Lesson 7: The Writing of Many Books – Selected Scripture

If you need a workbook, we're going through a series of lessons in adult Sunday school class called God Wrote a

Book. So if you need your workbook, or if you need a workbook because you don't have one, you can talk to Marsha, she's at the back, she's passing them out,

I think, if you need an extra one. All right, let's begin with a word of prayer before we get started.

Oh Father, we are so grateful to you that you have given us this place to meet, that you have gathered us here together, that we have the freedom to learn these things, to gather together and worship and serve you.

We're thankful for that, we're thankful for your word which you have preserved for us, and we pray that today in our study of these things that you would help us to see and understand and appreciate how it is that you have preserved your word, given it to us and then preserved it for us.

May you increase our confidence in the written word of God and our love for it and our understanding of it today through our time here, we pray in Christ's name, amen.

All right, we're lesson seven, the writing of many books. Did you have a question? Oh, thought I heard somebody say something.

All right, lesson seven, the writing of many books. In this lesson we're gonna learn about how New Testament books came to be written and then circulated and how documents were copied and transmitted.

And I think we should be able to get through all of lesson seven today, Lord willing. So we wanna talk first of all about the writing of books and the occasions that books were written.

Often New Testament books, and I'm just gonna be talking about New Testament books here for a moment, they were written usually to address certain needs or to answer questions or to communicate some truth.

So for instance, Luke writes at the beginning of his gospel that he had spent time researching these things and showing them to be true and eyewitness testimony and he writes to make a theological argument to Theophilus.

In the book of Acts, Luke picks up the pen again to continue what he wrote in Luke to show all the things that Jesus continued to do and to teach.

In the book of Luke, all the things that Jesus began to do and teach, in the book of Acts, all the things that Jesus continued to do and teach through his apostles then.

And so there are various reasons why different New Testament books were written and understanding the teaching or the meaning of any passage in any of those books requires some understanding of the purpose that those books were written, which is why we always begin a study of a

New Testament book by a little bit of background, sort of a sermon to introduce who's the author and why was it written and when was it written and to whom was it written.

And so various New Testament books had different purposes. The book of Galatians was written to correct false doctrines.

The book of Ephesians was a cyclical letter written to various churches intended to be generic and not addressed to any specific church but simply circulated amongst probably the churches of Asia Minor, which would have included

Ephesus and Pergamum and Thyatira and some of those churches. The book of Philippians was a thank you letter from the

Apostle Paul to the church at Philippi for supporting him and for encouraging him and sending Epaphroditus to minister to his needs.

The book of Colossians was intended to answer the Gnostic heresy. The book of Romans to explain the gospel and prepare the way for Paul's visit.

The book of First Corinthians to correct the practices of a church and answer their questions. Second Corinthians was written to defend his apostleship.

Paul wrote it to defend his apostleship and his apostolic authority against those who are attacking him and slandering him.

And the book of Philemon was simply a personal letter to return a slave to his master and appeal for kindness for that master.

So each Old Testament and New Testament book had an occasion for its writing. What is magnificent is how each one of those books with its unique purpose and its unique audience, intended audience, and its unique time and occasion of writing could all end up being gathered together and collected together into what we have as the

New Testament. It's quite a feat, if it were. It's quite a feat that God has accomplished in collecting those books together as they are and handing them to us.

Even a book like Philemon, written from Paul to Philemon, carried by Onesimus.

So initially there were three people who were privy to that letter, Paul, Philemon, and Onesimus, that's it.

And now, because of that one personal letter written to another person, carried by a third party, today we benefit from that book and we have it in our canon.

It's quite magnificent that God would find a way to preserve that for us and that it wouldn't be lost to human history, especially considering how many personal letters and personal correspondences have been lost in ancient history, right?

It's quite magnificent that we have what we do. And of course we have what we do because God has promised to preserve what he intended for his people to have today.

So let's talk for a moment about the circulation of books. This is under number two. The church recognized apostolic authority and followed their doctrine.

You see that in Acts chapter two, verse 42. They, that is the early disciples, were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship and to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

Letters and books, letter B, letters and books were read by Christians in the public assembly and they're, what I want you to see now is how it is that New Testament books came to be written and then came to be circulated.

There's a theology behind why it is that early Christians circulated the books of the New Testament and copied them.

And I want you to see what that theology is and I want you to see it from the pages of the New Testament itself. So letters and books were read by Christians in the public assembly.

Look at 1 Timothy 4 .13. Do you have these ones in your notes, by the way? Are these references in your notes? Okay, 1

Timothy 4 .13, until I come, give attention to the public reading of scripture to exhortation and to teaching. 1

Thessalonians 5 .27, I adjure you by the Lord to have this letter read to all the brethren. Now Paul says to Timothy, give attention to the public reading of scripture and then he says concerning his own writings,

I want you to publicly read this to the congregation. What would that tell you about Paul's view of his own writings?

He regarded them as what? As scripture. Now if I left for a period of time and I was not here and one of the other elders was filling in for me and I wrote a letter back to the entire church and I said look,

I command you to have this letter read to all the brethren during the worship service on a Sunday morning. What would that say about me?

That I'm no longer fit to be a pastor of a church, right? That I somehow regard my own writing to the congregation as that authoritative, that it needs to occupy the central focus of a worship service in the church of God?

That's egomaniacal? Or Paul viewed his own writing as authoritative and on par with scripture?

2 Thessalonians 3 .14, if anyone does not obey our instructions in this letter, take special note of that person, do not associate with him so that he will be put to shame.

Paul expected his commands to be obeyed. Why? Because he was an apostle who carried apostolic authority and what he wrote he considered to be authoritative.

Titus 2 .15, these things speak and exhort and reprove with all authority, let no one disregard you.

Paul encouraged Titus to have his words used to speak and exhort and reprove the people in that church on the island of Crete with all authority, indicating that,

I mean, that's exactly what Paul says, that all scripture is sufficient for those things in 2 Timothy chapter three, that this is what scripture is given for, the reproving of people.

Well, then he talks about his own letter being used to exhort and to reprove people. Paul viewed his own writings on par with scripture.

All right, letter C, letters and books by apostles were recognized as scripture. And I just want you to notice here, we're gonna go through this rather quickly.

Number one, Paul claimed divine inspiration for his own writings, 1 Corinthians 14 .37. If anyone thinks he is a prophet or spiritual, let him recognize that the things which

I write to you are the Lord's commandment. And so there's Paul claiming divine authority for his own writings, his own apostolic writings.

Number two, apostolic writings carried divine authority in the church. 2 Peter 3 .2 says that you should remember the words spoken beforehand by the holy prophets and the commandment of the

Lord and Savior spoken by your apostles. Notice how Peter puts the commandments of the apostles on par with the writings of the holy prophets.

Number three, Peter recognized Paul's epistles as scripture, 2 Peter 3 .15 and 16. And regard the patience of our

Lord as salvation just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, wrote to you as in all his letters, speaking in them of these things in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort as they do also the rest of scriptures to their own destructions.

Notice what Peter says there. He talks about Paul's writings and he says the wicked distort them just like they do the rest of scriptures, meaning that Peter viewed

Paul's writings as scripture. Number four, letters and books were gathered into collections,

Peter mentions Paul's letters. So it seems that Peter at least knew of multiple letters that Paul had written and that these letters were regarded,

Paul's letters were regarded as scripture in the early church and Paul's letters were regarded as scripture by the other apostles.

So let me ask you a question. Did the apostles understand that what they were writing was holy scripture? Yes or no?

They did. Now here's why they would have expected that. If there had been an old covenant and the giving of that old covenant was accompanied by the giving of revelation to explain the significance of that old covenant and now that old covenant has passed away and God has now instituted or brought to bear, brought into being, looking for the right words there,

God has now, we're in the new covenant, let's put it that way, now that we're in the new covenant and the new covenant has come, what would we expect?

If the old covenant was accompanied by old covenant writings, we would expect some instructions and explanations of the new covenant, wouldn't we?

And the apostles were promised that the spirit of God would be active in their writing and in their understanding and their explanation of things, that's

John chapter 16. The apostles had every reason to expect that and the apostles had every reason to expect that they, as the messengers of Christ, with the ability to do signs and wonders, would themselves be the instruments of divine revelation and that doesn't mean that they weren't humble, it doesn't mean that they were egomaniacal, it simply means that they understood their calling in the plan of God was to be the vehicles through which divine revelation would come, connected to the new covenant and so they expected the

Christians in the early church to regard their writings as apostolic, as authoritative, as divine revelation and to treat them as such and so the early

Christians did that and so number five, letters and books were circulated widely, as widely and as quickly as possible,

Colossians 4, 16, when this letter is read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans and you, for your part, read my letter that is coming from Laodicea.

So there's an instruction from the apostle Paul that when this letter is read among you, again, he's assuming that this letter's going to be read in the church, that when this letter's read among you, also find the one that I sent to the

Laodicean church and you get that letter and may have that one read in your assembly as well.

The Laodicean letter, most people believe, was the book of Ephesians, that that was the one that was considered the

Laodicean letter, what we call a general epistle, just sort of written without a particular church in mind, circulated widely amongst many churches.

Ephesians, the book of Ephesians has all the hallmarks of that. So they collected the apostles' writings into collections, they regarded them as authoritative and divinely given, they regarded them as the word of God and used them as the word of God, regarded the apostles as instruments of divine revelation and as authoritative men whose writings should be read in the early church and then they followed the instruction to circulate these writings even amongst the first century.

Now, we've gathered all of that just from some of the references here in the New Testament texts themselves, right? So they collected these writings and they circulated these writings.

So here's what that would look like in kind of a scenario. Let's say a book was written in the common language,

Koine Greek, and let's say it is the book of Ephesians. What do

Christians do with writings that they regard to be scripture? What do we do with that? We cherish it, we wanna read it, we wanna understand it, we wanna memorize it, we wanna teach from it, we want everybody to have access to it, right?

This is how Christians view the word of God. We want everybody to memorize it, we want everybody's lives to be changed by it, we want the word of God to have as public a proclamation and exposure as we possibly can.

We don't hide it in the corner, we don't put it in the basement of a monastery and hide it away from people, we want it out, we want it exposed to people so they can read it and have their lives transformed by it.

That's how Christians view scripture. That's how Christians view scripture today, that's how Christians viewed scripture in the early church.

So books would be read and reread and circulated quickly and widely and they would be copied with a fervency because they were treated as scripture and regarded as scripture, those early

New Testament writings. So you can imagine that in a city like Ephesus, for instance, that, and Ephesus was a major commercial center, imagine that you're sitting, imagine that you were a member of the church at Ephesus and it's the first century.

And last week at some point we received a letter from the Apostle Paul. So what are we going to do with that letter?

Well, whatever I've been preaching from, we're gonna set that aside for this Sunday and we're gonna read publicly the

Apostle Paul's letter to us, the Ephesian church. So we're gonna read that publicly this morning.

Now imagine that being a commercial center, there are Christians traveling from all over the Roman Empire and that on this particular

Sunday, just like probably any other Sunday, there was a visitor or two in the congregation and I stand up and I read the letter to our church.

Brand new from the Apostle Paul, attention, here it is, we just got this, I read through the Ephesian letter, maybe a few words of introduction, a few words of explanation here and there, a few words of conclusion, a closing prayer and we're done for the day.

And then this visitor who is there says, hey, back in our church, we don't have that writing from Paul and we could really use that.

There's some good stuff in there about election and marriage and spiritual warfare and everything. Our church could really use to hear that.

Do you mind if while I'm here this week doing my business, if I took an opportunity to sit down and just copy that letter so I could bring that back to my home church with me?

And then what would I say, no? No, I'd say, yeah, that's a great idea. In fact, we've got

Paul's letter to the Corinthians here as well and a couple that he wrote to the Thessalonian church, would you like to see those as well? Thessalonian letters?

There is a Thessalonian letter? Wow, yeah, I'd love to copy those if I can too. So I would have him into my office and give him the papyrus or the parchment and a quill and some ink and say, go at it.

And he would make copies of these letters for him to take back to his own church. And that visitor might even say, look,

I've got a copy of Paul's letter to the, I'm trying to come up with one that's textually relevant.

I got a copy of Paul's letter to the, well, Colossians wasn't written. Huh? Philippians wasn't written by that time either.

Okay, in my imaginary scenario, I got Paul's letter to the Galatians. Let's say the Galatians, there we go, pull that one out. I got a copy of Paul's letter to the

Galatians. I've been carrying that around with me. Do you guys have Paul's copy of the Galatians? No, I don't have a copy of Paul's letter to the Galatians. Okay, well, you let me do the one to Ephesians and I'll let you copy

Galatians. And we would sit down and we would have a little copying session there to copy these manuscripts. And of course, we would do it by hand, but I would wanna make a copy of what he had.

He wouldn't wanna make a copy of what I had. And that's how those early manuscripts were copied and distributed widely.

Yes, Thomas. Say it again, if he didn't have the letter, how would they know whether that was scripture or not?

We'll get into that actually in a later session. It has to do with, in fact, we're gonna talk about a little bit later in this morning as well.

If they knew that the letter came from an apostle and they knew that the letter was accepted as scripture in regard to scripture because it came from an apostle, if they could certify those two things, they would have embraced it as scripture and considered it as such.

The only thing that the early church would have been concerned about, not, sorry, not the only thing, the primary thing that the early church would have been concerned about was was this written by an apostle?

And if this is written by an apostle and contains apostolic instruction, then I want a copy of it for our church to read as well.

That's what they would have been concerned with. Good question. So you can see the letters, how letters and how

New Testament documents letters would have been widely circulated, quickly circulated and quickly copied. And you can also see how major cities, big cities with lots of traffic would have been the places where larger collections of manuscripts would have begun to gather because you had people from all over the

Roman Empire who would be traveling to these cities and they would have access then to these ever -growing collections of apostolic documents before they would leave and go back to their church.

And they might go back to their church and say, hey, when I was in Athens, they had seven of Paul's epistles there in Athens and a gospel from the guy named

Mark who traveled with the apostle Peter. It's Peter's gospel. Well, and this would have happened not just for Paul's letters, but Peter's letters, for John's letters, for the gospels, for the book of Acts, et cetera.

Those documents which were regarded as scripture were circulated widely, they were collected into collections and the church valued them as scripture.

And so as people came and went, you can see the motive behind that to quickly duplicate these things and spread them wide, as quickly and as widely as they possibly could because Christians had a hunger for apostolic writings because they regarded it as scripture.

All right, are there any questions about that before we move on? Yes. How did they verify authenticity?

I think that there probably would have been more than one way to do that. My suspicion is that they would have, it would have been something that was accepted widely amongst various churches.

For instance, the church at Philippi would have known that that letter came from Paul because it would have come, this is why

I think Paul's letters were sent with messengers. Many of his letters were sent by messengers. You'll notice you read through 1

Corinthians and Philippians, Philippians, 1 Corinthians, not Ephesians, I'm thinking through the other ones.

They were sent at the hands of Titus or Timothy or Epaphroditus or, one guy's name starts with A.

Anyway, there were various messengers that the apostles had that would send, that would accompany their documents and certify this came from Paul.

So it wouldn't have to be necessarily Paul that would deliver it, but if you were, I mean, look, if we knew of a church in Segal that had a copy of Paul's epistles, a copy of one of Paul's epistles, we might even send an emissary there to make sure that if that's genuine, they knew that it came from Paul, we would take their word for it and we would want somebody to go there and make us a copy and bring it back to our church.

And so that's the type of, that's how things could be certified because there was no way of, there's no obviously stamp of authentic certification there.

Paul made mention of ways that he would certify his own writings. He would talk about the large letters with which

I've written to you and an amanuensis, somebody who would write on his behalf and he would certify that or stamp it with his own seal of authenticity.

So the churches would know what came from Paul and then those churches would bear testimony to what came from Paul. And that's a good question because there were documents that Paul makes mention of in, is it 2

Thessalonians or 1 Thessalonians? Do not be disturbed as if by a letter from us that the coming of the

Lord has already come. There was somebody circulating letters in the hands or supposedly coming from Paul, suitable epistles, that supposedly came from Paul that he warned the churches about.

And there were ways that the, and church, Paul alludes to this with ways that he would sign his own letters. There were ways for churches to understand what came from an apostle and what didn't.

And Paul obviously wanted to guard the authenticity and the integrity of his own writings. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we're gonna talk about the ways, and how do you know that something is canonical? How did the early church decide, or did they decide, what was scripture and what wasn't?

I'll give you a little hint. The early church did not decide what books were scripture. The early church discovered what books were scripture.

God writing it decided which books were scripture. The task of the early church was not to decide which ones were gonna regard as scripture, but to discover which ones

God had actually written. There's a process behind that. And once you understand what that process was, of course, the

Da Vinci Code and all the other nonsense goes right out the window in terms of who determined what books we have and what books we don't.

Yeah, was there a question over here? Yeah, yeah.

And for those of you who couldn't hear, she was just saying the spirit of God obviously was present at that time, certifying and indicating which books would have been scripture, yeah.

All right, so there's an objection that some critics raise, and this is letter E. They would say that not all

Christians recognized all of the books of the New Testament as scripture from the beginning. That's true.

Not all Christians would have recognized all 27 books of the New Testament as scripture from the beginning.

I'm gonna shock you. It took a bit of time before 2 and 3 John and Hebrews and Revelation were regarded widely as scripture.

And by some time, I'm not talking about a couple of weeks. I'm talking about decades, even 100 years before it was widely accepted.

Does that disturb you? It shouldn't. We're used to things happening just like that.

If that book is not regarded as scripture today, right now, I can't wait for that to happen.

We're people who pace back and forth in front of our microwaves because our water's not heating up fast enough. We want everything instant.

Well, in the ancient world, things like that didn't happen instantaneously. There was no internet that you went to to find an authorized list of books.

So it did take a little bit of time for Christians to recognize all the 27 books on a wide scale, all 27 books that we today affirm as our

New Testament canon. Do you have a question? Was there more controversy over the book of James than other, it would depend on what section of the church you were in, not in the

Western or the Eastern church, which would have been Jerusalem and the areas around where James ministered. That wouldn't have been as controversial.

But in the Western church, probably a little bit more controversy over that one in the early church. Yeah, Hebrews was another one.

Why wouldn't we, why wouldn't, didn't they immediately recognize the book of Hebrews, do you think? Why do you think there was some questions over the book of Hebrews for a while?

There's no author. We don't know who wrote it, right? That's a pretty big hang -up. We don't know who wrote that.

Now, do you doubt that Hebrews is scripture? Going through it and reading it, do you doubt it? You see the work of the spirit of God all over those pages,

I hope. If I'm doing my job right, you're seeing the work of the spirit of God on every page of the book of Hebrews. But it would take a little while for all

Christians to accept that. Even some of the smaller, shorter books whose authenticity might have been questioned early on, like second and third

John. Can you understand why some books some books even whose author, today we understand and recognize why some books would have taken longer to be recognized as scripture in other parts of the

Roman Empire. Wouldn't it have to do with the wideness and the rapidity with which they were circulated, copied and circulated?

Imagine that you're, say, 150 AD and you're a Christian in Spain. And it's 150

AD and an epistle shows up and we call this third John. And you've never seen this before.

Your dad did not know that third John existed. In fact, your grandfather did not know that third John existed, because third

John is just now reaching the westernmost parts of the Roman Empire. What are you gonna do with third

John? Accept it as scripture? Would you immediately accept it as scripture? Or would you have some questions that you would want to have answered, right?

So you can understand why it is that some of these books took time to be embraced universally across the early church.

All right, number three, Big Roman number three, the copying of books. There was the need for copies.

Originals needed to be replaced from much use. Some were very well used before being copied and some were copied quickly after being received.

Other manuscripts might have never been copied. You might have had a manuscript that was circulated and widely circulated and never ended up getting copied for one reason or another and then ended up being destroyed or burned in a

Roman persecution for some reason. Some manuscripts had few copies made from them. Other manuscripts had multiple copies made from them.

And by the way, when we talk about the discipline of lower criticism, that is the discipline of looking at ancient manuscripts and determining which type of copying trains does this manuscript come from.

Was this a manuscript that is third or fourth generation or is it a 10th generation manuscript or is it really close to the original?

Those men who do that, the scholars who handle those ancient manuscripts and determine those things, that's what we call lower criticism.

And it's a good discipline and one that is healthy for the early church. Higher criticism is not healthy.

Higher criticism is, well, we just don't think Paul wrote 2 Timothy. That's a higher critical view.

It's sort of the liberal theology. Lower criticism is the act of taking these manuscripts and saying, look, we think that these two manuscripts here might have come from this other manuscript and they may have been copied in such and such a location and used widely and probably never copied again or they became the grandfather of a whole bunch of other manuscripts.

That's the discipline of lower criticism. Now, I hope this doesn't shock you, but we have no original manuscripts in our possession.

No original manuscripts in our possession. Does that disturb you? We do not have the actual piece of paper that the apostle

Paul wrote on. With his sweat, his tears, his DNA on it, his handwriting, we do not have the original copy of any one of Paul's letters.

The actual piece of paper. Yeah, Garrett. Yeah, we refer to those as the autographs.

We even call them the original autographs. Yeah, so that's a better phrase for it. We do not have any of the original autographs.

We have, in fact, it's not just true of the New Testament. That's true of all ancient documents.

We don't have the original autograph of Homer or Caesar or Pliny or any of those ancient authors.

We don't have the original autographs of any of those. And we don't think we need the original autographs, and I'll show you why here in a moment.

Number four, the process of copying. The process of copying. The first letter A is the

Talmudist period. It's between AD 100 and 500. I wanna describe to you, I'm gonna read to you here the discipline of copying ancient manuscripts that the

Talmudists used. The Old Testament was copied by Talmudists during this period of 100 to 500 AD, and they had laid down strict guidelines for the copying of manuscripts.

Now, I'm gonna read this to you. This comes from Geisler and, Norm Geisler's and Nix's book,

From God to Us, it's called. And here's what they describe as the guidelines for the copying of ancient manuscripts.

Now, I want you to imagine you're a Jewish scribe. Your job is to make a copy of the book of Isaiah or the first five books of Moses.

That's your job for this month or this year, I guess, if you're copying the first five books of Moses, the first five books of the

Bible. It's gonna be your task for this year is to copy those five books. Here are the guidelines for that. A synagogue scroll must be written on the skins of clean animals, prepared for the particular use of the synagogue by a

Jew. These must be fastened together with strings taken from clean animals, and every skin must contain a certain number of columns equal throughout the entire codex.

I wanna stop there for a second. Listen, already they have described the type of skins to be used, right? No pig skin, no writing manuscripts on footballs.

These had to be clean animals. The skins had to come from clean animals. The skins had to be prepared by a

Jew, and they had to be fastened together in a codex. Remember, we're talking about a book that's bound together by strings in a binding.

They had to be fastened together with strings, that is, strips of skin taken from clean animals.

Every skin must contain a certain number of columns equal throughout the entire codex. The length of each column must not extend over less than 48 or more than 60 lines, and the breadth must consist of 30 letters.

So remember, we talked about how they were justified on the right hand and the side hand. It has to be 30 letters across in each of these columns.

The whole copy must be first lined, and if three words are written without a line, it is worthless, and so they would scrap the document.

They considered it worthless. The ink should be black, neither red, green, nor any other color, and be prepared according to a definite recipe.

An authentic copy must be exemplar from which the transcriber ought not, in the least, to deviate.

The original must be exemplar, must be a perfect, the original must have no doubt as to what is written there.

In other words, it can't be missing pages, it can't be missing lines, it can't be creased in the middle so you can't read down the middle of the page.

The original copy from which you were copying had to be in fantastic condition. That was a requirement. No word or letter, not even a yod, must be written from memory, the scribe not having looked at the codex before him.

Between every consonant, the space of a hair or a thread must intervene. Between every new parshah or section, the breadth of nine consonants, and between every book, three lines.

The fifth book of Moses must terminate exactly with a line, but the rest need not do so.

So the fifth book of Moses had to terminate with the full line, had to be all 30 letters across the bottom of it. These are the guidelines for copying scripture.

Besides this, the copyist must sit in full Jewish dress, wash his whole body, not begin to write the name of God with a pen newly dipped in ink, and should a king address him while writing that name, he must take no notice of him.

Why would they not want the name of God to be written with a pen newly dipped in ink? It would make a blob at the beginning of the word, right?

So you had to be so fastidious, they had to be so fastidious in copying those manuscripts that when they started the name of God, they had to pace themselves in such a way that they didn't need to dip their pen freshly in ink when they started that name.

So you can imagine how slowly it would take to make these copies when you have gone through that much detail. The next was the

Masoretic Period, that's between 500 and 900. M -A -S -O -R -E -T -I -C, the

Masoretic Period. Masorets treated the text with the greatest imaginable reverence and devised a complicated system to safeguard against scribal slips and errors.

Sir Frederick Kenyon, who is an expert on ancient manuscripts, he writes this, quote, imagine doing this, listen to this.

Quote, besides recording varieties of reading, tradition, and conjecture, the Masorets undertook a number of calculations which do not enter into the ordinary sphere of textual criticism.

They numbered the verses, words, and letters of every book. They calculated the middle word and the middle letter of each.

They enumerated verses which contained all the letters of the alphabet or a certain number of them, and so on.

These trivialities, as we might rightly consider them, had the effect of securing minute attention to the precise transmission of the text, and they are but an excessive manifestation of a respect for the sacred scriptures, which in itself deserve nothing but praise.

The Masorets were indeed anxious that not one jot nor tittle, not one smallest letter nor one tiny particle of a letter of the law should pass away or be lost, close quote.

So they knew how many words were in every book that they copied, they knew what the center word of that book was, and they knew what the middle letter of that book was, so that when they finished a copy, they would go back and they would count the number of words, they would count the number of letters, and they would make sure that the middle letter of that book in the copy corresponded with the middle letter of that book in the original, and so on, and they knew which verses contained every letter of the alphabet that they were copying, and they marked those verses as they went through.

That's the type of fastidious detail that they took in making those copies. Now, if you're paying that much attention to not only how you're copying, but what the original product is, as well as what the copy ends up being, how easy do you think it is for errors to creep into the copying process?

Makes it more difficult. It's not foolproof, but it makes it more difficult for errors to creep into the copying process.

And I want you to remember that those who copied these things were, they were not malicious people who were trying to alter the text.

They had the utmost reverence for the text that they were copying, and they wanted it to be faithful and true, because they believed themselves to be the vehicles through which

God was preserving his word, and so they took this seriously. When they sat down to make a copy of something, they were not just willy -nilly making a copy and hoping that they got most of it correct and that they got most of the words there.

These are people who, these were ancient Xeroxers, ancient photocopying machines, and so they knew exactly what it was that they were copying.

Most of them had it memorized, because they lived in an oral culture and not a written culture. Most of them had those books memorized, but even if they did have it memorized, they didn't write it down from memory.

Remember, one of the requirements was they do not write down one jot, one tittle, one word from memory without checking with the original.

It was the fastidiousness with which they copied the books. So copies were made by people who had a high regard for the text, and copies were made and checked, oftentimes double -checked.

And you know what they did with unreliable copies? If they had made a copy, and they got done with their copy, and they said, now let's check to make sure that the middle word is the same as the middle word, the middle letter's the same as the middle letter, and the numbers of letters and words are the same in the original and in the copy, if they found an error in that copy, do you know what they did with it?

They destroyed it, right? They destroyed it. That's a lot of work that you see going up in smoke.

But they would destroy that copy. Samuel Davidson notes this, the roles in which these regulations are not observed are condemned to be buried in the ground or burned, or they are banished to the schools to be used as reading books.

So they would take inaccurate copies, and they would use them to teach people to read, but they would not use them in the synagogue, and they would not make copies from them.

They were deemed unfit for use, or for worship, or for instruction, because they were not considered the word of God accurately given.

So letter C, why did the early Christians not preserve the originals? We have a way of valuing original autographs, don't we?

The early Christians didn't. They didn't value the original autographs. Why not? Anybody have any idea why?

Peter? They wouldn't last, right? They wouldn't, sorry?

Yeah, that's right, that's the second one here. They did feel like they had accurate copies, so why worry about it? Primarily, let me give you two answers to this.

The early church and the ancient Jews lived in an oral culture and not a written culture. They lived in an oral culture and not a written culture.

And this is hard for us to understand, because I don't even know the phone numbers of my children. I don't have those memorized. Now, the phone number

I had as a kid growing up, in fact, my great -grandmother's phone number that she had when I was a kid growing up,

I know those phone numbers, and I know my grandmother's phone number and my mom's phone number, because I've had to memorize those.

But today, I don't even know my own children's phone numbers. Not one of my four kids' phone numbers do

I know off the top of my head. I don't need to know them. You know why? I have a phone with speed dial on it, so why would

I memorize that? But when you live in a culture where you don't have access to written materials and things are handed down then, since writing materials were expensive, were very difficult to transport, remember with the wood and the stone and all of that, in a culture where written materials were very expensive and hard to come by, you didn't trust written materials.

You trusted oral communication. You trusted an oral culture, an oral transmission of things.

So it was not uncommon for a Jewish boy to have memorized the entire Pentateuch, all the first five books of Moses, including, yes, the book of Leviticus, including, yes, the book of Numbers.

They would memorize these things. It is possible. There is somebody, I forget his name, but he does the dramatic presentations, he has the entire

New Testament memorized. That's hard for us to understand, isn't it? Man, we struggle to memorize a chapter.

You say, Jim, chapter? Lucky if I memorize the verse or even remember that you're preaching in Hebrews. Right, we don't tend to rely upon memory and the communication of things orally and transmitting things orally, but in the ancient world, they valued the oral transmission of things better than the written transmission of things because the written transmission could be destroyed.

If I have the entire New Testament memorized and somebody destroys all of my parchments, guess what I still have with me?

The entire New Testament. It was the memorization and the oral transmission of those truths that they valued over the written ones.

So they didn't value originals the same way that we would value them. Second, there was, with this care that I've described in copying, it led to the destruction of the originals because when a manuscript had been copied from an original to a copy had been made, they would think nothing of taking that original copy that they had, or the primary copy that they had copied from and destroying that, particularly if there were some defect in it or if it had shown the signs of aging and wearing and tearing.

It had been rolled up and unrolled too many times, the papyrus, and so it started to fade a little bit. They would think nothing of destroying that copy, or sorry, that manuscript, and why would they destroy it?

Because they would not want that to deteriorate further and to have another copy made from it which might include errors because it couldn't be read or copied properly or accurately.

So they would think nothing of destroying those original documents. If something was copied faithfully and accurately, it was regarded as just as perfect as an original manuscript.

So when Paul's letters reached the church written on papyrus or written on parchment and a letter arrived at the church and it was used several times, copied several times, once a copy of that was made and they could certify this is an exact copy, they would think nothing of destroying the original, even though we might wanna scream inside and say, no, you understand, that was written by the

Apostle Paul. We value those things that way, don't we? How would you feel if you could actually hold in your hands the piece of parchment that the

Apostle Paul held in his hands? That'd be pretty cool, wouldn't it? We value those things. And I go back to when we went back to Israel to stand where I know that Jesus stood or to stand where I know that the

Apostles stood on various occasions, to stand in the place on the very stones or in the very location that I know

Apostles stood, that was magnificent. To me, that was, Paul stood here.

I stood in the room where the Apostle Paul spent two years in prison in Caesarea Philippi, in Caesarea on the sea.

I stood in his very prison cell. I could've sat there all day long because it just soaked that in. It was fantastic.

One time when we're down in, when Deidre and I were down in California back in February this year, is it this year?

Yeah, this year's been a long year, so it was this year. We were down in California in February and we got a tour of Grace to You and I went into John MacArthur's office.

Now, John MacArthur wasn't there. John MacArthur couldn't pick me out of a lineup. But I went into John MacArthur's office because I was getting a tour of Grace to You from a friend that I know who works there.

And on the wall in John MacArthur's office is a handwritten manuscript of one of Charles Spurgeon's sermons.

And it's certified, it's Spurgeon's piece of paper. Spurgeon wrote on that with his own hand. It's his handwriting, it's not a mimeograph.

It's not an authentic copy. It's the, Spurgeon's DNA is on that piece of paper and it's behind a piece of glass.

So all I could do is get close to it. I didn't wanna put my fingerprints on it at all. But I sat there and looked at that and thought, this is cool.

Like that, the Prince of Preachers wrote that. And I'm standing within arm's reach of this. This is incredible.

In the early church, that meant nothing to them. We have a copy here, it's just as good as the one that Paul sweat and bled on.

They can burn that, no biggie, we've got a copy. The copy is good, the copy is certified, it's good to go.

They did not value those things in the same way that we value them. So are there errors in the copies?

The answer to this is yes, there are. Now here's the thing, we know what kind of errors are made when human beings make copies of other things, handwritten copies, so we can identify the errors.

We know how the errors are made, we know what kind of errors are made, we know the things that lead up to the making of those errors, and so it is easy for us to identify when there are variants, words left out, or words whose word order is switched.

And starting next week, we're gonna look at how those errors were made, what type of errors there are in the various manuscript copies, and how those errors ended up being made and how we can identify them.

That's gonna be our subject for the next couple of weeks. So that's it for this morning, do we have any questions? Before we close?

Is this interesting to you? Okay, good. So you're not wasting your time?

I'm not wasting mine? That's good. All right, let's pray. Lord, we are so thankful for the masterful way in which you have preserved your word for us.

We know that it is a treasure trove of wisdom and knowledge and understanding, and that the fear of you is the beginning of that knowledge and wisdom, and we would pray that you would give us that fear, that reverence, and that awe and respect that we should have for you because of what you have given to us in your word.

And help us to love it and appreciate it and to think clearly about these things, that we may trust your word and be always confident that we have in our hands a copy, a perfect copy, a perfect and complete representation of what you have originally given and preserved for us.