayer? I recently read the NIV, the NAS, the two versions of the Lord's Prayer. I found out that they were horribly gutted, and entire lines were totally missing in the new version.
And maybe you could comment on that.
Okay, I'd be glad to comment, and of course Mr. White would want to comment equally. The statement for the Mars, as far as the take up thy cross and follow me, it is eliminated in one of the Gospels in the Westcott and Hort type text, and that's the Auld Lang Syne text.
It is, however, found in some of the other synoptic Gospels, but at least in that area, that one portion, it is taken away. As far as the Lord's Prayer, thy kingdom come, thy will be done. There are certain parts of it that are omitted, and there's no question about that either.
And as far as the other one, get thee behind me Satan, that is left out also in that portion of the Gospel there. And certainly we feel that the King James Bible is superior in the keeping of these areas and these portions that are in line with the truth and in line with doctrine and in line with correctness in all ways.
I would like to comment on each of those in regards to get thee behind me Satan. It is found, of course, in Matthew 16, verse 23 in the New International Version. Mr. Marsman, you were on KXEG last week commenting on the Lord's Prayer.
You were referring only to the Gospel of Luke. Many of the things that you said were deleted are actually in the Gospel of Matthew and were not actually taken out. Take up the cross occurs four times in the King James Version, occurs three times in the modern text, and the only place where it's removed is Mark 10 .21 because it's not in many of the early manuscripts.
And interestingly enough, it is not in the parallel passages where Matthew and Luke record the same instance as Mark 10 .21, specifically Matthew 19 .21 and Luke 18 .22. So there is very good reason why it is not found in many of the modern translations.
I would like to ask you, Mr. Mars, if 2 Timothy 2 .24 -26 is indeed found in your Bible where it talks about how we are to address these particular issues, how we are to refute those who contradict us.
The Scripture says,. And the Lord's bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance, leading to the knowledge of the truth.
And they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will. When I sent you information on the errors in Gail Ripplinger's book, you wrote me a letter back that began, Don't write me again unless in sincere repentance.
You are a devil, plain and simple. And I understand well why Mrs. Ripplinger does not respond to your ridiculous assertions. Why dignify the lying claims of a servant of Satan. Would you maybe explain why you identify someone as a devil and a servant of Satan in light of 2 Timothy 2 .24 -26?
Because, James, you are attacking the Word of God. Also because what you have done, for example, is name your ministry Alpha and Omega, and yet in Revelation 1 -1, some of the new versions take out the words Alpha and Omega, and yet you have the audacity to give your ministry that name.
And by the way, you asked me a question. Could I answer it?
Well, I just wanted to correct what you had just said. I just wanted to correct what you had just said. You're confusing people. It's not Revelation text.
I would like to answer your question, James.
Go ahead.
All right. As far as your being a researcher, I received your treatise about Gail Ripplinger's book, and I noticed you misspelled her name throughout it. If you can't spell her name right, and all you had to do was call her up or call me or call any one of a thousand bookstores that have her name, if we can't trust the fact that you can't even spell an author's name right, how can we trust any other supposed scholar in this?
And by the way, I read your 40-page sniffle, but it was full of errors, and I really think that you need to get down and read some books, Dr. Waite's book, Dr. Fuller's book, Ripplinger's book, excellent books, and they're much needed by Christians today.
Well, Tex, if I could point out a few things. First of all, it's not Revelation 1 -1. It's Revelation 1 -11 that you're attempting to refer to there, and I provided you a full response to that in the letter.
Sir, I'm going to answer your question, Tex. I'm going to answer your question now. Revelation 1 -11, not Revelation 1 -1, and I explained that. Excuse me. It's Revelation 1 -11.
That's what I said.
Revelation 1 -1 -1. Revelation 1 -11.
Actually, sir, on the front of the last letter you sent me where you sent back my facts with red lighting on it, excuse me, Tex, Tex.
There has been no moderator to debate, and I guess are you trying to take over the debate?
No, sir.
No, sir, Tex, I'm just responding to your text.
Well, excuse me. I'm part of In Defense of Faith, and Tex, you're going to have to let James respond now.
You have to be quiet.
They're going to turn you down.
Sir?
Dr. Waite is the guy who debated not me. I'm going to let you good men go.
Okay.
All the best to you, my friend.
That's fine.
Tex, I have one question for you. Are you still there, Tex? He's gone.
If I could respond to that. First of all, I sent a letter to Tex Myers responding to his letter to me. He sent my facts back with red ink across it saying he didn't want any more of my evil trash, and interestingly enough, he just tried to say he didn't say Revelation 1 -1.
The front of the envelope has Revelation 1 -1 right here.
I'll show it to you.
Written on the front, not 1 -11.
All right.
Secondly, if I could finish responding to what he was saying. When he says I attack the Bible, no, I do not. I love God's word. I preach God's word. A couple of you, Dale, were there today as I opened God's word and spoke that word.
I love God's word. I do not attack it in any way, shape, or form, but I do attack those who would attempt to limit God's word to a 17th century Anglican translation, and that just simply is, those are the problems with what Mr. Myers said, and you'll notice he did not respond to my citation, 2 Timothy 2, 24 -26, to explain why he would identify someone as a servant of Satan.
That is not how Christians are to discuss this issue. I have respect for a person who can handle a discussion of this issue on a rational basis without resorting to names, but Mr. Myers obviously is not one of those individuals who can deal with this issue.
What he said about get thee behind me, take up the cross, the Lord's Prayer, and each of those things, we could have a good discussion on those things, but he's in error about many of the things that he said.
Now that was, like I said, 1994, and I'll never forget, he kept talking about Revelation 1 -1, and he was actually talking about a text of Revelation 1 -11 where the majority text actually splits, but the fact of the matter is, text Myers doesn't know anything about the majority text, he couldn't read a Greek epistle if it hit him in the face, so he just would not accept any correction.
He had sent me this letter with all this nasty stuff written all over it, and you're a servant of Satan and all this type of stuff, and then he puts, next to Alpha and Omega Ministries, he puts Revelation 1 -1, and so he calls in, he says Revelation 1 -1, then when I finally correct him, well that's what I said, Revelation 1 -1 -1.
There was actually a guy in the studio, like where Rich is now, and he was laughing so hard, that I turned around and looked through the window, and I see two feet in the air, waving back and forth, because he's on the ground on his back, laughing so hard at this man, and the foolishness of his inability to interact with anything that I had just said to him.
It was just absolutely incredible. By the way, I didn't respond to it then, but I'm going to be putting this, by the way, I think sometime over the weekend, the blog article that has a clip from the Ankerberg program, it has that audio clip, and it also has the page, it has the envelope from Tex Meyers with Revelation 1 -1 on it.
I didn't respond to it at that time, but I mention it in the blog article, that he was exactly right when Ripplinger first put her book out, it had only one name on it, G .A. Ripplinger, and she did so so that people would know she was a woman, so that she would get a wider audience.
And so I had to guess at the name Gail, and there's more than one way to spell Gail, and I spelled it G-A-Y-L-E, and it's actually G-A-I-L, and that is about the most substantive argument that Tex Meyers has ever come up with on anything, any subject whatsoever.
Is he even around anymore? I have not heard anything about him for a long, long time, but you probably barely caught it, but I was pointing out the erroneous nature of the argumentation he was making by saying the modern versions have taken this out and taken that out, and actually when you start looking at what they're actually talking about, they're either talking about variants that are clearly parallel corruptions between the synoptic gospels, and they don't know anything about, Tex Meyers obviously doesn't know anything about the manuscript evidence that would be behind these things, nothing like that.
But unfortunately, that is often how the textual data is addressed, and that's a shame in and of itself because it really deserves far more careful examination than these people are willing to give to it.
So be that as it may, we are continuing, of course, with the discussion of textual criticism. The program need to press on and to try to get at least through the symbols of the Nessie Olin text. If you are following along, if you have the Nessie Olin 27th edition, I'm starting on page 52.
If you do not,.
Then hopefully you have downloaded the NA27 .pdf. In fact, I'm looking at that. I'll be trying to follow that along because I can blow the font up larger in the PDF than I can in my NA27 text itself, and I forgot to bring my large print with me today.
So we'll be using the NA27 .pdf. And the last time we were together, we had noted initially probably some of the most common symbols, and these are symbols that you need to be able to understand to utilize the Nessie Olin text and the rich variety of information it provides to you.
We had looked at the superscript circle, which is the indication that the single word following that is omitted by the witnesses cited. We had looked over at Mark to see what it looked like. Then right at the end of the program, we were starting to talk about the superscript square and then the superscript backslash that indicates that the words, clauses, or sentences following in the text are omitted by the witnesses cited.
The backslash, the superscript backslash sign marks the end of the omitted text. So in other words, you use the circle when you've got one word. If you've got more than one word, if you've got a phrase or maybe even a sentence, that's fairly unusual, then you will use the square, and then the backslash will indicate the end.
And then when you look down at the bottom of the page, you'll be able to see which witnesses omit the words that are cited at that point. Then we have what sort of looks like half of a capital T. Again, it's going to be superscript.
It's a half of a bracket, indicating that the word following in the text is replaced with one or more words by the witnesses cited. So obviously when you look down at the bottom of the page, if it's one word, then you'll have the one word given.
If it's multiple words, then we'll give you the multiple words that replace the singular word that is used in the text at that point. And then you have, I'm not sure how to describe these, sort of a quarter bracket, I guess, superscripted, going two different directions.
And this symbol indicates that the words in the following text are replaced with other words by the witnesses cited, and it forms somewhat of a bracket around this. And sometimes that will indicate that the variant you're looking at will have multiple words, and they'll be in transposed order.
And so at that point, they'll give you a means of knowing what the order of the words in the variant are in the witnesses that are cited. Then you have what looks like a capital T, which is really more of an insert mark.
And this, again, these will be superscript. They're not going to be right on the same line with the Greek text. This sign marks the location where one or more words, sometimes a whole verse, is inserted by the witnesses cited.
So in other words, now you've got something that's probably in the text itself. It's not going to be included, but they're trying to tell you that we feel that the included text, which is in these witnesses down here, is not original since they're not included in the text.
But they give you that information at the bottom of the page that you know that in certain witnesses, there is material inserted at that particular point in time. Then you have the superscript looks a little bit like an S and then a backwards S.
That indicates the words following the text are transposed by the witnesses cited. So there is a word order issue raised there. The raised colon indicates a variant form of punctuation, which we've mentioned in the past there was no punctuation originally.
And therefore, what would that really refer to? Well, sometimes where you break and how you see a break in the text does have some meaning to it as far as the meaning of the text goes. And so that is indicated for you.
And then there's some other transposition citations given to you. Then it is explained to you as well that if there is more than one kind of a variant, omission, insertion, transposition, whatever, in a verse, which rarely happens, it's not common, but it does happen once in a while.
There will be a one or a two placed next to the symbol to give you an indication so that when you look down, you can find the proper citation material in the end note. And I don't think I've ever seen a three.
So I think most is two possible, but it would be very rare to have quite that many variants within one particular verse. And the same thing with the use of ellipses there for a lengthy transposition or variant that is found there.
On page 53, you're told about the large bold dot, which is in the Nessie Island. In the UBS, they break each variant into its own paragraph. But again, what's the primary purpose of the NA -27? To put as much stuff on the page as you can get on the page.
Really try to cram it into the smallest space as possible. And so instead of breaking each variant off, they just run it all together in one paragraph, the bottom of the page. And so the way to know where your next variant starts is with the bold dot that gives you the verse breaks.
Then you have the solid line. A solid vertical line separates the instances of variation from each other within a single verse or section of the apparatus. We looked at that last time. And then a broken line separates the various alternative readings from each other within a single instance of variation.
The letters TXT, italics, this sign, meaning textus actually, introduces the list of witnesses supporting the text of this edition. So in other words, in this one, you'll see first the variant, and then you'll see the witnesses for the text that has been provided in the Nessie Island portion itself.
Let's see here. Let's go on down to the next page. You'll have a parentheses where witnesses would show only minor differences are noted in parentheses. We saw that in Marks Chapter 16. There were some parentheses used to give you this manuscript pretty much follows this variant, but it has this one variant itself within it.
And that will give you extra information as to the reading that is considered there. Parentheses enclose the appropriate superscript sign when the first-hand or a later corrector of a manuscript witnesses some minor variation.
So in other words, if you have aleph with parentheses and an asterisk parentheses closed, that's saying that there is a minor variant, very later, first-hand later corrector of a manuscript witnesses some minor variation that is found.
And again, these are not overly regular signs you'd be looking at. Brackets, and I'm moving through these fairly quickly because I want to get into the text itself because the only way to actually see how these work is to start looking at them and seeing them, and they make more sense when you actually see them.
Brackets enclose conjectures with regard to both the text and its punctuation. Now, that makes a lot of people nervous, as it should in some sentences. Conjecture, why would you need to conjecture about something?
Well, for example, textual conjectures are identified either by their author. For example, when you have commentators, if it's probably something coming from another text, something along like that, sometimes you'll just see CJ for conjecture.
And sometimes people have made changes. Beza, for example, at Luke 222, makes a conjectural emendation. He's conjecturing that the original looked like this, but he's never seen a manuscript that reads that way.
And I don't believe that there are any main text readings in either of the UBS or NA -27 that are actually based upon conjectures, but they do let you know that there are some of those that are in commentaries and things like that.
We've already mentioned in the presentation of the witnesses that when you have an asterisk that indicates the original reading when a correction has been made, then you have the C indicates a correction made by a later hand, but sometimes also by the first hand.
Sometimes somebody went back, believe it or not, sometimes people would actually go back and check their own work. As a teacher, I go, yeah, right. But sometimes they would go back and check their own work, and you can see where they have made a correction themselves.
1, 2, and 3 identify as a correction made by the first, second, or third corrector. We're on page 55 in the text right now. Then you have such things as VL for Varia Lectio. It indicates a reading recorded in a manuscript as an alternative reading.
So sometimes, and we understand why this is. Remember, you're copying somebody else's manuscript, and they may be dead. And so you may be looking at a word, and you can't figure it out. And so sometimes they were stuck, and they would go, okay, this is my best reading here, but maybe above it they might indicate, and it might be this too, and they're just not in a position for some reason, maybe this is the only manuscript they have they can copy, of knowing which one is there.
And so since they can't read the original, they'll put the two possibilities there. Sometimes that is able to be found, and that is indicated with the VL. The TXT as a superscript sign, not as a full-size sign, indicates the reading in the text of the manuscript, which also records an alternative reading.
So if there's alternatives, the main text is given with TXT, and then the alternative is indicated with other means. MG is important, because remember, if you look at some of the graphics I've provided for you, especially if you're making a change in those things, you're writing on vellum, you're writing on leather, this is precious material.
If you're going to be making a change, you're going to be putting it in the margin. The problem is also if you make a notation, you're going to put it in the margin. And later people copying that, looking at what's in the margin, do they include it as a marginal note, something that you commented on the text, or do they put it in the text?
That becomes important in passages like John 5, for example. But MG indicates a marginal reading. S, a supplemental reading, if there's something indicated at the end of the manuscript, a supplement. VID, V-I-D, that one's important, because quite honestly, there are times you can't tell.
And as I said, sometimes VID will refer to the fact that it cannot be determined with absolute certainty, but there's enough evidence upon which to at least cite it, but it cannot be cited with its regular full authority.
Why would that be? Well, on papyri, sometimes what's written is just difficult to read. Over the time, including many centuries, things happen. The ink fades. The papyri degrades. You can have holes develop.
The edges fall off, become brittle and fall off. And so there's all sorts of things that can happen. But if you're looking at, for example, a variant where the difference is between a word that's three letters long and a word that's five letters long, and there's a hole in your manuscript, but you know how large this person writes letters anyways, and the hole would only allow for three letters, but it wouldn't allow for five letters to put in there, then you can probably tell what the word was in that manuscript, and it's going to be placed in the three-letter category rather than the five-letter category, but it's going to have the VID next to it because the word's actually not there.
But you can sort of tell. Or, for example, if the edge of the manuscript falls off, but you know how wide that column was, and again, you can count the number of letters. You can cite that manuscript as having left enough space for one particular reading, but not another particular reading.
See, that's how some of those things happen in your examination of these particular texts. Then we have the big M, the Fraktur M, meaning majority text, including the Byzantine Koine text. And please note, please note, they are not the same thing.
In fact, in one of the video clips I'm going to post, I think over the weekend or early next week, one of the two, on the blog, I have Dan Wallace actually making reference to the fact that there are about 1 ,700, 1 ,800 differences between the majority text and the TR, and the Byzantine text is almost always the same as the majority text.
But remember, there are times, especially in the Book of Revelation, we're preaching through the Book of Revelation on Sunday mornings right now at PRVC, and there was a pretty major variant at the end of Revelation chapter 5, and I had forgotten about it.
I did remember it once I saw it, but I had forgotten about the rather large variant there. And very frequently in the Book of Revelation, the Book of Revelation has the most unique textual history of any book in the New Testament.
No question about it. It just breaks all the norms for everybody else. And so in that particular text, in studying Revelation, you'll always be finding part of the M text. The majority text reads this, part reads this.
They've even identified consistent parts of the majority text that go together in their reading of the Book of Revelation. So you'll see that M breaking up in the Book of Revelation into different classes and families.
But you will see that M as an indicator of the majority text type, and it'll be found very frequently. There's a couple others that, you know, they're a little bit difficult sometimes for English speakers to grasp hold of, mainly because of the fact that we have little exposure to Latin.
So PM, for example, does not mean a private message in a chat room. It means paramulti, and it is used in place of the M sign, the majority sign, when the witness of the majority text is divided in fairly equal strength between two, rarely three, variant readings.
The abbreviation PM appears then with both majority text readings. If one of these readings is in agreement with the text, and APRAS does not list support for it, the sign PM appears only once, and the support of consistently sided witnesses of the second order may be inferred for the text, just as with M variants when the support for TXT is not shown, etc., etc.
PC means palsi, a few manuscripts. So if there's a few manuscripts of a translation, for example, or others, you'll see PC. AL for ali, some manuscripts other than those explicitly mentioned for a given reading, which differ from the majority text.
We saw PM above, rel, the rest of the manuscript, tradition, etc., etc. Just a few others that I'll mention here, such as HT for homoi teleuton, meaning similar endings. We saw that in 1 John 3 .1. And then you can come back to these and look at these as references when you encounter them, if you're doing a fairly in-depth study of a particular passage, because you would want to be looking at them.
And so with that, let's take a look at page 4 of NA27 .pdf. If you have the Nestle All in Text 27th edition, this would be pages 148 and 149. And this is the largest of the textual variants in the New Testament, largest in the sense of the amount of text.
Sometimes you'll hear people talking about major variants. Well, there's different ways of defining what major means. Major in the sense of having a real impact as far as meaning. Then I would say texts like John 1 .18 are major variants, but actually only one word there.
In this instance, we're talking about the largest block of text where there is a variation. And in fact, all of the text on pages 148 and 149 is involved in the variant. And this, of course, is what's called the longer ending of Mark.
Now, when you think about it, when you actually look at the actual, how many sentences do we have here? Well, sentences, of course, are defined by modern editors. But using their particular division, we have what here, what?
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, what? Maybe 10, 11 sentences grand total. Just sort of speed it up there for a second. If this is the largest one, and it is, then you are currently looking at the largest block of text about which there is any question and is the longer ending of Mark.
Now, my purpose here is not so much to argue the issues of the longer ending of Mark as it is to utilize this as a means of examining the textual apparatus. And you will notice that on the right-hand page, there is a fair amount of information that is given to you at this particular point in time.
This is actually probably wasn't the best way to start because it looks really, really confusing. And especially to a person who doesn't read a whole lot of Greek, it looks very, very confusing because you have an insertion of an incredibly long section of Greek about, well, it starts almost exactly halfway through this paragraph of textual data.
And if you don't bother trying to translate that, just go down to the very end of it. Right before it goes into Latin, you will see the one manuscript, Codex Washingtonius, which contains this lengthy insertion, this medium ending that is found to Mark's gospel.
If you take that out, and you'll notice that's inserted in verse 14, then this paragraph doesn't look quite as, shall we say, intimidating. But let's go ahead and go back to the top. And you'll see the listing of Mark 16, 9 through 20 in the double brackets.
And you will see that OM is omitted by Aleph B. 304 K. Cis S .A. Manuscripts, that is, Sahidic manuscripts, Armenian manuscripts, Eusebius manuscripts, according to Eusebius, and manuscripts of H .I .E .R., Egyptian origin.
Now, you might stop immediately and go, hmm, that's not a long list. And you might be tempted to go, wow, we have 5 ,300 manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. Stop right there before you do that. Because, you see, the immediate thing that people think of when they see this is they go, hmm, one, two, three, three?
Three manuscripts? Three out of 5 ,300? That's not many. A couple things. First of all, there are not 5 ,300 manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark. When people think of manuscripts of the New Testament, they automatically make the mistake, and I know I've already addressed this, but let me address it again because a lot of this stuff goes fairly quickly.
5 ,300 manuscripts means 5 ,300 full manuscripts? Yeah, there's full manuscripts, especially after 1 ,000 in the medieval period. Sure, there are full manuscripts there. There are full manuscripts in Sinaiticus and stuff like that.
But most are not that way, especially the early manuscripts. They're much more fragmentary. They might be just of the Gospels. They might just be of Paul, John, whatever. So you don't have 5 ,300 manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark.
You might have 1 ,500 or 2 ,000, something like that. But still, people are going to go, wait a minute. You only have three unseals that read this way? Why aren't there any papyri? Well, we don't have any papyri of the end of the Gospel of Mark at this particular point in time.
It'd be nice to find some, but we don't have any. And so you go, well, three is just not enough. Well, if that's all there was, if it was just three that didn't have it, we could hypothesize things like final pages falling off and stuff like that.
We could hypothesize that the particular manuscripts used for Sinaiticus and Vaticanus at the time of Constantine had lost the last page of the Gospel of Mark, and therefore that's why this wasn't there.
And that right before the last page, you got verse 8. That's where it ends. And so we could just sort of dismiss at that point. But that's not the only thing that this scan, this piece of information in front of us is giving to us.
You will note that providing 16 .9 through 20, and then as soon as you start trying to go down that line, you start seeing all sorts of variants within it. You see, for example, in the fourth line after 16 .8, you have sort of a short ending that's found in El and Psi and a couple other enseals.
And you have all sorts of variants. And interestingly enough, the translations split every which direction at this point. Notice just you've got the Syriac with a superscript S cited omitting it. And then on the next line, you have the Heraklion Syriac in a margin mentioned.
And then you have in the next line C, P, and H mentioned for a different variant. And it's all over the place. And the same thing happens with the Sahidic, certain manuscripts, S-A-M-S-S is certain manuscripts of the Sahidic, the Boheric.
When you have this explosion of variants going every which direction like you have here, that is a sure sign of a disruption of the manuscript tradition at a very, very, very, very early point in the transmission of the Gospel of Mark, very, very early on.
And a lot of scholars would say, yeah, because the way that Mark ends without finishing the story, there would be an absolutely overwhelming desire to fill it in. And remember, let's back up the truck here.
This may take me a long time, but it's important because this feeds into the series I'm going to be doing responding to the Brian Fleming stuff on the blog. And that is when Mark is writing, the Gospel is already known.
When Mark is writing, he's writing and he knows that the apostolic proclamation has already been made. It's been around for decades. All the Christians know this. Yes. And so you see, the people who see this, if the story stops before when they want it to stop, which is all the post-resurrection appearances and everything else, they say something's missing.
And so we're going to fill it in. And so it was filled in, and at least just glancing at the thing here, at least three or four different ways. Codex Washingtonius has its form, and the longer ending we have here, that little short ending that you find in El Emsai and some Sahidic manuscripts and Boheric manuscripts, and then some that squish all that together and have variants and so on and so forth.
And the fact that there's this explosion of variants tells us that there was a desire for something more past verse eight. And some people say, well, yeah, that's the longer ending that's part of the text.
Well, if that was there from the beginning, then why did this happen? Why do you have not just in Olive and Beeth, 200 years down the road, 250 years down the road, 325 or so, depending on where you put Mark, about 270 years down the road.
Why do they not have it? And why do these, the Armenian, Jacob Arminius, yes, the Armenians, you try to finally say Armenian, you can't even say it right. Certain manuscripts of the Armenian, why do they also likewise not have this at that early period of time?
There just doesn't make any sense. No other manuscripts or books suffer from this same type of situation. If the longer ending was original, then the longer ending would not have room for all these other things that have developed over the course of time.
And since the gospel had already been proclaimed and the resurrection had already been proclaimed, and there would be lots of people go, hey, we know the rest of the story and that rest of the story needs to be there.
And so there would be a basis from which they would draw to create this longer ending. And so when we look at the subject here, and again, my argument isn't so much to discuss the arguments about, well, the third line gives you the rest of the text and you've got A, C, D, W, theta, family 13, the majority text type, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, it does. But that doesn't explain the existence of all these other endings. It doesn't explain the deletion. It doesn't explain the translations. It doesn't explain Codex Washingtonius. It doesn't explain the variations within this.
It doesn't explain the fact that the language used by Mark is very different. And the only main reason I put this here was so that you could take a look at it and go, wow, this can get really confusing.
I mean, look at the number of double brackets and the number of superscript numbers and everything else. There's a lot of variation. The vast majority of the pages in the new test we're looking at aren't going to look anything like this at all.
There's just not that level of variation. We sort of started with the worst one. If you keep going after this, then you can't be scared away in essence is sort of what we're looking at here. But you can see anyways sort of the outline of how you can put a whole lot of information into a pretty small space utilizing the mechanism of the Nestle-Aland text.
Like I said, it wasn't my intention to walk through the whole thing about Mark 16, 9 to 20. But that just gives you an indication. I think it'd be a little bit easier to look at variants that are not quite as challenging as that.
And so, in fact, let's go to the we'll come back to the next one. Let's go to the sixth page of the PDF, page six, which is from 1 Timothy chapter three. This one is a very, very important text, a very important variant.
It's over on the right-hand side. There are some interesting texts we can look at on the other side too, but we're trying to avoid that. Let's look over on the right-hand side toward the bottom of the page.
Here you have the great variant of 1 Timothy 3 .16. And the text, you will notice, gives you a formatting in verse 16 that places it in the form of poetry. That is because many scholars believe that when he says this, by common confession, great is the mystery of godliness, what you have following this is an early confessional statement of the church.
Maybe hymnic in a sense, because people have always known if you want to remember something, put it in a poetic form or in a musical form, because you're going to remember it if it's set in that way. The very first word of the poetic section in the Nessie Olin 27th edition is hos, hos, which means he who was manifest, phanerao, in sarx, sarki, flesh.
He was manifest in the flesh and then justified by spirits and gazed upon by angels. As you know, the variant, if you'll notice right before hos, there is a symbol. Now go back to 16, you'll see the word chi, and then right before the next word, you have the indicator of a variant here where you have a different word being used in certain witnesses.
So if we go down to verse 16, it's the third line of the variants at the bottom of the page. You will see that same symbol followed by the variant, and it's a fairly minor variant found in the original hand of D. 1175 and a few others.
But then you'll notice that there is a second variant that goes along the same line, and it has a little dot placed in it, and that's the one that we want to look at. And that is, we have hos is the main reading, and in the Nessie Olin, the evidence for the main reading will be given at the end of the variant.
So if you look at the last line of the third chapter variants there, which is the second to last line of the page, you'll see VG and then MS and then the broken divider bar. And then you have TXT, and that gives you the evidence for the textual reading of the Nessie Olin 27th, which is the original hand of Aleph, the original hand of A, the original hand of C, FG, 33, 365, a few others.
And then you have a few variants from there and two early church fathers that are cited. But as you probably know, this is the difference between God was manifest in the flesh, theos, and he who was manifest in the flesh.
The reading here is he who, and then right above that, you will see that the other two variants, there's actually three variants here. In some of the Latin manuscripts and in D, which is a Greek Latin manuscript, and the Latin very strongly influenced the Greek, you have ha, the neuter, instead of has, the masculine.
That's one of the variants there, not an overly major variant, but anyway. Then you have the word theos, God, and that is given by the corrector of Aleph, the corrector of A, the corrector of C, the corrector of D.
Actually, the second hand is C and the second hand is D. Psi 1739, 1881, the majority text and manuscripts of the Vulgate is what that line of reading is found there. Now, I forgot to bring it up and it's going to take me a second to do so, but if you will go back to the blog for a moment, and I know that many of you read this via a long time later, so I'll try to give you the specific date so we can take a look at it once again.
But if you'll go back to the blog to February of 2007, and it's not any longer on the front page if you're listening live today, so you're going to have to scroll down to the bottom of the page and you're going to have to go to the, missed it when it was there, check the archives, then go to February of 2007, and then go scrolling because I've been going YouTube nuts.
And there's all sorts of pretty stuff to look at there. Isn't it wonderful? And finally, we get down to graphics related textual critical series under the 6th of February. You will see a beautiful column from Codex Sinaiticus, but we're not looking at that.
We're looking at the two little graphics, two tiny graphics in the February 6th entry graphics related to the textual critical series. I cannot tell you how long I sat up getting you these two graphics, folks.
I think I went through about two hours worth of work to get you those two graphics. Yeah, I could have gotten you some cheesier ones, but I wanted something that looked good and something that looked consistent so you could have a good idea of what we're looking at here.
Why? Well, here's yeah, someone has just posted in channel the actual numbering. Its item ID is 1734 in the blog if you can look on that basis too. But here's what we're looking at, and here's one of the problems.
This is one of the drawbacks, but the writers are assuming scholars basically are using this. When you look at that variant in the Nessie Olin text and you look at what's in the text, you see Haas, and then you look down and you see Theos.
You go there's a lot of difference between those two. I mean, okay, Theos ends with Omicron Sigma, and that's what's there. And so the thought is yeah, that's still a big thing, and we could if we wanted to dig up all sorts of sermons and writings from King James-only advocates just spinning this thing and talking about how people are trying to deny the deity of Christ and taking out the deity of Christ and all the rest of this stuff.
What I want you to see here is what the difference would have been in the unsealed text between Haas and Theos, and that's what those two little graphics give you, and they happen in my screen anyways to be lining up right above one another.
The first graphic gives you Theos, and remember, Theos is one of the Nomina Sacra, one of the sacred names. It was abbreviated, so it was just Theta and then final form Sigma, which looks like a capital C with a line above the two.
Haas would be Omicron Sigma, final form Sigma, which again looks like the capital C, and what I'm giving you here are examples of what they would have looked like out of Codex Alexandrinus, because the Codex Alexandrinus had a very good scribe who wrote very, very cleanly Vaticanus and Sinaiticus as well.
But notice those two graphics. There is not some huge difference between the two. Now, I got the cleanest, clearest versions of this that I could find. The cleanest versions of these that I was able to pull out is what I gave to you here in this particular instance.
But remember, this is a professional scribe on vellum. This was a project that obviously had money behind it, and so it had good quality vellum, a good quality writer, but the fact is the earlier papyri manuscripts just don't show this kind of penmanship.
They don't have the same kind of material to write on, and so again, it seems to me that especially if you were copying somebody else, if you were copying somebody else and there had been some smudging of the manuscript, if you're copying somebody else and you don't have an opportunity to ask them something, that to try to read a huge conspiracy into this, and especially think of this.
That line over top of the word, what if that's close to the word immediately above it? Remember, you're writing in lines here. I mean, just look at the really nice scan that I provided you there of Sinaiticus right next to these.
Very high quality, but even then, anything that is above those lines is very close to the line above it. And so you're writing along. The difference between the two, whether you have theos or has, does not change the meaning in the sense of the grammar.
Both make sense. And so the only difference you have between the two is the line across the theta and the line above. Now, remember, we're talking about things like papyri, which has lines all over the place, leather, which has lines all over the place.
And if time has passed, you know, it might have been that the leather that the original scribe was writing on was very clean. And there is no question about what he wrote. But over time, dust settles in it, and a line that was clean before, a line in the leather was clean before, collects something in it.
And now, well, was that written there originally? Is that how it could have gone from has to theos? Or the other direction? And I remember reading in Bergen, in Dean Bergen, a discussion of what Sinaiticus actually reads there.
And he was saying, under certain light, there are those who are certain that it reads theos in the original hand and that it's been corrected away from that. And there can be arguments about that. But the point of all of this is, I want to know that, first of all.
I want to know what the manuscripts read. Secondly, I am not going to use 1 Timothy 3 .16 as a primary proof text of the deity of Christ. I can't. Not if I'm honest with myself. I can't do that. Because there is a question as to whether it says theos or has.
Thankfully, we can know that. We should not hide this information from people. I reject completely the mindset of people who say, don't tell anybody about this because it might make them doubt things.
I understand the mentality, but it is a dangerous mentality. Because it ends up meaning that you have to give the text to some priestly cult, in essence, that's going to control it. And then you have to believe whatever they have to say.
And that's not a good thing at all. But there is no reason to insert into a text like this some huge, grand conspiracy theory. When the reason there would be a difference between these two readings is apparent to us.
If we will but transport ourselves back to the original context, to the original form, to the unsealed text, and see what the differences are. And I got to admit, probably one of the reasons that there's not more discussion of this kind of stuff.
Is up until recent times, it wouldn't have been all that easy in the context of the church to illustrate this stuff. Just think of what we're doing right now. How absolutely, almost unheard of in church history.
What we are doing right now is, I am sitting in Phoenix, Arizona. I see people all across the United States and outside the United States in my chat channel who are listening to me live right now. All looking at the same color images in digital form.
Some people are snowed in right now. It's about 70 degrees where I am and sunny. We're in different geographical locations. We're spread about all over the world literally. And yet we're all able to look at the same thing.
If I were teaching in a class situation, I would be projecting this on the wall in a digital format. And I can understand until you could do this kind of thing, at least have a overhead. It would be pretty hard to have meaningful discussions this outside of just simply academia.
But folks, how many times have I said this? What we can use for good, the enemy can use for evil. And the enemies of our faith are utilizing the very same technology that allows us to speak about the truth here.
To present falsehoods about the same stuff. And so we have to know these things. You say, man, you've gotten into some really complicated stuff. I'm sure we've got some people aren't really even listening anymore right now waiting for me to get done with this stuff.
Because they're just over my head is too much. But the Muslims are talking about this stuff. Shabir Ali is giving lectures where he mentions a variant that's found in one Latin manuscript. How would you find out?
How would you verify these things? Well, we can just always call it a dividing line. Well, maybe not. That freedom may not be ours forever in the future. And so we need to be able to look into these things, be able to see why the variants arose.
We can certainly see why the variants arose there. When we look at the textual data that's cited here, we certainly see that the original hands of each of these manuscripts. And to be honest with you, that's a little bit difficult to determine.
How do you know that? I mean, it would be very easy to change Has to Thayas. It's the addition of two lines. How do you change it from Thayas to Has? Erasing stuff is a whole lot different than just adding something.
And while sometimes we can very clearly tell the difference between the inks that were used by different people writing. Let's face it. The lines that would be provided here would be so small that it would be somewhat difficult to necessarily tell.
And so I do not believe in any way, shape or form that it's impossible that Thayas is the original reading. But we have to be straightforward and say there's a variant here. It could have been Has. Has does not result in some gibberish.
It makes perfect sense. And give all that information. Now, and here's where people sometimes lose their balance. They might say, yeah, but people can misuse that information. There is no truth that cannot be abused by the mind that wants to believe falsehood.
Are we going to stop speaking the truth just because of that? Yeah, it bothers me when I see people misusing this field of textual criticism and things like that. Sure, of course. But that doesn't mean that we stop talking about it just because there are going to be people who are going to take these things and misuse them.
We instead have to know them well enough to correct the misuse. See, that's where it comes from. And so we need to study these things. We need to be prepared to deal with these things. And we have been given tremendous amount of information in, for example, the Nessie Olin text to be able to answer those things.
So what we'll be doing, I'm going to try to wrap things up and start taking some phone calls. How does that sound? On Tuesday, because I know I'm not going to be here Thursday of next week. So we need to start trying to wrap this thing up.
So we'll be looking at the variant in John chapter 8, which is page 5 of NA27 .pdf. Another one of the larger ones. I'll try to start wrapping things up here on the Textual Criticism Series. Thanks for listening.
We'll be back next time. God bless.
That's AOMIN .org. Where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks. Join us again next Tuesday morning at 11 a .m. for The Dividing Line.