New Testament Reliability - Can you trust the Bible?

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Blossom. This is my e-biolic. Actually, this is Dr. James White, who is with us in studio with a group of a few of our friends to discuss something that is exceedingly important, especially these days.

College campuses, maybe your child goes off to school and gets told you can't trust the Bible. We see it on some TV shows. Certainly people like Bill Maher would be happy to tell us you can't trust the Bible.

Well, we are here to tell you you can trust the Bible. Actually, I'm not here to do it. This fellow is Dr. James White. Take it away, Dr. James White. Thank you very much.

Well, that is the situation today, and I'm very thankful to have the opportunity of addressing you and talking about this extremely vital topic, and that is, look, you all have Bibles in your hands. You open them up.

You turn to Paul's epistle to the Romans, for example. How do you know that that's what Paul wrote almost 2 ,000 years ago? How can you have confidence that there wasn't a church council somewhere that came along and said, you know, we want to insert the doctrine of the deity of Christ, or this particular political group wanted to do this thing with a text, and this group over here wanted to do something else.

How do you know that when you read Paul's letter to the Romans that that's what he sent to the Romans, or when you read the Gospel of John that that's what the Apostle John wrote? These are the questions, and unfortunately today there's a tremendous onslaught against us, specifically coming from those people who are going to assert that we cannot know that what we have today is what was originally written.

As you know, naturalistic materialism rules the day in academia. If you cannot put it under a microscope, if you cannot measure it, if it is not a part of just the natural realm, then you can't really discuss it.

You can't bring it into discussion. Of course, we believe that the New Testament is inspired, that it really has its origins as far as its real substance outside of the natural realm, but it enters into the natural realm and is communicated to us over a period of time.

It is transmitted over a period of time. But we all know, hopefully, the Bible did not float down out of heaven on a nice silk pillow with leather covers and thumb indexing. Certainly, though I was raised in a Christian family, I sort of figured that's how it was.

That's always how I had seen the Bible. But there was a process, and what we're being told is that process corrupted the text of Scripture. In fact, in the academy today, if you go to the universities, you can't even bring that kind of a discussion up.

You're not even allowed to discuss the idea that there is a supernatural element to things. Instead, we have to presuppose the existence of naturalistic materialism, and Christian claims are simply relegated to the arena of myth.

You can have your mythology. Everybody else has their mythology. Your mythology can't be any better than anybody else's mythology. And so, as a result, scholars spin the evidence, particularly in media appearances.

Believing scholars are not the first people that are called by CNN to discuss some new theory that's come along, which, have you ever noticed the theories tend to come along, I don't know, sometime around Easter and Christmas for some reason.

Ever notice that? It's a very strange thing, but remember a few years ago, the tomb story came out. They found the tomb of Jesus, and every spring and then every winter, we get the same thing. Someone retreads some type of theory that supposedly demonstrates that what we believe as Christians just isn't true.

And so the people they go to are unbelievers. For example, people like John Dominic Crossan, one of the co-founders of the Jesus Seminar. You know, Dr. Crossan's a wonderful man. In fact, he's my favorite heretic.

I've told him that, and he even signed an email to me once, Dom, your favorite heretic. So he's just one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, but he doesn't even believe in a personal God. Or an afterlife or anything like that.

They'll go to these scholars that are extremely skeptical, or they'll go to people like Bart Ehrman. Bart Ehrman is the favorite go-to guy in the world today because he's an apostate, and that's not an insult, it's a description.

An apostate is a person who once made a profession of faith, no longer makes that profession of faith, and Bart Ehrman's a graduate of Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and Princeton Theological Seminary, but he calls himself a happy agnostic.

Now, I've met Bart. We debated once, and I know he's an agnostic, but the happy part I wasn't really all that certain about. We'll talk a little bit more about him, but his books and his materials are being used all across the spectrum, especially in secular universities, as the given understanding of where the Bible came from, why we really can't trust it, et cetera, et cetera.

And so these scholars will come along, and they will emphasize, especially Bart Ehrman, that all we have are copies of copies of copies of copies of the New Testament. And the idea is, well, you know, if you're making a handwritten copy, if I passed out just the first two chapters of the Gospel of Mark to the front row here, and I had you make a handwritten copy and pass your copy, not what you copied, but your copy to the next row, and then we did it all the way back.

When we got to the back, there would be differences between what I handed out and what was copied, and that's just the first two chapters of Mark. If you go through all 16 chapters of Mark, then you're going to have more differences.

And the idea is, well, the first generation picks up differences, the second generation picks up differences. You get more and more and more errors as you go along this line of transmission. And so since the first copies that we have come from, depending on the book of the New Testament, we'll be looking at this, 100 to 150 years after the time they were first written, well, what happened during that time frame?

That's the type of issue that Bart Ehrman is raising, and that's the type of issue that, unfortunately, then his readers are presenting to our young people as they go to university. Now, many of the people who are reading him, many of the people teaching at the local community college don't really know what Bart Ehrman knows.

In fact, Bart Ehrman is frequently exaggerated by his followers, as we will see. But the reality is that that's the kind of information that's being thrown out, and let's be honest with ourselves. We haven't done a really good job within the church preparing our young people for this.

In fact, we haven't done a really good job even in our seminaries preparing most of our ministers for this. Most ministers will admit that even if they took a fair amount of Greek in their seminary training, that they get a little nervous when someone comes up and starts asking questions about, well, my ESV says this, but my neighbor's New King James Version says this, or I've got, have you all noticed those little notes at the bottom of your page that say, some manuscripts say this?

Now, it's really hard to read them, but there's a lot of folks that once they see them, and they see those little notes that says, some manuscripts say this, and some manuscripts say that. In your more honest moments, in your honest moments, will you admit that sort of bothers you?

That sort of causes you a little bit of concern that one translation would have a verse, and another translation does not have the verse? And many ministers have gone through seminary, and they don't feel overly confident responding to those particular questions either.

And because of that, then we generally don't do a real good job in our preaching or in our teaching of preparing our young people to go out there and encounter this onslaught of people saying, you can't trust what the Bible says.

You know, in my grandparents' generation, that wasn't all that big of an issue. But folks, things have changed, and they've changed rapidly. And we need to realize we are in a culture now, in all Western cultures, where Christianity is under attack.

There is no place we can hide. We can't insulate our people, isolate our people. We have to take these things straight on. And that's what I want to try to prepare us to do this evening. Now, got a question.

How many variants do you think exist in what's called the New Testament manuscript tradition? Let me define that for you. The New Testament manuscript tradition are all the handwritten copies of any New Testament book.

Now, that can be Matthew through Revelation, or that can be a little teeny tiny fragment of papyri from 150 years after the writing of the New Testament, and everything in between. Now, we have about approximately 5 ,700 manuscripts of the New Testament in Greek, either fragmentary or whole copies, about 5 ,700, ranging from about the earliest right now that we can really sort of prove is about 125 AD to all the way past the time of the invention of printing, because believe it or not, just like there were people who thought the iPad was going to go nowhere, there were people who thought printing was going to go nowhere, too.

And so it took time for presses to be built. People learned how to do, you know, the typesetting and stuff like that. And so handwriting was still the primary way of producing books, even long after Gutenberg came along and invented the printing press in Western culture.

And so all those manuscripts, you put them all together, and we catalog them and things like that, about 5 ,700 handwritten manuscripts. Now, there's about 138 ,200 words in the New Testament in the original language of the New Testament, which is Greek, about 138 ,200 words, approximately.

Now, how many variants? Let me define a variant real quickly. A variant is any difference between manuscripts. So if a manuscript has the word and, and you've got 10 manuscripts that have and and 10 manuscripts that don't, that's a variant.

If a scribe spells John with two Ns rather than just one, that's a variant. If a verse is there and not there, that's a variant. So it can be down to the spelling of a word or whether a verse or even a block of text is there.

The two largest New Testament manuscript variants, the two biggest ones, are the longer ending of Mark, Mark 16, 9 through 20, 12 verses, and the story of the woman taken in adultery called the Pricope Adultery, John 7, 53 through 8, 11.

Those are the two biggest ones. All the rest are either a verse or a line or a word or and or the or something along those lines. So how many variants do you think there might be in the New Testament manuscript tradition?

Now, sometimes when I get to this point, I can tell that people are bothered by the answer. I need to bother you first so I can unbother you by putting it in context. See, what happens is unbelievers present these facts without a context, and that's their primary weapon.

Bart Ehrman loves to talk about the woman taken in adultery. Dan Wallace calls it his favorite story that's not in the Bible. And people are troubled by that. We need to know what the issues are, and once we know what they are, we can put them in a context, then they're no longer a problem.

We recognize what the real issues are, and we in essence are taking the weapons away from those who are seeking to damage our faith. We need to be talking about these things in the context of faith and preparing our people to then take the answers out into the context of non-faith seeking to be used by the Lord and leading people to Christ.

So that's the issue. So how many variants do you think exist? Well, I normally ask folks, and because of our context here, I'm not going to ask you to put up a hand and ask a question and give an answer, but some people I've had say 10, 12, 100.

I would say a safe estimate would be at the high end about 400 ,000. 400 ,000 variants in the New Testament manuscript tradition. Now, that's a big number, and in fact, when you think about it, in the Nessean 27th edition of the Greek New Testament, there's 138 ,162 words.

In Nessean 28, there's a few more than that. If you think about that, that is about, and in fact, many people put it this way, that's about three variants per word. Now, I have seen people, atheists, some of my Muslim apologist friends, who will just present that, and they'll leave it hanging in the air that we basically have three options for every word in the New Testament.

That's not what it means. That's not even close to what it means, but that's the way they present it, saying, see, there's this many variants. That means we really can't have any confidence whatsoever.

In fact, if we look at it graphically, there's a number of words, and then the number of variants, it looks like the number of variants greatly dwarfs the number of words of the New Testament, and there would be many people who just present that and leave it there, and let's be honest with us, how many of us as believers would be able to give a response to that presentation?

You say, well, that's just for scholars to do. Not anymore. That's what I'm saying, not anymore. In my grandparents' age, sure, not anymore. Because of the internet, because of the way we communicate, we all need to know the answers to these kinds of things.

We need to know these facts and know how, in reality, what we're looking at here is part of the evidence for the reliability of this text, but until you hear the whole story, it can be hard to understand.

So let's look at what they don't tell you, what they don't tell you. 99 of all variants, I could not even explain to you in the English language because they do not impact the meaning or translation of the text.

They have to do, for example, with word order. And in the Greek language, word order is very different than it is in English. It has been well said that there are about 16 different ways that you could write something like Paul loves the church or Jesus loves his people in the Greek language as far as word order and utilization of different cases and tenses and all sorts of things like that.

And so when you have variations along those lines that cannot be translated into other languages, then they're not impacting the actual meaning of the text itself. But what's more is there's all sorts of spelling issues.

For example, I remember when I took first year Greek, one of the students in the Greek class we had really struggled with the concept of the movable new. The movable new is just basically the same thing as we have in English.

You're not supposed to say a apple. You're supposed to say an apple. You're supposed to put that extra n in there when you have a word starting with a vowel afterwards, right? Well, some people don't quite get that and some scribes didn't quite get that.

And the same thing is true in Greek as well. And that is that there are those words. You're supposed to have the movable new. Sometimes it's there. Sometimes it's not. That accounts for literally thousands of variants of that 400 ,000.

And so 99 of them are simply inconsequential. They do not in any way impact the meaning of the text. So 1 of 400 ,000 is about 4 ,000 meaningful textual variants out of 138 ,162 words is about 2 .9 or one meaningful variant every three pages.

But only about half of these are viable. What does viable mean? Well, if you had a scribe who got up one morning and he didn't have his coffee and he stepped on his cat on the way out to the scriptorium and he forgot his glasses.

Well, okay, let's not use glasses. That's a little bit anachronistic. But he's having a bad day and so he's not paying attention to what he's copying. And so in the process of copying a manuscript, his mind wanders and he comes up with a reading that no one's ever seen before.

And this is in the 14th century. If you find one manuscript in the 14th century, it has a reading that no one's ever seen before. It's not viable. That means it doesn't go back to the early period. It could not be the original reading.

In fact, we have one manuscript where one scribe had a really bad day because the text he was copying was written in two columns, but he forgot it was written in two columns. And so he just copied straight across and it was in the genealogy of Jesus.

And it really becomes weird because then God ends up with a father named Phares and it's really, really strange. And this guy somehow didn't even notice this. I don't know how that happened, but we still have the manuscript.

We still have the evidence that there were scribes who sometimes just were not really aware of what in the world was going on. And so that could happen. So only about half or a little less than half of these are viable.

They actually go back far enough. They have enough manuscript evidence behind them that they could possibly represent the original. So that comes up with about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 viable New Testament textual variants.

That is a very, very different picture than what we were given before when you talk about 400 ,000 variants and more variants than there are words and all the rest of that kind of stuff. We're talking about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 instead.

Now, we still need to understand that. Simple fact, the more manuscripts you have for a work of antiquity, the more variants you're going to have. Think about it. If you only have one manuscript, how many variants do you have?

None. Now, a lot of us would sort of like if that's the way it was. No manuscripts at all. We have the one master manuscript. What's the real problem with that? You have to trust that whoever made that one manuscript got it absolutely right.

And if you don't have anything else, if you don't have anything to check that by, you've got no way to get back to the original. You have no way of testing whether that one scribe was having a bad day or not.

So having just one manuscript, bad thing. For any work of antiquity, the more manuscripts you have that you can compare, the better off you are and the better certainty you have of still possessing the original readings.

But the downside to that is the more manuscripts you have, the more variants you have. So while we have a large number of variants, it's just because the New Testament has more manuscripts than any other work of antiquity at all.

So it's just a logical thing. I really struggle. I try to explain this to my Muslim friends because they think, well, I've got the Quran and there's no variants. Well, there actually are. They're just not aware of them.

And we've all got one Arabic text and we can all look at one Arabic text and that's superior to what you have. But the reality is it isn't. That's not superior. It's actually an inferior transmission methodology to what we have in the New Testament.

And so think about it. If there are more than 5 ,700 catalog manuscripts of the New Testament, the average length of which is at least, on the low end, 200 pages. It could be as much as 400 pages depending on how you count pages.

That's at least, at the very, very low end, 1 .3 million pages of text and some would say upwards to 3 million pages of handwritten text. That's a lot of pages of text. Now, when you think about it, 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 meaningful and viable variants over minimally 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 transmission of the text.

In fact, one might almost call it downright miraculous. Now, a number of years ago, I asked my computer to do something for me. And what I asked it to do was to compare the two extreme ends of the manuscript tradition.

Now, what scholars have done is they've identified streams within the manuscript tradition. You have what's called the Alexandrian text, which most scholars believe is the most primitive and earliest.

You have the Western text, like in the Latin Vulgate and things like that. You have what's called the Byzantine text, which is the majority of manuscripts that come from around Byzantium, modern-day Istanbul, or ancient Constantinople.

And if you compare the printed texts that represent these two most extreme edges, that's what I had my computer do. Well, how many differences are there? Well, here's Ephesians 1, 1 through 14, and the little bit of green that you see there is where those printed editions differ from one another.

Now, you can see there's very little difference there. And there is, now, some of them are very important. You can barely see it right down in the bottom left-hand corner. There's a little bit of green.

That's the difference between has and ha at Ephesians 1, 14, whether the spirit, the pronoun that's used there is either a masculine or a neuter. I mean, that's an important textual variant, and we study it, and it's a part of looking at the text.

But what you see is the vast majority of the text. There's absolutely no difference whatsoever. And most of the other differences are pronouns and things like that that, if you know Greek, you realize very frequently are not going to make a big difference.

One book that has a very interesting transmission history is the book of Hebrews. And notice, here's Hebrews 6, 8 through 20. There are only three places where you have a variation here. The vast majority of the text, every manuscript says the same thing.

Now, that's not what was in most of your minds when I first gave you the 400 ,000 number. But this is the reality. This is when you let the computer do the work and actually compare these things, and you're actually able to see the state.

But we need to explain, well, all right, but where did the 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 come from? That number needs to be understood. Now, up until the last two decades, the vast majority of scholarship would have said that the vast majority of variants were simply scribal errors, especially with the advent of Bart Ehrman and others.

They have developed more of a theory of scribes being more active in specifically seeking to make changes. One of my great concerns about this is that many of them have no longer, they're no longer looking for the original readings.

They're now exegeting the variants as if they can somehow climb into the minds of the scribes and see, well, why did they put it this way and things like that? And I, while there may be some interesting things that can be derived from that, I think it's primarily a dead end.

But that's an issue we can't really get into today. Scribal errors, even from Bart Ehrman's perspective, are still the reason for the vast majority of the differences that we find in the manuscripts of the New Testament.

And so, many of these errors involve common scribal errors, mistakes that we continue to make to this very day. Now, the younger folks in the audience might not remember what this was like, but when I was in school, I wrote my term papers on an IBM Selectric.

Oh, yes, yes. And it was a trial. It was a trial. Because, do you remember, not only whiteout and correction tape, my daughter's laughing at me, but you also might remember what would happen when you would forget to put a footnote at the bottom of the page.

Remember how you had to remember to put that in, and you're typing away, and you're doing so well, and then you realize you forgot the footnote, and you know what you do at that point? You take the piece of paper out, and you crumple it up, and you throw it out, and you start all over again.

Yes, mankind did somehow manage to survive this particular period of its history. And so, you would actually have to put a book next to you, and instead of doing cut and paste, you had to copy it yourself.

And even in our day, with glasses and lights and air conditioning and IBM Selectric, you could make mistakes. And one of the mistakes you might make is you might look over, and you might be copying a certain word, and you might see a common ending, like T-I-O-N or I-N-G.

And so, you type the word, and you look back, and you see I-N-G, and you continue on, except that I-N-G was on the next line down. And hopefully, you'd proofread, and you'd catch it, but then again, you take the paper out, and you start all over again.

Well, that has happened for a very, very long time. I'd like to give you an example from the New Testament where scribes had the same problem long before in IBM Selectric. That is 1 John 3, 1. 1 John 3, 1 in the King James 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.

Some of you might even know that as it's sung in a little praise hymn type thing or something like that. Now, compare that with the New American Standard. See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called 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 gentleman in the audience who are colorblind, and such we are is in red. And it's not in the King James Version of the Bible.

Now, unfortunately, there are people who utilize the differences between manuscripts as a foundation for causing division and for preaching long sermons. And if I was a anti-King James guy, I could go, See, you know what this means?

This shows that those nasty Anglican translators of the King James didn't like adoption as sons of God, and so they took it out. Well, that's ridiculous. The reason the King James doesn't have it is because the manuscripts that they were translating from did not have that particular phrase.

And the reason the New American Standard has it, and the ESV has it, and the Holman Christian, and the NIV, and so on and so forth have it, is because the manuscripts they're using contain the phrase.

But why is there a difference? Well, this is a standard error that I just illustrated for you just a moment ago called Homo eteliton. Homo eteliton, which is just a fancy Latin way of saying similar endings.

Similar endings. Though we will have a quiz on this at the end of the presentation. You do need to memorize that particular term. So, what happens is, here is the information. Now, this is a modern Greek text, and you can get this for your phone, and your iPad, and your computer.

It's amazing the amount of information that's available to us any longer. But this is what scholars look at. And actually, if you can read a little Greek, on the third line right toward the end, you see the phrase chi esmen.

There's a little red square next to the word chi, and that's the phrase, and we are. And if you look down at the bottom in green, on the right-hand side, there's a little square, and then KL04969, then a squiggly M for the majority text.

What that's telling us is that that phrase, and we are, is not found in those particular manuscripts, and it includes the majority. The majority of manuscripts, the majority of Greek manuscripts. But those all come from after 1000 AD.

But that still doesn't really answer the question as to why a scribe would have made that particular kind of mistake. Ancient writers, we know, made the same mistakes we do in regards to homoeotelioton.

And unfortunately, this only comes across in English right now due to the iPad. But what they did is they would actually write in all capital letters for the first 800 years of the history of the text, they would write in all capital letters no spaces between words and almost no punctuation.

The first 800 years of the writing of the Testament, all capitals, no spaces between words and almost no punctuation whatsoever. And so you would have this long line of letters and we can see what happened here.

And that is that when it said called clathomen in Greek, that ended with mu epsilon nu. And then the very next words were chi esmen, which ends with mu epsilon nu. An early scribe writes clatho mu epsilon nu, his eye goes back, he sees mu epsilon nu at the end of esmen, he goes on, and inadvertently and we are is deleted.

Common scribal error of sight. And then once New Testament manuscripts started being copied in scriptoriums, we have a guy up at the front and he's reading and you have a group of people writing, which you can make more copies that way, then you have errors of hearing.

For example, we can tell that back then the difference between, and I was taught what's called Erasmian pronunciation. So I would say, hey moan and hey mean, just sound like E-mean to them. And so unless you were listening very carefully, stopped, asked which one it was, a person's mind could wander a little bit and there would be errors of hearing that also creep in, especially with words that had the same pronunciation.

Well, since we know what those errors are and since we don't just have one copy of the Gospel of 1 John, we can compare them, then we're able to see these kinds of standard scribal errors. But you see what the problem would be if we only had one copy and that was done by someone who committed the error of homo et telethon?

We'd lose the phrase and we are. We wouldn't know that that was originally there. But because we have many copies from many different places, then that provides us with a variant, yes, but it also provides us the original.

And that's what a lot of people miss is they don't understand how ancient documents were transmitted over time and how important it is to have a wide and rich textual manuscript tradition. So that's how you can see how that happened.

Now, the majority of those 5 ,700 plus Greek manuscripts date from after 1 ,000 AD comprising the majority text. The earlier texts are called papyri texts written in unseal or maguscule text, all capitals.

And the papyri, you know, papyri wasn't meant to last for 2 ,000 years. I mean, I'm looking at the books that I bought when I was in seminary and the pages are turning yellow and stuff like that. And yeah, that was a long time ago, at least according to my kids, but for most of us, that really wasn't all that long ago.

And so papyri, which is made by taking the leaves of a papyrus plant, putting them at 90 degree angles, pressing them together, that really wasn't meant to last for 2 ,000 years. It's amazing that we have as many papyri as we have that have in fact lasted for 2 ,000 years.

As I said, unsealed text, all capital forms, no spacing, no punctuation. Here's a graphic that sort of shows you the distribution of manuscripts over time. So down at the bottom, 2nd century, 3rd century, 4th century, up to the 16th century, you can see that the majority of manuscripts come from after the 10th century, which makes sense.

I mean, think of Europe and places like that. We've had things called wars. World War I, World War II, not good for manuscripts. They don't handle bombing well, fires, things like that. But you've also got things like bugs and mold and all sorts of things like that that can take their toll over the time on manuscripts.

So it makes sense. There's also other things that need to be seen here. Notice the blue is the papyri. Green are the unsealed texts that were written on vellum, which is animal skin, but very thin animal skin.

And the unsealed texts were written in all capitals. You see they sort of fade out by the 10th century because people started going, you know, large letters, small letters, spaces, easier to read. And so that way of writing became predominant.

But there's also something else to remember about history here. And that is, what happened between 632 and 732? This is where you need to know a little something about history. Because you see, very early on, the Western church primarily switched over to Latin.

And so Greek was primarily in North Africa and in Israel and up into Constantinople and Greece and things like that. But then what happened between 632 and 732? It's called the century of Islamic expansion.

Muhammad dies in 632. The Islamic expansion is stopped in Europe at the Battle of Tours, Charles Martel, 732. So for 100 years, and Islam spreads all across what had been Christian lands, all across North Africa, Spain, Portugal, and all the way up through the Holy Lands and all the way up into the borders of Byzantium and Constantinople.

Islam's not really good for the production of Greek manuscripts in the New Testament. And so the production of those manuscripts is impacted by the rise of Islam. And the primary place left where Greek manuscripts are being produced is Constantinople or ancient Byzantium, which is why the vast majority of these are Byzantine manuscripts because after a certain period of history, that's the only place to be producing manuscripts in the first place.

So you can see the distribution. Now, I've found that Christians like to see some of these manuscripts. It's one thing to see the footnotes down at the bottom of the page, but I've found that Christians like to see some of these things.

So let's take a look at one here. This is Ryland's 457, also known as P52. Now, I love P52. It is right now the earliest agreed upon fragment of the New Testament that we possess. There's rumblings right now that we now have some earlier papyri fragments that are soon gonna be published, but we don't know when.

But until they're published, we can examine them, can't say. This was discovered amongst a box of papyri that had been brought to London. The British went all over the place, stole everybody else's treasures and dragged them back to London during the colonial period.

And a guy was rifling through some boxes and he pulled this out and he started translating and said, this is from the Bible. And they sent it to four of the greatest papyrologists alive at that time. And three of them dated it to 125.

Now, when you date a papyri, what you do is you compare it to other manuscripts where you know what the date is as to the writing styles. And so it's always within 25 years, one way or the other. So it's a 50 year window.

So if you date it to 125, it could be as early as 100 or as late as 150. And so three of the four dated it to 125 and the fourth dated it to 95, the first century, which is amazing. I'll show you how amazing that is a little bit later on.

What's really cool about P52, if you had gone to seminary back in Germany in all the 1870s, you would have been told that the Gospel of John was written around 170 AD. Why? Well, because it has such a high Christology, it has such a high view of Jesus that it couldn't have been written by anybody who actually knew Jesus because we all know Jesus wasn't like that, you see.

And so it had to have developed and evolved long, long, long after that. That would have been the assured results of scholarship, you see. That's what I love about P52. It comes along. And guess what P52 is from?