Can You Trust Your Bible?

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Welcome to the Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Okay, well, welcome to another Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, and I am joined by the man of the bud brief.

Well, we're trying to get him to do a bud brief, but it hasn't been working so far. Bud Alheim, how are you in there in sunny Florida?

Well, you know, it's overcast today, but I think it's like 80, so we're pulling out the fleece in anticipation of a very cool

Thanksgiving. Wait, you're not allowed to celebrate Thanksgiving. You know, you can't do that.

I guess you could do it if it's over Zoom. Yeah, you just can't. You got to get that turkey. You know,

I don't know if you've seen all the memes. This is so funny. I see these memes of, there was one, there was like a car with like 20 police cars behind them, and the meme is,

I just came back from the grocery store buying a turkey for 20 people. That's enough for 15 to 20 people.

Well, by the time this broadcast, we'll, you know, have already passed Thanksgiving, so.

Yeah, this is true. We can find out later whether or not there were any ill effects from the nefarious oversight of our leaders.

I wonder if we'll know who's president by then. No, you won't. Okay. We still don't know who's president.

Okay. No, it's not going to happen. We may never know. Well, one thing that I think that you sent me that we could talk about before we get into today's topic, what we want to do is really equip believers in an area that many don't study but need to.

It's an area called textual criticism, and this is something where so many

Christians think, hey, this goes over my head. We're going to break it down so it's easy to understand, and I'm going to give you the reason why this is so important.

This is probably the number one issue that people that do apologetics have to deal with.

Can you trust your Bible? Has the Bible been edited? Has it been changed? It's been corrupted.

It has contradictions. You know, all these type of arguments of the trustworthiness of the

Scriptures. Can you rely on the Bible that you held in your hand and say, thus says the

Lord? That's what we're going to cover today. But before we do, bud, you sent me something that just kind of cracked me up.

And so we'll start with this. You sent me an article from The Sun, which is a U .K. paper.

It seems that Kenneth Copeland— That's the U .S. edition, too, by the way. Right, it's the U .S. Sun. So this is an article about Kenneth Copeland, and he's been hacked by Russian hackers.

Now, for anyone that doesn't know who Kenneth Copeland is, well, good for you. Yes, yes, you are blessed.

Kenneth Copeland is one of only two people that Justin Peters actually believes is demon -possessed.

Kenneth Copeland and Todd Bentley are the two that he actually believes are demon -possessed. And when you watch Copeland, he goes from normal to insane in a split second and back to normal.

It's weird. Just when you watch him, it does look like, man, if someone's demon -possessed, that's what it would look like.

And the interesting thing about this Russian hack— so they got in and stole 1 .2

terabytes of data about his business and threatened to put stuff out there, of course, if he doesn't pay.

Which, by the way, let me just talk to you as someone who has a background in cybersecurity.

This is called ransomware. This is actually a real problem for bigger businesses. And people will—what they do is they will take computers, they encrypt them, and then tell you you have to pay them to get the code to unencrypt your own computer.

And people pay it and then realize that criminals, people that break the law, aren't to be trusted.

Right? So there's people that actually pay. There was a hospital that got everything encrypted, and they were told, you know, you got to pay—I forget what it was—several thousand, hundreds of thousands of dollars for the encrypt code.

And they paid it. And the bad guy said, thank you, and gave no code. You know, why would you think criminals are going to act any other way than being criminals?

So, you know, maybe one day—it wouldn't really be fitting with Christianity, but maybe one day what

I should do is a podcast. And, folks, if you want this, let me know. But maybe I should do a podcast on how to protect yourself online, things that people should be doing.

I mean, the easiest way to protect yourself against ransomware, someone that gets into your computer and encrypts it and then you have no access to all your stuff, the easiest way—

Wait, I know. I already know. Okay. Turn it off and turn it on again, right? Well, yes, that's true.

But there's something else you have to do when you turn it on. You have to turn it on, connect it to your external hard disk where you have a backup.

It drives me nuts that people don't backup their data. You want to have a backup.

So that's all free charge. But actually, folks, if you do want me to do an episode on cybersecurity, how to protect yourself, there's a lot of different things that you can do.

For many years, I did lots of work catching lots of bad guys using the technology that they try to abuse.

But this is what happened with these guys. They hacked in. They downloaded information.

Now they threaten to make it available. Here's the thing that so amazed me with the article you sent me, bud. It isn't that Kenneth Copeland got targeted.

I mean, he's worth, I think they said $760 million.

Yeah, that's three quarters of a billion is what his net worth is.

That's not a preacher, folks. That's really the bad thing. But the note, the comment that the article, and this is a totally secular article, the hacker's latest alleged victim,

Copeland, is, and this is what I hate, this is what is recognized, Copeland is, quote, one of the most famous evangelical preachers in America.

Yeah. Oh, my goodness. He's not evangelical. So here is the thing that I thought was so interesting with the title, though, because if I was going to title this, if I really want to get clickbait, if I want to get people to click on this,

I'm going to label it, you know, tele -evangelist Kenneth Copeland, who says he can predict the future, didn't see

Russian hackers, right? Or tele -evangelist

Kenneth Copeland, who claimed that he put an end to COVID and can see the future, couldn't predict

Russian hackers were going to hack him. I mean, like something like that. No, but here's what the title actually is.

Tele -evangelist Kenneth Copeland, who mocked Biden victory with...

Maniacal fake laugh. I can't even say the word. Maniacal fake laugh hit by Russian hackers.

Their focus is that he mocked the Biden victory. Here's the irony.

For the media, the whole world right now revolves around Biden. This is what we had when it was

Obama. It was like this love fest that everything is like... They called him,

Obama, a messiah. And what... This is totally off topic, but in what way could we ever claim that Barack Obama is a messiah?

He was the messiah because he was going to bring an end to racism in America just by being elected.

In fact, that's why he got a peace prize from... You know, the Nobel Peace Prize was just getting elected.

Well, that's all he did. He just needed to steal an election. He got a peace prize because he was going to end racism.

How's that working for you, Black Lives Matter? Was there an end to racism? I guess not.

He actually did exactly what he said he would do in his book, is keep racism going because it kept him in power.

So, and those aren't my words. Those are his words. He recognized that.

But notice, you're right, the focus of this is Copeland mocking

Biden, but it's also, behind that, there is this subtle agenda that's coming out that's going to be hostile towards Christianity.

That's exactly what this is doing. Yeah, and it's because Christians are being seen as standing up for Trump, and really what it is, it's not...

I would argue it's not that Christians are standing up for Trump as much as I think it is Christians are standing up for truth because that's what we stand up for.

Well, truth doesn't exist in the postmodern world. It's all about feelings and experience. Ah, that's right.

Come on, Andrew. All right, well, let us get to our topic for today. If you've watched or listened to my

Apologetics live show from a couple weeks ago, we had a young kid on...

Anthony Silvestro was debating him on evolution. Well, actually, I think the debate was on basically starlight issues and time, basically the age of the universe.

And at the end, we got into a 30 -minute discussion on textual criticism.

Now, why did we do that? This young man said he was Christian. Stop, I know. 1

John 2 .19, he wasn't a Christian. He went out from among us to expose he was never of us.

Yes, we all agree. He doesn't. He's deceived. So, he claims he was a

Christian, but textual criticism convinced him that Christianity is wrong. And so this atheist became an

Orthodox Jewish. I'm going, wait a minute. How do you... You go into Orthodox Judaism.

Now he's not... he's just Jewish. He's not Orthodox. Okay. But he's still atheist.

So, here's the thing, though. We wanted to cover this for this reason. There's some things with it when it comes to textual criticism that is important to understand, and it's something that many people think it's too heady.

People don't deal with this. In fact, I know many pastors that don't address this.

They've dealt with it in college. I actually had one pastor from Florida that called up, and we talked to him on Friday after the show, and he thanked me for doing that.

He's like, you know, I love that sort of stuff, but I haven't really dealt with it since I was in seminary.

In seminary, you take a class on reliability of Scripture, and that's like the only time most pastors really deal with textual criticism.

And yet, one of the biggest things that we see is guys like Bart Ehrman. If you don't know the name, good.

But Bart Ehrman is a scholar. He's not a believer. He is someone who studies the original languages and does work in the area of textual criticism.

Now, Bart Ehrman writes at two different levels. He writes scholarly work, and he writes work for the masses.

And when he writes for the masses, he waters things down. In fact, what

I'm going to be dealing with this Sunday when I'm preaching, I'm dealing with Mark 6.

And in Mark 6 is one of the things that Bart Ehrman says is proof that we cannot know what the

Bible originally meant. And the proof is in Mark 6 verse 3 in the

NASB says, Is this not the carpenter? Okay. Some translations word it differently for verse 3.

And in some translations, it is going to say not that he's the carpenter, but the son.

Is this not the son of the carpenter? Now, can we know what the original said?

No, we can't, actually. Because of the manuscripts that we have, it's very difficult with this one to know the original.

Does it change the meaning? Yes, it absolutely does. I mean, it's either Jesus is a carpenter or he's the son of a carpenter.

However, if we think about this, Bud, couldn't both be true? I was just thinking it could both be true.

Exactly. And that's what we have here is something that it really may not change the meaning.

But what you see from guys like Bart Ehrman is they will turn to the passage like this and say,

See? I mean, if you're going to write a New York Times bestseller, you want to put your best argument forward. This was his argument. I don't know a single doctrine based on Jesus being a carpenter.

In fact, here's a little known fact. In the first edition, the paperback edition of Bart Ehrman's book,

Misquoting Jesus, his book, when he wrote the hardcover, it flew off the shelves.

The publisher wanted more. They said, Can you write a paperback edition and put an epilogue in there so people that got the hardcover will buy the paperback?

So he did that, and he made a huge mistake. And the publishers didn't pick up on it. And this is why

I'm still, if there's anyone that has a first edition copy of Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, I would love it.

But in that first edition, which I was only able to see from my library copy that I got from the library,

I had to actually return it. But what they ended up saying, the mistake he did was he actually admitted that when we look at all these textual variances, and we'll explain what a variant is in a minute here, but when you look at all these textual variances, these changes, not a single one of them affects any

Christian doctrine. And they put that out because that's a fact. But when they're using this book to discredit

Christianity, that one line was so devastating that they quickly came out with a second edition and pulled all the first editions.

And what was the change? They had to remove that one line, because that one line proves that the whole book is meaningless.

It's like the book, I'm trying to remember the name now, I quote it in my book, What Do We Believe?

But there's a book that was written by a Muslim, and it became a

New York Times bestseller, again dealing with the issue of textual criticism. And he does everything that the whole book was based on, this belief in a document called

Q, that the argument goes that you had Q, Q was used to write Mark, and then Matthew and Luke used

Mark and embellished a little bit more. So by Q, Jesus isn't God at all.

By Mark, he's a little bit God. By Matthew and Luke, he's more, he's kind of like half

God there. And then by John, John basically ignores Matthew, Mark, and Luke and just writes about how

Jesus is God. That's the argument that they make. And this guy, his whole book is on the evidence that we have from Q.

Aslan, that's his name. Yes, yes. And the interesting thing is that I point out in my book, and I actually put the quote in my book.

Folks, if you don't know, I have a book called What Do We Believe? And in that, the second chapter, yeah, there, you're holding it up there.

It's a nice -looking book. Is that one of the limited hardcovers? This is the paperback edition.

Oh, that's the paperback. Which I need to get a few more, by the way. Please continue. You have not just one, but two hardcovers.

You are the only one in the world with two hardcovers. That is how special you are.

It's like the second blessing. There were only 25 made. So you have a pretty good percentage there.

But in my book, What Do We Believe?, the second chapter deals with this whole issue. I wrote it where it's easy to understand.

So if this whets your appetite, you want to get the book, What Do We Believe?, and read more detail.

But I quoted him because in his introduction, he ends up admitting that there's no evidence of Q.

We don't have a single copy. There's no reference to it anywhere, except in the last 50 years, 100 years, when this theory was developed.

And Q is German for Quell, which means source. This is coming out of the higher criticism halls of German liberal

Christianity. It's not Christianity, but very liberal. And yeah, you do quote that. He says, although we no longer have any physical copies of this document, meaning

Q, we can infer its contents by compiling those verses that Matthew and Luke share in common, but don't appear in Mark.

This almost sounds like the Biden win. Even though we don't have evidence of balance, we can infer that the ones we interjected are the ones that people would have voted if they were still alive.

This is how they would have voted. Hey, did you see Jeffrey Epstein voted?

It was good. I saw a picture of him with the I voted sticker. What scares me is that they had put

Epstein in lockdown for his own safety, and now they're putting the rest of the country in lockdown for our own safety.

And suicide rate is up. There you go. Yeah, maybe that's what...

You know, look, Bill Gates has always said there's too many people on the earth. This is a way of getting us to kill ourselves off, right?

So, but what you end up seeing there in that quote is he makes it clear. There's no historical evidence for this.

They just infer it. You have to know going into when you're studying this area of the reliability of scripture, you have to understand that the scholars do a lot of work in an area that's called make -believe.

They make -believe there is a document called Q that all the gospels are based upon, and then they use that to say, well,

Jesus was never claimed to be God in the original Bible. This is a later embellishment. Q, that original document, doesn't teach this.

This is the argument that they end up making. Don't think that that notion is not out there. I can point you to someone in a

Southern Baptist church in my own hometown that has, in his pulpit, had a man stand and preach that Jesus never claimed he was

God, and it is, from this kind of exposure, unbelievable.

This is out there. This is a very serious thing. Yeah, and you know, anyone that makes that statement obviously has not read the gospels.

Let me say why. I'm working on a book on the deity of Christ. Yes, I've been working on it for a long time. The thing that you end up seeing with it is 48 % of the gospels,

Jesus is putting his deity on display. He's constantly showing that he's God by being omniscient, by controlling the weather.

We dealt with this in a previous episode. And so, where we went through Mark and showed how in just a few things,

Jesus showed that he had the authority that only God has over the natural world, the supernatural world, disease, death, he controls it, okay?

He's over that. So, what we end up seeing, and if I could find a good

D word for weather, because it could be demons, disease, death,

I just, you know, I'll let the wordsmith out there figure that out. But here's the thing we end up seeing.

As we look at this, there's many people that believe that the Bible's been edited, it's been copied, it's been changed.

This is something that comes up regularly when evangelizing. Now, let me tell you a little story, but this was fun.

I was at, I think this was Montclair State University, and I was doing a speaking event, and during the day

I went to the college center and was just handing out tracts and evangelizing. A young man comes up to me, and he told me that we don't have a

Bible. The Bible, the Catholic Church in the 1500s collected all of the copies of the

Bible and replaced them, and the Bible we have now is a Bible that the

Catholic Church gave us in the 1500s. Now, I still remember this, because this was many years ago after I read

Greg Kokel's book, Tactics, and he talks about Columbo. And I said, you know, I want to practice his

Columbo tactic. I always ask questions, but playing dumb, that was, well, okay, it comes naturally for me, but the thing,

I wanted to play dumb with the guy. I wanted to just ask the questions like, oh, well, you're so smart, let me learn from you.

So I started asking him these questions, and I said, all right, let me ask you a question. How did they do this? He goes, oh, well, what they did was they got all the copies.

I said, all of them? Yeah, every copy. I said, okay, and they just replaced them.

Wouldn't people know? And he's like, oh, no, what they did was they had everyone hand in their Bibles, and people thought they were being returned.

And I'm going, but what about their notes? I mean, a lot of Christians take notes in their Bibles. Wouldn't they notice the notes are missing?

Right? You know, just having fun with questions. And I said, let me do a thought experiment with you.

I'm trying to understand what you're saying. I mean, you seem like you really understand this. I said, here's the school paper.

Do you know when the school paper comes out? He goes, well, I happen to be the photographer on the paper. It came out this morning at 11 o 'clock.

I said, okay. It's now like 1 .32ish. I said, how many papers come out?

And I forget the number now, but it was like 1 ,000, 1 ,500, something like that. I said, okay.

I said, where are they now? I said, I want to do the same thing that you say the

Catholic Church did in the 1500s. I want to do it with the school paper. So where are the papers now?

He goes, well, right there in that stack. I said, where else? He's like, well, around the center. I said, okay, where else?

He's like, students' dorms. I said, where else? He's like, students' cars. Okay, where else?

Students' work. I'm like, okay, where else? I kept going because there was one I wanted to get to. The garbage. He admitted, yes, they're in the garbage.

I said, great. Thank you. So if I wanted to replace them all without anybody knowing it, where would

I have to go? And he goes, well, you'd have to go to the stack right there.

You need to go to the rooms. You need to go in the center here. You have to go to the trash.

And I said, okay, so I got to get into students' rooms without their knowledge. And he's like, well, yeah, you'd have to do that.

And I can do that and replace it, and no one would realize that I've done that, right?

And he goes, well, you wouldn't be able to get into people's rooms. I'm like, well, yeah, but you said that this is what the

Catholic Church did. It's replaceable. And he goes, he's looking at this. And I said, now, here's the thing

I'm confused with, because we have a book written in many different languages, spread in many different countries when we look at the

Bible. It's all over the world, translated. We have all these copies, and we have copies that we find that are within the first 300 years, some that were found in the garbage, some that what they did was because paper was so expensive, they would use it for the

Bible, but then someone would take that paper, scrape off the ink, and reuse that parchment for something else.

And we now have those copies where with the technology, the infrared, we can actually read the text underneath what was scraped off, and we can see the scriptures, and we can see that it's the same as today.

And that's the trash. We find this in trash. And he just looks at me and goes, you know, this isn't making much sense to me.

Of which I said, I agree, it wasn't making sense to me either. Well, you know, and this is the problem.

You have a great argument. That would really work. But it wouldn't really work.

You've got to apply some reason to it, some logic to it. See, and that's what a lot of people aren't doing in our culture.

They suffer from an ignorant arrogance where they're so arrogant in their ignorance that they are unaware that they're ignorant.

Just the fact that they think they're right is the proof that they're right. And he thought he had a great argument.

He just never thought through it. He was ignorant of the details. And so what we want to do in this episode is give you these details, help you to understand this.

Now that you understand the importance of it, here's some simple things. When it comes to scripture, the

Old Testament versus New Testament was handled differently when they made copies. The Old Testament, the

Jewish leaders felt that they were handling God's Word, and therefore they were very, very meticulous in how they made copies.

And for that reason, we don't have a lot of variances. And a variance is basically just a change.

It could be a spelling error. It could be you flip the order of words.

It could be anything that's a change from one manuscript to another. That's it. So you don't have a lot of those changes in the

Old Testament. Now in the New Testament, the message of the gospel was so important that people wanted to get that out everywhere.

And for that reason, they were making copies very quickly. Where the

Old Testament was painstakingly slow, the New Testament they were trying to make copies as quick as they could and get them off.

Well, as you know, when you do something quickly, you're prone to make mistakes.

Not Bud, but, you know, me. I'm going to let my wife hear that. But the thing that you end up seeing with that is that they're in a rush to get this out.

And because of that, they are making mistakes, copying errors.

And I want to go through a couple of those, Bud, so people understand what type of things. And these are things, if you ever,

Bud, I'm sure you never had to do this, but I had to, for some reason, when

I was in school, my teachers liked to give me these assignments where I had to copy something out of a book that's like 200 words.

I used to have a teacher that always gave me 200 word essays. For some reason, she always seemed to think that I was misbehaving in class and that was her way of giving punishment.

I can't imagine why that would be. Well, go ahead. I'm thinking on that. So, here's the thing that I find interesting.

When I would do that, there was times where I would see a word, the, and on the next line, the word, the, and sometimes, not on purpose,

I would skip over that entire line. Sometimes I repeated the line because, while I wasn't actually looking at the words,

I was just trying to make a copy. I didn't care what it said. That sometimes happened.

And those are some things we would have. Sometimes you have people that will skip words or add words in.

Sometimes you have someone that's doing it from memory. They're in a rush to do it. And they're remembering something they read in Mark and they're putting that into Matthew because they just remembered it a certain way.

Now, sometimes you see people that are making a copy and because this is God's Word, they see it written in the copy that they're making a copy from and they don't know that someone added a word in or missed a word.

Sometimes they think, oh, you know what? I think the person did miss a word here and they would write something in.

And that could be a mistake. Sometimes what you have is where people, because someone would skip a word, they'd draw a line and then fill in.

Sometimes maybe you've done this where you have a document and you draw a line of what you should have put in there so when you go to edit it, you can put that in.

Sometimes they do that. Well, sometimes that's just someone's notes, but the guy copying it isn't sure, and this might be

God's Word, so he would take these side notes and put it. We actually have manuscripts where we see comments that are in the side notes that are brought into the text.

These are the things that people would do. One of the interesting things in this area is that some of the best copies are from people that we think didn't even know

Greek. And this might make sense because if they don't know Greek, they're not going to read ahead. They're going to be copying these letters.

They don't know the meaning of the letters. They just copy them. They're actually more accurate because they're not reading anything in.

One of the things that sometimes people would do is as they're making a copy, they see something that's a hard reading and they go, this isn't making sense.

Let me soften it. Let me use a different word. Or, as Bud, you're going to give an example, where they may put in some explanation, and yet the explanation is then thought to be the

Scripture and now we just don't know. So, these are what we call variances and how they come about.

It's a natural process. It happens when you're making a copy. I would challenge you, try this.

Take the Bible, the New Testament, and make an entire copy by hand. You're going to see that you're going to make a lot of different mistakes.

Some of these same ones that we mentioned. And if you're trying to do this, sometimes you may, if you're trying to be helpful to people because you're writing a copy of the

Bible for someone you know, you know that they don't understand big words or they might be confusing, you might change the word to be more explanatory to somebody.

That might be. Or to soften something because it seems too hard to understand. These are the things that happen.

Now, what we end up doing in textual criticism is try to get back to those original words. That's the goal.

So, Bud, you have an example that we're talking about from John 5. Yes, let me flip over there.

So, let's look at John 5. And for folks to understand while you're pulling that up, for folks, that's actually a page turning, if you hear that.

Yeah, you can't maybe see it. Oh, I can see it. But this is the healing at the

Pool of Bethesda. Yeah, the paralytic man. Yeah, and verses 3 and 4 have a textual variant.

Now, depending on your translation, it may note that. You may have a little note that says...

Or it may be absent. It may be absent altogether. You may not have John 5 .4.

Now, in the New American Standard, it's in brackets with a comment that says, early manuscripts do not contain the remainder of verse 3 nor verse 4.

So, sometimes you're going to have that footnote. So, Bud, why don't you read this and let's deal with this one because this is helpful for folks to see how someone may put in an explanation.

Okay, I'm going to start at verse 2 so that we get a little bit of the context and read through verse 4 in the

NASB because it is included in the NASB, just it is bracketed. It says, now there is in Jerusalem by the

Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew Bethesda, having five porticos.

Verse 3, in these lay a multitude of those who were sick, blind, lame, and withered.

And here's the bracket, starts at the end of verse 3. The blind, lame, and withered, waiting for the moving of the waters.

For an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and stirred up the water.

Whoever then first, after the stirring up of the water, stepped in was made well from whatever disease with which he was afflicted.

Now, Bud, why would this, so if you look in something like the ESV, the

ESV is not going to have this at all. Yeah, I think the ESV is not in there.

I think the NIV excludes it. The NASB picks it up and highlights it, as it does a number of other texts that you'll mention later.

When I was looking at this particular text, what was curious with regards to the textual criticism is that we have so many copies of manuscripts.

Well, these manuscripts, which are copies of the autographs, which is what you're trying to get back to.

We don't have those, but we want to know what the autograph said. And the autograph is that original writing.

Yeah, so what John would have, with his hand, written on parchment. But the manuscripts that we have, this verse is included primarily in those manuscripts that we see from the

Byzantine, the Eastern Church, essentially, geographically Eastern.

When you get into more of the Western manuscripts, which happen to be older, this verse is not included in there.

So as you go back in time, based on the age of the manuscripts, and also the geography of the manuscripts, you can determine what was in and what was not, because would it seem likely that, say, a scribe in Rome, would have found it necessary to delete that verse because he found it heretical or undoctrinal, or would it have made sense that he would have deleted that, or would it maybe have made more sense for a guy, say, in Turkey, who is a scribe, copying whatever source document he had, he decided, you know what,

I need to explain why these people are laying by this pool. Here's why, and he inserts this.

Now maybe like you say, he inserts it as his own note, not intending for it to actually be compiled into the canon of scripture of the

Gospel of John, but as his copy gets transmitted to someone else, multiple more copies are made, and that gets included.

So the whole goal of textual criticism is to get back to what does that original author actually say, and we're more than able to do that.

Now in our English, we have it in brackets in the New American Standard, and we have this punctuation that tells us things, right?

We have commas that tell us to pause. We have something in brackets that tell us this was not in the original.

We have things in parentheses. All these things, punctuation has meaning. They didn't have punctuation back then.

So when they were writing this without punctuation, could they have written it on the side and put it in, or could they have written it in as explanation to explain to people?

The folklore with this pool, so that people understand it, that is what makes sense, is that someone was trying to explain it and put that in.

This is what we end up doing. Now there's some things I want you to notice what Bud mentioned, because when it comes to textual criticism, there's three things you want to focus in on.

You want to focus in on the number of manuscripts, the age of the manuscripts, and the location of the manuscripts.

Those three things. And if you can remember those three, you can understand textual criticism.

And by the time we're done with this episode, I'm going to convince you that you can trust the

Bible you have in your hand, even if it's in the English. Because remember, that's not the original either.

Anytime you're dealing with a translation, you're dealing with a translation that is going to be someone's interpretation or choosing of a word they think best fits what that other language was.

Unless, of course, you believe, wrongly, that God inspired the King James Version in 1611.

And if you do believe that, then please stop using your 1700 edition of the

Authorized Standard and use the 1611, which included the Apocrypha in it. Because that would be what

God inspired. And yet there's been many additions to the King James, and the King James that everyone that uses a

King James Bible today is actually called the Authorized Version. It is not a 1611

King James. It's gone through many revisions. So if you believe the 1611 is inspired, then please repent for all the negative things you may have said about the

Catholic Church with the Bible, because if you think God inspired it, the Apocrypha was in there.

Jesus didn't use thee and thou and thine. No, no. That English is more precise.

That English is more precise. I mean, look, in another 50 years, people are going to go, remember when people used to use he and she instead of they?

So language changes, unfortunately, not in a good way. It devolves. So what we end up seeing is that when you have people that are doing translation, it is going to be something that does affect, gets affected by interpretation.

One of the reasons I like the New English Translation, the Net Bible, is it was done by someone with backgrounds in textual criticism.

They're arguing over word choices in English based on the textual variances and things like that.

So that's very helpful in this area, that Bible translation. Now, we're going to convince you you can trust your

Bible, but let's look at these three areas. Okay, let's first look at the issue of geography, why that could be important.

Now, you heard Bud just explain that East versus West, the Eastern folks might need explanation of Western folklore, and so it could be added in.

That makes sense. But if I take a letter, Bud, and I'm going to write this letter,

I'm going to make 10 copies of the letter, I'm going to give it to 10 friends so that they can go all over the world and share this story, and they're going to make copies.

But the letter that I give to you when you go to France has one word that when

I was making the copy, I dropped a word. Instead of saying, Lord Jesus Christ, I just said,

Lord Jesus. And you start making copies everywhere in France that with what you have, your copy says,

Lord Jesus, but in Spain, in Italy, in the UK, in the US, in India, in China, it all says,

Lord Jesus Christ. We would look at that and say, okay, all of these copies, we end up calling that a manuscript family when we see these same variances occur.

When we have a family that is by its location, and we go, okay, it's all in France where it's dropped the one word, but we look everywhere else, it hasn't.

We would look at that and go, okay, we can assume that someone in France that started making those copies, the word was dropped.

Now, they don't know whether I dropped that word in making my copy, or was it the guy who wrote the first copy in France, and he kept that going?

We can never know, but what we can know is the word should be there, Lord Jesus Christ, because everywhere else, all the other copies have it.

So that's where location comes into play. One of the other things that comes into play that Bud, if you heard

Bud mention, was the age. In the Western manuscripts, they're older than the

Eastern. Why does that play into things? Well, the closer you have a document that goes to the original writing, the less time there is for copying errors.

This is simple to think about. If I'm taking copies, and I'm making a copy, and I make another copy, and another copy, and some people get some of these copies, and they start making copies from the copies, and then someone else makes a copy from the copy, well, each time it's copied, there is a chance of someone making a mistake, of creating a variant.

So the closer you get, the less the probability that there is as many variances.

So you're going to question that less than the later ones. So we're going to put a little bit more weight on that earlier manuscript, the one that's dated earlier, because there's less chance of the copy from the copy from the copy.

Now, when we talk about this, there comes into play the telephone game. I'm sure you played this,

Bud, when you were a kid, where you have one person in a line. He'll turn and say a very long sentence, because you want to make it longer so people will accidentally forget things.

Then you have the people like me who would purposely mix things up. Because it's always fun to see.

The whole reason of the telephone game is so that you have the thing that was said at the beginning, you have the thing that's said at the end, and they don't match at all.

So you always have the characters like me who purposely do that, mostly because it was one paragraph and I didn't feel like saying that much, so I just dropped parts

I didn't feel like saying, or didn't remember, or whatever. Now, people think that the way we got the

Bible is the same way. One person copies it to another person, to another person, to another person. However, that only works in audible type of messages.

The telephone game doesn't work when it's a written message, because we have the other manuscript to compare to.

You actually have a source document from which you are working. Even though you may still inadvertently make mistakes, you've got a source.

And sometimes what people would do is go back to the source and compare. You can't do that in the telephone game.

And that's what some people would do. They'd realize, oh, I just skipped a whole line. Oops, let me draw a line, put on the margins, and write in the sentence

I skipped. We actually see that in manuscripts. So we can see it. Someone must have realized, oh,

I forgot this whole sentence. Let me put that in. This is the thing that you end up having. It's not the telephone game.

Because you have a source document you can go back to and verify and check. And now we have all these source documents, all these manuscripts that have been copies of copies of copies.

We don't have the original that we know of, but the thing is, we look at this.

So we look at where it's located. We look at the age. The other thing we want to look at is the number of manuscripts.

Why is that so important? When you look at the Greek, we have now about 8 ,000 to 9 ,000 manuscripts that are cataloged.

I'm being precise with this because we actually have probably tens of thousands, probably 10 ,000, 12 ,000 manuscripts, but they haven't been cataloged yet.

We have documents that we don't know if they are scripture yet. We have, like I said, you have documents where they ripped off the ink and wrote something else on it, and you have to put it under the machines to be able to see the next layer down through the infrared.

And looking at it that way, that takes time. So we probably have a lot more manuscripts that are available, they just haven't been cataloged yet.

And that takes time and energy and money. And so that is a process that Dan Wallace is working on, and you can go check out the work he does.

The thing that you end up having there is we have about 8 ,000 Greek manuscripts now.

And when we look at those, we can see the variances we have. Now here's the interesting thing,

Bud, as we get more manuscripts, we're not getting more variances.

So the variances are kind of staying steady, and the manuscripts are increasing, which means we've kind of leveled out on all the variances that there are.

It's almost like the coronavirus. There's lots of people getting positive test cases, but the death rate seems to be staying the same.

So there's a huge spike in the cases, but there's not a spike at all in the deaths.

It's kind of interesting. Actually, the spike in deaths was almost as if we figured out now how to deal with the virus and what the cure is for the majority of people.

For 99 .98 % of the people, we know how to handle it like we do with the cold or other things.

But I guess I... You're digressing. Just maybe. But it is a good analogy there, right?

That's the thing. As we're getting more manuscripts, we're not seeing an increase of the variances. That becomes helpful because that says, okay, we have enough of these to see a couple things.

One, it tells us, if you go back to that geographical argument I made, the more manuscripts we have, the more we can put that into that evaluation.

The age, the more manuscripts we have and where we find them, it helps to date them. That helps us to tell us which ones are the earlier ones.

Just the fact that we have so many copies, we can start to see where these variances occur.

It's not only... I just wanted to insert this. It's not only the fact that we have a multitude, these thousands, of Greek documents, but you've got over 10 ,000

Latin documents that are Scripture. You've got over... I wrote down 9 ,300 in other languages.

Those also feed into our ability to be able to determine what is legitimate, what may not be legitimate, and have come away from it with a high level of certainty.

What we have right now on our desks is the Word of God. We have about 70 ,000 translations of the

Bible in manuscript form, the handwritten manuscripts. Go back to the 2nd century.

We have hundreds of copies of Greek that go within the first 300 years.

When I say a manuscript, for folks to understand, I'm not saying it's a whole copy of the New Testament. This could be just a small section.

It could be one paragraph or something. We have some

P52, which is the size of a credit card. That's all we've got. But it is one of the oldest that we have.

It's within, I think, about 30 years of its writing. It's a copy of John's writing, which would have been, he wrote it in the 90s.

This was found in a mummy's tomb, used as garbage, by about 125.

We have some copies of Mark that are now dated to 85 A .D.

We end up having so many copies, though, we start to see, we can get a picture of the variances.

Folks, in my book, What Do We Believe?, I lay out the numbers here. It's hard to do numbers in audio.

Let me work through some of these. 75 % of all of these variances we're talking about are spelling errors.

That's all they are. They're spelling errors. Spelling errors are things you can easily get back to. If I have a spelling error,

I'm able to figure out, what was this? Let me see. He misspelled something.

Ah, okay. I can correct that. I can get back to what it originally said.

That becomes not viable. Not viable meaning, the idea of being viable is, can we get back to the original?

Can we get back to what it originally said? If the answer is yes, okay, then we're good to go.

Maybe one of the best examples with regards to the spelling is Christ using the hyperbole that a camel going through the eye of a needle.

The word camel, I think, is one letter off from the word cord, C -O -R -D, which could be a piece of thread.

A piece of thread is intended to go through the eye of a needle. The context and the fact that it's hyperbole, not to mention the older text that would validate the word actually as camel and not cord, that can make a difference in the text, but we've got the ability to discern that through the work that these scholars are doing and the multitude of manuscripts that give us access to.

Now, spelling errors are in a category of their own, though. Then that's the majority of them, because they're easy to fix.

Nineteen percent of these variances are going to be viable, but not meaningful.

What does that mean? Viable means we can't get back to the original. We're not sure. But it doesn't change the meaning in any way.

So a lot of these are Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Lord Christ, Christ Jesus.

It is impossible for us, with all the variances we have, to figure out what the original said.

But those several readings that I just gave you don't change the meaning at all.

You know exactly who that's speaking of. Whether it's Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Christ Jesus, Lord Jesus, Lord Christ, you understand who it's speaking of.

The meaning hasn't changed at all. Therefore, we're not concerned with it. That's nineteen percent.

Five percent are meaningful but not viable. In other words, what that means is five percent, the meaning changes, but we can get back to the original.

And therefore, yeah, the meaning changed, but we realize what it should have been, and therefore, we just go back to that.

That's five percent. One percent, and by the way, the one percent is a number that was used back really in the eighties.

It's an old number. Back when they were only four hundred thousand textual readings.

And what I mean by readings is, as I gave you, Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Christ Jesus, those are three separate readings.

And that's how you have four hundred thousand variances. It's now up to about five hundred thousand.

Now just keep in mind, when you talk about this, we're only talking about sixty -five thousand words in the

Greek New Testament. So obviously, it's not that every word in the Greek New Testament has a variant reading.

It's that you have some things where there's lots of different ways of reading it, like Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.

You can have five, six, seven variant readings. And there's many words that are affected sometimes by those variant readings.

So when we say one percent are meaningful and viable, one percent, we can't get back to the original, and it changes the meaning, such as, was

Jesus a carpenter or the son of a carpenter? It changes the meaning. We don't know what the original said.

That's where we're talking in the one percent. But I remember when taking a class with Professor Dan Wallace, who's an expert in this field, one of the best,

I asked him about this, and I said, okay, we know that the numbers of variants have increased by a hundred thousand.

What is the proper number for the variants that are in this category of viable and meaningful?

Because this is the most important area. Is it still one percent? He said, actually, we use the one percent as a conservative number, but the real number is one -fifth of one percent.

So that is the number that we would be using. But let's go with the one percent, just as an example.

When we look at the one percent, the one percent, if we have 65 ,000 words, right, this is how many we have of New Testament words, roughly, okay, 6 ,500 words, and you are going to have one percent of that.

How many words do you have? 65. Now, think about this. If you have 6 ,500 words, and really, your number is not one percent, but it's one -fifth of one percent, okay?

You're talking 13 words. 13 words is how we could look at that, compared to 65 ,000 words.

And remember what Bart Ehrman said, not a single one of these affect Christian doctrine.

So as we go to these texts, as we looked at just a couple today, in Mark 6, in John 5, as you look at these, you see that we can figure out what the

Scripture originally said or what the meaning is. Or, it just doesn't matter. Like in the case of Mark 6, it could be both.

Jesus could be a carpenter and the son of a carpenter. Both could actually be true. So, when we look at this, we have to realize that the

Bible would be 99 .98 % accurate. I'll put that number up to CNN any day of the week, and yet people trust that.

In fact, that's even the cure ratio of COVID, right?

It just happens to be. So, the reality is, you can trust the

Bible that you have because of the fact that all these manuscripts that we have, we evaluate all this, and we know where these variances readings are, and we can look at this and realize that they do not affect any

Christian doctrine. And you say, Bill, wait a minute. What do you do with the ending of Mark? What do

I mean by that? If you know Mark chapter 16, when we look at different manuscripts, there's four different endings to Mark.

It seems that Mark actually ended pretty abruptly, and then we have some that added a little bit, a little bit more, and a little bit more.

So, you have four different endings in the Gospel of Mark. Now, the argument that many have is that it seems, if you look at Mark, it seems like he just ended it abruptly.

Now, if you look, if you have a New American Standard, you're again, you'll see, well, even

New King James and others, they'll bracket it or put a note. So, in the

New American Standard, it's going to say that later manuscripts add verses 9 to 20.

So, how does it end? So, if this is the actual ending, verses 7 and 8 say this, but go and tell his disciples and Peter, he's going ahead of you to Galilee.

There you will see him just as he told you. They went out and fled from the tomb for trembling and astonishment had gripped them and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid.

The end. They're afraid. That's how it ends. So, some people add, now after he had risen early in the first day.

So, they add a little bit more. And so, does this affect any doctrine? Well, the only doctrine this actually affects is snake handling because much of what we see elsewhere is, we see this in other scriptures.

It's actually snake handling and drinking poison. You can see that the snake handling in Book of Acts where, you know, a viper had bit

Paul and he didn't die. But that wasn't a promise to everyone for that. So, that's the only two things you end up seeing.

Now, this does become a major issue for our charismatic friends, however, because this is the only place that they have in verse 17 and 18 where Jesus, you know, in this account, if you have a red letter, it's in red, these signs will accompany those who have believed.

In my name, they will cast out demons, they will speak in new tongues, they will pick up serpents, they will drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them, they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.

This is the only place that you see the idea that speaking in tongues and healing are to be done for everyone.

And so, this is the verse, and that's the, to have the only verse that you can have that says it's for everyone and it's in a variant is not strong evidence.

In fact, you know, that's where you get the people that are playing with snakes and pretending to drink poison, because I don't think they're actually drinking poison.

So, but you do have snake handlers, you do have people like that, and I remember watching a show where they had this guy and he was doing a whole thing about how he was snake handler, his father died, his father was a supposed pastor that died of a snake bite, he almost died of a snake bite.

So, these guys who do this, and yet they do get harmed by the snakes. So, this is where you can end up having a problem with some of these, because it wasn't,

I would argue, not actually in the scripture, it was added in. Does it affect any doctrine?

No, it doesn't. The only other thing you maybe affect is some of the earlier manuscripts will mention that the number of what people think is the beast, the number of man is 666.

Well, some manuscripts say 616. But we have an early church father, Anoraeus, 400

AD, I think he is, and he deals with this early on, so we're within 300 years of its original writing, and he is saying that based on the textual evidence he has at his time, the 666 is a better number.

So, he is closer to that, and lays out a case of why he makes that, it was a good case, and that's why we have the number 666, and not 616.

So, that might affect a lot of left -behind books or something, but I don't think it affects any other doctrine.

So, this is the thing... Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say, eschatology is still intact, whichever way you go.

And so, the thing that we want to encourage you folks with is when we look at this area of textual criticism, you can trust your scriptures.

The scriptures you hold in your hand, were there copies, were there changes, did people make mistakes in making the copies?

Yes. Does it mean you can't trust the Bible that you have in your hand? No. Why?

For a very simple reason. Because we look at all the manuscripts, we look at the type of changes or variances that we have, we look at where they occur, when they occurred, and we start to get a picture of what the

Bible originally said, and where we can't get back to that. Much of it has no meaningful changes, and in the small areas where we can't get back and it's meaningful, it doesn't affect a single doctrine.

There is no major Christian doctrine that's affected by any of these variances.

And that's the thing you need to know. Now, when you sit down with someone and they tell you the Bible can't be trusted, and you walk them through this, this is going to be the first time they're hearing it.

Because most of them have not actually done any work in the area. They don't do this type of research and study.

They just read what others have said about it. And that's the issue. This is not very hard.

I mean, I hope that you've seen, this is pretty simple. It's easy to explain. Easy to understand.

And we need to start educating other believers with this, so that when people challenge us, oh, the

Bible's full of contradictions. The Bible's been edited. The Bible's been written by men. But the

Bible is trustworthy. In fact, it is the most trustworthy document. We have enough copies, enough manuscripts and translations of the

Bible, that if we stacked them all in paper, we could start here on earth and hit the moon.

That's how many papers we have. That's a huge amount of evidence.

No one questions the accounts of Julius Caesar. Yet the closest document we have with Julius Caesar is 1 ,500 years from the event.

And we only have a handful. In fact, Bud, maybe you remember there was a book that came out many years ago called

Da Vinci Code, all based on this idea that Jesus actually married

Mary Magdalene. He didn't die on the cross. He actually someone else died on the cross. He snuck away and he went off, married

Mary Magdalene, eventually finds his way into what's now France and has offspring.

And those offspring, believe it or not, those offspring happen to be all the emperors of France.

So they were all of the line of Jesus. And all of this was based on a gospel known as the

Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Do you know how many copies we have of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene?

One. One copy. In fact, it's a French copy. It's not even in Greek.

So we have one copy in French, and the nice thing is because it had page numbers and all, we know that we're missing more of that than we have.

Okay? So that whole belief system that so many buy into, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, is based on one document written in French, which right there, the

French language didn't exist for like a thousand years. So it's over a thousand years from the, it's actually

I think about twelve to fifteen hundred years from the supposed events, with one copy that's not even complete.

You know, Scripture says the fool has said in his heart there is no God. And we could supplement that by saying the fool never gets his theology from novels.

Yes. Yeah, this is true. Hence, don't base your eschatology on Left Behind series.

So I hope this encourages you when people challenge you with the idea that you can't trust your

Bible. That you just don't know if it's really true. As I said earlier, Christians stand for truth.

That's why we're not afraid to do what the Muslims are afraid to do. See, the Muslims argue that they have one

Koran in Arabic, and that there are no variances. And then there's people who show all these different variances in all the different areas in the

Arabic. And the Muslims go nuts over it. Why? Because they don't believe that God preserved his word letter by letter from its original.

That's impossible because the Koran was written down about 18 years after Muhammad died.

So it was remembered audibly. And then they went to a battle, and many of these guys, the warriors that knew it supposedly audibly, died.

And so they said we better write this down. So one of their Imams, their Caliph Uthman, he ends up saying, well, let's get this written down.

So they all write it down, but there's a problem. They had different recordings. They had different accounts. And Uthman put out an edict to burn the abhorrent texts after they wrote it down and compared.

How do you know he burned the right ones? You don't. The fact that they all had different word for word, they memorized the word for word, and we're supposed to trust that, and yet when they wrote it down, there were variances.

There were changes. Well, there wouldn't actually be variances. There would be differences. There would be differences. You know, interestingly, you're looking truly at their scripture, which is a result of the telephone game, because they also have a doctrine of abrogation.

So whatever you read in the Quran that may be contradictory to something earlier in the book, you go with what's written latest.

So this doctrine of abrogation is how you accommodate, supposedly, these differences that are glaring in some places, if you've ever done any study on that.

That's not an inspired scripture. You can take the holy scripture of Christianity, the

Bible, and the integrity is inherent throughout it, not only doctrinally, but also the verbal plenary inspiration which we hold to.

Major difference. Major difference. Yeah. And so we can trust the Bible that we have in our hands.

That's really what we want you to know. But we want you to know how to talk about this, how to be educated on this.

If you want more information, just go to strivingforeturning .org. Go to the store and pick up a copy of What Do We Believe?

Whatdowebelieve .com, which I think would be the other place. I think it's whatdowebelievebook .com,

I think is the other site. But just go to strivingforeturning .org, search for the book

What Do We Believe? It will be out in Amazon soon. We are putting it out in Kindle version.

I just have to work on that. We have everything together, it's just now some stuff I have to do for final edits.

So look, you'll be hearing about that soon. So I hope this has been helpful for you, and this is something hopefully that you can now use when you go out on the streets and evangelize and defend the faith.

And you know what, bud? What's that? That's a wrap. This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry.

For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeturning .org.

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