Unanticipated Discussion of CBGM and P45, Then Beginning of Ijaz Ahmad’s Video on OT/NT “Corruption”

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. Here we are again. Lots of stuff to get to today. Might even open the phones because I have been told that there have been some people saying, why do you take phone calls again?

Well, I don't know. But we'll see. Might happen, might not. It all depends on whether we can get everything done. We need to get done. Topics gotten to, I feel a little bit behind. Don't feel quite as prepared as I'd like to.

It's been a real busy morning and didn't get in here until just a little while ago and trying to cue stuff up. And so we'll see. Always want to make the program as educational as possible. And sometimes you want to address some subjects that are just real deep.

I realized I left the Coptic Gnostic Library over there. I wonder if there's some other story time with Uncle Jimmy things we could read. There are lots of people who were really doing some funny things with the blank stuff on Twitter.

And in fact, there was a classic this morning. Yeah. Miller Brummett. Did you hear about the new Gnostic manuscript they found? It says, quote, in the future theological debate against Pato Baptist and Credo Baptist, the blank understand the scriptures correctly.

End quote. I retweeted that one. That was classic. That was very good. That was very, very good. And so, yeah, we'll have to have to see what other heretical things we can read on the air. People seem to like that.

I could just buy Joel Osteen. It's pretty much the same thing, but not nearly as interesting and not nearly as old, I guess. So there's that. Read it with a Joel Osteen smile. That's not really possible for me to do.

I've never been to a dentist for that long. And I don't have batteries attached to my teeth. So I couldn't do that, really. Anyway, while I was in St. Charles, I saw an article on Facebook linking to this video, and it was said, you won't hear anybody talking about this.

And I sort of responded by saying, well, what do you mean? First of all, I normally don't talk about politics, but secondly, I had not even seen this. And so I said, no, I will talk about it because this was troubling.

There is a video popped up last week of Judge Roy Moore being interrupted in a, well, it looks like a campaign. He's talking about the campaign. So it looks like it's a campaign appearance. It's not. It's a church service.

Now, what's going to happen is there's some protester, there's some guy that's going to start yelling, and eventually they're going to get rid of him. And the pastor of the church comes up. And I actually had just seen, sorry about this, I saw the name.

It was a Baptist church. It was in Alabama. What do you expect? Looked like some type of a Southern Baptist church, looked like a Southern Baptist pastor. And I'm not interested in getting into the names of who it was.

I don't know anything about the guy, whatever. But what he said was very troubling to me because he basically said, this is a worship service. This is a worship service. And if you interrupt a worship service, you'll be turned over to cops because that's illegal.

Well, then why is Roy Moore up front talking about a political campaign in a worship service? That's not worship. We have for, I have since as long as I can remember, recognized that people on the left have used liberal churches as platform for absurd campaigning and all the rest of this stuff, and just could care less about the issues raised by them.

But here's the right doing exactly the same thing, exactly the same thing, and with much less reason. I mean, liberal churches are pretty much just focused on being social justice warriors in the first place because they got nothing else to do.

They don't have a gospel. They don't really believe the Bible. But in a, I would assume Southern Baptist church, maybe somebody could look it up and verify for me that it was a Southern Baptist church.

I closed the thing and don't have time to track it back down. But assuming it was a Southern Baptist church, or some type of a Baptist church in the How do you identify having a political candidate behind the pulpit speaking as part of the preaching of the service?

That is not worship. If you think that's worship, then we need to have a discussion of what biblical worship is and the centrality of the presentation of God's Word, the centrality of focus upon Him. You can talk about how important all these other issues are if you want to, but don't call that the worship of the eternal God.

It's just stunning. So let's take a look at it. And I'll be honest with you, listening to his supporters was scary. He's a man's man. He's a man's man. What does that have to do with, what? This was, well, it was troubling.

So let's take a look. You got it? Okay. Let's take a look at it.

Never once has anyone stated anything like it has occurred in the last three and a half weeks. That's, that's not. Five statewide, five statewide campaigns and three county-wide campaigns. We can stop it and get them out or we can keep going.

All right. Now that the plant is gone with the IQ of one, I would remind everyone again that this is a worship service. And by the way, it is illegal to disturb a worship service. Now, the next one who makes disturbance will be turned over to the police.

So as pastor of this church, I'm saying we're going to do these things decently and in order.

Okay. Now, decently and in order in that context of a worship service would have to do with an actual service to the church. This has come up a lot recently, and I want to, I want to point it out yet again.

Tried to have a conversation with an individual in Twitter had actually unblocked him because I had seen some comments he was making and he actually made the argument. Some young fiery, fiery breathing guy.

He actually made the comment that Christian conferences are church services. And I said, well, excuse me, but isn't it rather obvious in the New Testament, you have elders, you have deacons, you have the ordinances of the church, baptism in the Lord's supper, you have the singing of Psalms, you have prayers, you have the reading of scripture, you have church disciplines.

So you have organization. These are all things it's very easy to identify from the epistles, from Acts. What's the issue? How can you identify a conference as a meeting of the church when you don't have anything even close to these?

There's no ordinances being, this is not a worship service of the church. There's a lot of confusion as to what the quote unquote church is, but very little discussion of exactly what the Bible defines as meeting of the church.

So someone in channel is saying it was Magnolia Springs Baptist Church. Is that, can someone find out if they are associated with the Southern Baptist Convention? I'm just, or if they're independent or whatever, it doesn't matter.

I just want to be accurate in the description. Because like I said, I saw it and then I went and closed that. I went upgraded my OS and every time I do that, my favorite Quran program is called Zekr. It just works well for me, but it runs on the old Java stuff.

So every time you upgrade your OS, you have to reinstall a legacy version of Java just to run it. And so I had to close everything and so I lost that and didn't have time to put back together again. Like I said, I was feeling a little rushed to try to get everything put together.

So I look at this, and this is very, very concerning for me. And it should be, I think, concerning for Christians that you would have, I don't care how strongly you feel about Judge Roy Moore one way or the other, about the issues we need to have.

I mean, look at the Supreme Court. We need to have another Republican Senator. And it's all about the Supreme Court and all about this type of stuff. And okay, fine, whatever. Someone's saying not listed as an SBC church.

So, okay. So it's probably just an independent Baptist church. There's plenty of those. So just your standard down South Baptist church without being part of the Southern Baptist church. So there you go.

Anyway, if anyone's wondering, I am offended that you would call a political rally, even for a conservative, a worship service. I'm offended when I see that being done on the left. I'm offended when I see that being done on the right.

It's not a worship service. That's a political gathering, and it needs to be identified for what it is. And I'm not getting into... I will say this. The Roy Moore situation has reminded me once again of how little modern people tend to think in a...

Well, tend to think the way that my generation did. Why? A couple of things here. First of all, there's something called the statute of limitations, and there's something called innocent until proven guilty.

And those are not covers for bad behavior in the past. They are foundations for justice and liberty, because when you bring something up from 40 years ago, there are no witnesses left. Memories have become corrupted over time.

There's no way to do justice. And you see, modern people go, but there has to be, there has to be. We have to do justice. And they don't. That's why people are tearing down statues and all the rest of it.

Why didn't people do that in the past? Was it because they didn't care? Because they just weren't as smart as modern people? No, it's because they had a Christian worldview, and they realized you won't always get justice in this life, but there is a day of justice coming.

And so they knew we can make mistakes in this life. Therefore, it is vitally important to have rules, evidentiary rules, innocent until proven guilty, the proper process, have judges, for example, who have a proper worldview to be able to function.

That's where I think our system is. When I say our, I'm sorry, for those of you listening outside the United States. That's why I think the United States system is virtually in a state of collapse, is because the judiciary that is supposed to be protecting these things no longer believes in a worldview that makes sense out of these things.

And so have we not known for a long time that guilty men might get away in this life? We've always felt that that was better than the imprisoning of an innocent man. That you have to, we can do the best we can with the evidence and the situation we have here, but we always recognized, we always recognized there is a day of justice coming.

That's why you'd put that hand on that Bible and you would swear. And you might lie through your teeth, but the point was, you're not going to get away with it forever. You might get away with it for now.

You might fool us. You might undercut justice in this life, but you're not going to undercut justice in eternity. There's going to be a greater judge and he knows, and you will be judged. I can see why secularists have to throw liberty and evidentiary rules and justice in that sense out the door to get instant feelings-based justice.

I want feelings-based justice. Who is that woman? I don't remember what the name was, but that woman who came straight out, you know, when the accusations, the Matt Lauer stuff and the Weinstein and all this stuff and Kevin Spacey, and I don't know much about Hollywood other than it's burning down right now, all that kind of stuff.

When there was a woman who came out and she just directly said, I would rather have dozens of innocent men's lives and careers ruined than a single perpetrator get away with it. You know why they say that?

Because it all has to be done in this life. There is no afterlife in which there's going to be justice because they don't have a God who's created this world and who sits upon a throne that's based upon justice.

So you better do it now. And if innocent people got to get trashed in the process, well, hey, you know, my priorities say that's just fine. Wow. So I do look at that situation. I do not have time right now to be reading all the stuff and going into the stuff about this woman said A, no interest, B, no time.

I don't live in Alabama. Maybe if I did, I'd have to spend more time on it, but I don't. But it's been scary to see how people will just not let the process go. And part of it's their worldview and part of it's the fact the process is falling apart.

Because if you do not have a unbiased, constitutionally bound, honest judiciary, what's left? I don't know. I don't know what's coming. But great will be its fall. Great will be its fall. No two ways about it.

If we are not exceptionally, exceptionally careful, well, exceptionally careful. We're being exceptionally careful. It doesn't matter. There's a lot going on here. So anyways, I can't even name the principles and the accusers and there's something about your book.

And I don't know. All I know is Roy Moore should not have standing in front of a Baptist church talking about his politics and calling it worship. It's not worship. Don't call it worship. Just don't even go there.

So I knew as soon as somebody said that, you shouldn't be running that on your computer because it's terrible. It's the only way program works. And it's the best Quran program I've ever run across. I don't use it in my browsers, but it's absolutely necessary for that particular program.

That's a good program. I just haven't found any others. Maybe they've come up with one now. Maybe my Muslim friends will tell me about what's new on the horizon as far as an accordance level type program.

But still the best Quran program I have is on my iPad called My Quran. That's still the best one I've found. I would like to think that there are some better ones out there. Anyways, okay. So there's that.

We talked about that. I'll mention this just real quickly since they're sitting over here. It came into the office, like I said, just a while ago and two more volumes had arrived. There's a total of three there.

You're looking at some really expensive books. Really, really expensive books there. I won't even bother to tell you what they cost, but they're very expensive. Why in the world would I have really super expensive books that have basically no English in them whatsoever?

All you've got in here is chart, chart, chart, page after page of nothing but charts. Oh, wow. Fancy schmancy with a little zoom zoom thing there. And then here's resultate der collation, result of the collation.

This is called Text und Textwert. This set is sort of the pre-computer work of the Institute in Munster where they are collating a certain number of manuscripts at particular points of textual variation.

It's the printed precursor to what is now the online databases and tools that Munster is making available to New Testament scholars to do New Testament textual study in what's called the coherence-based genealogical method.

Obviously, computers are much faster than we are, and the database is much larger now than what you have here. The problem is that so far, we only have access to the databases and tools for the general epistles and for Acts.

I can't be in this program forever, so in looking at P45, it's great to have Acts now, and it's great to have the online tools for Acts because a major portion of P45 is Acts. But the most important portion of P45 that I need to look at is Mark, and John is important as well.

Matthew and Luke are super fragmentary in P45. So what I have here are the text and textvert volumes for John and Mark, and what that will allow me to do very slowly is to do manual CBGM-type studies studies of key textual variants in P45 to utilize this very new technology to shed some light on the textual background of P45, which is my subject to begin with.

And so those just came today. For the vast majority of the human population, they would have no meaning whatsoever. I understand that. And I'm going to have to be really utilizing my best reading glasses because that font is really small.

And it's just page after page after page of tables and collation of manuscripts at particular points, but it's extremely useful, extremely helpful along those lines. And who knows what it will help us to dig up, but it's a whole new field.

It's a whole new area. And so that's just, I realize for most people, that's really boring. But in light of what we're about to look at, it's very, very relevant. And that is, y 'all can stop with the computer stuff.

I don't care. If you want to get muted or something on Twitter, I don't care. I know you're geeks, and you just got to do your geek thing, but just try to control yourself on the geek thing. Well, you see, I'm not even ready to go there.

CBGM, coherence-based genealogical method. Maybe in a year, I might be able to put together the type of slides and graphics to try to bring a general audience along in understanding such terms as pre-genealogical coherence, coherence, local stomata, global stomata, principles of parsimony, and everything else goes along with it.

A book was published just about three weeks ago, it came out. I think it was Dr. Wasserman and Dr. Gurry. I know it was Dr. Gurry, but I think it was Tommy Wasserman was the co-author, which is meant to be a introduction to the whole concept of CBGM.

And it is just simply extremely difficult even to follow what is meant to be the most simplified possible presentation of CBGM. In fact, the primary reason that CBGM is struggling for acceptance amongst many New Testament scholars and textual critics is most people just don't understand it.

It is not what I was taught in the 1980s. It does require a fair amount of mathematical analysis. The computer does a lot of it, but you still need to understand what in the world the computer is doing.

And it goes against the grain of where most of us are. For example, CBGM has, for those who are using it, only established the existence of one textual group, the Byzantine. It basically says there is no such thing as Alexandrian, Western, Caesarean.

It doesn't exist. It basically undercuts. And I'm pretty certain now, by the way, that my initial thinking on the Tyndale House Greek New Testament was correct. The primary editor, the man who did almost all this work, is Dirk Junkind.

And one of the strongest published criticisms of CBGM is from Dr. Junkind. So I'm pretty confident that the Tyndale House Greek New Testament sort of represents a pushback against CBGM. I don't have it in here, but if the Editio Critica Mayor, the ECM2 specifically, but the currently being published major edition of the Greek New Testament with massive amounts of collation, which is using CBGM, which when it's finished will probably be that big, easily, size-wise.

Since it's using CBGM, and it looks like all the English Bible translations are utilizing ECM, and it's going to determine what's in the NA28, 29. Well, NA28 is already out. So NA29, NA30 is all going to reflect what's coming out in ECM.

I don't know how you can do serious textual critical scholarship in the New Testament and not at least minimally interact with CBGM. And if you don't accept its principles or its application, say why.

So that's why I'm having to do what I'm doing with the study that I'm doing. What CBGM seems to be able to help us to do is to identify the purest streams of transmission of a text. The question is, how far back does that go?

And there's still a lot of questions. There's a lot of questions. Dr. Mink in Munster is the primary individual who's developed this. And I'll just explain this one thing. And I'm sorry, most folks have probably fallen asleep already, but let me just explain this one thing.

One of the elements of CBGM is you look, if you have a simple variant where you have two possibilities and you ask the computer to look through the witnesses that you have available for that reading. And when you look at the manuscripts that have reading A, and then you look at the manuscripts that have reading B, and you ask yourself the question, the manuscripts that have reading A, how coherent are they in having the similar readings elsewhere?

In other words, you're looking, and by the way, part of CBGM is you have to stop thinking of manuscripts. And I was even using the wrong terminology. You don't think of manuscripts, you think of witnesses and you go, what's the difference?

How do I explain this? We've known for a long time, and when I've done my presentation on New Testament Textual Reliability, I've pointed to two minuscule manuscripts, 1739 and 1881, that we know are from the 9th, 10th centuries.

And yet we know they're copying 2nd or 3rd century documents. So that somebody hundreds and hundreds of years later is copying, their exemplar is very, very old. So there's not a bunch of generations in between.

And so the witness of the text in 1739 can be much older than the manuscript itself is. And you might have manuscripts that are 500 years younger. So in other words, 500 years closer to the original than 1739, and yet their witness, the text they witness is actually much farther down the road from the originals.

And so one of the things you've got to try to do is stop thinking manuscript and start thinking witness. What is the text that it gives us and how far back does that go? So the point is, when you look at the manuscripts that have reading A in them and reading B, if the largest portion of manuscripts that have reading A, if their closest possible parent text, not manuscript, but parent text, that they could be related to, likewise has A, looks like the copyists were being very faithful.

And when you compare them at other places, these manuscripts have what's called high coherence, say 95, 97%. But then you look over at B and you have to start searching up the line to the 4th, 5th, 6th possible progenitor before you find somebody else that has the same reading, that the majority of ones that these manuscripts are related to have reading A rather than reading B.

What that tells you is, in all likelihood, the scribe made a mistake here or had an edit here. But if there's lower coherence here and higher coherence here, then that's part of the information that you want to take into making your textual critical decision.

It's information we've never had before. We've, when looking, you know, if you've been sitting there with your Nessie-Aland text, you know, and you're looking at a particular variant, you know, and you're looking at just a couple lines of information, you're basically just going, well, okay, looks like Vaticanus, a few minuscules here have this, and then it's just the Byzantines, and you got D out there doing its thing, and so we go with Vaticanus.

That's, you know, I mean, hopefully you've translated it and you might go, oh, maybe there's some Homo Etelyatan going on there, similar endings. There's some things you can look at, but we've never had this type of information before.

And in the general epistles and in Acts, there's been about, I don't know, significantly, maybe 70 places. I'd have to look up the numbers. I've got them around someplace where you've had a, you know, fairly significant change.

What's interesting is even the application of CBGM, it's all the same text. And I can assure you, once again, once ECM is done, the big thing like that, that you can't really carry around, though obviously it'll be digitized eventually and we'll all carry it around our iPhones, though I imagine it'll be pretty expensive for a while.

If you exegete that the same way you exegete the Tyndale House, same teaching. In fact, you get down to, I think it's 85 or 87 is the number that CBGM says is statistically irrelevant now, because all manuscripts are going to agree that much.

That's just the base number. And so the idea that, you know, the New Testament once used to teach something different, all the rest of that stuff. CBGM really does, from an apologetic perspective, it really does have some interesting application.

It ain't ready for primetime yet, just like that alleged first century thing of Mark wasn't ready primetime a few years ago. There's a lot of work that needs to be done. And one of the big questions that I'm working on is how does this relate to the earliest manuscripts?

Because it doesn't really care too much about how old your manuscript is. It cares about how consistent your text is in being consistent with what you think the original, the Ausgang's text, the original text is.

And what has happened, it's interesting, the Byzantine text guys aren't really sure what to do with this. Because on the one hand, it's really positive to them, because there are a number of readings that CBGM says, hey, guess what?

Byzantine text has it here over against all the earliest manuscripts. There's a couple of places. I wasn't prepared to do this, but since someone asked, I could give you one particular example in the General Epistles where, I mean, up until this point, I haven't looked, but I would imagine the UBS text probably gave this an A or B rating.

And CBGM comes along and says, nope, uh, the coherence is found in the Byzantine reading and it's not found in the earliest manuscripts. So there's a number of, let's see here. There's a number of, uh, particularly Byzantine, later Byzantine readings.

The CBGM says that's, that's got the best chance of being the original. And so a lot of the changes have come up, um, along those lines. So you'd think the Byzantine guys are like, woohoo. Yeah, we're, we're getting vindicated.

Probably not. Um, because obviously there's a lot of other places where it goes, no, that's a secondary reading. And here's the reason why there's, you know, it doesn't go back far enough. And the grounds that it gives are not the same grounds that the Byzantine text priority guys have been arguing for a very, very long time.

So, you know, it gives and it takes. And so I'm not sure exactly what the final result's going to be. Acts was interesting, but Acts has its own, uh, history. Now they're getting into the Gospels. And so I think Mark is next.

Once Mark comes out, now we're going to really start seeing what kind of impact CBGM's going to have. And, uh, it'll get a lot more interesting at that point. Was there a...

I was just going to remark that I'm sitting here following the YouTube chat, and it is interesting to me that as you're going through this, how many people are commenting on. Suddenly it's all clicking in their heads.

It's coming together. We got one guy who was talking about he's in the middle of studying for a nursing degree in the finals. And he, his inclination is to drop what he's doing and look at P45.

No, you need to do well on your finals there, bro.

But the point of all of it is, is that for all of these people, they're remarking about how it's suddenly clicking into place as to why these acronyms, why these terms, why these studies.

Become so important. And I haven't even, and I haven't even started. Let me tell you something. Uh, see, I don't, I didn't want to do this. I'm not, and I'm not doing this. Please no one say, Oh, James White was explaining CBGM.

No, I'm just... You have to have real clarity in your own thinking to be able to explain something to other people. And there are only a few people that have real clarity in their own thinking on this subject in the world right now, to be honest with you.

Um, and I'm not there yet. It's, it's extremely complicated. Um, that's what's turning a lot of people off to it. But we've, we've been saying for a long time, isn't it going to be neat when we can get computers involved in helping us analyze the manuscripts?

Well, did you really expect that it was just simply going to do the same thing we've been doing all along? What we, what we need, what we can't see is the interrelationship between manuscripts that a computer can see.

Because, you know, when we were trying to identify text types, that was basically that the general rule was a 70 agreement in particular variants. Well, now the computer can start saying, Oh no, well, this manuscript, uh, agrees with this manuscript 97 .5 of the time.

And with this manuscript 95, but this one only 82 of the time. And then it can track that through all the various variants where those manuscripts happen to contain the same material and can start popping this stuff out for you in tables.

So you can actually go online, you can go to Munster and you can start using these online sources and you can put in, you can go to a particular variant and there's now a specific nomenclature by which you identify variants now.

You can't, you can't just simply say, well, you see there in Nessie Island where you've got the little circle, that doesn't work anymore. Computers don't like that. They want to be a whole lot more specific than that.

And so now what you've got to do is you've got to, each word is assigned a even number and the space between it is an odd number. And so you have to identify the variant based on giving the computer the proper information.

And then what you can do, and you see CBGM still requires editors to input based on textual critical principles. That's why some of the Byzantine guys will still say, ah, but you can put in, I think the original was this.

Let's see what that does to the coherence of the witnesses. And then you can flip it and go, okay, let's see what happens when we put this as the original. And then you see what happens with the witnesses and the computer spits all this stuff out.

We couldn't do that before. And that's a good thing. It's a positive thing. CBGM is basically telling us, here's the baseline agreement of all these manuscripts. And at least on that level, from an apologetic perspective, it's like all those people who think these manuscripts are just all over the planet, sorry, the computers even tell us you're wrong about that.

But beyond that, part of the argumentation is how much light can be shed upon the history of the text by CBGM. And right now, we don't know. That's something I want to work on. That's what I have work on.

Because see, my initial goal was to ask the question, why is the text of Mark in P45, why does it show a different textual orientation than you have in the rest of this manuscript? And can this cast a light upon the period of time immediately before P45, hence going into the second century?

Once I had to address that question, now all of a sudden, I've got to deal with CBGM because, well, you can't avoid it now. It is part and parcel of the New Testament textual critical area. And at first, I'm like, and see, I even had the book in here last time, I was going to read you these.

And I'm going to resist the temptation. I'm going to resist temptation, because I'm just not ready. But one of the principles upon which CBGM is based is that scribes did their best to reproduce their manuscripts without editing.

That's what it's based on. And since it can work and establish familial patterns, then that seems to be part of the outcome of all this. But the scribe of P45 has a lot of singular readings. If you've read Royce's work on it, that big of a book.

There are places where the scribe of P45 engaged not in editing in the sense of changing words, but dropping what he considered to be excessive words, repetitive words. Well, does that make P45 irrelevant in a CBGM world?

And I started thinking, Dr. Gurry actually suggests dropping singular readings from CBGM analysis. If we dropped singular readings from P45, would CBGM allow us to identify the textual orientation and connection of P45 and extend, by that means, those lines back into the second century and hence do exactly what I want to do, and that is cast light into that quote-unquote dark period.

Those will help with that. It's going to take a lot of time. And to be honest with you, we're looking at debates next year. And I don't know how I'm going to do that and that, because I don't got anybody to help me with this.

I don't have research assistants, nothing. This is all me, myself, and I. And as Rich will tell you, pretty much most of my DL preparation is me, myself, and I on a bike with an iPod. But you can't do this on a bike with an iPod.

I can do a lot of my debate preparation, but we've already got Adnan Rashid before G3. I can tell you now that the INC folks have agreed to a debate on whether the INC is the one true church, probably in San Diego.

I am well aware of the fact that Jimmy Akin has said he'd be willing to debate in San Diego as well. Michael Brown and I are working right now to arrange a debate, the two of us together, against two Black Hebrew Israelites.

And in the midst of all that, Yasir Qadhi and I are definitely doing round number two. And we might have a really interesting place to do it now, too, that will just drive certain people right over the cliff.

But more on that later. Put that together with the Swiss Reformation and the global trip around the world. And I don't know when you sleep, to be honest with you. But I love that stuff. I love all of that.

And it's hard to say no to any of it. But obviously, your prayers and support are very much needed to be able to continue to do that kind of stuff. But that's what we're looking at. So in answer to Matthew's question on Twitter, which forced me to do stuff I wasn't going to do, thank you very much.

Will CBGM allow us to determine the original autographs of the Bible? Well, no, because we don't have them. The entire principle of textual criticism is reconstructing that text to the best of our abilities in light of what we have.

And so if CBGM becomes, and is functioning already, but becomes generally accepted as a very important tool in the textual critics' bag, so to speak, then yes, it will assist us in increasing our confidence in the establishment of what's called that Ausgang's text, that original text.

There's a lot of discussion, by the way, Eldon Epp and other people as to exactly what that means. I won't get into that right now. Or will there still be work, new theories, methods, etc. that need to be done?

There will always need to be textual critical studies being done. I know that Bart Ehrman says we're just tinkering with the original right now. But for us, it's extremely important. There will always be new discoveries.

I would imagine fewer as time goes on, the farther we get from that time period, of course. But there will always be a need for textual critical studies. Will textual critics be able to do this without more earlier manuscripts?

There is more to be learned from the extant manuscripts. It's one thing that CBGM, I will say, the one thing that CBGM does seem to do is to increase the value of older manuscripts that were just sort of all lumped together in the past.

In fact, in NA28, there are a couple minuscule manuscripts now that are being cited regularly that were just lumped into all minuscules in NA27. Because the computers have said, hey, you know, this manuscript here, every time we make a decision as to what the original text is, it seems to be tracking right along there.

So this seems to be a pretty important witness. And so along those lines, yeah, it has increased our knowledge of what we already had. You get more manuscripts, the more manuscripts you get. And look, the CBGM databases will continue to get larger and larger as we get more and more collation in.

And for a lot of folks that don't any of this. I mean, I can't imagine that Doug Wilson would like this in light of our our debate book. I want something firm right here right now. I don't want any of this stuff.

I just can't imagine. I know that someone like Erasmus could not even begin to conceive of what CBGM is about and things like that. There just weren't enough manuscripts available to him to even contemplate such things, let alone the computer technology.

But I just have to think that if those early great scholars had, you know, if we could somehow bring them up into up to speed in the modern period, we'd just be ecstatic. Absolutely ecstatic that we are bringing every bit of our of our ability to think, to bear on this issue.