The Reliability of the New Testament Text

Moderator Introduction and Speaker Credentials

Dr. James White is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, a Christian apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona. He is a professor, having taught Greek, systematic theology, and various topics in the field of apologetics.

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. 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.

He is an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church and has been married to Kelly for more than 28 years. He also has two children, Joshua and Summer. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. James White.

Why the Reliability of the New Testament Matters

Well, thankfully I'm not as tall as Lane, so I don't have to do the entire thing like that. It's very difficult on the back. Very hard indeed. It is good to be with you back here in Southern California.

I think I'm in Southern California. We left the Santa Ana Airport, so I figure I have to be somewhere near Southern California. I'll have to admit, when 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?

And I certainly have pondered the fact that things have changed a lot over the decades. The instant information, seeing things live, seeing the kind of devastation we've seen, 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.

And obviously we pray for the people of Japan, especially our brothers and sisters there. There are obviously Christians there that are suffering today, have lost loved ones, and we pray that God would draw near to them.

But obviously I think there is a relationship between what we do this evening and thinking about those events. Because when the world asks us how we respond to such things, how we understand such things, where do we go?

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 Word of God.

And so I think there is a meaningful reason to look at why we can trust specifically this evening the 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.

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. We live in a day where because of the internet, for example, Lane was up here and he was using his new 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. But he was using the internet to access my bio from my webpage. 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 and the way things used to take place.

And so obviously what that means is information is much more readily available, both the good and the bad. And that means attacks upon our faith can be just as quickly distributed as the defense of our faith.

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. 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.

And hopefully this evening you'll be challenged. Hopefully this will be a starting point, not an ending point. We will cover some complex things, but they are things that we need to know because the enemies of the faith know these things.

We need to, in the church, roll up our sleeves and start doing some work. If our topic this evening was Christian finance or some type of prophetic claim of I've figured out, you know, who the Antichrist is or something like that, we wouldn't have enough seats in this auditorium for everybody.

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.

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. 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. So let's dive in. Hopefully you're all aware of the fact that naturalistic materialism rules the day in academia, in the academy. Specifically, anything that does not presuppose an uncreated universe that can be explained solely on the basis of naturalism is rejected a priori.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Now, that kind of naturalistic materialism looks for people to be its champion. Some of you heard when Lane mentioned some of the people that I've debated. One of the men that I've debated is Dr. Bart Ehrman.

Dr. Ehrman is an apostate. That is a technical term, not an insult. 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.

And yet he today calls himself a happy agnostic. Having met Dr. Ehrman, I'm not sure how he defines the term happy. But he is not a believer, and in fact, the last three major books he has written, misquoting Jesus, Jesus Interrupted, and a new book coming out in just a matter of days, aren't you all excited, and have it preordered like I do, called Forged, which will be a standard, about 150-year-old, updated, but 150-year-old argument about how 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.

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. 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.

Bart Ehrman on Manuscripts and Textual Change

My guest tonight, a religious scholar and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. His best-selling book is Misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the Bible and why.

Please welcome Bart Ehrman. You were someone that went through sort of a period of discovery. 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.

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 Bible had been given by God. And so I studied Greek in college and decided to read the New Testament in Greek.

Because that was the original language. That was the original language it was written in. And so the more I studied, though, the more I saw there's 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. And so this 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.

Now, what does that do? Because to my mind, as I read your book and learned more about it, the Bible suddenly became more interesting to me in that I felt like that information doesn't denigrate the Bible in any way, but brings it to life in a manner.

It suddenly becomes a living document. It is changed by whoever it passes through, which suddenly makes it seem more, almost more godly in some respects.

Well, yeah, it's an interesting point, because for me, the Bible takes on new life when you see that the 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.

For me, I found it to be a liberating experience to realize this, in part because I realized that the 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.

And mostly shaped it during that 300 years between sort of Christ's death and when, I guess, Constantine converted and Rome converted and Christianity became sort of the law of the land.

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. And those are the Gospels. Those are the Gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Now, just one quick correction for those of you who are historians. 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? It just must hurt for the rest of you.

I don't have to deal with it. Anyway, just one quick correction. We always hear about Constantine making Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire. But if you know your history, you know that's just not the case.

In 313, he made Christianity a religio licita, a licit religion. But that did not take place until 383 -385 under Theodosius. So it wasn't Constantine that did that. But scholars spin the evidence, particularly in media appearances.

Bart Ehrman very rarely makes a false statement about history. 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.

They emphasize, and certainly Bart Ehrman does, that all we have are copies of copies of copies from hundreds of years after the originals. A couple years ago, I debated Zulfiqar Ali Shah, a Muslim at Duke University.

And three of the four books on the Sheikh's desk were by Bart Ehrman. It gives you an idea of the centrality of this form of attack upon the Christian faith and upon the reliability of the scriptures.

How Many Variants Are There in the New Testament?

Now, if we were to take all of the handwritten copies of the 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.

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. That continued well into, even into the 17th century in some areas.

And so we have at least about 1 ,600 years of handwritten transmission of the text of the New Testament. Now, how many variants do you think would develop in 1 ,600 years of hand copying the New Testament?

Well, you'll see different numbers amongst various scholars, but I think a fair number would be approximately 400 ,000. Thank you. I did not pay him to do that, but I appreciate when someone does that.

400 ,000 variants. 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. We need to hear the worst case so that you can then correct the worst case to the reality.

400 ,000 variants. Now, there are only 138 ,162 words. What was funny about that? I don't get it. There are 138 ,162 words in the Thessalonian Greek text. There's more words in the TR. There's a few fewer words in the Westcott-Hort text.

We can discuss that. But there are 138 ,162 words in the New Testament. How many of you knew that? Okay, good. That's nearly three variants per word. 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 New Testament, there's two other possibilities for what you have.

That's how people understand it. 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. 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 United States, in the United States.

I did use this at a church in Dublin, Ireland, just a few weeks ago, but that's Ireland. And they're not even the United Kingdom. So, you know, and they're just wee nice little people. Anyway, but you all, how many of you have seen a red laser pointer?

You know, a red laser pointer. How many of you have seen the really cool green laser pointers? Oh, yes, I have a green laser pointer down there. How many of you have ever seen a purple laser pointer? Now, I have two reasons for doing this.

Sometimes I need to point something on the screen. The other thing is, sometimes I'm so boring that people fall asleep. And this is so bright that what will happen is if you fall asleep, and I've had guys right down front, like right where you are, okay, brother?

I had a big guy once sit right there, fall asleep, and start snoring very loudly right in the front row. It's extremely distracting. If your mouth flops open, I'm shooting this into your mouth. It's so bright your eyeballs will glow.

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. But anyhow, here is the number of words right here. 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? 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.

First of all, 99 of all variants do not impact the meaning of the text whatsoever. Variations in spelling and word order make up the vast bulk of the variations. In fact, most of the variations I could not even explain to you in the English language because they are only relevant in the Greek language, and they do not impact translation whatsoever.

99 of them. I remember, it's interesting, I just ran into this fellow on Facebook. And I remember he was one of my fellow sufferers in first year Greek many, many years ago at Grand Canyon College. And he just, there were two things he could not get.

He could not get certain forms of one verb, which is an important verb, unfortunately. And then he could not get the movable nou. The movable nou, if you've ever studied Greek, is similar to the difference between a and an in English.

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. 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. 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.

Hence, 1 of 400 ,000 equals about 4 ,000 meaningful textual variants out of 138 ,162 words is about 2 .9%, or one meaningful variant every three pages. But only half of these are viable. 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 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. And I got to examine a particular manuscript we'll talk about a little bit later on, Codex Monfortianus.

And 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. I could write better than this. And it really struck me that it was very odd.

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. 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.

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. 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 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 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. But there's much more to it than that.

Think about with me for just a moment. The more manuscripts you have for a particular work, the more textual variants you will have. Right? If you only have one manuscript of a work, how many textual variants will you have?

None, because you only have one copy. But if we only had one copy, what would our confidence be that that one copy got everything exactly right? You see, that's the thing we have to keep in mind. 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. 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 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 Josh McDowell book or something like that, and they start repeating these things. That's not 5 ,700 complete manuscripts of Matthew through Revelation.

That's 5 ,700 individual manuscripts. Some of the later ones contain all the New Testament. But think about it. How big would a handwritten New Testament be? I mean, anybody here got the ESV Study Bible?

I heard in California you now have to register that as a dangerous weapon. 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.

So imagine if that was handwritten. It would be massive. It would be huge. So many of those 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 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. So if you do a little bit of math, that's approximately 1 .3 million pages of text grand total.

1 .3 million pages of handwritten text. 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 meaningful viable variants. Think about what that actually ends up meaning. 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 meaningful and viable variants over 1 .3 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.

One might even say it is downright miraculous. But that's not normally what you are told. Now on the screen right now, I asked my computer a few years ago to compare two printed editions of the Greek New Testament.

The two editions represent the two extremes in the New Testament manuscript tradition. In other words, the most dissimilar from one another in printed manuscripts. And then I asked it to mark off the differences by using color.

Here is Ephesians chapter 1 verses 1 through 14. You can see some differences. Some don't really matter because they're issues of capitalization. But whether you have the word Jesus up here, whether you have a preposition here, there actually is an important one right there.

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. And that's somewhat theologically significant. But we'll pass over it right now.

But as you can see, the vast majority of the text, there is no variation whatsoever between these texts. So the idea that you have three different options for every single word is just simply, utterly, and completely absurd.

Manuscript Evidence from Revelation to Hebrews

The next one here, let me ask you first, which book would you guess has the fewest number of manuscripts, handwritten manuscripts, extant today? Sorry? Philemon. Interesting. It's the Book of Revelation.

Book of Revelation. I'm sorry if there are any Tim LaHaye fans here. But there's a reason for that. 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?

Bring it on in. We'll put it in the New Testament. That's cool. That's all right. You know, they sort of examined things. You know, we need to look at this carefully, examine the theology. 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. But again, the vast majority are very, very similar.

And guess which book pretty much has the purest textual transmission over time? 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. And I mean, that's an entire section where there's just basically almost no variation whatsoever to be found. That gives you somewhat of a graphic idea of why that is.

Now, still, why are there variations? How many of you have noticed those? Let me change this. Let me change the question. 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.

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. 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? Be honest. How many of you said, I wish that wasn't there? Only a few honest people in the audience tonight. OK. Well, even the original King James, by the way, had those same notes.

They were in the margin. Why do we have differences in manuscripts? 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 Droid devices automatically changing.

Can you imagine what would happen today if we were transmitting the New Testament using a Droid? Because my Droid keeps changing what I tell it to say into something else. 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.

I mean, something like imputation would become Phoenix Suns. I mean, it just, you know, we would have variation. You just, 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, I mean, I just have to say something.

Didn't Lane look great tonight? I mean, I was so impressed. He cleans up so well. He's gonna make a great lawyer, unless they have really short microphones in the courtroom where he's always going, I object, you know.

It's towering over the judge. Whatever you say, it's okay. You know, I think it'll be great. But it might be a real advantage. But I'm sure 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.

And so, you know, what if Lane is typing along, you know, and he's got these piles of law books. 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. 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.

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.

And maybe his professor doesn't notice it either. It becomes the grounds of an entire legal suit or something like that. You know, scribal errors happen even today, even with the computers and the lights.

Can you imagine what it was like when you were doing this by candlelight and you didn't have glasses and you're writing on papyri or vellum and using a quill and you didn't have air conditioning and there were mosquitoes?

I mean, there's would have been a lot of reasons why there could have been such things as scribal errors. 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.

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. 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. And that is 1 John 3, 1. 1 John 3, 1. Now, given that this is Southern California and everybody's really, you know, cool here, I'm going to take my jacket off.

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. 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? I mean, she sort of faded away. I suppose I could come up with a different name. But 1 John 3, 1 in the 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.

Therefore the world knoweth us not because it knew him not. Okay, now let's compare that with the 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.

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. 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. And such we are is not in the King James Version of the Bible. Now, why would that be?

Well, this is a scribal error. The modern text contained an important phrase affirming our adoption as children of God through Christ that is not found in the King James. Why? Because the Greek text from which the King James was translated lacked the phrase.

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. 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.

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 homoeteluton, which is a long 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.

That's the same thing that happened to scribes as they were copying from the Greek New Testament. Now, here is from the Logos Bible software the actual variant itself, and you can see right here is that little square right there.

Kai esmen is the phrase, and we are. And you find the little square right here. These are the manuscripts that do not contain that phrase. KL049, these are unsealed manuscripts here. That little symbol right there, the majority text symbol, means the majority of Greek text do not contain the phrase, and such we are.

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. The best way to look at that is to look at how it was originally written.

Ancient writers made the same error. 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. Now, when the New Testament was written for the first 800 years of its transmission, the form of literary Greek was all capital letters, no spaces between words, and almost no punctuation whatsoever.

So it looked like that. A long line of capital Greek letters. All right? That's what you've got. Now, having seen that, 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. And now let's just blow it up so you can actually see what it…. Is that going to… that's going to show it? 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 technotheou, children of God, that we might be called. Chi, esmen, and we are. Notice clathomen ends with mu-epsilon-nu, M-E-N, and esmen ends with mu-epsilon-nu, M-E-N.

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.

The result makes perfect sense. But the intervening phrase, and we are, has been dropped out. 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 John, we'd have a problem. But we don't have just one copy of 1 John. We have many copies of 1 John, and therefore we are able to detect this kind of thing.

Now, the majority of the 5 ,700 Greek manuscripts date from after 1 ,000 A .D., comprising, as I pointed out, that Fraktur M, that German M, the majority text. The majority come after 1 ,000 A .D. 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.

Unsealed text is all capital forms, no spacing, and no punctuation, as we saw. Now, here's a graph that I put together for my book on the 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. 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 Greek today, is generally what you learn to read.

Very few people who learn Greek today can actually pick up one of the earliest forms in the 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.

They will say, look, you don't weigh text. 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. 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 thousand years, that would result in a different New Testament than it does today. 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 at important places of variation. The Alexandrian text is the majority during the first thousand years.

The later Byzantine text becomes the majority only later on. 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.

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. 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, I said, the day is coming when we're going to have right on our devices access to all these manuscripts. It's pretty much already here. I have pretty much all of it on my iPad right there.

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. This is Ryland's 47, better known as P52.

That is not a fighter plane for those of you from World War II fame. But this is a small fragment. It is about the size of a credit card. It was discovered in the 1930s. A man was shuffling through papyri fragments in a library in England.

He started translating this and he went, that sounds vaguely familiar. Most scholars believe this is the earliest fragment of the New Testament we have. You'll always have arguments. Well, I think this is a little bit earlier.