Lesson 8: Chocolate Chip Cookies and the Bible

Kootenai Church

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All right, I think we're ready to get started, so if you'll find your place and come on in, if you're out in the hallway yet. All right, let's bow our heads before we begin.

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Father, we are grateful to you for this time that we have, for this place that we can enjoy meeting and being together for fellowship and worship and study and learning.

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We praise that we give this day to you, that you would be honored and glorified through all of our discussion, our learning, our efforts.

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We pray that you'd be glorified through our fellowship, through our worship, through the preaching and reading of your word and through the congregations we gather here that we would all be honoring to you in every respect.

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We ask your blessing upon this time that you would help this time, this study, to help us to think rightly and clearly about how you have given us your word, how you have preserved it, and we pray that today would be profitable and this would be a beneficial time to us, in Jesus' name, amen.

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All right, we are in lesson number eight, titled Chocolate Chip Cookies and the Bible. So you may be wondering what do chocolate chip cookies have to do with scripture and you're about to find out.

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So here's the story behind this. I actually got this idea from Greg Kochel with Stand to Reason.

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He used this illustration and I thought, oh, I'm gonna take that illustration, I'm gonna make a lesson out of it, so that's what we're doing here.

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We're gonna take about 10 minutes today to compare and contrast those six different cookie recipes that you have in your lesson plan.

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Does everybody have your lesson book here, Chocolate Chip Cookies and the Bible? Okay, so here's the story behind this.

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All of these chocolate chip cookie recipes have been unearthed by archeologists. We do not have the original recipe in our possession.

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These are all copies. Some of them might be copies of copies, but there are differences between the various recipe copies that you have and what

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I want you to do is spend the next 10 to 15 minutes in small groups. So find a group of people that you can be with, look over your copies of the six manuscripts of Chocolate Chip Cookies recipes, and I want you to compare and contrast those six manuscripts and see if you can identify the things that are different between each of these manuscripts.

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Notice the changes, notice what manuscripts have different things written than other manuscripts.

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You're just observing and finding out how they differ from one another. And after about 10 minutes or 15 minutes after everybody's kind of satisfied that you found all of the changes, then we'll get back together and we'll kind of go through these recipes line by line and see what it shows us about ancient manuscripts.

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So gather up into groups of six or five, seven, whatever is convenient, three or four if you want, and we'll take 10 minutes and we'll keep the streaming going even though there's no sound, just in case somebody asks a question that I need to answer.

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All right, 10, 15 minutes. Does anybody need a copy of the sheets?

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How many do you need? Anybody need a copy of the recipes? You're welcome.

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Okay, errors might include deleted words or spelling errors, abbreviations, overt changes, anything like that.

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We'll do four more minutes. All right, does anybody need more time?

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Have you exhausted the manuscripts in your study? Anybody need more time? No? Okay.

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All right, so we are going to play Manuscript Expert. Again, these six manuscripts have been discovered by archeologists.

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We do not have the original. We know that all of them are copies. We don't necessarily know how old or young any of these copies are just by looking at them.

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Some of these might be copies of the original. Some of them might be copies of copies of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.

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And all of these are six different independent manuscripts and now we're going to play

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Manuscript Expert and we're going to look and examine these. And this, by the way, this discipline is what we might call a form of lower criticism.

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It's where we examine the manuscripts that are there and try to determine what is an error, what is not an error, what is an alteration, what was in the original, how does this compare with other manuscripts?

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And so that's what we're going to do. So let's go through it line by line. The first line on all six of them, two and a quarter cups of all -purpose flour.

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Are there any changes or alterations in that? Anybody see any? Okay, M6 has a misspelling.

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And M2 has abbreviation. Okay, so cup is abbreviated. Any doubt in your mind what's meant?

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Even by M6, reading M6, do you have any doubt what is meant by that? They misspelled flour. And if you didn't know what flour was, you might wonder, what's flour?

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I mean, what is that? Is that a new thing that I've never, is that a special kind of flour? Right, right, that's true.

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We read what we think ought to be there and what ought to be there instead of noticing the misspelling. All right, let's move on to the next one.

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One tablespoon of baking soda. M5 just says one spoon, right?

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Sorry, which one? M6 is abbreviated. M2, sorry,

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M2 is abbreviated. Correct. Could be teaspoon. Could be tablespoon.

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In fact, did you notice that two of the recipes have tablespoons, two of the recipes call for teaspoons?

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One of them just says spoon and one of them just has the abbreviation T. Which, if it's lowercase, what does that tell us?

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It's teaspoon. So how would we determine what the original recipe might have been? What would we do?

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Well, we don't. We could go with the original, we could go with the majority text, right?

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There's three of them that say teaspoon. We have two that spell out teaspoon and one that's just a lowercase T, so that would be three teaspoons.

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One that just says spoon, so we might kind of say that's really uncertain, but two of them. We have three teaspoons and two tablespoons, and one that is of uncertain designation.

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So in order to determine what the original said, we could go with what we'd call the majority reading. Most manuscripts have this.

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So that might be good evidence that it was originally teaspoon and not tablespoon. Very good question.

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Would we make that decision now or would we refrain from doing that until we could determine likely what manuscript is better?

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We may come across something in two of these manuscripts that do say teaspoon.

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We might come across something later on in the manuscript that would cause us to doubt that manuscript and discard it entirely, in which case that changes the number count, doesn't it?

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Yeah, first over here. Yeah, you could do that, but...

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Oh, I see what you're saying. Is there somebody that would have that ability to taste and determine which one is right in the manuscript family?

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We would have, you would have, we would have the, and we're transferring this over into biblical manuscripts now, we would have the ability to know which manuscripts are most likely the most accurate.

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Yeah, and that would weigh in the favor of certain readings as opposed to other readings. Yeah, Cornell, was yours the same way?

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Based on, I was gonna say, make a batch and see. Right. Let's assume for a moment that we're just looking at manuscripts and we don't have the ability to test the recipe.

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For the sake of the illustration, let's just assume that all we have is what's written here in front of us, that we can't actually make this thing, we're just examining the manuscripts without the ability to taste, test and taste.

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All right, how about one tablespoon of salt? I'm not asking you to judge the taste of it.

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Again, we're not talking about the taste of this recipe, we're talking about what do I know about these manuscripts from that designation?

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One tablespoon of salt. And some of the others are teaspoons. So we have the same situation now with tablespoons of salt as we did teaspoons of, what did we put?

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Baking soda, right? Do we have two of them that mentioned tablespoons, two of them that mentioned teaspoons, one of them mentioned spoons, and one of them that mentions just tea?

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Salt, yep. Okay, so we have the same situation with that designation. How about the cup of butter?

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What do we notice about that ingredient? M5 says what?

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Two sticks, yep, and one cup.

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Okay, what does M6 add to that? M6 specifies that it needs to be softened.

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Any other observations, Jeff? Would you give preference to the shorter reading?

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Yeah, that's a good point. Manuscripts tend to grow. People tend to add explanation in copying and not remove stuff in copying.

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So when you hear somebody say, well, this manuscript family removes all of these words or all of these references or all of these verses from it.

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We're gonna talk later on about why we know that certain things were not removed, but that is not the inclination of manuscript copying is not that stuff is removed, it is that stuff is added.

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Really, what we'll see in weeks to come is that our problem is not that we don't have all of Scripture, it's that we have pieces of that puzzle that we're not sure how they fit in there.

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We have a puzzle with too many pieces, that's what we have in terms of information in manuscripts. Yeah, good observation,

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Jeff. All right, now how about three quarters of a cup of granulated sugar? So M1 has granulated, okay.

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What'd you see? M1 has, oh yeah, with a D instead of a T, right. And all the rest of them have related with a

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T, you're correct, which is a spelling change in M1. Okay, so what might we conclude just from that observation?

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There's no spell check, is it possible, would it be fair to say that possibly at some point, a

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T became a D? Yeah, would it be somebody not copying it correctly or not reading it correctly?

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So that could be a spelling error, that could be an error of hearing, correct? That could be an error of somebody misseeing something and thinking it was a

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D when it was a T. This is why I don't write in cursive. Because to me, cursive should die the death of the

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Latin language, as far as I'm concerned. We should all print, I know, it looks pretty and all that stuff, but it's just, huh?

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It's not easier and faster. We have a disagreement in our house over cursive. All right, can you imagine how that might be that some copyist might be sloppy writing the letter

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T or the letter D, and so somebody else later on might wonder, is that T or D? Well, how do we spell it? I'm not sure how to spell it.

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How does it sound, granulated? Well, that could sound either way, right, T or D? The sound is sort of the same, unless you're really enunciating granulated or granulated, kind of sounds the same.

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All right, how about three quarters of a cup of packed brown sugar? M2 omits packed, and it abbreviates it, okay?

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How about one teaspoon of vanilla extract? Here we have the same problem with the tablespoon, teaspoon issue, but it seems to be consistent throughout the manuscripts, right?

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And if one manuscript renders it one way, it will consistently render it that way. Okay, how about the two eggs?

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Manuscript six adds the word large, correct? How about the two cups of chocolate chips?

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M5 says ounces. And M6 has ounces. But the rest of them don't have that.

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M2 also abbreviates cups with a C. All right, how about the instructions?

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Anybody notice that, how they creased the baking sheet? Yeah, so one of them mentions an uncreased baking sheet, and one of them mentions an ungreased baking sheet, or the rest of them mention ungreased baking sheets, ungreased and uncreased.

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By the way, which manuscript mentions uncreased? And isn't that the same one that got granulated wrong?

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Okay, so that might tell us something about the person who copied M1. Was M1 incursive?

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Probably was. If you can tell the difference between a C and a G incursive, you deserve an award.

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All right, how about, what other differences do you notice in the instructions?

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Sorry, what? Okay, M2 does not say heat the oven.

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M2, you have cooking it for quite a while, right? 911 minutes, Cornell, what was yours? M6 includes

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Fahrenheit, the designation Fahrenheit, but none of the other manuscripts include the designation Fahrenheit. All right, 1, 3, and 5 all say to add nuts, and yet there are no nuts in the ingredients list.

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That's a good observation. Sorry, what? Right, very good observation.

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These call for morsels, and if you didn't know that chocolate chips were called morsels, then you'd be wondering what a morsel is and why it's not in the recipe.

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Yeah, that's right, a special kind of mushroom. Same person who could not get granulated and uncreased.

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Yeah, creased the baking sheet, thought that morsels were mushrooms. All right, any other notes on changes or differences in the instructions?

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M2 doesn't say nuts. Stirring in one egg at a time, which one did that?

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M6, okay. Okay, M2 deletes the words or until golden brown.

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Yes, right,

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M2's got the long cooking time, 911 minutes. Missing a hyphen. M2 has what?

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Okay, I'm gonna play.

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You get extra points if you can name politicians. I had a train of thought before you totally derailed it there.

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Oh, I was gonna say adding nuts to a dessert falls in the same category as cursive. It should die the death of the

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Latin language. All right, any other things you noticed there in the instructions?

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Yeah, yeah, the lines are different because last week we talked about how they would number the columns and have a certain width of columns, et cetera.

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Yep, Jess? Oh yeah, yep, that was one that I think

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Dave mentioned. Anything else?

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M6 is chocolate chips instead of morsels. Okay, so I think that kind of exhausts most of the differences.

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Would you say that that is a lot of differences or just a few minor differences? It's a lot of differences.

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Yeah, we can postulate that right out the front that we're talking about. These are significant differences between these six.

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Very short manuscripts. Relatively speaking, these are very short manuscripts, aren't they? These are not big. These are just small little chunks.

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But there's quite a few differences amongst the six of them. What? Well, we're gonna talk about that here in just a second.

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Okay, so let's talk about some conclusions that we can draw from the differences that we have identified.

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What do you notice about M6 that is unique to it? What general feature does

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M6 have that no other manuscript has? Say it again,

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Ken? Okay, good. M6, manuscript six, has a tendency to explain what is meant, doesn't it?

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If there's some doubt, M6 kind of helps explain what is meant by something that might have been a little unclear to that copyist's thinking.

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M6 does that. M6 tends to add words for clarity. If I found out that M6 was newer than the other five and that it was written after the

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Celsius scale came into use, what would I conclude? If I found out that M6 was written a little later, maybe after the

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Celsius scale came into use, what would I conclude from that? What's that?

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It might be in Celsius, not Fahrenheit. Temperature of the oven, what? Was copied later?

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That might be an indication that it was copied later. It might be an indication that the copyist was aware of a different scale and he wanted to make sure that he was designating which of these two scales to use so that there would be no confusion by anybody who would come later who might not know, as if 375 degrees

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Celsius was actually a temperature you could bake something at. You can't. You realize how hard that, that's three times what the heat to boil water, right?

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You guys realize that? You don't know Celsius. Just like you don't know cursive and don't put nuts in your dessert, it's all good.

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Nobody should use the Celsius scale, should die the death of the Latin language. That was enough.

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That was the, that crossed the line? All right, number, second question.

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What do you notice about M2 that is unique to it? What general feature does manuscript two have that no other manuscript has?

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Abbreviations. Okay, so we have two manuscripts that really go two different directions with information, don't they?

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One of them abbreviates what he was copying and one of them adds explanation to what is being copied.

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Some of that explanation might have to do with what could be potential confusion by people reading his copy,

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M6. He might be trying to prevent potential confusion from what he is copying by adding a little bit of explanation to it.

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Why would M2 abbreviate? What might be some of his motivations for abbreviating his copying? What's that?

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A bad speller? Okay, M2 might be assuming knowledge.

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Rick suggests he might have had a golf game to get to. Cornell? Might be trying to conserve space, okay?

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Might be trying to conserve time. Could be that it was being rushed. Maybe the person who was copying this was fearful of his life because the

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Romans were hunting them down or trying to kill him and he's trying to make a copy of a manuscript quickly before the chocolate chip cookie recipe is burned and lost to the world forever.

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That would be a horrible thing, right? Oh, a very good one.

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It could be at that point in time that abbreviations were common and everybody would have understood exactly what was being abbreviated.

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Dave? Would changing the abbreviation also change the center word or center letter that they were diligent to preserve?

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We talked about that last week. Okay, M2 has omitted a bunch of things.

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They forgot oven, the hyphen, the nuts. Okay? If I were to find a later manuscript,

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M7, and I knew it was copied from one of these six manuscripts that you have in your hand and it contained the

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Fahrenheit designation, what might I conclude? If I discover

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M7 but I notice that M7 has the Fahrenheit designation, what could I conclude from that? Sorry, what?

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Might be copied from M6. Is that what you said, Mike? Okay, could be copied from M6. He could have made the same assumption.

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He might not have copied M6, but he might have copied it at a later date after the Celsius scale came into use, at which time he would have wanted to make that same designation for anybody in the future, right?

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He might have done it in cursive, yes. Oh, very good.

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So M7 might have been written before M6. The fact that it was found later doesn't necessarily mean that it was written later.

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In fact, M7 might have been the source for M6, right? Is that possible? That might be determined by other things.

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M6 might have been copied from M7. You guys are better at this than I am. All right, if I find a cookie recipe that called for baking for 911 minutes, what might

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I conclude from that? Probably copied from M2. Could I conclude that or am

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I assuming that? I'm assuming that because it's possible that M2 was copied from that manuscript, isn't it?

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So on the basis of some of these similarities between manuscripts, we might even be able to group them into families, right?

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Kinds of manuscripts, types of things that these various manuscripts have in common, maybe errors that they both have in common or differences that they both share in common.

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I could begin to group manuscripts in that way. M1 has two spelling errors.

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It might be that the original from which M1 was copied was in poor shape or condition. Isn't that possible? Uncreased versus ungreased.

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Granulated as opposed to granulated. If I, when I come across,

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I'm looking at M1 and I notice that it has those two spelling errors, those two errors have something in common.

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It might be, I could conclude possibly from my copy of M1 that what it was copied from had what characteristic?

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Deterioration, right? Maybe that manuscript, the one that M1 was copying off of, maybe that manuscript was creased at a certain point and the author couldn't tell whether it was a

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T or a D. Or maybe the papyrus, because of how the ink came on that rough surface, it was difficult to tell whether it was a

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T or a D. What might, Rick? Probably why he wrote creased instead of greased,

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Rick said, that could be. What else, those two errors, uncreased and granulated, not only just being spelling errors, but what else do those two errors or differences have in common with that issue in M1?

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Both of those are errors of the ear, are they not? If I say granulated and I'm dictating that to you and I say granulated and you're maybe a little unsure of exactly what

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I said, is it possible that if I have two people taking that dictation and writing that down as I'm reading it, that one person might hear it one way and another person might hear it another way?

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It's a possibility, isn't it? Same thing with ungreased and uncreased. If you say that fast, if I'm reading it and you're writing that down, ungreased, uncreased, that's an error of the ear.

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Those two words sound a lot alike, don't they? So that might tell me that whoever was writing

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M1 recipe down either was writing it down over what was on the phone, somebody was talking to them over the phone, or maybe that somebody was reading it in their presence and they were writing it down as somebody else was reading it, that might tell me that, right?

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Those two errors of the ear, they're there in that manuscript? Yes, yep, and that is the standard by which the intentional passing down of manuscripts happened by the

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Masoretic School and the Talmudic School, those people who copy those manuscripts.

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There are also people who made copies of manuscripts who did not do that because they didn't have the ability to do that. They had time constraints or travel constraints or other factors that would have went into them simply writing out a copy of that manuscript as fast as they could have, and that is how those errors would have crept in.

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Okay, before we move on and ask some of these key questions, count up the number of differences that you have identified.

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Can you number them? Or just look at it and tell me, is it a small amount, is it a big amount?

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Somebody give me a number that you've noticed real quick throughout three or four. It's a big amount.

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It's a lot of differences. Okay, now let me ask you this.

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By comparing all of these recipes, do you think that you could successfully make a batch of chocolate chip cookies? What's that?

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If you had all of them. If you just had manuscript two, you're gonna mess that up, right? You're gonna bake it for 911 minutes?

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What's that? If you had made chocolate chip cookies before.

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Do you need to have made chocolate chip cookies before to be able to compare all of these and identify what probably does not go into a recipe?

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I could go by the majority text and say that it's probably teaspoons instead of tablespoons or tablespoons instead of teaspoons with that issue, right?

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The abbreviations really don't mess me up all that much. I could look at all six of these manuscripts and I could conclude that it's granulated and not granulated.

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And I can conclude that it's ungreased and not uncreased. I could look at all six of these and get the time right and get the temperature right, get the order of events right.

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Identify that nuts was maybe something that somebody else wanted in there at some point for some ungodly reason and decided to put into the recipe to the curse of all of humanity that's to follow.

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I could probably make that conclusion. And I could probably, I think I could. If I gave you this challenge, take this home and make a batch of chocolate chip cookie recipes using these six to figure out what the original said, would you be able to do it?

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In fact, do you think that you have a pretty good idea within 99 .9 % sure of what the original chocolate chip cookie recipe looked like?

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I could take this and using common sense and what I know of how copyist errors are made and what types of errors that we've noticed in these copies.

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I could take these six recipes and I could probably compose something that is identical to the original, if not close enough to the original, that the wording order or the language would make no difference whatsoever.

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Is that not true, Brad? Did I?

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Would you? I would use a teaspoon for baking soda and a teaspoon for salt.

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I would use teaspoon. I would go with the majority reading in that case. Use teaspoons and not tablespoons.

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It almost is, if you factor in the abbreviation, then you get a majority reading of teaspoons. You have three as opposed to two and then one that's uncertain.

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Addition, yep. Yeah, Carol.

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Yes, question? Is it all trial and error?

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No, it's not because there is a science that goes into that and that's what we're gonna get into next week. We know the kinds of errors the copyists make as they make copies.

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There are other factors that come into this too. Like for instance, if I were to tell you that, do you remember what

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I told you about unsealed text and minuscule text? The unseals are earlier because that style happened.

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What if I told you that a couple of these, which are recipes that make a lot of sense, were written in unseal and not minuscule?

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Therefore, it indicated that they were likely older copies than others that were written in minuscule. Would that weigh into your factoring of which one?

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See, it's not a matter of just counting manuscripts and saying the most manuscripts read this, so we're gonna go with that. We don't count manuscripts.

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It's not an election process where we say, well, this one has so many votes and that one has, this reading has so many votes. We weigh manuscripts.

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It's different than counting manuscripts. You look at a manuscript and the discipline of lower criticism is to look at a manuscript and say, this has this age, it came from this location, it has this sort of transmission history, it looks like it might have been maybe just a copy of the original or a copy of a copy of the original because of its date, because of where it was located and how it was found.

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Those things all weigh in to whether or not how we weigh a manuscript. There are a couple of these recipes that may be in the consideration of it.

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Maybe M6, I would say, look, it adds a lot of explanation to M6, but I really don't even need

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M6 to consider, I can take that completely out of the equation simply because he had a tendency to add so much stuff to it.

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I can remove that, and even in removing M6, I could still bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies from that,

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I still could. I could take M5, M1, or no, M2, which has all the abbreviations, and I could probably remove

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M2 out of that simply because of the spelling errors and the abbreviations, and even if I removed

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M2 from consideration and pretended that that manuscript didn't exist, I still think that I could bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies from that recipe.

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Sorry, what? You'd have a tablespoon of baking soda though. I'd have a tablespoon of baking soda? Tablespoon, tablespoon, one spoon, and I have one

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M4 that has a teaspoon, yep. So now I've just eliminated a majority reading, but because I've eliminated the majority reading, does that mean that the rest of these don't have certain weight?

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I'm talking about weighing manuscripts and how we evaluate those? Doesn't mean that, right?

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And it's, yep, very good point.

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If the nuts issue, which are found in a few manuscripts, weigh in heavily on a theological issue, then that might evaluate how we weigh that, right?

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That if we eliminated every manuscript that had that information in it, would it affect the tenant of the Christian faith?

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Is it a doctrinal issue that is of such significance that the presence of that there would weigh in the likelihood of whether that was an original reading or not, and so it might add weight to that manuscript, to that manuscript family.

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Would any of the copyists add that kind of information? 1 John 2, is it the

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Johannian comma, where it talks about the water and the blood, and these three are one?

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That's not in some of the earliest manuscripts. It seems to be a Trinitarian reference and explanation.

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There was probably a marginal note at some point that got worked into the text at a later date. So we'll talk about this next week.

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This is all to sort of prepare for next week. We're gonna talk about the type of copies, the type of changes or alterations or variances.

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Variance is the word that we're using, the type of variance that we find between manuscripts and how they would have gotten into the text.

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Ken? Yeah, if you found out that nuts always went with chocolate, then that would be a determination of what maybe was in the mind of the copyist when he wrote that.

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Yep, Joe? If nuts were a major part, you'd expect in the ingredients list and not just an addition later on, yep.

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These are all considerations that go into weighing the manuscripts that we find. Jeff? Is it possible that somebody, which one had the 911 minutes, is that M2?

46:58

It's in my pocket, I think, M2. Is it possible that somebody who copied M2 later on might have put the hyphen in there and said, no,

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I happen to know that this is nine to 11 minutes. So I might even find a copy of M2 that has some corrections in it, right, where they corrected

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M2 because they knew, maybe from other manuscripts, other considerations, what that original would have said.

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That's possible, right? Here's what I want you to take away from this. The manuscript tradition of the

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New Testament is not nearly as messed up as that piece of paper that I gave you, not nearly.

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We're not talking about manuscripts that even represent the kind of variance that we have here.

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We talk about manuscripts of the New Testament. We're not talking about this, this is a heavy proliferation of manuscripts,

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I took, or of variance. I took and I threw everything at here that I could think of that comes into copying mistakes or errors the copyists make, all the types of variance that we can find, spelling errors, missing words, added words, errors of the ear, things like that.

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I put all of that in here and I just heaped them all on this to demonstrate that even when you take the variations amongst

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New Testament documents and you multiply it by 10 ,000, it still does not mess up what we can get to at the original, right?

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Because the New Testament is not like this. We're not talking about a paragraph where there's 10 different differences between the same paragraph in another manuscript family.

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That's not what we have. We don't have anything of the type of concentration that I put into this here.

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Nothing even close to that. And you'll see that in the weeks ahead as we look next week at the type of variance that we find.

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All right, any other questions or comments? All right, what I want you to understand is when you're talking about New Testament documents, we're not talking about these kinds of differences.

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We're talking about these kinds of differences, we're not talking about this volume of differences in the text.

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Can you imagine with the type of differences that you have here if this were as long as your New Testament, that one recipe?

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If that were as long as your New Testament, would you be able to even know what your

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New Testament said by the time you got done with it? Not if you had that type of variation between manuscripts of the

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New Testament, but we don't have that volume of variance or differentiation. It's minimal, wildly minimal compared to what we have here in this exercise.

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This was to get you to think of how we look at these and evaluate changes and what goes into evaluating those changes.

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I hope that was productive and we're over time, so let's pray and then we'll be dismissed.

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Father, we are very grateful to you that you have preserved your word, and again, you give us every confidence and every reason to know that because you have promised to preserve your word, you will do that, and you have given to us exactly what we need for life and godliness, and so we're grateful for that, and for the time that we've had, and we pray that your blessing might rest upon our worship, our fellowship with one another, and our service to one another, that is to follow in Christ's name, amen.