- 00:01
- You never actually said that in your first video.
- 00:14
- You just said that Muslims claim that there were additions and changes, and that is not true. Whereas now you're saying, no, no, no,
- 00:20
- I meant just the original manuscripts. Firstly, Christians don't have the original manuscripts.
- 00:26
- There's no Bible scholar that will claim they have the original manuscripts. In fact, that's the holy grail of Bible scholarship, is to find the original manuscripts, which no
- 00:35
- Bible scholar has found. Well of course no one claims to have found original
- 00:41
- Bible manuscripts, just like we don't have an original Koran. But you still have to make a differentiation between the original manuscripts of the
- 00:49
- Bible and copies of the original manuscripts, versions of the
- 00:54
- Bible, translations of the Bible. I can't tell you how many times I have heard people, including
- 01:00
- Muslims, say, well look at the King James and look at the NIV. See, you've changed the Bible. That's like saying, look at Yusuf Ali and look at Piktah.
- 01:09
- They're different. So you've changed the Koran. No, they're English translations of the Koran. They're going to be different. Different English translations of the
- 01:15
- Bible. Difference being, you're at least translating only one Arabic text, which you've just simply determined is it, not through textual critical means, not through comparison of manuscripts, but popularity.
- 01:29
- It's 1924 Egyptian printing. It's become the popular one, therefore it becomes the standard. That's not how you determine the text of an ancient work as to what's most popular today.
- 01:39
- But be it as it may, you have to be able to make these differentiations. And many people are very confused because they don't understand the history of the
- 01:48
- Bible, or the Koran for that matter, and so bad arguments get repeated over and over again.
- 01:54
- And I don't even know what video of J. Smith you're responding to, but I can tell what he was saying.
- 02:01
- That is, he made a general statement about the textual purity of the Bible. And then someone said, oh, but what about these textual variations?
- 02:11
- And then he expanded upon that to talk about the difference between the original manuscripts and later copies of the manuscripts and so on and so forth.
- 02:19
- And evidently you're accusing him of some sort of dissimulation because having done so.
- 02:25
- I've experienced it many times before, because the attack upon the textual veracity of the
- 02:31
- Bible is a common element of almost all apologetic interaction. As for the second point that the scriptures have not been corrupted because we have found the predating manuscripts, wait a second, listen to what you're saying.
- 02:48
- You're saying that for a time the Bible was corrupted because the people believed in the
- 02:54
- KJV for the last 400 years, or other Bible versions even before that.
- 03:01
- But now we've found pre -existing manuscripts, we've managed to uncover these corruptions, and of course now the
- 03:07
- Bible isn't corrupted. I can assure you that's not what J. Smith was saying in any way, shape or form.
- 03:13
- And again, the King James Bible was translated in a language that did not even exist for over a thousand years after the
- 03:25
- Bible was completed. So anything that has to do with the King James is almost irrelevant textually speaking, except to English speaking people.
- 03:35
- But as far as the history of the Bible is concerned, in the original languages, what happens with a translation a thousand years later in a language that doesn't even exist?
- 03:46
- That would be like saying that 500 years from now, a translation of the
- 03:52
- Koran in a language that hasn't even developed yet is somehow relevant to the original readings of the Koran.
- 03:57
- Which, of course, is ridiculous. So no one's saying anything about, well, the
- 04:02
- King James was most popular for 400 years. So, if the NIV became the most popular for the next 400 years, is that relevant?
- 04:10
- Not in the slightest. Not to the original languages, not to what was written by the apostles or by the prophets of old.
- 04:18
- It's completely irrelevant. It doesn't have anything to do with anything at all. Other than if you're writing a book on the history of the
- 04:23
- Bible in English, or the impact of the Bible on the English language or something, but those are completely different categories.
- 04:31
- And then you seem to, and this is a very important element, you seem to have a real problem with the idea of going to earlier manuscripts.
- 04:40
- I would assume that what Jay was talking about is that as we have found earlier and earlier manuscripts than the
- 04:46
- TR, we're going to look at some of your confusion about the TR in another few minutes or probably the next video, but what he was probably talking about is the fact that the manuscript evidence upon which modern translations of the
- 05:00
- Bible or upon which the Greek editions of the Bible that we have today are based, are much, much older and much closer to the originals than anything that was used by Erasmus or Stephanus or Beza in the production of what is generically called the
- 05:18
- Texas Receptus today. And there is a really, at least
- 05:24
- I guess I do understand the motivations of it, but there's some real ignorance on the part of anyone who has a problem with Christians being very open about the history of their text and publishing, for example, in the 27th edition, the 28th edition's coming out, some of it's already on the web, but here is a section from Acts, Acts chapter 10, and you have the textual notes put at the bottom of the page.
- 05:54
- And through the use of an ingenious system of sigla, of signs, as long as you know what the signs are, you can put a tremendous amount of information on a single page.
- 06:05
- And I understand why people don't like this. I just want one version. Well, there is a danger.
- 06:14
- I remember the first time I heard Dan Wallace use this terminology and I hope you'll think about it.
- 06:21
- There are many people, Christian and Muslim, who are willing to sacrifice the truth for certainty.
- 06:30
- Sacrifice the truth for certainty. For many years I've dealt with King James only advocates and King James only advocates, they don't want any,
- 06:39
- D .A. Waite, for example, these modern translations are corrupt because they put these notes and say some things say this and some things say that.
- 06:48
- They destroy people's confidence in the Bible. Well, if your confidence in the
- 06:53
- Bible can be destroyed by the truth then your confidence has been misplaced in the first place and it's dangerous.
- 07:02
- And I understand Muslims. Hey, we've only got one text. Well, how do you know, where did you get it from? How do you know 1924
- 07:08
- Egyptian printing happens to be exactly right? You may have absolute confidence.
- 07:14
- You may have absolute assurance, certainty, that that's exactly what you're supposed to have.
- 07:21
- That doesn't make it true. I've met Mormons that are absolutely certain the
- 07:26
- Book of Mormon is a revelation from God. It's not. All the certainty in the world can't turn that book, which is so obviously written by a not overly well -trained individual from the 1830s and late 1820s in upstate
- 07:43
- New York, into the word of God. All the certainty in the world doesn't make that happen. And so we have to be careful not to trade the truth for a feeling of certainty.
- 07:58
- And the reality is there are textual variants. Now I believe that those textual variants are the very artifacts of the process that God has used to keep the
- 08:11
- Bible pure. Now what I mean by that is that because we are so open about our text, because we produce works like this, people who say that we've inserted doctrines such as the deity of Christ or we've inserted the resurrection, we've taken out reincarnation or something like that.
- 08:30
- The fact of the matter is because the New Testament manuscript witness is so wide and so early and so diverse and comes from so many different sources that if someone did come along and try to do what
- 08:42
- Uthman did or what was done maybe even 50 years after that or so, around 700 -705, those changes would stand out like a sore thumb in comparison to the earlier manuscripts.
- 08:56
- Now the cost of that is what's called copyist errors. And since 99 % of them do not change the meaning of the text,
- 09:03
- I consider it a small cost. We do have to do textual criticism. But the point is we can look at someone and honestly say that kind of wholesale editing and corruption of the text simply didn't happen.
- 09:16
- If it did happen, we would see it when we compare the later manuscripts upon which, for example, a tiara was based, say 1 ,000 -1 ,200 years
- 09:25
- A .D. with the papyri that have been discovered over the past century. But that's not what happened,
- 09:32
- Abdullah. When you look at the papyri and you look at what you had 1 ,200 years later, are there textual variants?
- 09:38
- Yes. Do you have a Byzantine, sort of an ecclesiastical text? Yes. But Abdullah, if you use the same rules of interpretation on the most
- 09:47
- Byzantine manuscript and the most Alexandrian manuscript, you come to the same conclusions.
- 09:52
- They're not different teachings or different doctrines or even a different New Testament.
- 10:00
- And anyone who has actually studied those variants knows that that is, in fact, the case.
