Textual Criticism and the TR Live from CBTS

Introduction and the Setting at Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White and we're coming to you live from Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary in Owensboro, Kentucky.

And.

We have the largest studio audience. I think we have ever had we warned the students sitting down front I don't know what the camera angles look like, but we had one guy over here saying can I eat almonds during the program?

I've never had anyone ask that question before but congratulations. You're now famous for that. We got another brother who is just not good at providing sufficient numbers of protein bars for all the rest of us to utilize but I was thinking, you know I'm gonna be gone most of January.

I know when I'm in Russia the chances of getting a dividing line in are pretty small and since this class is on new testament reliability textual criticism one of the topics that I have wanted to address it's in my files and my notes for The Dividing Line came about because of a conversation that I had on Twitter and I had a conversation with someone whose name on Twitter is Textus Receptus.

Now before you say you shouldn't be picking on people I want to point out that that conversation began with criticism from Textus Receptus about some of the comments that I had made on the subject of Revelation 16 5 during the seminar that I gave at Covenant of Grace Church in St. Charles, Missouri first weekend in December.

I've been going to that church for that was my 17th year going at that particular time of the year and evidently someone took the time to listen to the presentation and to disagree with the brief comments that I made on the subject of Revelation 16 5.

The Context of Revelation 16:5 and the Third Bowl Judgment

It fits in perfectly because this is a class on textual criticism. We've spent all day yesterday looking at background issues, manuscripts, the issues that are relevant to why we need to be engaged in textual criticism and so far this morning after some biblical study we spent time looking at the origins of what is generally called the Textus Receptus.

This is the Trinitarian Bible Society edition. This is Scrivener's text. I think it's important to emphasize that if you carry this around this is a Greek text based upon an English translation called the King James Version of the Bible.

That is Scrivener took the 1598 Beza, the Stephanus text, the Erasmus versions, the five that he did between 1516 and 1535, compared them with one another and then whatever the King James translators, various groups of King James translators, let me point out those various groups did not necessarily use the same reasoning for their textual choices all the way across the New Testament of the of the King James Version of the Bible, but where they made a decision where those those different versions, Erasmus, Stephanus, Beza, differ, that became the basis of this.

So this is the King James New Testament in Greek. I think it may be the best way to describe it is the King James New Testament in Greek rather than the ancient Greek New Testament that has come to us and received by the church and all the rest of stuff, which is normally what people believe, over against the modern versions of the Greek New Testament, we have the Nessie Olin 28th edition, UBS 5th edition, and I also have with me the Tyndale House Greek New Testament just came out, which is a very very interesting edition as well.

So.

What.

I'm gonna do during this time period for the students and for everyone in the in the audience is to demonstrate how not to do textual criticism and that use that methodology to shine light upon how we need to be doing textual criticism.

I have already been talking all day yesterday, all this morning, and so unfortunately there will be a few coughs along the way. It's a little bit colder back here than it is in Phoenix, not all that much to be perfectly honest with you.

It's been fairly cold there. But I may have picked up something on the plane, in the airport, whatever it was. We'll see about that. The example is found in Revelation 16 5, and if you'll turn your Bibles there, or in your Greek New Testament for that matter, this is the third bowl, the third bowl judgment, and I'd like to look at it in context because I think what's fascinating here is the argumentation we're gonna see from our Textus Receptus representative utterly ignores the close context of Revelation chapter 16 verse 5.

Then the third angel poured out his bowl into the rivers and the springs of waters, and they became blood, and I heard the angel, this is a new American Standard that I'm reading, and I heard the angel of the waters saying, Righteous are you who are and who were, O holy one, because you judged these things, for they poured out the blood of saints and prophets, and you have given them blood to drink, they deserve it.

And I heard the altar saying, Yes, O Lord God the Almighty, true and righteous are your judgments. Now, what I want to point out is that there is a consistent theme in the third bowl, and that is judgment.

Judgment on the part of God. So at the beginning of verse 5, Righteous, dikaios, are you. He is described as righteous, and then the end of verse 5, because you have ekranos, you have judged these things.

So God is being described, the one upon the throne is being described as a righteous judge. The judgment that he judges with is righteous, and why? Because, verse 6, they poured out the blood of the saints and the prophets, and you have given them blood to drink, they deserve it.

Worthy are they of this. And I heard the altar saying, and we really, I think, learned something about how far we can push literalism in the book of Revelation at that point, I heard the altar saying, Yes, O Lord God the Almighty, true and righteous are your judgments.

So there's really a summary statement of the emphasis of this particular bowl judgment, and that is that the Almighty God is true and righteous when he acts as judge. There is no capriciousness, there is consistency in that judgment.

So, there is the context, and so we go back to where the variant is,.

And.

It is found in the phrase, ha-on kai ha-ein ha-haseas,.

Who was.

The one being and who was the holy one. Now, when we look over at the Nesseol in 28th edition apparatus, which is on the screen, and I realize that probably is not visible to the dividing line folks, but I'll describe it for you here.

You will notice, as we have mentioned in this class already, the textual history of the book of Revelation is incredibly complex, partly because of its history of transmission, the issue of its canonization, and partly because there are so few manuscripts of the book of Revelation that they tend to be much later manuscripts.

We have very few early manuscripts of the book of Revelation, but you will notice that there is a variant, and you first have has-ein, then p47 and 2329 add kai, and then you have ha-seas. Now, please note right here, p47 having the word and, that's going to come up in one of the tweets, so I want you to see that before the person that I was dialoguing with brings up that issue.

There is the word and in p47 and 2329, but you have ha-seas, and then notice something we haven't seen before. Yesterday, we were talking about the majority text, and you have a K next to the majority text here, and down here you have majority text with A.

The majority text is split in the book of Revelation, and so the splits are fairly easy to recognize. There's lots of theories as to why this is, but the majority text is split. There is no one Byzantine text or one majority text in the book of Revelation, but here's the point.

If we look at all of them, we have has-ein, ha-seas, we have ha-ein, kai, ha-ha-seas, we have ha-ein, ha-seas. What do all of them have in common? The word ha-seas, and ha-seas means holy, the holy one.

Now, if ha-seas has the article, then that's going to be more.

Easily.

Translated as the holy one or something along those lines. So there could be some minor translational differences, but the point is all the manuscripts that are cited by the Nestle-Aland text say ha-seas, holy one.

The problem is, and I'll go ahead and close the Nestle-Aland here, and what I will do is I will add a parallel column, and we'll go over here, and we will grab.

The.

Greek New Testament where to go, Textus Receptus, right there, and I will not leave the print so small that not even I can read it. So, what do we have, we won't make it bigger than the others though, what do we have in Revelation 16 .5 in the Textus Receptus?

And I heard the angel of the waters saying, dikaios kuri, and so there is the use of the term kurios there, which was not noted as a variant. Ai haon, kai haen, kai ha-esaminos, hati tauta ekranos, because you've judged these things.

Righteous are you, O Lord, and we're not even looking at that variant, the one who is, and who was, and who will be, asaminos, is the future participial form of aimi, because you have judged these things.

So, the variant that we are discussing is the fact that the Textus Receptus uses ha-esaminos rather than ha-hasios at Revelation 16 .5. Now, again, the Nessiolan text is going to give you more variants, but less information, because the UBS text is designed for translators, and so they give you primarily the variants that are going to impact translation over time and give you more information on it.

But the Nessiolan does not even list ha-esaminos as one of the variants, let alone kuti, either. So, where did this come from? Well, it comes from Theodor Beza. Theodor Beza, in his 1598 edition, reads ha-esaminos.

Now, if you go back to the earlier printed manuscripts, I'm sorry, printed editions, Erasmus has ha-esaminos. Stephanus has ha-esaminos. The first one to have this in a printed edition is Beza. Well, did Beza find new Greek manuscripts?

What was, where does this come from? Beza's argumentation is that what you have in the phrase ha-on kai ha-ein is what's called a nominus sacrum. It's a phrase, the one who is and who was and who is to come, this has to be all one phrase.

It's used back in Revelation chapter 1. It didn't use ha-esaminos, it used er-kaminos there, but the idea of God as eternal and that that language is who is and who was and who is to come, Beza's like, well, that's what fits here.

Haseas doesn't fit here. To which I would say, wait a minute, two objections. All the Greek manuscripts read the same way. And secondly, who are you to say that just because there are full names of God, like who is and who was and who is to come, and that is used in Revelation, that in this place, because of what?

Because of the emphasis upon what? Judgment and the righteousness of that judgment, that the angel says, Holy One, ha-haseas. Now, right now you start seeing where.

Interpretation.

Can enter into the issue of textual criticism. And that's a dangerous area. Why? Well,.

Because.

If you say, well, I want my theology to be accurate in whatever Greek New Testament I have, well, where do you get your theology from? Well, you get it from the text. So if you use your theology to determine the text, you're now stuck in a super tight circle.

And we've already, and this is one of the problems, I think, I've seen far too many people, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Baha 'i, groups like this, who get stuck in this interpretational circle. And they can't see what the Word of God is saying because they have an external authority that they have identified as the Word of God that now becomes a tradition that gets involved in this mix.

And they just can't see what the Word is really saying because they're allowing their theology to determine what the text actually is supposed to say. This is, on the most basic level, what it's supposed to say as in the very words of it.

Something to always keep in mind.

But.

What you have here is a reading.

That.

Anywhere else in any Greek New Testament, including the Textus Receptus, would be more than sufficiently warranted because it's all the Greek manuscripts. Every majority text says what? Hacios. So the Robinson Pierpont, Byzantine textual platform, the majority text Hodges-Farstad, what does it say?

Hacios. Because that's what the Greek text says. And so what you've got is Beza going, yeah, but that doesn't really fit. Well, I'm sorry, you don't get to determine that. Now, if you had a bunch of manuscripts that said something else, then fine.

Then you could make your argument, but you don't. This is, now you're gonna see that there's gonna be an argument about it. I call this a conjectural emendation because you don't have evidence of this.

Well, actually, you know, there's a Ethiopic text someplace that has a future in it. So that means it's not an emendation. When you have nothing in the original language, you have nothing from the fathers.

He's gonna try to argue that there are, but we're gonna demonstrate that there isn't. That's conjectural emendation, and that's what's in the Textus Receptus. So what do we have here? What are we gonna see in all of this?

We're gonna see you have the text, you have the reading. We know how it arose historically, but it doesn't matter. This is our standard now, and we will now use whatever standards of argumentation we need to defend this reading, even though those are not the standards you used to derive 99 .99999999 of the rest of the words in this book.

That's how you determine when someone is stuck in a tradition, and that tradition is something that must be rejected. So let's escape out of the large screen there. Here is the first of the statements.

I posted on Twitter a list, a link, to the videos. And you'll notice I'm wearing a Coogee sweater in the picture there as well, so I am consistent. This weekend's seminar on the New Testament and King James-only-ism, and Textus Receptus responded to that by saying, It seems the Revelation 16 .5 argument has not been advanced in iotas since White got it from Nestle.

That would be Nestle-Aland, which is not where I got it, by the way. I guess with James refusing to even read the evidence he asked for, proving that every manuscript in the world reads like Beza and the KJV would stifle that train of logic.

Every manuscript. Wow. Well, what what is that supposed to mean? Every single manuscript reads the same as Beza and the KJV. Hmm. Well, let's look at the next one. I had said,.

And.

By the way, whether Nestle had an argument about Revelation 16 .5, I do not know. I didn't get it from anyone. The evidence is right in front of one's eyes when reading the text. And he said, the holy is clearly nomena sacra.

Art and Wasten shall be is the expansion of the I am and of hovah in Jehovah. Now, as soon as someone uses the term nomena sacra to me in a textual critical context, I'm assuming they're talking about, well, the nomena sacra.

That is the abbreviations of divine names that are used in the papyri. That's not what he's referring to. What he's arguing is that the phrase, who is and who was and who is to come, is a nomena sacra.

It is a sacred name as a phrase. But how the holy becomes a nomena sacra at this point that should be replaced with shall be, I don't know. I don't know and I'm not going to be able to figure out from what comes after this to be perfectly honest with you.

But I'm showing it to you as it as it came along. He responded and said, okay. Well, Nestle mentions it in his introduction of the 1904 edition, mistakenly not reading Bayes's notes pointing to Revelation 1 -4.

Revelation 1 -4 is where this phrase appears,.

But.

It's not identical. It's not what we have in the the the TR of the somnos. It's their commonos. It's a different term, but he'll say, well, they're all related. So it doesn't really matter. Pointing to holy being nomena sacra.

It is in the Vulgate, Ethiopic, and several commentaries. That sounds really great. Oh, it's in the Vulgate. It's in the Ethiopic version, which I would assume means going all the way back to the earliest Ethiopic manuscripts and things like that.

That's not what is the case either. And several commentaries. Now just stop for a second. How many different readings that are differ from the TR could we find in commentaries? Not just modern commentaries, but commentaries that existed, say, in 1611.

Tens of.

Thousands. This person would never agree to amending a single word of this based upon commentaries or something from the Ethiopic. But this is the one place where those things are relevant. You see the inconsistency?

See the double standard? This is the exact example of not only not how to do textual criticism, but how to detect traditionalism in the doing of textual criticism. And by the way, the Vulgate does not read Shalbi.

There may be some manuscripts of it do, but the vast bulk do not read that. In all Greek text, it is in the Nomena Sacra form, which is a nice way of saying somehow that Hoseos is a Nomena Sacra that should be changed at the end of the 16th century to a different word.

I don't get it. I don't understand it. It doesn't make any sense. We'll see if it ends up making more sense as we get a little bit farther along here. He says, I had said, oh pray tell, I have never seen an even semi-rational argument for the Tiara reading of Isamnos versus the entire body of Greek text, Byzantine and all others, Hoseos.

Hopefully you won't do the, there was a Latin commentary somewhere that might have. Well, he already did. But that's the problem with Twitter conversations. They go all over the place and even trying to find them and put them in a logical order is frequently next to impossible to do.

He says, I found it in an early Latin Bible and in the, ready for this? 1549 Ethiopic. 1549 Ethiopic. I expanded the triadic declaration who is and who was and shall be by looking at the I am, as you may know, and the expanded name of Jehovah, hovah meaning to be.

That is not even close to Yahweh and.

Yahweh who,.

It's way off. Erasmus has Erkamenos in all five annotations. Now, think about that for a second. Erasmus has Erkamenos, which is not Esamenos. It's a different word, but has Erkamenos in all five annotations.

But what's, what's the relevance of that? He may be discussing what the triadic formula would normally be, but what is the textual reading of his text?

Hoseos.

Not Erkamenos. So in a note, he discusses it and somehow that becomes evidence for changing the actual reading of the text itself to something that no Christian reading Revelation 16 .5 had ever seen before 1598.

That becomes your, that becomes a part of the evidence. You see, once you enshrine this, everything that could in any way be supportive of this now becomes evidence. Even if in every other verse in this, you would never use any of that as evidence to overthrow this.

You see the difference between having sets of principles, taking your data, applying it, and coming up with a text, which you could then defend, and then you can then take in new information as it's discovered.

Like I said, we had a new discovery of papyri or something like that. Bring it in, apply the same standards, voila. Can not do that here at all, because you're using bunches of different standards. You've got one standard over here, Revelation 16 .5.

You got another standard over at 1 John 5 .7. And what you're willing to accept as evidence changes all dependent upon your ultimate authority. That's not textual criticism. That's a defense of a tradition.

That's a defense of a tradition. So, oops. Next. Now check this out. He mentions one of Erasmus' annotations, which has ha-on, ha-en, ha-er-kamenos. But he doesn't say it. Erasmus was saying that's what it should read here.

It's just that Erasmus made reference to the triadic formula. So what? Same thing here. Gregory of Nyssa referred to Christ as ha-esamenos. Ha-christos, ha-on, kai-praon, kai-esamenos. Blessed now and forever, amen and amen.

Amen. So I just, I just stop and I go,.

Okay,.

So Gregory of Nyssa referred to Christ as ha-esamenos. Did Gregory of Nyssa do that at Revelation 16 .5? No, but somewhere in Gregory's writings, he referred to Christ as the one being, uh, and praon isn't even used in, in, uh, in Revelation 16 .5.

And then he uses esamenos, esamenos, blessed now and forever, amen. So he used it in a blessing of Christ. So since he used esamenos, somehow that means something. This is desperation. This is pure desperation.

Well, esamenos was used someplace. Think with me for just a moment because there's more. How much time has this poor fellow invested in digging through original language texts of, of the early church fathers?

Probably used the TLG CD-ROM. Well, actually it's TLG website now, but way back in the 90s when I was working on my first, first doctorate, I used the TLG CD-ROM, uh, which was basically all the Greek literature in Greek, uh, on one CD.

So you could do searches for words. So he probably did a search for esamenos and pulled up Gregory of Nyssa here.

Um,.

And oh good, someone used that term. Okay, not in Revelation 16 .5, not in the same way, but hey, he used the term. Think, I mean the amount of time that that would have taken and yet from a textual critical perspective, is it even slightly relevant?

It's not. It's not slightly relevant because if you were consistent, well Gregory of Nyssa actually used esamenos. Well, he also used, uh, you, uh, eulogetos, and so maybe we could, uh, insert that in places in the Texas Receptus too, because Gregory of Nyssa used it of Jesus, and so that must be a good thing, and therefore we should insert it in the TR, right?

Of course not. Of course not. Not gonna make that argument. Two different standards. Different standards. It is really amazing to see this. You'll see, I've only, I'm all, not, not even halfway down here.

Um, well, that's number eight. Okay. Number nine.

Um,.

Concerning the Tetragrammaton, Clement, third century, and Clement at some point in his voluminous writings had ha-on kai-ha esamenos, and Beza had kai-ha esamenos, therefore we should change the reading of the text, even though Clement is not quoting Revelation 16 .5, but he's simply saying the one being and the one who shall be.

So, okay, people describe God as being eternal in the early church writings, so therefore we should change what's found in every single Greek manuscript in Revelation 16 .5 on that basis, right? No, of course not.

Has nothing to do with it. Has nothing to do with it all, but I found somebody else using esamenos, and look, I can put it in parallel. Okay, and who was isn't there, but it's still in parallel. Doesn't that look really.

Cool?

I, I sort of feel sorry for someone who has spent this amount of time on, there's just so many more important things to be pursuing in life.

Um,.

Art and wast and shalt be would be the purest form of the expansion of the I am and also hova. Again, I'm just sorry. Jehovah is a mispronunciation. Uh, it's a, it's a Germanic mispronunciation. It's got too many syllables to it.

I, hey, I, yeah, hey, I, hey, um, there is lots of discussion about what the Hebrew means and then the Greek translation ego in exodus chapter 3. All that's wonderful and great, but it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that you have every single Greek manuscript reading the same way at revelation 16 .5.

And when you start dragging that stuff in, this is a huge flag that you, that's being waved back and forth in front of you. This is somebody who is trying to justify a traditional issue under the guise of textual criticism.

Then when the word LORD, and notice he puts it all caps, appears in revelation by a heavenly being, the triad always appears with it. Shalt be more accurately expands the most holy name as is to come is less specific.

Now, the reality is that when kurios appears, now kurios actually doesn't appear in revelation 16 .5. That again is another issue we could look at in the TR.

But.

I can show you other places where kurios appears in, in revelation where it's not followed by the triadic formula. So I don't know what he has in mind here, but there is the the assertion that is being being made.

It sounds good if you want to believe it. Being the purest form of the triad and the expansion of the most holy names of God, I am in Jehovah with its own Strong's number, number 3801. This noun phrase is the most significant name of God in the new testament.

Oh, okay. I don't think anything can compare except perhaps a Stourgram or a Christogram. Okay. So because it's really important to me, that's the way it needs to read it, revelation 16 .5. Or that's, that at least explains why I'm, I'm digging through everything on the planet to find some way of substantiating this.

Vala Erasmus and others pointed out that the Vulgate had been corrupted. That is a true statement that we've already made earlier today, right? Remember Lorenzo Vala. How did he know the Vulgate had been corrupted?

He went to Jerome, Jerome's commentaries. This is why two, two Latin commentaries have shalt be, but in the main text, it has Sanctus, Sanctus being the Latin for what? The Holy One. So in the commentary, someone makes a reference to shalt be, but in the text itself, it says Sanctus.

This was the main reason for a clarified edition by Erasmus, which raises the question, did Erasmus make the change that is being suggested here? I don't know what Erasmus' reading is in his Latin, but I know what it is in the Greek.

And it's Hasias. So here you, you say something that's true. The Latin Vulgate has corruptions in it. And therefore, we should corrupt the Greek New Testament based upon our reconstruction of what we think might be a corruption of the Latin Vulgate.

That's not how you do it, but that's how it's being done. P47, remember I told you, remember this, P47 has the and that Beza pointed to, which was going on to fulfill the triad. Now, do you remember what he was talking about here?

Let me pop it up again real quick. Let's take the that out. So P47 had right here, and I'll blow it back up again, right there. Chi is found in P47 and 2329, who was and, and so he's saying C, the writer P47 was going to say the whole triad, who was and shall be Ha-Esamenos, but he, what?

Put Chi and then went, oh, it says something else and just wrote something else and didn't erase Chi? Is, do you see what's being done here? What's being done is, well, I'm going to speculate that the reason Chi is there in P47 is that all the way back in that early period, this was the original reading, but somehow everybody always ended up putting Haseas instead in all the manuscripts that survived, but I'm going to assume that the scribe P47 was going to fulfill the triadic formula.

Well, maybe he was. Because that is the natural, that is the natural, if you were writing who is and who was, what's the next thing? I mean, even our hymns, we have it, right? I mean, holy, holy, holy, who is and was and is to come.

I mean, and if you are copying by phrases, Haseas and Ha-Esamenos do look a little bit alike. They both end with an Os. So it would be natural for a scribe.

To.

Go that direction. So maybe there is, but you see, that would be an error on the scribe's pocket. That would be the natural scribal error to be made. Not something you want to point to and say, oh, that substantiates my changing that 1 ,600 years down the road.

Well, 1 ,500 years down the road. Because that would be the more natural way of doing it. When we look at John 118 again, well, we looked at John 118, but when we analyze it, that's likewise part of the argument.

When you write Ha-Monoghanes, the unique, what's the normal term that comes after Monoghanes? A child, either a Huyas or a.

Pideas,.

Child, son, something like that. That's the normal term that comes after Monoghanes. So that would be much easier to explain a scribe doing that because it's natural than to put the Os, which would never come after Monoghanes.

That has to be done purposefully. That's part of the process of textual criticism, is considering those particular things. Just a few more here. I said, nothing you gave me even begins to approach a serious attempt to give a defensible basis of adopting the TR reading against the entire Greek manuscript tradition.

It is backwards. Start with a conclusion, use anything to support it, period. He said, Theodore Beza explained in his 1582 footnote that the triadic declaration appears when Jehovah, Greek Kurios, appears in Revelation.

The KJV translators did not slavishly follow Beza, but chose to adopt Shaltbe knowing that Beza was correct. Now again, only a very small proportion of the King James translators worked on the book of Revelation.

So to try to grab the entire authority of all those august men is a little bit unfair. Probably a very small number of men were involved in the translation of Revelation and probably not the leading men were involved in the translation of the book of Revelation.

But we know that Theodore Beza argued for this emendation. We know that he did. But we've already shown that there is contextual reason not to do it, and the most important thing is let's put it this way.

What do we know that Theodore Beza didn't know? Theodore Beza had access to let's be kind um and say, well remember Erasmus did not have a manuscript of the book of Revelation. I forgot to mention this earlier.

But this, it's important here. Erasmus gets to Revelation. He assumed he could find one in the library. There wasn't one. He asked his friends, I need a Greek manuscript of Revelation. It's the last book I got to work on, and the printer is a mean nasty dude, and.

Nobody had anything.

What he eventually borrowed was a commentary on Revelation.

And.

What he had to do, he had to extract the Greek text from a Latin commentary on the book of Revelation. That took a little while. And then he gets to the end of the book, and the last pages have fallen off.

And that's where the story of his back translating from Latin into the Greek comes from, the last six verses in the book of Revelation, which have all these readings that are not found in Greek manuscripts anywhere.

He did a pretty good job. Most of us couldn't do what he did. But the fact is, he had almost nothing. And Beza had almost nothing as well. We have literally hundreds of times the manuscript evidence for Revelation today than they had at that time.

And when I say manuscript evidence, I mean from the original language, not from secondary languages, such as Latin, which was still given, I would say, more weight in that day, because everyone spoke Latin, than it should be given, given the history of the New Testament text itself.

So we have so much more today. Okay, Beza argued for this, but Beza did not, would Beza have argued for it today against a hundred times more Greek evidence than he had ever seen? We don't know. I doubt it.

I doubt it. But this is one of those issues where you got to be very, very careful if someone said, well, Theodore Bayes, Calvin's successor at Geneva, is a brilliant scholar, and he's wonderful, and blah, blah, blah, blah.

That's fine. But he still didn't have what we have today. It's like when people point you to Dean Burgon, who opposed Westcott and Hort, and defended the traditional texts, and stuff like that. People loved him.

Dean Burgon, a brilliant scholar. Yeah, but he lived before the papyri were discovered. How do you know what position he would have in light of the data we possess today? How do you know he would accept the same presuppositions of textual study that he used then?

In light of having papyri that go back to the second century. You don't know that. And so, citing him, and bringing him in as evidence, or Beza here, in the modern context, means red flag, traditions, once again.

And believe me, if we can recognize that, Bart Ehrman's disciples can too. And that's why this stuff is simply indefensible in that context. Check this out. Hutter, in his 1599 Dodecaglot, that's a lot of translations, has shalt be in his Hebrew version.

Wow.