December 15, 2005

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

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

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

Bart Ehrman, Textual Criticism, and the NPR Interview

Good afternoon, evening, welcome to The Dividing Line on a Thursday afternoon. We last time did not have the opportunity to get around to one of the things that I had mentioned that we wanted to look at.

But I have gotten a number of emails, a number of people are quite concerned and unhappy about hearing the recent NPR presentation of an interview with Bart Ehrman, who is a textual critic and seemingly has decided to join sort of the ranks of the Jesus Seminar in publishing for Harper Collins, Harper San Francisco, which ironically is the same book that published NT Wright's recent book.

And he has put out a book entitled Misquoting Jesus. For those who, for example, have read My King James Only Controversy, who have some historical knowledge of the text of the New Testament, it's somewhat unusual to read this.

It's sort of in the sense that it's, there's nothing new in it. Anyone who reads the Greek New Testament and takes the time to look at the text itself and to learn something about textual criticism and how to utilize the vast amount of information that is available today in the UBS text, even more so in the Nestle Holland textual platform.

As I look at my computer screens in front of me right now, I have the Libronics digital library system up and I have what I call my Greek textual study desktop set up, which has the New American Standard on one side.

It has Bower and Gingrich and Donker in the middle. Beneath that, the Nestle Holland 27th edition. Beneath that, the Nestle Holland critical apparatus. And to the right, Metzger's textual commentary. So I have three rows and all of that right there.

They're all linked to one another so I can go to any text and I can search the textual apparatus. We have a tremendous amount of information available to us. And so anyone who has access to that can read the Greek New Testament, has some background in this, has to look at this book and go, what's new here?

Other than, in essence, trying to use the existence of textual variation, which is something that is clearly known to everybody, to sell some more books or to do something. I'm not sure what the whole idea is.

But anyway, this book, like I said, says nothing new. It's just simply coming from a position of, as Bart Ehrman describes himself, as a happy agnostic. But it is, I think, interesting to recognize and to note the process that brought Bart Ehrman to where he is.

I got the feeling, now this is the same lady from NPR interviewing him that we played earlier interviewing John Dominic Crossan, what I mean earlier, this was a number of months ago, who is very, for me, very difficult to listen to.

I grew up doing radio. Radio has to have some pacing, it has to have some energy in it. And pacing and energy are two things that she absolutely eschews. And so it's very difficult to listen to her go through one sentence in the amount of time it would normally take.

Most folks do four and you're just like, OK, I know where you're going. Can we get there sometime today? I want to hear what this other fellow is saying, not what you're saying. So it's a little bit difficult to listen to that.

But I could tell that Ehrman was very unhappy. Well, OK, I'll take that back. Not very unhappy. He was uncomfortable with the fact that she kept asking him questions about his religious background. The fact that he had a, quote unquote, born again experience.

And that he, as a result of that, was a conservative evangelical. And you can listen to her own questions very, very clear, that she's a nice, strong humanist and wants to get the idea across that the Bible is a very human book over against being a divine book.

Listening to Ehrman describe his, he went to Moody Bible Institute, graduated from Moody Bible Institute, called himself a very conservative evangelical. And then I'm sitting here listening going, all right, I'm going to hear the big arguments.

What's going to be the material that's really going to explain how it is that, on his part, the discovery of textual variation blew his faith away. What is it? Because I, I'm more, I'm just as conservative, maybe more conservative than he was when he was an evangelical.

He graduated from Moody. My father graduated from Moody. I just spoke at Moody. I believe in inerrancy. And I know everything that he has said in his book about textual criticism. I know all the variants he talks about in much deeper detail than he goes into in the book.

Of course, he's writing for non-specialist here. He can go very, very deep. He's a scholar in these things. And so I'm expecting some sort of compelling argumentation. And all I get is, well, once I discovered that there were textual variants, then that clearly was inconsistent with the belief in inerrancy.

And I'm like, what? What do you mean? Why is it inconsistent with the belief in inerrancy? In fact, why can't this be the very mechanism that God used to protect the New Testament from the very kind of corruption that people like Dan Brown say took place?

We can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the type of corruption Dan Brown says took place didn't. And that's because of the means by which New Testament text was communicated to us. So I just was sitting here going, OK, where are we going to hear it?

And of course, as you probably already guessed, I didn't hear it. And why didn't I hear it? Because this kind of falling away, in fact, the specific term to describe what Bart Ehrman has done is called apostasy.

That is a technical term. Oh, you're being mean and nasty. No, it's a technical term. It has a particular meaning. And that meaning and that application is appropriate here. Very rarely is apostasy due to the things that Bart Ehrman is talking about.

It seems to me there was something else going on, and he's not telling us what that other thing going on is. But something else happened. Something happened at Wheaton because that's when he says it started and it continued on at Princeton, which isn't surprising at all.

And who knows what it is? But if you're expecting to hear some compelling argument as to why you should apostatize in the light of the existence of textual variation in some texts of the New Testament, you're not going to get it from Bart Ehrman.

But it's interesting to listen to. And so that's what we're going to listen to. And take your phone calls as well at 877 -753 -3341. 877 -753 -3341.

Let's dive in. You've written other books about the text of the Bible. But you say that this one is the most important to your own religious journey. How so?

Well, my religious journey began actually when I was a young boy and was attending an Episcopal church. And I guess I was fairly religious, but I had a born-again experience in high school that changed my life for the time.

I became a very hardcore evangelical Christian who believed that the Bible was the inspired word of God without mistakes in its very words. But as I began studying the manuscripts of the Bible after I learned Greek in college, I started realizing that we didn't actually have the original words of the New Testament, which made it a little bit difficult for my theology, which insisted that these words had been inspired.

Can you tell us a little about that born-again experience in high school? Well, I was 16 years old.

I was living in Lawrence, Kansas. And I started attending a youth group that was connected through my high school, a Youth for Christ group. And I, in attending this group, realized that the people who were most active in the group had a different religious experience from the one I had had in my Episcopal church, that they were more, I think, fervently religious and were more certain about their faith and seemed to have a lot of answers to questions that I had.

And that seemed attractive to me. And so I actually joined the group and also had this born-again experience.

Still after that born-again experience.

Well, the born-again experience for most people at that time in the early 70s involved accepting Christ as your Lord and Savior. And it meant acknowledging that Christ had died for your sins and had been raised from the dead and that you needed to be personally committed to him.

And so the born-again experience meant giving up on your past life and now living a life for God.

What was that past life that you felt you had to give up?

Well, that's the irony now looking back, of course, as a 50-year-old wondering what it was that I had to give up when I was only 7 or 16 years old.

Already we're all sitting here going, boy, we're missing some important things here. I wouldn't expect that the interviewer, of course, would actually necessarily understand those things. But not really getting a real good explanation from the good Dr. Ehrman either.

But once again, I don't know about you, I can sense he'd rather be talking about the book, he'd rather be talking about textual criticism. He doesn't really want to be talking about this, but she just keeps pressing him on.

And I think the idea was simply that people who have these experiences realize that they have an emptiness inside of them, that they are searching for something, and they think that God, through Christ, can fill that void.

And so I think now, looking back, that it was the very common experience of a teenager who felt that there was some emptiness inside and that this was a solution to the emptiness.

And what happened next? Did you participate in this Born Again religious fervor for quite some time? Did you sort of go through a period where you came to doubt what you were doing and then slowly, slowly move away?

Well, as I do with most things, I threw myself completely into this experience and became very active in this Youth for Christ group. And the leader of the group convinced me that if I wanted to be a really serious Christian, I would commit my life to it and go off to study Bible in college.

And so I actually, after high school, went to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and did a three-year degree there, majoring in Bible theology. I was a very hardcore, ultra-conservative, evangelical Christian then for years.

Now, let me stop it right there.

I suppose it's possible, I'm not sure how, I would be disappointed if it is possible, that you could get the three-year degree at Moody Bible Institute and not learn Greek. He's going to say he didn't.

I know that years and years ago, back in the 50s, if you did the missionary track, you didn't have to take Greek. But if you did the pastoral track, you did have to take Greek. And if you're going to be translating the Greek New Testament, and I don't believe they used the Textus Receptus there, there's these little notes at the bottom of the page.

I'm not sure how you could not know about the existence of textual variants. I knew about the existence of textual variants, taking Greek. I mean, you open the text, and they're right there, and you put your hand up, and you go, what's this stuff down here, and you deal with it.

So that's just very odd to me, that what he's going to be saying is, I graduated from Moody, and I didn't know there were textual variants. I guess it's possible, you know? But again, it just seems very odd to me.

After Moody, I went to Wheaton College, which was an evangelical college. There I studied English literature, and I took Greek. And it was in the process of taking Greek that I started being able to read the New Testament in the original language.

And it was that experience, reading the text in the original language, that you came to have questions about what you were believing?

Not at first. The reason I wanted to read Greek was because I knew that the New Testament had been written in Greek, and the only way to understand it fully was to read it in the original language. But as I started working through the Greek New Testament, I realized that there are places where we don't know what the original words were, because we don't have the originals of any of the books of the New Testament.

We only have copies that are made many years later, centuries and centuries later. And these copies all have differences from one another, so much so that there are places where we don't know what the original text actually said.

Well, there's his thesis, of course. The thesis being that, evidently, the level of corruption in the manuscripts is of such a proportion that you can't believe what Christians have believed all along concerning the nature of the inspiration of the text of Scripture.

There's the assertion. Now, if you're expecting him to back that up with examples, in reality, he's not going to. And, in fact, the examples he's going to use prove only the other perspective. But there's the assertion that is being presented.

And I think that started me down a different path, where I started realizing that the certainties that I had been holding on to, in fact, were uncertain, even to the point of not knowing what the words of the Bible were.

So, indeed, you began to understand and realize and even conclude that the Bible is a very human book.

Oh, isn't that sweet? She's going to take another shot at evangelicals a little bit later on. More at evangelicals here, it's more at the Bible, a very human book. In contrast to what? Well, a divine book.

This was the major shift, I think, in my thinking, away from thinking of the Bible as completely inspired in all of its words by God to thinking that, in fact, the book was not only copied by human scribes over the years, but as time went on, and I went on in my education, I went to Princeton Theological Seminary to pursue these kinds of questions, I began to realize that the Bible was also written by humans, and that the human authors, in fact, were very human.

And just as the scribes had changed the words of the text, that the human authors themselves had changed the traditions they had inherited about Jesus and about their understanding of the world and God.

Now, a bunch of stuff there, a bunch of stuff that just got thrown in all at one shot. Was there somebody at Moody that thought that the authors were not humans? Were they extraterrestrials? What's that?

What you mean when you say that they were human is that they were not inspired, right? That's what's being said. Why not just say that? That the writers I discovered, but once you say I discovered, then you'd have to explain what you discovered it from.

What was the source of this revelation to you that the authors were not inspired? That's a good question. And then this other stuff that's just been thrown in here has nothing to do with texts themselves.

I hope you caught that. Now we're talking John Dominic Crossan, now we're talking changing all sorts of streams of tradition and the manuscripts don't reflect that. That's not something you get from the manuscripts.

That's something that you get from your theories and your worldview but it's not something you get from the manuscripts. And unfortunately, here you've got someone who is a scholar about the manuscripts and he's throwing this stuff in as if they're somehow connected.

And I can certainly see why it is that people get confused when someone like this is speaking in this way when they don't utilize their language in a careful fashion or they are utilizing their language in a careful fashion and specifically doing so in such a way as to promote a particular thesis.

And that what we have in the Bible.

Isn't a set of books handed down by God but we have a set of books by very committed religious people but people nonetheless, very human.

As you moved away from that dedicated religious fervor and into a more intellectual approach to...

As you stopped being religious and started using your mind what happened then? I'm reminded of an interview I saw Perky Katie Couric doing recently and I have a feeling these folks, like at NPR, really do think that they're journalists.

They don't realize just how utterly biased they are and how clear their bias is and how easy it is to identify. I really think they don't even see when they say something like that what they're really suggesting.

Did you separate yourself from those people with whom you had previously been so closely associated?

Yeah, this was, for me, part of the real emotional turmoil associated with a change in my perspective because I was very close to a lot of people friends, family who shared my evangelical commitments and the more I studied, the less certain I was about it and that created tensions in my personal life with my life with my friends, my family and it meant moving from very conservative churches to more liberal churches and it meant acquiring a different set of friends and so, in fact, it was part of the struggle for me.

The book is titled Misquoting Jesus The story behind who changed the Bible and why. Bart Ehrman is the author. He chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He's an authority on the history of the New Testament the early church and the life of Jesus. Please do join us. 800 -433 -8850.

Please do not call, these numbers are not currently available.

Email to drshow at wamu .org. As you looked at these changes these differences that you were perceiving. Now, please, know something.

The term change and this is where Ehrman is very, very subject to criticism because he seems to feel that he has developed the ability to read the minds of ancient scribes somehow and that's where he's really.

I think, sort of left mainstream scholarship is when you're looking at a textual variant the statement should be something along the lines of innocent until proven guilty. Let's bring this up to today.

Most of us use computers. In fact, if you're listening to this you obviously do or someone near you does and they get this program for you and maybe they do all the work and convert it to mp3 and so on and so forth so you're listening to stuff most of us are used to using computers.

I'm sitting here at my desk and I have a very nice computer set up. I've got two screens. I've got a lot of stuff on my screen and I'll be writing things and I'm very frequently multitasking doing a bunch of different things all at the same time.

And I will sometimes have a book let's use a really recent example, the Da Vinci Code. I'll have the Da Vinci Code book out. I do have that in PDF format but I've been typing in the stuff because the PDF was for the palm and I just haven't wanted to mess with it.

So I've been typing in the quotes myself and so you've got a book sitting here and I have nice lighting here. It's not like we're in the olden days where you have the scribes working by candlelight. I have multiple lights around my office and I can make sure that we can see things well and I've had LASIK surgery which I couldn't have back then.

In other words, we've got all sorts of advantages here and in fact, if I'm typing in a program like Word or OpenOffice, something like that when I misspell something or I misspell something that's not found in the dictionary you get the little red underlining.

And if you want to have the grammar stuff on it can check things like that and we've got a lot of advantages. And yet, how many times have I made a mistake despite all those things there's things that will distract me in the writing or still, especially when you're copying something even if you're a pretty decent typist like I am and I can sort of concentrate on the original.

Still, I'm going to look back at the screen at times, and when my eye goes back to the book I can skip words, I can skip lines all of the standard things that a scribe did and we can see in manuscripts I do to this very day, even with all the advantages that I have, that they didn't have.

And so when I say innocent until proven guilty the point is, if you can come up with a reason simply based upon scribal error I mean, if I were to misquote Dan Brown I would imagine there might be some people who would accuse me of purposefully misquoting Dan Brown if I were to leave out certain words here's an error that we frequently make we will go into a phrase, and we think we know what the phrase is and we'll actually fill in the phrase when that wasn't the phrase they were using and what if I did that, and I inserted something there would be people who would probably accuse me of actually trying to change what he was saying and let's say people didn't know me let's say people didn't know that I realize that's really stupid and I have a long track record of being as accurate as I can be on those things because I recognize, if you misrepresent what your opponent is saying, they can blow you away in a debate and everything else, because I've done that to other people and they misrepresent me.

I remember what happened to Robertson Jenis during the mass debate when he tried to quote from The Fatal Flaw, my first book and he stopped in mid-sentence and I was able to demonstrate that the rest of the sentence completely changed the application he was trying to make, and how embarrassing from any type of debate perspective that was for him if I've done that to others, I know it would be done to me if I did the same thing, so I'm not going to do that now, I may make mistakes, but they're not going to be purposeful mistakes and so, let's say someone didn't know that stuff about me, and all they knew is that I wrote this stuff about Dan Brown and I obviously don't think Dan Brown could put two scholarly thoughts together if his life depended on it, and so since that's obvious then I must have been trying to make my case even better by changing things, see and let's say they're reading this 50 years down the road, and I'm not around anymore to ask that's what I mean by innocent until proven guilty.

When we're looking at the scribes of the New Testament if there is an explanation for the textual variant that can arise from the simple process of copying where is Ehrman getting this idea that when you look at all these, and oh, there was a theological reason here this person, this scribe made a particular change, his big thesis going back to his Orthodox corruption of scripture book has been that many of these variants actually come about because Orthodox scribes are trying to stack the deck in essence they're trying to make the Bible stronger against heretics, now, is that something the scribe might do?

Sure, sure I do not argue that there could not have been scribes who for one reason or another wanted to make things better on either side of an argument, no question about it because we see people doing things like that today King James only people argue that the King James should be used because it's better in defending this doctrine or better in defending that doctrine rather than having the proper attitude which is what was written by the original author as the work of the Holy Spirit in inspiration and scripturation that's always got to be the issue, but people are always like you can't go that direction because then we wouldn't be able to defend this particular point or that particular point type of situation, which is backwards you derive your theology from the scripture, you don't take a theology and enforce it on the scriptures and so on and so forth, so anyway I understand all that, but again, the best you can do since the ancient manuscripts and especially the ancient manuscripts of the first millennium which are the most relevant to us we don't know who wrote them we don't have names, almost well, later on you might have some, but we don't have names on these manuscripts, and so we can't climb into the minds of these people and say, well they made this change because of this, and they were trying to alter this because of this, and so on and so forth and so you combine this mind-reading ability that Ehrman seems to have developed somehow for himself you combine that with his liberalism and his well, anybody who wrote anything about Christianity was a Christian idea which you pick up in his New Testament introduction book published by Oxford University Press, which is a shame it's one of the most nicely typeset and put together books I've ever seen.

I mean, it is really, really nice but unfortunately it's filled with references to John Dominic Cross and stuff like that, and I mean in reference to that kind of very, very far to the left viewpoint and anyway, you combine that with the idea that everybody back then was a Christian, even the enemies of the Christian faith so the Judaizers were Christians and the Gnostics were Christians, and everybody you put all that together and you can come up with a real mess, which is exactly what you have in Bart Ehrman's material, and that's what's being promoted here.

We will continue, and take your phone calls maybe you'd like to comment on that or other issues at 877 -753 -3341, we'll be right back.

The Meaning of “Change” in Textual Variants

Many stars, strong and true quickly fall away.

What is Dr. Norman Geisler warning the Christian community about in his book Chosen But Free? A New Cult? Secularism? False Prophecy Scenarios? No, Dr. Geisler is sounding the alarm about a system of beliefs commonly called Calvinism.

He insists that this belief system is theologically inconsistent, philosophically insufficient, and morally repugnant. In his book The Potter's Freedom, James White replies to Dr. Geisler. But The Potter's Freedom is much more than just a reply.

It is a defense of the very principles upon which the Protestant Reformation was founded. Indeed, it is a defense of the very Gospel itself. In a style that both scholars and laymen alike can appreciate, James White masterfully counters the evidence against so-called extreme Calvinism, defines what the Reformed faith actually is and concludes that the Gospel preached by the Reformers is the very one taught in the pages of Scripture.

The Potter's Freedom, a defense of the Reformation and a rebuttal to Norman Geisler's Chosen But Free. You'll find it in the Reformed Theology section of our bookstore at aomen .org. This portion of the dividing line has been made possible by the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

The Apostle Paul spoke of the importance of solemnly testifying of the Gospel of the grace of God. The proclamation of God's truth is the most important element of his worship in his church. The elders and people of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church invite you to worship with them this coming Lord's Day.

The morning Bible study begins at 9 .30 a .m. and the worship service is at 10 .45. Evening services are at 6 .30 p .m. on Sunday and the Wednesday night prayer meeting is at 7 .00. The Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church is located at 3805 North 12th Street in Phoenix.

You can call for further information at 602 -26-GRACE. If you're unable to attend, you can still participate with your computer and real audio at prbc .org where the ministry extends around the world through the archives of sermons and Bible study lessons available 24 hours a day.

Under the guise of tolerance, modern culture grants alternative lifestyle status to homosexuality. Even more disturbing, some within the church attempt to revise and distort Christian teaching on this behavior.

In their book, The Same-Sex Controversy, James White and Jeff Neal write for all who want to better understand the Bible's teaching on the subject, explaining and defending the foundational Bible passages that deal with homosexuality, including Genesis, Leviticus, and Romans.

Expanding on these scriptures, they refute the revisionist arguments, including the claim that Christians today need not adhere to the law. In a straightforward and loving manner, they appeal to those caught up in a homosexual lifestyle to repent and to return to God's plan for His people.

The Same-Sex Controversy, defending and clarifying the Bible's message about homosexuality. Get your copy in the bookstore at AOMin .org.

The New Testament as a Reliable Text Despite Many Variants

And look back into the divine line. We are listening to the NPR interview, National Public Radio. Your tax dollars at work, yes indeed, ladies and gentlemen. Promoting Bart Ehrman's new book, Misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the Bible and why.

I had mentioned before, using the term changed normally implies purposeful alteration rather than textual variation due to copying. I had also mentioned that I think as we move into a response to him on the blog, which I had mentioned a couple days ago we're going to be doing, he's written a book on the Da Vinci Code, we'll use that as the transition into the subject, that I will be spending a fair amount of time, once again, expanding on the fact that, and this is something I raised in the series and will continue in the series once I get a chance to continue that series, in response to Saifullah and Azmi in regards to the Islamic take on textual criticism, the existence of textual variation in the transmission of the text of the New Testament is the natural result of the means by which the New Testament was transmitted to us.

And as I've pointed out many times before, the Muslims while they like to tout the alleged textual purity of the Quran are actually in a significantly less enviable position than New Testament scholars are in establishing the original text of the New Testament as the work of the disciples, the apostles themselves.

The reason being that even in the Islamic way of looking at the Quran, there was a period of time of revision, the Uthmanian revision, where Uthman had to collect the copies of the Quran that existed at that time, come up with a version that allegedly is the pure version, and then burn the others.

Well, the problem is, first of all, you didn't get hold of all of them. There are pre-Uthmanian Qurans that have been discovered, manuscripts that have been discovered, and you find the textual variance that exists there.

But the problem is, when you have that kind of a single ecclesiastical text, one text established by a group, protected by a powerful central group, that becomes your final authority. You can't claim to go back to the original at that point.

You can only go back to the point where that particular text is created. You can't take it back to the original authors at that point, especially when you have people collecting things and burning them, and so on and so forth.

And so, that is not the way that the New Testament was transmitted to us. If we only had one text of the New Testament, and let's say it was allegedly floated down on pillows carried by angels, and was entrusted to some ecclesiastical authority, everyone would always be saying, well, we don't know that's what was originally written, because only one group's been in control, and they then could alter that to fit their particular purposes at any particular point in time.

But the fact the New Testament is transmitted by many people in many different places in such a wide scale and so quickly in the early years of the Church, you have in that methodology not only the concern that the Christian Church has always had, that people have read the text of the New Testament and hear that gospel message, and that that's the important part, is getting that word out to people.

Not only do you have that explanation, that viewpoint of the Christian Church, but you have such a quick transmission of the text so widely that the theories that say that, well, the Da Vinci Code theory, that Constantine made all these wholesale changes, is a bunch of baloney, that they couldn't possibly have happened.

We have manuscripts that go way, way back, and if someone came along and tried to make these kind of changes, those later altered manuscripts would stick out like a sore thumb in comparison to the earlier ones.

And so, this is the methodology that God chose, the result of having all believers involved, well, not all, but a large number of believers, not just professional scribes, and not just some priest class involved in the transmission of the text of Scripture.

The result is textual variation, so we have to study them. And I guess that's why I've always enjoyed doing that. That's just always been fascinating to me. I like doing that. I can understand why people wouldn't.

I can understand why people would not find staring at all those symbols at the bottom of a page and looking at manuscripts, I can understand why they would not find that to be a fascinating thing. But, some of us, the Lord has made us a little bit odd, and we like that kind of thing.

But that's what we have to do. That's what we have to do to deal with those textual variants. But that is a small price in comparison to the situation the Muslim is in, or someone else is in, who claims that, well, my one group has this one text, and your ultimate authority can never be the text of Scripture at that point.

Your ultimate authority always has to be what that group says, because your knowledge of the text itself is dependent upon them. And despite what Ehrman says, I'm looking at the text right now on my screen.

Like I said, I have this particular setup in Libronics, in the Libronics digital library system. And by the way, I run two Bible programs. BibleWorks is running at the same time. I always have BibleWorks running.

BibleWorks is a little bit faster for me to use than Libronics is, unless you have oodles of RAM, which I thankfully do. When you're running Libronics, everything else slows down, because it loves RAM.

It really does so. But anyway, I have on the screen in front of me, in English translation, I have the Bauer and Gingrich Greek lexicon. I have the Nestle Island 27th edition. I have the Greek critical material beneath it.

And what I was going to say is, I had told the folks at Herman Utica a long time ago, and they're the ones who make BibleWorks, I had said, you know what, the only thing you're missing for this thing to be absolutely perfect is the textual data.

I wish I had the textual data. Well, Libronics got it before BibleWorks. I don't know if BibleWorks is ever going to get it. I sure hope they do. But the fact of the matter is, that's one of the reasons that I utilize the Libronics for doing this study, is because I can have the very same material on my screen that I have when I have the Nestle Island text open.

Though, the nice thing here, especially for those of you getting past 40 years of age like I am, is you can also play with the fonts and hence make the fonts nice and large, and make the fonts in the textual apparatus larger as well.

That's a very practical, practical thing there that you can have. And I'm just looking at John 7 51. Our law does not judge a man unless it first hears from him and knows what he is doing, does it? And there is one variant in that sentence, in toto, in the text that is provided to us.