Has God Preserved His Word?

I understand why we're spread out like this so you don't, you know, the heat zone around you isn't quite as intense as last evening. I could have told you that we wouldn't have to be putting any chairs out this evening.

It's just human nature, I think. People want to see... Why does anybody watch hockey? Because at any moment a fight may break out. So I mean that's sort of the whole thing there is. And 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. Obviously, you know, I remember the first time I passed out tracks at Temple Square sometime in 1984, I believe. Had no idea what in the world we were doing.

But I've often told the story about, it was May. We didn't know about General Conference. So we came up in May. It was just a regular day. So people going in out of the members entrance for their endowments and stuff like that.

And it was a very warm day. You can't blame global warming for this one. This was 1984. So I'm not sure if there's still a Howard Johnson's over there. 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. And as we're crossing right up on North Temple, North Temple and West Temple, crossing the street, and I tried to hand a track to this 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. 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 I was right because I'm not an apostate Mormon.

So, but yeah, we had some fascinating experiences there. And then discovered what General Conference was and started showing up for conference. And that for 18 years until the 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. I guess they've moved on to other pastors. But the person who didn't move on to the pastors was Jason. He's stuck here in this very, very interesting area of differing theologies, shall we say.

And you got a little bit of everything here. And it's, so yeah, we, Alpha and Omega has felt that it's good to keep a good gospel witness up here, so if we can help, then we'll help. That's all we've really attempted to do.

If you haven't seen the new video that Jason put together on Roman Catholicism, I was, he kept sending it to me. Really would like you to, could you, could you, could you, really? I was like, dude, I'm busy, you know, I'm sorry, you know, I mean.

You know, but I really want you to look at it. So finally, it just wore me down, and I, and I, I converted it to audio, so I could listen to it while driving around and riding and stuff like that. And at high speed, even at that.

And so I, I got through it and was, was really, really impressed. I, I had a feeling that someone maybe had heard a few of my debates. In putting that material together. But there was stuff in there that I've not used.

So there was, there was original, there was original stuff in there. It was very, very good. And so I, I highly recommend that. Of course, we already had a few Roman Catholic apologists, you know, all right, just cherry picking quotes and blah, blah, blah, blah.

The same stuff you always, you always get. But some, that's a tremendous amount of work. I don't know how, I don't know how you do it, but that's, that's a lot of work that goes into those things. So anyway, if you, how many of you were here last evening?

Okay. All right. So everybody else is just ignoring me. I wanted to start off with a, something that happened last evening, expand upon a little bit, use it as a sort of an introduction this evening. Normally, as I would address this subject, I would have a projector and I'd have slides and stuff like that.

We, we, we will know that you all have entered into the 21st century when they, a projector appears up there on the up there on the roof someplace. That's probably not going to happen. Or at least on a little cart, you know, hides in the, hides in the, in the office.

That would be pretty cool. Anyway so hopefully you have your Bible because we're probably going to be looking at a few texts and, and since I'm not going to be able to, you know, project something, then, then it doesn't work real well if you're just listening to me.

You might want to, you know, be visually looking at something. But last evening, one of the three points that I addressed in my presentation. And it, it was interesting to me that of the three points that, that I'll have presented, that the second one he spent three minutes on and never really referred to it again.

It was sort of behind some of the other stuff that he said. But the, the third point that I presented was on what's called the Book of Abraham. And if you are familiar with Mormonism and Mormon history, you know that probably when it comes to LDS scriptures there is, there is nothing that has been more damaging to the claims of Joseph Smith as an alleged prophet than the Book of Abraham.

The Book of Mormon, golden plates, what are you supposed to do about that? You can't, you can't you know, they've been taken back to heaven very conveniently, and therefore you cannot check these things out.

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. You can't, and so when it comes to the Book of Mormon, now you have these fascinating theories that keep shrinking the 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. 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.

But we can't check that stuff out against the original, but you can with the Book of Abraham. And even if they dispute the papyri themselves, you've got to facsimiles in their own scripture. And it has been devastatingly, it has been devastating to the claims of Joseph Smith, and 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 the, what we call the Old Testament and New Testament scriptures, that even comes close to having the kind of verifiable material in it that the 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 Christian scriptures. There's a big conflict amongst apologists today. I'm gonna be addressing it next week on my program again.

Due to Pastor Andy Stanley utilizing his rather large pulpit. 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, but he has a large audience.

And he has been convinced by certain apologists that as long as the resurrection is true, then Christianity is true, even if parts of the Bible are not. Now, he can't logically tell you why the resurrection's relevant without scripture to explain that, but that's the direction that he's going.

And 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 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.

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 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 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.

And so, from his perspective, what you do is the best apologetic is the resurrection. If the resurrection's 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.

And when you think about that, how could you historically attack or disprove the concept of virgin birth? It's actually embarrassment at the supernatural. Now, think about that for just a moment. 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, 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.

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. 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 Old Testament, we're dealing with a book that is truly ancient in its origins. 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.

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. How much you can actually determine as far as details of events and antiquity is extremely small.

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. There's 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 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. It's all theoretical. When we're talking about the book of Abraham, we're not talking about theories.

We are talking about verifiable, documentable. I mean, 1835 sounds like a long time ago. But in world history sense, that is not a long time ago at all. 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. 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.

And I don't know if you understood Alma's response to that, because it sort of went over, I think, 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.

Well, maybe, maybe not. That would actually be an argument against the book of Abraham, not an argument for it. If Joseph Smith had already started working on something like this, and then the papyri come along, he says, look, the writings of Abraham upon papyrus.

I'm going to translate them. That doesn't help anything. What it does is if you are a believer, as Alma is, you're trying to find some way of holding on in the midst of all of this counter-evidence. And the way to do it here, for Alma in that situation, is to say it's all revelational, and so since it's revelation, it really cannot be tested.

Historically or textually, he basically made that argument at the beginning of his comments, is that, well, we're looking at all, looking at whether the Book of Mormon actually happened historically isn't its ultimate proof.

It's the fact, when I read the Book of Mormon, I'm a better husband. Well, I've met lots and lots of people who read the 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. That doesn't make it a divine revelation. And so what that did highlight, I think, is the fact that we as Christians, we have such a tremendous heritage in what has been given to us in scripture.

And yet, when you just turn on the television, listen to the radio a little bit, 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 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. 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 Bible codes. And if you added up the Hebrew numbers, the numbers in Hebrew here, and it spelled out Henry Kissinger's name, or something like that.

All that kind of stuff. And every group has that kind of thing. The Muslims have Quran code stuff. Everybody comes up with this kind of stuff. 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, 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. 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.

I try, but I'm just a strange looking guy from Phoenix, so I can only do so much. 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.

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. And the more you know about that history, the less likely you are to become a victim of the next 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. 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.

And when you recognize those folks are out there, then you need to have a firm foundation in yourself. 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.

I think that in light of the fact that we're all carrying one of these things around, Jason's screen is broken, I feel really sadly about that. But so he can only read a certain portion of what's on there.

But we all have these things. We are all connected now. And that means truth as well as falsehood can travel very, very quickly to any one of us. 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. 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.

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.

And I don't see most of our seminaries inculcating a passionate understanding of these things amongst their students. 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 memorization of scripture, aside from meaningful, when you think of the things we spend time on, reading just some old and New Testament background material, putting scripture in its context, knowing a little something about what was going on in the Roman Empire in the days that the 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.

There's all sorts of information like that. But you should also be aware of the history of whatever translation of the Bible is your favorite. Now these days, again, thanks to the computer, 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.

They will use multiple translations because it's easy to do. It's just a swipe and the other translation is their type of situation. Which is a little difficult if you're trying to memorize 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 I memorize something when I have instant access to it anywhere?

One good North Korean EMP and we're all going to be biblically illiterate again. Where did I put that Bible? I have no idea where it went. But those disciplines, 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 Mormon church, as far as it is translated correctly, should probably have a good solid foundational understanding of what's going on there.

So let me give you an example that you might find interesting. Well, first, let me do a quick poll here. 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, and it's the ESV.

So do we have any ESV folks, okay? Well, right, right, but as far as maybe the one that you use most of the time. Okay, ESV. NIV? NKJV, New King James Version? King James? Okay, wow. We've now discovered the old folks in the group.

NASV? NASV? Okay, all right, all right. So we have a mixture of the primary conservative translations. So if you have your Bible, why don't you look at Jude, the Book of Jude. I was gonna say chapter, but there really isn't one.

Book of Jude, on your phone, it would be 1 -5. Otherwise, it's just verse five of the only chapter in Jude. And what you'll find here is a phrase in the middle of the verse. It says, that the Lord once delivered a people out of Egypt.

Right in the middle of the verse, right? Now, if you have the ESV, and I think the newest edition of the NIV, and I would not be surprised if the new, it hasn't come out yet, but there is gonna be a new revision of the NASV that was supposed to be out last year and it's been delayed.

I have a feeling it will do this as well. You have a different word there. Yours says that Jesus delivered a people out of Egypt. Now, the ESV originally had the Lord. NIV originally had the Lord. NASV still has the Lord, but I think eventually we'll say Jesus.

Now, we don't like when things change. We want everything to be the same. The problem is, even you venerable King James folks, if you know the history of your text, know that you had such humorous incidents as the adulterer's Bible, where 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, and so it was printed, thou shalt 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. And you're probably aware that you are reading what is known as the 1769 Blaney Revision. You're not, almost nobody is reading a 1611, except Stephen Anderson, I think, but the 1611 is very, very difficult to read.

You're reading an updated version, and then there's the Oxford edition, the Cambridge edition, and there are differences between the two. And so every translation has a history. The New King James has a history.

The NIV has a really now complicated history, an unnecessarily complicated history, but especially modern translations, where the publishers are still in existence, such as Lockman Foundation with the NESB, Crossway with ESB, Zonderman with NIV.

As long as those organizations still exist, then there is the possibility of further work on the translation. And what that then leads you to is, well, what text are they translating? The King James, of course, is based upon a, I really don't think the dog's bothering me.

I'm not sure if it's bothering anybody else, but it must be bothering Jason, so. The King James, of course, is based upon what's called the Texas Receptus, but even that, to make a long story short, has a history to it as well.

And there was no one single printed edition of what's called the Texas Receptus. The one that people carry around today was not invented until the late 1800s. And that was based upon something like someone going back and looking at the printed editions that the King James translators used, looking at what they chose in the text, and making a Greek text based upon the King James translation.

Most people are not aware of that. So there's always a history to everything. But what's interesting is it's one thing to look back upon what happened 150, 200 years ago in the history of the Texas Receptus of the King James.

We are living in the history of the continuing study of the manuscripts of the New Testament. And what you're seeing when you look at Jude 5 is a revolution. It's a revolution. Now, when I say a revolution, this particular revolution has resulted in about 30 changes, Jude 5's one of them, the rest are not nearly as monumental or important, in what's called the general epistles, 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, very, very minor things. But people want to understand, 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.

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 ESV, that does not mean that the Bible is being changed. The problem is most 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. And unfortunately, just not too many people are giving those answers.

Why has the ESV changed at Jude 5? It's because of the text it's translating. And the text is translated, it's changed. Well, okay, what's it translate? Well, it's translating what's called the Nessie Olin text.

All right, well, how did that change? Well, between the 27th and 28th edition, if you have one of those texts, you know, and they're available, 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. It's not that we just discovered a manuscript buried someplace from the second century that had Jesus there, oh, so we're gonna 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. And if you look at Jude 5, right down there at the bottom of the page, you know, Lord, some manuscripts, Jesus, it gives you what the manuscripts are, so on and so forth.

This isn't, nothing new has been discovered that has somehow changed everything. 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 haven't been stolen from Egypt during the period of colonial control of Egypt by Britain.

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. But that's not what's necessarily going on here at all.

The Nessie Olin 27th edition said 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 ESV is simply following that.

What happened? Well, this is where people start getting a little, especially if you're older folks. Younger folks are like, yeah, so what? But older folks, especially traditional stodgy people like Jason, get really, really uncomfortable with the next thing I'm going to say.

It's because of computers. Computers, I don't want computers having anything to do with the Bible. Well, hold on, just hold your anti-technology stuff. And 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. 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 New Testament.

And probably 25 ,000 when you include 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.

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?

Because see, we need to understand something. The New Testament was transmitted to us over history. We don't, if you've seen the 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 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 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. The problem is, even if we had that, how do you know what the guy's been doing for 700 years in there?

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. If you've just got the one controlled text and whoever's controlling it, they are your ultimate authority, not the text anymore.

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. It's impossible for us to go, okay, here's this manuscript, ah, and we're gonna be able to tell that this was the manuscript it was copied from.

The Romans were very, very active in seeking to destroy the Christian scriptures. We found a papyri, it was published, I think, just before my debate with Bart Ehrman, that listed, it was just an official government document from the early fourth century, so around 315, somewhere around there, that gave a listing of, if you know your church history, starting about 250, 260, persecution of Christians becomes empire-wide.

The emperor wants to stamp out Christianity once and for all. And so for 50 to 60 years, it's the worst persecution that the church faced. 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. And aside from everything else, the thing that obviously catches my attention was the fact that in that listing, there were, I recall, 37 papyrus documents taken from one church.

That document also indicates that this was one of about 300 churches in which this had happened just in the preceding years. Do the math. That's a lot of manuscripts. Now, do we know they're all biblical manuscripts?

No, but in the church, the vast majority of them would have been. So there is a lot of destruction. 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.

I mean, I look at some of my books that were published back in the 90s, and they're all, you have yellow pages. I mean, books I wrote, because of the acid in the paper. 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. 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 gonna look like in 1 ,800 years?

Probably not gonna look as good as this papyrus. So all the ravages of time, you've got the 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.

And so the relationships between those manuscripts to our minds is rather opaque. We really can't see. But what we've done is we have collated a large portion of these manuscripts now. In other words, you take what every manuscript reads at every point of data in the New Testament, every word is a point of data, and you put it in the computer, because the computer can remember.

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 of your New Testament scholars know nothing about it. I started my PhD work.

My doctoral advisor did his PhD under Bruce Metzger at Princeton, okay? Not a slouch. He had never heard of it. I only heard of it because I started working on the manuscript that I was gonna be doing, and happened to listen to a reformed podcast where they had this guy on as a guest.

I started putting it all together. The revolution that has taken place, in fact, I was just teaching at a major, very good seminary, and I asked every leading scholar in the school if they'd ever heard of this.

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 ESV, and will impact, especially now, the next two books I'm gonna be doing are Mark and John.

Then you're gonna start hearing about it. Once Mark and John get impacted by it, then you're gonna start hearing about it. But what I'm referring to is something called CBGM. CBGM, coherence-based genealogical method.

Coherence-based genealogical method. 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. Ich habe Deutsche gern, es ist ein schönes Sprache.

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 September. And gotta give me kudos, I included at least two, maybe three citations of Martin Luther in German in my sermon.

I had to, because he's buried right there. You have to, there's one, two, three, there's four steps. There is about 14 up to Luther's pulpit. And right there is Luther's crypt. That's where he's buried, so I had to include that.

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. And takes you three seconds to pronounce.

And that's just how Germans do things. And it was the Germans who came up with coherence-based genealogical method because the primary New Testament repository of manuscripts and the readings of manuscripts and stuff is in Münster, Germany.

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. 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. You can see them on Google Earth, do you see that? You can actually see, you can go into Google Earth and you can zoom in on that cathedral. Everyone's looking at me, what are you talking about?

Look up the Münster Anabaptist Revolution, 1534 to 1536. And it's one of the most amazing stories in history. And it continues to have its reverberations to this day. But anyway, CBGM, coherence-based genealogical method.

In a matter of moments, how can I describe this to you in a way that'd 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 does not, we don't do anything in life that would give us the categories to be thinking along these lines.

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. But let's use Jude 5 as an illustration to just sort of explain why what happened happened.

Because what happened is they've applied CBGM to the general epistles and to Acts. When they did that to Jude, CBGM indicated that the stronger reading amongst the manuscripts, you had manuscripts that said Lord.

It's actually a very complicated text with variant if you look at it very carefully, it's very complicated. 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.

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. But this manuscript agrees with this manuscript only 87 of the time.

So who's more closely related to the other? Well, the one that's 97 rather than the one that's 87%. And so you run these manuscripts together through the computer and you are able to look at the manuscripts that say 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 Nessie-Allen text, you just couldn't do it. When you look at all the manuscripts that say Jesus, their closest relative, according to the computer analysis of the readings, their closest relative also says Jesus.

When you look at the manuscripts that say Lord, far more often their closest relative says Jesus. So in other words, there is no coherence. 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 Jude 5, what would be the normal word you would use in talking about delivering a people from Egypt?