New Testament Reliabity, Part 2

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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And what I like to do, and a lot of people find a little bit weird at first, but I like to actually show folks at least some pictures of some of the manuscripts that we have of the

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New Testament. A lot of folks find that, why are you wasting that time? Well, it's not. I think it's sort of cool to actually see the manuscripts.

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More and more of them are available online now, again, thanks to CSNTM and to other folks, as we will see.

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But, you know, just having a few notes down at the bottom of the page is a little bit different than actually seeing them. What you see on the screen right now is called

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P52. I'm not sure why I have the wrong P up there. For some reason, it should be a fracture

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P, but I'll have to fix that. I'm not sure why. Oh, I know why. This is a new computer.

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And that sort of throws things off, but anyways, when we talk about the earliest fragments of the

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New Testament, this is pretty much agreed upon to be the earliest fragment we have.

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Some of you may have heard the discussion of what's called the Green Project a few years ago, where some people were suggesting that we had found a first century fragment of Mark, but nothing has come of that.

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And even though certain people came out and said, well, it was in this Egyptian funerary mask and la, la, la, la, the fact that nothing more has been said seems to indicate to me that maybe people had been a little bit, had jumped the gun a little bit on that subject.

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So for right now, anyways, for the majority of scholars, what you're seeing on the screen would be the earliest fragment of the

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New Testament that we possess. It was discovered in the 1930s in the basement in a building in London.

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Of course, the British stole everybody else's cool stuff when they were in their imperial mode years and years ago, dragged it all back to London where it was been relatively safe except during the

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Blitz. But that's where it's all found. A guy was rummaging through a bunch of old papyri and started reading this.

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Very difficult to read stuff like this because basically all you have are the middle of sentences. In fact, if you were to wrap the text around it, this is what it would look like.

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And so if you can imagine what it's like to read just middle part portions of sentences, that's what you have to do when you're working with manuscripts like this.

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And what's really cool is that this P52, it's about the size of a credit card. It's written on both sides.

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On the one side is John 18, 31 through 34. On the back is John 18, 37 through 38.

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Christians, early Christians, for reasons that are speculative, totally preferred to write in the codex form.

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In fact, some people theorize that Christians in the West invented the codex form. Codex form is a type of book we have today that has pages where you take pages, you fold them over, you sew them together, and that's the codex form.

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It's pretty certain that the New Testament books were originally written on scrolls. I mean, a couple of the

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New Testament books, like the Book of Revelation, mentioned scrolls. But it's quite probable that the

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New Testament books were originally written on scrolls. And yet, we only have, I think, six scrolls of New Testament books, grand total.

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Very, very, very few. Everything else was written in the codex form. And this was written in the codex form because it's written on both sides.

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And it's from the Gospel of John, which is fascinating because liberal scholarship had pushed the

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Gospel of John back into the second century, around 170 AD. When this was first discovered, it was sent to four leading papyrologists of the day.

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Those are people who live fascinating, exciting, fast -paced lives of studying ancient papyri.

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And, yeah, I'm currently working through the Oxford Encyclopedia of Papyrology myself as part of my third doctorate, and it's just scintillating.

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It is. And anyway, so yes, he can lie in public, too.

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But three of the four dated—when you date the papyrus, you're basically looking at the form of writing on it because,

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I mean, this is all we've got. There's no dates on it. There's no context in which it was found, anything like that. And so what you do is you're examining the style of writing that was prevalent in business documents and things like that of the day.

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And they dated it—you generally date it in a 50 -year range. So the center date and then 25 years, either way from that.

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And they dated it to 125, so in other words, between 100 and 150. And the fourth papyrologist pushed it about 10 years earlier than that, so about 90 to 140, around that time frame.

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And so there you have P52. I am such a geek that here is a picture of me in my debate with Bart Ehrman in 2009.

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You'll notice my tie is made up of P52. Both sides of it.

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Do not worry yourself. The original was not harmed in the production of this tie. And in the bottom picture, you see me handing

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Bart Ehrman his own copy of the P52 tie. That's one of the few times that he actually smiled during the debate.

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And I do not know what he's done with it. I don't know if he burned it. I don't know if he wears it on a special day for his classes to make fun of fundamentalists.

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I really don't know what he does with it. But there's P52. Now this one, anyone—where's the fellow in the orange shirt from the church here?

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Any staff members from the church here right now? Okay, right over there. I have no idea what just happened.

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Does anyone else know what just happened? I don't know what just happened. There is the—okay, we've got two staff members here, okay. Now any questions whatsoever about the implications of what

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I'm about to show you, this gentleman right here and that gentleman back there will answer all questions about the implications.

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He's now backing out of the room, so he's abandoned you. I thought you'd like to know that he just left, so nothing like having your back, huh?

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I always say that because this has something to do with eschatology.

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Eschatology scares me, okay, because people get really weird about it. This is

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P115. As you can see, this is what a page would have looked like, so this is all we have of the page.

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And like I said, if you go, oh, that's bad, what are you going to look like 1 ,800 years from now, okay?

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It's about 250 to 275, and what's interesting is it's from the book of Revelation.

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We don't have almost any papyri of the book of Revelation. This is one of them, and it's from Revelation chapter 13.

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And in the book of Revelation chapter 13, we have something really, really important. It's called the number of the beast.

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Now right now, if we went out to the interstate out there and we flagged down a guy in a

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Harley and asked him, what's the number of the beast, he'd go, 666, right?

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Everybody knows the number of the beast. Well, there's that little, see that third line down looks like XIC to us with a line over it.

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When you put a line over it, that's indication of a numeral, a number. They didn't use like the numbers that we use today, they use letters.

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And the problem is, in the two earliest manuscripts of the book of Revelation, it's not 666.

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It's 616. And so that's why

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I said, if you have any questions about what that might mean, and how that might impact your identification of Barack Obama as the

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Antichrist, whatever else it might be, the gentleman in the green shirt will answer all of your questions, because I don't touch

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Eschatol... Huh? It's an area code. Well, Dan Wallace at Dallas Seminary, I think

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Dan Wallace has an even better idea. 666 is the number of the beast, and 616 is the number of the neighbor of the beast.

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So it's just right down the road a little bit. I noticed the chicken guy in the orange came back once we covered everything.

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And he's leaving again, so there you go. This is P72. It's extremely readable.

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You can even see it on screen like this. You can see, for example, up here, Petru Epistolae Bae, which means that's the beginning of second

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Peter. Here's the end of first Peter over here. And what you can also see with this, which

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I think is really neat, are called the Nomina Sacra. The Nomina Sacra are the sacred names. For some reason,

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Christians would abbreviate God, Jesus, Lord, words like this, and they would put a line over it.

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So here you see Jesus Christ, lines over it, there's Jesus Christ. There's God with a line over it.

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There's God over there with a line over it. And so you can very easily, just by sight, recognize

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Christian manuscripts of the New Testament because they use the Nomina Sacra.

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Why did they develop it? We have no earthly idea. There are really cool, interesting theories, but we really just don't know why they did it.

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But I saw this very page in 1993. I was in Denver doing two debates with Jerry Matitix on the papacy.

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It was during World Youth Day when the Pope was in town. And so they had the

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Papal Treasures Exhibit, and so Rich Pearce and I went. And this was one of the very first things you could see.

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And so I'm just standing here, you know, it's under glass, and I'm looking at, oh, this is incredible. And what's really neat, for example, is this is 2

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Peter 1 .1. We talked about 2 Peter 1 .1 last night, remember? I showed, I showed, I asked Joe to look at 2

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Peter 1 .11 and translate 2 Peter 1 .11, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And then I took him to 2

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Peter 1 .1, and there's our God and Savior, Jesus Christ, right there in the

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Greek. And he wouldn't translate it that way because, well, comparing spiritual to spiritual.

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We do not base our doctrine on grammar, is what he said, remember? That was great. So we don't base our doctrine on the meaning of words, just what we want to think they mean.

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So that's it. But there you have, and so I'm looking, oh, look, there's the, there's the Granville Sharp construction and the

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Nomen Sacra and all this stuff. So, you know, most people would sort of walk up to it and sort of read the thing and look at it and walk off.

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But I'm sitting there and I'm reading it, and someone would sort of come up and they'd look at it and they'd sort of look over at Rich and they'd go, can he, can he read that?

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And Rich would go, yeah. Look at this, George, this man's reading this ancient manuscript, you know, and the people start gathering around and the security guys are doing this number, you know, and so Rich would drag me off to go look at some gold tiaras or something for a while, and then we'd come back and eventually they kicked us out.

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But there's, there's P72. P72 is our earliest manuscript of 1 and 2

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Peter in Jude, 1 and 2 Peter in Jude. And it's, it's pretty, pretty cool to see.

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P75 is one of the most important gospel manuscripts we have. It was originally

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Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This is the end of Luke, the beginning of John. And what is really important is this scribe was a really, really good scribe.

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You know, if we, if we were forced to only have one manuscript of Luke and John, this would probably be the one to have.

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It goes all the way back to 175 to 200. The scribe was meticulous.

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He was careful. He wrote one letter at a time. He did not write words at a time. He wrote one letter at a time.

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That really increases your accuracy. And he wasn't trying to make pretty letters.

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He was just trying to make really accurate letters. He was probably a business scribe. He was probably someone who did like accounting stuff, you know, those kinds of people.

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That's who you want making copies of your manuscripts, believe you me, because one little stroke can be wrong.

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So P75, very, very important early gospels manuscript that we know is in the line of, not the direct ancestor of, but in the line of Codex Vaticanus, which is another of our most important early manuscripts we'll see here in a moment.

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Then we have P66. And what I like about this picture of P66 is you can see what it looked like as a book.

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Almost all these books have been taken apart into their individual pages now for closer examination photography.

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But this one's sort of cool because you get to see the whole thing. This also is the beginning of John. And so you can see up at the top, there's the phrase that Joe was trying to avoid yesterday.

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Caitheas einhalagos, and the word was as to his nature deity. You notice theos there is a nomen of sacred.

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It's got the line over top of it. And I just saw a tweet from an INC member during lunch that said that no one believed in the deity of Christ until the

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Council of Nicaea in 325. Well, of course, this is P66 from around the year 200, and there you have the deity of Christ before that.

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Oh, well. But you also get to see the damage that a book would...

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Now obviously along the spine, you have the strongest area. But then you can see that the corner down here has been damaged, and then a little bit up at the top.

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And that's, you know, your paperback books that you have, that's pretty much where the damage is going to be. It's on the outside, mainly lower corner if it's going to be on a shelf, and the upper corner as well.

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And that's exactly what you have here. So if you have this shape, you can tell which side the papyrus are on, and if it's going the other way, it's on the back side.

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So this would be recto, that would be verso of the piece of papyrus. And that's

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P66, also very, very important manuscript. Have to slide this one in here just simply for personal reasons.

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But this is P45, you'll notice I have the proper papyrus thing on this one.

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This is P45, somewhere between 180 and 220, I hope to maybe do a little work on that to get it a little bit more narrowed down if possible.

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But this is a portion of the manuscript that I'm working on right now, and it contains portions of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts.

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This is John chapter 10, the story of the Good Shepherd, into the beginning of John chapter 11.

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And I probably should just quit there because if I start from there on, it's going to get too complicated and weird.

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But this is the manuscript that I'm going to be staring at for the next three or four years and maybe longer, depending on how things go in the work that I'm doing.

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Here is P46, and you'll notice the same shape. See how this is obviously the recto side because the breakage is around here.

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This is in the Chesterby Library in Dublin, and I saw this a few years ago. And what's interesting about P46 is you have right here, pros philippatius, to the

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Philippians. And so P46 is the earliest collection we have of all of Paul's writings.

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And so it's extremely important for most of Paul's writings. This is the earliest, you know, extant text we have anywhere of Romans or Galatians, whatever else it might be.

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I always ask groups to participate in an informal study I've been doing for a long time, and that is there is one book of the

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New Testament that is anonymous, and that of course is the Epistle to the Hebrews. Now, if you have the King James, it says the

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Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews, but there are no manuscripts until much later on that say that.

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So given that Hebrews is anonymous, it doesn't say in its actual text who wrote it, a lot of people believe that Paul wrote

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Hebrews. And so the question I like to ask audiences is, do you think

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P46 contains or does not contain Hebrews? Now what happens is,

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I'll get about a third of the people will vote one way or the other, and then there's a third of the people who are sticks in the mud.

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And they just sit there in their seat and go, I'm not voting, you can't make me vote, because I could be wrong, so I'm not going to vote.

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So they just sit there, I'm not going to vote, I'm not going to participate. And I'm like, why not?

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Take a wild guess, what am I going to do, mock you from the front? So what I've started doing is, if you don't vote,

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I will mock you from the front, okay, because I'm just tired of being dissed, you know, I mean, you know, participate.

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So we have all the guys from SGA Apologetics, they're going to be watching, and if you do not vote, they're going to break your little fingers, so just so you know.

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So let's just not let violence break out here, participate, okay? So, how many of you think that P46 contains

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Hebrews? How many of you think it doesn't contain Hebrews? I think we got close to 100 % participation,

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I've never tried the threat of violence before, that's pretty cool. You know, it's funny, before I've always done the, and it always just so hurts me when people don't participate, and actually the numbers go down, it's like, ha ha ha ha ha, let's see him cry, yeah, that's pretty good.

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It contains Hebrews, right after Romans, what does that tell you? It tells you that somewhere around the year 200, this scribe thought that Paul wrote

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Hebrews, does that mean Paul wrote Hebrews? No, it doesn't, but that does give you that information.

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So if you ever want to see this, it's on display at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, it's awesome to get to see.

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I normally tell you stories about how we got in trouble with the security by reading P46 and by doing it by kneeling on the ground, it's a long story, but I keep getting in trouble with the security, but anyhow, here is

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P91, this is actually one third of P91, the other two thirds are in Italy.

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There are a number of manuscripts that eventually you discover, oh, we have a fragment of that over someplace else, and then of course the two institutions that have it that have paid money for it don't want to get rid of it, and so this is in Macquarie State University in Australia, in Sydney.

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So it exists in two different locations, and obviously there's been high quality photography taken of it, that's actually just my cell phone picture of it right there, but we know what it says, all the parts of it, but it exists in two different places, and so I was teaching down in Sydney, and I knew that it was there, and so instead of going seeing sightseeing and seeing the opera house in Sydney and stuff like that,

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I went and saw a manuscript from around AD 250, it was sort of fun, so that's what we did.

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All right, so after the peace of the church in AD 313, if you don't know what that is, that's when the

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Roman Empire ceased persecution of Christians, Christians could have professional scribes copy the scriptures, at this time the great vellum or leather manuscripts began to appear, including the three greatest of these,

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Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, and Codex Alexandrinus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus are right next to each other in the

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British library in London, at least they were the last time I saw them, Oliphant B, B is in the

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Vatican library of course, Oliphant B may well have been among the Bibles copied with imperial monies at the time of the

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Council of Nicaea in AD 325, somewhere between 325 and 350 is where Oliphant B are dated as to their origination.

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Here is what you would, this is certainly pretty much what I saw when I walked into the British library,

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I was the only one in the room, nobody else around, I'm standing there in front of Codex Sinaiticus and I'm going, am I supposed to be here?

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Because there's like no guards, no nothing, and I'm like, this is amazing, there's

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Codex Sinaiticus, this is not all of Codex Sinaiticus, Sinaiticus exists in about four different locations,

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Russia, St. Catherine's Monastery was found, London and one other place, Leipzig I think has a leaf or two, if I recall correctly.

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And it's all available online now, codexsinaiticus .org, so you can read all of it there, but that doesn't really give you an idea of how different this is once you have professional scribes, there's what

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Codex Sinaiticus looks like, remember folks, that's not printed, that's handwritten. And the beauty of the lettering, but still, and it's the only four -column manuscript that we've ever found in the

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New Testament, but it's not just the New Testament. What is amazing, if I had more time I'd tell you much more of the story of Codex Sinaiticus, its discovery by Konstantin von

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Tischendorf, etc., etc., but it is also one of the oldest

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Old Testaments because it has pretty much, it initially completely contained the both

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Old and New Testament texts in Greek. And you can see that there are things written in the margin, here's one here, here's one put in between the lines right here.

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This was a manuscript that was in use for about 1 ,500 years before it would be like frozen and no longer touched, but it was sort of a living manuscript with scribes making insertions and so on and so forth.

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In fact, here's from CodexSinaiticus .org, you can blow up the text, you know, see this would be one column, and you can see these dots and then the insertion by later hand, you can see even the ink is a different color here and here.

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The reason I included this particular picture is because of this word right here, parakletos, paraklete, the paraklete of John 14 and 16.

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Our Muslim friends will tell us that the paraklete in John 14 and 16 is Muhammad and that it was originally periklutos, but that doesn't work.

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And here you have a manuscript long before Muhammad came along that has parakletos there, not periklutos, that's why

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I included it there. But what's interesting, so why would you put the same picture twice? I didn't, you can't really see it so much up here, but this is straight on light, this is raking light, and so you can actually change what you're looking at and have one picture where it's straight on and the other picture of the light's coming from the side, so you can actually see the texture of the manuscript itself, it's really, really, really cool.

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So CodexSinaiticus .org. I had fixed this and I don't know what happened to my having fixed it and I just keep forgetting when

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I'm traveling, when I get home to update these things, but I had a really nicely updated image of this very page from Codex Vaticanus and then that presentation disappeared somehow.

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When you change your computer, everything changes, but this is Codex Vaticanus. It is now completely online at the

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Vatican Library as well, which is nice, it had been difficult to get hold of. Another very, very important ancient manuscript.

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It breaks off in Hebrews 9 .13, it originally had the rest of it, but that part has been lost and something else has been put in its place, but Codex Vaticanus, very, very important.

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Last evening in the debate, you've now seen P75, you've now seen P66, you've now seen

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Codex Sinaiticus, and there's Vaticanus. Those four manuscripts all read the

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Aus at John 118, which was the text that Mr. Ventillacion was saying, no, no, it's only sun there, it doesn't say

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God there. These would be the four earliest manuscripts we have of John 118.

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You say, well, didn't the manuscript you're working on have John? Yes, but we only have sections of John 10 and 11, we don't have

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John chapter 1, unfortunately, in P45. And then this is right next to Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, it's from around the year 400, it's really pretty,

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I made a tie out of this one too. It's fun making ties on Zazzle from Biblical manuscripts, it's not copyrighted anyways, that's nice.

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A little bit out of copyright date to be, you know, 1600 years old. So aside from the 5 ,800 plus Greek texts, we have early translations in the

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Latin, Coptic, Sahitic, that are important witnesses to the early texts of the New Testament, combining these, the

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Greek text yields over 20 ,000, some say as high as 25 ,000, handwritten witnesses to the

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New Testament. We have more than 124 Greek manuscript witnesses within the first 300 years after the writing of the

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New Testament, far more than any other work of antiquity, and this is what I want to emphasize with you, far more than any other work of antiquity.

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Any book that was written contemporaneously with the New Testament has nothing near the manuscript evidence of the

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New Testament. And yet the vast majority of people who criticize the New Testament will not criticize those other works, and yet we have far more reason to believe we know the original readings of the

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New Testament than we have of the others. Now what's happening right now is Aaron is showing on the phone there some

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Facebook messages that are going on right now about a sporting match, so I just thought

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I'd mention that obviously Aaron knows everything about all of this and doesn't need to be paying any attention to what's going on.

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He thinks by leaving he can get away, but the fact is he can hear me out there even as we're speaking right now, so he can't get away from me at any point in time.

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In fact, we have 12 manuscripts from the second century, that is within 100 years of the writing of the

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New Testament. These manuscripts contain portions of all four Gospels, nine books of Paul, Acts, Hebrews, and Revelation, comprising majority of the books of the

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New Testament we possess today. Again, no work of antiquity even comes close to this early attestation.

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The average length of time between the writing of most works contemporaneous with the

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New Testament, such as the historical works of Pliny, Suetonius, or Tacitus, and their first extant copies, between 500 and 900 years, what does that mean?

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Well, Tacitus, extremely important early Roman historian. How long is it between when he wrote and when we have the first manuscript of what he wrote?

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About 700 years. For the New Testament, 100 years. Think there's a difference there?

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Yeah, a huge difference. And yet when Tacitus is quoted in historical works today, you don't have big long footnotes, but now, of course, we know that there's been 700 years between the original, and that many changes could have taken place.

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We don't really know. You just don't get that. And if you run into these unbelieving scholars in universities today that go off after how we can't possibly know what the

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New Testament originally wrote, well, find out if they believe the same thing about Tacitus and everything else, because if they don't, then they're being rather hypocritical.

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Sorry, I forgot to click one. I'm going to need to put the microphone down next to the computer.

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I asked Bart Ehrman a question during cross -examination in our debate, which was considerably more civil than last evening, both the audience, because he didn't have anybody in the audience chanting for him, and the fact that it was a much more scholarly exchange.

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But he offered up a statement that I never expected to hear from him, and here's how it went.

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On the Unbelievable Radio program in London, you discussed the length of time that exists between the writing of Paul's letter to the

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Galatians and the first extant copy, that being 150 years. You described this time period as enormous.

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That's a quote. Could you tell us what term you would use to describe the time period between, say, the original writings of Suetonius or Tacitus or Pliny and their first extant manuscript copies?

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Very enormous. Sorry, ginormous would be a good one? Ginormous. Ginormous, okay. I mean, ginormous doesn't cover it.

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The New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book from antiquity. Now, did you hear that?

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For the New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other work of antiquity, and that's the leading

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English -speaking critic of the New Testament. You don't get that. When I talk to people who've read his books, that's not the message they get, okay?

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So there's a disconnect there. Part of it's his fault, part of it's their fault. I mean, I remember,

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I need to track this down again someday, but I listened to a podcast where Ehrman was on this atheist podcast, and so the atheists were just all excited to have

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Ehrman on and talking about all the changes in the New Testament and stuff, and so he got really excited, and he says, so, Dr. Ehrman, given all the changes, what do you think the

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New Testament was originally about? What was it actually really about? And there's sort of this pause, and Ehrman goes, it was about Jesus coming into the world to give his life so people could be saved?

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And it's just like when you take one of those balloons, you know, the atheist is sort of like,

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I mean, you could just see his bottom lip quivering, even though it wasn't video. But sometimes

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I just go, Bart, you know they're interpreting you that way, you're making money off of it, so stop it. But then other times

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I just go, maybe he's just so disconnected, he doesn't realize how they're interpreting him, what he's actually saying.

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Because when he's among scholars, he's like, yeah, we know what the original text is, I mean, there's a couple of places we might not know, but yeah, we're just tinkering around with it, big deal.

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And then in the books, it's like, well, we don't have any clue, you know, and it could be interpreted as if it was actually about Zeus and Hermes and stuff like that, and that's just simply not the case.

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So what you often do get, often the transmission of the text of the New Testament is likened to the phone game we played as kids, where one whispers something in the ear of the person next in line and so forth around the circle until the last person repeats what he's heard, and it's inevitably changed in often humorous ways from what was originally said.

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But is this an accurate way of thinking of how the New Testament was transmitted over time? Now, these next graphics

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I designed and did myself, so if you simply cannot keep yourself from going, ooh,

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I'll understand, it's okay, I mean, it is pretty impressive, so if self -restraint, you can't handle it, it's okay.

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But what you have is you have the New Testament being written at multiple places by multiple authors to multiple audiences at multiple times.

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Multiple authors, multiple places, multiple audiences, multiple times. And then what happens over time is, well, for example, we saw

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P46, and so by the year 200, someone had gotten the bright idea that, you know, we have these letters from the apostle

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Paul, and we have them separate from one another, but why don't we put them into a collection?

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And so you had gospel collections, P45, P66, P75, you had some of the general epistles,

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P72, 1st, 2nd Peter, Jude, and then you had the Pauline corpus in P46 coming together in various places, and they're being distributed all over the known world.

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And so they're not just going in one place, they're going to multiple audiences, multiple copings being made.

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The point of all of this, and I'm glad that you all were able to control yourselves, and I didn't hear a single ooh or ah.

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You know, when they have to drag it out of people like that, it just doesn't have the value that it once did. It's just really sad.

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Ah, but I'm going to soldier on anyways. It's vitally important to realize that the transmission of the text of the

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New Testament did not follow a phone game single line. Not only are written documents less liable to corruption than what is whispered in the ear, but the phone game involves a single line of transmission.

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The New Testament originated in multiple places, written by multiple authors, with books being sent to multiple locations.

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Now I mentioned to you earlier that we know that P75 and Codex Vaticanus are closely related.

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They have a common ancestor, but they're not in the same line. Even they represent multiple lines, even at that early period.

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And what that tells us is when we have P75 and Codex B giving the same reading, like in John 118, that means we can have confidence that that reading goes back at least to the close to the first century itself.

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In other words, within one to two generations of the original. That's how far back we can push those readings, because of the multiple lines of transmission.

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Almost no other work of antiquity has anything like this at all, because it just doesn't have enough manuscripts to do it, and not enough early manuscripts to do it.

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So, this multifocality, as I call it, leads us to the final considerations that demonstrate the bankruptcy of the modern attacks on the

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New Testament. To make specific changes in a text like the New Testament, which originally circulated as a group of texts, not as a single body, would require a centralized controlling body that could make wholesale changes in these widely dispersed texts.

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You'd need to have some type of centralized group. But the fact of the matter is, no such centralized agency ever existed, or could have existed.

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Christianity was a persecuted religion made up mainly of the lower classes. There was no central authority that could ever have gathered up all the texts and made wholesale changes.

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Such was impossible in the earliest days of transmission, and given that we have such ancient texts now, obviously could not have happened at a later point without giving clear evidence.

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You watch these stupid BBC things and stuff on the History Channel, which is anything but normally history anyways, and you have these cowled, hooded monks scurrying around making manuscripts and changing things, and you've got

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Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code and all the rest of this upside -down silliness that people think is actually history.

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None of that stuff has any historical possibility to it at all, because of the multifocality of the text.

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Multiple authors, multiple places, multiple audiences, multiple times. It simply could not have happened. In fact, we can prove beyond all doubt this kind of corruption did not happen, since papyri have been found that date back to the second century, and that only within the past hundred years that we found them.

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Had any later centralized organization sought to alter the text, let's say Dan Brown was right, and Constantine decided to try to change the text.

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Well, if he changes manuscripts in the beginning of the fourth century, and we find manuscripts from the second century, what's going to be obvious?

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There's going to be a huge change between them. But when we find these early papyri, there are no huge changes between them, what we have today.

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I mean, when we look at P52, and then we look at the Greek text in, say,

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Codex Vaticanus, of the same section in John chapter 18, or Codex Sinaiticus, it's the same thing.

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There might be one word variant between P52 and what we have, one word. Everything else is identically the same.

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So, nothing's been taken in, taken out, doctrines inserted. That requires massive editing to do stuff like that.

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It simply has not happened. So all allegations of purposeful corruption, such as those made by Muslims or others, fall upon the mere consideration of the historical context and date itself.

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The rapid, widespread distribution of New Testament manuscripts in the first two centuries precludes any purposeful, centralized corruption.

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It also gives rise to the need to study the relatively small number of textual variants, because the

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New Testament text exploded across the known world. If people wanted to have a copy of 1

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Peter, hey, go ahead and copy it. That's probably how P72 got written. Somebody probably went into somebody else's fellowship while they were traveling.

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Someone brought out a manuscript, started reading it. We've never heard that at our church. What is that? These are Peter's writings. Can we copy that?

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And they'd go, could we see your official certified copyist ability card, scribe card, please, before we let you do that?

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They didn't have any such thing. And so you have manuscripts going all over the place. We know the Romans were burning manuscripts, and so the church had to replace those manuscripts.

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And so there was a huge explosion of these things. So that's why we have textual variants, but that's simply the byproduct of how the

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New Testament text has actually been preserved for us. This leads to another very important point.

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When scribes copied their text, they were very conservative, often incorporating marginal notes into the text, since they could not be sure if the note was original or not.

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So if you come across a manuscript, you don't know who wrote it, there's this thing over in the margin.

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Is that supposed to be in the text and the guy forgot it and put it in later once he realized he skipped it? Or is that a comment?

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Huh, he's dead, I can't ask him, I better include it. That's how John 5 -4 got into the

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New Testament. What's John 5 -4 about? Remember we started with that? It seems like years ago now. We started with John 5 -4.

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It's about the angel coming down and troubling the waters. It's an explanatory note. It probably was someone who didn't know about Jerusalem, didn't know about the stuff about the

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Pool of Siloam and things like that, heard someone preaching and said, oh, that's why they did that, because the angel would come down, trouble the waters, first one in, got healed.

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The next person who copies their manuscript, can't ask them, goes, hmm, I guess that belongs in there, included in there, voila.

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Marginal note incorporated into the text. That's how that type of thing would happen. This means they even preserve mistakes, or even silly readings.

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This may sound bad at first, but consider what it really means. The New Testament text is tenacious. That means readings are preserved in the text.

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All readings, including the original readings, are still a part of the manuscript tradition.

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That's the important part. That's the important part. If the scribes acted in such a way as to delete stuff, or try to improve stuff all the time, then we'd have questions.

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But they didn't do that. This is why the believing textual critic can persevere in even the most difficult variants.

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One of the readings is the original. We don't have a lot of time here, but I want to go just through one textual variant, and then we will hit the summary button and eat cookies.

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Right? This time we will eat cookies. Because some people are going to blame me for eating all the cookies.

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Actually, it's Aaron's fault. Would you all agree in here that it was Aaron's fault? Yes. We have applause.

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Blaming Aaron. Wow, I'll tell you, man. Rough life. Rough life.

40:02

1 Timothy 3 .16 This did not come up last night at all. This did not come up last night.

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It could have. But I wouldn't go there. Compare the King James Version to the New American Standard without controversy.

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Great is the mystery of godliness. God was manifest in the flesh. That's 1 Timothy 3 .16,

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King James Version. Justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.

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New American Standard, by common confession, great is the mystery of godliness. He who was revealed in the flesh, was vindicated in the spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up into glory.

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Now, if you read any King James -only stuff, and I am one of the...

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I'm the favorite person. I'm the favorite Christian apologist of King James -only folks. I really am.

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They love me. They have my picture up on their walls. For some reason, there's darts in the pictures, but they...

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I just don't take that really personally, anything like that being identified. And for some reason, they call me

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Antichrist and Satan and a number of things like that. Huh? No, no,

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I'm 666. Yeah. I just don't get it, but they love me. And so, they did a movie.

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Steven Anderson did a movie a couple years ago. Any of you have seen the interview that Steven Anderson and I did? About a quarter of you.

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Okay. That was far more interesting than the resultant movie was, which only used 90 seconds of our interview.

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And I think it's been viewed more than the movie has. So it's sort of funny. But Steven Anderson put out a movie, and the central argument was 1

41:37

Timothy 3 .16, liberal, critical scholars, taking the deity of Christ out of the Bible, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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That's... And besides, God and he who do not look much alike. But let's take a look at the actual text.

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Here is Ha Siphonorothe Anzarki, who was manifest in flesh.

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And you see that there is a variant mark right there. The variant mark goes to right there. Codex D, which is sort of the

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New Living Translation of the early church. Codex Bezae Canterburgiensis has Ha.

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It's a Latin diglot. Then you have these manuscripts that have the os, God.

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So the Corrector of Sinaiticus, Corrector of Alexanderus, Corrector of Claremontanus.

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D2, Psi 17th to the right, 18th to the right. The majority of texts have the os, as do manuscripts of the Vulgate. It's the original reading of Sinaiticus, Alexanderus, CFG, and these others here, along with Didymus and Epiphanius, early church fathers.

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So there's some of the information, but let's just look at it as it would have looked originally. So up at the top is what

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God would read. At the bottom is he who. We'll use color again, but this is the easiest screen to see right here.

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Remember that God is a nomina sacra. It's one of those words that would have been abbreviated in the early manuscripts.

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And the os, as a nomina sacra, is theta sigma with a line over top.

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Hos is omicron sigma with a line over top. Now you may notice those look a lot alike.

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And what was the original, what were the original writing materials? It's called papyrus. And if you remember the papyrus, papyrus is made up of leaves.

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And on the one side, you would have horizontal leaves, in other words, horizontal lines.

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And so if you're reading someone else's writing, or if it's been smudged or anything else, it doesn't take rocket science or conspiracy theory to come up with why someone would have read this as this or vice versa.

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And so it's not a matter of liberal scholars. It's not a matter of anything like that whatsoever. It's a matter of looking at the intrinsic possibilities and looking at the manuscripts.

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And the fact of the matter is, you can see, here's Codex Sinaiticus. Musterion, Hos, Iphanerothe.

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Very, very clearly, the original ancient reading from around the time of the

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Council of Nicaea is Hos, he who. Then here you have the three dots and written into a hand at least 700 years later.

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So around the year 1000, you have Theos written in by a later hand.

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So there's no question what the reading of Sinaiticus was at this particular point in the text as well.

44:27

So I'm going to skip by a couple of those. I was going to talk about John 118. Don't have time to. Don't have time to.

44:33

Here's the... By the way, just really quickly. Here's the data on what's called the

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Pricope adultery, the woman taken in adultery. Dan Wallace calls it his favorite story that's not in the

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Bible. And it may be your favorite story and you may not like the fact that I'm telling you this, but if you look at the data up here, the first manuscript that has the woman taken in adultery is right there.

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Codex D. That's Codex Vese Canterburgiensis, the New Living Translation of the early church.

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Most unreliable New Testament manuscript we have in the early period. And it's the first one. And what's really interesting is here's others that have cum obelai, which means with marks, which people mark to say this isn't original.

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So these manuscripts have marks. And then you have some that have it at different places in the

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Gospel of John. So some have it after 8 -3. These manuscripts have it after 7 -36.

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These manuscripts have it after... That doesn't look right.

45:46

Oh, that's okay. After 21 -25. And then these manuscripts have it in the

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Gospel of Luke at two different places. There is no other text in the New Testament that is trying to find a spot to fit in.

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Could you move over, please? Oh, not here? Okay. I'll try Luke. Okay, how about... Obviously this...

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In fact, there's at least one manuscript that just simply has it at the end of all four Gospels. I don't know where to put it, so we'll just put it over here.

46:15

This is clearly a story that a lot of people really, really liked that's looking for a place in the

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New Testament. But it's not what John wrote. And what you really want to ask yourself is, what do

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I want? Do I want what John wrote? Or do I want what a scribe 500 years after John thought

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John should have written? That's really the issue. Or do I want, just because I've always liked it, it's my favorite story?

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Which is what a lot of people do when it comes to this particular story. And so everybody always asks me the question.

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Here's the big question. If I was preaching through John, would I preach this section? And my answer is always the same.

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My people know me. I've been the adult Bible study teacher there for a quarter of a century.

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And so I've given this presentation. They've suffered through almost all my debates and stuff like that.

47:09

So they know me. And so I would have a solid foundation. I talk about textual variance in my sermons all the time.

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They're used to it. So I'd have a solid foundation to say this is clearly not a part of the original Gospel of John. I'd go from 752 to 811 and continue on.

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And I would not preach it. I do not believe it's inspired scripture. If I was in a church where they didn't have that kind of background information, then

47:29

I'd probably not do a sermon on it. What I would do is I would do a Bible study class or something like that, give some of the background information, and then the information about this particular story, and then move on in the preaching service from that point, knowing that there's a lot of churches.

47:45

You know, when I gave this information while teaching in Ukraine, I had a Ukrainian pastor, and of course it's through interpretation, a

47:53

Ukrainian pastor saying, I really appreciate this information. I see why it's important, but you just need to understand, my people could never accept this.

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They just don't have the background to, and I just don't think I could give them the background to even begin to understand this.

48:09

I get it. I understand. It does leave them open to the critics to attack them, but I get it.

48:15

I get how that happens. Don't have time to talk to you about the Kamiohanim or even show you the real neat picture of me right there examining

48:25

Codex Monfortianus in Trinity College in Dublin. Oh, if you ever get to Trinity College, you've got to see the reading room.

48:32

It is one of the seven man -made wonders of the world. It really, really is. It's just awesome. But I just got to get to the summary because Mormonism takes some time.

48:40

400 ,000 variants, 99 % or more percentage inconsequential. Most thoroughly documented work of antiquity.

48:47

Spread all over the world quickly. No controlling authority. Any later editing would stand out clearly in comparison with ancient manuscripts.

48:56

I know that's a lot of information. Very, very fast. This same presentation is on YouTube if you want to review it a little bit more slowly.

49:06

Wretched Radio, Todd Freel, has... I did it for him once as well so you can get it from that perspective.

49:14

And I realize that sometimes, as far as book goes, a lot of this information is in my book The King James Only Controversy as well in a written form if that's easier for you than just watching stuff and things like that.

49:25

Okay? Alright, let's hit the cookies and then we've got to hit Mormonism hard and fast.