- 00:08
- They went around and gathered up old scrolls that they could find and copies of the Bible, and they found about 5 ,000 copies of scripture from countries all over the world.
- 00:19
- This group of manuscripts became known as the Texas Receptus, the Received Text. They looked at all these scrolls and could find no differences except the spelling of people's names and the spelling of cities, like Peter and Pedro and stuff like that.
- 00:31
- So they made English translations and finally the King James in 1611 was made from these texts, what's called a majority text.
- 00:40
- Wow, how many errors can we pack into a very short period of time? The TR, Texas Receptus, a term of course coming from about 1633 in an advertising blurb for a published edition of the
- 00:54
- Greek New Testament, that this is 5 ,000 manuscripts from all over the world.
- 01:01
- Isn't it fascinating, the people who promoted the Greek Septuagint in the early church as being an inspired text, circulated stories about how when the
- 01:16
- Jewish translators translated the
- 01:23
- Septuagint, they each went in and they did their own translation, some of the stories of Abel, the
- 01:30
- Old Testament, whatever. They came out and they compared them and they were all the same, no differences.
- 01:36
- And notice how that works here. This creation of a mythology, that all these manuscripts that they had, they all read just the same.
- 01:48
- The only differences were spellings of names, again, pure fiction. You could not document any of this.
- 01:56
- If you read Erasmus, if you read anything by Beza or any of the history of that time period, that just simply isn't the case.
- 02:07
- There were differences, there were textual variants, there's well -known textual variants in the manuscripts that Erasmus worked with.
- 02:15
- And he brought material in from the Latin Vulgate and there's all sorts of issues for the serious student of the time period and textual critical issues to look at.
- 02:28
- But this idea that, well, they had 5 ,000 manuscripts, they all said the same thing.
- 02:35
- Where does this come from? As I said, it's purely fictional and that's not where the
- 02:41
- Textus Receptus came from. The TR comes from the five editions of Erasmus, the work of Stephanus, the work of Beza, and even then, the
- 02:49
- King James translators, there were differences between each one of those. And the King James translators had to make that final decision as to what text they were going to follow.
- 03:00
- So again, Mr. Hovind's presentation here just simply does not make any sense whatsoever.
- 03:07
- Meanwhile, down in Egypt, there was a group of folks called the Alexandrians down in Alexandria, Egypt, which was at that time a major city, a major library was there, which later burned.
- 03:17
- But a major city in Alexandria, Egypt. There was a cult down there called the Alexandrians.
- 03:22
- They're sort of like Jehovah's Witnesses. They wanted everybody to think they were Christian, but they believed a lot of strange things. So they made their own version of the
- 03:29
- Bible. They left out a lot of verses they didn't like. They changed little things here and there. It was a careful counterfeit, but a counterfeit nonetheless.
- 03:37
- They have this Alexandrian Bible and some copies were made and the primary guy in this cult was a guy named
- 03:43
- Origen, who lived about 240 AD. In 350
- 03:49
- AD, two copies of the Alexandrian Bible were made and those copies are called the
- 03:55
- Sinaiticus, because it was found in the Sinai desert in a monastery, and Vaticanus, because it was found in the
- 04:00
- Vatican library in the basement, I believe. Those two copies from 350 AD are still around today.
- 04:06
- You know, 1 ,600 years old copies of the scriptures, well, of the
- 04:12
- Alexandrian Bible. The Latin Vulgate was made from those manuscripts in 380
- 04:19
- AD. Okay, the errors are piling up so fast here, we have to keep jumping in to try to correct all of them.
- 04:26
- This idea of the Alexandrian cult, again, more mythology and more fiction. There were people who denied the deity of Christ everywhere.
- 04:35
- In fact, interestingly enough, the very hometown of the Byzantine manuscript tradition, at least its focus,
- 04:43
- Antioch, was filled with Arians. In fact, it was Athanasius who stood for the deity of Christ and he was the bishop of, oh, let me think of it, oh,
- 04:54
- Alexandria. Yes, it was Athanasius who defended the Nicene faith for all those decades.
- 05:00
- So again, just a completely warped, mythical, fictional view of church history.
- 05:07
- Very common in King James only material, but just as mythical as well. So you've got
- 05:14
- Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, I would put them actually at the time of Council of Nicaea, and then the
- 05:20
- Vulgate is translated from there. Well, that's fascinating. I'm sure Drone would have found that to be most interesting because he took so much heat for translating from the
- 05:30
- Hebrew, and neither of those are actually in Hebrew for the Old Testament, of course.
- 05:37
- And then there's the Western readings in the Vulgate. Again, this kind of very simplistic thing.
- 05:46
- In fact, he's going to jump now about 1 ,200 years and ignore all the intervening stuff to get to the time of Erasmus and things like that.
- 05:58
- And did you notice right at the beginning, I forgot to comment on this, but he said, meanwhile down in Alexandria, this was about two cliffs ago, and he had just finished talking about Erasmus, and actually there was about a 1 ,200 year difference there too.
- 06:10
- I think he was just transitioning, but it could be very confusing to people. Again, all this, all these errors piling up, it's interesting to me that Erasmus wanted to use the
- 06:23
- Vatican manuscript. He knew of its existence. He did not reject it. He even wrote to his friend Bombasius in Rome to have him check on the
- 06:29
- Commiohonium. So, if he had had access to it, he would have used it. And so, again, this idea that we've got these 5 ,000 manuscripts, and you had just these few
- 06:40
- Alexanderians, simply does not line up with the facts of history at all. It was translated to Latin.
- 06:47
- Then in 1582, the Catholic Church ordered the translation of the
- 06:53
- Latin Vulgate into English, and that's where the Douay confraternity and the Douay -Rheims version come in.
- 06:59
- The Douay versions were made from the Latin, which was a good translation of the wrong manuscript.
- 07:05
- They're translating the Alexandrian. So, they got the bad manuscript, the corrupt, you know, cult manuscript being translated into English, which became the official
- 07:13
- Catholic version in use today. The Douay version of the Bible. Two guys. Now, again, it is simply ridiculous to identify
- 07:23
- Sinaiticus, or Vaticanus, or P75, or P46, or P66, or any of the
- 07:31
- Alexandrian manuscripts as cult manuscripts, if you apply the same rules of exegesis to any, quote -unquote,
- 07:42
- Alexandrian manuscript, that you apply to any, quote -unquote, Byzantine manuscript. By the way,
- 07:48
- I apologize, I forgot to comment, he identified the TR with the majority text, they are not the same thing.
- 07:54
- A very common error. Again, only people who have never done any textual study would make that error, and that's the majority of King James only advocates, but they're not the same thing.
- 08:03
- There's at least 1 ,800 differences between the two. But, again, take the most
- 08:10
- Byzantine manuscript, the most Alexandrian manuscript, apply the same rules of exegesis, you get the same teachings.
- 08:17
- You get the same beliefs. This idea of, well, you know, they are taking out all these verses, like that, it's just,
- 08:23
- I'm sorry, it just isn't true. And when you get these kind of folks into a room to debate you, as you saw in the
- 08:31
- John Ankerberg material back in 1995, it does not go well for them. But, unfortunately, they keep promoting this stuff.
- 08:40
- And if we're going to be objecting to the misrepresentation of the history of the
- 08:45
- Bible endemic in Islamic apologetics, well, we need to be consistent in rebuking those who call themselves
- 08:53
- Christians who, likewise, engage in myth and fantasy in coming up with stuff like this presentation.
