Verses Changed About Christ's Deity (04/01/2001)

Park Meadows Church

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It was about a year ago that we embarked upon a study of the

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Feasts of Israel. Some of you finally remember that time. You thought your pastor was going crazy, and that's impossible to do once one has already arrived at that state, so you didn't have to worry.

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But this Saturday evening will be Passover. If you don't have a

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Jewish calendar, you can't really figure that out. The church has made sure you don't know when it is nowadays, but I do encourage you, if you can go back and remember some of the studies we did,

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I encourage you to take your children and to celebrate Passover, not

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Easter. I'll assure you that at the last table there were no

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Easter bunnies nor Easter eggs. There's a far more serious topic being discussed, and that's really what

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I think would make your families happier, our families happier, and so I strongly suggest that as your pastor.

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Go back over maybe some of the studies we did, and there's plenty of information there if you still have copies of some of the notes and verses to look through, and it's a marvelous study for me personally, in my personal life.

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I gleaned enough out of that, really it kind of boosted me for the whole year to get me to this point this morning, those particular studies last year.

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So keep that in mind, please. Let's continue our study this morning on Bibliology.

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We're actually studying systematic theology through the Bible this year, at least this year, and the first and most appropriate topic to start with,

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I believe, is what the Bible says about the Bible. Because if you don't have a strong foundation in that area, then your faith will not be even used as you go to the

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Word of God. And so it is the place to start, and we've gotten fairly deeply into this topic, and it brought us to that aspect, the topic that has to do with the preservation of the

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Word of God. In other words, we all believe that God inspired the Bible, that every word, every jot, every tittle, every little word is breathed by God himself, but we also all agree that those originals have not been found lately on the face of the earth.

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And so the question that one would ask is if we don't have the originals and we say they are inspired, how does that do us any good today?

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Because unless God has preserved his Word down through each generation to us, then it does us a little good to believe that the originals were inspired.

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So that's what we've been studying for quite some number of Sundays now, the preservation of the scriptures.

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You might, some of you may have asked, you know, why are we spending so much time on this? Why don't we go on and get into what the

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Bible actually teaches? Well, I'll tell you, we spend all of our life and time studying what the Bible actually teaches.

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We're not short in that area in this church and never have been since 1980. So that's not my concern.

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My concern is that as we go into these last days, there is a great mindset and a great temptation to just receive anything and everything that the modern authors are putting out in the bookstores.

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And this topic is not all that modern. Actually, this battle was fought in the late 1800s, and I believe won from a point of view of logical argument, but at the same time lost from the point of view of what actually is happening in the religious world and in the seminaries and Bible colleges, with the possible exception of Pensacola as one of the only bastions today that's left that believes in the

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King James Version because it is based upon the received text, the proper

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Greek manuscripts. I don't know of any other Bible college seminary in the world that takes that stance today.

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So that's a brave stance to take. But there are reasons for that, and I really had hoped that we could finish this material this morning.

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I know many of you are rooting for me that I would. I can't do it justice and finish it this morning, however.

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My great fear is that all of this material will be provided to you in outline form with a lot of the great quotes from men like Burgin and Scrivener and Hills and the different men who fought this battle already.

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But my great fear is you won't really take it home and read it because you're not as interested in it as I am.

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A lot of you just trust me and so all you're waiting for is the conclusion and you'll just do that.

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Well, that's sweet, but it's dangerous. And so because of my fear that you might not read it word for word and get all of these magnificent quotes, then

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I've decided that since we don't have Brother Otis teaching this afternoon, we'll just go right through until dessert time with this.

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Or we could break it up and finish next Sunday instead of this Sunday or even the Sunday after.

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So let's just go with this and see where the Lord directs. I was sitting there praying and I sensed that you need a

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Bible message this morning and I have one. I believe it's this one. And no, it's this one.

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And yet I feel like it is the appropriate conclusion to the whole matter and I just can't see leaving a lot of this one out.

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So we could do like some people study the Bible, throw it up and see which one lands on the pulpit and we preach that one.

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But let's just let's just begin. How about if we begin with Bible and then let's get into some of these nice books and then maybe either sometime this afternoon or next

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Sunday or Sunday after we'll end up with a Bible message. Because you, I'll promise, you cannot come to a conclusion from a point of view of scientific scholarly work in this area.

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Some of us in this room have tried, I know Brother Russ has attempted that, I have, Brother Alfred has kind of emerged himself into a new study of this,

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I know Brother Roger has studied it in Bible college and even taught some of that here in this church on Wednesday nights.

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But the thing, the great thing that God has taught me in my renewed study is that the answer is not in the scientific approach of either side, neither the

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King James only people nor of the West Codhort people. You will not find the answer in the scientific arena, only in the word of God.

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So let me assure you that we will conclude with a Bible study and it's going to take you somewhere you probably hadn't been before, hadn't thought of, maybe, at least

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I certainly had not. Because I'm one who likes to use logic, a logical approach, a scientific approach when possible and I have not found that possible.

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And I've read, I don't know, I think most of the best books written on this subject and I can't find it possible to come to a logical conclusion based on what the scholars say.

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So I've gone back to the word of God and I believe God has shown us the answer. So I don't know if we'll get there today, probably won't, but that'll keep you coming maybe.

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So maybe the Lord will come back and we won't need that answer. That'd be great too. In Psalm chapter 12, verse six, if you'd like to turn there with me, this is the conclusion right here from this verse,

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I believe, but you also have Psalm 119, 152. You have

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Psalm 119, 89. You have very powerful words of Jesus Christ in Matthew 24, 35, where he says, my words shall not pass away.

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You have first Peter 1, 23, where it says the word of God is incorruptible, which means it can't be corrected.

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You only correct things that are fallacious and have problems. You can't make something more perfect.

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It's either perfect or it's not. And then we come to Psalm 12, six and seven.

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It says the words of the Lord are pure words as silver tried in a furnace of earth.

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That furnace of earth pictures the humans that God used to give us the

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Bible that's sitting in your lap, whether it be the printer, the printing press, the company that printed the

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Bible you've got, whether it be the person who died for the belief in this particular text, which is you study manuscript evidence, you'll find that people died for a text of the

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New Testament, especially the Waldenseys. Many of them were killed by the

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Roman Catholics because Roman Catholics believed in Jerome's Latin Vulgate and the Waldenseys had their own ancient

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Latin Bible that was translated from Greek somewhere probably in the third century that matches more nearly the received text by the way.

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Many of them died for that. So this furnace of earth truly was a furnace.

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It was purified flesh, purified dirt. Let's put it that way. And God uses us in all of his plan of salvation.

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When's the last time you saw him right in the sky and said, I am God, Jesus is my son, receive him and you'll be saved.

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No, he could do that though, couldn't he? He's written on walls before, hasn't he? And on rocks.

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But you know what? He usually speaks through you, you are the epistle he likes to speak through as he draws people to his son,

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Jesus Christ, and in working together with the Holy Spirit and the word of God. So he goes on and calls it the furnace of earth purified seven times, seven being the perfect number in the

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Bible, it means it's perfectly pure, but verse seven will end up being our probably conclusion as we get to the end of this sometime in the near future.

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Thou shalt keep them, he says, well, now that's a nice promise. When we consider that it's been almost 2000 years of copying and re copying and re copying of our new

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Testament alone, not to speak of the old Testament, but he promised to keep them. Oh Lord, thou shalt preserve them.

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So there's a re -emphasis or an emphasis on the keeping of it and the preserving.

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And the word them deals with words, not ideas, not just concepts, but words being the vehicles that bring the mind of God to us.

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The very words are important and this is where you have to pay attention because if you don't, you think

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I'm nitpicking with some of this study as we read some of the verses in a few moments where you see one word is changed and you say, well, yeah, but there's a hundred other places you can find that same verse and it teaches the doctrine very clearly, even in the other, all the versions.

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Well, that's true, but why would one want to change one of the words, even one word in the word of God?

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Why would one want to change such a word? It has been debated.

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Westcott and Hort said none of the words were ever changed for religious reasons. How many of you believe that without even studying anything?

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How many of you would believe that that statement is true? No one would ever want to change anything in the Bible for religious or doctrinal reasons.

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Would you believe that? But that's what they said. In fact, their theory is based upon the fact that no one would ever do that.

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And I'll show you that in a few moments, but to me, that's one of the things that makes their theory crumble.

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But the father tells us very clearly that he will preserve these words.

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Didn't tell us how he would do it. He may have told us, but we have to dig in the word to find the answer.

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He didn't just out and out tell us like he did here, but he said he would do it. Not only that, he said he would do it from this generation forever.

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So that's a lot of generations, even between us and the times of Jesus Christ and there are the times of John, the one who, the apostle who was the last one to leave this planet from that time till now, that's a lot of generations.

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But the promise is unto each of them. Now that's enough

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Bible for this morning. Let's get into some of this scientific stuff, okay? No, you can't, you can't do this with just the scientific approach.

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I guarantee you if you tried, you would be so confused when you got through, you would probably throw up your hand and say, forget the whole thing.

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I'm going to try to forget everything I've learned. So it all begins and ends with the scriptures. Let's do this though.

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Let's go through a few actual verses in the Bible and finish up what we started last, the last service where we looked at several verses in the

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Bible that dealt with salvation itself. Let me see if I can help you remember some of the things we saw that were interesting.

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I remember, and I'm not going to remember them all because I didn't jot it down. So if you think of something else, raise your hand and bring that to our attention to remind us last time when we dealt with some of these salvation verses.

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But I remember one thing that I saw again and again was that where there were places where in the gospels, it said, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ now shall be saved or where Jesus himself said, if you believe on me, dah, dah, dah, dah, the new versions tend to agree in removing the on me part.

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So that it ends up just saying, believe dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, or whosoever believes shall be saved rather than saying on the

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Lord Jesus Christ. So it tends to take the word believe and the word faith and separate it from the word

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Lord Jesus Christ where possible as many times as possible. And we saw that again and again last Sunday as we looked at these verses.

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So that leaves a situation where a person could take these verses and use them to prove that all one has to do is believe that there is a

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God, which is exactly what we find on our little trip to California a couple of weeks ago,

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Dr. MacArthur pointed out, and I could tell he was not enjoying this. He's not like some of the independent

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Baptists that just love pointing out to someone's a heretic, you know. He was grieving over the fact that one of our, probably the premier evangelist in the world in our time,

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Billy Graham, has made a public statement on TV in front of the whole world saying that if you're out in the darkest corners of Africa and you don't happen to have the

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Bible and you don't happen to know the gospel, if you just believe you can be saved. Now the problem that I have with that beyond the fact that the

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Bible and the Lord Jesus Christ said I am the way and the truth and the life and that you're not going to get there except by me, aside from that fact,

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I think William Carey's wife and his children who died on the mission field, his wife who literally lost her mind, she actually went crazy on the mission field because of the hardships that that man went through in translating the

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Bible into some hundred different dialects. All was for naught because they didn't need to know about Jesus.

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Can you believe that? You can tell a missionary didn't make that statement. It had to be an evangelist, right?

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It wouldn't be a missionary that would make that statement. The sad thing is in the Bible, an evangelist is nothing more than a missionary.

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So Billy Graham missed his calling apparently. He should have been a seminary professor.

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That's sad truth to learn. It hurt our hearts because I have defended him in the light of some of these independent

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Baptist brothers of ours who have blasted him with, in my opinion, very little evidence through the years.

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And when Brother MacArthur said that, it hurt my heart because I'm thinking maybe they were right. I guess apparently they were.

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But, you know, when you start changing the Bible and removing the Lord Jesus Christ from the belief that we must have, that creates an opening for the one world church, doesn't it?

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You can believe anything you want. We don't want you to be too specific in what you believe because that creates division in countries and nations.

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So that was one of the great things I saw missing or had been taken out of the Bible in the modern versions.

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Another thing that I tended to notice was where it had the word Jesus, it would remove the word Lord and where it had the word

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Lord, it removed the word Jesus so that you never saw or I won't say never, but you seldom saw the word

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Lord Jesus Christ in the same verse like we see in the received text again and again and again, again, again, everywhere we see that.

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And so I saw that. Did anyone see anything else that I've neglected to think about there? I'm sure there were other couple of other things dealing with salvation that you caught.

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Russell, you're right.

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So it tended to weaken the, uh, the traditional, uh, view of the sovereignty of God and the teaching of election in the

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Bible. It would tend to weaken that. And sadly enough, a lot of our Baptist brethren today don't know are

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Armenians. They no longer believe that you see that, you know, the difference between a Calvinist and Armenian, don't you?

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A Calvinist believes both and an Armenian only believes in free will. That's the difference.

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Now you wouldn't know that if you didn't study, but it's true. Calvinist believes both. He believes

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God is sovereign, but he believes man has a will and the Armenian only believes man has a will and he believes logically that therefore

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God could not be sovereign because you can't have the two together. True enough. You can't in this dimension.

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Can you brother bill? But God lives in a different dimension. So anyway, well, let's take a look.

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Last time we talked about salvation verses that had been changed. And when I say change,

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I mean from the point of view of the received text where the modern versions from different lines of Greek manuscripts have changed what the received text has said.

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Let's look at a few that deal with the deity of Jesus Christ just for a few moments. We won't take as long as we did last time,

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I don't think. Let's see. Turn with me.

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Let me find my first one because I'm going to skip a bunch of them if I don't. Matthew chapter one, verse 25.

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Let's start there. Matthew one and verse 25.

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And Joe, could you read that one from that Bible?

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What you have all right,

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Russell, would you read that from yours? King James. All right.

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I read yours again, Joe. What word is missing?

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Do you see how subtle this can be? You hear it twice and you don't catch it. I read.

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Read yours. But knew her not until she had born a son.

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Stop right there. Now read yours, Russell. Firstborn.

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Now, what word's missing? Firstborn. Firstborn. Firstborn son. So the modern versions would at least leave the possibility open that he is just a son.

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One of many. A Buddha could be a son. Muhammad certainly could have been a son that came along a little later.

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In fact, that's what Muhammad taught, isn't it, brother Russ? Jesus was just another prophet.

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All right. Another son of God. Now let's see if we can find a little pattern here.

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Look at Luke chapter two, verse 33 to 33.

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Luke chapter two, verse 33. These are, you have to listen.

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You may have to listen more than once to catch these. Russell, read Luke two, 33. Read it one more time.

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Joseph and his mother marveled. Okay. Stop right there. Joseph and his mother marveled.

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Okay. Go ahead and read yours. And his father and his mother marveled.

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All right. You want to read yours, Joe? Now, he has a new

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American standard version and he has a revised standard version, by the way, and Russell back there has a

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King James version. So what was changed there? It's kind of subtle, but did anyone catch it? Joseph is called

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Jesus's father, whereas the received text does not call him his father because he ain't his father.

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Is that important? With regard to the deity of Christ? What about Luke two, 43?

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Did we read them both already or did you just read one? We'll read the next verse. No, I'm sorry. It's 43.

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Luke two, 43. Joseph and his mother marveled.

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All right. Joe, read yours. And his parents marveled.

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His parents were unaware of it. Now, read yours again. Now, do you see how it's very subtle, but the

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King James does not say Joseph was a parent. He just says Joseph and his mother, but the new

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American standard and the revised version both say his parents. Read yours,

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John. I've forgotten the phrase. And when the feast was ended, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind.

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His parents did not know it. His parents. So, so Joseph becomes a parent here or a father.

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Very subtle, but you have to remember if you go all the way back in our study to, oh, two,

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I don't remember the exact date. Listen to the tape. Two fifty, something like that.

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When origin was the first Bible corrector and, uh, he put together a book called the hex blow, which had several columns, four columns to be exact of different versions of the

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Greek text, which all differed from one another. Origin was an Aryan. An Aryan is a person who does not believe

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Jesus is God. So we believe that many of the, the line of manuscripts that come to us today that the modern versions have come from can be traced, cannot be traced back, but the presumption can easily be made that they come from origins.

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One of his columns, he being an Aryan would remove, he would like for Joseph to be a parent.

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He would like for Joseph to be Jesus's father. Yes. Put a name at 41.

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Which one? Uh, you'll have to read it, uh, Russell. He's a parent from Jerusalem every year, the feast and the

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Passover. Why didn't they pick up on that one, on 41, when they, when they, that, when they burned the democrats on that one there, it was just, you can guess.

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Read it, Russell. Let's see. Okay. Now read, that was 41.

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Read 43. Now, if you, if you had two verses in a row where they're called parents and everywhere in the new

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Testament, the word parents is used and you never have a place where it makes a distinguishing point that Joseph was not considered as a parent.

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What would your conclusion be? That's right. But if you have places where it distinguishes that you at least see how that ties in with the deity of Christ.

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So many times these things, as I've said many times, they're subtle. There was one last

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Sunday where we had three verses within say eight verses of each other that seemed to say pretty close to the same thing.

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And the difference in the versions was the new versions just removed the first two and they left the last one.

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So you might say, well, it's still in the Bible, but the point is if God intended for it to be there three times, then what is

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God intending? Well, what do we call that in teaching though?

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Repetition. So if we remove the repetition as often as we can, what do we do? We make it more difficult for the church to have a mindset on a particular topic.

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And this is similar to that in the sense that you're just removing some of the evidence. You remove some of the evidence.

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You don't remove it all. If you removed it all, would you call it a Bible? So that's a good point though, a good point, but it just brings out the subtlety of it in my mind.

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So the point is not that the received text is trying to not say that they're parents in the sense that Joseph raised

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Jesus. The point is if that's all you say, then you could deduce that he was the father of Jesus.

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Okay, let's go to 1 John 1 .18. In any verse that you see that's been changed, you can find others where that doctrine is still in the

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Bible. And I believe Bill was talking with me before class this morning and he pointed out that the truth is you could take any of these versions and the

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Holy Spirit could, if you're a child of God, he can lead you to the doctrinal truths.

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First John 5 .18, I mean 1 .18, okay,

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I'm sorry, it's not 1 John either, it's John 1 .18. Our fear is not that a born again believer couldn't find the truth.

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Our fear is that some false teacher, perhaps the

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Antichrist himself, will make use of the verses that have been changed and quote them as the truth and teach their doctrines from it.

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And that's the biggest fear I have. The biggest fear I have is that we're being set up for the one world church and for the easy believism gospel that's out there today where you say you believe and you leave off Jesus Christ or believe and you leave off on me, it waters it down.

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It's not that you can't find another verse somewhere where it says believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, you'll find it somewhere in there.

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I don't know who it was, maybe in Russ or whatever, you're telling me there's no way a man could even try and remove all the doctrines from the

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Bible and it still look like a Bible. So Satan doesn't do that, he just subtly does it a little bit here and there.

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But it's more than a little bit if you start tracing these things. Now where were we first,

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I'm sorry, John, I don't know why I want to insist on it being first John. John 118, Russell, read yours.

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You can stop there, all right. Joe read yours. All right, read yours,

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John. Okay, so what word's missing from yours, begotten, and it is in yours,

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Joe, okay. So some of the modern remove begotten, some leave it in that particular verse.

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How do they know whether to remove it or leave it? That's the interesting question.

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Now, and also in the revised version, verse 14 of that same chapter in John's would also remove the word begotten.

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Okay, well that's interesting. Okay, now did 14 leave out begotten?

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Okay, and probably the received text says only begotten son.

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All right, well read that. Well, it takes the son out, it would emphasize the deity though, wouldn't it, if you,

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I guess. The only begotten God instead of the only begotten son.

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Well, that's another interesting change.

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You start taking the word begotten out and it then begins to match with Matthew 125 where it takes the word firstborn out.

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What about John, let's see,

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John read yours in John 3 .16, we all know how that one reads.

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Well, God so loved the world that he gave his only son. Now, doesn't ours say only begotten son?

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It always has since it's in the mind of the whole church, but it's removed from the revised standard version.

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I believe that John 3 .18 is going to do the same thing, and last week we studied

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John 3 .36 while we're there in John that taught a works salvation, if you remember that.

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Let me go back in here and look at just a couple in 1 John that are kind of interesting when it comes to the deity of Christ.

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Before we get there, though, let's look at 1 Timothy 3 .16, Russell, okay, stop right there.

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God was manifest in the flesh, Joe read yours, okay, so that version says he instead of God and I'm sure yours does too, right?

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First Timothy 3 .16, he who was manifest in the flesh.

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So the point is, if you go back to the different manuscripts, the

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Vaticanus and the Sinaticus that were the favorites of Westcott and Hort, upon which all of our modern versions are based upon their theory, those two have the word who rather than the word

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God. So rather than saying God was manifest in the flesh, it says who was manifest in the flesh, which to a believer says the same thing, you know, you say, well, that's obviously

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Jesus. I mean, that's obviously means God was manifest in the flesh, but to someone who wanted to debate the deity of Christ with you, such as a

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Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon, you'd be in trouble if that word were changed.

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Now look at 1 John 4 .3, and Russell, if you would read that one.

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Now stop there and Joe read yours, okay, that one says every spirit that doesn't confess

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Jesus is not of God and the received text says, everyone that does not confess that Jesus is come in the flesh.

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So there's quite a bit of information left out of that one. In 1 John 4 .9, the revised standard version, which is

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John's version up here, leaves the word begotten out again. And then let's look at this one, 1

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John 5, 7, and 8 are kind of interesting. There's quite a bit of literature on this particular verse debating whether or not these verses should even be in the

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Bible or not. So Russell, read 1 John 5, 7 through 8, okay, all right,

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Joe read yours, okay, now that last phrase you read, what verse is that in yours?

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And Russell, in yours, where it said there are three that agree, did you say in earth? Yeah, which verse is that?

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No, the one about the earth. Okay, now is there one in yours,

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Joe, that talks about three that bear record in heaven? Okay, so the part that says there are three that bear record in heaven, the

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Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one, is missing. Now you won't find a clearer statement of the

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Trinity anywhere in the Bible than that verse, and it's missing. Now would you do me a favor and see if there's a footnote that tells you why it's missing?

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I know there'll be one in one of the two. I look for yours, too, John, to see if there's a footnote.

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They may not even mention it, but they probably will. What does it say? It says a few late manuscripts.

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Okay, it says a few late manuscripts, what they mean by that is that those manuscripts were not old, they were not ancient, they were maybe in the 1400s, 1500s, rather than say 200, or 300, or 400, okay?

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So go ahead and finish that little reason. Okay, so it's reasoning for removing it from the text is because it says a few late manuscripts have it.

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So there are some Greek manuscripts that have it, but they say they're late, and the word late is a phrase that means they're not as old as some of the more ancient ones, in their opinion.

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Bill? Is yours a

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Scofield, Ryrie, same, very similar?

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Right, okay, very good, I'm glad you brought that up.

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And John, yours doesn't have a, he just leaves it out. All right. Now, so Ryrie says not in any, okay, all right, well, it's fairly easy to disprove

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Ryrie. This note was a little more clever because it just doesn't mention that it's not in any ancient ones, it just says it's in later ones.

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Well, that's true, it is in later ones. But that's a very interesting study to ask the question, why is this passage of scripture on, and I almost hate to use the word trinity because Russ and I have been studying this doctrine of the trinity for a long time, and we're not through with our study.

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I'd say we're not even half through with it, at least I'm not. He's more than half through, but I'm trying to catch up, but there are some concepts in what we call the doctrine of the trinity that come down to us from the days of Constantine, and some of that, sometimes the language that are in some of the confessionals, in my opinion, is not as biblical as it should be, and I'm just going to leave that there right now.

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But I'm going to go ahead and use the term, because you all know what I mean when I say the doctrine of the trinity. We're talking about exactly what this part of this verse that is missing says.

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It says that there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one.

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That's a pretty safe way to biblically describe what the trinity should be, but that's missing from most of the modern versions.

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This version says they left it out because only late manuscripts have it, and remember their theory is the older is always the best.

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This theory is from Schofield and Ryrie, is that no ancient manuscripts have it.

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That's false, by the way. It's been proven since they did their studies. Allen and others have found ancient manuscripts that are far more ancient than these, and there are some manuscripts that are ancient that do have it.

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So we'll get to that as we get a little further in our study. But there are some ancient that don't have it.

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So the question is, how do you know if it's supposed to be there or not, and we plan to answer that when we get to our conclusion.

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In Revelation 1 .11, for sake of time, we won't read any more of these, but I want to give it to you because it leaves out the fact where it says, where Jesus himself said,

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I am alpha and omega. It leaves out the words alpha and omega. Now we're almost out of time already, but I feel like that far too often we just study and we say things like, well, there have been a lot of changes.

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There have been over 5 ,000 changes here, over 9 ,000 changes there. The Revised Standard Version, 36 ,000 changes in the

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New Testament alone, perhaps. And you say, well, great. Okay, there's a lot of changes. But when you actually look in your

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Bible and you see the words that have been removed, then you start to think, you know, these words are important.

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Doesn't matter if there are five other verses that say the same thing. Understanding the fact that it's been removed caused me to ask the question, why would it be removed and who would remove it?

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And so I wanted you to see those things. Let me take about five minutes and get into this thought with you just a little bit and then we'll adjourn.

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I think you're really past that though. So let's stand and pray and we'll start next Sunday. Most of you are already past it.

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You've had enough for today. Okay. Next Sunday, let me just tell you where we're headed.

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The Westcott -Hort theory of textual criticism rises and falls with three suppositions.

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Number one, the existing text can be categorized into families. Number two, the

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Byzantine, which is our received text, is late, which is like, which footnote said that?

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Years. Late, which means it doesn't come from anything that's ancient. And it is corrupt.

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And number three, the oldest Greek manuscripts are the best. Now the truth is, if you could dismantle those three arguments, then you've dismantled

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Westcott -Hort theory and you got to start over. So without going into it today, let me just say this, it's been dismantled.

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It's been dismantled since 1885 by a man named Burgin. And by many others since that time, many other scholars.

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It's just that you don't get to read those because they're not popular. So they're not in the bookstores. You get to read the other side of the argument.

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You should read the other side. But when you read them both, it's going to take you to the same conclusion

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I think that I've come to, which we'll get to eventually. You got to go back to the Bible. You just have to go back to the

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Bible to find out what the answer is. So we'll be addressing those three points and attacking them next

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Sunday and showing how not one of them holds up. And this view over here where Ryrie said no ancient manuscripts have 1

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John 5 -7, absolutely wrong. It's a lie. In defense of Ryrie, in his day when he wrote that, he may not have known because things of many ancient papyrus findings of scripture have been found since he wrote the

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Ryrie Study Bible. So I'm not saying he lied on purpose, but he made a statement based on a theory that he held.

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It was not a fact. It was a theory. And he took a chance when he made that statement and he missed. And we pray the

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Lord will keep us safe from such mistakes, but we all make mistakes, don't we? Let's pray.

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Father, thank you so much for these great men such as Burgin who gave their life to defending the text of the

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New Testament. We pray that you would help us to glean what we can from all the different things that have been said, but mostly from what you promised when you said you would preserve it to each generation.

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Help us to have that confidence and we know that it's a fact because you said it. And Lord, as we come into a conclusion of this matter in days to come, may you use us perhaps to guide others towards thinking with a more open mind about some things that might help people to realize that the version of the

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Bible they use can in fact make a difference in the mindset of whole churches and whole generations of believers as things are watered down.

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So, Father, we thank you that you've preserved the word of God for us. We thank you that we can trust it and read it in our faith.

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We will learn to use our faith more and more glory unto glory as we studied in Sunday school this morning.

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Lord, we ask you to go with us into the fellowship time. Bless our meal that we're going to have together. Bless our afternoon fellowship.