Reliability of the New Testament-Session 3

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

But anyways, all right, so afternoon, I realized that you all just finished lunch, and all that yummy food is sitting down there. And your blood sugar count's going to be crashing here in a few minutes.

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, 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.

So we will try to avoid that. I actually managed about a 15-minute snoozer myself, so I'm ready to rock and roll. So you burn off those sleep desires that way. OK, so we've already mentioned that the majority of the 5 ,800-plus Greek manuscripts date from after 1 ,000 AD, and they comprise the majority text.

That's that fractur M for majority. 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.

And so after 1 ,000 AD, you have far more manuscripts than you do before then. We've already mentioned the earlier text called papyri, written in unseal or majuscule. Here is a graph that gives you an idea of the distribution by centuries of the various manuscripts.

So your papyri are your blue down here, and they go up through about the 7th century. And then your unseals, your majuscules, they're written in the same way, but it's what they're written on. Papyri doesn't last as long.

The unseals are written on vellum or animal hide. Now, that's not like a big, thick piece of cowhide 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.

I mean, it's very expensive, but they were able to do it, and they were beautiful, beautiful manuscripts. And then you have the minuscule starting in the 9th century. 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. And that is the minuscule is the small letters, capital letters, space between words, punctuation. 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. 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.

I mean, how does that work? I don't even know how that happens. I've got a great idea. You're crazy. You're nuts. No, look at it. It's a whole lot easier. But it obviously worked. Now, all of this takes place in history.

Why Majority Text Theory Fails

So for example, this is just a brief discussion of why 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.

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

What do I mean by that? As we're going to see when we start looking at the CBGM materials a little bit later on, the real difficulty is seeing how manuscripts are related to one another. 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.

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

But you have a piece of papyrus in a museum or in a library someplace. And how do you date a papyrus? They don't have numbers on them, a very small number of them. Yeah, 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. But I can see you. I can see you, because they've heard me say this before. How do you date a papyrus? You walk up, just say, hey, baby, would you like to go out tonight?

That's what you told him, isn't it? 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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 New Testament, but they can be.

For example, we have found stuff where someone took some portions of a New Testament manuscript and scraped the ink off and then wrote something else on it. And that happened to be dated. 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, you know?

And so it 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, you know?

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

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

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. 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.

And so if you compared what were called the Alexandrian manuscripts with the Byzantine manuscripts, all the early papyri and things like that are Alexandrian in text type. And then the Byzantine starts coming along at a later point in time.

And so if you just counted manuscripts, the majority up through the 5th century would be one thing. And then the end of the 9th century would be sort of even, even. And then it would become Byzantine after that.

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. 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? 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.

Alexandria is in North Africa. And Byzantium, of course, Istanbul in modern Constantinople in the ancient world, of course, held out until 1453 as a Christian city. But right in this time period is the rise of Islam.

And so between 632 and 732, you have the century of Islamic expansion. Muhammad dies in 632. In 732, the Islamic expansion into Europe is stopped at the Battle of Tours in France. And in that 100 years, Islam takes over all of North Africa.

North Africa was a completely Christian place up until Islam rose. And so if that's where the Alexandrian manuscripts were primarily being produced, and now it's a 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. And so that historical reality impacts the things that you see as far as the history of the text.

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

And what were the elements in that process? And what was involved in the production of the text? So as I said, the way that we're going to be able to stay awake during this dreaded 2 to 3 PM Saturday afternoon hour.

Isn't there some football game or something going on? Tomorrow? Tomorrow? Oh, OK. All right. I don't know. I gave up on all that stuff a number of years ago. But I understand it's, what is it, Kansas City?

Are they playing? OK, OK, yeah. I did see, though, on Twitter, I saw, is it Mahomes? And wasn't there some controversy about overtime or something? 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.

And I was 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. Christians would never do that.

They would. Yeah, sure they would. Yeah, yeah. When you see somebody out in the congregation, that makes you feel really good, makes you feel like they're really tuned in, the spirit's moving. Well, actually, the offense is moving.

And yeah, OK, anyway. But to help us get through this difficult part of the afternoon, it's always good to use pictures. And that's what we will do. So here is a little fragment. It is about the size of a credit card, so figure about yay big.

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 Christian invention to write on both sides of papyri, that it was those wacky Christians that came along with that idea.

As you can see, it does not contain a lot of writing. So imagine how this was discovered. You may know that the Brits ruled Egypt for a number of years. And there was actually a long history behind all of that.

And in the process, they stole a lot of stuff, to put it bluntly. They appropriated a great deal of important stuff from Egypt and dragged it off to London, which is why 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. 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.

And he is shuffling through these little fragments, these little pieces of papyrus. 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 a half of a word, a quarter of a word, one word here, half a word down there.

And to be able to read that stuff, all sorts of different kinds of handwriting styles and things like that. 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. 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. And OK, here. I have fonts. 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. 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. I thought I had both sides. I thought I had a graphic of both sides. I do someplace else. But anyways, he reads this. And all of a sudden, he realizes what he's reading.

Back up one more step. Before I tell you, you need to understand that in the 1870s and 1880s, 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 Gospel of John could not have been written any earlier than about 170 AD.

Now, why did they come to that conclusion? 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 Gospel of John has such a high view of Christ, it had to have taken quite some time for that to develop.

Because we all know Jesus was just a peasant traveling around in Israel. There was nothing more to it than that. And so you just simply have to believe that John was written probably about 170 AD. Now, obviously, Bible-believing Christians were like, no, no, but that's the assured results of scholarship, you see.

And so that's your background. And so this guy's reading this thing, and he realizes, hey, I've seen this before. This is from the 18th chapter of the Gospel of John. It's from Jesus's interview with Pilate.

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

But what it does tell you is what the Gospel of John looked like. Well, when? Once he found this, it was sent to the four leading papyrologists of the day. And of course, it's been examined 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.

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

Now, generally, when you date a papyrus, you go 25 years each side, so a 50-year range. Because again, it's not an exact science. So most today put it between 120, 150, somewhere around there. It could be earlier.

It could be later. But most, most scholars would say we're looking at the earliest fragment of the New Testament. Now, there's some scholars who say, no, I think this one's 10 years earlier or something like that.

But realize what kind of an earthquake that caused. 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.

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.

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 Bible colleges, you'll be taught that Mark was the first gospel written.

Then Matthew and Luke used Mark to write theirs. And then John was written way toward the end of the first century. That's the normal idea. What's interesting is the gospel that we have the earliest attestation for and the fullest attestation amongst the papyri is John.

And the one we have the least attestation for is Mark. We only have a couple of papyri fragments of Mark and Toto. The one that I'll show you here in a little while, P45, that I've done so much work on, is probably the earliest fragment of Mark that we have.

So does that mean that that whole story is wrong? Well, no. But it does make you go, well, that is interesting. Is that relevant? Yeah, it probably is. But anyway, so this is I wore. Notice, this is from my debate with Bart Ehrman.

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

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. 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. I have no idea. But there I am giving him a copy of that tie. So there you go. Now, this one's fun. This one is one of my, I love talking about this one in various churches.

Because I get to, now, I can't do this today. But, well, we've got Kenny here. He's an elder. So we can throw it his direction. This is P115. It is one of only two papyri that we have that contain portions of the Book of Revelation.

It is never, ever the Book of Revelations. 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 Revelations or say turn to Psalms 103.

It's not Psalms 103. Do you turn to Hymns 103? No, you do not turn to Hymns 103. You turn to Hymn 103. So just be careful how you cite the Bible. And we will get along as friends. 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. So you can see we don't even have the majority of the page. So that's just the way it is. And many of these early papyri are very, very fragmentary.

But what's interesting is what this particular page is. Because as I use my graphical capacities and skills here, ooh, did you see that? We zoomed right in on it there. I did that myself. Just want you to know, if you have to go, ooh, it's OK.

It's all right. Thank you. OK, after a while, it gets a little much. But this is from Revelation 13. And as most of you know, Revelation 13 has a certain revelation in it, and that is the number of the beast, the number of the beast.

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. And I'm certainly old enough to remember, the first person I remember being identified with the number of the beast was Henry Kissinger.

Y 'all remember that? Henry Kissinger. Did you know he's still alive? He's about 147. It's amazing. It's just astonishing, but he's still alive. He seemed old when I was a kid, 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, Obama, Hillary, Nixon. I remember all of them being identified with 666. And I don't think anybody bothered with Joe, because he was alive back then anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

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 Left Behind series didn't seem to know anything about, and that is in the two earliest papyri of the Book of Revelation, that right there does not add up to 666.

It adds up to 616. The number of the beast in the two earliest manuscripts of Revelation is 616, not 666. Now, there's a joke that Dan Wallace tells, and I've always credited him for this, but it makes you think.

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

But there is a much better explanation, and that is if you spell out 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. So it depends on whether you use the Hebrew or the Greek.

I forget which one's which. But in Hebrew, it adds up. I think it's in Hebrew it adds up to 616, and in Greek it's 666. It's one of the two. You might have to switch those around. So whatever that does to your eschatology, whatever, that's what we have in this early papyrus.

So if you ever hear anybody freaking out because they just went through the drive-thru and their bill was $6 .66, and I've had people do that, you can go, chill. It's OK. It's a textual variant. You're all right.

And they'll go, what? Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. Here is P72, and I wish it was a little bit bigger because this image is fully readable and fully translatable. It's extremely clear on my screen.

In fact, right here, you can see Petru Epistole Be, the epistle of Peter, Be, second 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.

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

And so God, and Jesus, and Lord, and Savior, and these are all, there's numerous nomina sacra here at the beginning of second Peter, and there's one, just one over on the other page at the end of first Peter.

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

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. 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.

That was sort of before the video craze and all that kind of stuff. Man, we're coming up on 30 years? Next year? I need a chair. 30 years ago, wow. It does not feel like it was 30 years ago we did this.

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 Winchell's, and I'm reading the newspaper. They still had newspapers back then, too.

And I see a notification that the 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, but then they mentioned that a page from P72 would be on display at the Papal Treasure exhibit.

Well, this is the page that was there. And so you walk in, and I said to Rich, we're going, 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. 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. Well, I'm in hog heaven, okay?

I mean, oh, look at the Nomina Sacra. And not only that, by the way, let me see if, yeah, right here. Okay, here comes some more graphics stuff. Just be here. And you go, well, what's that? This is, so there's the Nomina Sacra of God again in the Genitus Singular.

Our God and Soteros, Savior. And then notice Jesus Christ is three letters instead of two. There sometimes will be two, sometimes it'll be three. This is called a Granville Sharp construction. And it's one of a couple places in the New Testament where Jesus is identified as God, or the term God.

You have God and Savior, and they're connected by Chi. The first has the article, the second one does not. The rule from a, actually it was an English abolitionist, is that in that construction, both nouns are referring to the same person.

And so I'm immediately recognizing the Granville Sharp construction, and I'm commenting on it and stuff like that, basically to myself. I mean, Rich is standing there, but. And so I'm just, this is all 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 sort of lean over and look at Rich and go, can he read that?

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. 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.

Now you may notice it's not the best handwriting in the world, you know. It's not a perfect line, for example. I mean, you sort of got a line going up here at the end, and that's not exactly, that's going one direction.

And it really doesn't look like this scribe was, at the top of his class. And he could have been just a businessman. It could have been, you know, I've thought about many times, what was the origination of a manuscript like this?

I mean, what if you were traveling, and you went into a city, and Christians would always try to find other 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, I mean, this is dated 175 to 200, and they bring out a book you've never heard before?

And they're reading it, and you go, what is that? Well, these are Peter's epistles. We don't have that in our fellowship. Well, you wanna make a copy? Because that's the only way you could have it. And it may have been during a time of persecution.

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

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? And then, of course, the thought has crossed my mind many times, how big would our Bible be if we actually had to write it out?

How many of us would have all of Ezekiel? Yeah, right. We would all have really abbreviated scriptures, 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.

You had to really love this stuff to put out this kind of effort. And so here you're seeing the result of someone, he never thought that what he was writing would be on display around the world 1 ,800 years later, obviously, but there it is.

And it's the earliest manuscript we have of 1st, 2nd Peter in Jude. And so it's something to see, and it's something to translate, and eventually we had to move along, and there you go. All right, then we have P75.

This is actually the end of Luke and the beginning of John. And if it was bigger, again, you'd be able to actually read, enarkein halagos kaihalagos enprostan theon kaitheas enhalagos. John 1 .1, in the beginning it was word rose with God, word was God.

And notice it does say, according to John. So the titles were very early, very, very early on these manuscripts. And this is, again, about 175 to 200, same time range. Now this one's fascinating. This one is absolutely fascinating.

Think with me for a second. 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. We'll do it as a class project if you have the time, but you have been assigned to hand copy the Gospels.

Now think of how, how would you do it? If you're having 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. 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. But how would you, what would the actual process be? Would you copy it word by word? Would you do one word at a time?

Would you do a phrase? How long a phrase would you do? Would it depend on how easy that phrase was to remember? If it was a common phrase that everybody uses, oh, okay, I'll just go ahead and, you know, write out maybe five words without actually looking.

You know, I read it, there's five words, I write five words. Would you do three words, three words, two? How would you do that? So it 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, and there are entire papers on the scribal habits of the scribe of P75.

There are. We are a boring lot. These are not people that are doing first-person shooter games online, okay? What we've discovered about this particular manuscript, it's extremely accurate. It's extremely accurate.

Why is that important? Well, I'm gonna show you a unsealed manuscript a little bit later on called Codex Vaticanus, Codex B. We know that B and P75 are directly related. Vaticanus is not a copy of P75.

But basically, Vaticanus is down here around 325 to 350. Up here is P75. It's 175 to 200. And they have a common ancestor, okay? So whatever, it may be the direct thing that P75 was copying is the same one being copied by Vaticanus, 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. That means their connection point is back at no earlier than 150. And it could be 120 to 125. In other words, way, way, way, way, way back there.

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 Greek historians and that you'll see quoted in history books all the time, on average, and I'm gonna put this up a little bit later, so if you're taking notes, you'll get to see it again.

On average, the writings contemporary with the 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.

We're talking about having manuscript copies of the New Testament that are within the lifetimes of the last writers. There is no comparison. And I will play you a clip where Bart Ehrman will confirm this.

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

Okay, that's the first thing. Secondly, I'm sorry. Why is what? Because P75 is 175 to 200, Vaticanus is down here at about 325, and they're both copying, there had to have been something before P75. If it's copying that, and Vaticanus is copying that, it has to be before 175.

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. 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.

This has a tremendous amount of weight. And there's another reason for it. When you look at P75 and the kinds of errors that are made, because I mean, he does a great job, but he does make errors. Guess how he copied his manuscript?

We can tell by the nature of the errors how he did it. Letter by letter. Not word by word, not phrase by phrase, one letter at a time. That took a while. That probably means he wasn't actually reading it.

He was making just a simple, straight, mechanical copy. That's as close to a photocopier as you're gonna get until 1949 when they invented it. P66, we'll see here in a moment, phrases. 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 like an accountant or something. And produced an incredibly accurate, we could wish it had more of the Gospels than it has.

But that's P75, which, by the way, I mentioned in John 5 .4, the woman taken in adultery. P66, P75 will be cited together. These are the two earliest Gospel manuscripts we have of John that contain pretty much the whole text.

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.

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 like a Bible, and you carry your Bible. My fellow pastor, Jeff Durbin, has one of these Jeffrey Rice rebinds.

And it's an ESV. And he's had it for only like 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. Well, where's the damage gonna be? Well, notice where the damage is here.

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

And of course, the spine is gonna be the strongest place. So you're gonna have the least damage over on this side. 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 have, to personally own, even something like this of gospels.