Transmission of the NT - Papyri

The Transmission of the New Testament Text and the Challenge of Revelation

If we could put some chairs where the late comers will be able to get to them, maybe up here. If we keep moving stuff back there, it's harder to see. Up here would be a good spot for some folks. I just happened to be digging through my bag, looking for a connector, and look what I found.

Those of you who were here last week, remember we have started looking at the transmission of the text of the New Testament. We gave you some of the bad news last week, and now we're looking at what they don't tell you.

What you're seeing on the screen right now is the last slide we looked at last week, which is where we are comparing the most dissimilar printed editions of the Greek New Testament. For those of you with some study in this area, we're comparing the Byzantine and Alexandrian text types there, and as you can see, there's very little difference between them.

Now, of all the New Testament books, which one do you think we have the fewest manuscripts of? Of all the New Testament books, which one do you think we have the fewest manuscripts of? We have two Johns, a Mark, I can guarantee you we have most of all the Gospels, so that is not going to be correct.

All right, all right, obviously you all are just... Yes, dear? Yes, ma 'am, it is Revelation, thank you very much. That's not fair, she's married. Insider knowledge. Insider training and knowledge, yes.

I don't recall ever having had a conversation about the textual history of Revelation with my wife, but it's been 32 and a half years, so there's any possibility there. Yes, the book of Revelation, we have the fewest manuscripts of any book in the New Testament.

Anyone want to guess as to why that would be? It's not because it's the last book in the New Testament. Remoteness? No? No, because the book of Revelation struggled greatly for inclusion in the canon.

There were a lot of people that did not think that books about seven-headed monsters and things like that should be in the New Testament, and so there were properly a lot of questions about the book of Revelation.

So that would explain the fact that it has the fewest manuscripts, and it has the most unique transmission history. Here's Revelation chapter 1, verses 1 through 11. You'll see there's a little bit more as far as differences there.

Textually speaking, the book of Revelation is a real challenge, not only because of the small number of manuscripts, but it was transmitted in a very, very interesting way. Now, what book of the New Testament do you think might have the cleanest or the purest transmission?

The least number of meaningful variants? Hebrews. That's right. Here's Hebrews 6, 8 through 20, and I only count three spots. There's one there, one there, and one there. As far as any variations there.

So I show these to you as examples of how far off those graphics were that I showed you originally, where you've got three variations for every word. No, that's just not the case. When you actually look at it, you discover that, given this was transmitted to us in handwritten form, as we'll see in a moment, a very interesting handwritten form, it's pretty amazing.

Yes, sir? The green indicates where there's a difference between these Greek manuscripts, and so that's where there are variations between the two most dissimilar, what are called text types, the Byzantine and the Alexandrian text types.

The point is, the vast majority of the text, there's no variation whatsoever. Yeah, so this is a comparison of the most dissimilar. Now, we still need to understand why there are scribal errors. Even the 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 number, for those of you who weren't here last week, we reasoned down to the point where there are about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 meaningful, which means they impact the meaning of the text, viable, possibly original, textual variants in the New Testament.

But even that number needs to be understood. Even when the variant does impact the reading, in the large majority of instances, the careful student of the text can see which reading is original. Many of these errors involve common scribal errors, mistakes that we continue to make this very day when copying from one text to another.

Scribal Error and Homoeoteleuton in 1 John 3:1

Here's an important example in the history of the New Testament. Now, it's interesting, when I first started teaching on this, this was easier for people to associate with and to understand than it is today for younger people, because young people have grown up with computers, and young people have grown up cutting and pasting.

How many of you ever wrote a school term paper using an IBM Selectric? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Notice that everyone that put their hands up either has gray hair or no hair. One of the two. So, when you had to copy from another text, when you had to have a book sitting there, and you'd have to have a paperweight to hold it open, and you're sitting there copying over from one to another, I realize you young people are going, my goodness, you people survived that?

Yes, we did. And we thrived, actually. It's an amazing thing. But it's a little bit easier to explain how that works to older people, because young people, all they know is cut and paste. You just select text, copy, insert.

What's the difficulty? Well, there was obviously difficulties. If you want to look at your Bible, 1 John 3 .1, let's compare the King James, New King James, with the modern translations. Again, as I explained last week, your King James and your New King James are based upon what's called the Textus Receptus.

This is a Greek text based upon between 6 and 12 manuscripts produced in the early 1500s. The modern translation is based upon the modern eclectic text based on about 5700 manuscripts. 1 John 3 .1, Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God.

Therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. Now compare that with the New American Standard. See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us that we would be called children of God, and such we are.

For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know him. For the gentlemen in the audience who are colorblind, and there always are some, the phrase, and such we are, is in red, and you will note that it is not found in the King James translation.

And so you have an assertion of adoption as sons that is not found in the King James. Now, if I was a King James only-ist, and I had something like this, I'd be preaching sermons about how the modern translations don't like the adoption of children as sons of God, or whatever, if the case was reversed.

But why is there a difference? Is it because the translators, the King James and New King James, have something against adoption? No. It's because of the Greek text that they are translating. The Greek text from which KJV was translated simply lacked the phrase, and such we are.

But why? Well, in this instance, we have a glowing example of what's called homoe teluton. Homoe teluton. Before you leave today, you will have to be able to pronounce and define homoe teluton. George, stand at the back door.

You cannot get past George unless you give the secret keyword, which is homoe teluton, which means similar endings. I want everyone practicing that over lunch today. Homoe teluton. Think how many times you've been copying a word.

Again, this is for older folks. You've been copying a word ending with such combinations as ing, tion, or es, very common grammatical terminations of words in the English language. And when looking back at what you were copying, have mistakenly started with a different word that had the same ending.

So you just typed the word, you just typed or wrote the word education. You look back at what you're copying from, you see tion, and you continue on. The problem is the tion you just looked at is at the end of the word instruction, it's on the next line.

And in the process, you inadvertently delete everything between education and instruction. Why? Because they both end with the same series of letters. This was a common scribal error in the copying of any ancient manuscript, not just the New Testament, but any ancient manuscript.

Now, if you have, as many people today do have, an electronic Bible study program, you might have a Greek New Testament or something like that in it. This is from the Lagos Library. And we have 1 John 3, 1, and here it says, the Father in order that show of God we might be called, and we are, for this reason the world is not knowing us.

And right next to, and we are, you see a little square and then a backslash. That is the indication of a deleted phrase in some witnesses. You find the little square, there it is right there over in the witnesses.

And these are the witnesses that do not contain, and we are. KL 04969. The KL and 049 are unsealed manuscripts. I'll explain what an unseal is here in a moment. You're always looking for this, it's called a Fraktur M.

Fraktur is a German font. And that means majority text. The majority of manuscripts do not contain this, but the majority text also comes from a thousand years and more after the time of Christ. So we'll be looking at this in a moment, but I'll show you the relative numbers of manuscripts.

And VGMS means certain manuscripts of Vulgate do not contain it as well. All other witnesses, therefore, contain the phrase, and we are. But this doesn't explain why the scribal error would take place.

Let me illustrate it for you. Here is what the relevant portion of the Greek, as it would have appeared in the unseal or majuscule, there's two ways of referring to it, the majuscule text as it appeared in the early days of the New Testament.

And what you need to understand is that up till the 9th century, and in some places the 10th century, all New Testament manuscripts were written in all capital letters, no spaces between words, and almost no punctuation.

So it would simply be page after page, line after line of capital letters crammed together. When you get to the end of the line, you just start on the next line, even if it's in the middle of a word. And that's how it was written.

That's how all the manuscripts of that day were written. So, especially if you don't know Greek, looking at just simply a long line of capital letters, you can see why, if you're not paying real close attention, you can make a mistake.

Let me use color to show you where the issue comes in. We can see tecna, theou, theou is what's called the nomena sacra, Lord, God, Jesus, they were all abbreviated in Christian manuscripts. We don't know why.

I'll tell you more about that later. Children of God, clathomen, we might be called chi esmen, and we are diatuta, for this reason the world does not know us. Clathomen, we might be called, ends with mu epsilon nu, or m-e-n in English.

Chi esmen ends with mu epsilon nu. And so you've just written down clathomen, your eye goes back to what you're copying, you see chi esmen, you see the m-e-n, you continue on from there, you've inadvertently deleted chi esmen in the process.

It wasn't purposeful, it doesn't require some grand conspiracy, I don't like adoption of sons of God, etc., etc. No, it's just a simple error of sight, and again, if we only had one manuscript, this would be a bad thing.

If we only had one manuscript that came after someone made this error, that would be a bad thing, but we have lots of manuscripts from a number of different lines, and once you're then able to compare them, you go, oh, see, there's homo et al.

Even if the majority text has the error, still, once you can see what the describable error was, it's fairly straightforward to understand what the real issue is. Now, as I just mentioned, the majority of the 5700 plus Greek manuscripts date from after 1000 A .D., comprising the majority text.

The earlier texts are called papyri texts because they're written upon papyrus. Papyrus is made of taking the leaves of the papyrus plant, putting them at 90 degree angles to one another, pressing them together.

It produces one very smooth side, and one not so smooth side. And ironically, there are almost no Christian scrolls that have ever been found. Again, we don't know why. Christians preferred the codex.

They preferred the book form that you and I use today, even though that was not the most popular form at the time. And especially with papyri, one side's smooth, the other side isn't. That means you're writing on a rough side, but they still preferred that form.

We do not know why. Unsealed text, as I mentioned, probably better to call it maguscule text, same thing. All capital forms, no spacing, almost no punctuation. And this is what the earliest manuscripts are found in.

I'm going to be showing you lots of manuscripts as time goes by here. Now, as we look at all those manuscripts, scholars have been able to identify families of manuscripts. There is some argument today as to whether the Caesarean really exists or not.

But the two ends of the extreme are the Alexandrian versus the Byzantine. The Byzantine is obviously the majority text. There is a reason for this, and it's fairly easy to understand. When you think about church history, starting in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the Western church began to use Latin as its primary language.

Greek was still being used in North Africa, in what we would call Israel, and so on and so forth. Then something really important happens between 632 and 732. What happens between 632 and 732? The rise of Islam.

Muhammad dies at 632. For the next 100 years, Islam expands all across North Africa, across into Spain, Portugal, into France. And in 732, their expansion into Europe is stopped. The Battle of Tours, Charles Martel, 732.

So exactly 100 years. And, of course, they also have gone all the way up toward Constantinople, all the way across into Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on and so forth. And so the vast majority of places where, well, all the places where the Alexandrian text predominated are now controlled by Islam.

The only place that for the next 800 years is going to be producing Greek manuscripts is around Byzantium, Constantinople, or modern-day Istanbul. And so the Greek church in that area continues to use Greek, continues to produce Greek manuscripts, and hence the text type that is popular in that area is going to be, by far, the majority of manuscripts we possess today.

That's why the vast majority of scholars do not count manuscripts. They weigh manuscripts. That is, you don't give every manuscript an equal weight in a reading, because if you have a bunch of manuscripts from 11 centuries after the time of Christ, you've got far fewer from the 3rd century.

Obviously, the 3rd century is a whole lot closer than the 11th century. And the number of generations between the original and that is going to be smaller than it's going to be nearly 1 ,000 years later.

And so the Byzantine manuscripts are definitely the majority. Here's another graphic that gives you a little better understanding. You can see our papyri are down here in blue. The unsealed texts, the great unseals in vellum manuscripts, leather manuscripts, extremely parchment, very fine parchment.

And then you see, starting in the 9th century into the 10th century, the minuscule form is developed. That's large and small letters spaced between words and punctuation, like we have today, which is what the vast majority of Greek New Testaments are in today.

That develops here in the 9th century very quickly, takes over the unseals, and you can see this is where the vast majority of the manuscripts come from, and this is also after the Islamic expansion, so they're all Byzantine in their form.

Early Papyri and the Earliest New Testament Fragments

I said we were going to look at some manuscripts, so let's look at some manuscripts. This is Ryland's 457, better known as P -52. That's not a fighter plane, but there was a great fighter plane known as P -52 as well.

Now, I mentioned a couple weeks ago. Was it last week or a couple weeks ago? I think it was a couple weeks ago. The new finds in the Egyptian funerary masks. Remember I mentioned that? Again, until that is vetted and discussed and published in a scholarly fashion, so on and so forth, we really can't put a lot of weight on that yet.

So, certainly to this point, what we're looking at is pretty much, there are obviously people who disagree, there are a couple other scraps they would look at, but pretty much the agreed upon earliest fragment that we have of the New Testament, P -52.

It is about 3 1⁄2 inches by about 2 1⁄2 inches, about the size of a credit card, written on both sides. What's amazing today is we have fonts that match these ancient manuscripts. My family is going to sleep right now because two years ago for our Christmas devotional, our Christmas devotional was on P -52, if you can believe that.

It can be done, trust me. And so, we have fonts that match these papyri now. So this is how the text would have flowed around. See, there you go. So you're looking at the top corner of a page. You can sort of see the margin up there is where this came from.

And it was in a cardboard box in a basement in the early 1930s in London, or England. I'm not sure it was London. And a guy was looking through this stuff and started reading this. Now, it's tough to read because you're looking at only a few words, you know, in a sentence and without much in the way of context.

So it's not the easiest thing to do. But he started reading it and said, wait a minute, I recognize this. And he recognized it was from the New Testament. And it was sent to the four leading papyrologists of the day.

And three of the four dated it. Now, when you date a piece of papyri, you don't just take it out for pizza. Okay, anyway. A little bit of textual critical humor. Come on, you got it. Yeah, thankfully, no.

That would have probably brought the whole thing to an end. They are dated. Now, obviously, some can be dated because they're found in the lining of a book and there's a date in the book, and so it can't be any later than this date and so on and so forth.

But the vast majority, especially of the earliest fragments, are just that, just tiny little fragments. So how do you figure out what the date is? Well, each of the emperors brought in their own scribes and they brought in their own style of handwriting.

And so, you know, there's a Hadrianic form and obviously if you have emperors and only emperors for a short period of time, it's a little bit more difficult. But when you've got emperors that are around for a long time, you know, we have lots of secular documents from that time period, and we can compare them with one another.

And so, generally, you date it within a 50-year time range. So this was dated between 100 and 150. So 125 AD is the center point by three of the four. One dated it to the first century, about 95. Now, you need to realize, up until last century, we didn't have anything earlier than around 325 and even then, most of that century had passed, we didn't have anything before about 500.

So we're talking about some pretty major increases in manuscript finds. And what's wonderful to me about this particular text, why I think it's just so awesome, if you had gone to seminary in Germany in the 1870s, you would have been told that scholarship was assured, it was the assured results of modern scholarship, that the Gospel of John was written around 175 to 180 AD.

Why? Well, because scholarship was convinced that the high view of Jesus found the Gospel of John, it would take a long time for that to develop. And so John simply could not have been written any earlier than about 170 to 180 AD.

Now, of course, what's P52 of? P52 is from John chapter 18, verses 31 through 34 on one side and verses 37 to 38 on the other side. Ironically, it is the very discussion of Jesus with Pilate, where Pilate says, what is truth?

And so the earliest fragment currently that we have that has been thoroughly vetted is from the Gospel of John. In fact, of the four Gospels, the earliest and widest attested is the Gospel of John. Mark is the least.

Now, this new find might change that and give us the earliest fragment of anything, so it might be from Mark now, but that hasn't been proven as yet. For now, John has that distinction. And all of you know that I am a geek, and so here is a picture from my debate with Bart Ehrman a number of years ago, and you'll notice what I'm wearing.

That is my P52 tie. It has both sides of P52, fully readable, and there in the second picture, you see me giving a copy of my P52 tie to Bart Ehrman. That's one of the few times during the evening he smiled and I don't know what he does with it today.

He may have burned it. Maybe he wears it once a semester to show his students something about the crazy fundamentalist. I don't know. But there you go. There's the P52 tie. Now, almost every time when I talk about this fragment, I'm in a church someplace, and so what I do is I say, now, if you have any questions about what I'm about to tell you, talk to your pastor.

But now I'm in my own church, so I really can't get away with that. So I have to be a little more careful. This is P115 from about 250 to 275. As you can see, we have portions of a page. Portions of a page.

What is special about this, about P115, is it's one of only two papyri fragments we have of the Book of Revelation. Now, if I were to ask you all, what is the number of the beast, you would all say 666.

I mean, we could probably flag down a motorcycle group going by on 12th Street and say, what's the number of the beast? And they'd all pull up their t-shirts and go, 666, you know, right there. And they all know.

Well, maybe. Why? Well, because if you blow up that one section right there, this is from Revelation chapter 13. And Revelation chapter 13 is where we get the number of the beast. Problem is, in both of the earliest papyri manuscripts we have of the Book of Revelation, it doesn't say 666.

It says 616. 616. That explains it. You have an explanation for us, brother? Oh, you're volunteering. You put your hand up. What's the explanation? So much for Henry Kissinger. Anyone remember? Any of you old enough to remember when Henry Kissinger was the beast?

Some of you are going, what? Oh, yeah. I mean, everyone's name has eventually added up to 666. Well, Henry's off the hook now because there's no way you can get it to 616. It just doesn't work. Do you have a note or something there?

Now, I think possibly that Dan Wallace at Dallas Seminary has figured out what's going on here. I think I stole this directly from Dan. He says 666 is the number of the beast and 616 is the number of the neighbor of the beast.

I just wait for a few seconds. Let that one sink in slowly. Some people still afterwards are asking me, I don't understand. Why would the beast have a neighbor? It's the street address. Get close by is 616.

Got it now? Got it? Okay, good. Pizza, yeah. Any further questions about the beast should be directed to... You're volunteering? Okay, good. All right. Yes. Yes, sir. Hebrew? Yeah, I don't know. Well, I've heard a lot.

Yeah, certainly Nero has been a very popular fulfillment of the number. No two ways about it. But the fact is we just don't know. I mean, still the majority of scholars who go for 666, even though the two earliest manuscripts don't say that, the vast majority of other manuscripts coming from other lines do.

So it does, though, make it a little bit more difficult for Hal Lindsay to sell new books. Or old books, for that matter, which I think he still is. Yes. No, it is Greek, and they use their own letters.

They use letters for numbers. They don't use Roman numerals. That would be Latin. That would be Latin. So I'm going to just leave you with lots of questions about that and show you this. We'll ask Pastor Fry later.

Yes, Pastor Fry, I'm sure, will be happy to entertain. He preached... Hey, I say whoever preached the Revelation last gets to answer that question. Hmm, who is that? Okay, all right. I'm off the hook.

So he's stuck with it. Here's P72. Very clear image here, as you can see. In fact, it's readable. Notice right here, if you can read any Greek letters at all, it says Petru Epistole Be. Petru Epistole Be.

What do you think that is? Second Epistle of Peter. So there's the beginning of 2 Peter. There's the end of 1 Peter. And a little doodads there mean that's the end of a book. And the little drawings and so on and so forth.

There's the end of the book. This is from around 175 -200. P72 is the earliest copy we have of 1, 2 Peter, and Jude. I saw this very page in 1993 when I went up to Denver to debate gerrymatitics on the papacy.

They had a museum exhibit there with the Pope's visit. And this was one of the things on display. And so Rich and I went to go see it. And it was one of the first things. It was under glass. And I come walking up to it, and I'm like, oh, man, look at this.

Remember I mentioned to you before the Nomena Sacra. The Nomena Sacra are the abbreviations. For example, there's Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, God, Jesus. There's God right there. See those little lines?

Whenever you'd see lines over those words in a manuscript, that was the dead giveaway. This is a Christian manuscript. A Christian produced this. And again, we don't know why they developed this system of abbreviation.

Some would use three letters. Some other manuscripts, it's only two. But Christians use these abbreviations. We do not know why. There are bunches and bunches of theories, but nobody knows why. But I'm reading.

I'm starting to translate it, and I'm just enjoying myself immensely. Especially because 2 Peter 1 .1 is one of our early references to the deity of Christ right there. Let's blow it up. And thank you very much.

There is what's called a Granville Sharp construction. 2 Peter 1 .1, our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. So, you know, for all the Da Vinci Code fans, here is absolute refutation of the Da Vinci Code because they said that Constantine made this up in 325.

And this is 175 to 200. And there you have the deity of Christ very clearly found in the papyrus itself. But I'm reading this thing, and people would come up, and they'd sort of read the description, and they'd look at it, and they'd look at me, and they'd look over at Rich, and they'd go, can he read that?

And Rich would go, yeah. Look at this. Harold, this man's reading this ancient papyri. And people start gathering around. The security guy's doing this number. And so Rich would grab me and make me go look at a crown or a tiara or something for a little while.

Then I'm right back to it again. And eventually the security folks suggested we move along. But it was fantastic because when you think about it, this was copied during a period of time where in certain parts of the Roman Empire you could lose your life for even possessing the Christian scriptures.

And I have often asked myself the question, if we had to make our own handwritten copies of the Bible, I wonder how many of us would have even a full New Testament, let alone an Old Testament. And yet here's someone who may well have risked their life.

And you'll notice that's not the greatest penmanship in the world. This does not look like a professional scribe or something. This could very well have been a businessman, maybe a soldier, who sought out Christian fellowship.

And, you know, they bring out the scrolls to be read. Not scrolls, the books to be read. And they read from 1st and 2nd Peter. And the guy goes, what's that? I've never heard that before. Well, that's one of Peter's epistles.

Well, we don't have that in our church. Could I make a copy? Sure. And that's how copies were made. They didn't ask him for his professional copyist card. Could we see some examples of your previous work first?

No, that's not how it was done. And so we look at these early papyri, and that's the form that they have. And these are available all over the place. I had the opportunity of seeing some of these. Well, let me just show you a couple others before we run out of time here.

Here's one of the most important, and I hope to get to see this one later this year when I'm teaching in Zurich. I hope to have time to run over to Geneva to see it. This is P75. It's a Gospels manuscript.

This was done by a professional scribe. Probably did business documents. It wasn't meant to look pretty, but he was very accurate. Very, very accurate. And it's a Gospels manuscript. It's the end of Luke and the beginning of John there in P75.

Very, very important. And then here's P66. And what I like about this particular picture of P66 is you get to see, instead of individual pages, you get to see what the book itself looked like. And what's important to see is what would happen to books back then.

The outer edges is where you get most of your damage, and more of it is going to be down at the bottom and up at the top. So you end up with this kind of form. And we'll see... Let me just show you really quickly here.

I'll come back to this. Here's P46. See? The exact same type of thing that you have in P66, which I think is really, really interesting. This is also John 1 .1. There's Kaitheos Einhalagos right here in that first section of P66.

So P66 and P72, really important manuscripts for the Gospels. Then, last one I'll try to sneak in here real quickly. I saw this manuscript in the Chester Beaty Library in Dublin a few years ago. I saw this very page.

It was on display. And this is... What does P46 contain? Well, this is Prosphilipasios to the Philippians. So P46 is our earliest collection of Paul's epistles. Paul's epistles. Now, here's what I want to ask you all to help me with.

I always ask every audience this. And in every single audience, there are people who say I'm not going to participate. And they won't participate. Now I'm at home now, so I'm sure everybody will participate.

No one's gonna diss me here, right? Because what book in the New Testament is anonymous? Hebrews. And there are people who believe that Paul wrote Hebrews, and there are people who don't believe Paul wrote Hebrews.

Well, this is the earliest, from around 175 to 200, earliest collection we have of Paul's epistles. So what's the natural question? Does it contain Hebrews or not? And so I always love to ask every audience, how many of you think P46 contains Hebrews?

How many of you think it does not contain Hebrews? How many of you joined with all those anonymous people and completely blew me off and did not vote? Hmm? Anyone? Anyone? Uh-huh. Well, I was one person.

I was one person. It does contain Hebrews. It does contain Hebrews. Which only tells you that someone around the beginning of the 3rd century believed Paul wrote Hebrews. That's really all it tells you, but it is interesting that it's there.

We did get in trouble with security, again, thanks to this. They were displayed, the pages were displayed under very dim light for obvious reasons. And so we're trying to read them. We're trying to read them.

And so we realized, well, the light's coming from up top. They're at an angle, so if we get down here, then the light will be reflecting directly. So we're on our, I'm on my knees, looking up at it, and the light's a lot brighter.

And so I'm able to go, oh, okay, we're right here, and here's this term, and here's that term, and here comes security. Because you can just imagine what they saw on the monitors. Oh, great, the Christians are worshipping the manuscripts again.

We better go break this up, you know. And so they, you know, these security guards show up, and we explain to them, no, we're not worshipping. We are translating them, though. You can read that? Yeah, we can read that.

Oh, okay. It was unusual. But it was great. Yeah, yeah, really, yeah. What really, what really, what was a real bummer was they have all of Philippians out, and I wanted to see the Carmen Christi. I wanted to see Philippians 2, 5 through 11.

Because it's in here. It's in P46. But the way they have it displayed, they have the other side of the page out. See, I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I mean, I have it in my programs and stuff now.

It's all available online in high-quality digital. But it was still pretty cool to actually see it. And that one was on the back side. But you can see the Nomen Osacra. So you can see Nomen Osacra there, there, there, there.

Nomen Osacra up here. Again, we just don't know why they did that. But they did. All right? All right, we are out of time, and I'm not even done with the papyri yet. But next time, we will press on with our New Testament Reliability Studies.

Let's thank the Lord for our time. Lord, we are thankful for all that you've given to us, how you've preserved the Word for us. We thank you for this time to consider these things. We ask that now you would be with us as we go into worship.

May you be honored and glorified in all that takes place in this place. We pray in Christ's name.

Amen. Papyri. 616 in the Hebrew numerology. What adds up to...