Intro to Textual Criticism

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Good evening, I'd like to ask you to open your Bibles with me tonight, because we're going to, we're going to be looking at a verse before we begin.
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Open your Bibles to Matthew chapter 24 and verse 35.
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Very familiar verse, many of you can probably quote it without having to look at it, but still as part of our introduction I wanted to look at this verse.
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As most of you are aware, at least I hope that you're aware, we are studying the subject of how we got the Bible as part of a larger series in apologetics, defending the faith.
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If we're going to defend the faith, we need to know how we got the Bible that tells us about our faith.
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And tonight we're looking at the subject of textual criticism, which is by far one of the most controversial subjects when we talk about how we got the Bible.
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But before we even get to the lesson, I want to read the words of Jesus Christ.
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This is from Matthew chapter 24, and again verse 35, and it says this, Jesus is speaking, he says, heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
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Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
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So, I want to say this from the outset, even though tonight we are going to be talking about manuscript variations, we're going to be talking about the fact that even though there are some 5,000 manuscripts plus in handwritten Greek, not counting those of other languages, Latin, Syriac, and all these other languages, and even though none of those 5,000 manuscripts plus agree with one another, they all vary at some point, because they are handwritten, and because handwritten manuscripts have the, and we're going to talk about different types of variations.
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I do believe, and I want to say this from the outset, I believe in the tenacity of the word of God.
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I believe that the word of God has not been lost.
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I believe that the word of God has remained intact, and I believe that the word of God can be trusted, because I know that certain people will hear this lesson, especially maybe not some of you, but some on the outside will hear some of the things I'm going to say tonight, and would call into question my fidelity to that very thing.
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So, I want to say from the outset, I do believe in the word of God, I believe that it can be trusted, and I believe that we have it.
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I don't believe any of it has passed away.
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However, I also have to deal with the way that God has preserved his text, and God has preserved his text through a vast manuscript tradition, and that vast manuscript tradition does have places within it where we have to dig a little deeper to find out what is the actual correct reading from the original, because we no longer possess the original manuscripts.
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Nobody has the original copy of the Gospel of John.
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If they do, we don't know about it.
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If it's hidden in a rock somewhere, or if God took it and miraculously preserved it invisibly somewhere, we don't know where it is.
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It wasn't kept, and so we can't compare our manuscripts with the original.
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If we could, there'd be no question, there'd be no conversation.
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But what we can do is we compare the manuscripts with one another, and we come away with what is called a critical text, or a text that has been examined, and we have determined, based upon several different methods, what is the actual reading of any particular verse.
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I'm going to close this.
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Is anybody in here? For those of you who don't know, when there's background noise, it really bothers me, and I have a hearing issue that's a problem, so forgive me.
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So like I said, this is what we're talking about tonight, the subject of textual criticism.
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This is not something we can do in one night.
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Tonight is what I'm calling the intro to textual criticism, because there are several different parts of this that we're going to have to look at, and I have been told that Wednesday nights have been a little difficult.
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Not for everybody, but a few people came and said they were having a little bit of difficulty, so I definitely don't want to put too much into one lesson and make it to where it's hard to follow.
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I'd rather go slow, answer questions, dig a little deeper if we can, and just take it as it comes, rather than try to rush and skip over giant swaths of information when that's not necessary.
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I know you all, nothing here is too difficult intellectually for you all, but sometimes I do talk fast, and sometimes I put a lot of information into two or three sentences, and that can easily be difficult to follow.
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So I want to try not to do that, especially on this subject.
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And as I said, the subject of tonight is textual criticism.
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The question, what do we do with the fact that we have over 5,000 hand-copied New Testament manuscripts and no two of them are exactly alike? Another way to state that question, should the variations in the manuscripts be cause for us to jettison our confidence in the accuracy of our text? Over the years, you've heard me talk about a man named Bart Ehrman.
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Bart Ehrman is an American New Testament scholar, focuses on textual criticism.
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The historical Jesus is one of the things that he focuses on, what he considers to be the historical Jesus, which is not the biblical Jesus.
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And he's written and edited 30 books, including three college textbooks.
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He is an author of five New York Times bestsellers.
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He is currently the James A.
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Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Ehrman believes that because variations exist within the New Testament manuscripts, this should cause us to conclude that they are not reliable and thus, they are not from God.
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Now Ehrman will tell you, he calls himself a happy agnostic, so he's not even sure that God exists, according to him.
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Calls himself a happy agnostic, I guess that means he's pleased with himself and his not knowing.
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But he will tell you that because of the variations in the manuscripts, we should not have any confidence that God actually inspired these writings, because in his mind, if God had inspired their writings, he would have also ensured that none of the copies were varied in any way.
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So that's his position.
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I disagree, and I'm going to give an argument as to why I disagree, but I wanted to mention I've met Bart Ehrman, he did a debate with Dr.
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White several years ago, and Jennifer and I had the opportunity to go and sit in the audience of that debate.
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Now I will say this, Bart Ehrman presented a very erudite and very elegant presentation, but his presentation was a lot of smoke and mirrors.
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A lot of what he said in the presentation was vastly overblown, stated his case vastly larger and more, he was stating things more than what they were, and Dr.
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White called him on much of that, and if you've never seen the debate, I encourage you to watch it.
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You may not like the way Dr.
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White presents himself, because he is somewhat of an evangelical bulldog, and some people get a little turned off by him, he's one of my favorite teachers, but in fact I was with a guy the other day and he mentioned, he goes, oh I didn't like that debate, I thought Dr.
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White was too fundamentalist, and I said, well I disagree, I think he was straightforward as he ought to be, and so anyway I encourage you, you can see it on YouTube, it's for free, and go and watch it.
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The debate, look up James White and Bart Ehrman, it's E-H-R-M-A-N, and if you look up those two names it'll come up, and like I said, I may even be on there, because I think I got up and asked a question, so you may see my face pop up at some point, maybe, maybe not, I don't remember if I'm on the video or not, but I was certainly in the audience.
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But as I said, in our last two sessions, we've been discussing the copying process of the Bible, our last two sessions were on the transmission of the Bible, and I've already said that there are variations in the copies, we've already talked about that.
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We pointed out that there are no copy machines in the world before the 1930's, they were not popularized until the 50's, and they didn't make it into the average American home until after the year 2000.
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Copy machines were not a thing when the Bible was written.
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Fax machines were not a thing when the Bible was written.
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Up until the time of the printing press, all manuscripts were handwritten.
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With anything that is handwritten, there is a potential for mistake.
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Some would argue that because the Bible is inspired by God, he should have kept every manuscript from error.
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However, as we have seen, even within the variants, the New Testament is still the single best work of antiquity, and this is what I want to point out first thing.
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It's on your sheet, and that's this list of the New Testament reliability.
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Before we even discuss variation, I want you to recognize something very important.
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The New Testament is the best attested work of antiquity, and if you compare it to the other works of antiquity that we possess copies of, it's not even close.
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They're not even in the same ballpark.
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Homer's Iliad.
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You've heard of Homer and the Iliad? It was written about 900 years BC.
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The earliest copy that we have is 400 BC, which means there's a 500 year span of time between the time it was written to the earliest copy that we have, and there's only 643 manuscripts in existence.
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So what does that mean? That means there's a long period of time, 500 years, from the time it was written to the earliest copy we have, and there are only 643 copies.
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Compare that to the over 5,000 New Testament copies.
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Not even close, right? And here's the thing.
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Homer's Iliad is the next best work of antiquity, as far as attested.
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It's not even close to the New Testament in any way, shape, or form, and it's the next best.
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Going down the list, you have Plato, written somewhere in the 420s to 3...427 to 347.
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Earliest copies, 900 AD, which puts it 1,200 years after the original.
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How many copies exist? Seven.
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That's not even in the same...
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That's not even...
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You can't even...
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Not even in the ballpark.
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Aristotle, 384 to 322 BC, earliest copy, around 1,100.
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That's a 1,400 year difference.
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How many copies? Around 40.
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Caesar's Gallic Wars, written between 100 and 44 BC, earliest copies 900, time span of 1,000 years, only 10 are in existence.
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The Annals of Tacitus, written between 56 and 120, earliest copies 1,000, 900 year span of time.
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We only have three copies.
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Herodotus, the history, 484 to 425, earliest copy, around 100.
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That's about a 600 year span of time, 75 copies.
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And the Livy's History of Rome, 59 BC to AD 70, earliest copies 300, 400 year span of time, only 27 copies.
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Not even close when you compare it to the New Testament, which is written between 50 and 100.
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We have manuscripts that go back.
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We have portions of manuscripts that go back between 100 and 150.
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That's within 100 years.
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We have entire books that go back from 150 to 200.
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That's within 150 years.
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We have an entire New Testament compiled, starting around the 300s.
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The span of time, 29 to 100 years for the earliest fragments that we have.
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And we have over 5,800 manuscripts.
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It's not even close.
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So I point this out to you because we have a rich, vast, amazing textual history, specifically for the New Testament.
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But with all of the variants comes what? I'm sorry, with all the manuscripts, I just gave the answer away, with all the manuscripts comes what? Variation, right? That's, that's, sorry, totally gave, that would have been a good one too.
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Because here's the thing.
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If you have only one manuscript, there are no variants.
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If you have only two manuscripts, the only variants that you have are the ones between these two.
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Every time you add a new manuscript, you add variation.
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So now when you're talking about somewhere in the range of 5,000 plus manuscripts and every manuscript has a variation compared to the other, that's why you begin to talk about the variations and why some people will make the point that there are so many that it's ridiculous.
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And there are a lot, we're going to talk about that in a minute.
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But the point to think about for now is that the more manuscripts you have, the more variants are introduced.
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And the process of attempting to discern those variations and ascertain the original wording of a text is what textual criticism is.
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That's the definition of textual criticism.
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The process of attempting to ascertain the original wording of a text based upon the available manuscript evidence.
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That's textual criticism.
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Some people might, and I've heard this before, I've heard this from more than I'd like to admit.
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They'll say, well, who are you to criticize the Bible? And usually had that same tone, who are you to criticize the Bible? Understand, this is not criticizing God, and this is not criticizing God's Word.
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This is a critical analysis of manuscripts.
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There's a difference.
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And there is two different types, and actually I don't have to write it because it's up here.
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There's two different forms of textual criticism that you need to be aware of.
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There is what is called lower criticism.
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Lower criticism is an honest attempt to determine the original text of biblical books.
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That is what I am talking about.
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When I use the term textual criticism in scholarship, that term is usually referred to as lower criticism because of its sister or brother, whatever you want to call it, the opposite is higher criticism.
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Higher criticism, how many of you have ever heard the term higher criticism of the Bible? Okay, Richard.
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Higher criticism of the Bible is a fairly popular term among scholastics, and what it means is making judgments on the genuineness of biblical texts in regard to authorship, dating, and accuracy.
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The findings are often subjective and normally present a very low view of Scripture.
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For instance, one of the higher criticisms of the Bible is Daniel didn't write Daniel.
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They'll argue that Daniel didn't write it because it's so accurate in regard to its prophecies that it had to have been added to by later writers, and that's an example of having a higher form of criticism because they're not criticizing the text to see what's the accurate text, they're criticizing the reality of Daniel having been given by God prophecy to know the future.
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You understand? That's a different type of criticism.
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That's not criticizing a text to see what it originally said.
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That's saying Daniel couldn't have known this so Daniel couldn't have written it.
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You understand? It's the same thing we talked about a few weeks ago when we talked about when it comes to the five books of Moses, there is the, oh boy, I just lost it, the principle that there was actually four different authors.
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The documentary hypothesis, I knew I was going to get it in a second, documentary hypothesis is the idea that Moses didn't write Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, but that there were at least four different groups of writers, those who were writing using the name Yahweh, those who were writing using the name Elohim, and any time you see those names used it's two different groups of writers.
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There was the priestly writers and there was the Deuteronomist who wrote Deuteronomy, so there's an entire argument that Moses didn't write those.
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Now I told you I believe Moses did write them.
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Why do I believe that? Anybody remember? Because Jesus said it.
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He said in the writings of Moses and he was referencing the first five books of the Bible.
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I mean, I'm going to go with Jesus on that.
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Might be a little simplistic but I think that's all I need in that sense is to know that Jesus believed Moses wrote it and I think Jesus knows because he was there.
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So that's an important distinction because if you maybe are talking to somebody over coffee from another church and you say, oh my pastor is teaching on textual criticism and they go, oh no, that's bad, that's terrible.
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They may be thinking that we're engaging in the higher criticism.
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We are not.
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We're not questioning whether or not God works miracles.
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We're not questioning whether or not God speaks through prophets.
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We're not questioning anything that the Bible says in the sense of God's ability to do whatever he wants to do.
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So that's not what we're doing.
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That's not what textual criticism is in the way we're using it.
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What we're doing is we're looking at manuscripts, we're examining them and we're trying to ascertain and determine what the original, what did Paul write when he wrote? And if there's a difference, how do we make that determination? Now on your sheet it says, why is textual criticism necessary? Why is textual criticism necessary? I've given you three reasons why textual criticism is necessary.
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Number one, the original manuscripts of the Bible no longer exist.
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Number two, there are variations within the 5,000 plus manuscripts we possess from the first to the 15th centuries.
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And number three, these variations have to be examined to determine the original readings.
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I've already said all this, but that's the, if you want to synthesize what we've talked about in the introduction, that's it.
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By studying textual criticism we're also preparing ourselves for objections to the Bible, which are often raised by those who oppose Scripture.
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One of the most common objections to the Bible is the accusation of corruption.
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People who say, well the Bible isn't God's Word because it's been corrupted.
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In fact, last week I mentioned the Mormons, but I didn't have a quote.
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I have a quote this week.
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The eighth of Mormon's 13 articles of faith found that the end of the Pearl of Great Price says this, quote, we believe the Bible to be the Word of God as far as it is translated correctly, end quote.
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So what's that saying? Well, there's parts that have been corrupt.
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There's parts that have been translated incorrectly.
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And they go on to say that the Bible has, quote, suffered the loss of many plain and precious parts, end quote.
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That's directly from the writings of the LDS church.
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Suffered the loss of many plain and precious parts.
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What's that saying? That's saying that there's missing pieces and the whole reason why we don't believe Joseph Smith is a prophet and we don't believe that God was once a man who lived on a planet that surrounded a star called Kolob and he was Elohim and he became God because of his adherence to Mormon law and he gave birth to a spiritual children and those children are us and we're the spiritual byproduct of Elohim, the God who was once a man.
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The reason why we don't believe all that is because there's been things removed from our Bible.
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There's been things corrupted in our Bible.
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And again, the Islamic view is very similar.
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The Muslims believe that some of the Bible has been corrupted and distorted.
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That the text has been added to and subtracted to take away those things which would point us to Allah.
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So textual criticism is essential because we need to be able to answer these objections.
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Now I'm not saying we'll be able to answer every single objection in every single situation but we at least need to have dealt with the issue.
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We at least need to have introduced ourselves to the issue.
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So we're going to move now to understanding the variance.
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Understanding the variance.
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Definition time.
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What is a textual variant? A textual variant is any place where there are differences between the handwritten manuscripts.
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Pretty simple, right? Any place where there are differences between the handwritten manuscripts.
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They are everywhere.
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That sounds kind of scary.
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In fact, if I told you, I'm going to give you the numbers here, they're not on the overhead.
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If I told you there were 138,162 words in the Greek New Testament.
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Greek words.
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There's 138,162 words.
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If you added all the words up, there's 138,162 words in the Greek New Testament.
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How many variants do you think there are? Nobody wants to say.
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Okay.
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400 variants.
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Okay.
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138,162.
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138,162.
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According to scholarly estimates, there are approximately 400,000 textual variants in the 5,800 manuscripts.
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Now, I'm making you uncomfortable.
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I see the toes starting to curl.
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Don't get up and leave just yet.
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Because what people see, this is how Bart Ehrman gets a lot of people.
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Because he'll say, see, that gives you three variants for every one word.
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How could you possibly trust a document where there are three variants for every single word? Sounds good, right? Sounds like a hard argument to dismiss.
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Until you start realizing what these variants are.
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The vast majority, you can read this up here, 99% of these variants have no impact at all on the meaning of the word or phrase in any way.
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Because let me give you an example of what some of these variants are.
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Spelling.
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If there is one spelling area, guess what? That's a variant.
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In 5,800 manuscripts.
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You think anybody misspelled a word? Used to be an English teacher.
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Miss Anne.
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Do people misspell words? Even with spell check? I tell you what, people still can't get there, there, and there correct today.
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I mentioned last week or the week before I said there was no punctuation in unsealed text.
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That's not true.
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I said it wrong.
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There's all capital letters, no spaces, and little punctuation.
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There's very little punctuation.
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There was some punctuation.
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So some of it is punctuation.
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Another issue that's huge is word order.
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Word order differences.
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Is he Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus? Well, that's a variant.
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I mean, really, that one thing.
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Does that change the meaning at all? Not at all.
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But is it a variant? Yes.
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So a variant's introduced, right? Now do you see how we're getting to the 400,000? How quickly you can get to that many zeros? Well, we're going to get there.
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These account, the spelling, punctuation, word order, and what we would say are meaningless variation accounts for 99%.
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99% of all variation is accounted for in these.
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There's one other that's interesting.
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It's called the movable new.
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That is new in the Greek.
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Looks like a V in our language.
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But in Greek, that would equal the N in our language.
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And the movable new is, for instance, in English, you don't say a apple.
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You say an apple.
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Because phonetically, we add the N when it's appropriate.
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And that can change without changing the meaning.
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If you say a apple versus an apple, it doesn't change the meaning.
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But phonetically, we would say an apple, not a apple.
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Well, the Greeks have a similar thing.
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It's called the movable new.
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And that makes up a ton of variants, because whether or not it was there.
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So, again, spelling, punctuation, word order, things like the movable new, these are the vast majority of the textual variants.
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99%.
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However, now we've got to deal with the next part.
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If 99% of the variants have no impact, what does that mean? That means we've still got 1%, right? And let's just real quick do a little math, okay? 1% of this is 4,000.
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That's still a lot more variants than a lot of people want to have to deal with, right? The ones that don't account in the 99% spelling, punctuation, word order, movable news, things like that.
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Those account for 1%, approximately 4,000 variants.
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That makes up, you ask for a percentage, about 2.8, number, number, number, we'll say 2.9%.
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2.9% of the 138,000 words are actual variants that have to be dealt with, okay? So, having pointed that out, that's a lot different than one for every three.
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You see, this is the part Bert Ehrman's not going to tell you.
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This is the part, because this doesn't sell books.
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When you go from, there's one variant, or there's three variants for every one word, woo, we didn't know anything about what Jesus said.
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But then, am I wrong on my math? I'm sorry, I made a, am I, okay.
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So, so, when we look at the numbers, you have some people saying, there's so many variants, we can't know what it said.
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But when you look at the reality, we can have great confidence.
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There is about 2.9% of the text that has to be dealt with, and the variants have to be considered.
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But what we're going to learn is even in that, even in that almost 3%, most of those variants are easily determinable as to which is the accurate and proper reading.
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So, that's what we're, there's only really a few that really stand out as big questions.
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And we're going to talk about, in the weeks to come, we're going to talk about the three main ones that really stand out as questionable.
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The Longer Ending of Mark, the Kamiohonium, and the Pericopae Adulterae.
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They have names, because they are considered to be the more, the more difficult textual variants.
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Alright, so having said all that, this is more of what we're looking at.
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This is the textual variation that we're having to deal with.
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We have to deal with the remaining variants, the 2.9%.
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And of those, we need to remember this.
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There are categories of variants.
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Of the 2.9%, there are categories.
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Viable and non-viable are two different categories.
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And then you have intentional and unintentional.
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Remember, we've already knocked out meaningless, because we've said 99% of them are meaningless.
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Because there's meaningful and non-meaningful, and that's 99% are meaningless, 1% have meaning.
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Meaning, in the sense that they would change the meaning of the text.
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Of that 1%, you have to consider what's viable and what's not viable.
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And then you also have to consider the idea of intentional and unintentional.
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Now, let's look through this.
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Viable.
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Viable means this.
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If it is a viable variant, it actually has the possibility of being the original.
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The opposite of that is a non-viable, meaning it has no possibility of being the original.
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And there are many, many, many variants that only show up once in a manuscript that's hundreds of years removed.
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And there are many manuscripts that date prior to that one that do not have that variant.
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So you see this one variant pop up in a 10th century manuscript.
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And all the manuscripts that came before it didn't have it.
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And you say, okay, well that's not viable.
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It doesn't have a history.
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It can't be traced back.
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So there, that one's off the table.
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So that's viable and non-viable.
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Okay? I would argue that the Kamiohonium is a non-viable variant.
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The Kamiohonium is 1 John 5, 7.
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And let me tell you something.
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If you ever have a conversation with a King James onlyist, they will hold to the heels on 1 John 5, 7.
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It has to be in the Bible.
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If you take it out, we can't believe in the Trinity.
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Because it says there are three that bear witness in heaven.
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The Father, the Word, and the Spirit.
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And these three are one.
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That's what the verse says.
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I do not believe there's any reason to believe that was part of John's original writing.
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I believe there's no reason to believe it was part of the textual history.
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It is not in any Greek manuscript in the first thousand years of the church.
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I don't consider it to be a viable variant.
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That's why it's not in the ESV.
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It's not in the New American Standard Bible.
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It's not in several Bibles.
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It's in the KJV, though.
33:37
So if you're a KJV purist or KJV onlyist, you're going to argue for it.
33:41
Not because of the textual history, but because you have a presupposition about the King James being the standard.
33:53
Nope.
33:54
No.
33:54
And we're going to see that in a minute.
33:56
Yeah.
33:56
No.
33:57
It goes...
34:00
Actually, in that one, there's only a partial part of the verse.
34:02
So there's still part of verse 7.
34:03
It's just that section that comes out.
34:07
So you have viable and non-viable.
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You understand what that means, right? There are some that could be, some that can't be.
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And that takes away a large percentage of those leftovers.
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Some of them just aren't viable variants.
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Then you have, on top of that, the intentional and the unintentional.
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Now, this gets people a little uncomfortable.
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Because if I tell you there were some scribes that intentionally added some things to the Bible, you think, oh, they were nefarious, terrible people.
34:33
But slow down.
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Most variation is unintentional, meaning they made a mistake.
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But sometimes there were scribes who made intentional changes.
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For instance, I'll give you an example.
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If you read the Lord's Prayer in Matthew, or what we call the model prayer, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
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Thy kingdom come.
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You know that prayer.
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If you read it in Matthew and you read it in Luke, it reads differently.
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But in some manuscripts, they harmonized it.
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And you can tell that's an intentional harmonization.
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Because the older manuscripts show that they weren't exactly the same.
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Jesus probably gave that prayer several times in his years of ministry.
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He probably taught that prayer several times in several different ways.
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Because it's a pattern of prayer.
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It's not meant to be necessarily recited.
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We recited at church to teach children.
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That's why we do that.
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If you ever wonder why we recite that prayer in church, it's because we want to teach, and that's a teaching tool.
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Recitation is a teaching tool.
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But that prayer wasn't meant to be repeated like the Catholics with the rosary beads, how they sit there and they say it, and they say the Hail Marys.
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Because Jesus even says, he says, don't pray in vain repetition.
35:48
And that's what it often becomes, is just vain repetition, right? So I have no problem with Matthew's version being a little different than Luke's version.
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Because it's probably two different times that Jesus gave that prayer.
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But in certain manuscripts, we see a harmonization.
36:04
Because there was a scribe sometime at some point who didn't like the fact that they disagreed.
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And so there was a harmonization that happened.
36:13
Yes, and we see that.
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The good thing is, we have more than one manuscript.
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So we can compare, and we can see what he did.
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So we see the intentional thing.
36:23
But what's an example of an unintentional variant? Well, let me give you a couple.
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If a man is copying from one copy to another, and his eye, looking from one to the next, sees the same ending of a word, like you think of the word construction, has the word T-I-O-N, and another word with that same T-I-O-N.
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We have a lot of words that have that T-I-O-N on the end.
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It's called homoetaluton.
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It means a similar ending.
36:58
And so, you see that word with the T-I-O-N, his eyes go over here, he copies, he looks back, and he sees another word with that same ending, and his eye thinks that's where he was, and he can leave out an entire line.
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And we see manuscripts with that.
37:09
Manuscripts that have entire lines gone, because they jumped from one word to the next, without realizing they had skipped.
37:18
Some guys skip whole lines.
37:20
There's one manuscript that's hilarious, because it was written, I say hilarious because I find these things funny, it was written originally with two columns.
37:30
And you've seen things written like this, right? Where you've got a column here that you read, and then you go back up there and you read down.
37:38
Well, there's a manuscript where the copyist probably didn't read Greek, but he was just copying letter for letter, and he literally copied straight across.
37:47
He didn't know there was a gap in between.
37:49
And so, his reads differently than anyone that came before it, because it literally reads from this sentence to this sentence, which had nothing to do with that sentence, and back to here, and back to here, and back to here, and back to here, because he's literally just copying straight across the page.
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He doesn't realize it's two columns, he doesn't read the language, most likely.
38:05
So, we would say that's an unintentional variant.
38:10
But it's easy to see.
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You can go and see how that happened, and you can even imagine some old scribe or Christian man who just wants to perpetuate this copy of the Bible, and he sits down to copy, and he makes this mistake.
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Which, like I said, I think is somewhat humorous.
38:31
But, that is an unintentional variant.
38:36
Intentional variation.
38:37
Intentional variation, things like seeking to improve grammar.
38:43
There's times where grammatical changes are made, and you can tell that there's an attempt at some point to try to improve the grammar.
38:52
Like I said earlier, harmonization is huge.
38:55
You see that, an attempt to harmonize stories.
38:59
Changes that were made by combining two variant readings into one.
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And so, we'll have manuscripts that say this, manuscripts that say this, and then we'll have manuscripts that have both, because they don't know, so they just put both in there.
39:12
Alright? And some additional information as to a historical setting can be added.
39:20
And that's what we're going to look at now.
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If you'll take out your Bibles, I'd like for you to take out your Bible and turn with me to John, chapter 5, and verse 4.
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What version of the Bible do you have, Ms.
39:41
Jackie? ESV.
39:43
ESV.
39:43
ESV.
39:43
Will you read, once everybody, once you hear, we'll wait until everybody gets there.
39:48
John, chapter 5, and verse 4.
39:51
Would you read that? Is that verse 4? Does it have the number 4 next to it? In that version? Okay.
40:13
Because a lot of, mine doesn't even have the number 4 there.
40:18
Yeah, is that, are you sure that's the ESV? Yeah.
40:21
Okay.
40:21
Mine's like 4 and then 5.
40:23
Oh, it's got a 4 and then a 5.
40:25
Okay, yeah, yeah.
40:25
The 4 is there, but the verse is missing.
40:28
Yeah.
40:29
The verse itself, John, chapter 5, and verse 4, is not in the ESV.
40:36
It's not in the New International Version either.
40:39
If you have a King James, it's there.
40:41
How many of you have it? How many of you don't have it? You just got an empty spot.
40:46
How many of you have it and it's separated by a bracket? If you got the NAS, that's what it, it's got a bracket around it.
40:52
Right, Richard? Yeah.
40:53
It's got a line that shows, it looks just like this.
40:58
It's got verse 4, and there's a bracket, and it's got the verse, and then it brackets it down at the end.
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So it's just different ways that different translations deal with a spurious text.
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John, chapter 5, and verse 4 is what many, including myself, would believe to be a scribal addition to John's writing, not part of his original writing.
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So, ESV translators, take it out.
41:29
NIV translators, take it out.
41:31
Other translations, bracket it off and say, you need to know this verse, it's in some manuscripts but not others, and here's the reason why we bracket it off.
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I just like it when everybody has an NIV.
41:48
Because when everybody has an NIV, you just say, open your Bibles to John 5, 4, and everybody's going, because it's not even mentioned.
41:56
And you go down.
41:56
3 to 5? Hm? Go from 3 to 5? Yeah, the reason why, I mean, you would think they would just go from 3 to 4 and just make 5, 4, but the reason why they don't do that is because they have to harmonize it with other, we all know the numbers weren't introduced until many, many, many centuries after the Bible was written, and they're in keeping with the tradition of the verses.
42:16
If they took the verse out and made the next verse 5, then John 3, 16 would no longer be John 3, 16, and that would throw off the whole process, you know, so they can't do that.
42:27
So, let's talk about that passage.
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That's going to be the, whoa, we're almost out of time.
42:31
Okay.
42:31
I got a lot more to say, but let's talk about that passage real quick.
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John 5, 4.
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Because the first question some people have, well, why'd they take it out? Let me ask you a question.
42:46
What is assumed in that question? If somebody asks, why did they take it out? What's assumed? I heard somebody say...
42:56
That it's correct.
42:57
That it's correct? What'd you say, Manoa? That they took it out at all.
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Yeah, the assumption is that it was there originally.
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The only reason why you would say, why did they take it out, is if you assume it was supposed to be there.
43:10
Right? Generally, people who say, why did they take it out, have a standard text in their mind, and the standard for most people is the King James, because that's what they grew up on.
43:18
Even people who aren't King James only-ist, tend to have grown up, especially if you're over 50, you grew up in a time where the King James Bible was, that and the NIV was pretty much it, and the NIV was considered by many people to be hands-off, because that's the nearly-inspired version.
43:34
That's not God's Word.
43:35
That's the NIV.
43:36
So a lot of people didn't want anything to do with that.
43:38
They had their King James Bible, and that's it.
43:42
And so if you see something in the NIV...
43:44
In fact, if you look this up, you Google it, why is the NIV and the New American Standard and the ESV so dangerous, they'll say, because they're missing verses.
43:54
What's the assumption? They're supposed to be there.
43:57
The only reason why you say something's missing, is if you assume it was there in the beginning, right? So, question, why would someone take this out? That is an assumption.
44:12
Rather, let's ask the question, what does it say? What does it say? What manuscripts do we find it in? What manuscripts do we not find it in? And is there a reasonable explanation as to why it may have been included if it was not part of the original? That's textual criticism.
44:36
That's the questions that we should ask.
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What does it say? What manuscripts does it find in? And is there a reasonable explanation as to why it might have been included if it were not part of the original? Okay? So let's ask the first question.
44:48
What does it say? We got John 5, verse 3.
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And these lay a multitude of individuals, invalids, blind, lame, and paralyzed.
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Verse 5 says, One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.
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In between that, if you look at the bottom of the page on your ESV, if you have this particular one that I'm using, which might be different from yours, Miss Jackie, it does give the verse at the bottom of the page.
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It says, They were waiting for the moving of the water.
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For an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and stirred the water.
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Whoever stepped into the first after the stirring of the water was healed in whatever disease he had.
45:31
Okay.
45:32
You guys remember this now.
45:34
There was the pool that the people would gather around.
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The angel would come and stir the waters.
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And the people who got into the pool were healed.
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The first one into the water was healed of whatever the infirmities he had.
45:45
Right? That entire section about the angel is the verse in question.
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Now, remember, we're lower criticism, not higher criticism.
45:53
We're not questioning whether or not God can do this.
45:56
We're not questioning whether or not God can send an angel to stir up the St.
46:01
Johns River and heal everybody in Baptist Hospital.
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We're not questioning.
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We know what God has the capacity to do.
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So this is not a question of if he can.
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The question is, what did it say? Okay.
46:11
Now, I want to first mention where it's absent.
46:19
Okay.
46:19
It's absent from some of the most early manuscripts of the New Testament.
46:26
You remember P66, the New Testament manuscript I showed the picture of? It's not in that.
46:34
It is not in Oliphant B.
46:38
That's Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus.
46:40
It's not in those.
46:41
It's not in several other manuscripts.
46:45
And it is not in the true text of the Latin Vulgate, the Syriac, or the Coptic.
46:51
So the oldest witnesses that we have to this text do not include those words about the angel coming down and stirring up the water.
47:04
Bruce Metzger, biblical scholar, professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the good guys.
47:11
Bruce Metzger is one of the good guys.
47:14
He makes some points about this text as to why he doesn't believe it should be included.
47:19
He points out the fact that it's absent from the earliest manuscripts.
47:23
Number two, he says there is the presence of asterisks and obolae, which are marks, even in other manuscripts, marked this passage off as being potentially not part of the original.
47:37
So you know how we put it in brackets.
47:38
There are manuscripts that have marks on it to show this passage is in question.
47:43
Even in the handwritten manuscripts there was a question as to whether or not this was part of the original.
47:51
Also, he says, this is according to Bruce Metzger, the presence of non-Johannine words, meaning there's words in this section that John didn't use in the rest of his writing, what they call non-Johannine or non-John-like words.
48:07
It doesn't read like something John would have written when compared to the other writings.
48:13
We have a lot.
48:14
We have four books by John, right, and Revelation.
48:17
We have John, 1st, 2nd, 3rd John, and Revelation.
48:19
So we have a lot to compare John's use of language.
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And there's non-Johannine language here.
48:27
Also, he says, the rather wide diversity of variant forms in which the verse has been transmitted.
48:34
Not only is it a variant, but it's different in different manuscripts.
48:40
So there's a wide variance in the variants.
48:44
That's a big tip-off that this wasn't likely part of the original.
48:48
So the question is, why? How? Why is it part of it? How did it get introduced? Dr.
48:55
James White has what I think is a very viable, using that term, viable reason why it may have been included.
49:05
How many of you write notes in your Bibles? If I picked up your Bible and I read the notes, and your Bible was handwritten and your notes were handwritten, would I know the difference? Possibly not, right? He said what likely happened was that this was a textual note about the circumstances that surrounded that pool and the things that were happening at that pool.
49:27
And when a later person was copying a manuscript that someone had, they didn't know, the person possibly couldn't have asked them the question, they didn't know if that note was or was not supposed to be in it, so they included it to ensure that nothing was lost.
49:44
And I think that's good.
49:45
I would rather have the extra than to take out something that should be there.
49:51
And that's, again, we don't know that for certain.
49:53
This is where we get into the concept of, okay, we know what it is, we know what it reads like, we know where it is in the manuscripts, we know the fact that it doesn't read like John, there's a lot of reasons to not believe it should be there, why did it end up there? Most likely it was a scribal note that at some point made its way into the text.
50:16
And you say, oh, that scares me, I don't like the fact that that can happen.
50:20
Beloved, isn't it great that we know that this is a possibility, that it could have happened? We know that so much of the New Testament, so much of the Bible, that's not what happened, but at this place, we can look at it and say, yeah, there's a possibility, this could be it.
50:33
This could be the answer to why this particular passage is as it is.
50:40
And as I said, if you think about the fact that your Bible, handwritten, had your notes handwritten, it would be difficult for somebody to be able to tell the difference.
50:49
John 5.4, I think, is an example of an intentional note that was later unintentionally added.
50:56
So it's unintentional, intentional.
50:58
It was intentionally made a note, it was later unintentionally added into the text, and it became part of a textual tradition and transmission.
51:07
But again, it leads to the question, is it viable? I don't think it's viable, not based on the evidence.
51:12
I don't believe it's viable based on the evidence.
51:15
Some people might consider it to be viable, and this is where we do get to have a conversation, and sometimes we get to have a debate.
51:21
And there are entire debates on certain small passages, but here's the beauty of the reality of all this.
51:28
No text in question, none of the text in question, none of the textual variants, change fundamentally anything that we would believe about the Christian faith.
51:42
In fact, Dr.
51:44
Bart Ehrman, that guy I told you about, he was interviewed on a radio show by a person who was kind of railing against the Bible and saying, oh man, all these textual variants, I can't believe the Christians would believe the Bible, I can't believe they'd even trust something like that with all those variants and differences.
51:59
He said, Dr.
52:00
Ehrman, what do you think the Bible really said before all those changes were introduced? And he said, the same thing it says now.
52:12
And the guy is speechless.
52:17
What do you mean? Because these changes, the 99% of them are meaningless, the 1% that we have, we can basically go back and ascertain what the original was, and it doesn't change the meaning at all.
52:32
So this big argument about textual variation causing us to lose faith in what it says, and what the Bible says, it's smoke and mirrors, folks.
52:41
It really, really is.
52:44
Do we have questions? Yes.
52:45
Do we have to deal with those questions honestly? Yes.
52:48
And here's the thing.
52:50
I want to give you, this is, I know we're a few minutes over time, but I want to give you, and that clock's fast, so don't trust it.
52:57
I want to give you a few things to hang your hat on before we leave tonight.
53:01
Just a few quotes first.
53:06
A.T.
53:06
Robertson said he believed that only a thousandth part of the entire New Testament text was of any real concern.
53:14
That would make the New Testament, in his mind, 99.9% free of any real concern.
53:21
Basically what he's saying is the variants that really would concern him are less than 1% of the entire New Testament text.
53:29
Sir Frederick Kenyon quote this, he said, The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hands and say without fear and hesitation that he holds the word of God handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries.
53:42
So here's eight things, and we're not going to go through these slowly, we're going to go through these quickly.
53:47
Eight reasons, when somebody says why, Pastor Keith, do you remain confident in the accuracy of the biblical text even in the face of all these variations? Eight reasons, here they are.
53:57
Number one, I believe the scriptures are without error in the original manuscripts.
54:00
That gives me an absolutely perfect starting point.
54:03
I believe they had an absolutely perfect starting point.
54:06
Number two, we no longer have the original manuscripts.
54:08
What we do have is a text that represents a critical study of the vast manuscript tradition.
54:13
We don't have two or three or five or 500 manuscripts, we have over 5,000 manuscripts.
54:18
We have more than any other group.
54:21
Number three, variants do exist in these manuscripts, yet because of the vast amount of copies, these variants are easily recognizable.
54:27
We can see them, we can study them, we can research them, just like we did tonight.
54:32
Number four, the overwhelming majority of these variants are either not viable or meaningless.
54:37
Gotta keep that one in mind.
54:40
Number five, no one variant changes or distorts any doctrine, as no doctrine is based upon any single text of the Bible.
54:47
Number six, the New Testament is the single best documented work of antiquity.
54:52
Number seven, the New Testament is the most open religious document, readily acknowledging the textual critical issues in its own footnotes.
55:00
Number seven is huge, by the way, because if you ever have a Bart Ehrman-esque type person try to challenge you on your faith, say, look, you don't have to tell me the variants are there.
55:08
My Bible says it right here.
55:12
You're not telling me anything I don't know.
55:15
You're not surprising me.
55:16
You're not, again, smoking mirrors, buddy.
55:18
I got it right here.
55:20
There are entire commentaries on these variations.
55:23
If you really want to dig into it, it's out there.
55:25
The information's there.
55:26
And let me tell you something, that don't exist in the Koran.
55:29
You're not going to open up a Koran and at the bottom of the page it says, well, there's a variation here.
55:33
And there are variations, but they're not going to, it's not like this.
55:37
And lastly, number eight, God's providential preservation of the New Testament differs from His preservation of the Old Testament, but both have been miraculously preserved.
55:46
And I do believe it's miraculously preserved.
55:48
I think the reason why we have so many more manuscripts in the New Testament than we do of Homer or Tacitus or any of those other guys is because it's vastly more valuable to mankind, and God has preserved it.
55:59
Some people get upset with textual variation and textual criticism, but I want to tell you this, do not ever, and if you take nothing else away, take this away, do not ever be willing to trade truth for certainty.
56:17
Because that's what people do when they go off into things like King James Only-ism.
56:22
They want to be certain, so they abandon truth for certainty.
56:29
And that's what we're going to talk about next week.
56:31
Because next week we're going to actually look at the history of the King James Movement, the history of King James Fundamentalism, and why I would reject the King James as the last final arbiter of every textual variant.
56:47
I'm not saying I love the King James.
56:49
I love the way it reads.
56:50
I'm not saying it's a bad translation, but I am saying this, we need to abandon the idea that we want to be certain in error.
57:00
We want to be in the truth and not replace truth for certainty.
57:04
So that's next week.
57:05
Yes, sir, Mr.
57:06
Richard, do you want to end us out? I would know...
57:14
What's that? Sunday.
57:15
Oh, yes, thank you.
57:16
And we'll do that right after we pray.
57:18
All right.
57:18
Let's pray.
57:19
Father, I thank you for this evening.
57:22
I pray that this lesson has been helpful for your people, and I pray that they would have a desire and a drive to want to learn more.
57:29
And I pray, Lord, that in the weeks to come we will understand better your word and what it says.
57:35
And, Father, be able to trust what Jesus said, that heaven and earth will pass away, but my word will not pass away.
57:41
And so we can be confident that your word has been preserved in this vast manuscript tradition.
57:47
And, Father, thank you for that.
57:48
In Jesus' name, amen.