Lesson 6: The Bible’s Beginnings, Part 2

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Lesson 11: Defining and Defending the Canon, Part 3

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All right, good morning, everyone. Welcome to Adult Sunday School class. Today we are finishing a lesson that we started last week on the

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Bible's beginning. It's called The Bible's Beginning. It's number six in your workbook. If you don't have a workbook and you would like one, somebody here has a stack of them, don't we?

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Marsha has them, so, Marsha? Paul would like one there. All right, all right, let's begin with a word of prayer.

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Father, we wanna commit this time to you with the understanding and acknowledgement that if it is not for the power of your spirit working in us that we are unable to understand spiritual things and we cannot expect your blessing upon anything that is taught or learned here today unless you are here working in and through us to help us to understand these things and to teach us through and about your word.

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We pray that you would be glorified through this time. Help me to say only those things that are true and to be mindful of all that is thought here.

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We pray that you would be glorified through all of our thinking, our fellowship, the meditation of our heart. Help us to focus and be intent upon what it is that we're learning here today, that you would give us an appreciation for your word.

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That is our desire and that is our end goal here this morning so that in appreciating your word and loving it that we may give honor and glory to you, our great

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God and Savior. We thank you for these things and ask your blessing upon this time in Christ's name.

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Amen. Amen. All right, last week we kind of did a historical survey of the forms that writings have taken over the years.

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We talked about the various ways in which things were written, beginning with hieroglyphics and then developing into an alphabet type of a script.

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And then we talked about the various writing materials that have been used throughout human history, stone tablets being the first, then clay and then wood and wax and metal, the strata which was pottery shards and then papyrus and leather parchment.

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And you remember, of course, that the history of writing and the development of writing and materials really took a leap forward with papyrus and with parchment because they had benefits that wood tablets and clay and stone could never even approximate.

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And so those were huge technological advancements in human history in terms of writing and the ability to preserve written material on some sort of a surface.

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So all we did was look at that last week and we finished up by just, we compared and contrasted the benefits and the drawbacks of each of those things and got right up basically to the time of the writing of most of the

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New Testament books written on papyrus and then later on parchment. And we saw references in scripture to both papyrus and parchment as writing materials.

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And I made a statement toward the end of the class last week that I need to clarify or at least correct.

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And that is I said that when we type something out on a screen and we send a text or an email or something that it's there but it's not there.

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It exists but it doesn't exist. I understand that that's technically incorrect. It does exist but it's in a form of writing that we cannot access without some sort of a device and it is in a place that we can't access without some sort of a device.

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My only point there was not to say that these writings do not actually exist. They do exist. In a language we cannot read without some sort of assistance, a screen or a computer or a processor.

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But they do exist. They exist on hard drives and the cloud is hard drives and they exist in physical space and they're written in a language and through a medium that we cannot access.

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That was my main point. It's not like you can just crack open your phone and take it apart and look inside there with a microscope or a magnifying glass and read the emails.

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That's not how that works. It's a completely different mode and method of communicating, of writing things down and preserving information that we are exposed to today than what we had in years past.

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Have you ever thought to stop to consider, on that before we jump into the second half of this lesson, have you ever paused to consider how many mediums of recording information we have gone through just in the digital age, just in the computer age?

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Since let's say 1970, how many different forms, storage, what would you call it?

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Storage mediums? What's that, Toms? Storage media.

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Storage media. Some of you are old enough to remember punch cards. When punch cards was the way that you would insert that into a computer, you would use those to program and to get out certain.

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Yeah, some of you are old enough to remember that. I'm not. But I am old enough to remember the floppy disk. The five and a quarter inch or five and a half, it was five and a half inch.

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And they were called floppy disks because they were actually floppy. And then the next step was the three and a half or three and a quarter inch.

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We called them floppy disks, but they weren't floppy. But what was inside was floppy. Do you remember those? And those stored 1 .44

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megabytes of information or something like that, or maybe it was 3 .5. It was, I mean, you can't even hardly send a text message.

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One photo on your phone now takes up more space than you could store. You couldn't even store one photo from your phone on one of those floppy disks today.

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And then we've gone from that. There's, of course, digital DVDs and CDs. Those store information now.

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Hard drives, now we have solid state storage mediums for that, flash drives, which is a form of solid state storage.

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So just in this brief sliver of human history that consists of 30, 40 years, 40, 50 years, man.

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Just in that brief history of 50 years. Bryce, have you ever seen a floppy disk?

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Taryn or Aiden, no? So they've never been exposed to that. What'd you say,

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Peter? They're really missing out. They're really, yeah, really missing out, right. Because there's nothing like having your vacation on a stack of floppies this big.

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So you can show everybody, as you put it in and wait for it to load and grind and you listen to it.

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And as I say that, listening to it, people are nodding, it's like, I can remember that, ee, ee, ee, ee, of loading that.

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So things have changed radically, right? I mean, it took thousands of years to go from stone to wood tablets. And we have gone through probably 30 different storage media.

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And now they're talking about storing things in crystal and storing things in actual genetic material as the ability to store massive volumes of information gets shrunk down into even smaller and smaller mediums nowadays, stuff that is just beyond our ability to comprehend.

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All right, we're talking about the form now of ancient books. This is the beginnings of the

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Bible. We're gonna talk about the ways in which some of our early Bible manuscripts, what they looked like.

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So we're gonna start first with the scroll, the scroll. Often the form of a book was a scroll.

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Writings were arranged in two columns that were three to four inches wide. And here's what a scroll would have looked like.

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The scrolls were about nine to 10 inches wide and varied in length. Usually they were no longer than 35 feet.

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A scroll of 32 to 35 feet would be what was needed to contain the book of Acts, the book of Luke, the book of John, any of the longer gospels.

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It would have taken about 35 feet of scroll material. Scrolls did not exceed that length because they became very bulky and more unwieldy.

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Remember, in having a scroll, you would have to unroll with one hand and roll up with another hand. And so 35 feet of that bound parchment like that was about as much as they could get, which is why

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I think, and I'm not alone in this, why I think that Luke acts as two volumes instead of one. Because Luke and Acts would have both fit on one scroll.

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I'm sure if Luke could have had a 70 -foot scroll, he would have included those in one volume because Luke and Acts, it's really a one -volume work.

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It's really one continuous story. The gospel of Luke, what Jesus began to do and teach, and the book of Acts, what

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Jesus continued to do and teach through the apostles. And where Luke leaves off at the end of his book, he picks up at the beginning of the book of Acts.

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I think that Luke had in mind both books when he started to write the book of Luke, the gospel of Luke. Since scrolls were used, the longer books were usually circulated individually, but you can see how if you were writing on a scroll like this, that you would be able to put several smaller books, like say all of Paul's prison epistles or all of the smaller epistles of John or something onto one scroll.

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You could keep smaller books in one collection on one scroll. The next medium of collecting ancient books and writings was the codex.

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The papyrus eventually gave way to parchment and scrolls gave way to the codex. So with parchment, you would have long rolls, or papyrus, you would have long rolls that you could roll up into a scroll.

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But when they started to use parchment, which you remember is animal skins, they would begin to bind them into books.

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And the word codex was a term for a Roman writing tablet. The term was used for a book with leaves.

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So sheets were placed together and stitched in the middle. And nobody knows who invented the book, but he has to be somebody on par with the guy that invented the wheel, whoever that was.

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And I guess I'm assuming it was a guy. I shouldn't do that, that was a sexist statement. Whoever it was that invented the wheel is probably the only person to surpass in benefit to us, the person who invented the codex.

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When did the codex replace the scroll? Recent scholarship seems to indicate that the widespread use of the codex was largely a

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Christian invention. In other words, the codex was used, these little books were used in the

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Roman Empire prior to Christianity, prior to the first century and the existence of the Christian church. But the most extensive use of the codex was by Christians by the second century.

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And there's a reason for this. Christians valued learning, we value reading, we value God's word.

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And since God's word, we believe it to be God's word, we value being able to teach other people to read it, to understand it, to preach it, and to be able to teach it.

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And so that emphasis on literacy is a natural, it's the natural result of a high view of scripture.

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If you believe that God has communicated to us in his written word, then you want people to be able to read that and you want people to be able to have it.

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Because of our high view of scripture necessitates that we want this in people's hands. And we want everybody to have access to it.

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That's a normal, natural result of that type of theology. Now, if God is just speaking to us in whispers, nudgings, and promptings, et cetera, then the value of a written word is not that much, is it?

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It kind of depreciates naturally if I can get the same information just through my mental capacities.

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Yeah, Peter. That's what I'm saying, yes, God doesn't whisper. Thank you.

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All right, here are the benefits of the codex. It's more easily carried, it's more easily read, it's more easily referred to.

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If you have codex with pages, you can simply turn to a page instead of rolling in the scroll. Imagine if you had to find in your scroll

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Hebrews chapter eight, and remember, without chapter divisions, without verse divisions, how difficult would that be?

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If I stood up and I said, turn to the passage in Hebrews that says that Jesus, that Melchizedek is like unto

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Christ, and the passage that deals with Melchizedek and Christ. And there's no chapter division. All of you have a scroll, imagine this. All of you have a scroll.

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It's not what it was like, because remember, parchment was expensive. Not everybody had copies of that. But imagine that you all had a scroll of the book of Hebrews.

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How long would it take for everybody was on the same page? Well, not even on the same page, because there's one page. But if you were all in the same place in that scroll, it's very difficult to unroll that and to find exactly that place.

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How far down do you go? 12 feet, 13 feet into your scroll before you get to that position?

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So you can see the benefits of having a small book like this. Another benefit of it is that you can write on both sides of the piece of paper.

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So it's very easy to turn the pages and to find what you're looking for. You could also include several books of the New Testament you could fit into these codexes.

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You could fit a collection of the Gospels, for instance, or a collection of Paul's epistles or Peter's epistles or John's epistles, or you could put

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Luke and Acts into one volume in a codex like this. So there's a lot of benefits to that. Let's talk for a moment now about the

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New Testament text. And here are just a couple of other examples of codexes. So they would take these.

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Eventually, I mean, you could do that with parchment, or sorry, papyrus, but it was far more effective to do with parchment because it was more durable to take the sheets of leather skin with the writings on it and to put them together and stitch them in the middle.

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It's another example of an ancient codex. Yeah, Rick asks,

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I wonder if they treated it to keep the hide from cracking. There was some sort of a treatment that they did with the skins in order to make them writable or able to write on.

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All right, let's talk for a second about the New Testament texts. There are two types of New Testament manuscripts.

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When we talk about the manuscripts that we contain of the New Testament writings, there are two kinds. There are unseals and minuscules.

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Unseals and minuscules. An unseal is written in all capital letters, and it was the earliest writing style.

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And we talked about the benefit of using unseals when you're writing on parchment. Remember, straight lines for capital letters are easier to write than cursive lines when you have parchment that is made out of fibers and threads of a plank.

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Where something could catch the tip of your quill and end up sending you in a direction you don't want to go. So writing in all capital letters had an advantage on the ancient papyrus.

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Minuscules were also known as cursives. They were smaller letters and more cursive -like in appearance. I gave you, I don't know if it was last week or the week before,

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I think it was the week before, an example of what a Greek text, and those were cursives that I had up on the screen there. The cursive or the minuscule style did not debut really until about the 800s as a main way of writing.

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It existed, the cursives existed before that, but in terms of its widespread use, the minuscules or cursive style of writing in Greek letters did not really come into fashion until about 800.

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And you can see just by that fact alone how you would date, be able to date ancient manuscripts.

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If you found one that was written in a cursive script, the widespread use of that was somewhere around 800 or thereafter.

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So if you found something written in a cursive script, it kind of gives you an idea, at least on what side of that year 800 it might fall.

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But if you have something that's written in the unseal script, the all capital letter script, it might give you an idea that that is perhaps an older manuscript, that's something that predates the year 800.

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Both unseal and minuscules were used before 100 AD, but the original writings were probably dictated and probably used in cursives.

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But when copies were made, when copies were made, they were made in what was called the book hand, which was the unseal script or the all capital letter script.

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So in terms of writing books, in everyday correspondence, for instance, they might write in unseal script, it was more natural.

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Or sorry, yeah, no minuscule script, it was more natural. But when you copied something for preservation or when you put something out there for widespread use, it was copied in what was called the book hand, which was the unseal script, which was the all capital letters.

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I'm gonna show you an example here of an unseal script. And I think what I'd like to do,

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I need a volunteer. Let me give you the, somebody just pointed to you.

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Hold on, here are the qualifications before you jump on this. Number one, I need somebody who can read publicly, somebody who can read quickly and fluently publicly, and somebody who doesn't mind being embarrassed.

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Volunteers? You'll do it?

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All right, come on up. You don't have to get in front of the, hey

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Dave, I'm turning this main mic on here. You don't have to get in front of the camera, so step back right there.

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Hold on to that. Can you talk into that and test it real quick? Test, test, test. Okay, I'm gonna show you a slide here in just a moment of English text.

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Okay, so you're not reading a foreign language, you're reading English text. But you're reading English text as it would appear in the unseal form.

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Because when they wrote in unseal form in the ancient manuscripts in the book hand, they would write in columns with large letters.

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They would use little to no punctuation. There was no space between words. And when they got to the end of a line, and they would keep them justified on both sides, and when they got to the end of a line, the rest of the word would be continued on the next line down.

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And they would have no hyphen at the end to tell you that they were splitting words. Okay, so this is what it's gonna look like.

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I'm gonna ask you to read this as fluently and as naturally and quickly as you can. Okay, not speed reading, but just read it naturally.

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Are you ready? Yes. Okay, I'm not even gonna tell you where this is from. It's from the New Testament. For the one concerning whom these in are spoken belongs to another tribe from which no one has.

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Don't help him out now. He's supposed to be embarrassed. At the altar, for it is evident that our

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Lord was descended from Judah, a tribe with reference to which

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Moses spoke, nothing concerning in priests, and this is clear still if another priest arises according to the likeness of Melchizedek, who has become such in not on the basis of law of physical require.

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Requirement, very well, good job. Thank you to everybody else. The early

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New Testament days, that's what it would look like in English. And you're gonna see later on how sometimes the translation of a passage can depend upon how you break a word.

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Like, are these two words together, or is this one word, or is this two separate words?

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And you'll see later on, I'm giving you a whole bunch of examples where even in English, if we wrote like that, the meaning would be very unclear.

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You'd really have to look at the context to determine what it is that we're talking about and how you would divide up those words.

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So that was the book script. That was the early book script. Here's an example of it.

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Now see, that's Greek, that's unsealed, that's all capital letters. But that's exactly what

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I described to you. Here's another example of it. That I think, if memory serves, that's the

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Gospel of John. I might be wrong about that, maybe it's Matthew. I can't, what's that? I can't read the title up there from here.

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Yeah, so the question, when

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Paul asks in 1 Timothy, asked him, or 2 Timothy, to bring him, 2 Timothy, to bring him his coat and especially his parchments, his books and his parchments, what form would that have been?

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Paul was probably referring to his Old Testament manuscripts and probably would have been a codex.

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It probably would have been something in the unsealed script like this, a copy of his Old Testament text.

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And it would have, since it was written on parchment, it would have been animal skins and not papyrus, which means it probably would not have been scrolls, but probably something to the codex or the book that we looked at earlier.

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Yeah, it takes some study and it also takes some understanding of the Greek language and Greek vocabulary as well.

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You've gotta be familiar with it. Yeah, right.

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All right, any other questions about that? Okay, so here is an example of minuscule writings.

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Now, that's the cursive writings, still the columns. Later on, of course, the non -book text would have put spaces between words, but in the

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Greek text, back in ancient times, they would not have used punctuation like we use punctuation. We use punctuation to emphasize certain portions of a sentence, or we use punctuation even to demonstrate the cadence that a sentence might take, right?

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Aidan, who is my daughter, is very beautiful today. And so if I were writing that out,

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I would put on, Aidan's just happy that I didn't throw her under the bus and burn her like I do normally during a sermon.

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So if you were writing that out, you would use punctuation to sort of separate ideas and words, phrases, and clauses.

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You didn't do that in Greek. That's not the purpose of punctuation in the Greek text. It wasn't to separate out phrases and words like that.

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And even keep in mind, another thing about Greek, real quick before we move on, Greek word order is not as significant as English word order is.

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So John hit the ball at Frank. I mean, the word order of that sentence is essential in English to understand who hit the ball, or who hit, what was hit, and to whom it was hit.

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But in Greek, it doesn't make that at all. In Greek, you can mix up the word order of a sentence, and the order of the sentence does not determine the subject, the direct object, or the indirect object, or who does the acting of the verb.

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Those are determined by word endings in Greek. So word order has a different emphasis in Greek than it does in English.

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Hebrew is written right to left. Greek is written left to right. All right, let's talk for a moment about the number of New Testament manuscripts and the forms that these take.

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We have what we would consider, what we would count as 5 ,488 portions, or wholes, of New Testament manuscripts.

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Almost 5 ,500 New Testament manuscripts. 300 of these are in the unseal form, which is the all -caps form.

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95 of them are papyri. And we have near 2 ,000 lectionaries, which were manuscripts designated for reading in public worship.

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So a lectionary was something you would use for like a scripture reading, and if you opened up our hymnal, the hymnal that we have that we used to keep out before we went to overheads, you would find massive scripture readings in there, something you could just turn to there and read as part of your worship service.

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So many of our New Testament manuscripts are in lectionary form. There are three major manuscript families, or three major manuscripts that I'm gonna talk about here today.

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I'm just gonna introduce these because we're gonna get later on into the significance of some of these and where they play in and different characteristics of each of these manuscripts and manuscripts families.

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So some of our most valuable copies of the New Testament date back to the second and the fourth century, and these are manuscript collections, which were much like Bibles of the day.

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So Christians would gather together for public worship, and I think we're gonna talk about this next week.

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I think this is next week's lesson or the week after that. Seven, eight, I think it's next week's lesson. Christians, when they would gather together for public worship, they put emphasis on two things, reading the

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Word and preaching the Word. Everything was Word -centered, reading the Word and preaching the Word.

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And so as Christians would gather to do that, they emphasized, since they emphasized that, they also put a premium on the copying and the distribution and the spread of Scripture.

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So we have evidence in the New Testament that Paul knew of his writings in certain cities where he wanted them, the people in this city, to go to the other city and read what he wrote to that city.

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He knew that his writings were being copied, he knew that his writings were Scripture, and he knew that his writings were being distributed, and he wanted to make sure that Christians all over the

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Roman Empire read what he had written to other locations, other locales. And so it's that widespread distribution and collection of manuscripts in the

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New Testament era in the first couple centuries that really resulted in some of the codexes that we find, some of the collections that we find, different manuscript families, et cetera.

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Christians would gather these things together, preserve them, and make copies of them, and they had a motivation to do that because everything that they did revolved around the reading and preaching and teaching of the

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Word of God. And so they wanted to make sure that everybody had access to it, and the copies were made and they were distributed widely.

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And next week we'll talk about, I think it's the next two weeks, we're gonna talk about how that was done. So some of our most valuable copies of the

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New Testament date back to the second and fourth century. They're written in unsealed form, most of them, or many of them.

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There are three basic manuscripts, major manuscript collections in number, three of them.

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Now, there are all kinds of little parchments. There are manuscript fragments like the

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John, oh, what's the name of that? What was it?

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Ryland. Ryland, yeah, the John Ryland fragment, which is a chunk, I think, from the Gospel of John, if memory serves me, that they date back right near the end of the first century, around 100

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AD. And those are just like little tiny fragments of this that they discover.

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Sorry, what? 57 AD. Okay, I won't contest that right now, but I thought it was a little bit later than that.

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But anyhow, many of our manuscripts are not necessarily full collections of books. So when I say we have 5 ,500, close to 5 ,500 manuscripts that we have to compare to one another, out of which we derive our translations, don't think in terms of 5 ,500 ancient copies of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation.

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What we have is manuscript collections, codexes. So a codex might contain, say, all of Paul's epistles, or it might contain the first two

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Corinthian epistles, or it might contain the prison epistles, or John's writings, or something like that. We have various fragments from all different portions of the

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New Testament, 5 ,500 total in number. So here are three large collections, and the word codex here, of course, is the word tablet, or refers to a book.

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But we have what is called Codex Vaticanus, or the Vatican Manuscript. That's the first one, letter A. Oh, it's codex.

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The Vatican Manuscript, did I not write that in there, letter A? Vatican Manuscript, just write that down. It's the

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Codex Vaticanus is the technical name of it, the Vatican Manuscript. This has been in the

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Vatican Library in Rome since 1481. At first, it was a hassle to get it published, but it finally became public property and available to all scholars in 1890.

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It contains, in Greek, most all of the Old Testament and the New Testament. There are a couple of verses from Genesis that are missing, a few of the

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Psalms are missing. The last part of the New Testament, Hebrews 9, 14 to the end, the letters of Timothy, Titus, and Revelation are missing from that.

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Now, when I say these are missing, I don't want you to think in terms of somebody cut them out, because that's not what we, we talk about Vatican, when we talk about manuscripts or codexes, like the

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Codex Vaticanus, missing certain portions, it's not that there's some evil guy at the head of the

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Catholic Church, or some monk somewhere who, with ill intent, cut out things that he disagreed with.

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That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a collection of books that were collected sometime in the Middle Ages. It's existed in the

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Vatican and Rome since 1481. At some point, this collection of manuscripts was brought together, and that particular collection doesn't contain certain books.

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That doesn't mean that there are no manuscripts of those other books. It just means that Codex Vaticanus does not have a portion of Hebrews and St.

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Paul's letters in it. It's an incomplete collection. All that means is that that particular collection does not contain everything that we have in the

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New Testament. Does that make sense? Man, we're not talking about some evil conspiracy, Dan Brown style, to get rid of things in the

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New Testament that we don't like. So after 1 ,600 years, and it is believed that this dates back to around 400 or so, after 1 ,600 years, the original ink has not faded from view.

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It is considered to be the most exact copy of the New Testament in existence. It's something of a standard text that we use as a collection of New Testament manuscripts.

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The second is the Sinatic Manuscript, S -I -N -A -I, like Sinai, T -I -C,

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Sinatic Manuscript, yes. The question is, is that copy that we're talking about, the

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Codex Vaticanus, is it available, if you wanted to bring it up, on the internet or something?

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I'm almost certain it would be. Paul, would you know that? I would, yeah. Yeah, like Alpha Omega Ministries, A -O -M -I -N dot

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O -R -G, it's James White's website. He has links, he has links to it. There are digital copies or digital pictures and copy representations of these manuscripts online.

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You can get them online. All right, the second one is the Sinatic Manuscript, which we call

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Codex Sinaticus. This is a very valuable manuscript. It was discovered in St.

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Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai. It is the oldest complete copy of the New Testament that exists today, probably comprised somewhere around the middle of the fourth century.

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The oldest complete copy of the New Testament. It was compiled by three scribes and their handwriting, style, and spelling enable us to distinguish who copied which parts of that manuscript.

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So sometime in the fourth century, they brought all of those books together and made copies of them and put them together in one codex, and that's the

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Sinatic Manuscript. Any questions? All right, there is a third one, and that is the

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Alexandrian Manuscript. Alexandrian, or what we call Codex Alexandrius, or it's

31:09

Alexandrinus. All right, the Alexandrian Manuscript is called that because it was known to be in Alexandria for several centuries.

31:18

It was brought to Constantinople shortly after 1621. It contains both the Old and New Testaments, mostly complete, dated to sometime in the fourth to fifth century.

31:29

So these are all very old manuscripts, large collections. These are the three primary ones when we talk about New Testament manuscripts.

31:37

We have three collections or codexes that are very valuable because they're very old, and they're these three collections of New Testament, Old Testament books.

31:46

We can compare and contrast the different copies that are made as well as compare them with the other 5 ,500 -some manuscript, manuscript fragments, lectionaries, et cetera, and codexes that we found, some of which we had up here on the overhead just moments ago.

32:01

The Vatican Manuscript, the Sinatic Manuscript, and the Alexandrian Manuscript, those codexes, those three massive collections of those books, copies of those books, are old and they're valuable.

32:13

Yeah. That I don't know other than the one that's in the

32:19

Vatican, the Sinatic Manuscript, and the Alexandrian Manuscript.

32:25

Paul knows a lot about this stuff too. Do you have any idea where those are located? I don't either, no. Yeah, many of these codexes are contained in museums, in monasteries at the

32:57

Vatican, in different places that house these ancient manuscripts, and there is an incentive for everybody to be able to make copies of them, photographs of them, and have them preserved digitally for us, because obviously the digital preservation is valuable because you can pass it around.

33:14

Everybody can see visibly exactly what was written and study the details of what was written. Yes. Oh, yes.

33:28

Yeah, repeat when they were dated to the Vatican Manuscript. About 1 ,600 years old, so I think it goes back to the late fourth or fifth century.

33:40

The Sinatic Manuscript is comprised mid -fourth century, and the

33:46

Alexandrian Manuscript was copied and compiled sometime in the fourth and fifth century. Yes.

34:20

So the question was the Alexandrian Library, it was a renowned library, it was. There was something,

34:26

I have it in a later lesson, there was an attempt was made to duplicate the Alexandrian Library and to collect another, to make a sort of another rival to it in Constantinople, and I forget exactly what date that was, but the question was is that where Paul and others went to study and to learn?

34:43

I don't know if Paul ever went to the library in Alexandria, I don't know that. There's no record of that if he did, but it was a library of renown, or books were collected, yeah.

34:52

And remember, back in those days, libraries were not something that you just taxed a few citizens and every town and every shire had one.

34:59

They were very rare, because writing materials were very rare, and writing materials were very expensive. So to have a city with a library in it had to be, it was almost like a center of civilization to have a place like that where you could read and write and have access to books and ancient writings.

35:16

All right, let's talk for a moment just briefly about the number of New Testament manuscripts. Again, we have,

35:22

I mentioned, having 5 ,500, 2 ,000 electionaries. We would add to that a number of Latin manuscripts.

35:33

Remember, Latin was a language back in those days, and they made copies of Greek and Hebrew into Latin, so we have

35:38

Latin translations of Greek and Hebrew texts that go back to the early centuries of the Christian church.

35:44

There are 10 ,000 Latin manuscripts. And then there are 9 ,300 other versions or other translations, ancient documents and other translations of New Testament documents that we have.

35:54

So when we talk about the wealth of New Testament manuscripts and documents that we have at our disposal, we're not talking about five or six copies that date back to 1 ,500 that we're comparing and then hoping that they represent the original.

36:08

We're talking about thousands of copies, thousands of fragments of Scripture, various books, various locations in Scripture, et cetera, fragments, some small, some large, but thousands of them, as well as translations of those manuscripts in other languages, thousands of those, as well as lectionaries that were all, have been preserved for us.

36:28

So when we talk about translating and preserving the New Testament text, and we read, you know, if all we had, if the only manuscript we had or the codex we had was the one in Sinaiticus, then we would,

36:39

I would be out of preaching material in the book of Hebrews because we would already have gotten to the point where Sinaiticus ends in terms of Hebrews, 9 verse 14.

36:48

But we don't just have that one collection of manuscripts. We have thousands, and so we know that there's more from Hebrews, because even though that particular manuscript is broken off at that point, hasn't been preserved for whatever reason, and we'll talk about why they weren't preserved a little later on, but the fact that that was, the one was not preserved is no detriment to our confidence in Scripture because we have thousands of other copies and lectionaries and translations and Latin manuscripts, et cetera, that you can compare and contrast this.

37:17

And we're gonna talk a little bit about how that was done, and how the copying was done, and how we compare a little bit later on. Not only that, but we have a number of quotations from the

37:26

New Testament that have been preserved. So let's, for a moment, in our minds, imagine that every manuscript and copy that we have of the ancient documents, all the codexes, the papyruses, or the papyri, sorry.

37:42

The papyri, the codexes, the manuscript fragments, all of it, imagine that it were to all go away right now, instantly.

37:51

We would still have a nearly complete copy of the New Testament in another form, and it is the form of the quotations of the

37:59

New Testament that the early church fathers did. The early church fathers who lived between the time of the apostles, 180 and 480, those writings give us 86 ,000 quotations from the

38:12

New Testament documents. 86 ,000 quotations of New Testament documents. So Josh McDowell, in his book,

38:19

A Ready Defense, says this. Sir David Dalrymple was asked, suppose that the New Testament had been destroyed and every copy of it lost by the end of the 3rd century.

38:26

Could it have been collected together again from the writings of the fathers of the 2nd and the 3rd centuries?

38:32

Dalrymple says this. That question roused my curiosity, and as I possessed all the existing works of the fathers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries,

38:39

I commenced to search, and up to this time, I have found the entire New Testament except 11 verses. So we have the early church fathers who lived right after the apostles who were quoting the

38:48

New Testament. So even if we took all the writings that we have, the copies of the New Testament documents, and burned them all, we could take the writings of the early church fathers who quoted the

38:56

New Testament, and we could reproduce our New Testament, all of it except for 11 verses. It has been preserved so faithfully, so widespread, so thoroughly, and so comprehensively that it staggers the imagination in terms of talking about ancient documents and ancient manuscripts.

39:16

There are thousands upon thousands of these quotations, 86 ,000 of them, in the early church fathers themselves.

39:23

So you can see how God has preserved his word for us. Even if we burned every copy of the

39:29

New Testament from the year 100 all the way through to everything we have today, if we burned it all, we could reconstruct the entire

39:37

New Testament from the quotations of the early church fathers. And we would have, with confidence, all of our

39:43

New Testament text except for 11 verses. Somehow they managed to not quote 11 of those verses. Yes, up here first.

39:58

Are the quotations referred to as the Vulgate? No, the Vulgate is a Latin translation of the

40:03

New Testament. So those are not the quotations from the early church fathers. Paul. Paul.

40:21

Yeah, that was my next step. I'm just, well,

40:28

I'm just using the lesson that you prepared for me, so that's it. So there's

40:34

Homer's Iliad. In terms of the writing, Homer was written 900 B .C. The earliest extant copy that we have is 400

40:40

B .C. So there's a 500 year gap between the original writing and the earliest copy of Homer that we have.

40:47

There's 643 ancient manuscripts of Homer with a 95%, they estimate a 95 % perfect faithfulness to the original, representation of the original.

41:00

In the New Testament, it was written in the first century, and this is just describing the New Testament, not the Old Testament. The New Testament, written in the first century.

41:07

The earliest extant copies that we have are second century A .D., which is less than 100 years between the two of them.

41:12

We have 5 ,600 copies of them with a 99 .5%, and that 0 .5 % has to do with spelling errors, okay, different word changes, word order.

41:22

Sometimes we're gonna talk about the ways that scribes made variants in copying the New Testament. We're gonna talk about that later on.

41:28

So that 5 % is not, you know, that 0 .5%, your salvation is not in there. We're talking about the names and places and spellings and things like that.

41:38

So the number one best attested, most thoroughly copied book of antiquity is by far the

41:46

New Testament. And in terms of time between the original writing and the earliest copies we have of those earlier writings, it makes every other ancient document pale by comparison.

41:56

The next best one is Homer's Iliad, and it's not even close to the New Testament. And then when you start talking about other ancient writings, it gets even worse.

42:05

I mean, the gap between the New Testament and Homer's Iliad, is that in your notes? They have that chart in your notes?

42:11

Yeah, okay, you can see there in that chart that there's a whole nother list of ancient writings there and how the

42:20

New Testament stacks up against those. Okay, Peter, did you have a question? Are you gonna cover? We are gonna cover that, yeah, we're gonna talk about that.

42:35

Yeah. Yeah, Jim. What's the distinction between a codex and what we would call a book?

42:55

They both were bound. They both had a way of binding them. I think they're synonymous.

43:01

And a codex is just what we use to refer to an ancient document like that that was bound in book form rather than scroll form.

43:08

Simply another word for book. Yeah, I don't know of any other distinctions other than one's really old, but I think they're virtually synonymous.

43:18

Do you know of one, Paul? Yeah, yeah.

43:42

Okay. All right, I think we are done. Yeah, Brian. Right, the word of God endures forever.

44:03

Yeah, and the purpose of going through all of this, and again, we're just laying a foundation. The purpose of going through all of this is so that we can see, we don't question whether or not

44:12

God has preserved his word for us. That's not what we're doing. We're not questioning that. He's promised to preserve his word for us.

44:18

Well, what I'm intending to show you is how he has done so. And when you see how he has done so, then you realize that all of the

44:23

Bart Ehrman attacks against Scripture, the faithfulness of Scripture, and the preservation of Scripture, they all fall flat when you realize how

44:30

God has done it. It is truly amazing. The wisdom of God is wiser than the wisdom of man. We would never have done it this way.

44:38

We would have done it another way, but God has done it this way, and we're gonna be looking at it in the next few weeks, and you're gonna see just how amazing that is.

44:45

All right, let's pray together. Father, we are grateful for your word. We thank you for your promise to reveal yourself in Scripture, and your promise to preserve it for us.

44:54

And it is truly a treasure trove of wisdom, and knowledge, and revelation from you, and we thank you for the work that it does in our hearts and in our minds, and we thank you for your grace, the grace of salvation, for drawing us near to your son, and for giving us this confidence in your word.

45:08

Thank you for preserving it for us, and we pray that you would be glorified through our worship and our fellowship, and the preaching of your word to follow at this time.