The Reliability of the New Testament Text

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Dr. James White is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, a Christian apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona.
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He is a professor, having taught Greek, systematic theology, and various topics in the field of apologetics.
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He has authored or contributed to more than 20 books, including The King James Only Controversy, The Forgotten Trinity, The Potter's Freedom, and The God Who Justifies.
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He is an accomplished debater, having engaged in more than 100 moderated public debates with leading proponents of Roman Catholicism, Islam, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Mormonism, as well as critics such as Bart Ehrman, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and John Shelby Spong.
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He is an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church and has been married to Kelly for more than 28 years.
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He also has two children, Joshua and Summer. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. James White. Well, thankfully,
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I'm not as tall as Lane, so I don't have to do the entire thing like this. Very difficult on the back, very hard indeed.
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It is good to be with you back here in Southern California. I think I'm in Southern California. We left the
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Santa Ana Airport, so I figure I have to be somewhere near Southern California. I'll have to admit, when
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I woke up this morning and immediately heard about what had happened in Japan, I started thinking about, wow, how do you have an event like we're going to have this evening in California, in light of what we have been seeing on our televisions?
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I certainly have pondered the fact that things have changed a lot over the decades.
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The instant information, seeing things live, seeing the kind of devastation we've seen.
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I don't know if it freaked any of the rest of you out, but I know that looking at the water as it was going through that airport, to see those jetways sitting there, and then the water coming through, it's just absolutely an amazing, amazing thing.
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Obviously we pray for the people of Japan, especially our brothers and sisters there.
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There are obviously Christians there that are suffering today, have lost loved ones, and we pray that God would draw near to them.
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Obviously, I think there is a relationship between what we do this evening and thinking about those events.
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Because when the world asks us how we respond to such things, how we understand such things, where do we go?
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Well, as believers, as Christians, we go to the Word of God. And yet, in so many instances today, we are being told that we cannot do that, that we cannot trust that which we see and that which we read in the
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Word of God. And so I think there is a meaningful reason to look at why we can trust, specifically this evening, the
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New Testament documents. The Old Testament would be a completely different study, because God used a very different way of transmitting the text to us over time.
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But most of the attacks are focused upon the New Testament documents themselves. And so this will be a little bit of a challenge to you this evening.
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We live in a day where, because of the internet, for example, Lane was up here and he was using his new
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Zoom device. If anyone would like to see what the new Motorola Zoom looks like, Lane will be demonstrating it after the talk this evening.
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But he was using the internet to access my bio from my webpage.
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Now for most young people today, that's second nature. For those of us who have as much white in their beard or hair, if you're fortunate enough to still have it, that's a different world than the way things used to be done, the way things used to take place.
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And so obviously what that means is information is much more readily available, both the good and the bad.
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And that means attacks upon our faith can be just as quickly distributed as the defense of our faith.
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And you've heard it said before that error is halfway around the world before truth gets out of bed in the morning, and that very frequently is what we experience in so much of our life.
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But we are the ones given the opportunity and indeed the responsibility to respond to those who would ask a reason for the hope that's within us, yet with gentleness and reverence.
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And hopefully this evening you'll be challenged. Hopefully this will be a starting point, not an ending point.
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We will cover some complex things, but there are things that we need to know because the enemies of the faith know these things.
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We need to, in the church, roll up our sleeves and start doing some work. If our topic this evening was
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Christian finance or some type of prophetic claim of I've figured out who the
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Antichrist is or something like that, we wouldn't have enough seats in this auditorium for everybody.
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We know that. But the fact that we're talking about something that is much more fundamental and foundational means that for a lot of folks, well, we're just not sure if we want to spend our time doing that.
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That, and the fact that we're competing with the Shepherds Conference, that sort of helps too. But that was not any of our understanding.
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Let's dive in because I figure I've got about an hour and 20 minutes or so before we want to be able to take some questions this evening, and I've got a lot of stuff to talk about.
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So let's dive in. Hopefully you're all aware of the fact that naturalistic materialism rules the day in academia, in the academy.
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Specifically, anything that does not presuppose an uncreated universe that can be explained solely on the basis of naturalism is rejected a priori.
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That is, if you do not start with the orthodoxy of our society today, you are going to be looked at as some type of fundamentalist nut, and there are many people in academia who will make it their purpose to pursue you and to hound you.
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My own daughter was the object of that kind of behavior by a community college professor when she was an 18 -year -old freshman, and I get emails from people all the time experiencing that very same type of thing.
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Christian claims are relegated to the arena of myth. You can believe them if you want to, but you have to recognize that they're just myth.
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You cannot put them in the categories of truth. You certainly should not live your life in such a way that those beliefs would impact how you live and how you make decisions and what your morality is and things like that.
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Now that kind of naturalistic materialism looks for people to be its champion.
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Some of you heard when Lane mentioned some of the people that I've debated, one of the men that I've debated is
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Dr. Bart Ehrman. Dr. Ehrman is an apostate. That is a technical term, not an insult.
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He is a man who once claimed to be a Christian, a graduate of Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and Princeton Theological Seminary, a student of Bruce Metzger there, one of his last students.
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And yet he today calls himself a happy agnostic. Having met Dr. Ehrman, I'm not sure how he defines the term happy.
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But he is not a believer, and in fact, the last three major books he has written, misquoting
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Jesus, Jesus Interrupted, and a new book coming out in just a matter of days, aren't you all excited, and have it pre -ordered like I do, called
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Forged, which will be a standard, about 150 -year -old, updated, but 150 -year -old argument about how
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Paul didn't write the pastoral epistles and a few things like that. And you'll be hearing a lot about it, because he, of course, will get free advertisement on NPR, which probably won't have public funding by then, but will still get free advertising on NPR, and it will be assigned as readings for our students in various universities.
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We need to understand where these folks are coming from, so I have a little bit of a clip here. I want you to listen to Dr.
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Ehrman's perspective on where the New Testament came from and how it was altered during the early years of its transmission, so let's take a look at what he had to say.
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I guess tonight, a religious scholar and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the
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University of North Carolina, his best -selling book is Misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the
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Bible and why. Please welcome Bart Ehrman. You were someone that went through sort of a period of discovery.
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You were a literalist, I guess, or born again, it would say, and then as you studied and learned more about it, you began to question that.
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Right. I started out being interested in the Bible because I was a born -again Christian, a fundamentalist who thought that the very words of the
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Bible had been given by God, and so I studied Greek in college and decided to read the New Testament in Greek.
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Because that was the original language. That was the original language it was written in, and so the more I studied, though, the more
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I saw there was an enormous problem. We don't have the original Greek copies of any of these books. All we have are these thousands of manuscripts from centuries later that have all these changes in it.
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And so realizing that we didn't have the original and that some places we don't know what the original said, that had quite a profound effect on my faith that these words had been given by God.
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Now, what does that do? Because to my mind, as I read your book and learned more about it, the
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Bible suddenly became more interesting to me, in that I felt like that information doesn't denigrate the
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Bible in any way, but brings it to life in a manner. It suddenly becomes a living document that is changed by whoever it passes through, which suddenly makes it seem more, almost more godly in some respects.
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Well, yeah, it's an interesting point, because for me, the Bible takes on new life when you see that the
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Bible is a living thing, that it isn't a dead document that was written 2 ,000 years ago, but as scribes copied the text, in a sense they were interpreting the text and putting their interpretations into the text while they did that.
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For me, I found it to be a liberating experience to realize this, in part because I realized that the
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Bible was not only copied by human scribes, it was written by human authors. And these authors all had different points of view, different perspectives, different ideas, and they put all those different views and points of view in the text itself.
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And mostly shaped it during that 300 years between Christ's death and when,
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I guess, Constantine converted and Rome converted and Christianity became sort of the law of the land.
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Right, so the authors of the New Testament were writing mainly in the first century, but then their books were copied by these scribes over those centuries.
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And those are the Gospels. Those are the Gospels of the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, Luke. Now, just one quick correction for those of you who are historians.
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Boy, I liked it a lot better when the lights weren't so bright. Doesn't it glare off the head just a little bit? Must hurt for the rest of you.
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I don't have to, you know, deal with it, but anyway. Just one quick correction.
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We always hear about Constantine making Christianity the religion of the
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Roman Empire, but if you know your history, you know that's just not the case. In 313, he made
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Christianity a religio licita, a licit religion. But that did not take place until 383, 385 under Theodosius, so it wasn't
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Constantine that did that. But scholars spin the evidence, particularly in media appearances. Bart Ehrman very rarely makes a false statement about history.
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It's the spin that he puts upon that material that is so troubling and that requires a response from us, but that's what our young people are seeing.
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They emphasize, and certainly Bart Ehrman does, that all we have are copies of copies of copies from hundreds of years after the originals.
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A couple of years ago, I debated Zulfiqar Ali Shah, a Muslim at Duke University, and three of the four books on the
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Sheikh's desk were by Bart Ehrman. It gives you an idea of the centrality of this form of attack upon the
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Christian faith and upon the reliability of the scriptures. Now, if we were to take all of the handwritten copies of the
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New Testament, and remember the New Testament was handwritten, not just up through the invention of the printing press in the middle of the 15th century.
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With the invention of, with the printing of Gutenberg's Bible, people did not stop handwriting the text because there were very few printing presses.
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That continued well into, even into the 17th century in some areas. And so we have at least about 1600 years of handwritten transmission of the text of the
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New Testament. Now, how many variants do you think would develop in 1600 years of hand copying the
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New Testament? Well, you'll see different numbers amongst various scholars, but I think a fair number would be approximately 400 ,000.
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Thank you. I did not pay him to do that, but I appreciate when someone does that. 400 ,000 variants.
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Now let me give you the worst case scenario, because this is what you're going to hear all the time. This is what you're going to hear from people.
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We need to hear the worst case so that you can then correct the worst case to the reality.
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400 ,000 variants. Now there are only 138 ,162 words.
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What was funny about that? I don't get it. There are 138 ,162 words. There's actually more words in the
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TR. There's a few fewer words in the Westcott -Hort text. We can discuss that. But there are 138 ,162 words in the
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New Testament. How many of you knew that? Okay, good. That's nearly three variants per word.
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That's nearly three variants per word. And so what is presented to people is, well, that would mean that for every word in the
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New Testament, there's two other possibilities for what you have. That's how people understand it.
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And so when you think about it, we are confidently told no one can have any confidence that the text they read today accurately reflects what was originally written.
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And so even if we were to look at a graphic, and by the way, I would like you all to know that you all tonight will be the first people to see my new laser pointer in the
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United States. In the United States. I did use this at a church in Dublin, Ireland, just a few weeks ago, but that's
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Ireland. And they're not even in the United Kingdom. So, you know, and they're just wee nice little people.
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But anyway, but you all, how many of you have seen a red laser pointer? You know, a red laser pointer.
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How many of you have seen the really cool green laser pointers? Oh, yes, I have a green laser pointer down there.
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How many of you have ever seen a purple laser pointer? Now I have two reasons for doing this.
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Sometimes I need to point something on the screen. The other thing is sometimes I'm so boring that people fall asleep.
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And this is so bright that what will happen is if you fall asleep, I've had guys right down front, like right where you are, okay, brother.
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I had a big guy once that right there fall asleep and start snoring very loudly right in the front row.
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It's extremely distracting. If your mouth flops open, I'm shooting this into your mouth. It's so bright your eyeballs will glow.
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And we have people in the audience that will take a picture, it'll be on YouTube before you know it. So that's to keep you awake.
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But anyhow, here is the number of words in the new, the number of words right here.
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And here's the number of variants, 400. How in the world can anyone trust the reliability of a document that is that badly corrupted over history?
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That is what people will tell you. But for the rest of the time this evening, I'll be telling you what they don't tell you in those presentations.
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First of all, 99 % of all variants do not impact the meaning of the text whatsoever.
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Variations in spelling and word order make up the vast bulk of the variations. In fact, most of the variations
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I could not even explain to you in the English language because they are only relevant in the
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Greek language and they do not impact translation whatsoever. 99 % of them.
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I remember a, it's interesting, I just ran into this fellow on Facebook. And I remember he was one of the, my fellow sufferers in first year
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Greek many, many years ago at Grand Canyon College. And he just, there were two things he could not get.
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He could not get certain forms of one verb, which is an important verb, unfortunately. And then he could not get the movable nou.
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The movable nou, if you've ever studied Greek, is similar to the difference between a and an in English.
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And you could use the movable nou. It comes from the fact that all languages are spoken before they're written down. And every time he'd run into a movable nou, it would just throw him off.
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He just didn't, he just really struggled. Well, other scribes did too. Now, that doesn't make any difference as to how we translate it into English.
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It does not affect the meaning at all, but many of the variants in the New Testament have to do with things like movable nous, 99 % of them.
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Hence, 1 % of 400 ,000 equals about 4 ,000 meaningful textual variants out of 138 ,162 words is about 2 .9
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% or one meaningful variant every three pages. But only half of these are viable.
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What does viable mean? Well, if you have a Greek text, I'll be showing you a picture a little bit later on, but I just had the tremendous opportunity while in Dublin, Ireland to visit the manuscript reading room at the
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Trinity College there in Dublin. If you ever get a chance to go to Dublin, see Trinity College. It's just amazing. The long hall there in the library is just an outstanding thing to see.
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I got to examine a particular manuscript we'll talk about a little bit later on, Codex Monfortianus.
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As I was examining this manuscript from about 1520 and as I was paging through it, the one thing that struck me was, this guy was in a hurry.
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This guy was, this is, I could write better than this. It really struck me that this, it was very odd.
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And obviously, if you hand wrote the entirety of the New Testament, how long would it take you to do that? I mean, this is a long project.
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And so let's say some guy in 1520, let's say that that very manuscript has a particular reading in it that has never been seen before.
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What's the chances that that's the original reading of the New Testament? Well, absolutely none. So it's not, it wouldn't be a viable reading.
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It wouldn't be a possibility that that was the original. So only about half of those are viable, hence there are about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 viable, meaningful
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New Testament textual variants. That is quite a different picture than the 400 ,000. In fact, if we were to look at a graphic of that, now the, up at the top is the number of words in the
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New Testament. And now that little thing right there are the number of variants in the New Testament. And that shows things in a very, very, very different light than what is normally presented.
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But there's much more to it than that. Think about this with me for just a moment.
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The more manuscripts you have for a particular work, the more textual variants you will have.
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Right? If you only have one manuscript of a work, how many textual variants will you have?
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None, because you only have one copy. But if we only had one copy, what would our confidence be?
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That that one copy got everything exactly right. You see, that's the thing we have to keep in mind.
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The more manuscripts you will have for a particular work, the more textual variants you will have. There are about 5 ,780, we're getting right near that number,
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I was keeping track of it as closely as I could for a while, but I've given up now, but not quite up to 5 ,800 catalog manuscripts of the
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New Testament books, the average of which is 200 pages long. Now, please, when you hear these numbers, and I hear Christians repeating this, they attend a seminar, they read a
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Josh McDowell book or something like that, and they start repeating these things. That's not 5 ,700 complete manuscripts of Matthew through Revelation.
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That's 5 ,700 individual manuscripts. Some of the later ones contain all the
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New Testament, but think about it. How big would a handwritten New Testament be?
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I mean, anybody here got the ESV Study Bible? I heard in California you now have to register that as a dangerous weapon.
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And look how small the font is. I can't even read it. I mean, it's only for people under age 45, or if you have those big reading glass type things.
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So, imagine if that was handwritten. It would be massive. It would be huge. So, many of those
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New Testament manuscripts only contain the Gospels. We're going to be looking at a number of them. You'll see that there are portions of the
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New Testament. So, don't get the idea that's 5 ,700 of everything. However, the average of that 5 ,700 is about 200 pages long.
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So, if you do a little bit of math, that's approximately 1 .3 million pages of text, grand total.
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1 .3 million pages of handwritten text. 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 meaningful, viable variants.
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Think about what that actually ends up meaning. 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 meaningful and viable variants over 1 .3
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million pages of hand copied text spanning approximately 1 ,500 years prior to the invention of printing is an amazingly small percentage of the text reflecting an amazingly accurate history of transmission.
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One might even say it is downright miraculous. But that's not normally what you are told.
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On the screen right now, I asked my computer a few years ago to compare two printed editions of the
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Greek New Testament. The two editions represent the two extremes in the
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New Testament manuscript tradition. In other words, the most dissimilar from one another in printed manuscripts.
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And then I asked it to mark off the differences by using color. Here is Ephesians chapter 1, verses 1 through 14.
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You can see some differences. Some don't really matter because they're issues of capitalization.
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But whether you have the word Jesus up here, whether you have a preposition here. There actually is an important one right there.
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Verse 14, ha est in arabon, speaking of the spirit of God, whether it's ha or has is the difference between a neuter and a masculine.
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And that's somewhat theologically significant, but we'll pass over it right now.
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But as you can see, the vast majority of the text, there is no variation whatsoever between these texts.
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So the idea that you have three different options for every single word is just simply utterly and completely absurd.
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The next one here, let me ask you first. Which book would you guess has the fewest number of manuscripts, handwritten manuscripts, extant today?
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Sorry? Philemon. Interesting. It's the
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Book of Revelation. Book of Revelation. I'm sorry if there are any Tim LaHaye fans here, but there's a reason for that.
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It struggled for canonicity, and I'm glad that it did. I mean, I'm sort of glad the early church wasn't like, oh, you've got a book about seven -headed monsters?
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Bring it on in. We'll put it in the New Testament. That's cool. That's all right. They sort of examined things. Oh, we need to look at this carefully, examine the theology.
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It's a good thing. Here's Revelation chapter 1, verses 1 through 11, and you can see there's a little bit more variation there between the two ends of the manuscript spectrum.
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But again, the vast majority are very, very similar. And guess which book pretty much has the purest textual transmission over time?
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It's the Book of Hebrews. Look at that. There's Hebrews chapter 6, verses 8 through 20. I only count three little splotches of green there, and one of them is a definite article.
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And I mean, that's an entire section where there's just basically almost no variation whatsoever to be found.
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That gives you somewhat of a graphic idea of what that is. Now, still, why are there variations?
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How many of you have noticed those? Let me change this. Let me change the question.
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I'm sure you've all noticed the little notes in your study Bible down at the bottom of the page that are now in the font that I can't see.
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It looks like a smudge at the bottom of the page now. But that tiny little font that says, some manuscripts read this, and some manuscripts say that.
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We've all noticed that, right? You've all seen those little notes down there? Now, here's my question. How many of you have been annoyed by those little notes?
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Be honest. How many of you said, I wish that wasn't there? Only a few honest people in the audience tonight.
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Okay. Well, even the original King James, by the way, had those same notes.
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They were in the margin. Why do we have differences in manuscripts?
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Well, the vast majority of them are due simply to what's called scribal errors. And that is, even you today, sitting at your computer in your air -conditioned home with LASIK and your computer underlining your own scribal errors in red, or any more on our
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Droid devices automatically changing. Can you imagine what would happen today if we were transmitting the
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New Testament using a Droid? Because my Droid keeps changing what I tell it to say into something else.
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And so, I mean, it would be a royal mess if you had automatic changing in the Droid, especially because theological terms, it has no idea.
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I mean, something like imputation would become Phoenix Suns. I mean, it just, you know, we would have variation.
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It would be really hard to even keep up with all the variation you have. But even if you're typing away, you know, like, for example,
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I mean, I just have to say something, didn't Lane look great tonight? I mean,
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I was so impressed. He cleans up so well, he's going to make a great lawyer, unless they have really short microphones in the courtroom where he's all,
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I object, you know, towering over the judge.
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Whatever you say, it's okay. I think it'll be great, but it might be a real advantage. But I'm sure
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Lane has to do a lot of work, and he has to do a lot of typing, and you have to look stuff up and, you know, write papers and all that kind of stuff.
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And so, you know, what if Lane is typing along, you know, and he's got these piles of law books.
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You have to have piles of law books to be a lawyer, don't you? I mean, you don't do it electronically yet, do you? I mean, that'd be really boring, but you're typing stuff out.
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And even though he's a young guy, so his eyes are still good and stuff like that, when you're sitting here and you're copying something out, sometimes your mind wanders.
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Sometimes you've got music playing. Sometimes your phone goes off, you know, Sue texts him or something like that, and then he comes back and he starts typing again, and he's skipped a line, and doesn't even notice it.
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And maybe his professor doesn't notice it either, becomes the grounds of an entire legal suit or something like that.
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Scribal errors happen even today, even with the computers and the lights and everything.
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Can you imagine what it was like when you were doing this by candlelight and you didn't have glasses and you were writing on papyri or vellum and using a quill and you didn't have air conditioning and there were mosquitoes?
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I mean, there would have been a lot of reasons why there could have been such things as scribal errors.
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So even the 1500 to 2000 number needs to be understood. Even when the variant does impact the reading, in the large majority of instances, the careful student of the text can see which reading is original.
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Many of these errors involve common scribal errors, mistakes that we continue to make to this very day when copying from one text to another.
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Here's an important example from the history of the New Testament. If you have your Bible with you, please feel free to take a look at it.
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And that is 1 John 3 .1. 1 John 3 .1. Now, given that this is
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Southern California and everybody's really, you know, cool here, I'm going to take my jacket off.
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It's getting a little bit toasty under these lights and that's only going to require my head to glow more and you don't need that.
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Put this thing back here too. I detest Britney Spears microphones, but that's all we've got. So you all remember her, don't you?
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I mean, she sort of faded away. I suppose I could come up with a different name, but 1 John 3 .1 in the
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King James Version of the Bible says, Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.
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Therefore, the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. Okay? Now, let's compare that with the
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New American Standard. See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called the children of God, and such we are.
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For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know him. Now, for the men in the audience who are colorblind, the phrase and such we are is in red.
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And I actually don't chuckle when I say that. There are sometimes men in the audience that are colorblind that didn't see that, so I'm playing that out to them.
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And such we are is not in the King James Version of the Bible. Now, why would that be?
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Well, this is a scribal error. The modern text contained an important phrase affirming our adoption as children of God through Christ.
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It is not found in the King James. Why? Because the Greek text from which the King James was translated lacked the phrase.
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As soon as you hear somebody saying something like, well, it's because those Anglicans that translated the King James didn't like adoption as sonship, and see, that normally goes the other direction.
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Well, these modern Bible translators are trying to attack the deity of Christ, and there's normally a non -conspiratorial answer that you need to look at.
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Why is it that the Greek text from which the King James was translated lacked the phrase? This is a glowing example of what's called homoiteleuton, which is a long
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Latin word meaning similar endings. Think how many times you've been copying a word ending with such combinations as ing, tion, es, and when looking back at what you were copying, have mistakenly started with a different word that had the same ending.
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That's the same thing that happened to scribes as they were copying from the Greek New Testament. Now, here is from the
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Logos Bible software, the actual variant itself, and you can see it's right here, is that little square right there, chi -es -men is the phrase, and we are.
32:50
And you find the little square right here, these are the manuscripts that do not contain that phrase,
32:56
KL049, these are unsealed manuscripts here. That little symbol right there, the majority text symbol, means the majority of Greek texts do not contain the phrase, and such we are.
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But what it also means is the vast majority of the earliest manuscripts do. But that information doesn't really help you to understand why there was a scribal error here.
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The best way to look at that is to look at how it was originally written. Ancient writers made the same error.
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Here is the relevant portion of the Greek as it would have appeared in the unsealed text in the early days of the New Testament.
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Now, when the New Testament was written, for the first 800 years of its transmission, the form of literary
33:37
Greek was all capital letters, no spaces between words, and almost no punctuation whatsoever.
33:46
So, it looked like that. A long line of capital
33:52
Greek letters, all right? That's what you've got. Now, having seen that,
33:59
I'm sure you can all see exactly why the scribal error took place. Oh no, you want me to show you a little bit more? Let's use some color.
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And now let's just blow it up so you can actually see what it, uh, is that going to, that's going to show it?
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No, it's not going to show it. I'm going to have to go back and show it to you right here. Here you have clathomen, that we might be called, here's technotheu, children of God, that we might be called, chi -esmen, and we are.
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Notice clathomen ends with mu -epsilon -nu -m -e -n, and esmen ends with mu -epsilon -nu -m -e -n.
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And so a scribe writes down clathomen, writes mu -epsilon -nu, looks back at what he's copying, he sees mu -epsilon -nu, but what he sees is the second one, not the first one, and continues copying from there.
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The result makes perfect sense. But the intervening phrase, and we are, has been dropped out.
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This is called homoiteleuton. It's very easy to recognize it, it's very easy to see it in the manuscripts, and of course if we only had one copy of 1
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John, we'd have a problem. But we don't have just one copy of 1 John. We have many copies of 1
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John, and therefore we are able to detect this kind of thing. Now the majority of the 5700
35:24
Greek manuscripts date from after 1000 AD, comprising, as I pointed out, that Fraktur M, that German M, the majority text.
35:35
The majority come after 1000 AD. The earlier texts are called papyri texts, written in unseal or majuscule text, which we were just looking at, or the great vellum texts like Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, which we'll look at in a few moments.
35:50
Unseal text is all capital forms, no spacing and no punctuation, as we saw. Now here's a graph that I put together from my book on the
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King James only controversy. These are the centuries, 2nd century through the 16th century, and this gives you an idea of not only the relative number of manuscripts that we have from those centuries, but also what kind they are.
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The blue are the papyri, the green are the unseals, primarily written on vellum parchment, and then minuscule is where someone got the brilliant idea of writing in large letters, small letters, putting spaces between words and using lots of punctuation, which is what, if you learn
36:29
Greek today, is generally what you learn to read. Very few people who learn Greek today could actually pick up one of the earliest forms in the
36:36
New Testament and read much of it. It's very, very difficult to do. It takes a lot of practice. Now some people will argue for what's called the majority text.
36:45
They will say, look, you don't weigh texts. You don't say, well, because a text came from the 2nd century, it's more important than one that came from the 15th century.
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You just count texts. And it's a very complicated argument. I can't get into all of it this evening, but I just want to point out that at least over the first 1 ,000 years, that would result in a different New Testament than it does today.
37:05
What do I mean by that? Well, the Alexandrian text, and you can identify the families of a manuscript by the kinds of readings that it has in it and important places of variation.
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The Alexandrian text is the majority during the first 1 ,000 years. The later Byzantine text becomes the majority only later on.
37:24
So my argument is, if you have a way of figuring things out that results in a different New Testament depending on where you live, that might not be the best type of argumentation to use.
37:36
If there's some questions about that, we can come back to it. But this is what actually people normally like about this presentation, is that is seeing many of these manuscripts.
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Now, almost all this stuff anymore is becoming available online if you know where to look. I used to say just a few years ago,
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I said, the day is coming when we're going to have right on our devices access to all these manuscripts.
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It's pretty much already here. I have pretty much all of it on my iPad right there.
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It's going, where'd my iPad go? Oh, it's right there. I pretty much have all of them right there. And the number of them and the quality of the images is increasing.
38:17
This is Ryland's 47, better known as P -52. That is not a fighter plane for those of you from World War II fame, but this is a small fragment.
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It is about the size of a credit card. It was discovered in the 1930s.
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A man was shuffling through papyri fragments in a library in England and he started translating this and he went, that sounds vaguely familiar.
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Most scholars believe this is the earliest fragment of the New Testament we have. You'll always have arguments, well,
38:51
I think this is a little bit earlier, I think that's a little bit earlier, whatever. To give you an idea of what it would look like,
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I sort of typed in the rest of what went around it to give you an idea of where that was on the page.
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It was at the top of the page anyways. And what I love about P -52 is that if you had gone to a seminary in Germany back in the 1870s, you would have been told that all scholarship recognizes that the
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Gospel of John was written around AD 170, 175, 180, something like that.
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Why? Because it has such a high view of Jesus and we all know, of course, Jesus wasn't like that. And so it took time for that kind of myth to develop and evolve and et cetera, et cetera, sort of a
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Darwinian viewpoint. And you would have been told that we just know that John was written much, much later.
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What I love about P -52 is that God has a sense of humor in that this little papyri fragment is from around the year 125.
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And guess what it's from? John chapter 18, verses 31 through 34 on one side, 37, 38 on the back side.
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And it is Jesus' discussion with Pilate about the nature of truth. So here you have one of the earliest physical evidences of the
40:10
New Testament and it's from what? It's from the Gospel of John. So much for all that wonderful German scholarship back in the 1870s.
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In fact, John is the earliest attested book we have of the New Testament.
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And it certainly is the most popular of the Gospels as far as the number of manuscripts in the early day of the manuscripts that have survived to this day.
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Mark is the least. We only have portions of Mark in a papyri form and almost all of them have to wait until there's an unsealed text before we have some evidence of Mark.
40:47
Now, I'm a bit of a geek. I don't know if you can see much of that with the lights, but this is my debate with...
40:55
There's Bart Ehrman right there. And notice my tie. I made a tie out of P52.
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Not the original, don't worry. It's just an image. But for my debate with Bart Ehrman, it's both sides of P52 are on my
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P52 tie. And there I am giving Bart Ehrman his own P52 tie.
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He thought that was great. I'm not sure if he's burned it or just what he's done with it since then. But I gave
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Bart Ehrman a P52 tie in our debate a couple of years ago. And he is smiling, so I suppose that's a good thing.
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But I would love to hear what he says to his classes about that particular thing. Now this is
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P115 from AD 250 to AD 275.
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Now 250 to 275 is still very, very early. Keep in mind that the earliest manuscripts we have of most works of antiquity are five to 700 years removed from the original.
41:52
We have much more evidence of the New Testament than any other work of antiquity. But the reason I want to show you this one is
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I want to blow up one little section here. There it is. We have two papyri manuscripts of the
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Book of Revelation. And what is really, well, of this particular portion of the
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Book of Revelation, what's really interesting, this is from Revelation chapter 13. And what do we find in Revelation chapter 13?
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Well, one of the most interesting things there is we could probably go outside this evening and go out on one of the major thoroughfares here in Southern California and stop a biker on his
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Harley heading to a bar someplace and stick a microphone in his face and say, what's the number of the beast?
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And he'll go, 666, right? Or 666 right there on my forehead, man.
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You know, everybody knows the number of the beast, right? And there are whole books written. Any of you old enough to remember when there were many, many people convinced that Henry Kissinger was the beast?
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Some of you just don't remember that, huh? Some of you are still convinced of that, I can see. He's not really all that active anymore.
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But anyway, entire books about 666. Funny thing is, these two papyri of the
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Book of Revelation that contain that particular verse don't say 666.
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You can't really see it unless we turn the lights down, but it's right there. And the
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Greek number is 616, not 666.
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616. Now, what do you do with that? I don't get into eschatology personally, especially in somebody else's church.
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Not wise. Generally don't get invited back when you do that. And generally get invited to leave quickly if you do.
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But I think Dan Wallace of Dallas Seminary has figured it out. And this is a great insight.
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I would have missed it. But Dan Wallace says 666 is the number of the beast, and 616 is the number of the neighbor of the beast.
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Some people are still getting it. 616. I get it. Yeah. My mom would still be going, what?
44:35
And then a couple weeks later we'd figure it out. Here is manuscript P72. I saw this during the
44:41
Papal Treasures Exhibit. If I don't hurry up, we're not going to get anywhere near done with this. Papal Treasures Exhibit in 1993 in Denver, Colorado.
44:49
I was doing seven and a half hours of debate on the papacy. But before all of that,
44:56
I got to visit the Papal Treasures Exhibit, saw this very page. This very page is so clear.
45:01
I have such a good scan of it. You can read it thoroughly and completely. I almost got in trouble because I saw this thing and I'm like, oh.
45:11
And it's under glass, and I'm standing there looking at it, and I'm translating it. Oh, look, the
45:16
Nomina Sacra and stuff. And my friend Rich Pierce is with me. He's the president of Alpha Omega Ministries. And people would come up, and they'd sort of look at it, and they'd look at the description, and they'd lean over, and they'd look at Rich, and they'd go, is he reading that?
45:29
And Rich would go, yeah. Look at this, Ralph. This guy is reading this on a piece of paper over here. And people start coming around.
45:35
The security people are like, no one's looked at that that long before. What's going on here? So Rich would drag me off to go look at a tiara for a while, and then
45:44
I'd come back again. It was great. It was wonderful. It was awesome. Because, for example, what we have here, let's blow this up a little bit.
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What we have right there is right there. That is the
45:59
Granville -Sharpe construction. This is the earliest manuscript we have of 1 and 2 Peter in Jude.
46:05
And that's the Granville -Sharpe construction at 2 Peter 1 .1 where Jesus is described as our great God and Savior. Now, remember, this is long before Constantine came along.
46:14
Remember the Da Vinci Code? Constantine made up the deity of Christ. Before Constantine was a twinkle in his daddy's eye, this book had been written and was probably buried in the desert someplace before he ever came along, and it teaches the deity of Christ.
46:29
And I just thought, I mean, that was the first ancient papyri I had gotten to see.
46:34
I'd seen a number since then. But I was just overwhelmed with the recognition of one particular thing.
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This guy doesn't have the greatest handwriting in the world, as you can tell. He probably wasn't a professional, but he was probably someone who loved the
46:49
Word of God. And remember, at the time this was copied, it was a capital offense to be a
46:55
Christian and to own the Christian scriptures. So here was someone who was risking his life to write these words.
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We can't get people to come to Sunday school on time, let alone risk their lives to possess the
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Word of God. And what I loved, thank you, and what I loved was the fact that with the
47:19
Nessialan Greek text that I possess today, or that I have on this, or my iPod, or whatever else,
47:27
I could reconstruct every single word of this manuscript, 1 ,800 years after it was written.
47:35
That's an amazing thing. It really is an amazing thing. I'll show you some more about that in a little while.
47:42
Here is manuscript P75. Very, very important manuscript. I wish we had a little bit more access to it.
47:48
I hopefully, Lord willing, will see it next April, a year from next month.
47:56
It is in Geneva, and I hopefully will be seeing that. That is a Gospels manuscript.
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That's the beginning of John there, the end of Luke, the beginning of John. Here is P66, also in the same place in Geneva.
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Also a Gospels manuscript. This also contains right there. We'll blow it up for you here. There is
48:14
Kaitheos Einhalagos. That's the end of John 1 .1, another reference to the deity of Christ long before Constantine came along.
48:21
I like this particular image because you can see what the book itself looked like. You can see how papyri broke down.
48:27
I mean, this book's 1 ,800 years old. Papyri was made from laying the leaves of the papyrus plant at right angles and normally it was only written on one side.
48:36
Christians evidently were so poor they wrote on both sides of it. But you can see how the edges will break off.
48:44
Then again, I don't know if you've noticed this, but we use such cheap paper for our books today that mine are starting to yellow.
48:51
My seminary books are starting to yellow. I'm not sure what they're going to look like 1 ,800 years from now, but I'm not sure they're going to look that good.
48:58
So I'm not sure that we've really advanced a whole lot. But here's P66. And then here is
49:05
P46. And you are the first audience that I've addressed on this subject since I got to see this myself.
49:14
That very page, that exact page, in the darkness of the
49:20
Chester Beattie Library in Dublin, Ireland, just a matter of weeks ago, that very page is on display.
49:29
They have it in very subdued lighting because they don't want to damage the papyrus.
49:37
So if you want to... Security showed up here too. They're not used to people standing in front of these things and translating them.
49:47
But I was joined by my good friend, Pastor Doug McMasters, and by Chris Cahi, who's a student at Trinity, a doctoral student there.
49:56
And we are straining our eyeballs. I'm still struggling to see to this day, straining our eyeballs to read these things in the darkness.
50:04
And we realized the lights were up at the top, and so the best place to see is where the light's going to be directly bouncing off at the same angle.
50:14
So here we were. Okay, is that an
50:19
Omega? I said, okay, all right. And then I've got my iPod, and I've got the
50:24
Accordance Bible software, and it's got a transcription of all the papyri on it. So I'm searching. Ah, here it is, here it is.
50:31
Okay, oh, there it is, all right. And then we could read the whole thing. And eventually security's showing up.
50:36
Why are there people bowing in front of it? Is this a new... We've had some strange people here before, but there are people bowing before the papyri now.
50:45
This is getting a little bit odd. And I was so excited because this is the image
50:50
I have used in this presentation for years. And notice what this is here. We'll blow it up for you so you can see it.
50:58
There's pros Philippasius to the Philippians. This is the beginning of the book of Philippians.
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That very page I was able to see in the flesh.
51:09
And so I'm like, wait a minute. If that's from Philippians 1, I go to the next page next to it. And I'm going, could the
51:16
Carmen Christi be here? Philippians 2, 5 through 11. So I'm looking at it, and I'm looking at it. The Carmen Christi, which is a text
51:24
I've done a lot of work on on the deity of Christ, you're familiar with it. The hymn to Christ is to God, Philippians 2, 5 through 11, was on the backside of the page that is displayed.
51:35
But I knew it was there. I have pictures of it. And I was that close to it anyways. So I was still really, really, really excited.
51:42
But if you ever get a chance to go to Dublin, Ireland, go to the Chester Media Library, you'll be able to see P46. P46 is the earliest collection we have of Paul's writings.
51:53
Now here's a question for you. And I have never had an audience where more than 30 % of the people voted.
51:59
So you have an opportunity of setting a new record here, okay? But I can't see you anyways because of the lights. But anyways, there's a question about whether Hebrews was written by Paul.
52:09
It doesn't say that it was. How many people in our audience tonight think that manuscript
52:16
P46 contains the book of Hebrews? Put your hand up. How many think it contains the book of Hebrews?
52:24
How many think it does not contain the book of Hebrews? How many of you just punked me again?
52:32
I didn't get a third of you to vote again. See, you didn't set the record. Sorry, so I'm not going to tell you. No, all right.
52:38
It does contain the book of Hebrews. Now all that means is that someone in the year AD 200 thought that Paul wrote
52:45
Hebrews, but it does contain the book of Hebrews. So that is interesting. Is that P46 a real treasure that we have?
52:53
Now here's another manuscript that I got to examine. This is P91 from about AD 250.
53:00
I was in Sydney, Australia in 2009. I'll be going back in October of this year. And I had a few hours one day.
53:07
What do you want to do? Do you want to go? When you're in Sydney, Australia, what do you expect someone's going to go do?
53:12
You're going to go see the opera house, right? You're going to go find
53:17
Nemo. No, I didn't do that either. Though I did discover, by the way, that Finding Nemo is a historical documentary.
53:24
Did you not know that? It is a historical documentary. Do you remember the part in Finding Nemo where the seagulls were going, mine, mine, mine, mine?
53:34
Remember those guys? I discovered when I ate at the famous fish and chips place on the harbor that whoever wrote
53:44
Finding Nemo had eaten at the same place because I sat down, and I noticed there were all these seagulls.
53:51
Well, okay, it's nice to see seagulls. As soon as I opened the box of my fish and chips, the business end of a seagull was in my face trying to get it out of my hand.
54:03
I spent the entire time sitting here like this trying to get my food down.
54:08
They are the most... It is a historical documentary. I did not know that, but the next time those of you are watching
54:15
Finding Nemo, you will now know that it is actually not an animated story, but it is true. Anyway, I did not want to do any of that stuff.
54:23
I knew that this manuscript was at Macquarie State University in Sydney, and so I got to meet with the curator who,
54:32
I got the distinct feeling, was really happy to have someone to talk to about papyrology. I got the distinct feeling his wife had burned out on that about 40 years earlier.
54:46
So he let me examine it. We put it under a microscope. We had lots of fun. P91 is one of the earliest manuscripts we have of the
54:53
Book of Acts. Actually, there is more to P91, but the other two -thirds are in Venice, Italy, because it broke apart because it had been folded.
55:04
Just like if you want to rip paper, you fold it, and then it rips a little bit more nicely than it is supposed to anyway.
55:10
This was in Sydney, Australia. It is one of the earliest manuscripts we have there. Okay, I got to press on, or we will never get done with all this.
55:16
I am sorry. After the Peace of the Church in A .D. 313, that is when Constantine stopped persecution against Christians, Christians could have professional scribes copy the scriptures themselves.
55:28
At this time, the great vellum or leather manuscripts began to appear, including the three greatest of these, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus.
55:34
Sinaiticus and Vaticanus may well have been among the Bibles copied with imperial monies at the time or shortly after the
55:40
Council of Nicaea in A .D. 325, where Constantine gave some money to the
55:47
Church to replace some of the thousands of manuscripts that the Romans had destroyed.
55:53
Here is a picture of Codex Sinaiticus. It is in the British Library in London.
55:59
I saw it. It looks exactly like that in 2005. But to give you an idea of what it really looks like, here is the text of Codex Sinaiticus.
56:09
Now, please keep in mind something, folks. That is handwritten. That is handwriting. That is not printed.
56:15
That kind of regularity is just absolutely amazing. You can see some marginal things here, some insertions that have been made later on.
56:25
This particular text was in use from the middle of the 4th century until its discovery by Constantine von
56:34
Tischendorf in the middle of the 19th century. So that's a long, long period of time to be in use.
56:42
And Codex Sinaiticus, by the way, is available completely now in extremely high -quality digital photographs at codexsinaiticus .org.
56:52
You can go home and look at it. Or if you're like Lane, you can whip out your Zoom and start looking at it right now and not listen to another word
56:59
I have to say all night. And what's really neat is this is the same text on the screen.
57:06
Why does it look different? Well, this is your normal lighting. And then they have what's called raking light where it's from the side, so you can actually see the very surface of the papyri itself.
57:16
It sometimes tells you a little bit something about the penmanship or whether it's been gone over again.
57:22
It's really, really fascinating stuff. And the reason I have this is because of this word right here.
57:28
For those of you who can read Greek, that's parakletos, same word right there, parakletos in the
57:35
Greek. This is from John 14. I actually have a tie. I didn't wear it tonight, but I've made a tie that has the same section from Codex Alexandrinus on it.
57:45
And I made it for witnessing to Muslims because Muslims believe, some of you don't know this, but Muslims believe that Muhammad is prophesied in the
57:55
Bible. Well, the Quran says that Muhammad is found in the Bible. And they believe it's found in John 14 and 16 where the parakletos, the parakletos, the paraklet, the
58:07
Holy Spirit, is actually Muhammad. And that it wasn't originally parakletos, it was perikletos, which means the exalted one, which could be
58:16
Ahmed, which would be the shortened form of Muhammad. And so I have a tie, and so when
58:21
I'm talking to Muslims and we talk about that, I can pull it up and say, see this? This was written long before your prophet was ever born, and it says parakletos, not perikletos.
58:31
So there's other reasons why you shouldn't believe that Muhammad is found in the Bible, but there's one right there. And how many of you would ever have thought of making a tie to something like that?
58:40
It's strange, but that's why I wanted to show you Codex Sinaiticus for that particular one.
58:45
Codex Vaticanus is another extremely important manuscript, may have been copied around the same time, as you can sort of guess, it's at the
58:55
Vatican Library in Rome, also around AD 325, and there's Codex Alexandrinus. When I saw
59:01
Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus was sitting right next to it. I was alone in the room with these things.
59:06
They were under glass, of course, but it was just sort of like, you know, there was a Tyndale Bible behind me and a 1611 and this, and I was just,
59:13
I was in hog heaven, no choice about it. Now, aside from the 5700
59:18
Greek texts, we have early translations in the Latin, Coptic, Sahitic, that are important witnesses to the early texts of the
59:24
New Testament. Combining these with the Greek text yields over 20 ,000 handwritten witnesses to the
59:31
New Testament. We have more than 124 Greek manuscript witnesses within the first 300 years after writing the
59:37
New Testament, far more than any other work of antiquity. And, in fact, we have 12 manuscripts from the second century that is within 100 years of the writing of the
59:46
New Testament. These manuscripts contain portions of all four Gospels, nine books of Paul, Acts, Hebrews, and Revelation, comprising a majority of the books of the
59:56
New Testament we possess today. Again, no work of antiquity even comes close to this early attestation.
01:00:05
The average length of time between the writing of most works contemporaneous with the New Testament, such as the historical works of Pliny, Suetonius, or Tacitus, and their first extant copies is between 500 and 900 years.
01:00:20
Now, when I debated Bart Ehrman, one of the reasons I asked him many of the questions that I did during cross -examination was to get this man who was looked at as the leading opponent of New Testament Christianity today to say some certain things that would be useful.
01:00:37
And notice this particular question, if we can make sure the audio is ready to go here. Notice this particular question and Dr.
01:00:44
Ehrman's response. On the Unbelievable Radio program in London, you discussed the length of time that exists between the writing of Paul's letter to the
01:00:52
Galatians and the first extant copy, that being 150 years. You described this time period as enormous.
01:01:01
That's a quote. Could you tell us what term you would use to describe the time period between, say, the original writings of Suetonius or Tacitus or Pliny and their first extant manuscript copies?
01:01:12
Very enormous. Sorry, ginormous would be a good one? Ginormous. Ginormous, okay. I mean, ginormous doesn't cover it.
01:01:21
The New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book from antiquity. Did you hear that?
01:01:27
For the New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book of antiquity. And that's the leading opponent.
01:01:35
It's funny how people try to interpret Ehrman because one of the other things
01:01:41
I asked him, I said, would it not be fair, Dr. Ehrman, in light of what you said, that if you edited your own
01:01:48
New Testament, you made all the textual decisions regarding the text of New Testament, that your edition would differ far less from the
01:01:59
Nessean text from which the ESV, NESV, so on and so forth have been translated, would differ far less from that New Testament than the
01:02:08
King James Version and the Textus Receptus differs from the NA27. And it took him a second to figure out what
01:02:15
I was asking. I said, well, yes, of course, of course. He said, all we're doing now is tinkering. And I've heard him on an atheist radio program, and the atheist was just loving the fact he was saying there are certain texts we don't know what it originally said.
01:02:29
And so he goes, so, Dr. Ehrman, what do you think the New Testament originally said?
01:02:35
And there is this silence, and he goes, well, pretty much what it says today. What?
01:02:44
Well, yeah, we know what the New Testament said. And you could just, it was like when you take one of those balloons and, you know, it's exactly what this atheist guy was doing right here.
01:02:54
Oh, man, I thought, oh, no, oh, what a shame. So, anyway. Often the transmission of the text of the
01:03:01
New Testament is likened to the phone game that we played when we were kids, where one person whispers something in the ear of the person next in line and so forth around the circle until the last person repeats what he has heard, and it is inevitably changed in often humorous ways from what was originally said.
01:03:16
But is this an accurate way of thinking of how the New Testament was transmitted over time? Now, this is a beautiful graphic that I created myself, so you're going to like it.
01:03:30
You're going to like it. He threatened us with a laser pointer. No. The initial
01:03:36
Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament were written at various places at various times. Some were written for distribution within the community, such as the
01:03:43
Gospels, and others were epistles sent to specific locations. Then copies would be made and sent elsewhere.
01:03:50
Often Christians traveling from one place to another would encounter a book that they had not heard of before and hence would make a copy to bring back to their own fellowship.
01:03:57
And though a graphic that would represent how many different lines of transmission there were and how often they were interconnected would rapidly become useless due to the number of manuscripts that would be on the screen, the fact of that complex history of transmission should be kept in mind.
01:04:12
Over time, single books would be gathered into collections. This was especially true of the Gospels and the
01:04:17
Epistles of Paul. Hence, we have P75, P66, Gospel collections, and P46, which we already looked at, containing the
01:04:24
Epistles of Paul, all dating from the middle to the end of the second century. These collections would then come together until finally, after the
01:04:31
Peace of the Church in 313, you could have entire copies of the Scriptures, such as we find in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.
01:04:38
But the important point to note is this, the multifocality of the process.
01:04:45
Multiple authors writing at multiple times to multiple audiences produced a text that appears in history already displaying multiple lines of transmission.
01:04:55
This results in a textual variance we must study, but it illustrates something else as well.
01:05:03
And that is, it is vitally important to realize that the transmission of the text of the New Testament did not follow a phone game single line.
01:05:13
Not only are written documents less liable to corruption than what is whispered in the ear, but the phone game involves a single line of transmission.
01:05:23
The New Testament originated in multiple places, written by multiple authors, with books being sent to multiple locations.
01:05:31
Now why is that important? This multifocality leads us to the final considerations that demonstrate the bankruptcy of the modern attacks on the
01:05:38
New Testament. To make specific changes in a text like the New Testament, which originally circulated as a group of texts, not as a single body, would require a centralized, controlling body that could make wholesale changes in these widely dispersed texts.
01:05:55
You'd have to have control over the entirety of the text. But the fact of the matter is, no such central agency ever existed or could have existed.
01:06:04
Christianity was a persecuted religion made up mainly of the lower classes. There was no central authority that could ever have gathered up all the texts and made wholesale changes.
01:06:13
Such was impossible in the earliest days of transmission, and given that we have such ancient texts now, obviously could not have happened at a later point without giving clear evidence.
01:06:23
Now, what do I mean by that last statement? Well, we can prove beyond all doubt, and since this is sponsored by a law school,
01:06:31
I like to use the term prove beyond all doubt, beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt, this kind of corruption did not happen.
01:06:39
Since papyri have been found that date back to the second century, we've already looked at some of them this evening, and that only within the past hundred years, had any later centralized organization sought to alter the text.
01:06:53
Those later texts would show stark differences as older and older manuscripts are found. But just the opposite has been the case.
01:06:59
Think about it. If Dan Brown was right, how many of you read The Da Vinci Code or will admit in public you read
01:07:05
The Da Vinci Code? I did. I'm admitting in public. How many of you saw the movie?
01:07:11
A larger number. Okay, all right. What was the theory? Well, the
01:07:16
Gnostic Gospels were the first Gospels, and they presented Jesus as a human being who was married and had kids. And then
01:07:23
Constantine comes along and he wipes all of them out and burns all of them and writes the canonical Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, what makes
01:07:29
Jesus a god. If anyone's ever read the Gnostic Gospels, you know it's the exact opposite of that.
01:07:35
It's the Gnostic Gospels that have Jesus as this ethereal being that sort of floats around and may not even have a physical body and all the rest of that stuff.
01:07:42
I mean, Dan Brown made millions out of turning history on its head. But the point is, let's say someone actually believes that happened.
01:07:48
We are in California. Happens everywhere,
01:07:55
New York especially. But anyway, let's say that you run into someone that actually believes that that happened.
01:08:01
The idea then is that somehow Constantine was able to gather up all these ancient manuscripts and destroy them and write new stuff.
01:08:12
How in the world could Constantine find all those earlier manuscripts? I mean, this is the 4th century.
01:08:21
We can't find Osama bin Laden with GPS and satellites. How in the world are you supposed to find manuscripts that are buried in the desert someplace when you live in Rome and they're in Egypt?
01:08:32
Doesn't make a lick of sense. And so, if there had been some wholesale changing that took place to Council of Nicaea or something, by the way, the
01:08:40
Council of Nicaea had nothing to do with the canon of scripture at all. Nothing. Zip, zero, nada. But let's say if something had happened then, and in the 4th century you rewrite everything, and now we find stuff that was written 200 years earlier, wow, the later stuff is going to really stand out.
01:08:58
It's going to be very obvious by the changes. But that's the exact opposite of what has happened.
01:09:04
As we've found earlier and earlier manuscripts, what has that proven? That we've always had the same New Testament.
01:09:10
The farther back we go, the more we see it. That's the point. So, all allegations of purposeful corruption, such as those made by Muslims, and my
01:09:21
Muslim friends make these allegations all the time, fall upon the mere consideration of the historical context and date itself.
01:09:28
By the way, just for the fun of it, I gave this same presentation, well, I've added a few things to it since then, but I gave this same presentation in New York about a year and a half ago.
01:09:39
And an entire group of Ahmadi Muslims. They had attended a debate
01:09:45
I had done with an imam earlier, and they were very nice folks, and I talked with them afterwards, and they said, are you speaking anywhere else on the island?
01:09:52
I said, yeah, I'm going to be doing a thing on New Testament on Wednesday night at a Baptist church. We'll cancel our service and come to yours.
01:09:59
They all came. It was about 60 -40 Christian -Muslim split, and they sat through this entire presentation.
01:10:07
The same things you're hearing. And afterwards, they invited me the next time I come back to Long Island, they'd like me to lecture in their mosque.
01:10:16
I'm looking forward to getting a chance to do that. The rapid widespread distribution of the
01:10:22
New Testament manuscripts in the first two centuries precludes any purposeful centralized corruption.
01:10:30
It also gives rise to the need to study the relatively small number of textual variants. The point is, Christians wanted everybody to have the gospel.
01:10:38
And so they let their scriptures go everywhere. You didn't have to have, you didn't have to whip out your
01:10:43
I am a professional scribe card. Remember P72, what I saw up in Denver?
01:10:48
That guy's handwriting wasn't the best. He made some silly mistakes. But he loved the word of God and he wanted to possess it.
01:10:55
And so yes, there were those kinds of things. But since it went everywhere immediately, no one could ever come along and gather them all up and say, hmm, these teach reincarnation.
01:11:09
We'll take it out. Or these don't teach the deity of Christ. We'll put it in.
01:11:15
Could never have happened. Not possible. Now you see, if you've ever been bugged by those little footnotes that say some manuscripts say this and some manuscripts say that, folks, that is the cost, if you want to call it the cost, of not having the problem that the
01:11:30
Muslims have. Because you see, about 20 years after Muhammad's death, according to Sahih al -Bukhari, volume 6, pages 509 and 510, which is one of the authentic Hadith collections, and you actually have to mention it's
01:11:46
Sahih al -Bukhari if you cite Hadith, unlike certain people. But anyways, if you read that, you'll discover that there was a fear among some of the
01:11:55
Muslims. The fear was that the Quran would become like the
01:12:00
Christian scriptures or the Jews where they'd fight over things. And so they wanted an official version.
01:12:07
And so the third Khalif, Uthman, gathers the Quran together and he assigns a group of people and they create a revision, an official version, and then they burn everything they used to create it.
01:12:25
And then they send copies to all the main Islamic senders and say, this is what you must do.
01:12:31
Now that produces a nice stable text. When you've got the power of the sword and the
01:12:36
Islamic caliphate behind it, it creates a very stable text over time. But there's one little problem.
01:12:44
You don't have to have those little footnotes. I don't have it with me right now, but if I had my
01:12:50
Arabic Quran with me, I could open it up and there are no footnotes in it. And Muslims like that.
01:12:57
That makes my text better than your text because you've got those little footnotes. But if you're thinking with me, actually all they've got is what
01:13:07
Uthman thought the Quran should say. And they have to have absolute confidence that Uthman got it right.
01:13:15
There's a cost to that kind of certainty and sometimes that kind of certainty isn't the truth.
01:13:24
And that's one of the issues that we have to think about. We don't have that issue at all when it comes to the New Testament.
01:13:31
This leads to another important point. When scribes copied their text, they were very conservative, often incorporating marginal notes into the text since they could not be sure if the note was original or not.
01:13:41
Makes sense because you're reading somebody else's handwriting. Sometimes they'd be dead. You couldn't go back and ask them. This means they even preserve mistakes or silly readings.
01:13:49
This may sound bad at first, but consider what it really means. The New Testament text is tenacious.
01:13:55
That means readings are preserved in the text. All readings, including the original readings, are still a part of the manuscript tradition.
01:14:05
That is why the believing textual critic can persevere at even the most difficult variants. One of the readings is the original.
01:14:13
What does that mean? Well, there are some very difficult textual variants.
01:14:19
I discussed one in my webcast a couple days ago out of, I think it was 1st or 2nd
01:14:25
Peter. And it is hard to come up with a decision. It doesn't really have any great weight to it, but it's hard to come up with a decision.
01:14:34
But we can have confidence that one of those manuscripts contains the original reading.
01:14:40
It's tenacious. It hasn't disappeared. It's like, Rob Bowman put it this way, and I think it's a very good way of putting it.
01:14:46
It's like having a 1 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle, and you have 1 ,010 pieces. It would be bad if you, how many of you have ever done a 1 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle, and you get to the end and you're missing one piece?
01:14:58
Isn't that a bummer? You know, the cat ate it, the dog ate it, something like that, you never know, buried in the backyard. It just ruins everything.
01:15:05
But what if you had a 1 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle, and you have 1 ,010 pieces? It's the identification of the added material that is important.
01:15:15
We haven't lost the original readings. They're still there. Now, very quickly, because I want to be able to allow for questions, and there's still two more segments
01:15:23
I want to cover. A key theological example. Look at 1 Timothy 3 .16 in your Bible. Compare the King James and the
01:15:28
New American Standard. King James says, Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness. God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the
01:15:38
Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory. The New American Standard says, By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness.
01:15:45
He who was revealed in the flesh was vindicated in the spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.
01:15:51
Now, there's a huge difference between saying God was manifest in the flesh and saying
01:15:56
He who was manifest in the flesh. And He who and God don't seem to look very much alike at all.
01:16:05
And this is where King James only advocates really start preaching. See, those godless people that translate the
01:16:10
New American Standard, they're trying to hide the deity of Christ and so on and so forth. And you can preach a real stemwinder if you want to.
01:16:17
But why is there a difference here? Well, obviously, as we've already noted, it's because of the underlying
01:16:24
Greek text. The variant is very evenly matched as far as external evidence is concerned.
01:16:33
There are many manuscripts that read both directions. But I think if you can just see, here's the information.
01:16:41
Here is the word, as it's found in the Nessiolan text, haos, he who, ephanerothe, ansarki, was manifest in flesh.
01:16:49
And there's the little thing right there. And there's the information right there. And so you have the text is found in the original of Codex Sinaiticus, the original of Codex Alexandrinus, the original of C, F, G, 33, a few others, and these early church fathers.
01:17:05
The word theos, God, is found in the corrector of Sinaiticus, the corrector of Alexandrinus, the corrector of C, D, and in the majority text.
01:17:15
And these two important, these are miniscule manuscripts, 1739 and 1881, which actually go back to much earlier manuscripts before them.
01:17:23
But once again, having that information doesn't necessarily explain why there would be a textual variant unless we look at what it originally looked like as it was originally written.
01:17:35
Here are the two texts as they would have been written in the unsealed text.
01:17:41
God at the top, he who at the bottom. Let me use color to show you what the difference is. And if you didn't see that, let me blow it up for you.
01:17:51
There is a difference between God and he who in Greek unsealed text. Oops, all of a sudden they look very, very similar.
01:18:02
You see, Christians developed this thing called the Nomina Sacra. They would abbreviate sacred names,
01:18:11
God, Jesus, Lord, Spirit. Some expanded that out to even other commonly used words in the
01:18:18
New Testament. Sort of a shorthand, basically. And so God normally is with Theta, Epsilon, Omicron, Sigma, Theos, but you'd put the first letter and the last letter and put a line over top.
01:18:30
So the difference between Has and Theos would be two small lines.
01:18:37
And remember, what were the early manuscripts written on? Papyri. Remember what the papyri looked like?
01:18:44
A lot of lines in that papyri. And if you were reading somebody's manuscript, they're gone, they're dead.
01:18:51
You couldn't go back and ask them. It's real easy to see how someone could have mistaken one for the other.
01:19:00
Now here is Codex Sinaiticus, and you can barely see it here, but there is Has, Ephanerothe, and then in a much later hand, at least 700 years later, someone has written in Theos.
01:19:14
There's three little dots and written in Theos above it. But there's the original. Very clearly, it is Theos in Codex Sinaiticus from the fourth century in regards to that.
01:19:25
So that's why there is a difference between the two is you simply look at the manuscripts. But let me look at...
01:19:33
I'm going to have to skip this one. I'm going to have to go to this one. I have never presented this in this presentation before.
01:19:40
This is added in because of some work that I did just recently. And this is one that people have a lot of questions about.
01:19:46
And so we'll get this one taken care of and then we can start taking some questions. I'm not sure how that's going to be handled, but I'll ask
01:19:52
Lane to come up and explain that in a moment. The Comma Johannium.
01:19:58
The Comma Johannium. If you are familiar with 1
01:20:03
John 5, verses 7 -8 in the King James Version of the Bible, it says, For there are three that bear record in heaven, the
01:20:09
Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the
01:20:15
Spirit, and the water, and the blood, and these three agree in one. Now, if you compare that with, for example, the
01:20:21
New American Standard, for there are three that testify, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood, and the three are in agreement.
01:20:27
Everything in red, the entirety of the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one, is not found in the
01:20:34
NASV, ESV, NIV, NET, basically all modern translations except for the
01:20:40
King James and the New King James Version of the Bible, which are based upon what's called the Textus Receptus.
01:20:47
Now, once again, the accusation is made, well, if you don't have this, then your Bible's corrupt, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
01:20:54
There is no text more directly relevant to the integrity of the New Testament text, for if such a vitally important theological text can disappear in toto from the
01:21:06
Greek manuscript tradition, then we have absolutely no confidence whatsoever that we still possess the original readings of these ancient writings.
01:21:13
No Greek text for the first 1 ,300 years of its history contains the text found in the
01:21:22
Textus Receptus or in the King James Version of the Bible. There is not a Greek text until at the earliest, the 14th century, that contains these words.
01:21:36
And so, if they were originally written by John, then we have no idea what the
01:21:42
New Testament originally said. And yet, there are people who will go to the mat defending this text, entire books written and defending this, without realizing that by defending it, they are undercutting the very essence of our reliability, the reasons for our reliability in looking at the
01:22:06
New Testament text. The text first appears in certain Latin texts in the 4th century, most probably as a gloss, an explanation of the spirit, water, and blood.
01:22:18
While it is found in a few 10th and 11th century Greek manuscripts, it is only written in the margins of those manuscripts in a 16th or 17th century hand.
01:22:29
The following manuscripts are the only ones that contain the verse in the actual Greek text of a
01:22:34
Greek manuscript. And there is the table. You can see that the oldest is from the 14th or 15th century, number 629.
01:22:43
It is a Greek -Latin diaglot, and in this case, the Greek is actually taken from the Latin because the text had become a part of the
01:22:50
Latin Vulgate. It was not a part of Jerome's original translation of the Latin Vulgate, but it had become a part of the
01:22:55
Latin Vulgate. So even the earliest one is only taking it from the Latin. It's not representing an earlier
01:23:01
Greek text. Then we have Codex Monfortianus, and notice we know almost exactly when it was written, 1520.
01:23:09
I'll tell you the story of that in a moment. It has a differing reading of the text than what we have today.
01:23:16
And then we have two 16th century manuscripts and an 18th century manuscript.
01:23:22
Now I don't know about you, but a handwritten manuscript from the 18th century doesn't carry a whole lot of weight.
01:23:31
Actually, 16th century manuscripts don't either. Now, Codex Monfortianus, number 61, is in Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.
01:23:41
And it was presented to Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus was the Dutch humanist scholar who had produced the first published and printed and published
01:23:52
Greek New Testament in 1516. There was one that was printed before his, but it wasn't published before his.
01:23:59
And he put out two editions and came under great fire for the fact that he did not have this
01:24:08
Kamiohonium in his Greek text. And so he said, I've never seen a Greek text that contains it.
01:24:14
Point me to a Greek text that contains it. He had even written to his friend Bombasius. And who would ever name their kid
01:24:19
Bombasius? But he wrote to his friend Bombasius in Rome and said, look at the Vatican manuscript,
01:24:25
Codex Vaticanus. Does it contain these words? And so he goes, he looks, he writes back, says, no, it does not contain these words.
01:24:33
Well, many people theorize that Codex Monfortianus, manuscript 61, the one
01:24:39
I talked to you about earlier that I examined at Trinity College just a few weeks ago, was actually written specifically to force
01:24:48
Erasmus to put the Kamiohonium into his text. That's why we have a good idea of when it was written, about 1520.
01:24:57
And so it was pointed to Erasmus and said it's there. And so Erasmus inserted it into the third edition of his
01:25:10
Greek New Testament. So it was in the third, fourth, and fifth editions of the Greek New Testament picked up by Stephanos in his 1550 text,
01:25:17
Theodore Bayes in his 1598 text. Those are the seven printed editions that were used by the King James translators and that's why the
01:25:23
Kamiohonium is in the King James version to this day. Now, that is a picture that unfortunately you can't hardly see at all.
01:25:31
There is a big guy there that's Doug McMasters. Right there is my arm. That's all we managed right there.
01:25:37
But there we are looking and we are examining at that point Codex Monfortianus. We actually looked at more than just the
01:25:44
Kamiohonium but we specifically looked at the Kamiohonium. And up above you have the transcription that I tapped out on my droid.
01:25:54
That's all I brought with me so I tapped out on a note program on my droid. The actual reading.
01:26:01
And it's interesting because this is not the reading found in the King James version of the Bible. You'll notice it says in heaven, pater, as a nominus sacra, logos, chi, and then pneuma has been abbreviated hagion,
01:26:19
Holy Spirit. In the King James and in the Greek text of the Textus Receptus there is an article before each one of those words.
01:26:27
And then it goes on to say and these three are one and that phrase isn't in it. So fascinatingly the very text used to force
01:26:35
Erasmus to put that in doesn't read the way that Erasmus eventually stuck it in there anyways.
01:26:42
So when people say this is the touchstone if you don't have this and your Bible's corrupted and all the rest of that stuff the reality is that Christian scholars have known for a long time that 1
01:26:55
John 5 -7 does not belong in the New Testament. Folks, I want to know what John wrote. Not what someone 1 ,500 years after John was dead thought he should have written.
01:27:06
And why is this important? Well, because I'll tell you something. Atheists, Muslims, I've had 1
01:27:13
John 5 -7 throughout me so many times. Even in the debate I did in 2006 at Biola.
01:27:18
Anybody here at that debate? Catch that debate? What did Shabir Ali mention in one of his statements?
01:27:25
1 John 5 -7! As if somehow we don't know about this. We've known about this for a long, long time.
01:27:33
And it's not in the vast majority of translations of the Bible nor should it be because it simply was not original.
01:27:40
So, in summary and then we'll start taking questions. 400 ,000 variants 99 % of them inconsequential.
01:27:47
Most thoroughly documented work of antiquity even Bart Ehrman admits that spread all over the world quickly no controlling authority hence no ability to edit, change, insert, delete.
01:27:58
Any later editing would stand out clearly in comparison with the ancient manuscripts themselves.
01:28:05
And so there you have an introduction to the history of the text of the
01:28:11
New Testament. There is much more out there. But folks especially those of you who might have children you're getting ready to send out to university you might think you're sending to some community college and therefore they're going to be safe there.
01:28:31
Folks we need to be discussing this stuff inside the church. We need to be preparing our young people before they go off to the university and they have people shooting at them using part of this information but not the whole.
01:28:48
And each one of us even us older folks as we interact with the society around us we need to know why we believe the
01:28:57
Bible is true. And given that there's so many attacks today upon its veracity this is one area where the facts are all on our side if we will but know them and be able to present them.