Has God Preserved His Word?

Alpha & Omega Ministries iconAlpha & Omega Ministries

5 views

Comments are disabled.

00:17
I understand why we're spread out like this, so the heat zone around you isn't quite as intense as last evening.
00:24
I could have told you that we wouldn't have to be putting any chairs out this evening. It's just human nature,
00:30
I think. People want to see... Why does anybody watch hockey?
00:35
Because at any moment, a fight may break out, so that's sort of the whole thing there is.
00:43
That's sort of what was going on last evening, though they should have recognized that wasn't going to happen as far as a fight fight, but certainly we did have some disagreements.
00:54
Obviously, I remember the first time I passed out tracks at Temple Square, sometime in 1984,
01:02
I believe. I had no idea what in the world we were doing, but I've often told the story about...
01:08
It was May. We didn't know about General Conference, so we came up in May. It was just a regular day, so there were people going in out of the members' entrance for their endowments and stuff like that.
01:19
And it was a very warm day. You can't blame global warming for this one. This was 1984.
01:26
So I'm not sure if there's still a Howard Johnson's over there near...
01:31
There isn't? It's all gone, huh? Well, there was back then. And I was just dying of thirst, and so I headed over to get a drink at Howard Johnson's.
01:42
And as we're crossing right up on North Temple, North Temple and West Temple, we're crossing the street, and I try to hand a track to this
01:51
Mormon fellow who had just come out of the members' entrance. And he looked at it, and he looked at me, and he says, go to hell.
02:00
And I looked at him and just smiled and said, sir, according to your theology, I can't. He was so frustrated, because he knew
02:09
I was right, because I'm not an apostate Mormon. But yeah, we had some fascinating experiences there.
02:18
And then discovered what General Conference was, and started showing up for conference. And that for 18 years, until the
02:25
King James Only guys showed up and turned the whole place into a zoo. And they did the same thing down in Mesa for a while, but they've finally given up on all that.
02:35
I guess they've moved on to other pastors. But the person who didn't move on to other pastors was
02:43
Jason. He's stuck here in this very, very interesting area of differing theologies, shall we say.
02:56
And you've got a little bit of everything here. So yeah,
03:01
Alpha Omega has felt that it's good to keep a good gospel witness up here. So if we can help, then we'll help.
03:08
That's all we've really attempted to do. If you haven't seen the new video that Jason put together on Roman Catholicism, he kept sending it to me.
03:20
He really would like you to... Could you... Could you... Really? I was like, dude, I'm busy. I'm sorry. But I really want you to look at it.
03:29
So finally, it just wore me down, and I converted it to audio, so I could listen to it while driving around, and writing, and stuff like that.
03:39
And at high speed, even at that. And so I got through it, and was really, really impressed.
03:47
I had a feeling that someone maybe had heard a few of my debates in putting that material together.
03:55
But there was stuff in there that I've not used. So there was original stuff in there. It was very, very good. And so I highly recommend that.
04:04
Of course, we already had a few Roman Catholic apologists, you know, just cherry -picking quotes, and blah, blah, blah, blah.
04:09
The same stuff you always get. But that's a tremendous amount of work.
04:15
I don't know how you do it, but that's a lot of work that goes into those things. So anyway, how many of you were here last evening?
04:23
Okay. All right. So... Everybody else is just ignoring me. I wanted to start off with something that happened last evening, expand upon it a little bit, use it as sort of an introduction this evening.
04:39
Normally, as I would address this subject, I would have a projector, and I'd have slides and stuff like that.
04:45
We will know that you all have entered into the 21st century when a projector appears up there on the roof someplace.
04:53
That's probably not gonna happen. Or at least on a little cart, you know, hides in the office, that would be pretty cool.
05:01
Anyway, so hopefully you have your Bible, because we're probably gonna be looking at a few texts and since I'm not gonna be able to project something, then it doesn't work real well if you're just listening to me.
05:15
You might wanna be visually looking at something. But last evening, one of the three points that I addressed in my presentation, and it was interesting to me that of the three points that I'll have presented, the second one he spent three minutes on and never really referred to it again.
05:34
It was sort of behind some of the other stuff that he said, but the third point that I presented was on what's called the
05:41
Book of Abraham. And if you're familiar with Mormonism and Mormon history, you know that probably when it comes to LDS scriptures, there is nothing that has been more damaging to the claims of Joseph Smith as an alleged prophet than the
06:04
Book of Abraham. The Book of Mormon, golden plates, what are you supposed to do about that?
06:09
You can't, you know, they've been taken back to heaven very conveniently and therefore you cannot check these things out.
06:16
You can't, now that we can read Egyptian, which we couldn't in 1830, at least not fully, you could be able to check those things out.
06:27
You can't. And so when it comes to the Book of Mormon, now you have these fascinating theories that keep shrinking the
06:36
Book of Mormon down, the Book of Mormon area gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Even though it's plain to anyone who just reads words on a page that Joseph Smith believed that this took place all across North America.
06:49
I mean, if you've ever heard of Zulf, the white Lamanite, then you know that Joseph Smith believed that this was something that had gone on in his area as well as many other areas.
07:00
But we can't check that stuff out against the original, but you can with the
07:05
Book of Abraham. And even if they dispute the papyri themselves, you've got to facsimiles in their own scripture.
07:12
And it has been devastating to the claims of Joseph Smith.
07:19
I made a statement, there wasn't a follow -up on it, but I made the statement that there is absolutely nothing in our scriptures, hence in what we call the
07:32
Old Testament and New Testament scriptures, that even comes close to having the kind of verifiable material in it that the
07:45
Book of Abraham has that has been demonstrated to be utterly untrue. It's not that there are not all sorts of arguments made against things found in the
07:55
Christian scriptures. There's a big conflict amongst apologists today,
08:01
I'm going to be addressing it next week on my program again, due to Pastor Andy Stanley utilizing his rather large pulpit.
08:11
Well, he doesn't have a pulpit, so his rather large checked shirts or something, I'm not really sure how to say it anymore.
08:16
But he has a large audience, and he has been convinced by certain apologists that as long as the resurrection is true, then
08:26
Christianity is true, even if parts of the Bible are not. Now he can't logically tell you why the resurrection is relevant without scripture to explain that, but that's the direction that he's going.
08:41
Part of his reasoning for this is we send our young people off to university, not having grounded them in a meaningful presentation of the
08:59
Christian worldview. It's one thing to give a Christian worldview, but if you don't give it in such a way that the young person absorbing it will be able to see how that's relevant to the objections of a secular society, you're not doing them much good.
09:13
And sometimes we so protect our young people in certain contexts from what's out there, rather than letting them see the power that the
09:24
Christian worldview has over against these things. And so people like Stanley see these people, they go off to university, and they get hit with objections to almost everything, especially in the
09:37
Old Testament, but especially the supernatural worldview, and the existence of miracles, and canon issues, and the whole nine yards, and we haven't prepared them.
09:47
And so from his perspective, what you do is the best apologetic is the resurrection.
09:52
If the resurrection is true, hey, we don't have to worry about... He's even gone so far as to say, we don't even have to worry about the virgin birth.
10:00
And when you think about that, how could you historically attack or disprove the concept of the virgin birth?
10:10
It's actually embarrassment at the supernatural. Now think about that for just a moment.
10:16
Is there anything more supernatural than resurrection from the dead? So how embracing one supernatural thing is supposed to rescue you from embarrassment about other supernatural things,
10:27
I haven't really figured all of that out yet. But the point is that there are objections out there to the flood or to whatever else it might be.
10:38
And there are people in the church today that are saying, well, the best way to deal with this is to put all that on a lower level.
10:47
When I say we have nothing even close to the book of Abraham, I'm not saying that there are not arguments against the accuracy of historical events, that especially when we look at the
11:00
Old Testament, we're dealing with a book that is truly ancient in its origins.
11:09
And you're dealing with events that, to be perfectly honest with you, cannot be verified in a secular sense in light of how much time has passed.
11:22
I mean, nobody was running around with digital cameras and MP3 recorders 3 ,000 years ago or 3 ,500 years ago or 4 ,000 years ago or whatever.
11:33
How much you can actually determine as far as details of events in antiquity is extremely small.
11:41
And so most of the objections to, say, the dating of the Exodus, if you go to seminary you discover there's two primary views.
11:50
There is the old traditional view and then there's the newfangled view. And I had never understood the arguments why you would abandon what seems the logical situation there, but there are people that are embarrassed, again, by the
12:03
Exodus. And so there are people that argue that stuff. When you dig deep down into it, what you discover is they have their theories and they accept their theories and that's really all there is to it.
12:14
It's all theoretical. When we're talking about the book of Abraham, we're not talking about theories. We're talking about verifiable, documentable.
12:21
I mean, 1835 sounds like a long time ago, but in world history sense, that is not a long time ago at all.
12:31
This is not a galaxy long, long ago and far, far away. This is upstate New York not all that long ago and not very far away.
12:40
And so we can gather a lot of information and when we do, we discover that the book of Abraham is a huge, untouched argument against the prophet of Joseph Smith.
12:56
And I don't know if you understood Alma's response to that because it sort of went over, I think, you know, it was very, very briefly stated, but his argument was that Oliver Cowdery had quoted from the book of Abraham before the papyri showed up.
13:11
Well, maybe, maybe not. That would actually be an argument against the book of Abraham, not an argument for it.
13:19
If Joseph Smith had already started working on something like this and then the papyri come along, he says, oh, look, the writings of Abraham upon papyrus and I'm going to translate them.
13:30
That doesn't help anything. What it does is if you are a believer as Alma is.
13:36
You're trying to find some way of holding on in the midst of all of this counter evidence.
13:45
And the way to do it here for Alma in that situation is to say it's all revelational.
13:52
And so since it's revelation, it really cannot be tested historically or textually.
13:57
He basically made that argument at the beginning of his comments is that, well, you know, we're looking at all, you know, looking at whether the
14:05
Book of Mormon actually happened historically isn't its ultimate proof. It's the fact when
14:11
I read the Book of Mormon, I'm a better husband. Well, I've met lots and lots of people who read the
14:17
Quran and are a better husband as a result of reading the Quran. That doesn't make the Quran revelation from God. There are people who read secular textbooks on psychology and are improved by that.
14:29
That doesn't make it a divine revelation. And so what that did highlight,
14:37
I think, is the fact that we as Christians, we have such a tremendous heritage in what has been given to us in Scripture.
14:48
And yet when you just turn on the television, listen to the radio a little bit.
14:55
How often do you hear any type of sermon study that goes to any depth whatsoever about the many resources available to us that demonstrate that not only has
15:11
God given us his word, but he's preserved his word. I also know that there's some bad stuff out there on it, too.
15:17
Remember how long ago was this? Late 80s, early 90s. Remember all the Bible code stuff? Some of you may be too young to remember some of that, but for a while there was a real popularity of these
15:30
Bible codes. And if you added up the Hebrew numbers, the numbers in Hebrew here, and it spelled out
15:36
Henry Kissinger's name or something like that, you know, all that kind of stuff. And every group has that kind of thing.
15:46
The Muslims have the Quran code stuff. Everybody comes up with this kind of stuff.
15:52
It's backward engineering. You have your conclusion and you make the facts fit into a certain theory that you want to put out there.
15:59
And you can do that with the Bible just like you can with Quran or anything else. So there's bad stuff out there, too.
16:05
But the reality is that there is a richness in what we possess in regards to the accuracy of our scriptures, that for some reason, and I can't necessarily identify what the reason is, but for some reason, we are not nearly as excited about or knowledgeable of as we should be.
16:31
I try, but I'm just the strange -looking guy from Phoenix, so I can only do so much.
16:38
I have been successful. I actually have met a few people who are actually in seminary going into textual criticism, and they say, you gave me the interest in doing it.
16:47
So I guess I can take some solace in that. But the reality is that the text that you hold has a history to it.
16:58
And the more you know about that history, the less likely you are to become a victim of the next
17:07
Bart Ehrman. If you're not familiar with who Bart Ehrman is, he's one of the leading English -speaking critics of New Testament Christianity.
17:16
He teaches in North Carolina. He is an apostate, a former Christian, and his acolytes, his followers, his minions fill our universities and community colleges and things like that, and are gunning for our young people.
17:37
And when you recognize those folks are out there, then you need to have a firm foundation in yourself.
17:46
And I don't think that should be just for someone like me, who does textual critical work on a scholarly level or anything like that.
17:53
I think that in light of the fact that we're all carrying one of these things around, Jason's screen is broken.
17:59
I feel really sadly about that, so he can only read a certain portion of what's on there. But we all have these things.
18:07
We are all connected now, and that means truth as well as falsehood can travel very, very quickly to any one of us.
18:20
And so I have been beating the drum now for a long time. I don't care if you're a housewife. I don't care if you work in a dentist's office.
18:27
I don't care if you're a landscaper. If you're a Christian, the issues that my great -grandparents did not even have to think about are central to what you do have to think about.
18:39
And I don't say that in a negative fashion. I'm simply saying that we have available to us information that other generations never had right at the time we need it, but we need to avail ourselves of it.
18:52
And I don't see most of our seminaries inculcating a passionate understanding of these things amongst their students.
19:03
And if it's not being preached in the pulpit, it's not going to end up amongst the people. So aside from godly disciplines such as the memorization of Scripture, aside from meaningful — you know, when you think of the things we spend time on, reading just some old and New Testament background material, putting
19:27
Scripture in its context, knowing a little something about what was going on in the Roman Empire in the days that the
19:33
New Testament was being written can shed a tremendous amount of light and give you such an insight as to how so much of the attacks upon our faith are extremely shallow and should not impact us.
19:49
There's all sorts of information like that, but you should also be aware of the history of whatever translation of the
19:56
Bible is your favorite. Now these days, again, thanks to the computer,
20:02
I've seen in my own life, in my lifetime, this strange change to where a lot of believers now don't have a particular translation.
20:17
They will use multiple translations because it's easy to do. It's just, you know, swipe and the other translation is their type of situation, which is a little difficult if you're trying to memorize
20:26
Scripture, by the way. It really, I'm almost hesitant to ask most audiences if Scripture memorization is even on the map for many of us anymore, because for most of us, it's like, why should
20:43
I memorize something when I have instant access to it anywhere? One good
20:50
North Korean EMP and we're all going to be biblically illiterate again. Where did I put that Bible?
20:55
I have no idea where it went. But those disciplines,
21:01
I think, are extremely, extremely important. And if you do them and you start comparing translations, you can encounter stuff that I think we as believers in any context, but especially here in Salt Lake where you have the eighth article of faith of the
21:20
Mormon Church, as far as it is translated correctly, should probably have a good, solid foundational understanding of what's going on there.
21:29
So let me give you an example that you might find interesting. Well, first, let me do a quick poll here.
21:39
One Bible translation came out less than 20 years ago now, I think, and has taken the market because it was marketed incredibly aggressively and incredibly effectively.
21:55
And it's the ESV. So do we have any ESV folks?
22:04
Right, but as far as maybe the one that you use most of the time. ESV. NIV?
22:14
NKJV? New King James Version? King James? We've now discovered the old folks in the group.
22:24
NASV? NASV. All right. So we have a mixture of the primary conservative translations.
22:31
So if you have your Bible, why don't you look at Jude, the book of Jude.
22:42
I was going to say chapter, but there really isn't one. Book of Jude.
22:58
On your phone, it would be 1 -5. Otherwise, it's just verse 5 of the only chapter in Jude.
23:08
And what you'll find here is a phrase in the middle of the verse.
23:18
It says, that the Lord once delivered a people out of Egypt.
23:28
Right in the middle of the verse, right? Now, if you have the ESV, and I think the newest edition of the
23:40
NIV, and I would not be surprised if the new, it hasn't come out yet, but there is going to be a new revision of the
23:49
NASV. It was supposed to be out last year, and it's been delayed. I have a feeling it will do this as well.
23:57
You have a different word there. Yours says that Jesus delivered a people out of Egypt.
24:08
Now, the ESV originally had the Lord. NIV originally had the Lord. NASV still has the
24:15
Lord, but I think eventually we'll say Jesus. Now, we don't like when things change.
24:26
We want everything to be the same. The problem is, even you venerable
24:35
King James folks, if you know the history of your text, know that you had such humorous incidents as the adulterer's
24:45
Bible, or there was an entire edition printed early on, or in the type setting they forgot the word not in the commandment, thou shalt not commit adultery.
24:57
And so it was printed, thou shalt not commit adultery, and so it was called the adulterer's Bible. Yeah. I don't think any heads rolled on that, but it was during that time when it could have happened.
25:11
And you're probably aware that you are reading what is known as the 1769
25:18
Blaney Revision. You're not almost, nobody is reading a 1611 except Stephen Anderson, I think.
25:25
But the 1611 is very, very difficult to read. You're reading an updated version.
25:31
And then there's the Oxford edition and the Cambridge edition, and there are differences between the two. And so every translation has a history.
25:40
The New King James has a history. The NIV has a really now complicated history, an unnecessarily complicated history.
25:46
But especially modern translations where the publishers are still in existence, such as Lockman Foundation with the
25:54
NASB, Crossway with ESB, Zonderman with NIV, as long as those organizations still exist, then there is the possibility of further work on the translation.
26:09
And what that then leads you to is, well, what text are they translating?
26:16
The King James, of course, is based upon a,
26:22
I really don't think the dog is bothering me. I'm not sure if it's bothering anybody else, but it must be bothering
26:30
Jason. The King James, of course, is based upon what's called the
26:36
Texas Receptus. But even that, to make a long story short, has a history to it as well.
26:46
And there was no one single printed edition of what's called the Texas Receptus.
26:53
The one that people carry around today was not invented until the late 1800s, and that was based upon someone going back and looking at the printed editions that the
27:06
King James translators used, looking at what they chose in the text, and making a Greek text based upon the
27:12
King James translation. Most people are not aware of that. So there's always a history to everything.
27:20
But what's interesting is it's one thing to look back upon what happened 150, 200 years ago in the history of the
27:27
Texas Receptus of the King James. We are living in the history of the continuing study of the manuscripts of the
27:36
New Testament. And what you're seeing when you look at Jude 5 is a revolution.
27:44
It's a revolution. Now, when I say a revolution, this particular revolution has resulted in about 30 changes.
27:55
Jude 5 is one of them. The rest are not nearly as monumental or important in what's called the general epistles.
28:04
And about 50 in the Book of Acts. Almost nothing in the Book of Acts that has almost any translational impact or anything like that.
28:12
Very, very minor things. But people need to understand why this is happening, because many people use that to say, well, see, it's sort of like that question that was asked last night.
28:26
Well, if Jason and you have disagreements, then that means a great apostasy has taken place. No. And if there is a change in the
28:35
ESV, that does not mean that the Bible is being changed. The problem is most
28:41
Christians would have a hard time explaining why that isn't the case. And that's what we need to spend time thinking through, if we want to be the type of people that can reach out to others and provide meaningful responses to difficult questions that are being asked.
28:57
And unfortunately, just not too many people are giving those answers. Why has the
29:03
ESV changed at Jude 5? It's because of the text it's translating. And the text it's translating has changed.
29:11
Well, okay, what's it translating? Well, it's translating what's called the Nessie Olin text. All right, well, how did that change?
29:17
Well, between the 27th and 28th edition, if you have one of those texts, you know, and they're available, you know,
29:25
I have it sitting here on my iPad. They're available for your phone, so on and so forth. You know that you'll have the text, and then you'll have little indicators, and you'll have these textual footnotes down at the bottom.
29:39
It's not that we just discovered a manuscript buried someplace in the second century that had
29:45
Jesus there, and, oh, so we're going to change it. No. In fact, I have my dad's Nessie Olin text that he used when he was at Moody Bible Institute back in the 50s.
29:55
And if you look at Jude 5 right down there at the bottom of the page, you know, Lord, some manuscripts,
30:01
Jesus, it gives you what the manuscripts are, so on and so forth. This isn't ñ nothing new has been discovered that has somehow changed everything.
30:09
That can happen. You can discover, certainly in the 1930s when we discovered most of the papyri buried in the basements of museums in London, hadn't been stolen from Egypt during the period of colonial control of Egypt by Britain.
30:32
That did change things because you're finding manuscripts that are many, many, many, many hundreds of years older than anything that we had had before.
30:42
But that's not what's necessarily going on here at all. The Nessie Olin 27th edition said
30:48
Lord. Nessie Olin 28th edition, up in the text, Lord has been put in the footnote, and Jesus, which was in the footnote, has been now put into the text, and so the
30:57
ESV is simply following that. What happened? Well, this is where people start getting a little ñ especially if you're older folks.
31:06
Younger folks are like, yeah, so what? But older folks, especially traditional stodgy people like Jason, get really, really uncomfortable with the next thing
31:18
I'm going to say. It's because of computers. Computers? I don't want computers having anything to do with the
31:24
Bible. Well, hold on. Just hold your anti -technology stuff.
31:32
My fellow elder doesn't even have a cell phone, so I fully understand the I don't trust any of that newfangled technology stuff.
31:40
I get it. But hold on just one second. The fact of the matter is we have over 5 ,800 fragmentary manuscripts in Greek of the
31:54
New Testament, and probably 25 ,000 when you include
32:00
Latin and Boheric and Syriac and all the rest of this stuff, and there just isn't anybody with a brain big enough to keep track of all the data that those manuscripts represent.
32:19
We've known for a very, very long time that eventually we would use computers to collect information about the manuscripts so that we could start figuring out, are these manuscripts related to one another in any way?
32:36
Because, see, you need to understand something. The New Testament was transmitted to us over history. If you've seen the
32:44
Indiana Jones thing where the Holy Grail, you've got the guy who's 700 years old or whatever he is, who's just been sitting in a cave for 700 years protecting this one thing, even though the
32:57
Nazis somehow can shoot him and kill him. But anyway, that's another story. But a lot of us wish that there was the one manuscript of the
33:06
New Testament hidden away in a cave. When we really need to know what it says, we can go ask the 700 -year -old guy, and then we wouldn't have those little notes at the bottom of the page that says, some manuscripts say this and some manuscripts say that.
33:18
The problem is, even if we had that, how do you know what the guy's been doing for 700 years in there?
33:25
You've got to trust that he hasn't been messing with stuff because there's no way to know. There's no way to know.
33:32
If you've just got the one controlled text and whoever's controlling it, they are your ultimate authority, not the text anymore.
33:41
So it would be nice to have it that way, but it doesn't work that way. And so what we've come to understand is the history of what took place, especially in the first 400 years.
33:59
It's impossible for us to go, okay, here's this manuscript, ah, and we're going to be able to tell that this was the manuscript it was copied from.
34:08
The Romans were very, very active in seeking to destroy the
34:13
Christian scriptures. We found a papyri. It was published,
34:19
I think, just before my debate with Bart Ehrman, that listed, it was just an official government document from the early 4th century, so around 315, somewhere around there, that gave a listing of, if you know your church history, you know starting about 250, 260, persecution of Christians becomes empire -wide.
34:46
The emperor wants to stamp out Christianity once and for all. And so for 50 to 60 years is the worst persecution that the church faced.
34:55
And up until then, it had been in this area or that area, and it would come and go. Now it's everywhere, and they're trashing whatever buildings have been built, and this papyrus contained all this information about what had been taken from this church.
35:13
And aside from everything else, the thing that obviously catches my attention was the fact that in that listing, there were,
35:22
I recall, 37 papyrus documents taken from one church.
35:28
That document also indicates that this was one of about 300 churches in which this had happened just in the preceding years.
35:36
Do the math. That's a lot of manuscripts. Now, do we know they're all biblical manuscripts?
35:42
No. But in the church, the vast majority of them would have been. So there is a lot of destruction.
35:49
It's amazing we have as much as we have, given how long it's been, and given, you know, we make really uber cheap books these days.
35:59
I mean, I look at some of my books that were published back in the 90s, and they're all where you have yellow pages. I mean, books I wrote, because there's the acid in the paper.
36:07
We don't use high -quality paper. We use cheap paper, stuff like that. And so almost anything we're publishing today would never last for 1 ,800 years.
36:18
So when you look at a papyrus today, and it's all broken into pieces and stuff like that, I like to say to people, what are you going to look like in 1 ,800 years?
36:26
Probably not going to look as good as this papyrus. So all the ravages of time, you've got the
36:33
Roman Empire trying to destroy as many as you can. We can't just simply take our manuscripts, our 5 ,800 manuscripts, and put them on a big old board and go, okay, this one was copied from this one, because there might be two or three generations that are missing.
36:48
And so the relationships between those manuscripts to our minds is rather opaque.
36:54
We really can't see. But what we've done is we have collated a large portion of these manuscripts now.
37:02
In other words, you take what every manuscript reads at every point of data in the
37:08
New Testament, every word is a point of data, and you put it in the computer, because the computer can remember.
37:16
And it can start to see patterns that we can't see. And so what has happened, this revolution that has taken place over the past decade, 99 .9
37:30
% of your New Testament scholars know nothing about.
37:36
I started my Ph .D. work. My doctoral advisor did his
37:44
Ph .D. under Bruce Metzger at Princeton. Okay, not a slouch. He had never heard of it.
37:51
I only heard of it because I started working on the manuscript I was going to be doing and happened to listen to a reformed podcast where they had this guy on as a guest.
38:02
I started putting it all together. The revolution that has taken place, in fact,
38:08
I was just teaching at a major, very good seminary, and I asked every leading scholar in the school if they had ever heard of this.
38:22
Hadn't. I was the first one to introduce it to them. So that's how new this is, and yet it's already impacted the reading of the
38:29
ESV and will impact, especially now, the next two books I'm going to be doing are
38:34
Mark and John. Then you're going to start hearing about it. Once Mark and John get impacted by it, then you're going to start hearing about it.
38:40
But what I'm referring to is something called CBGM.
38:48
CBGM, coherence -based genealogical method. Coherence -based genealogical method.
38:57
Now, as you can guess, it was designed by Germans. Because Germans do not bother coming up with names that are actually understandable or easy to remember.
39:13
Ich habe Deutsch, again. Schöne Sprache.
39:19
I don't know if any of you saw my bucket list experience last year, but I got to preach from the high pulpit in the castle church in Wittenberg last
39:31
September. And got to give me kudos.
39:36
I included at least two, maybe three, citations of Martin Luther in German in my sermon.
39:44
I had to because he's buried right there. When you're in the hut, you have to, there's one, two, three, there's four steps.
39:52
There is about 14 up to Luther's pulpit.
39:58
And right there is Luther's crypt. That's where he's buried. So I had to include that.
40:04
Anyway, the Germans just love, when the Germans have to come up with a way of describing something, just take a bunch of preexisting words and cram them together until it's like 45 letters long.
40:14
And takes you three seconds to pronounce. And that's just how Germans do things. And it was the
40:19
Germans who came up with coherence -based genealogical method because the primary
40:25
New Testament repository of manuscripts and the readings of manuscripts and stuff is in Münster, Germany.
40:33
Which is interesting when you consider Jan of Leiden. That's a whole other fun church historical thing that we won't even get into right now.
40:40
Though I am visiting Münster on the way back from Russia next year, and I'm taking pictures of those three cages. I'm getting them.
40:47
You can see them on Google Earth. Do you see that? You can go into Google Earth and you can zoom in on that cathedral.
40:52
Everyone's looking at me. What are you talking about? Look up the Münster Anabaptist Revolution, 1534 to 1536.
41:01
And it's one of the most amazing stories in history. And it continues to have its reverberations to this day.
41:10
But anyway, CBGM, coherence -based genealogical method. In a matter of moments, how can
41:19
I describe this to you in a way that would be memorable to you and you would understand? One of the reasons that there might be two dozen scholars in the world that have a firm grasp on CBGM is because it is, it does not, we don't do anything in life that would give us the categories to be thinking along these lines.
41:48
And what I'm trying to do as I'm working with it is to maybe come up with some things that might help make it a little bit more understandable.
41:57
But let's use Jude 5 as an illustration to just sort of explain why what happened happened.
42:06
Because what happened is they've applied CBGM to the general epistles and Acts.
42:13
When they did that to Jude, CBGM indicated that the stronger reading amongst the manuscripts, you had manuscripts that said
42:22
Lord. It's actually a very complicated textual variant if you look at it very carefully. It's very complicated.
42:27
But of the primary readings, the manuscripts said Lord, manuscripts said Jesus. When you look at their relationship to one another, because what the computer does is it can take any manuscript, and if you've got all the data points in the book of Jude, is where there are variations.
42:49
Once you do that, just like any big spreadsheet, a computer can say, well, this manuscript agrees with this manuscript 97 % of the time when there's a variation.
43:01
But this manuscript agrees with this manuscript only 87 % of the time.
43:07
So who's more closely related to the other? Well, the one that's 97 % rather than the one that's 87%.
43:13
And so you run these manuscripts together through the computer, and you are able to look at the manuscripts that say
43:25
Lord, and you look at the manuscripts that say Jesus, and they discovered something, which you could never tell by just simply looking at the page in the
43:33
Nessie -Allen text. You just couldn't do it. When you look at all the manuscripts that say
43:38
Jesus, their closest relative, according to the computer analysis of the readings, their closest relative also says
43:48
Jesus. When you look at the manuscripts that say Lord, far more often their closest relative says
43:58
Jesus. So in other words, there is no coherence.
44:04
The coherence level amongst the manuscripts that say Lord is lower, and the assumption is, and it's a good assumption, is that that's where, when you think about it, a scribe who's copying
44:18
Jude 5, what would be the normal word you would use in talking about delivering a people from Egypt?
44:25
The Lord. I mean, that's what you have in the Greek Septuagint. That's the term kurios.
44:31
That's just standard. Jesus delivered a people from Egypt makes a strong Christological point because it's not what you would expect it to say, and so it's much easier to understand why a scribe would mistakenly put
44:48
Lord than why they would insert Jesus, and the point is you would have had to have inserted
44:53
Jesus numerous times, but that's what the analysis tells us didn't happen.
45:00
All the manuscripts say Jesus are in line with one another. The changes happened over in the other camp, and so because of that, then the reading had been sort of balanced, but most people said, well,
45:16
Lord makes more sense here, and so we'll go with that. Once you have an analysis that gives you that insight, then the editors of the
45:22
Nessie -Allen 28th edition put Jesus as the main reading and Lord in the footnote, and the
45:28
ESV is followed. The NIV is followed. I think the NASV will follow as well. Now, the problem with that is even for New Testament scholars, the mathematics and all the stuff behind it just doesn't seem really easily accessible, and I understand that, but it is simply another tool that some people are just going to be uncomfortable about because it's, you know,
46:00
I've had people uncomfortable because I normally preach from an electronic device.
46:07
There are people who say you should only preach from paper. Well, if you could see how big the Greek font is on my iPad,
46:13
I mean, you can almost read it from the back of the room. I mean, it is that. See, all the way in the back.
46:19
I love it. Once you get to be my age, I'm sorry, especially when you're glancing down. I try to preach from the original languages.
46:25
When you're glancing down, you don't have time. You're trying to figure out, is that a Kappa? Is that a Chi? No, you've got to be able to see it.
46:33
I've had people who honestly just don't think it can be as spiritual if you're preaching from a glowing screen than if you're preaching from paper.
46:43
Well, of course, the problem is, does that mean that it was more spiritual to preach from papyri, handwritten copies, rather than printed copies?
46:54
I mean, you know, I get it. I understand that something that's new like that tends to have some negativity attached to it.
47:03
But let me, just in our closing minutes here, let me turn this around and make an application that a lot of people aren't making only because I may be the only scholar working in the field of CBGM that's also an apologist, literally, around the world.
47:22
In fact, I can tell you, the field that I'm working in right now, sort of turning
47:28
CBGM backwards and analyzing it from a historical perspective using the papyri, there might be six people in the world that would have any idea of what in the world
47:39
I'm talking about if I started talking about it. So we're talking cutting -edge weirdness here, which
47:44
I love. It's great. It's wonderful. My hope is it's going to be extremely positive in the effect that it has.
47:50
But here's what has fascinated me. When you talk about, when scholars talk about the rate of agreements between these manuscripts and how you identify the relationships, when they're talking about 97 .7
48:09
% agreement, they're not talking about the whole text. They're talking about the variance. They're talking about where there is a variance in the text.
48:20
In fact, it gets down to a certain point where the computer just stops looking at it. It's about 87 % because that's where all the
48:27
Byzantine manuscripts are. It just sort of stops looking at it at that point. That's on the variance, not on the actual text.
48:37
So what we can now document beyond a shadow of a doubt is the massive agreement of the entire body of New Testament documents.
48:51
Now, this has only been being done in Greek. There's no reason CBGM could not be applied to Latin other than the huge amount of time that it would take to do all the coding and the collations and transcriptions.
49:04
Eventually that'll be done. Some poor group of graduate students will be punished in that way eventually,
49:09
I would imagine. But there's no reason this could not be applied to the Old Testament as well, to the
49:16
Hebrew Masoretic, to the Greek Septuagint. In time, I think eventually it will if the
49:22
Lord tarries because it would take that amount of time. But still, the point is that what
49:29
I see when I look at the CBGM data is the ultimate computerized refutation of the
49:38
Eighth Article of Faith of the LDS Church in a sense because obviously there are
49:43
Mormons who interpret the Eighth Article of Faith translated as a translational issue, but the vast majority of Mormons have always understood that in a transmissional sense, that many plain and precious truths have been removed from the
49:55
Bible. No, they haven't. And now we can document it. Because when you're talking about...
50:02
When I look at my... I call it my manuscript. I do not own it, but P45.
50:09
When I look at P45, I can bring up right now on my iPad here its agreement, its coherence with all the other witnesses in the text that it contains.
50:25
It contains material from Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts. And in general, it's in the 90s.
50:32
It's in the mid -90s. That's on the places where there's differences, which means that as far as the full text is concerned, that even
50:42
P45, which has some idiosyncratic characteristics to it, is going to be 97 % to 98 % absolutely identical to everything else.
50:54
The idea of editing, changing, removing, inserting, all the rest of this stuff, there is absolutely no room left for that kind of a theory anymore at all.
51:06
Most people don't know why, but if you're familiar with the CBGM collations, you can just literally say, you want to try to say the
51:15
New Testament has been edited and you've taken out doctrines, you've put in doctrines?
51:21
The computer says, no, not possible. The level of agreement between all these manuscripts demonstrates one overwhelming truth, and that is it was the intention of the vast majority of scribes to make faithful copies of what was before them, and they succeeded in so doing.
51:41
All that stuff, the hyper -skepticism that Bart Ehrman, and Bart Ehrman knows this stuff, by the way.
51:48
I mean, he's not an expert in CBGM. He's sort of out of this field right now, but he well knows the fact that we know what the
51:56
New Testament was originally about. I've told the story many times before, but it's one of my favorite stories.
52:02
He was on an atheist webcast a number of years ago, and after talking about some of the variations in the
52:11
New Testament, the atheist is like, so, Dr. Ehrman, what do you think the
52:17
New Testament was originally all about? In light of all these changes, what do you think it was originally about?
52:25
And you're going to hear Ehrman sort of go, it was about Jesus as the
52:31
Lamb of God who gives his life so people can have their sins forgiven.
52:37
I mean, he doesn't even actually know what to say, because he's not really catching the idea.
52:44
This guy is sort of going, do you think it might have been about space gods from Xenon or something like that, you know?
52:50
And, yeah, some Scientologist thing, or space gods from Kolob, for that matter. Whatever, whatever it might be.
52:57
And he's like, no, we know what the New Testament was about. It's hard for me to believe that Barth doesn't realize what his writings have, what they communicate to people, but he acts like he doesn't.
53:13
And so he's like, yeah, we know what it's about. We know the idea. There might be a few places we don't know here, there, or someplace else, but we generally know.
53:23
Now we don't have to have him to confirm that in any way, shape, or form. CBGM makes it very, very plain that we have an incredibly coherent, consistent manuscript tradition, despite all the interruptions from Roman soldiers and everybody else down through history.
53:45
And so it may be very, very popular in our culture for people to say, well, we just have no idea what it's originally about.
53:51
But that is documentably untrue. The problem is the form of documentation is still rather mysterious to many.
54:02
But the printing press was mysterious to many when it first got invented, and then the mimeograph machine and everything else over time.
54:14
Eventually, I think that there will be a more clear presentation. There has been a couple of books written on this subject, both of them by Dr.
54:25
Peter Gurry, who did his PhD on CBGM at Cambridge last year. He and Tommy Wasserman have put out a small...
54:35
It's supposed to be a friendly introduction. There is no such thing as a friendly introduction to CBGM. I'm sorry. It's just...
54:40
You can't... I'm doing my best. I've started doing it on a dividing line, slowly introducing people to portions of it.
54:48
But there are a couple of books that are out there, Dr. Gurry's dissertation is out there. And I'm blessed because Dr.
54:56
Gurry happened to take a job, once he graduated from Cambridge, at Phoenix Seminary. So he's local.
55:02
And he's also the age of my son, which makes me feel very old. But we were sitting in a
55:07
Mexican restaurant only a couple months ago, talking papyri and CBGM, and I had to sit there thinking, people around us must really think we are strange.
55:18
I hope they don't call Homeland Security or something on us, because it sounds like we're speaking another tongue or something like that.
55:24
But I think eventually this information will be a little bit more accessible.
55:31
And obviously, until the entire project is done... And the project, by the way, is the production of what's called the
55:37
ECM, the Editio Critico Mayor. It's going to be a massive New Testament.
55:43
I mean, the Book of Acts is four volumes about that big.
55:50
That's just Acts. $310, just for the bound volumes of that. It is available online, thankfully.
55:59
But if that's just Acts, you can imagine how big this thing is going to be when it gets done. Once CBGM has been applied to everything, then
56:08
I think it's going to become much more known and criticized and analyzed and everything else.
56:14
That's what needs to be done. That's how scholarship works. People don't like that. Y 'all remember...
56:21
I forget when I did my New Testament thing up here. I think it may have been that year that I came up. So it's been three or four years. But I mentioned to you at that time that there was this big brouhaha going on about the first century mark.
56:32
I don't know if you remember that. But there was this big controversy because Dan Wallace had mentioned in a debate with Bart Ehrman that they had found a fragment of the gospel mark from the first century.
56:45
And then everybody had to shut up about it. And I was like... I love
56:50
Dan. Dan's a friend. Dan's a wonderful guy. But you never should have done that. You don't do that in debate.
56:57
You don't bring up something that the other guy has never even heard of before that has not yet been vetted, published, analyzed, examined, and use it as an argument in debate.
57:07
You just don't do it. And I've seen a lot of Christians do that. I saw Jay Smith at Shabir Ali.
57:12
And I go, mm, foul, mm, don't do that. If you don't want it done to you, you don't do it the other way.
57:18
It's just a matter of integrity. About a month and a half, two months ago, finally, after like five years, that whole thing has now...
57:30
I was about to say it has come to resolution. Not completely. We now know what fragment was being referred to.
57:38
And it's not from the first century. It's roughly contemporaneous with P45, my P45.
57:45
It is from Mark. It's from Mark chapter 1. There's nothing in Mark 1 from P45. So it is a good addition.
57:50
But it's only about yay big. And it only has like 58 letters or something like that.
57:58
And it's not from the first century. Well, is it still important?
58:04
Of course. Every time you find something new like that, that gives us insight into an early state of the text, it's important.
58:13
But it was handled so poorly. And it was made such a football of that that fragment will always be almost jokingly referred to as first century
58:25
Mark from the third century. Or fourth century. It was not handled well.
58:31
There is a process. And as much as millennials...
58:36
And what's the generation after millennial? Is it generation
58:42
X? No, you're gen X. Z or something? I don't know. Generation Z?
58:48
Who knows? If you're a millennial or earlier, this idea of instant knowledge, just Google it.
59:01
I want to know now. True scholarship doesn't happen that way.
59:09
And when you demand that it happen that way, what you end up with may not be truthful at all. And we as Christians should be extremely patient people when it comes to things like this.
59:20
We want to make sure that when we make a statement, that that statement is grounded in reality and in fact.
59:27
And so you may see when
59:33
Mark comes out, and Mark and John are the ones currently closest to completion.
59:39
I wish Mark was out because that would give me really what I need of P45, but I can't wait.
59:44
It could be three years. Who knows? But there are interesting textual variants in Mark that will be impacted.
59:52
The big one that everyone's wondering about is Mark 1 .1. The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the
01:00:00
Son of God. The Son of God is a textual variant. There's been some not full or CBGM applied to that.
01:00:10
And what's interesting is those studies did indicate that the coherence was best amongst the manuscripts that had the longer ending.
01:00:20
And it's interesting, the Byzantine text has received somewhat of a renaissance from CBGM.
01:00:26
CBGM very frequently points the Byzantine reading over against other readings. So there's a revolution going on.
01:00:32
And it's okay. And that's good. And it's necessary. It's happened before. It'll probably happen again, depending on how long the
01:00:40
Lord tarries. We need to be aware of it. But we need to be a people who aren't so easily unsettled.
01:00:51
Just because studies are going on and just because someone says this, that, or the other thing.
01:00:56
We should not be people that are unsettled so easily by things like that.
01:01:02
I'm afraid that in our day, we are so accustomed to the social media way of approaching things.
01:01:10
Christians should not have that perspective. We should be a people who are open to hearing what is being said.
01:01:17
Understand what the objections are. And then, well, it's going to take some time maybe to think through this.
01:01:22
Maybe need to do some studying. And our society says, no, you need to respond right now.
01:01:29
No, no. If it's truthful, then it's going to be true two months from now, or six months from now, or two years from now.
01:01:38
I don't have to go rushing into something. But keep one thing in mind.
01:01:45
Hopefully, what you've heard is not, oh, my text is changing, and I have no way of really analyzing why.
01:01:55
But I hope what you've heard is, wow, we have so many manuscripts, we have to use computers to keep up with all the evidence that we've got.
01:02:04
And that evidence is that we know what the New Testament says, and we know what its message is, and we know that it's been transmitted to us accurately.
01:02:12
And so when we see variations in it, which are due 99 .9 % of the time to scribal activities, scribe as in not intentionally trying to change something, but they're faithfully trying to copy the text.
01:02:28
Even when we have those variations, that they are the result of the fact that we have such a healthy
01:02:36
New Testament manuscript tradition that comes from all sorts of different places and was never under the control of anybody that could make changes and things like that.
01:02:45
Because when you think about it, that's the ultimate argument. The ultimate argument is you don't have to believe in the deity of Christ, it was inserted at a later time.
01:02:56
I mean, wasn't that what Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code was all about? That was the whole theory there.
01:03:02
Though it was fiction, people accepted it as fact. It wasn't. That is the ultimate type of argument.
01:03:09
It's not well, you know, there are a lot of different spellings of Bethsaida in the manuscripts.
01:03:16
Ooh, yeah, I'm ready to stop being a Christian because of that. You know, that's a fact, but that's not much of an argument.
01:03:24
The argument is the overarching idea that there have been fundamental changes made in the text, and we can demonstrate beyond any shadow of a doubt that that is simply impossible.
01:03:35
It's simply untrue. It's simply untrue. I'm sure that I can guarantee you that there is a 99 % probability, 99 .9
01:03:52
% probability, that nowhere in the English speaking world today was a lecture given outside of any seminary anywhere on the subject of CBGM.
01:04:04
You are the only people in the entire world, you are at the upper echelon.
01:04:11
If you survive this and do not start snoring, which always interrupts me, if anyone who starts snoring,
01:04:17
I cannot handle that. I give up right then. So give yourself a pat on the back for having survived that, but unfortunately it's probably true.
01:04:29
This is probably the only discussion of that that was done publicly today. It may not be what you were expecting, but at the same time,
01:04:39
I've got to talk about what I'm working on. It's sort of necessary when you're involved in doing the type of work
01:04:46
I'm doing right now, and it is, I think, going to eventually be one of the elements that we bring into the discussion with groups such as Mormonism that does make the broad textual corruption argument.
01:05:04
The Muslims make that argument, the Mormons make that argument. I brought that up last night. There are some fascinating parallels, fascinating parallels between Muhammad and Joseph Smith.
01:05:15
And there's also fascinating parallels between Joseph Smith and Jan of Leiden, either
01:05:21
Matthias or Jan of Leiden, both the Anabaptist leaders in Munster. Very, very similar mindsets and experiences in the whole nine yards.
01:05:31
It's fascinating, it really is. So congratulations on surviving that.
01:05:37
Do you have any questions you might want to ask about that? Yes, sir. How will all this affect...
01:05:45
I mean, you've already answered a lot of the questions with the King James Only crowd and stuff like that.
01:05:51
Well, except for Jason. How will this further kind of I guess answer well, not answer, but kind of knock down their arguments when it comes to the between the
01:06:09
Textus Perceptus and the Nessiean? Well, what's interesting is people like Maurice Robinson, who's primary leading
01:06:18
Byzantine text advocate in the United States. He's looked at CBGM and says don't really buy it.
01:06:27
It doesn't really end up making any difference from my perspective. And that's because Maurice will be honest about this.
01:06:35
He presuppositionally begins with the Byzantine text. So you can't necessarily feed a presupposition into a database and have it work on that.
01:06:45
Though a number of people have, just to be fair, fed the data in in such a way as to start with the
01:06:51
Byzantine text and to see what the result of that would be. So it's not like they've just ignored any of that.
01:07:01
If you're going to start with a particular text like the debate book
01:07:08
I did with Doug Wilson two years ago, the 1550 Stephanus. Did you know that's the inspired text?
01:07:15
The 1550 Stephanus. Which I happen to have one of those. You can't analyze that.
01:07:24
You're starting from this end and looking back and saying it was this, rather than going back to the data and deriving something out of it.
01:07:31
So you can't really analyze that. So they're not going to be impacted by anything, to be honest with you. Just like the discovery of the papyri, which
01:07:39
I think are one of the greatest treasures that God has provided to us. But they came in the 1930s.
01:07:47
So if you're already wedded to a text that came before that, you can't...
01:07:55
I just know on that one debate you did with the guy the older gentleman. It was in England.
01:08:01
Yeah, I was on that TV show. He was going on about how... Revelation TV. Yeah, he was going on about how the text was set to be more cohesive, coherent, and it was monster that said this or something.
01:08:17
I just watched a few weeks. What is interesting is
01:08:25
CBGM so far has said that the only text type that is identifiable on this level of certainty is the
01:08:35
Byzantine. It says there is no Alexandrian or Western text type at all. Now that's only in those small portions that have been done.
01:08:42
Once Mark and John are done, then it's going to have a whole lot more to say about that.
01:08:49
But the Byzantine guys aren't happy that CBGM has actually adopted some
01:08:54
Byzantine readings because of the cost. The cost is at other Byzantine readings.
01:09:01
It's just like a true King James onlyist hates the new King James. It's like Satan incarnate because it's that close but it's not the real thing.
01:09:11
They absolutely detest the new King James. Those types of presuppositional arguments you can't analyze them because they don't come from the data.
01:09:26
Yes? You were talking about different regions that manuscripts were coming from.
01:09:36
Could you talk a little bit about where manuscripts were coming from?
01:09:42
Well, we don't know. Almost no manuscript has data contained in it that indicates where it came from.
01:09:55
We know that there are many that were done. There were scriptoriums in Caesarea. There were scriptoriums in Alexandria.
01:10:02
There were scriptoriums in Rome. The fact is, especially the earliest manuscripts, we don't know where they were produced.
01:10:12
If they were all produced in one area that would not be a good thing. You want manuscripts from a wide variety of places.
01:10:23
What you don't want is a controlled text. You want a freely transmitted text. As long as someone can control the text, then they become your ultimate authority.
01:10:31
If someone can revise the text, do what Dan Brown said, that's a bad thing.
01:10:37
That's literally what you have with the Quran, what's called the Uthmanic revision. The New Testament manuscripts are distributed all over the world in a very free fashion.
01:10:49
That makes for the healthiest transmission of a text. That's what we have. Even Bart Ehrman says that for the
01:10:56
New Testament we have far earlier attestation than any other work of antiquity. I think he'd admit better attestation than any other work of antiquity as well.
01:11:04
That's just a fact. I wanted to know, in comparison to the
01:11:10
Rosetta Stone or the Dead Sea Scrolls, is this going to be the item of this day and age?
01:11:21
Because of its complexity, probably not. When you look at the number of changes, the impact that it is having, 30 some odd places in the general epistles, 50 in Acts.
01:11:35
Given that at least 90 % of them wouldn't even end up changing the
01:11:41
English translation, probably not. But let's see what happens when we get into Mark and John.
01:11:48
Once you start getting into the Gospel stories, that's when it will have some major impact.
01:11:56
Or, obviously, the Pauline Corpus. You get into the Romans or something, there's a major, I have a feeling that, for example, at Romans 5 .1,
01:12:06
CBGM will indicate a reading that a lot of people aren't going to want. When that happens...
01:12:16
It can't be in Omega. I have a gut feeling CBGM is going to say, it's in Omega.
01:12:26
That will have impact, but not something like... Dead Sea Scrolls moved our knowledge of the
01:12:33
Old Testament text back a thousand years. So I wouldn't say that it has that kind of an impact.
01:12:41
Computers have just been so remarkable. You were saying the downfall, one of the biggest downfalls of the
01:12:47
Mormon Church was the Book of Abraham. It actually is the computer age that is destroying it because everyone is...
01:12:59
It's not the computing power, it's communication. It's the ability to communicate and get that information out there that has changed everything.
01:13:08
The same thing is true with Jehovah's Witnesses. The Witnesses have been forced into a very different attitude because of the fact that, from the beginning, they were able to control the vertical and the horizontal.
01:13:21
They were able to control all the information about their history and their past to people.
01:13:26
They can't do that anymore. That has changed everything. Yes, ma 'am.
01:13:32
So, I think it's been hinted at a little bit, but how does this affect evangelism?
01:13:39
How does this affect evangelism? Well, the only thing that I would say directly is in our day, we have to have regular conversations with the people that we are evangelizing who have already heard in their classes, even in public schools, about these alleged contradictions, changes, corruptions of the text.
01:14:09
And so, my great -great -grandparents could quote the Bible in evangelism to people and expect a general cultural acceptance of the accuracy of that text and even the authority of that text.
01:14:25
Now, we can assume that the people we're going to talk to have a general prejudice, not only against the supernatural, but against the accuracy of the transmission of the text.
01:14:34
So, I could see it as a positive thing once somebody gets around to being able to explain it as simply as possible and to lay these things out that we could utilize this as another...
01:14:49
We're already utilizing it as a tool to analyze the text. I think that there is an appropriate utilization of it as a tool to demonstrate that the accusations of major editing and things like that simply are not valid.
01:15:06
Yes, sir? Are there any risks that you can see associated with this that may concern you about using this methodology?
01:15:16
It depends on the context of risk. I mean, there's the risk of people thinking that we're now determining the text of the
01:15:28
Bible by computer rather than by human beings. But do
01:15:34
I have concerns about the methodology? That's why I'm doing the work that I'm doing is
01:15:40
I am concerned that since it weighs every manuscript equally,
01:15:46
I am concerned that it removes the text from its history too much.
01:15:55
My work is going to be analyzing the variants in the
01:16:01
Book of Acts, because with P45 the only thing that CBGM has touched is the Book of Acts and there's a lot of Acts in P45, thankfully.
01:16:09
I'm looking at every variant in P45 in Acts and I'm doing an alternate form of CBGM limiting the manuscript for the first seven centuries.
01:16:22
And if the outcome of that differs from the full
01:16:28
CBGM then this would be an argument that there needs to be some revision of the method that would allow for a weighting of the earlier manuscripts over against later manuscripts.
01:16:39
If it comes out the same, that's a pretty strong confirmation of CBGM as a whole. I don't know what's going to happen yet because I've been traveling too much to have gotten much done since I literally have been home two weeks since I sat and spoke with my advisor in South Africa and presented to him this concept and he said, yeah, it's a great idea.
01:17:02
It's a little tough to be doing that in a hotel room. So I think there are questions that a lot of people have.
01:17:09
It's not like every New Testament scholar that knows about it has gone, oh, this is great, this is wonderful. It needs to be vetted, it needs to be analyzed, but we also need to recognize it's already impacting the printed edition of the
01:17:21
English text that we're reading whether we know it or not. We need to know why it is. And even if you don't buy it or if you're a
01:17:28
King James guy like Jason, you need to know in a
01:17:36
Bible study if you're talking about Jude 5 and someone says, yeah, well, my
01:17:42
Bible says Jesus did that. It's a good idea to know why.
01:17:48
Why is there a difference and what's the background of it? It's not the type of thing we can stick our heads in the sand about.
01:17:56
We need to know why it's there. Yes, sir?
01:18:09
Yes, you can. But you need to be careful.
01:18:17
Well, you're exactly right when you say the Lord delivered the people out of Egypt is a much more general statement than Jesus delivered the people out of Egypt.
01:18:27
If you have Jesus delivered the people out of Egypt, that's a Christological statement that is specifically identifying Jesus as Yahweh.
01:18:33
Okay, so that's big. But the rule and no one, you can't say, well, who made up this rule?
01:18:43
Okay. The rule that I think is a very, very valid rule is you do not build a dogmatic case upon a textual variant.
01:18:55
So while I would, if I was preaching through Jude 5,
01:19:03
I'd explain all this. And I would explain why I would take one reading over the other.
01:19:12
It's not the type of, if I were debating a Unitarian that denies the deity of Christ and denies that Jesus is identified as Yahweh, this is not the text
01:19:24
I would use. I would use it in a class and explain that it's a variant, which puts it at,
01:19:32
I think, a lower authority level in proving a dogma. You don't use, there's two things you don't use to establish a dogma, a textual variant or a disputed hapax legamata.
01:19:46
A hapax legamata is a word that is used only one time in Scripture. A disputed one would mean words we're not really sure what the original meaning was because we can't go to another example in Scripture.
01:19:59
So I think those are valid rules of interpretation. And so if I were teaching in Jude 5 in seminary,
01:20:08
I would present it. I'd present the fact that there is a variant there and how
01:20:13
I'd interpret it either direction. But as far as proving using that in a debate, there's much stronger text to be used than that one.
01:20:25
It would be confirmatory, but only after you've established the actual reality of the teaching.
01:20:31
I'm putting it within a friendly context, that is the teaching in a congregation, a church congregation, where you're, everybody's believing together.
01:20:47
Now, I mean, the Jude 5 passage is not going to create a practice of problem.
01:20:59
But now Acts 10, 48 could. Acts 10, 48 is baptizing either in the name of the
01:21:10
Lord or in the name of Jesus Christ. In the name of Jesus Christ?
01:21:20
I'm just quoting the Bible as part of the reference to change the
01:21:25
Lord, Jesus Christ. Well, yeah,
01:21:31
I'm looking at the critical text and yes,
01:21:39
Jesus Christ is the reading of the Nessie Island 28th edition.
01:21:47
So let me see here. Yeah, Lord, well, yeah, okay.
01:21:57
So the possibilities are Jesus, one manuscript, the
01:22:02
Lord, about 6 or 7, the Lord Jesus, a couple of others, the
01:22:08
Lord Jesus Christ, a few others, and then the text, Jesus Christ is the earliest, all the earliest manuscripts and almost all the translations.
01:22:23
So are you saying that the King James has Lord alone? That's interesting.
01:22:32
That's interesting. Yeah, because that's... Well, that's a different issue.
01:22:45
That's a different issue in that when you say baptize in the name of Jesus Christ, you're talking about Christian baptism.
01:22:51
You're not talking about the very words that were used. We are given the words to be used by Jesus, but in the book of Acts, when you have
01:22:58
Christian baptism, when it's talked about being baptized in the name of Christ, it's an error to think that what that is is a quotation of what was said.
01:23:06
What is being done is that the baptism is specifically Christian baptism that baptizes one in that name.
01:23:14
There is one name for which people suffer, the name which they proclaim, the name that the Sanhedrin says, don't preach in that name, and that's the name of Jesus.
01:23:23
And so that's why when baptism takes place, it's just simply said to be Christian baptism, it's done in the name of Jesus.
01:23:30
But you don't have a quotation. There are certain ways that Greek can indicate, say this, or this is what was said, and that's not what you have in those instances.
01:23:39
So I know the one that's Pentecostals who are Jesus -only baptizers try to say that...
01:23:46
They basically try to say Matthew 28, 19 -20 is not original, which is impossible to do, but they try to say those are quotations.
01:23:54
I don't think they're quotations. I think they're indications that the baptism that was received was a specifically
01:23:59
Christian baptism which included the name of Jesus Christ. But when we're given the formula, it's very clear.
01:24:07
But as far as 1048, the strongest, strongest evidence by a long shot is
01:24:17
Jesu Christu. And interestingly, if I had it up right now, I could tell you what
01:24:23
CBGM said about it, but I don't have it up right now to be able to show that to you. We're pretty much out of time anyways.
01:24:28
Thank you very, very much for your patience. I know that wasn't easy.
01:24:34
That was a seminary lecture. So if you survived that, then you have some idea of what you would get in a seminary classroom.
01:24:47
But as I said, unfortunately, the vast majority of seminaries ain't talking about this yet, so you've got a leg up on almost everybody.