Reliability of the New Testament-Session 3

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Advanced it gets, the more challenging it gets, I guess. All right. Well, I'm glad that you all are as excited as Kenny is about numbers.

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For a while, I stopped telling him how many miles I had ridden because it was just getting too crazy. But anyways, all right.

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So afternoon, I realize that you all just finished lunch and all that yummy food is sitting down there.

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And your blood sugar count is going to be crashing here in a few minutes.

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The only thing I ask is if you're going to start snoring, try to lean over on somebody at an angle where you won't.

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Because that's the one thing that just drives me insane is if I hear snoring. Then it's really tough to remain focused at a particular point like that.

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So we will try to avoid that. I actually managed about a 15 -minute snoozer myself.

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So I'm ready to rock and roll. So you burn off those sleep desires that way.

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OK. So we've already mentioned that the majority of the 5 ,800 plus Greek manuscripts date from after 1 ,000

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AD. And they comprise the majority text. That's that fractur M for majority.

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And so, I mean, that makes sense, right? I mean, the older the manuscript, the less likely it's going to survive fire and war and bugs and just the natural decay of life.

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And so after 1 ,000 AD, you have far more manuscripts than you do before then.

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We've already mentioned the earlier text called papyri, written in unsealer majuscule. Here is a graph that gives you an idea of the distribution by centuries of the various manuscripts.

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So your papyri are your blue down here. And they go up through about the 7th century.

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And then your unseals, your majuscules, they're written in the same way, but it's what they're written on.

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Papyri doesn't last as long. The unseals are written on vellum or animal hide.

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Now, that's not like a big, thick piece of cow hide or something like that. As I mentioned last night, it's astonishing how in years, years, years ago, they were able to make incredibly thin, high -quality vellum manuscript material.

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I mean, it's very expensive, but they were able to do it. And they were beautiful, beautiful manuscripts. And then you have the minuscules starting in the 9th century.

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And then by the 11th century, they are all that is. And last night, I explained that again. And we sort of looked at it a little bit just a while ago.

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And that is the minuscule is the small letters, capital letters, space between words, punctuation.

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What we read today in our Greek New Testaments is minuscule text. And for all this time then, you had had the unseal form where all capitals, no space between words.

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I don't know how this happened, but did someone just wake up one morning and go, you know, this would be a lot easier if there were spaces between words.

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I mean, how does that work? I don't even know how that happens. I've got a great idea.

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You're crazy. You're nuts. No, look at it. Look, it's a whole lot easier. But it obviously worked.

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Now, all of this takes place in history. So for example, this is just a brief discussion of why

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I don't accept majority text theory. There are a small minority of scholars that do. But the problem with counting noses or counting manuscripts is that it gives you a different text depending on what century you're in.

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So if we looked at the majority text, say, in the first five centuries,

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I do need to explain these, Alexandrian and Byzantine, these are phrases, terms, that were used and are still being used but are being phased out in a sense.

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What do I mean by that? As we're going to see when we start looking at the

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CBGM materials a little bit later on, the real difficulty is seeing how manuscripts are related to one another.

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It's not like they have, hi, this manuscript was copied by Bob in such and such a year at such and such time from such and such a manuscript.

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That would be wonderful. That would make things a lot easier. But you don't have anything like that.

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And if you could create a tree of the manuscripts, then it would be a whole lot easier to see what reading came from what and everything else.

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But you have a piece of papyrus in a museum or in a library someplace.

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And how do you date a papyrus? They don't have numbers on them, a very small number of them.

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Yeah, OK, I know what you guys are doing back there because you've heard this before. You think because you're behind everybody, you can get away with this kind of stuff.

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But I can see you. I can see you because they've heard me say this before.

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How do you date a papyrus? You walk up to them and say, hey, baby, would you like to go out tonight? That's what you told him, isn't it?

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I know. I know what's going on back there. I was going to be the mature one this year and not use that joke.

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But no, no, it had to, there you go. How do you date a papyrus? It's basically based upon the formation of the letters, the style.

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The Roman emperors would bring in certain scribes to do their official documents. And people would adopt the style that these scribes would use and things like that.

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And so you compare them with one another. We have over the past, well, it hasn't even been a full 100 years yet that we have had real good access to the papyri.

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But we made discoveries at places like Nag Hammadi and Oxyrhynchus and places in Egypt where you were able to basically break into these, well, they were garbage dumps in essence.

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But they had been super well -preserved over the centuries. And there were receipts and contracts and military records and all sorts of stuff like that, which you would not think would be overrelevant to the

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New Testament, but they can be. For example, we have found stuff where someone took some portions of a

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New Testament manuscript and scraped the ink off and then wrote something else on it. And that happened to be dated.

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So now that gives you an idea of when you look at what was written on it before, which you can tell under ultraviolet what it was, gives you an idea, well, it can't be any older than this because there's a date on it.

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And so that gives you an idea of where it came from and the timing. And it's fascinating. It really is. It's a little bit like I've caught my wife and my daughter a few times watching these cold case things on TV.

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And it's a little bit like doing that kind of work, investigative work.

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And so it can be sort of fun to do that kind of stuff. Anyhow, so when you look at the early papyri, at least in the first, say, 500 years, when we compare them with one another, up until just recently, they would be placed into families based upon a relatively small number of readings.

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So they were called the Alexandrian, Western Caesarean, and Byzantine. The Byzantine manuscript tradition still exists.

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And that terminology is still being used. The others are fading out because the analysis, CBGM, which we'll talk about later, is basically saying those families didn't really exist.

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But the best we could do up until recently was to sort of lump them together in groups of similarity based upon a relatively small number of variants.

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That's what CBGM does is it does the same thing, but it does it based upon all their variants because the computer can see connections amongst millions and millions of pieces of data points, which our brains just can't do.

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And so if you compared what were called the Alexandrian manuscripts with the Byzantine manuscripts, all the early papyri and things like that are

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Alexandrian in text type. And then the Byzantine starts coming along at a later point in time.

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And so if you just counted manuscripts, the majority up through the 5th century would be one thing.

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And then at the end of the 9th century would be sort of even, even. And then it would become Byzantine after that.

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And so what does that really tell you? It doesn't really help you see what the original manuscripts look like and what the original readings were.

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And so that's one of the reasons that you wouldn't want to go there. And let me just ask, if you're thinking with me, what happens right around in this period here?

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Something very important happens. Because see, the Alexandrian manuscripts are generally, and we can't say this for certainty, but are generally associated with North Africa.

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Alexandria is in North Africa. And Byzantium, of course, Istanbul in modern

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Constantinople in the ancient world, of course, held out until 1453 as a

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Christian city. But right in this time period is the rise of Islam.

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And so between 632 and 732, you have the century of Islamic expansion.

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Muhammad dies in 632. In 732, the Islamic expansion into Europe is stopped at the

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Battle of Tours in France. And in that 100 years, Islam takes over all of North Africa.

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North Africa was a completely Christian place up until Islam rose.

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And so if that's where the Alexandrian manuscripts were primarily being produced, and now it's a

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Muslim area, well, that's not really good on manuscript production, is it? You're going to have a reduction of manuscripts being produced along those lines because of the rise of Islam.

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And so that historical reality impacts the things that you see as far as the history of the text.

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But what's the most important thing? What did the apostles write?

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What was the original reading? That's the key. And then you have to recognize there's been a historical process down through time, down to where we are today.

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And what were the elements in that process? And what was involved in the production of the text?

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So as I said, the way that we're going to be able to stay awake during this dreaded 2 to 3

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PM Saturday afternoon hour. Isn't there some football game or something going on?

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Tomorrow. Tomorrow? Tomorrow? Oh, OK. All right. I don't know. I gave up on all that stuff a number of years ago.

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But I understand that's a Kansas City. Are they? OK, OK, yeah. I did see, though, on Twitter, I saw, is it

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Mahomes? He, after the, after the, and wasn't there some controversy about overtime or something?

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It was a great, great game. Well, all I saw was he running through the crowd at the end to find the opposing quarterback to hug him and give him congratulations and stuff like that.

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And I was sort of like, I like that guy. That's cool. I think that's pretty neat. Anyways, so hopefully that's not in the morning so that it won't affect our church service tomorrow morning.

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Christians would never do that. They would. Yeah, yeah, sure they would, yeah. When you see somebody out in the congregation, that makes you feel really good.

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Makes you feel like they're really tuned in, that the spirit's moving. Well, actually, the offense is moving.

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And yeah, OK, anyway. But to help us get through this difficult part of the afternoon, it's always good to use pictures.

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And that's what we will do. So here is a little fragment.

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It is about the size of a credit card, so figure about yay big.

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It is written on both sides. Again, remember, I mentioned last evening that that was sort of a, some people have actually concluded that it was a

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Christian invention to write on both sides of papyri, that it was those wacky

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Christians that came along with that idea. As you can see, it does not contain a lot of writing.

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So imagine how this was discovered. You may know that the

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Brits ruled Egypt for a number of years. And there was actually a long history behind all of that.

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And in the process, they stole a lot of stuff, to put it bluntly.

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They appropriated a great deal of important stuff from Egypt and dragged it off to London, which is why

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London's museums are filled with such amazing stuff, like the Rosetta Stone and things like that. And along with all of that, there were boxes and boxes and boxes of papyri fragments.

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So somewhere in the early 1930s, some guy, if you can imagine having this exciting a life, is in the basement of a museum in London.

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And he is shuffling through these little fragments, these little pieces of papyrus.

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And you've really got to be good at reading ancient languages to be able to take just a segment of something like this and figure out, because you're only looking at half of a word, a quarter of a word, one word here, half a word down there.

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And to be able to read that stuff, all sorts of different kinds of handwriting styles and things like that.

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He comes across this one. And obviously, this is at the top of what was the top of the page. You can see the top margin up here.

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And so he looks at this and, believe it or not, is able to recognize what the text is, what is being said, just from what's here.

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And OK, here, I have fonts.

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I've had fonts for many years that match the early papyri. And so this is what the text would look like as it flowed around this particular portion of this page.

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All the rest of the page has disappeared. This is the only thing that has survived. And if I recall, the next one here, no, no, no, no, no, go back, go back.

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I thought I had both sides. I thought I had a graphic of both sides. I do someplace else. But anyways, he reads this.

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And all of a sudden, he realizes what he's reading. Back up one more step before I tell you.

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You need to understand that in the 1870s and 1880s,

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German scholarship sort of reigned supreme. And they had developed all the sciences of higher textual criticism, form criticism, source criticism, and had come to the conclusion that the

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Gospel of John could not have been written any earlier than about 170 AD. Now, why did they come to that conclusion?

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Because it has such a high view of Jesus. They had embraced Darwinian views and Hegelian dialectic and all the rest of this kind of stuff and had come to the conclusion that since the

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Gospel of John has such a high view of Christ, it had to have taken quite some time for that to develop.

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Because we all know Jesus was just a peasant traveling around in Israel. There was nothing more to it than that.

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And so you just simply have to believe that John was written probably about 170

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AD. Now, obviously, Bible -believing Christians were like, no, no, no. But that's the assured results of scholarship, you see.

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And so that's your background. And so this guy's reading this thing, and he realizes, hey,

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I've seen this before. This is from the 18th chapter of the

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Gospel of John. It's from Jesus's interview with Pilate.

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Remember when Pilate says, what is truth? So on the front side is John 18, 31 to 34.

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On the backside, John 18, 37 to 38. You only got a portion of it. It's not really important in finding textual variance, because there's not enough text.

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But what it does tell you is what the Gospel of John looked like, well, when.

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Once he found this, it was sent to the four leading papyrologists of the day.

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And of course, it's been examined over, and over, and over, and over, and over again since then. Now that we've found so many more papyri since that time, that you can compare the handwriting style with, and things like that.

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And in the 1930s, three of the four put it in the first quarter of the second century, and one put it at the end of the first century.

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Now what does that mean? So one of them said like 95 AD, and the other said around 120

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AD. Now generally, when you date a papyrus, you go 25 years each side, so a 50 year range.

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Because again, it's not an exact science. So most today put it between like 120, 150, somewhere around there.

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It could be earlier. It could be later. But most, most scholars would say we're looking at the earliest fragment of the

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New Testament. Now there's some scholars who say, no, I think this one's 10 years earlier, or something like that.

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Now, but realize what kind of an earthquake that caused.

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Because the Germans have told you that John wasn't written until 170. So it's sort of pretty tricky to have a portion of John from about 125, 50 years before it was supposed to be written.

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And so all these books that have been written about that just sort of had to be thrown out or put on a shelf someplace by one simple, small piece of papyrus that was discovered in a basement of a library someplace.

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And some guy was smart enough to realize what it was. And so it is fascinating to me that you would, the modern theory, if you're familiar with this, the modern theory is if you go to most seminaries, most

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Bible colleges, you'll be taught that Mark was the first gospel written. Then Matthew and Luke used

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Mark to write theirs. And then John was written way toward the end of the first century. That's the normal idea.

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What's interesting is the gospel that we have the earliest attestation for and the fullest attestation amongst the papyri is

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John. And the one we have the least attestation for is Mark.

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We only have a couple of papyri fragments of Mark and Toto. The one that I'll show you here in a little while,

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P45, that I've done so much work on, is probably the earliest fragment of Mark that we have.

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So does that mean that that whole story is wrong? Well, no. But it does make you go, well, that is interesting.

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Is that relevant? Yeah, it probably is. But anyway, so this is from my debate with Bart Ehrman.

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See, there I am with Bart Ehrman. And notice my tie. It is made out of this papyri.

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Now, don't worry. The original was not damaged in the making of this tie. But both sides of this papyri are visible on my tie.

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And I had a second one made. And there I am giving it to Bart Ehrman. He has actually, it's one of the few times he smiled during the course of the debate.

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And I don't know what he ever did with it. I don't know if he burned it. I don't know if he wears it on mock fundamentalist day.

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I have no idea. But there I am giving him a copy of that tie.

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So there you go. Now, this one's fun. This one is one of my,

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I love talking about this one in various churches. Because I get to, now, I can't do this today.

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But well, we've got Kenny here. He's an elder. So we can throw it his direction.

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This is P115. It is one of only two papyri that we have that contain portions of the

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Book of Revelation. It is never, ever the Book of Revelations.

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Just to mention that in passing. If you want me to mock you, if you want me to shoot you in the eye with a bright laser while you're falling asleep, whatever it is, say

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Revelations. Or say, turn to Psalms 103. It's not

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Psalms 103. Do you turn to Hymns 103? No, you do not turn to Hymns 103. You turn to Hymn 103.

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So just be careful how you cite the Bible. And we will get along as friends.

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Anyway, so this is the Book of Revelation, one of only two papyri. And so the way they've laid it out here is this is what the page would have looked like.

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So you can see we don't even have the majority of the page. So that's just the way it is.

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And many of these early papyri are very, very fragmentary. But what's interesting is what this particular page is.

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Because as I use my graphical capacities and skills here, ooh, did you see that?

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We zoomed right in on it there. I did that myself. Just want you to know, if you have to go, ooh, it's

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OK. It's all right. Thank you. OK, after a while, it gets a little much.

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But this is from Revelation 13. And as most of you know,

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Revelation 13 has a certain revelation in it. And that is the number of the beast, the number of the beast.

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And everybody knows the number of the beast. Every guy riding by on a Harley has a tattoo on his shoulder, has it painted on his gas tank, whatever, the number of the beast.

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And I'm certainly old enough to remember, the first person

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I remember being identified with the number of the beast was

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Henry Kissinger. Y 'all remember that? Henry Kissinger.

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Did you know he's still alive? He's about 147. It's amazing. It's just astonishing.

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But he's still alive. He seemed old when I was a kid. So he's, yeah, but he's still kicking out there. And so every presidential season, you have people coming up with ways of adding up people's names,

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Obama, Hillary, Nixon. I remember all of them being identified with 666.

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And I don't think anybody bothered with Joe because he was alive back then anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

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But so 666, the number of the beast, except for one little tiny problem that Hal Lindsey didn't seem to know about and the

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Left Behind series didn't seem to know anything about. And that is in the two earliest papyri of the

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Book of Revelation, that right there does not add up to 666.

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It adds up to 616. The number of the beast in the two earliest manuscripts of Revelation is 616, not 666.

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Now, there's a joke that Dan Wallace tells, and I've always credited him for this, but it makes you think.

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And that's very hard to do at this time on a Saturday afternoon. But Dan Wallace says 666 is the number of the beast, and 616 is the number of the neighbor of the beast.

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So you think about addresses. And you have to be a textual critic to really find it to be overly funny.

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But there is a much better explanation. And that is, if you spell out

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Caesar Nero in Hebrew and in Greek and use the letters to add up the numbers, in one it's 666, and the other is 616.

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So it depends on whether you use the Hebrew or the Greek. I forget which one's which. But in Hebrew, it adds up.

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I think it's in Hebrew it adds up to 616, and in Greek it's 666. It's one of the two.

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Yeah, you might have to switch those around. So whatever that does to your eschatology, whatever, that's what we have in this early papyrus.

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So if you ever hear anybody freaking out because they just went through the drive -through and their bill was $6 .66,

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and I've had people do that, you can go, chill. It's OK. It's a textual variant.

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You're all right. And they'll go, what? Trust me, I know what I'm talking about.

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Here is P72. And I wish it was a little bit bigger, because this image is fully readable and fully translatable.

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It's extremely clear on my screen. In fact, right here, you can see

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Petru Epistole Be, the epistle of Peter, Be, second

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Peter. So this is the end of first Peter, and this is the beginning of second Peter. And again, it's a little bit hard, but you might be able to see a number of lines, like right there, right there, right there, right there, that are between lines, like right there.

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There's one over here, right there. Those are the nomina sacra that I told you about last night.

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That is, the places, and I mentioned them again today, we don't know why, but Christians, and this is one easy way to recognize a manuscript produced by a

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Christian, is they have this weird thing where there's all these words that have been abbreviated and have a line written over top of them, the sacred names, nomina sacra.

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And so God, and Jesus, and Lord, and Savior, and these are all, there's numerous nomina sacra here at the beginning of second

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Peter, and there's one, just one over on the other page at the end of first Peter.

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Now, the reason I have such a good picture of this, I didn't take this picture, but in 1993, yeah, 1993,

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Rich and I got in a, I think we may have even rented a car back then, I'm not sure, and we drove up to Denver, Colorado, because Pope John Paul II came to Denver, Colorado for World Youth Day.

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And so we went up there, and we had all sorts of tracks with us, and we stood along the pilgrimage routes, and we passed out tracks and witnessed to people for a number of days up there.

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But we also arranged debates, and I debated gerrymatitics for seven hours, three and a half hours, two nights in a row on the papacy, and those are available on Sermon Audio.

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That was sort of before the video craze and all that kind of stuff. Man, we're coming up on 30 years?

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Next year? I need a chair. 30 years ago, wow, it does not feel like it was 30 years ago we did this.

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Anyway, at some point during that trip, Rich and I are at a health food store, because we're very conscious of health food, called

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Winchell's, and I'm reading the newspaper.

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They still had newspapers back then, too. And I see a notification that the

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Papal Treasures Exhibit is in town, well, because the Pope's in town. And it's at a local museum, and I'm looking at the description of it, because I don't care about tiaras and diamonds and stuff like that.

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But then they mentioned that a page from P72 would be on display at the

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Papal Treasure Exhibit. Well, this is the page that was there. And so you walk in, and I said to Rich, we're going.

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One way or the other, we're going. It was one of those things where we had to get tickets for a certain time and all that kind of thing. So we went, and it was one of the first things they had.

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And it was under glass, thankfully. And you walk up, and it's got a description of it and what it contains and things like that.

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Well, I'm in hog heaven, OK? I mean, look at the

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Nomen Sacra. And not only that, by the way, let me see if, yeah, right here. OK, here comes some more graphics stuff.

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Just be here. And you go, well, what's that?

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This is, so there's the Nomen Sacra of God again in the genitive singular.

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Our God and Soteros, Savior. And then notice

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Jesus Christ is three letters instead of two. There sometimes will be two, sometimes it'll be three. This is called a

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Granville Sharp construction. And it's one of a couple places in the

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New Testament where Jesus is identified as God, or the term God. You have God and Savior, and they're connected by Chi.

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The first has the article, the second does not. The rule from a, actually it was an

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English abolitionist, is that in that construction, both nouns are referring to the same person.

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And so I'm immediately recognizing the Granville Sharp construction, and I'm commenting on it, and stuff like that, basically to myself.

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I mean, Rich is standing there. And so I'm just, this is all

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I came to see. I don't have any reason to be going anyplace else. And so people would come up, and they'd read the description, and they'd look at me, and they'd lean over and look at Rich and go, can he read that?

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And Rich would go, yeah. Look at this, Harold, this man's reading this ancient manuscript. And so this crowd would gather around, and the security people are doing this number, you know.

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So Rich would drag me off to go look at a tiara for a while, and then I'd come back, and I'm looking at P72, because it was just so readable.

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Now, you may notice it's not the best handwriting in the world. It's not a perfect line, for example.

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I mean, you've sort of got a line going up here at the end, and that's not exactly, you know, that's going one direction.

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And it really doesn't look like this scribe was at the top of his class.

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And he could have been just a businessman. It could have been, you know,

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I've thought about many times, what was the origination of a manuscript like this?

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I mean, what if you were traveling, and you went into a city, and Christians would always try to find other

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Christians to fellowship with, to worship with, and to have the Lord's Supper with? And what if you came into a fellowship early on?

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I mean, this is dated 175 to 200. And they bring out a book you've never heard before.

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And they're reading, and you go, what is that? Well, these are Peter's epistles. We don't have that in our fellowship.

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Well, you want to make a copy? Because that's the only way you could have it. And it may have been during a time of persecution.

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The person who wrote this may have been risking their life to make this copy. We don't know.

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But it's possible it comes from that time period. In fact, the worst persecution was 303 to 313, and this is well before then.

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So did someone risk their lives to write these words that have been preserved for us by God's providence so much later in time?

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And then, of course, the thought has crossed my mind many times. How big would our

35:59

Bible be if we actually had to write it out? How many of us would have all of Ezekiel?

36:11

Yeah. Right. We would all have really abbreviated scriptures,

36:19

I think, if we had to write them all out. But that's what people had to do for a very, very, very, very, very, very long time.

36:25

You had to really love this stuff to put out this kind of effort. And so here you're seeing the result of someone.

36:34

He never thought that what he was writing would be on display around the world 1 ,800 years later, obviously.

36:47

But there it is. And it's the earliest manuscript we have of 1st, 2nd Peter in Jude.

36:53

And so it's something to see, and it's something to translate. And eventually, we had to move along, and there you go.

37:03

All right. Then we have P75. This is actually the end of Luke and the beginning of John.

37:13

And if it was bigger, again, you'd be able to actually read N -R -K -N -H -L -O -G -S -K -H -L -O -G -S -A -N -P -R -O -S -T -O -N -T -H -A -N -K -T -H -A -S -A -N -H -L -O -G -S.

37:21

John 1 .1. In the beginning, it was Word, Word was with God, Word was God. And notice it does say, according to John.

37:28

So the titles were very early, very, very early on these manuscripts.

37:37

And this is, again, about 175 to 200, same time range. Now, this one's fascinating.

37:43

This one is absolutely fascinating. Think with me for a second.

37:51

You are, let's say, and I've thought about doing this, and I'll probably do it if I get to teach on this at Grace Bible Theological Seminary at some point.

38:03

We'll do it as a class project if you have the time. But you have been assigned to hand copy the

38:13

Gospels. Now, think of how would you do it. If you happen to do it longhand, you're sitting there, and we'll go ahead and let you use a modern writing instrument rather than a quill.

38:26

Can you imagine how much fun that was? And we'll let you do it under good lighting and stuff like that, which they didn't really have back then.

38:38

But how would you, what would the actual process be? Would you copy it word by word?

38:46

Would you do one word at a time? Would you do a phrase? How long a phrase would you do?

38:53

Would it depend on how easy that phrase was to remember? If it was a common phrase that everybody uses, oh,

38:58

OK, I'll just go ahead and write out maybe five words without actually looking.

39:05

I read it. There's five words. I write five words. Would you do three words, three words, two?

39:10

How would you do that? It sort of depends on the individual. But when we examine the errors that these scribes make, and there are people who literally that's all they do in life is write papers and books on Codex Sinaiticus, or this papyrus, or that papyrus.

39:32

And there are entire papers on the scribal habits of the scribe of P75. There are.

39:39

We are a boring lot. These are not people that are doing first -person shooter games online.

39:50

OK? What we've discovered about this particular manuscript, it's extremely accurate.

40:00

It's extremely accurate. Why is that important? Well, I'm going to show you a unsealed manuscript a little bit later on called

40:07

Codex Vaticanus, Codex B. We know that B and P75 are directly related.

40:16

Vaticanus is not a copy of P75. But basically,

40:22

Vaticanus is down here around 325 to 350. Up here is

40:28

P75. It's 175 to 200. And they have a common ancestor.

40:36

OK? So whatever, it may be the direct thing that P75 was copying is the same one being copied by Vaticanus.

40:46

Or there might be some steps in between. But the point is they are related. And if they're related, they have to be related earlier than P75.

40:56

That means their connection point is back at no earlier than 150.

41:01

And it could be 120 to 125. In other words, way, way, way, way, way back there.

41:07

You need to understand something. Let me just throw this out here so you've got some context. When you're reading about Suetonius and Tacitus and Dionysus and some of the

41:18

Greek historians that you'll see quoted in history books all the time, on average, and I'm going to put this up a little bit later.

41:27

So if you're taking notes, you'll get to see it again. On average, the writings contemporary with the

41:33

New Testament, the first extant manuscript we have of any of them, on average, is 500 years after the original was written, and is frequently as much as 900 years later.

41:51

We're talking about having manuscript copies of the New Testament that are within the lifetimes of the last writers.

42:01

There is no comparison. And I will play you a clip where Bart Ehrman will confirm this.

42:07

He will say, we have far earlier attestation for the New Testament than for any other book of antiquity.

42:14

You don't hear that in the local university. They'll quote the secular writings, but they won't tell you that we have significantly better manuscript evidence for the

42:25

New Testament than any of those books they're quoting, but they'll use them anyways. They'll use them anyways. So Vaticanus, P75, go back to an earlier ancestor.

42:36

That means when they agree on a reading, that means that reading goes way, way, way back, far earlier than any other secular work would ever be able to dream of having evidence of.

42:50

That's the first thing. Secondly, I'm sorry? Why is that? Why is what?

42:55

Why is it that it goes back so far? Because P75 is 175 to 200.

43:01

Vaticanus is down here at about 325, and they're both copying. There had to have been something before P75.

43:08

If it's copying that and Vaticanus is copying that, it has to be before 175.

43:14

So all the way back, it could be 150. It could be 125. It means that there is a very, very early source that gives rise to both of these manuscripts.

43:24

So when they both agree on a reading, that means that's a very, very, very ancient reading, especially when that disagrees like the majority text or something like that.

43:32

This has a tremendous amount of weight. There's another reason for it. When you look at P75 and the kinds of errors that are made, because he does a great job, but he does make errors.

43:42

Guess how he copied his manuscript? We can tell by the nature of the errors how he did it.

43:50

Letter by letter. Not word by word, not phrase by phrase.

43:57

One letter at a time. That took a while.

44:04

That probably means he wasn't actually reading it. He was making just a simple, straight, mechanical copy.

44:11

That's as close to a photocopier as you're going to get until 1949 when they invented it. P66, we'll see here in a moment, phrases.

44:21

Not letter by letter, not even word by word, phrases. And hence, interesting errors as a result. But it's almost like this guy was an accountant or something and produced an incredibly accurate.

44:36

We could wish it had more of the Gospels than it has. But that's

44:43

P75, which, by the way, I mentioned in John 5 .4, the woman taken in adultery.

44:49

P66, P75 will be cited together. These are the two earliest Gospel manuscripts we have of John that contain pretty much the whole text.

44:57

And they're very, very accurate. So there's P75. And there's P66. Now, I like this particular picture because instead of just a single page, which is what most of your pictures of the papyri are, that's the book.

45:13

That's what the book looked like before it was disassembled, basically. And so you can see, and this makes sense, if you have a book, if you have a

45:24

Bible, and you carry your Bible, my fellow pastor,

45:30

Jeff Durbin, has one of these Jeffrey Rice rebinds. And it's an

45:36

ESV. And he's had it for only two years. And it looks like he's had it for 25 years because he travels so much and he sticks it in his backpack.

45:46

Well, where's the damage going to be? Well, notice where the damage is here. Lower outside corner, upper.

45:54

Not as much in the upper, but especially down here at the lower part. You'll notice that all the papyri have that same.

46:00

If it's on this side, it goes this way, like this on the other side, depending on which side of the book it was on.

46:07

And of course, the spine is going to be the strongest place. So you're going to have the least damage over on this side.

46:13

But that's what the book itself looked like when it was originally produced. And it would have cost, in modern days, thousands of dollars to personally own even something like this of gospels.

46:28

This is also John 1 .1. This is same spot in P66. This scribe was not nearly as meticulous.

46:37

He was more concerned about how it looked than its accuracy at times. And like I said, toward the end of John, it starts falling apart.

46:47

And there's damage back there. But there is P66. And there's kai theos ein ha -lagos.

46:55

If you're arguing with Jehovah's Witnesses, there's the phrase. And you'll notice that the os has been, there's the nomina sacra.

47:04

There's the line above it, and theta sigma. In unsealed text, the sigma looks like a large

47:12

C when it's at the end of a word. There it is at the end of lagos as well.

47:20

For those of you that read Greek and are wondering why it looks weird like that. OK. I will try to be brief.

47:27

But this is the one I know the most about because I've spent the most time with. This is P45. This is the one

47:32

I mentioned to you. It contains portions of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts. It's the only manuscript we have, only gospels manuscript that we have from the ancient world that has those five books.

47:45

They're not in that order. It was originally in what's called the Western order. Well, that's the theory.

47:54

We're not 1 ,000 % certain. But it was probably in the Western order rather than in the order that Matthew, Mark, Luke, John that we have today.

48:03

But this is actually the largest fragment. That's the most text you're going to get on any page.

48:09

This is from John chapter 10, actually. I did a whole sermon series years ago.

48:17

Didn't finish it up. I probably should. But where I preached from each chapter that there was any text in P45 in.

48:29

So if P45 contained any text from that chapter, then I preached from that chapter.

48:34

And so obviously, we did John chapters 10 and 11, because that's what this contains.

48:41

I can basically tell you that this scribe did try to smooth out certain irregularities in the original text.

48:55

So there are some unusual readings in P45. And if you cancel them out, if P45's alone, then ignore it.

49:08

But if it joins with others, then it's a very valuable witness to early readings and things along those lines.

49:17

And it is interesting. I don't have time to go into it right now. But we have pictures of P45 from the 50s.

49:26

And then we have pictures from today. It's in the Chester Beaty Library in Dublin.

49:32

So I've seen it. And it's amazing how much it has degraded just in those years, around the edges primarily.

49:44

But it shocked me when I saw a comparison of 50, 60 years ago, around the edges, there were still clear letters that are no longer clear today.

49:57

And so I wish

50:03

I had spent more time with it at that time. I can see a gnomon and a sacer here. I won't bother to point out to it right now. But I will tell you the story about this.

50:12

P46, now look, you two, no funny business back there.

50:18

Ken, those of you who have been here before, I'm going to ask you all to participate in a little poll.

50:28

If you know about this, you are not allowed to participate in the poll,

50:33

OK? But if you don't, then I invite you to participate.

50:38

I hope that you will not disrespect me by not voting in the poll, because it hurts me.

50:46

It really hurts when I ask people to join with me, and then you just sit there going, nope,

50:55

I'm not going to do it. You can't make me do it. What are you going to do, take a picture and put it on Facebook? No, I'm not going to do it.

51:01

So P46 is from 175 to 200, again, the same date range.

51:08

It's the earliest collection we have of Paul's major epistles. It doesn't have the pastoral epistles, but Romans, and Galatians, and Philippians, and so on and so forth.

51:20

So the big question for everybody is, what's the longest anonymous book in the

51:28

New Testament? Hebrews. And if you've got a King James version, it says the epistle of Paul to the

51:34

Hebrews, right? It does, but we don't know who wrote Hebrews.

51:40

And so the interesting question would be, does P46 contain Hebrews? Because, I mean, it's early on, so this would be a very early witness to someone who believed that Paul wrote

51:55

Hebrews. If they include Hebrews in here, then they're obviously thinking Paul wrote it. And so the poll question is, for everyone who doesn't already know the answer, do you think

52:07

P46 contains Hebrews, yes or no? So for those who are participating, how many of you think

52:15

P46 does contain Hebrews? How many of you say it doesn't contain

52:23

Hebrews? And how many of you just sat there and said,

52:28

I ain't voting, because I don't care whether you're hurt or not? Doesn't matter.

52:35

Doesn't matter. I've tried crying crocodile tears. I've gotten pictures of my grandkids out.

52:41

It doesn't matter. There are still people who are just so heartless that they will not participate. So fine.

52:48

By the way, have you all noticed I changed my sweater? OK, a couple of you did. A bunch of you are like, it's a

52:54

Coogee. Who knows? It's just a blur of color to me. I'm sitting in the back because it makes me nauseous.

53:03

But I changed Coogees just for you, just for those of you who care. It does contain Hebrews right after Romans. It does contain

53:09

Hebrews right after Romans, which only tells you that someone around the year 200 thought that Paul wrote Hebrews. I think

53:16

Paul preached Hebrews in Hebrew, and Luke wrote Hebrews in Greek.

53:22

Because it's not Paul's style. It's not Paul's language. It's not Paul's syntax. It's not Paul's grammar.

53:28

It's not Paul's vocabulary. But it is Luke's. But it is Paul's theology.

53:35

So my theory is Paul preached it in Hebrew, and Luke wrote it in Greek.

53:41

And that's how it became distributed. So here's P46. Now, you'll notice here, pros philippasius to the

53:48

Philippians. Sadly, when I saw this in Dublin, the page

53:56

I wanted to see was the page that contains the Carmen Christi, Philippians 2, 5 through 11.

54:02

That's what I really wanted to see, that. It was there, but they had that side facing down.

54:11

So I saw the back side of it, basically. And it was under very, very, very low light for the obvious reason that you don't want to degrade the writing.

54:24

And so it's in a case, and the light is up here, and then it's at an angle, sort of like about like that.

54:34

And so I'm trying to read it, but it is so dark. And so what

54:40

I did is I thought, well, if the light's up here, then where will it be the brightest?

54:48

Not where I am, but down here. And so I'm like, well, let me try something here.

54:55

And so I got down on my hands and knees, and I'm looking. Oh, yeah, yeah, that is a lot clearer.

55:00

OK, all right, so we're in Philippians 1 here, and I don't know how far

55:06

I got through it before I heard, sir, what are you doing, sir?

55:13

And there's a security guy standing behind me. You know what happened. No, we didn't get kicked out immediately, later, but you know what happened.

55:23

They've got cameras all over the place. And so I've imagined what it was like, these sort of bored museum security guys are sitting there, and they're watching their various monitors.

55:37

And they're watching us, and we're spending a whole lot of time looking at these papyri. And then

55:44

I'm down on my knees, and it's like, shh, Bob, Christians are worshiping the papyri again.

55:51

Did you go take care of it? Yeah, OK, I got it, all right, shh. And here they come. And no, we're actually translating it.

55:59

Sure, yeah, sure you are, yeah, yeah, but we were. We were. It was a lot of fun.

56:05

And if you ever get a chance to go there, I don't know that I will ever get to go there again. But if you get a chance to go there, you'll want to see those things.

56:12

Here I am at Macquarie State University in Sydney, Australia. I am very proud to say that I escaped

56:19

Australia before it became a prison camp again. And I am examining

56:25

P -91, which you can see over there on the left -hand side. It's a very small fragment, obviously.

56:34

There is a Nomena Sacra that I can see. It's from Acts 3, as I recall, maybe

56:42

Acts 2 and 3. They have this fragment. The rest of that fragment is in a museum in Italy, Milan, as I recall.

56:54

And the two institutions argue regularly as to who should send theirs to the other institution.

56:59

And they remain ununited about that. But I can tell you for certain, when

57:07

I went to visit with the curator, and he got it out, and we put it under the microscope, and we're looking at the formation of letters, and all the rest of stuff, and we're talking about the

57:19

Nomena Sacra, and I could just see the light in his eyes.

57:27

He loved talking about this stuff. And I could also see that his wife had stopped talking about this stuff about 45 years earlier.

57:35

This was about the first time he had had an exciting discussion about papyrology in a long time.

57:41

It was almost like he didn't want to see me go. So it was sad.

57:47

But there's P -91. That's around AD 250 there. And so those are some of the fun things.

57:55

I'm in Sydney, Australia. And my host is like, what would you like to do? Would you like to go to the opera house? When my wife came down once when

58:02

I was there, I was recording television programs on Mormonism or something like that. And she did the

58:08

Sydney Bridge thing, where you go over the top of the bridge, and you have to be chained on because it's so windy.

58:14

I mean, she's crazy. She goes and does stuff like that. I would never do something like that in the first place. But what did

58:20

I want to do? I wanted to go see P -91. That's how exciting life is with me.

58:27

Anyway, so after the Peace of the Church in AD 313, that's when the persecution ends,

58:35

Christians could have professional scribes copy the scriptures. And at this time, the great vellum or leather manuscripts begin to appear, including the three greatest of these,

58:43

Sinaiticus, which is the Hebrew letter Aleph, Vaticanus B, and Alexandrinus A.

58:50

Sinaiticus of Vaticanus may well have been among the Bibles copied with imperial monies at the time of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325.

58:56

We know from Eusebius that Constantine, knowing that only 12 years earlier, the

59:04

Romans had been destroying manuscripts right, left, and center, donated money for the production of Bibles, given that Rome had been destroying them.

59:15

And so these may be the result of that, or they may be just a few years after that. But they have come down to us.

59:23

So here is Codex Sinaiticus. That's very much what it looked like when

59:30

I saw it at the British Library or was it

59:35

Museum? British Library. Yeah, Library. In 2005, I walked into this collections room, and there was nobody there.

59:45

I was alone. And I just come walking in, and I walk up to this glass case, and there it is,

59:54

Codex Sinaiticus. And I'm literally looking around going, I'm about to get shot, aren't

01:00:01

I? Because I'm not supposed to be here. You're not supposed to get this close. This is a priceless treasure.

01:00:08

And there's nobody around. And so I look next to it. Codex Alexandrinus.

01:00:17

I turn around, Wycliffe Bible. Tyndale Bible. 1611 KJV. And I'm the only one in the room.

01:00:26

It was pretty freaky. It really, really was. You can see it's very large. But this is where people go, you've got to be kidding me.

01:00:35

Let's take a look at what the page actually looks like. Now remember, that's handwritten.

01:00:41

That's not printed. That is handwritten. The other thing to remember is, this is not just the

01:00:52

New Testament, it's the whole Bible. Genesis to Revelation, in Greek, it's huge.

01:01:00

Can you imagine how much it costs to produce something like this? There are entire books on the scribal habits of the scribes of Sinaiticus.

01:01:08

They've identified at least five, I think maybe six. But you would have a hard time telling the difference because of the beautiful regularity of the letters.

01:01:22

I mean, it's amazing. But there are still corrections. There's a correction in the margin here.

01:01:28

There's a correction right down here. There's one over here. And what's really interesting is, we can tell that some of the correctors were contemporaneous with when it was originally written, the fourth century.

01:01:47

And then others are 700 years down the road. This is a manuscript that was in regular use from the fourth century until the middle of the 1800s for about 1 ,500 years.

01:02:07

That's astonishing. It's truly astonishing when you think about it. And the story of its discovery is far too long for me to get into right now.

01:02:17

But I will tell you this because it's the only thing you may remember from this entire lecture. The man credited with the discovery of it, discovery in the sense of allowing the

01:02:29

Western world to know about it, is a man by the name of Count von Tischendorf. Count von

01:02:34

Tischendorf. Now, Tischendorf is frequently maligned and slandered.

01:02:42

Tischendorf was a believer. He was a firm believer in the gospel. He was a firm believer in the scriptures as the word of God.

01:02:49

He defended them against German liberalism, even though he was living in the heyday of German liberalism.

01:02:55

And he was absolutely convinced that there had to be more ancient copies of the scripture that had been found in his day.

01:03:04

And so he would raise money to go into places.

01:03:09

I mean, in these days, it was found in the library at St. Catherine's Monastery, which still exists to this day.

01:03:17

And in the 1850s, the only way you could get into St. Catherine's Monastery would be to be raised up the walls in a basket, because this was a fortress.

01:03:29

And I'm not sure I would trust those types of mechanisms. But he did it.

01:03:35

He was an adventuresome fellow. And he had visited.

01:03:43

And he had found some fragments. He saw a monk walking past him with a basket.

01:03:51

And he sort of just happened to glance in. And he stopped the monk. And he looks in.

01:03:57

And he recognizes these are ancient fragments of manuscripts. He says, where are you taking this?

01:04:04

To the kitchen to be burned. And he's like, well, think about it.

01:04:09

If you have an ancient library, and stuff's falling apart, and ends up on the floor, do you leave it on the floor?

01:04:16

What does that become? Massive fire hazard. And so they had been doing this for a long time.

01:04:24

And he freaks out, because he knows how valuable this stuff is. They don't know how valuable it is, but he does.

01:04:30

Well, that was a mistake. Because you're a foreigner, and you're freaking out about the stuff that these people burn in their kitchen.

01:04:38

That makes you weird. And so they sort of clam up. Because he's like, where did you get that? They allowed him to keep the fragments.

01:04:46

And so he visits again over the years. But he doesn't find anything.

01:04:53

And so finally, he's visiting one last time. And he has published an edition of the

01:05:01

Greek Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. And so the last night he's supposed to be there, one of the monks was assigned as his steward to take care of him.

01:05:16

And so he decides to thank the monk by giving him a copy of the

01:05:23

Septuagint. And so the monk's looking at it, and he goes, oh, I have one of these.

01:05:29

Really? Yeah. So he takes him to his room, to his cell. And he goes into the closet, and he lifts down out of the closet a volume wrapped in red cloth.

01:05:43

And he lays it down, and he pulls the cloth aside. And von Tischendorf is staring at Codex Sinaiticus.

01:05:53

He immediately knows this is what he's been looking for his entire life.

01:06:02

But he's grown up. So he's, oh, yeah, yeah, that's

01:06:12

Septuagint, yeah. Inside, he's going, yes! But he's being very calm.

01:06:19

Could I look this over tonight? Sure, sure. Into his room, close the door, goes crazy, goes nuts, does not sleep, does not sleep.

01:06:34

Spends the whole night just, oh, it contains that. Making notes.

01:06:42

Tries to buy it in the morning. Long, long, long, long story as to the czar of Russia got involved.

01:06:53

And to this day, the St. Catharines believe that he stole it.

01:07:00

But it eventually did leave the monastery. And Tischendorf edited a version of it and published it.

01:07:09

And it was, at the time, the earliest manuscript, for quite some time, it was the earliest manuscript that was available to us of the entirety of the

01:07:18

Bible. And it, along with Vaticanus, are right around the same time frame.

01:07:27

Vaticanus was known long before Tischendorf. But it wasn't really easily accessible, thanks to the

01:07:33

Vatican holding onto it. You can go to codexsinaticus .org. Now, I haven't gone there in a while.

01:07:39

I remember when it came online years ago, it was a big, big event, and it was great.

01:07:45

Problem was, they have not updated that website in like a decade. And it is now way out of date.

01:07:53

I hope they've updated it. Like I said, I haven't gone in a while. But when it first came online, you could have either straight -on light, or this is called raking light.

01:08:04

The light's coming from the side, so you can actually see the surface of the vellum and how it lies and stuff like that.

01:08:14

This is from John 14. And one of the reasons

01:08:19

I chose this one is you can see those dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, and then there's a word written in between.

01:08:27

And if it was a little bit bigger, you could really tell that the ink of the correction is very different than the ink of the original.

01:08:38

But that would still be listed in the Greek New Testament as aleph with a one or a two next to it, where you assign first -hand corrector, second -hand corrector, stuff like that.

01:08:48

But you can also see an important word. Does anyone know what that word right there is?

01:08:57

What's that? No? Parakletos. See?

01:09:05

Parakletos. Remember, that's always a s sound, parakletos. Well, it's a reference to the

01:09:12

Holy Spirit, but it's the comforter, the advocate. It's the terminology used in John 14 of the

01:09:18

Holy Spirit. And the reason I chose that is my Muslim friends think that's

01:09:25

Muhammad, and that it was originally perikletos. But here you have, long before Muhammad came along, you have parakletos, not perikletos.

01:09:35

So why would somebody have changed it until Muhammad came along? There's no reason to. So that's one of the reasons

01:09:41

I chose that particular one for that purpose.

01:09:47

It looks like they have it. It's looking pretty good? Yeah, well, on a phone,

01:09:52

I don't know. But I know the last time I tried to use it, it was next to impossible to get it to Zoom or do anything.

01:09:59

It was pretty good. Well, I'm glad they got around to it. Here is

01:10:04

Codex Vaticanus. It is pretty much contemporaneous with Sinaiticus.

01:10:13

You want another inside story? OK, years ago, after the

01:10:21

King James Only controversy came out with Bethany House, I was asked if I would help edit

01:10:28

Walter Martin's The Kingdom of the Cults. It had been out forever. And it was a

01:10:35

Bethany House book. And they wanted me to do the sections on Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, because that's my area.

01:10:43

And I said, I will, but I don't want my name associated with it. I'll do the editing, but I don't want my name associated with it.

01:10:52

I just didn't want to get involved with all the political aspect of things. And so I was reading the section on Jehovah's Witnesses.

01:11:01

And Martin made a big point of the fact that in Revelation 1,

01:11:09

Jesus is identified as the Alpha and the Omega, which he is, but for some reason, he connected it all the way back in Codex Vaticanus, which shows how ancient this is.

01:11:23

That book had been in print for decades, and no one had ever said a word about it. And the only reason that I recognized the problem was

01:11:34

I just finished writing King James Only Controversy. Vaticanus ends at Hebrews 9 .14.

01:11:44

What is bound with Vaticanus after that is a 10th century manuscript finishing off the rest of the

01:11:51

Bible. But the actual Vaticanus manuscript, that part has broken off.

01:11:58

And so Vaticanus doesn't contain Revelation 1. And yet, here you had a book that had been in print.

01:12:05

Now, would Martin have had any way of knowing it? Probably not. Probably not unless you're actually involved with dealing with the manuscripts and stuff like that.

01:12:15

But it's that kind of a thing that Jehovah's Witnesses zero in on, I can assure you of that, and use that as a weapon.

01:12:22

So I did fix it. And you know what the funny thing is? There's a division in the

01:12:28

Martin family. There's two sides, and they go back and forth as to who controls what.

01:12:34

And they're not really friendly with each other. And after that edition came out, the other side retook control of the book.

01:12:43

And they reverted everything back to what Martin said. So if you buy a copy of it today, it still has that error in it.

01:12:49

Even though the error had been fixed for a while, now it's back in, because we just want Walter Martin's stuff in it.

01:12:55

OK. So here's Codex Vaticanus. And this is the manuscript I mentioned before with P75, remember?

01:13:03

So in the New Testament, at least in the Gospels, Vaticanus and P75 are both drawing from an earlier ancestor, which is extremely important in the establishment of early readings, where they both contain the same material.

01:13:23

Obviously, P75 doesn't even contain all the Gospels, whereas Vaticanus has

01:13:29

Paul and Acts and all the rest of that stuff. But again, this is between 325 and 350.

01:13:35

It is in the Vatican library. And it is available fully online as well. I'm not sure if you looked it up. How would you know about this?

01:13:43

It's throwing your curves now? Did you get it too? Yeah, I eventually got it too, but it was on a phone.

01:13:52

Yeah, I wouldn't even try. But on my Mac, I eventually did coax it into doing what it was supposed to do.

01:13:59

But they needed an update big time. Here's Codex Alexandrinus. It's a beautiful, it's a much smaller manuscript, physically, than Sinaiticus.

01:14:11

But it does have this beautiful yellowish gold color to it. And so I made a tie out of Alexandrinus with parakletos on it for when

01:14:22

I debated Muslims. So I could just go, we'll see right there. And again, it's sort of no longer in copyright since it's 1 ,600 years old.

01:14:35

All right, so back to the facts. All right, aside from the 5 ,800

01:14:41

Greek texts, we have early translations in the Latin, Coptic, Sahitic, that are important witnesses to the early text of the

01:14:49

New Testament. Combining these with the Greek text yields over 24 ,000 handwritten witnesses.

01:14:56

We have more than 124 Greek manuscript witnesses within the first 300 years after the writing of the

01:15:04

New Testament, far more than any other work of antiquity, far more than any other work of antiquity.

01:15:13

124 within 300 years. And you might go, that doesn't sound like a lot. Trust me, you need to recognize, we have 12 manuscripts from the second century.

01:15:25

That is, within 100 years of the writing of the New Testament. These manuscripts contain portions of all four Gospels, nine books of Paul, Acts, Hebrews, and Revelation, comprising a majority of the books of the

01:15:33

New Testament we possess today. Again, no work of antiquity even comes close to this early attestation.

01:15:42

And as I said, and as I said, I put this up on the screen later, the average length of time between the writing of most works contemporaneous with the

01:15:52

New Testament, such as the historical works of Pliny, Suetonius, Tacitus, the

01:15:57

Greek historians, and their first extant copies is between 500 and 900 years.

01:16:06

And we have 12 within 100 years. There is no comparison. But you don't hear that.

01:16:14

That's not going to be repeated by someone who is seeking to destroy the faith of our young people in freshman college classes.

01:16:24

Let's just be honest. So you ready for, got the sound back there? Because I said

01:16:31

I'd play this from Bart Ehrman. Here's the background. This is in the cross -examination period of my debate with Bart Ehrman in Tampa, Florida in 2009.

01:16:42

And I am asking him certain questions.

01:16:48

You will notice I almost cut him off before he gave me the best part of the answer.

01:16:54

I'm thankful that that didn't happen. But I am asking him questions at this point.

01:17:00

And I had read all of his books. I had listened to his courses.

01:17:05

I had listened to debates he had done, all the debates he had done. I had listened to radio programs he did.

01:17:11

He's frequently on the unbelievable radio broadcast in London. I've been on that one 15, 16, 17 times.

01:17:18

And so I had done months and months and months of study.

01:17:23

He had never listened to anything I'd ever said, because he doesn't feel like he needs to. Gives me an advantage. And so I could quote him to him.

01:17:31

And that's what I'm doing here, is I'm pointing out that the language he uses is inconsistent.

01:17:40

And so here's, we'll try to make sure this works. Here's what Bart Ehrman says.

01:17:56

In 50 years, you describe this time period as enormous. On the unbelievable radio program in London, you discuss the length of time that exists between the writing of Paul's letter to the

01:18:07

Galatians and the first extant copy, that being 150 years. You describe this time period as enormous.

01:18:16

That's a quote. Could you tell us what term you would use to describe the time period between, say, the original writings of Suetonius or Tacitus or Pliny and their first extant manuscript copies?

01:18:27

Very enormous. Sorry, ginormous would be a good one? Ginormous. Ginormous, OK. I mean, ginormous doesn't cover it.

01:18:36

The New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book from antiquity. Did you hear that?

01:18:42

For the New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book of antiquity.

01:18:49

We have wider attestation, number of manuscripts. And I imagine if you pushed him,

01:18:56

Bart would admit we have better attestation as to the quality of those manuscripts. You just got to know how to push him to make the admissions.

01:19:08

Now, I mentioned this before, but what about the phone game? Often, the transmission of the text of the

01:19:14

New Testament is likened to the phone game we played as kids, where one person whispers something in the ear of the person next in line, sometimes called

01:19:21

Chinese whispers. I'm sure that's probably really politically incorrect now, too. And so forth around the circle until the last person repeats what he has heard and is inevitably changed in often humorous ways from what was originally said.

01:19:33

But is this an accurate way of thinking of how the New Testament was transmitted over time? That's what most of the people you're going to be talking to think.

01:19:40

That's what they've heard. But is that accurate? Now, once again, please try not to get too excited, but there's another.

01:19:49

Look at that. Have you ever seen papyri moving around the world before?

01:19:58

Not until you came to this presentation. Let's remember something about how the

01:20:04

New Testament was written. You have multiple authors writing from multiple places at multiple times to multiple audiences.

01:20:16

It's not being written in one place. There isn't one central location where all the books were written, and then an approved copy could be sent out.

01:20:27

We know Paul is writing. He tells us. He's on his missionary journeys. And he tells us when he's in prison or when he's going from one place to another.

01:20:38

And these things are bouncing all over the place. And the same thing is going on,

01:20:44

I'm sure, with Peter and with John. They're going different places at different times. And so multiple authors writing to multiple locations at multiple times with multiple audiences receiving these letters.

01:20:57

And then after the apostles are gone, something interesting starts happening. And that is we see that collections begin to be put together.

01:21:07

And they probably get to be put together at some of the major cities. If you're in a city that is on a major trade route, then you're going to have more

01:21:18

Christians coming through who may have portions of scripture than if you're living out in the boonies someplace.

01:21:24

And so collections start forming at places like Rome, Ephesus, places like that.

01:21:30

And then you get gospel collections going out. P46, whoo, comes right off the top of that piano there and blinds me.

01:21:39

P46, the epistles of Paul that are going out, these begin to go all over the place around the

01:21:47

Mediterranean world. So what does that mean? That means we have multiple lines of transmission.

01:21:58

Multiple lines of transmission. Thank you. It's vitally important to realize the transmission of the text of the

01:22:04

New Testament did not follow a phone game single line. Not only are written documents less liable to corruption than what is whispered in the ear, but the phone game involves a single line of transmission.

01:22:17

The New Testament originated in multiple places, written by multiple authors with books being sent to multiple locations.

01:22:28

This multifocality leads us to the final considerations that demonstrate the bankruptcy of the modern attacks on the

01:22:35

New Testament. To make specific changes in a text like the New Testament, which originally circulated as a group of texts, not as a single body, would require a centralized controlling body that could make wholesale changes in these widely dispersed texts.

01:22:52

If you go on YouTube, you will see all sorts of videos where you have monks in cowled robes and they're gathering in rooms and they're making manuscripts and they're making changes and then they're sending stuff out and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

01:23:12

That didn't exist in this day. The church was a persecuted minority. There was no centralized controlling body that ever had control of all of the books of the

01:23:24

New Testament. It just never existed. And that time period never existed. So, no such central agency ever existed or could have existed.

01:23:33

Christianity was a persecuted religion made up mainly of lower classes. There was no central authority that could ever have gathered up all the texts and made wholesale changes.

01:23:41

I mean, think about it. How many of you did any of your recent devotions in the book of Laodiceans?

01:23:51

I bet some of you did. You've read Laodicean. You've memorized portions of Laodiceans.

01:24:00

For by grace you're saved through faith. You say, that's Ephesians. Right, that's what

01:24:06

Ephesians is. Colossians 4 .16, read the epistle that's coming from Laodicea, right?

01:24:12

What was that? Ephesians. How do we know that? Think about it. How long was Paul in Ephesus? Three years.

01:24:19

He raised up the elders. He trained the elders. You ever notice something about the letter to Ephesians?

01:24:26

There's nothing personal in it. Nothing. It's a circular letter.

01:24:31

It was meant to be passed around the churches in the Lycus River Valley. In fact, some early manuscripts don't even say to Ephesus at the beginning.

01:24:40

And so you've read Laodiceans. That was Ephesians. What that means is if it's being passed around, that means it is sent to a church.

01:24:48

And what do they do with it? They copy it. And then they send it off to the next church, and they copy it.

01:24:55

Send it off to the next church, and they copy it. So what happens if someone 10 cities down the road decides they're gonna change something?

01:25:02

Their changes will stick out like a sore thumb. No one's ever gonna have the opportunity of going back and gathering up all those copies and making wholesale changes.

01:25:13

It can't be done, even though the cults are always saying. Islam says, y 'all changed the

01:25:19

Bible, and you put this doctrine in, and you took that doctrine out. You couldn't have done that. If you start doing stuff like that way down the road, and then we find these papyri buried in the sands of Egypt that were written 150 years earlier, the changes are gonna be glaring.

01:25:36

And what have we found? We found the papyri. No changes. There was no editing. There was never any opportunity for that.

01:25:45

Such was impossible in the earliest days of transmission, and given that we have such ancient texts now, obviously could not have happened at a later point without giving clear evidence.

01:25:55

In fact, we can prove beyond all doubt this kind of corruption did not happen. Since the papyri have been found that date back to the second century, and that only within the past 100 years, had any later centralized organization sought to alter the text, those later texts would show stark differences.

01:26:08

As older and older manuscripts are found, just the opposite has been the case.

01:26:14

So all allegations of purposeful corruption, such as those made by Muslims, fall upon the mere consideration of the historical context and the data itself.

01:26:24

The rapid widespread distribution of New Testament manuscripts in the first two centuries precludes any purposeful centralized corruption.

01:26:33

It also gives rise to the need to study the relatively small number of textual variants.

01:26:40

Since it was done freely, since you didn't have to show your I'm a licensed scripture copyist card, since it was done freely and not under a controlled mechanism then we have textual variants.

01:26:58

And so we have to look at the textual variants. But that is a small price in comparison to when you have a controlled transmission of a text where you can no longer have confidence that you have access to the original readings.

01:27:13

That's really an important thing. And it's not known by the vast majority of Christians and it should be, there is no reason.

01:27:19

I do not think there is any reason whatsoever why that should not be something that every

01:27:25

Christian in any evangelical church in an English speaking world or outside of the

01:27:30

English speaking world should be aware of. I think that should be part of basic Christianity 101 is to understand how we got the text and how the

01:27:41

Lord has preserved it for us. But for some reason, how often have you heard sermons on any of this?

01:27:48

Not very often, not very often. Needs to be done, needs to be done. But this leads to another important point.

01:27:56

When scribes copied their texts, they were very conservative, often incorporating marginal notes into the text since they could not be sure if the note was original or it was not.

01:28:08

So, this means they even preserved mistakes or silly readings. This may sound bad at first, but consider what it really means.

01:28:15

The New Testament text is tenacious. That means readings are preserved in the text.

01:28:23

All readings, including the original readings, are still a part of the manuscript tradition.

01:28:31

Do you hear that? That's key. I realize it's late and all, but that is absolutely central.

01:28:44

Because the New Testament text is tenacious, remember, this came up in my debate with Ehrman, and so I challenged him.

01:28:52

All right, you deny the tenacity in the Testament text. Where do you think an original reading has disappeared?

01:28:59

It's no longer in the manuscripts. He had one place. An irrelevant text in 2 Peter, that's all he could come up with.

01:29:06

You would think if the New Testament is so corrupt that you'd have more than one place that has absolutely zero doctrinal impact.

01:29:16

But that's the best the other side has to offer. See, when

01:29:21

I, and I didn't bring my critical text, but the Tyndale is semi -critical.

01:29:28

It has some notes down at the bottom, not nearly as many. I mean, you look at that, that is the critical text.

01:29:33

It's massive. But the point is, we can have confidence that when there are differences down here, the original is either in the text or it's in the footnote.

01:29:45

It's in the manuscript tradition. It hasn't fallen out. It hasn't just disappeared someplace. Rob Bowman used a really good illustration, so I'll properly credit him for this.

01:29:56

The situation that we face with the New Testament manuscript tradition is basically we have a 1 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle and we have 1 ,100 pieces.

01:30:12

Okay? You've got a 1 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle and we have 1 ,100 pieces. Which is better, to have 1 ,100 pieces and have to filter out the 100 added or to have a 1 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle and you only have 900 pieces?

01:30:28

Do a number one. Huh? Do a number one is way better. That's right. That's right.

01:30:34

That's what we're dealing with. And so, that helps you to understand what we're...

01:30:40

The 1 ,000 pieces are still there. It's the identification of them that we are working on.

01:30:49

And honestly, even Bart Ehrman. Ehrman doesn't work in this field anymore.

01:30:54

He honestly says it. This isn't his thing anymore. And before he left it, he basically said, we pretty much know what the

01:31:04

New Testament said. We're just tinkering around with a few things on the side. But we know what it said.

01:31:12

And he's right. We do know what it said. He was on... I remember, I wish I could have...

01:31:17

I'm so sad that I lost this audio file. It's wonderful having massive hard drives.

01:31:25

I mean, my first computer had 360K floppy drives, okay? Any of you remember those?

01:31:31

Yeah. So, I've got a laptop up here with an eight terabyte SSD drive.

01:31:38

The problem is, you can lose stuff in there. It's just like sucked into the void, you know?

01:31:45

Because wow, it's gone. I can't find it. I wish I had this audio, but I remember listening to it and just cackling out loud.

01:31:53

Ehrman was on an atheist webcast. And so he was going through his thing.

01:32:00

And so the atheist is getting all excited and he's, woo, this is good. And so he, finally, the atheist goes, well, talk to Ehrman.

01:32:09

If, in fact, the Bible's been changed and all this stuff is happening, what do you think the

01:32:17

New Testament was originally about? And there's this, this is sort of an uneasy silence.

01:32:27

And Ehrman goes, well, what we've always thought, it's about Jesus coming as the

01:32:34

Lamb of God to redeem people by his death and resurrection.

01:32:41

And you can just hear the atheist like, he was hoping for space aliens or something, you know?

01:32:49

Because he's hearing Ehrman saying, it's been massively changed and it doesn't have anything to do with what we thought it did and all the rest of that stuff.

01:32:57

And all Ehrman's saying is, you know, Enoch could be Enochi, which means nothing.

01:33:06

And he has a couple of the favorite places, like in Mark, where majority of the manuscripts say

01:33:12

Jesus, with compassion, healed the leper. But in some manuscripts, with anger.

01:33:19

Just little teeny tiny things like that, that they interpret as being an entire change of the story, basically, is what's going on there.

01:33:31

And so, this reality, that the original, I have all the original readings right here.

01:33:39

They haven't disappeared. They're still here. And today, we have far more confidence that those are what's in the main text than we've ever had before.

01:33:52

Because we have far more information available to us. We never had all this kind of stuff available to us.

01:34:01

So, that is why the believing textual critic can persevere in even the most difficult variants. One of the readings is the original reading.

01:34:10

You're not just sitting there playing games. So, let's look at an example. Well, I'm supposed to go to four, aren't

01:34:17

I? No? What? 4 .30.

01:34:23

4 .30? Two and a half, so we were supposed to take a break during this somewhere.

01:34:32

Okay, I can't trust him as far as I can throw him, so. We're five minutes over.

01:34:38

Oh, okay, all right, all right, all right. It used to be four, again, so they cut it back a little bit.

01:34:44

So, 1 Timothy 3 .16. Compare the King James Version and the

01:34:50

New American Standard. King James Version. Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness.

01:34:56

God was manifest in the flesh, that's in red for those of you who are color -challenged, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the

01:35:03

Gentiles, believed on the world, received up into glory. And then the

01:35:08

NASB, by common confession, great is the mystery of godliness. He who was revealed in the flesh was vindicated in the spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on the world, and taken up in glory.

01:35:21

When you listen to King James only -ists, this is one of their favorite texts to preach on.

01:35:27

If you want to get Christians emotionally invested in something, attack the deity of Christ, attack the glory of Christ.

01:35:35

And so, some of you may have seen an interview that I did with Pastor Steven Anderson, the wild King James only guy in Tempe.

01:35:48

That was for a movie. And the primary focus of the movie was this text, 1

01:35:54

Timothy 3 .16. See how the modern versions are perverting the scriptures, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

01:36:00

And how they've removed God from 1 Timothy 3 .16. They've removed

01:36:07

God from 1 Timothy 3 .16. Well, it certainly looks like it, doesn't it?

01:36:13

God was manifested in the flesh versus he who was revealed in the flesh. The manifested part doesn't matter, that's just simply a translational difference.

01:36:20

But God versus he who, that does seem like a pretty major difference. And so they will say, see, these modern translators, they're trying to hide the deity of Christ, all the rest of that stuff.

01:36:33

Despite the fact that in my book on the King James only controversy, I produced a chart on the key text that used theos of Jesus.

01:36:42

And the NIV was clearer in testifying to the deity of Christ than King James was.

01:36:48

But they don't worry themselves too much about that. Let's look at 1 Timothy 3 .16. All right.

01:36:58

So, let me show you what it looks like. Here's the data. And so you have

01:37:07

Haas, Ephanerothe, and Sarkee. So he who was manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, looked upon by angels, so on and so forth.

01:37:17

So over here are your readings. Theos is the reading of the corrector of Sinaiticus, the corrector of Alexanderus, the corrector of C, the corrector of D, that should tell you something.

01:37:32

1739 and 1881 are both interesting minuscule manuscripts. They're about 10th century manuscripts, but we know that they are copies of very early manuscripts themselves.

01:37:40

So they are important. It is the majority reading. The text of Haas is the original reading of Sinaiticus, the original reading of A, the original reading of C.

01:37:52

F .G. 33 is a very important manuscript as well, and a few others. That's actually a very small listing.

01:37:59

You could get a much larger listing. So it is a textual variant, and there is a difference between the two.

01:38:08

It's real obvious, see what it is, right? Again, that's what unsealed text is like.

01:38:14

Let me use color to, oh, this isn't plugged in. There's color to help you see where the difference is.

01:38:25

There versus there. You go, that looks a lot alike. Let me blow it up for you. There's the difference.

01:38:34

There's the difference. Because remember, the Haas is a nomina sacra, and so it is reduced down to two letters with a line over top, theta sigma.

01:38:45

Haas is omicron sigma. What was the original writing material that was used?

01:38:53

Papyri. What did you notice in the papyri? What does it have in it? Lines, especially parallel lines.

01:39:02

And so the only difference between the two is one line there and one line over top. Now, by the way, I know this is

01:39:08

Sinaiticus, the corrector, there it is right there. And you can tell even from there, that was done about 700 years after Sinaiticus was written.

01:39:18

The original is very clearly Haas, with a dot, dot, dot, and then in a very different ink, in a very different hand, the

01:39:25

Haas has been written in as a nomina sacra. So all the preaching and the conspiracy theories and all the rest of that stuff, and then when you actually look at what the difference between the two readings is, you go, oh, that's pretty obvious why there would be a possible difference between the two.

01:39:48

Yep. Now, that doesn't make movies, that doesn't sell books, that doesn't get people all excited and angry and all the rest of that stuff, but that's why this should be done by people who are in control of their emotions, might be the way to put it.

01:40:06

Yeah. One other key theological example, and then

01:40:12

I'll probably just pick up with Kamiohaniam this evening and then we can jump into the CBGM. Key theological example,

01:40:19

John 118. Notice down below, no one has seen God at any time, New King James, the only begotten son who is in the bosom of the

01:40:28

Father, he has declared him. But a couple of people have asked me about the NET, for some reason I used it here. No one has ever seen

01:40:34

God, the only one himself God who is in the closest fellowship with the Father has made God known. If you look at ESV, NIV, NAS, NASV has a real sort of wooden translation here, the only begotten

01:40:49

God. Others have the unique God. Let me see, yeah.

01:40:59

Nope, that jumped me past it. This is a reverse where in the modern translations, the word

01:41:07

God is being used of Jesus, but in the King James it's not. So if 1

01:41:14

Timothy 3 .16 was evidence that the modern translators are trying to hide the deity of Christ, then why isn't

01:41:20

John 118 evidence that the King James translators are trying to hide the deity of Christ? Well, it's not, it's because they're looking at manuscripts, they're actually looking at the underlying text.

01:41:29

It's not a matter of prejudices and things like that. Now, I'm gonna be really interested, really, really, really interested.

01:41:38

As I've mentioned, I keep motioning over here because I have Mark and part of Axe in the

01:41:44

Editio Critico Mayor, which is where we're gonna explain CBGM a little bit later on.

01:41:53

The CBGM analysis of John is ongoing, and I'm very certain that this has already been done, it's just a matter of getting it published.

01:42:01

But I'm gonna be very interested in seeing what the result of the CBGM analysis of John 118 will be, as to whether God or Son has the nod from that analysis in the future.

01:42:15

I'm hoping that that will come out maybe by the end of this year. Should, but I think

01:42:20

COVID has slowed a lot of this stuff down and made it difficult for people to travel and things like that.

01:42:27

So I'll be looking forward to that. But John 118, one of the reverse examples where the text has

01:42:34

God of Jesus in the older text, but not in later texts. It's not a matter of prejudice. It was simply a matter of scribal error.

01:42:44

That's all there is to it. Okay? All right, so I guess according to what I'm hearing, I went 15 minutes over.

01:42:51

So, and we're supposed to get rolling again when? Seven.

01:42:56

At seven. And wrap up at? 10.

01:43:03

10. 10. 10. 10.

01:43:10

I can't trust that guy. We will gonna take some, yeah, we will try to take some questions, but I do need to wrap this up and get,

01:43:19

I keep telling you I'm gonna talk to Tony about CBGM. I'm not sure how long that will take. But yeah, we'll try to take some questions at that point this evening.

01:43:26

Definitely try to do that. All right? Okay, thank you for surviving with me.