From Moses to Me

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I want to welcome everyone back tonight as we continue our study.
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The larger study that we're in is the study of apologetics, defending the faith.
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But we're in an offshoot of that study on the question of how we got the Bible.
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And as I have made the point, Hi.
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Often times in the study of apologetics, the question of the Bible's authority and where the Bible came from, the reliability of it, is part of the question that we get when we're dealing with the subject of apologetics.
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Because the world knows that when it comes to the Christian faith, our hope is built on what the Word of God says.
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We believe this book comes from God.
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And so if it is that the world is going to attack our faith, and they know the foundation of what we believe is in this book, then often times the attacks will come aimed directly at the book.
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And aimed at how we know it is what we say it is.
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And so apologetics, I do believe, involves having at least a rudimentary understanding of why we believe the Bible, and part of that comes in knowing how we got the Bible.
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The Christian faith, as I said, is based on the Bible.
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It's 66 individual books written over a period of about 1,500 years, written by about 40 different authors.
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In our session so far, we have discussed several things building up to this point.
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We've looked at Revelation.
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Not the book of Revelation, but the concept of God revealing Himself.
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We've talked about general Revelation and special Revelation.
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We've said the Bible is special Revelation.
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We've looked at inspiration.
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That is the act whereby God superintended the writing of His Word to ensure that we had His Word, not just the words of men, even though they were written by men, but words from God.
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We've looked last time, which was two weeks ago, because we had a week off, because we had that special event last week.
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The last time we met, we looked at canonization.
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And if you don't remember, canonization is the concept of the question, how do we know that the 66 books that we have are the right ones, and how do we know there shouldn't be 68 or 72 or 140 or just 5? And that was the question that we asked in our last session.
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Well, tonight, we're going to be looking at the subject of transmission.
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Now, when I say transmission, a lot of you are thinking, well, is it a five-speed or is it automatic? It's not that kind of transmission.
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Transmission in this sense is how did the books of the Bible go from the hand of the writer who wrote them to our hand today? How did the Bible go from Moses to me? How did the Bible go from Moses to me? So that's the title of the lesson.
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In your notes, it says lesson 8.
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That's actually incorrect.
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It's lesson 9.
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That was a typo.
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So tonight is lesson 9, From Moses to Me.
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We have tonight a presentation on the screen that will hopefully help us understand what we're going to be learning.
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And I want to tell you, originally this was one lesson.
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But then I began to read the lesson and look at the PowerPoint presentation that I was making and I began to think, unless we want to be here for two hours, I don't think, and that's fine, I know for some of you, but I don't think that I can fit it all into one lesson.
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And I think we'd be better off for it.
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Because if we divide it into two parts, we can spend a time focused on the Old Testament, that's what we're going to do tonight, and we can spend a time focused on the New Testament, that's what we'll do next week.
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So rather than trying to force and cram a lot of information into one night, which would leave your head spinning possibly, I'm hoping that by combining it into two, or separating it into two nights, we'll have a lot more, and it'll give you an opportunity to ask questions if you have them.
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So on your notes, under number 3, Old Testament Manuscript History, it's got ABC and then 1, 2, 3, 4.
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Underneath that 4 that says Latin Vulgate, you can draw a line and write part 2, because part 2 is next week.
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We're going to start with New Testament Manuscript History next week.
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And you can bring your handouts back with you, and I'll have some copies just in case you come next week and you forget to bring it back.
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You'll notice also on your notes I didn't give you any blanks.
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I didn't give you blanks because I felt like I did not want you to miss anything in this one.
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This is a huge part of understanding the Bible.
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This is how we got the Bible.
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This is actually the crux of everything, how it went from Moses to me.
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And I felt like I didn't want to sit here and have to make sure you had all the blanks filled in.
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I'd rather just give it to you, and you can make notes off to the side, but you don't have to worry about missing anything as we go through the lecture this evening.
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Now, when we discuss the subject of transmission, we're addressing the subject of copying documents.
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Copying documents.
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That's what transmission means.
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The transmission of Scripture is how the documents of Scripture were copied down through the ages.
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And when we think of copying documents today, it's a rather easy process.
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We take whatever it is we want copied.
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We put it into a machine which photographs.
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That's why we call it a photocopier.
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It photographs whatever we put on the piece of glass, and then it spits out an almost exact replica of whatever it is we placed on that piece of glass.
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But you have to understand, it wasn't until the 1930s that photocopying was invented.
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Then it was 20 years later that the first photocopiers began to show up on the market.
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And it's really relatively recent that people have photocopiers in their homes.
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I mean, think about it.
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I didn't grow up with a photocopier in the home.
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If I wanted to make a photocopy, I had to go down to the gate station.
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I remember this because I would want to make flyers up for different things, whether if I was trying to make money, if I was trying to sell something or whatever.
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I'd go down, and it was 10 cent a copy at the local gate station.
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And I'd bring my one copy that I had.
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Sometimes I'd draw on it with a marker or sometimes something like that, and I'd go up there, and every copy was 10 cent.
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You remember that? You can still do that now, but usually you don't have to because a lot of us have computers at home, and we have printers at home, and we have copiers at home.
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That is a relatively recent invention.
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Most of you are probably familiar with the name Gutenberg.
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What was Gutenberg famous for, young people? Creating the printing press, right? Prior to photocopying, there were different methods of making copies of things, and Gutenberg invented the first movable type printing press, and it was in the 15th century.
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What that meant was he had all these letters, and he would make a stamp, as it were, with these movable type, and then that was pressed down onto the sheets that they were used, and that pressing down created a stamped image of that writing, and that was the first mass production printing that the world had seen outside of a different type of printing, which is called serigraphy.
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The oldest type of mass production printing is called serigraphy.
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Does anybody know what that is? Serigraphy, if I think, yeah, serigraphy, I think I'm saying it correctly, is screen printing.
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I know about that because I do screen printing.
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Most of you know that, and that's where you actually take a screen made out of what used to be made of silk.
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That's why they called it silk screen.
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Nowadays they do it monofilament, but what they would do is they would block out portions of the silk, and they would leave behind what they wanted.
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They would take that and put it down on a piece of paper or a piece of fabric, and they would draw the ink across it, and it would press through that screen, and it would leave behind an image, and that was the first type of mass production printing that was ever in the world, and it was done in the Orient as a way to produce money.
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The very first money was screen printed in Asia.
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So when we think about copying and the ability to mass produce copies, it really is something that has an interesting history, and it's something that hasn't been around for a long, long time, and I mention these printing methods because it's hard for us to imagine today what I'm about to say.
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I want you to think about it, and this is my first note here.
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The Bible was written by hand.
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There were no typewriters.
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There were no word processors.
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The Bible was copied by hand.
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There were no printing presses until Gutenberg in the 15th century, and there were no Xerox machines until the 20th century, 2,000 years after the Bible was written.
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Now, I know that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody, but that's a huge deal because I want to ask you this.
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I want you to be real honest with me.
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If I sat you down today, and I said, okay, you are going to undertake the process of handwriting the Bible.
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Now, let me say this.
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What if I told you the only way you could own a Bible is if you sat down and hand wrote the Bible? How many people do you think would be dedicated enough to the Scripture that if I said the only way you can have your own is if you write it yourself, you sit down with a copy, or even better, everybody gets paper, and I stand up here, and I read it to you.
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That's why they did it in the scriptorium sometimes.
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They had a reader who would read, and the scribes would hand write the words as they heard the person reading them.
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Isn't that amazing? Could you imagine the only way you get to have one is you have to copy it.
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A lot of people wouldn't have one, right? Wouldn't be willing to put out that type of effort.
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Now, I say this all to point out what's on the screen because this has been the basis for much of the attacks that are leveled against the Bible.
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People want to claim that because the Bible was written by hand, and because the Bible was copied by hand, that that opens up the Bible to the possibility of blunders on behalf of the scribes and the copyists.
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Now, I will say this.
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Scribes did make mistakes.
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And next, not next week because this is going to be a two-part lesson, but in a couple weeks we're going to look at textual criticism.
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And textual criticism is the examination of scribal mistakes, scribal errors, whether they be intentional errors.
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And we're going to look at some of those because I do believe there are some places we can see where a scribe came in and made a textual amendation.
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They amended the text.
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And there are other places where it's an unintentional error.
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And you can see those as well.
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So I'm not here to say that a scribe has never made an error.
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But what I want to focus on tonight is on the fact that the transmission of the text itself is so reliable and so powerfully meticulous that we can trust what we have and we should trust what we have.
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So, that's the introduction to copying and textual transmission.
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Let's now look at our first subject.
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And this is the fact that the Bible was written by hand on various mediums.
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In your sheet, you've got three.
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And I put little photographs up here of each one.
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We know that certain parts of the Bible were written in stone, right? You've heard people say there's nothing written in stone.
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Well, that's not true.
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The Ten Commandments were written in stone.
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They were written by God.
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Later, of course, Moses destroyed those and an additional copy was made by Moses.
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But they were etched in stone.
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So we do know that there was a time where God's Word was placed in tablets of stone.
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But that was not the normal way that it would be held down through the ages.
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Thank God that we don't have giant cinder block Bibles that we have to carry around with us.
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Wouldn't that be a really difficult life to live? Especially, you talk about people having a hard time carrying their Bibles now.
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Could you imagine if they had to bring them in a wheelbarrow? The Flintstones.
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Yeah, be the Flintstones.
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Yeah, exactly.
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So the Bible did have portions that were written in stone.
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But the next element that was used as a writing medium was what is called papyrus.
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Papyrus is where we get the word paper.
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Papyrus is where we get the word paper.
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And the reason why it's called papyrus is it's from the papyrus plant.
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This plant was used to produce a paper-like substance very similar today to something like we would have more like our cardstock.
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Nothing like the notebook thin sheets that we have today.
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But what it was was they would take the reed of the papyrus plant and they would lay it down one direction and then they would take another reed and they'd lay it down another direction.
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They would press it together and dry it.
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And it was like a basket almost having been woven together to produce a piece of paper.
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And papyrus has been around for thousands of years.
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The problem with papyrus is that just like paper today, it doesn't last very long.
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Think about this.
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If you were to take a piece of paper today, how many of you have notebooks from when you were in school? I still do.
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I can go out to the shed and I've got things, I've got notes that Jennifer and I wrote back to each other back when we were in high school.
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And I've kept those notes.
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But you know every time you fold it up it creates more of a crease and that crease becomes more and more difficult.
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Next time you open it up it wants to tear on that crease.
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Well imagine if, and that's a piece of paper that was manufactured in a mill.
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Well these were not manufactured in that way.
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These were manufactured sometimes by individuals.
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There were places and there were businesses of course that were in the business of making papyri.
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But they were not done at all with the kind of things and mechanical and chemical things that we do today.
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So the very fact that we still have papyrus today that is 2,000 years old and we do and I'm going to show you some not tonight but next week.
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Actually there's one right there.
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Here's an example.
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That's a papyrus leaf from one of the ancient manuscripts that probably is from the second century which would put it right at 1,800 years old.
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And next week we're going to look at a lot of them and that's why I wanted this on the screen.
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But just to give you an idea.
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People say, well why is it all tattered? Well could you imagine what your work from high school would look like if you pulled it out today? Even if you put it in the ground and in a box the moisture and all these things that would get to the paper of course the edges are going to be foxed and they're going to have all these problems.
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And some of what we have you'll hear us talking about manuscripts.
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Anytime we talk about papyrus manuscripts usually we're not talking about a whole manuscript.
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Usually we're talking about only a few pages that have survived.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And that was probably that's probably been produced at least the last century or maybe a little longer and that's starting to fade and starting to it's amazing to me at all that any of this still exists.
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That any of the papyrus still exists.
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So you have stone.
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Yes, God used stone.
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But it wasn't the primary method.
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Papyrus was more common.
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In fact it was very common because it was easy to get.
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It was inexpensive and it was readily available.
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So you have papyrus and it's mentioned in if you just want to write this down it's mentioned in 2 John chapter 12.
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The word paper is used in your modern translation but that's a reference to papyrus.
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Also in Revelation chapter 5 verse 1 it talks about the books.
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That could also be a reference to papyrus because papyrus again was used to make books.
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You'll see here you see that mark down the center.
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That's where the leaf was put into the book.
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Okay.
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So you have stone.
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You have papyrus.
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And the third is animal skin.
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Animal skin.
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You have vellum which comes from calves.
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You have parchment which comes from sheep or goats.
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And you have leather which comes from cows.
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And there are manuscripts that are written on all of those.
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Vellum, parchment and leather manuscripts.
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And the best manuscripts from the ancient world were written on those because those last.
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Those manuscripts last.
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Leather lasts.
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It's not a subject to the problems of papyrus.
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And the best manuscripts we have from the ancient world the most complete manuscripts we're going to talk about next week about Codex Vaticanus Codex Sinaiticus two of the most complete manuscripts that we have both from the 4th century so they would be about 1700-1600 years old.
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Both of them are on animal skin.
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Not papyrus.
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Yes? And it was pretty neat because he talks how he dries it out.
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He soaks it first which kind of sounds weird in hog brains because it's the oil is what keeps it pure.
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Oh wow.
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There's something in this oil and it's soaked for a couple of hours and it pulls it out and he stretches it out.
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He's got a wooden frame and he strings it up and he lets it sit there and dry it out and he sits there with a wooden scraper with a little piece of metal on it and he scrapes all the hide off.
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And he can use some for paper he says if he just leaves it alone.
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Some of it he can take again and soak it, get it wet and he starts stretching it and the piece that he had that he stretched out was the softest piece of material I have ever seen.
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Wow.
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And it was just pretty neat to watch him go through the whole process of one that was just skint to a piece of clothing or to a piece of paper like you said for doing the right one.
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Isn't it amazing? Just the ingenuity of the ancient world and how it's guys who still know that today that's a dying skill.
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Because not many people in the modern world care to know that.
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Because they can go down and buy a pack of paper for 50 cents.
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They don't even care how valuable that skill is and how once in the world that was the most important thing or not one of the most important things because people wanted to write things down.
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People wanted to know these things.
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People wanted to have copies of these things.
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So that's really cool.
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So we have the Bible written on various mediums.
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You've got stone.
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You've got papyrus.
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You've got animal skins.
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Obviously the ones that have been the best preserved are the ones on animal skins.
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But we do have papyrus manuscripts but not a lot of them.
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So part of this lesson is going to be looking at some of those.
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Now we need to recognize that there is a difference between how the Old Testament has been preserved and transmitted and how the New Testament has been preserved and transmitted.
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And here's the two things to recognize.
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The Old Testament was copied within the Hebrew community under very rigid circumstances.
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The New Testament was copied by a much broader community because the New Testament church wasn't limited to only the Jews or the Hebrew people.
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The New Testament was copied by a much larger community of people under various circumstances or varied circumstances.
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So for just a second, even though we're not going to be doing New Testament tonight, I want to talk very quickly about the difference between the two because this is going to be important as we flesh this out in a moment.
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Under the Old Testament, the Old Testament was copied within the Hebrew community under very rigid circumstances.
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The Jewish scribes conscientiously sought perfection in the transcription of the text.
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And I want you to hear this.
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This is from the Talmud, the old ancient teaching of the Jewish people.
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They had rigid regulations that were laid down for the making of the copies of the Bible.
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Now for them, the Bible is the Old Testament only.
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These are some of the requirements of those who were making copies.
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Number one, the copyist was required to sit in full Jewish dress after having completed a ritual bath.
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They essentially were baptized and then they went to work in their full gear.
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They were to take what they were doing seriously.
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This was very important.
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They were writing and copying God's Word.
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So they had a ritual for preparation.
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Only a certain kind of ink could be used in the copying of the Scripture.
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And rules governed how far the words were to be separated from them.
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The space in between words and letters was very meticulously kept.
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No word or letter could be written from memory.
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You know how often times you'll be writing something? If you're copying by hand and you'll read a sentence and then you'll start writing the sentence and then you'll look back and say, oh, I missed that word.
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They didn't do that.
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They went one at a time, a one-for-one copy.
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They were very meticulous in ensuring that they were making an accurate copy.
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Lines and letters were counted methodologically.
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They would count the letters.
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They knew what letter was supposed to be in the middle of the page.
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That's how specific it was in the copying of the Old Testament.
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And if a manuscript was found to have an error, it was destroyed.
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Now this is the Old Testament.
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Yeah, that's it.
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The manuscript itself.
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If it was found to have an error, it was destroyed.
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As a result of that, there are not very many Old Testament copies when compared to the New Testament because it was a harder, more rigorous, more ritualistic process that went into copying the Old Testament.
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The New Testament, however, was a lot different.
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Because the larger community was able to copy the New Testament, there are many more copies available and it is, in fact, the most well-attested work of antiquity because there's over 5,000 copies, handwritten copies, which go back all the way to the second century.
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But, however, this comes with more textual variation.
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Because of the vast amount of copies, these textual variations are recognizable and if we only had two copies of the New Testament, we wouldn't know which one was right if there was a variation.
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You know what I'm saying? If you only had two copies and they disagreed, you wouldn't know which one was right.
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But because we have thousands of copies, it makes it easier to figure out which one represents the original.
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That's what textual criticism is and that's what we're going to study in the weeks to come.
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But, as I said, when it comes to having so many copies and they're written under the circumstances, not baptizing beforehand, not wearing the ritualistic robes, but, in fact, sometimes being copied while on the run.
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And, as I said, if you wanted a copy of Paul's letter to the Romans, sometimes you had to copy it yourself.
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So there's a lot more New Testament copies, but the variations are more as well.
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That's what you get when you have a larger body.
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You have a larger body of variation.
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Interestingly enough, according to Dr.
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James White, Christians, he believes, actually invented the process of writing on both sides of the page.
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Because papyrus, when it was made, there was a rough side and a smooth side.
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The smooth side was used for writing.
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The rough side usually was not.
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But Christians in the first century, wanting to copy their Bible and wanting to have copies for themselves and wanting to be able to distribute, began the process of writing on both sides.
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So when we find ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, we find them with writing on both sides, both on the smooth side and on the rough side.
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So it speaks to the conditions in which they were writing, much different than that of the Old Testament, much different than that of being very meticulous in a scriptorium.
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It's just a different situation altogether.
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And remember, in the early church, you had different types of people.
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You had people who were wealthy and influential like Lydia.
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She was a businesswoman.
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She obviously was very wealthy.
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There was a lot that she could probably do that possibly someone on the run who maybe was living out of fear because of the authorities or something like that probably couldn't do.
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So that's another reason for the vast variation that we have in the New Testament versus the Old Testament.
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Alright? So I wanted to begin giving you that before we get into Old Testament history because when we talk tonight about the Old Testament, next week when we talk about the New Testament, it will be very different.
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The whole history is different because it really is two different communities that are maintaining the text.
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For the Jews, there's the maintaining of the Old Testament.
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But Christians maintain the New Testament and Christians were not a solidified community like the Hebrew people and the Jewish people in the first century.
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I mean, Christians were coming everywhere and from various backgrounds, various situations.
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Alright, so looking now at Old Testament manuscript history.
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Old Testament manuscript history, that's what we're going to move into now.
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I'm going to say a few things that you probably know.
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The first is this.
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The first books of the Old Testament were written by whom? It's in your notes.
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Moses.
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Moses wrote what books? The Pentateuch.
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Penta being five.
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So it's the first five books of the Bible also known as the Torah or the Law.
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The Law of Moses.
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Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
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So you've got the first five books of the Bible all written by Moses.
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Now I want to throw this out at you.
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This is not intended to confuse you but this is intended to make a point.
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That statement, when I say Moses wrote Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, that statement by itself is highly controversial in some circles because there's a lot of people who don't believe that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible.
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In fact, among liberal scholars it's almost unanimously rejected that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible.
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There's something called the documentary hypothesis.
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The documentary hypothesis is the JEPD theory.
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J-E-P-D is the Jehovah's, the Elohis, the Priestly, and the Deuteronomist.
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The J-E-P-D theory.
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Basically what this says is when you read the books of Moses sometimes God is referred to as Jehovah or Yahweh, which is the divine name, and sometimes God is described or called Elohim.
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And they say any time you see God use the word Jehovah, that's one writer.
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And any time you see the term Elohim, that's a different writer.
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And then for some of the writings of Leviticus and other priestly rules and laws, that was a different group.
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And Deuteronomy was written by a completely different author later.
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So that is the JEPD theory.
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I do not agree with that called the documentary hypothesis.
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And let me tell you why I don't believe it.
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Because Jesus tells me that Moses wrote.
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What does He say? He tells us in the Scripture that have you not read what Moses wrote to you saying? And He quotes from the Old Testament.
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He quotes from the writings of Moses.
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It was very clear in the time of Christ that when He was quoting from the Torah or the first five books of the Bible, that it was accepted that Moses had written them.
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So the question then becomes why does Moses sometimes use Yahweh or Jehovah to describe God by name and sometimes the term Elohim is used? Well, I ask you this question.
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Do you ever do that? Have you ever called God Lord and God and Yahweh in the same conversation and yet you're referring to the same person? Yahweh is the divine name.
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Lord is the title.
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And God is the nature.
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God, He is God.
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And He is Lord and He is Yahweh.
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I have no issue with there being different ways that God is described by name in the writings of Moses and I have no issue with any of the first five books being written by Moses save one part.
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I do believe that the last portion of Deuteronomy was written most likely by Joshua because it talks about Moses' death.
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And unless Moses was prophesying his own death and it's not written as prophecy, it's written as narrative.
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So unless Moses was prophesying, which I don't think he was, then I believe that Joshua came and wrote the latter part of Deuteronomy.
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Now, does that mean he could have written the whole thing? I don't think he did.
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I don't believe he did.
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But I do believe someone finished what was written by Moses.
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Okay? And I don't think there's any reason to have an issue with that.
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You know? I don't see any reason why we have to force Moses to write about his death after he dies.
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I think that would be a little difficult to try to force.
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But so we have the argument.
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I don't agree with it.
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I believe Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible.
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But then the question becomes, well, alright, how did it get from Moses to me? Because that's the whole question of tonight, right? How did it go? Because when did Moses write? Approximately 1,500 years before Jesus.
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Alright? So it went 3,500 years of travel time before it gets to me.
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Well, let's look at some of the examples.
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The first text that we're going to look at tonight is the Masoretic Text.
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The Masoretic Text.
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The Masoretic Text comes from the Masoretes, which were a group of Jewish scribes whose meticulous copying of the Old Testament, or what they would have considered to be their Bible, took place between the years 500 and 1,080, or AD 500 to 1,000.
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It is considered to this day to be the authoritative text for Jewish rabbis, or rabbinic Judaism.
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It was primarily copied and edited and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between AD 500 and 1,000.
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The Masoretic scribes used a very meticulous system of transcription, had a deep reverence for the text, and God used their respect for the text to preserve the text's accuracy.
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Now, here's where this becomes an issue for some people, and I'm going to erase.
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By the way, now do you see why I didn't want to try and push it all into one lesson? I'm not even part done with the Old Testament.
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We're not even close to being done with this part.
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So, there's a lot here.
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But here's the thing.
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If Moses wrote, let's say, 1,500 B.C., and this is Moses, so we go 1,000 years ahead to 500 B.C., that would have been...
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Well, let's go 1,100 years, let's go 400 B.C.
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That's about the time that the last Old Testament prophet would have lived and written.
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What's the last book of the Old Testament? Malachi.
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Malachi.
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So, we have Malachi.
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The joke is he's the Italian prophet, Malachi.
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No, he's Malachi.
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So, we've got the Italian prophet.
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So, this is the writing period of the Old Testament.
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Okay? Now, there's a 400-year period where there is no writing.
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There is history being written, the Book of Maccabees and things like that, but we don't consider that a scripture.
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You have the time of Jesus, and then you have another 500 years before you have the Masoretes.
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Okay? So, between 500 and 1,000, probably between 700 and 900, actually, you have the writing of the Masoretes or the copying of the Masoretes.
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We do not possess Hebrew manuscripts prior to that point.
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Okay? That's a huge issue for some people because they're written way back here.
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The first copies that we have are here.
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So, that is a very long period of distance.
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See, here's the thing about the New Testament.
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New Testament's written here.
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First copies we have are, like, within one generation.
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Not that way with the Old Testament.
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We're getting there.
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We're getting there.
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No, no, you're fine.
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You're catching me.
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You're getting a little ahead because this is about how it was before the Dead Sea Scrolls came into knowing.
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But even still today, the only full copies that we have, handwritten full copies, date that long of a period of time.
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And again, think about the reason why.
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The copying was meticulously done Old copies were destroyed when new copies were made so that there wouldn't be any confusion or any problem and they kept a very meticulous method for ensuring accuracy.
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But obviously, you can see how an unbeliever might come in and say, How in the world can you know that what Moses wrote is what you have today because you've got 1,500 years plus 500 years.
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You've got 2,000 years.
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That's right.
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I did the math.
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15 plus 5.
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So it's 2,000 years of history from the time it was written to the time of your earliest copies.
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That's a huge problem, right? At least for some folks.
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Then we have to ask the question, What else do we have? What else do we have? If this is all we had, there could be the argument, Has there been any changes that nobody knows about because they're hidden in history and they're invisible because we can't see them.
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Here's the beauty.
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Right around here was written something called the Septuagint.
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The Septuagint is written somewhere around the 2nd or 3rd century BC, meaning it was written before Jesus.
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The Septuagint is written before Jesus.
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That's important because the Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.
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The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.
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So we can compare this to something that came almost 1,000 years before.
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You see? And we have good reason as Christians to believe that the Septuagint is accurate.
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Why? Because it was the Bible of the apostles.
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In fact, there's places in the New Testament we can prove that they're quoting from the Septuagint and not the Hebrew text because of how they make the quote.
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So you understand why this is valuable.
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Because this bears an older witness to what these are saying.
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Demonstrating that there haven't been errors introduced and there haven't been wholesale changes made because we have something almost 1,000 years prior that gives us a witness to what these say.
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Even though it's in a different language, we know what it was saying because we can translate in reverse as it were to make sure that there's been no wholesale changes, no errors.
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So that's the Septuagint.
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And I want to read just what the notes say.
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Although written in Greek, scholars can generally determine what Hebrew words were being translated in the Septuagint.
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It provides evidence that the Hebrew Bibles were copied extremely well for all the years between the Septuagint translation, 2nd, 3rd B.C., and our best existing Hebrew copies, which are around 900 to 1,000 A.D.
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Okay, so we have the Septuagint as a witness to the Hebrew text.
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But then there's what Mr.
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Mike mentioned just a minute ago, the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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How many of you were alive when they found the Dead Sea Scrolls? How many of you remember it? It was a huge deal that they found these scrolls because the Dead Sea Scrolls, handwritten copies of the Old Testament that predated the existing copies by a thousand years.
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Not Greek, but Hebrew.
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Now there's a lot of debate about the Dead Sea Scrolls, who wrote them, and where they came from.
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I tend to believe that the Essene community wrote them.
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The Essene community was a very pious community that lived near the Dead Sea.
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They had a scriptorium, and that scriptorium was a place, just like we talked about earlier, where they did their ritual washings, and they would sit down and they would copy text.
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These were people that were so pious that some people have even argued that John the Baptist spent time with them because of his piety.
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I don't necessarily ascribe to that, but I'm just saying these are people that considered the cultural Judaism of their day to be absolutely too liberal, and they were very conservative, and they went and they created a community around their beliefs, and they made it their point of writing Scripture.
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And they took these scrolls, and they put these scrolls into big pots, and they hid them in the caves near the Dead Sea.
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A thousand years later, children are playing, and a rock is thrown into one of the caves, and they hear a crash, and what it was was the rock breaking the top of one of the pots.
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And so the boy goes, and he sees these pots, and he goes and gets his father, and his father comes back, and he sees these giant...
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These pots are not pots.
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These pots are pots.
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These are real.
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These scrolls are not small.
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These are big, giant.
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See this thing here? That's the Isaiah scroll in Israel, and that's the whole scroll in a circle.
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That thing that's lit up in the middle, that scroll is underneath light that you can go and walk up and look at it.
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And if you could read Hebrew, you could read it.
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And the building that it's in is actually built in the shape of those pots that they found them in.
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So that's why it has that interesting looking roof because the pots had a very interesting...
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I actually have a model of one that was given to me by one of my professors, a very small model of the giant pots that they were found in.
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So the Dead Sea Scrolls took the text back a thousand years.
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It introduced some questions about some of the texts where there were some questions about textual criticism.
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Again, we're going to talk about those in a couple of weeks.
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But the vast majority, it was a testimony to how well God's people had preserved God's Word down through the ages.
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So we have, first, the Masoretic Text, meticulously cared for and copied.
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We have the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation dating before Christ.
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And we have the scrolls found by the Dead Sea, which also bear testimony to the consistency.
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Last one.
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Last one.
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The Latin Vulgate.
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How many of you ever heard of the Latin Vulgate? If you've ever been a part of the Roman Catholic Church, you've probably heard of the Latin Vulgate because even to this day, Latin is considered a very important part of the Roman Catholic history.
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In fact, there are still masses which are held in the Latin because of the use of the Vulgate, which was written...
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Let me make sure I have my date right.
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It was written between 390 and 405.
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It was copied.
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And there was an older Latin version, but the older Latin version had been copied from the Septuagint.
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This one was not.
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The Latin Vulgate was copied by Jerome.
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That's the picture that we see here.
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And the Latin Vulgate was copied directly from the Hebrew into Latin.
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So his copies of the Hebrew copied into Latin or translated into Latin give us one more example of what the Hebrew Old Testament actually said because we can reverse translate to see and ensure that what we're saying and what we know is correct.
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So this does come a little later.
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This comes right about here, right around 400.
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So it's after the cross, but it still predates the Masoretic text.
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So the Masoretic text can be read next to the Vulgate and we can see the consistency and the accuracy because we know that Jerome was translating from Hebrew texts.
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So there is...
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as it says at the bottom here of our notes, though not a Hebrew copy, the Vulgate provides insight into the Hebrew manuscripts from which Jerome translated.
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So what do we have? Do we have the writings of Moses, the original writings? No.
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But we have a tremendous manuscript history in the Old Testament that we can be confident is accurate because of the meticulous nature with which it was handled within the Hebrew community.
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And we have two additional sources, the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, which bear witness to the consistency and the accuracy of the Old Testament Hebrew text.
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So what do we know? All of the evidence points to a very meticulously preserved Old Testament which accurately reflects the original writings.
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Amen? Amen.
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That was a lot.
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I'm out of breath.
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So, brother, do you want to say something before we close? Yeah, well, when you talk about the great difference between the history of the Old Testament...
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Yes.
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I know where you're going.
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I know what you're...
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...came about after the Latin Vulgate.
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Yes.
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The 39 books that you have in your Bible that are Old Testament books in the Hebrew Bible are numbered differently.
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There are not 39.
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There's 24, right? 24.
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24 books.
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Because all of the prophets are held together as one book, and that drastically decreases how you count the number.
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So that can create some confusion, but you're right.
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The reason for the difference is because of the introduction of the change in the Latin.
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It also makes it where when we read our Old Testament, it seems to read out of order.
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If you read it as it's written and used among the Hebrew people, it's much easier because it keeps things more in line with what's happening at the time.
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Yes, sir.
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Since we don't have the original, we don't know what the original was.
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Absolutely.
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It could be the same.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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It could be absolutely the same.
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And I believe God has preserved it the same.
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And like you said, the onus is on them to prove the error.
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And without the original, they can't.
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But we have every reason to believe that what we have accurately reflects the original.
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So if you take nothing else home tonight, take that last sentence home.
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We have every reason to believe that our Old Testament accurately reflects the Old Testament as it was written by Moses and the prophets.
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Let's pray.
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Father, thank you for tonight.
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Thank you for the time to study.
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I pray that it's been a lesson that would encourage your people to trust their Bibles even more.
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I pray that it's been helpful in learning.
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And I pray that as we move out of this lesson and in next week's lesson that we'll learn even more about why we can and should trust the tenacity of the transmission of your Word.
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And it's in Christ's name.
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Amen.