Crash and Burn Textual Critical Program!

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:31

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. We were going to try to do something somewhat experimental today, something different than what we've done in the past.

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And that was we're going to try to let folks contact us and raise particular questions that they have concerning textual criticism.

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And that is specific variants. We get a lot of people ask questions. You know, why does my

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King James say this and my ESV say this? That may or may not be a textual variant.

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But the point being, use the big board to do some explanation of the manuscripts and the background and how that process works.

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So we set up a Zoom room for people to call in. And for some reason,

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I'm not sure if the moon is full or there's something in the water or when

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OSHA mandates get struck down by the Supreme Court. But there are just a bunch of people clogging up the room with music.

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And one kid sounded like he was about 12, got in there and just started cussing up a blue streak.

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And I'm not sure what the what these people are doing, but that didn't that didn't work out real well at all, unfortunately, which

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I'm sure bothers Rich because he was the one that did the you know, this

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Zoom stuff is really awesome. This is how we need to do the phone stuff in the future. And unfortunately, I'm wondering if that's going to be really, really helpful in the future with folks like that out there.

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So I've put out the word on Twitter that if there are particular textual variants you would like to take a look at, drop us drop me something.

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Of course, that concerns me, too. I have sometimes seen things on Twitter hours after they were initially posted to me.

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And so that doesn't really encourage me in any at all. But hopefully folks will get involved and put a few up there.

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If not, we'll just look at a few and call it a day and say, well, we tried it.

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It looks like fun, but not something that people want to do. So we'll take a look at.

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But for the few geeks who do want to consider the transmission of the text of New Testament over time,

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I have on the screen right now, and I took the time to make

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Rich feel good because he doesn't like light backgrounds. He wants he says the cameras love the dark backgrounds.

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And that's OK. I understand that. That's a big white light. It's not something a camera likes to look at.

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I understand that has nothing to do with anything else going on in society right now. But anyways, here is

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Mark Chapter one. And I was just going to put this up here to do some basic introductions before we start getting to people's questions.

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But I don't see any people's questions at the moment. So, of course,

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I should look at just what's what's for me right here. But I don't see that.

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Yeah, it's nowhere on my feed. But Mark, Chapter one is is really important for two reasons.

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And so I want to this is. Oh, there you go.

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There you go. This is accordance Bible software in which you can find some of my books these days are sort of cool.

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And here in Mark one, one, there are two variants.

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Well, there's there's more than that. Every time you see what I have over here. Let me explain what you're looking at, because you can buy all this stuff just like anybody else can.

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And many of these things are cross tagged to English text and things like that. So you can you can do that.

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But every time you see in the text, a little mark like this here and here.

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Let me find one that I'm not going to be looking at. So, like, here's a variant right here. These are our textual marks that tell you that there is a an insertion.

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Sometimes it's deletion. It all depends on on going over to the textual apparatus and looking at it.

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So this is an essay on 28th edition Greek New Testament over here. And then you have it's what's called apparatus in the center.

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And then I put the United Bible Society fifth edition over here. Now, you can purchase these, you know, your local

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Christian bookstore if there are such things anymore. And generally, when you start first year

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Greek, you use the the red case bound edition of the

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United Bible Society's text. It's a little bit larger print and a little bit friendlier to read.

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The Nessie Olland is a little bit, at least in printed edition, obviously, in electronic edition.

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That's that's irrelevant. The Nessie Olland is a little bit more advanced.

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The UBS text is designed for translators working in the field.

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And so it's not meant to be a overly critical text. What that means, it's it's it only lists a certain number of variants.

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It limits itself to the variants that specifically impact the meaning of the text as you would be translating into another language.

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So if you're a translator working out in the in the field with a small tribe, this would be the type of material that you would want to know, you know, what what's really going to impact the translation of the text into another language.

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The Nessie Olland is different and it lists many, many, many, many more variants.

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But as you can see, well, you can't really necessarily tell from this. But here in the

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Nessie Olland text right here, here is the material on Mark one one.

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And then that is this here. So you can see that the

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UBS text gives a whole lot more as far as citations and information.

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And this is even in a smaller text right now. So it's even more than that. And you can see this is the same information.

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But you see that, for example, the names of the early church fathers that are being cited,

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Syro -Jerusalem, these are spelled out. So you can you can click on them.

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Here's origin. And then it's little gr lat afterwards means in both Greek and Latin.

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Here's origin over here. O -R. So your UBS is going to give you much more citation of the early fathers.

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And so it's give you more data and information on each variant, but not give you nearly as many variants.

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So it's a tradeoff. You sort of have to have both of them if you if you want to look at a lot of stuff.

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And none of these are meant to be taken exhaustively. So there are more variants than either one of these will will list.

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You can get the CNTTS apparatus if you want to really get exhaustive along those lines.

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And even then, there would be some some questions about how much is there. So. These are the sources we have up here to to utilize and that are available to everybody else available to you.

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And it's important to remember. This is not. What has been normative for Christians and Christian scholars.

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Throughout the history of the church. Only over the past. Fifty years.

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Has there been a widespread. You know, there were microfilm copies of manuscripts and things like that, but only once you you had the ability for the kind of communication and a peaceful enough world.

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To begin cataloging where manuscripts are and to get meaningful transcriptions of them and things like that.

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The vast majority of Christians down through the years have never had any idea. How many manuscripts read one way and how many manuscripts read another way.

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They would have loved to have known that. And it's very, very easy for us to go back into the writings of men that we have tremendous respect for.

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But when it comes to this area, they were very, very ignorant.

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And because everybody was. It doesn't mean that they could have done better. It was that the information wasn't available to them, so they couldn't have done better.

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And so I can think of situations where, you know, great theologians have made comments about certain textual issues.

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And they've said all the manuscripts read such and such. And the reality is two or three manuscripts read that way.

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And all the rest of manuscripts read otherwise. So that's that's one of the issues that you have to keep in mind is that our opportunities to be doing the things that we are doing today.

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With this kind of information are really, really unusual in the history of the church.

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And especially for for just lay people to have all of this information right in front of them.

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Extremely, extremely unusual. That's that's an amazing thing. So. All right.

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Let's see here. Huh. Well, that's interesting.

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OK, that finally came. That did come through. We've we've talked about the comma many, many, many times.

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There's a number of all you. I might take a look at it. But the first question about 1

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John 5, 7 in the King James Version. If you just look up comma Johannium or just look up COMMA at AOMin .org,

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numerous dividing lines will come up. We've we've expended a great deal of time talking about the fact that the comma

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Johannium is not original to 1 John, that it came in as a

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Latin explanation in the fifth and sixth centuries and was not in any of the

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Greek manuscripts that Erasmus had access to, was not put into the printed Greek New Testament that he was doing until the third edition.

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And so we've really gone through a whole lot of that. But let me finish up with this and then

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I will look at a couple of the questions that have that have come in, especially I would like to address a little bit about.

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Yeah, we've talked about. Well, OK, John 5, 3 through 4, a lot of a lot of the ones that we have, a lot of ones that are a part of my normal presentation.

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In fact, my my New Testament Reliability presentation starts with John 5, 3 through 4.

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And I actually what I do is I I ask if someone has an ESV in the audience and if someone has a

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King James, a New King James in the audience, then I'll ask the ESV person to read for me.

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John chapter five, verse four from the gospel. And it's fun to sort of watch them going.

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Because there there is no five four in the ESV goes from five three to five five. And then

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I ask one of the King James New King James people to read it. And that gives us a way to get started.

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And by the end of the presentation, I go over the textual data and explain that it was a marginal note incorporated later on and stuff like that.

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So, yes, these are some of the main ones. And of course, I do not claim to have examined every textual variant in the

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New Testament. I had a friend contacting me about, I don't know, four or five months ago. And he said, hey, could you give me some insight into this particular variant?

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And I looked at it and I said, you know, I looked it up and I said, you know, it's interesting.

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I don't know that I've ever looked at this information on this particular variant before. And so I'm sure there are many others like that as well.

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Not so much big ones that have a big impact on things, but stuff like that. So anyway, so let me illustrate some of the things that we have here at the beginning of Mark, because there are two readings, there are two variant readings that are theologically significant.

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And they come up in some of the King James only stuff and even

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TR only stuff, too, as well. The first one is right up here. And you will see that.

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We have the phrase who you say, you son of God.

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And it is in these little brackets right here, a bracket there, a bracket there.

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So since they go like this, what it's saying is what's in between those two brackets is what the variant is.

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And you will notice that there are single brackets around this in the printed text, which is the printed text way saying this is a disputed phrase, but we are including it rather than just excluding it and putting it in in the notes.

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And so here is the specific information in the Nessie -Aland text, the

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UBS text here. And you'll notice again the whole point of the

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Nessie -Aland system. And it's brilliant. I forgot to bring my text in. If you own an

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NA -28, it's a small book. It's not huge.

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And the whole thought process into producing this stuff right here is to give you as much information in the smallest space possible.

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As much information in the smallest space possible. And it's just brilliant how they did it.

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It really, really honestly is. That also means, though, you have to you have to sort of learn how it works.

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And so you'll you'll notice that the UBS text gives you much longer

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Greek readings. So Christ, Son of God. Christ, Son of God.

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But with the article two right there. Son of God or Son of the

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God. Jesus Christ, Son of the Lord was only found manuscript 1241.

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And then just Christ without the Son of God. And then all the manuscripts listed afterwards are the manuscripts that read like that.

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All of that is put in here by simply putting who you say you son of God.

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Then there's the one manuscript that has some of the Lord. And then you have

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Jesus Christ in Irenaeus and Epiphanius. And then just simply a little thing there.

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It says then text. So the text we already printed. So they're not going to waste waste paper doing that.

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Repeating that. So text. And then it gives you what you have there.

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I forgot. Omit. So you have omit in some of these manuscripts as well. So Son of God is found in these manuscripts.

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So you look at this, you go a K, P, Delta. This is families one and 13, number 33.

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Very important manuscript. 565, 570. What is any of that supposed to mean? Well, the wonderful nice thing for you today is you just run your cursor across any single one of these in accordance.

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And in a window will pop up the best dating for the manuscript, where it's located, what it contains.

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That's always quite interesting as well. And again, it's hard for me to communicate just how completely amazing it is that we can do this.

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I mean, when I first started studying this stuff, you couldn't do any of this kind of thing. It was great enough just to have the

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Nessie Olin text or the UBS text or Metzger's textual commentary or whatever. You've got all this stuff now.

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And I think eventually many of these, well, more and more of these manuscripts are coming online all the time.

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And eventually, I think you'll you'll be able to pop up any one of these manuscripts and look at it yourself.

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If you want to verify, verify the reading, anything else. It's just amazing.

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It really is. But. So you can find out where these are.

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If they're if they're capital letters or if they start with a zero, they're they're called unsealed text or maguscule text.

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If they're if they don't, they start like three, thirty three, five, five, nine. These are minuscule text.

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Always look for this. This is the majority text sign. The. Normally, that was the indication in the

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UBS, by the way, they use BYZ Byzantine instead of the Fraktur M, the

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German Fraktur M for majority text sign in the Nessie Olin text. But that's going to be your bulk of the later past one thousand eleven hundred twelve hundred manuscripts.

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And so that's could give you some idea. Sometimes that split sometimes.

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Sometimes, especially when you get in the book of Revelation. You'll find all sorts of splits in the manuscripts in the

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Byzantine text. So you don't just in many, many instances of Revelation, there is no majority text.

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There is no majority reading. You sort of have to play around with stuff to try to figure all that out.

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So anyway, so what you have then here is you can look at which manuscripts say son of God.

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Well, these manuscripts say son of God. And then here's the. Or it says just a dash, so deletes this.

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And you'll notice that you have. Olive twice.

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So Olive does not have son of God. But then it does have son of God.

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What's what's that all about? Well, when you put the asterisk next to Olive, that means the original hand and then the one means the first corrector.

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Now, how do you know when that took place? You don't.

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There have been more studies done on Sinaiticus and its correctors than I think any other manuscript.

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Vaticanus would probably be next. But they've they've identified not only styles, but ink formulations and just all sorts of things, because this is a manuscript that was in use for so long.

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And so what you can see from that is it wasn't there originally. And then it was inserted by the first corrector.

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Now, was that was that 50 years later, 100 years later, 700 years later?

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We don't know. But since it clearly was produced in a like a scriptorium or something like that.

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In all probability, it would be in the first reading. So after the the the manuscript had first been produced, before it was released or published or sold or whatever, there was a someone would would correct it.

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Someone would read through it. And seemingly that was where the initial correction was made.

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Codex Sinaiticus dot org and look at it yourself and see how what the what the correction looks like and so on and so forth.

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Now, it's really important to realize with this particular variant, by the way, that this is not what the original scribes were looking at.

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OK. Unfortunately, with our new lights now,

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I can't see my board. Just realizing this here. All right.

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Let's go here. And now let's turn that off.

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And Rich says it looks better for him. But now I've got more far more light reflecting off of the board than I had before.

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So it's really, really, really, really hard to see. And this is the hard part down here.

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And let's go to Mark one one. Hey. If you if you had any idea how small that was, you would be going, wow, you did good, good work there.

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Here is Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Washingtonianus and Alexandrinus.

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So unfortunately, all of those are dinky, dinky, dinky, very small. So let's let's let's blow up a couple of them over here.

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Just just just so you can see. All right. So here's

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Vaticanus. Here's Sinaiticus. And notice this is original hand is what they have in the transcription.

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And so what you have to remember is and I realize these are white backgrounds.

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I don't know. There's nothing you can do about that right now. What happened?

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What what what you need to remember is that initially we are talking about.

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Just go ahead with black so it can be seen. We are. This is called unseal or maguscule text.

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And even this is not what you necessarily would have seen because they have put let's go down here to verse four.

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They have have put spaces. In between. And that actually represents where the columns were.

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All right. So this would just be run together capital letters.

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That's how Greek was done for the first about 900 years. The transmission of the text of New Testament.

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And so you'll notice up here in Mark. Here is Jesu Christus.

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You say it doesn't look like what we were just looking at in the modern Greek New Testament.

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That's right. These are called the Nomina Sacra. The sacred names.

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So, for example, the word Lord. Here's the word Lord right here in Vatican. It is two letters the line over top.

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And we don't know why Christians did this, but they did.

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They abbreviated the the sacred names and Jesus Christ God.

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And in many instances, son, well, would be.

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And so here in the original hand of Sinaiticus, you had

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Jesu Christus. These are called generative forms. And so they end with the same letters.

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And so if we had who you say you, it would go right here. And it was inserted into Sinaiticus at that point, maybe in the very first reading.

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You can see that it is here in Codex Vaticanus. But what it is, what it does, it gives you one, two, three, four, five, actually six words in a row.

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All ending in the same letter. And so textual critical scholars for a long time have been going, well, this is this is why there was a variant.

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Is it if you've got that many generatives in a row and then you go into nomena sacra, it's easy for something to get to get lost in in in the transcription.

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So it's it's always important to remember that when you're looking at something in a modern text, that's not what the original scribes or the earlier scribes would have been looking at.

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They would have been looking at capital letters in a single line.

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And not even breaking words at the end of the line, just halfway through the word, you move to the next line.

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So you can see it's a different world than what we are accustomed to in in dealing with where we are.

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Oh, and where did. OK, this is the fun part is where.

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Did the one I was using go? Let's see if it's this one.

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Come on. No, it's not. No, it's not there.

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How about this one? Nope, that ain't it either. I had that one someplace.

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That's that one. Look at all these fun things I have here. I got the crown.

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We could start a discussion about about that. Well, I have no earthy idea where the screen that I had up before was going, but it seems to have disappeared on me.

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That's not a good thing. Hey, what's that? That's that's the right one. Yay.

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All righty. Super duper. And now any black commentary there just disappeared right off screen.

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All right. Well, good. We're back to where we're supposed to be. So with that in mind, go back to something we can see nicely here.

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With all that in mind, the discussion has been, is

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Jesus called the son of God? And Mark one one, you might be saying you're boring us to tears. You remember the debate with with Shabir Ali in 2006?

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I didn't queue this up, but in the cross examination.

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One of the things I was pushing him on was we don't have a New Testament that looks like you as a

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Muslim would expect the New Testament look like, do it. We don't have any manuscripts at all. And in the process of his response, he made reference to what?

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Mark one one. And he made reference to the NIV and to the NIV text note, which said some manuscripts do not say son of God.

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So maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. The whole point was to say, we don't really know. See how that works.

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See why this is relevant. Now what's interesting is all of this was published and made available prior to just a few months ago when the gospel of Mark in the new

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ECM, the edition of Critico Mayor, the largest project of collating the

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Greek New Testament that's ever been undertaken. Gospel of Mark was published. And what's interesting, if you want to see how in depth that is.

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Let me show you something. I thought that it would be hiding right there, but evidently it isn't.

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That's not it there. And that's not it there. And there it is.

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Slide this over there. Here is. Don't go all the way over there now.

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Here is the ECM for this textual variant.

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It's available online, by the way. We don't just make these things pop in out of nowhere.

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Unfortunately, I cannot expand the font size on a website very much.

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But point is, this information is available to you and it gives you.

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I'm not sure if I'm working. Here is ABCDEF and then

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ZZ. Now what in the world is that supposed to mean? The first reading is son of God.

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The second is son of God without an article. The third is son of the Lord. We already know 1241 is the only one that does that.

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We saw that before. Here is the son of God, two articles. Of God, no son.

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Omit the phrase completely. And then ZZ simply means these manuscripts.

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And there's my little baby right there, P45. These manuscripts listed here at the bottom do not contain

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Mark 11. So they're not relevant because they don't contain that material.

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But the point is, you can go here to Munster's website. Here's all the manuscripts.

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Obviously, far more manuscripts collated and made available to you here.

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And then what you can do with CBGM is you can see the relationship between these various manuscripts and these various readings.

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And so up here, for example, you have the conclusion of the editorial process in regards to this is the original.

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And then here's reading A. And reading A gave rise to B, C, D, E, and F. And then you see some of the primary witnesses down here and how they are related to one another.

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Again, what we're doing here is we're using computers to track these manuscripts and how they are related to one another.

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And then that gives rise to this beastie, which gives you the coherence in attestations and how all these manuscripts are related to one another at this one variant.

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So if you went to a different variant in the next verse, this is going to look different. But here, just this one variant, what

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CBGM allows you, and I wasn't going to talk about this, but we're going to talk about it now. What CBGM is allowing us to do is to see how these manuscripts are related to one another, not just in one place, but across an entire book and really across the

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New Testament when they contain that much information. Obviously, you can't do that with many manuscripts. Most manuscripts do not contain all the

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New Testament. But this stuff is where no human mind could ever go.

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We can't keep this amount of data in mind.

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Maybe there's a savant someplace making money in Las Vegas, counting cards or something, I don't know. But us normal human beings, we can't do this.

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This is really the result of a massive data bank, really, because every reading, that's what it is, it's a piece of data.

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And for years and years and years, scholars were looking at manuscripts.

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I'm one of the few people in the world that has read Bart Ehrman's doctoral dissertation more than once. And he was looking at the rise, the proto -Alexandrian text type, in one particular early church father.

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And he was using, back then, 70%, 75 % agreement to create a textual family.

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That's all past now. This goes so far beyond that, because now we can really ask the question, is there such a thing as a textual family, and how much agreement is there, and so on and so forth.

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And so this is simply the computer saying, this is how these manuscripts are related to one another, and in this particular variant, this is how they're related to one another.

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By the way, this is an extremely important manuscript. It's become far more important since CBGM has been 35.

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You can see how central it is to the transmission of the text over time.

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And there's more to it than that. That's coherence and attestations.

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And here is the general text flow. I can't even get all of it on here, given how wide this is.

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But this is your general text flow. And it's giving you, you can see by the colors, if you're resumed in, you can see the colors.

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That's where those go back up to what I showed you up above right there, where you're defining the variants that are available, which we – what?

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Yeah, well, so here are the colors as they are defined initially, and then that continues on down through it.

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So the point being, there is a massive, massive, massive amount of information available to us now to examine and to look at these things even more so than we had just a brief period of time ago.

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And so I'm just trying to get this down. I don't want to close it, but it doesn't want to go away.

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I didn't think I had – okay, maybe I did. Ah, there we go. You are the one that I want up here.

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So point being, everything that I have on the screen right now was published before CBGM was available.

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And so what have we discovered? CBGM is now – the data has been collated for Mark, and Son of God has been included in the

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ECM reading for Mark 1 .1. So the ECM analysis, the

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CBGM analysis has basically said that the manuscripts that contain

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Son of God are more consistent with one another than the manuscripts that do not. And so we had all sorts of arguments about, well, if you have a whole line of genitives, is it easier to lose something toward the end?

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The answer would be yes. And so people had argued on both sides. Now you have not the computer telling you how you have to decide this, but the computer telling you something that's really important, and that is the manuscripts that have one reading are more consistent with one another than manuscripts that have the other reading.

38:28

And so CBGM is not the end of the discussion, but it's an important benchmark. I would say that it puts weight on one side that now needs to be counterbalanced on the other side if you want to take a different reading in essence.

38:49

So all that to say, it does look like the best original reading, the earliest reading for Mark 1 .1

38:59

is calling Jesus Son of God, right at the beginning of the book. The other reading here is right here, and that is in Isaiah the prophet.

39:18

The TR says, in the prophets. And so you end up with a tremendous amount of argumentation here because the quotation isn't just from Isaiah.

39:38

It is a mixed quotation. And to make a long story short, this is how someone would have cited, if you have a citation that includes major prophets and minor prophets, the major prophet is going to be the one that you're citing it from.

40:02

And that may have come from how the scrolls were organized. The minor prophets were frequently on just one scroll.

40:12

Sometimes they were included inside a major prophet scroll. And think about how to get to a reference when you have scrolls.

40:24

Jewish scribes had massive forearms. They looked like Popeye. I mean, that would be really good for you if you want to get good grip strength and stuff like that.

40:34

Back when I was a weightlifter, you had all those types of things. You're doing grip strength. And it takes you a while to get back and forth in a scroll.

40:45

That's primarily, I think, why Christians didn't do scrolls. They always did the codex.

40:50

You can't have Bible drills with scrolls because it's like, oh, a minor prophet?

40:56

Oh, no. It's going to be 10 minutes before I get there. So this is how they would have been cited because if your minor prophet is inside a scroll that starts with major prophet, then this actually makes a lot of sense.

41:13

But later scribes don't know that. I mean, think about it. If you're living in the medieval period,

41:22

I saw, again, another medieval painting recently of some –

41:28

I forget which story it was from the Old Testament. But everybody is dressed in medieval clothing, and there's a castle in the background.

41:38

And it was anachronism. If you were born in the medieval period, you almost never traveled more than seven miles from the place you were born.

41:50

And people really believed that things had always been the way they were now because they never saw any kind of difference in their own lives.

41:59

Things changed so slowly. And so people thought that things had always been that way.

42:08

And so when you look at a medieval scribe, all he's ever seen are manuscripts that are in the codex form.

42:23

He wouldn't necessarily know about Jewish scribal practices, Jewish means of citing things.

42:32

He's never used a scroll. So why would he ever cross his mind?

42:38

And so certain manuscripts, you will notice down here, right here, the prophets, as it's written in the prophets.

42:51

And here it is over in UBS in the prophets. And that is the majority.

42:59

There's Byzantine right there. That's the majority reading. And there's your majority text indicator right there in Messianic as well.

43:12

And so why would, if it said, if it originally said, because what you do is you look at this and you go,

43:24

OK, this is interesting. The earlier manuscripts have one reading, and the later manuscripts have another reading.

43:34

Why might that be? And there is a process over time of harmonization, of scribes trying to smooth things out.

43:50

And so that's what you've got here. So, well, that's not technically

43:57

Isaiah. So instead of saying in Isaiah the prophet, we'll just put the prophets.

44:08

And it happens fairly early because Alexandrinus is fairly early. Washingtonianus is fairly early.

44:17

But there were others that, you know, down to Delta and 1241, well, 1241

44:25

Syriac, things like that. You can see certain that the original reading remains in those situations.

44:38

But it's not like it just disappears overnight. Nothing happened that fast in the ancient world.

44:46

But if you've got Isaiah there, then it's smoothing it out to put the prophets because you didn't understand.

44:55

And even to this day, you will get, I'm sure Cody Zorn would be one of the people, who would go, see, that's wrong.

45:05

These modern versions are perverting the Bible because that's not all in Isaiah and so on and so forth.

45:12

And it's just simply ignorance of how Old Testament citations were handled and why they were handled that way.

45:22

That's where it comes from. So, again, this kind of information is widely available if people will avail themselves of it.

45:33

And that's why years ago, I think just a few years after we moved into this facility, we did a two -and -a -half, three -hour dividing line, which was really long back then, where we went through all the various sigla, the various signs that are used here in that.

45:57

That's hard to do. I now have more respect for weathermen who are looking at something and trying to point at things and stuff like that.

46:08

It's tough to do. Anyway, be able to read the various signs and symbols, because once you figure out how the

46:16

Nestialian symbology works, it's just amazing the amount of information that can be communicated without wasting any space at all, just how much you can cram onto a page.

46:29

That was their whole goal. It's fascinating. But, yeah, so there you go.

46:35

There's Mark 1 -1 and Mark 1 -2 and how you can do the stuff that you do with all of that.

46:44

All right. Let me refresh my thing here.

46:51

It's not really doing much. Well, someone has a

46:57

Latin thing going on there. Yeah, other than 1

47:06

John 5, we've got John 5 -34 and nothing else.

47:13

I think this topic scares people to death. So let me just mention, suppose we can go ahead and do it.

47:24

It doesn't take very long. But the only problem is the textual entry button is right there, and I'm over here.

47:38

And it's going to be fun. And this is called shooting in the dark.

47:45

But I think I got it. Yeah, here we go.

47:54

Shooting in the dark. All right, so here's John 5 -3. And you'll notice in the

48:02

Nestle all in text, there's a double line right here, and it goes from 5 -3 to 5 -5.

48:11

So there is no 5 -4, which is why you have an ESV. It's down at the bottom of the page.

48:19

It's down there. It's just in really, really, really small font. And so here is, in the

48:27

UBS 5th edition, omit verse 4. And then here are your witnesses.

48:35

And then include verse 4. Notice, with many variations in later manuscripts and versions, that is always a telltale sign.

48:45

That's always a telltale sign. When you have a major textual variant, if it's a block of text, so whether it's longer ending of Mark, whether it's the

48:53

Percopaea Adulterae in the Gospel of John or in the

49:00

Gospel of Luke, depending on which manuscript you're looking at, 7, 5, 3, 3, 8, 11, you will have all sorts of variations within the added material.

49:10

And so you will see, here is the added material all the way down to here.

49:17

And so this is the story of an angel of the Lord who would come down and would trouble the waters, first went down in the water, be healed of his disease, and so on and so forth.

49:24

And so there is verse 4, as it is found in the

49:30

Textus Receptus. And here are your witnesses. It's the

49:35

Byzantine reading and the various early church fathers, early translations, especially

49:42

Latin, that contain it. And then the manuscripts that don't, most important, are right here.

49:50

These first four, you might say, well, that's a small number. That's true, but those are the first four manuscripts we have of the

49:56

Gospel of John. P66, P75, Sinaiticus, and Vaticanus. They are the oldest manuscripts we have of the

50:04

Gospel of John. So the question becomes, why does this get excluded, or why does it get included?

50:12

And the vast majority of scholars have concluded that there is no reason why these early manuscripts would just X this out and say we don't want it.

50:25

That's an awful large block to have just simply fall out of the text by some kind of scribal error or something along those lines.

50:34

So instead, what the vast majority have concluded is that this whole, all of this material here was a marginal note.

50:46

Sometime early on in the transmission of the text, and think about it.

50:53

Given the story, the natural question you would have is, if you're not from around Jerusalem, okay?

51:03

It's one thing if you're writing to people who have been in Jerusalem for a long time, and yeah, they know that pool, and they know what goes on there.

51:12

But if you live 800 miles away, you've never been there, you don't know anything about the background.

51:18

You don't have any Bible dictionaries to look up anything. It's like, okay, why are there a bunch of sick people around this pool?

51:28

And so you've got a question. Why is that? And so let's say you've got a good preacher that happens to have done some studying, knew an apostle or heard somebody who heard an apostle preaching or whatever, and in their sermon they include in the information that this was what was believed, that angel of the

51:52

Lord came down, troubled the waters, first went in. And so you go, that's really cool.

51:59

And if you happen to be one of the readers, maybe one of the people who has access to one of the manuscripts, because remember, very few

52:05

Christians actually possess the scriptures themselves. You would have in house churches, you would have readers who would take care of the manuscripts, and they would bring them to the various services wherever they would be being held, which is why they became so endangered when the

52:24

Romans started collecting all that kind of stuff and destroying it. And so you've heard the explanation, so you write it in the margin.

52:36

And then let's say 15 years later, because you used manuscripts for a long time back then, 15 years later, you're dead, diseased, run over by a horse, got killed by the

52:52

Romans during persecution, whatever, and now someone has that manuscript that you had, that you put this in the margin of.

53:00

And they can't ask you. And when manuscripts would be made, people would discover that they had skipped a few lines or things like that, and they would insert it in the margin.

53:12

So what are you going to do? You can't go back and ask the guy, is this an explanatory note, or was this in what you were originally copying?

53:18

He's gone. And the good thing is, and it is a good thing, the good thing is that Christian scribes tended toward conservatism.

53:30

They didn't want to lose anything, and so they would include whatever was in the manuscript in front of them rather than losing something.

53:38

And so that's how a marginal note could become incorporated into the text itself, and that's what happened with John 5, verse 4.

53:47

It's not in the earliest manuscripts, but it comes in at a later point, and it comes in because it is explanatory.

53:53

It helps to explain how a particular text is to be read, and what it was referring to, and things like that.

54:04

It's good to know this, not just simply for the textual critical reason.

54:11

But I've told the story before. I was teaching a class for Golden Gate back when

54:20

Golden Gate still existed and had an Arizona campus. I was teaching a class, and I forget which class it was.

54:28

It might have been Christian philosophy, religion, apologetics, I forget what it was. Anyway, one of my students was a youth guy or a young person's guy over at a real large

54:41

Assemblies of God in the valley. If you know the valley, you know which one it was. And he asked me to come over, and this was so long ago.

54:50

This was before YouTube. I could do stuff like this without anybody knowing who or what

54:56

I was. I found them recently.

55:02

I still have my little name badge that I had made that said

55:08

Elder Lucas, as I recall. And so I came to his class at his church as a

55:18

Mormon. And so he tells the whole class, I'm going to give you the opportunity of talking with Elder Lucas and see how much you know.

55:31

Let's be good witnesses here. And of course, this makes everybody nervous. But man, nobody's sleeping through this one.

55:40

These role plays, they were just so enjoyable. I really miss doing them. You just can't anymore.

55:46

Everybody, thanks to YouTube, knows what you look like. And so I started off the program.

55:53

I started off the evening talking about differences in the Bible. And I knew that probably at this church, most everybody had an

56:03

NIV. This was before the ESV came out, actually. And so I said, does somebody have an

56:09

NIV here? I said, could you look up John 5, verse 4?

56:20

And I have the LDS King James Version of the Bible with me. And I'm just watching the faces.

56:29

I'm just watching everybody. And this, I think, poor guy's face started turning red.

56:37

He just didn't know what to do because there is no John 5, 4. And he can see 5, 3.

56:43

He can see 5, 5. There's no 5, 4. And so I read

56:48

John 5, 4 from the King James. And I had their attention at that point.

56:56

Now, I always tell people, now, we didn't just leave them there. We went through about half the time that they had, and then halfway through, he introduced me as his professor from Golden Gate.

57:06

And we went back and repaired all the damage that we had done. But that is the kind of thing that can happen.

57:19

I remember, I forget where I was, but it was back in those days when

57:24

I was meeting with Mormon missionaries fairly regularly when

57:30

I grabbed a big brown, I think it was a textual interlinear.

57:37

I think I know where it is in my office. And took it with me to a meeting with some missionaries.

57:44

And I was going to talk to them about Jesus being called monogamistos, the unique God, at John 1, 18.

57:50

And I opened that thing up, not knowing it was based on the TR. And so that reading is not going to be there.

57:58

So these things do have very, very practical value, especially when you're doing any kind of witnessing situation where there's going to be questions about the nature of the text.

58:11

And I can just tell you that from starting in the 1980s until today, it's a different world.

58:21

And the thing to remember is, if we can buy these modules and these books, so can they.

58:29

And that's why you've got certain Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, Muslims, who will utilize these resources to trip up someone who just isn't familiar with the history of the text of the

58:45

Testament. And it can be challenging. There's no choice about it.

58:51

So there you go. Sorry to anyone who did have an interesting variant you wanted to look at, and the crazy young people on Zoom kept any of that from taking place.

59:06

We will keep that in mind, that we are being watched and monitored by ne 'er -do -wells in the future.

59:15

That's why we screen calls. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah.

59:23

Yeah. It was interesting. I was listening to Rich trying to get people queued up, and it was pretty sad, really, honestly.

59:34

But anyways, there you go, another textual critical show in the can, under the belt.

59:41

And I can't say anything more about current events today because we're on YouTube. Got to keep the algorithms happy.