Divine Scripture: Bible or Qur'an?

Debate Format and Opening Statements

Right here we have Mr. Abdullah Hamimi and Abdullah we're very thankful you can be with us. Abdullah has contributed long-standing efforts working closely to mobilize large-scale collective action between Muslim university students associations all across Victoria.

Leading many community initiatives, Abdullah's dedication lies in educating and equipping his wider community to confidently practice and share Islam with others. He is the Australasia Outreach Specialist for IERA and also an executive board member at his local Muslim community organization, Pillars of Guidance Community Centre.

Motivated by challenging existing ideological frameworks, he is committed to uplifting his local and global Muslim community. If you could please give a round of applause for Mr. Hamimi. And to my left here we have Dr. James White.

James White comes from Phoenix, Arizona. He is the Director of Alpha and Omega Ministries. He is the author of over 24 books and has participated in over 170 moderated debates. And we are very excited that he has come to Australia.

He has just recently ministered in Sydney last week. And he is also a part of the Hills Bible Church Apologetics Conference this weekend. So we are grateful for him. If you could also give him a round of applause.

Now before we formally begin our proceedings, I want to just tell you what you are going to be in for. We are going to have a time where there will be two 20-minute presentations. And these will be timed.

You'll notice that I have a beautiful captain's bell here. Listen to this. When that bell rings, our speaker needs to finish up what he is saying. And we want to be tight with the time so that we can be respectful to the program.

And I've always wanted to use that bell. We are going to have two 20-minute presentations. And that will be followed by two 10-minute rebuttals. We will then move into a 30-minute section where we are going to have some cross-examination and dialogue.

Each speaker will be given 15 minutes to lead those questions. And that, of course, will also be timed. And then we will conclude with two five-minute closing remarks. And where possible at the end of the program, if you have any questions, I'm sure we're available.

The speakers would love to be able to talk to you. And we will advise after this event in terms of where and when you can find the video and audio recordings of today. And what I would like to encourage everybody is when you are hearing the presentations, if you could please show your respect by holding back any applause or comment.

Until the end of the presentation, we want to respect both of the speakers and give them the ability to be able to communicate these things clearly as we respectfully listen on. I'd like to begin by, first of all, asking Dr. James White if he could come and bring our opening presentation.

Thank you, Dr. White.

The Bible and the Qur'an as Different Kinds of Texts

All right. Well, it is indeed a pleasure to be with you. I am very glad that Abdullah was able to make it through that wonderful... I'm discovering that Australians have interesting difficulties with traffic.

It seems a little bit like the United States in that way. But I'm very happy that you all were able to be here this afternoon. And I wasn't exactly sure what direction to go in our discussion on the subject of the Bible and the Quran.

Abdullah was very kind to take this discussion on in a very relatively short period of time. And so we didn't want to do anything that was completely out of the norm. And, of course, I've done many dialogues before on the subject of the Bible and the Quran.

But thankfully, I think it was only about four or five days ago you had a dialogue. Was that at Monash University? Was it Wednesday? Something along those lines. With a Christian on this very same subject.

So I watched that and said, OK, there we go. We'll be able to be a little bit more focused that way. Because when you talk about comparing two scriptures, let's keep a few things in mind. Not everyone knows the historical backgrounds of these two particular books.

But when you're looking at the Bible, you're talking about a collection of writings by more than 40 authors. That was collected over 1500 years. And so written in multiple languages, Hebrew in the Old Testament.

But, of course, Hebrew went through a lot of change and development during the lengthy period of time during which what we call the Old Testament or the Tanakh was being written. There are about 12 chapters of Aramaic as well.

And then you have Koine Greek in the New Testament. And a much shorter time period for the writing of that. But you have very, very, very ancient material in the Pentateuch, the writings of Moses. Less ancient once you get to the minor prophets who are up to about 400 years before the time of Christ.

Then the New Testament is written in a very short period of time, relatively speaking. And then you have with the Koran, you're coming 600 years later. This is in historical. Let's not get into the debate today on the eternality of the Koran.

I just did a debate with Yusuf Ismail in South Africa on that subject about two months ago if you want to take a look at that. But at least as far as historical appearance, the Koran comes about 600 years after that.

So Koran is not actually an ancient work in that sense. Because it's coming right at the beginning of the medieval period. It wouldn't classically be identified as one of the works of antiquity like the New Testament would be.

And so the Koran is also significantly smaller. It's only 14 the length of the entire Bible. About 53 the length of the New Testament as far as the number of words are concerned. And so it's a much smaller volume and it's a relatively much more recent volume.

So in other words, it only had to go through about 800 years of handwritten transmission before the invention of printing in the West. Whereas the New Testament has to go through about 1400 years and portions of the Old Testament multiple thousands of years.

And so when we're comparing these two volumes, we're comparing very, very different works. One is one language and we're told one author versus a collection of over 40 authors collected over 1500 years in comparison to about 12.

So very, very different things. And so I have often asked in my dialogues and discussions with Muslims when criticism is made of the Old and New Testaments. Well, we need to use the same standards. We need to have, as the Koran refers to, equal scales.

We need to use the same standards of evidence and reasoning and so on and so forth. And so when we do that, when we talk about the Bible and the Koran, we have to be very, very careful. Most Muslims and Christians just simply look at it as a volume on the table and do not recognize the historical reality of how these books came together.

And a lot of Christians are not aware of the historical reality of how, for example, the New Testament came together. It's very important to recognize, I think, if we want to seek to compare. And if any of you have my book, Whatever a Christian Needs to Know About the Koran.

Do you have that book? You can get an autographed one, yes. We'll try to try to work that out. But you have read it? Oh, no. OK, well, you may lose your copy today. Yeah, OK. In my book, in chapters 9 and 11, I deal with this specific issue.

You could have known everything I was going to say. Oh, man. I'll send you on YouTube. It's OK. OK. So what is really important for both sides to understand is that one of the fundamental differences between the Bible and the Koran, other than the things we've already mentioned here, that is multiple authors, different kinds of literature in the Old and New Testaments.

You have apocalyptic and poetry and so on and so forth. And there are a couple of different forms of various of the surahs in the Koran, but not nearly as wide a variety of literature as you have in the context of the Bible.

But the most important thing, I think, that would help advance the conversations that we need to be having between our communities. And by the way, if I could just say this, I'm really hoping that conversations with young men like Abdullah will, in the future, lead to an advancement of our conversations between our communities to important issues.

I'm afraid that in the past, very often our conversations have gotten stuck into certain ruts and don't necessarily result in a lot of increased understanding of what either side actually believes. I want to see that advancement in the future because it can be done with respect.

We don't have to be at each other's throats. We will always, as long as Islam remains Islam and Christianity remains Christianity, be at disagreement with one another. Surah 112, Ayah 3, If that is directly in reference to Christianity, and I think that it is, we will always have reason to be at disagreement on key issues.

But that doesn't mean that we cannot respect one another and that we cannot engage in this type of dialogue in a meaningful fashion. And I think the whole world needs a whole lot more of the dialogue rather than the fighting, personally.

And so I'd love to see an advancement of the topics. And here's my contribution to that. The fundamental difference between the Quran and the New Testament. Let's focus upon the New Testament because the history of the Old Testament is so long and so far back in antiquity that it's very, very difficult.

The fundamental difference is between what is called a free transmission of a text and a controlled transmission of a text. Now what does that mean? In the New Testament, the older of the two documents, and the longer and the multi-authored document, you have multiple writers writing it multiple times to multiple audiences.

So, the Apostle Paul, he didn't write all his letters in the same place. The Gospels probably weren't written in the same place. The Book of Revelation was not written in the same place as other books.

So you have multiple authors, multiple times, writing to multiple audiences. That meant that certain churches, for example, if you received a letter from the Apostle Paul, then you would let copies of that be made and they'd be distributed to other churches, but you'd have that one, you'd keep that one particularly to yourself.

And eventually collections of those letters would be made, and collections of the Gospels were made, and eventually those were put together with the letters of Paul. And you have a process going on, and the important thing is, it's not a straight line.

You don't have someone writing the New Testament, and then a copy is made of the New Testament, and then a copy is made of the New Testament, and then a copy is made of the New Testament. You have multiple origination sources, and hence you have multiple lines of transmission going up through history until they start being collected together.

Now why is that important? It's extremely important because what it means is there was never, ever a time in the history of the New Testament when any man or group of men could control what was in the New Testament.

Oh, I know that's against YouTube, and if you get your scholarship from YouTube, you'll believe anything on any subject there is. But there was never a time historically when any one man or group of men controlled the New Testament.

Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code, Constantine, that is all absurd from any historical perspective whatsoever. It could not have happened. There is no way that Constantine could have gathered up all the copies of the Gospels and made wholesale changes.

He couldn't have found all of them. We have manuscripts today that had already been buried in the sands of Egypt before Constantine was ever born. He wouldn't have had access to those things, and hence if he did make changes later on, once we find those earlier manuscripts, there would be huge differences between them.

But the reality is, as we began finding the papyri, they're called the papyri, we started really finding them en masse in the 1930s. The British had stolen them from Egypt long before during the colonial period and dragged them back to London.

And as we discovered these papyri, did we discover a new New Testament, some new message? No, not at all. They confirmed the accuracy of the manuscripts that we already had, the great unseals like Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, Washingtonianus, etc.

So, that kind of editing could not take place in a free transmission of the text. Now, the result of free transmission of the text is something called textual variation. Because for the first 300 years of the church, there's persecution.

Especially between 250 and 313, there's empire-wide persecution. The Romans are trying to destroy the New Testament, and so the Christians are having to make a lot of copies of the New Testament to make sure that people have the scriptures.

And they didn't require you to be a professionally trained scribe to make a copy. If you wanted to make a copy of 1 Peter for your church, because your church didn't have a copy of 1 Peter, they didn't say, let me see your scribal accreditations card, please, before we allow you to do that.

No, you were allowed to make a copy. And so when we look at those early papyri, we see varying levels of skills and clarity of writing and so on and so forth. And the result is something called textual variation.

If I took a handwritten document and gave it to everybody in the front row and asked them to copy it and give it to everybody in the second row, and then they gave their copy to the third row, by the time it got back to the back, we would have a number of differences in what was originally given.

But if we could find your copy and your copy and your copy and your copy on the way and compare them together, we'd have a very good ability to reconstruct what was given to the people in the first row.

That's similar to what we have in looking at the transmission of any ancient text, but especially in regards to the New Testament. That is the result of the free transmission of the text. The cost is textual variance, which we need to study to this day, but the good thing is there could never be any substantial editing or changing of any of those documents that would not stand out in clear display as earlier and earlier manuscripts have been found.

That gives us the free transmission gives you the highest level of confidence. The more lines of transmission that you have, the higher the level of confidence that you have. We have almost 5 ,800 fragments of the New Testament in Greek, plus you add in the Latin, Syriac, Boheric, Coptic, etc., etc.

We have over 25 ,000 handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament. As Bart Ehrman said in the debate we did in 2009, the New Testament has the earliest attestation of any work of antiquity. No other work of antiquity comes close.

Every other work written contemporaneously with the New Testament, the average amount of time between the first manuscript that we have and the extant now and when it was written is between 500 and 900 years.

For the New Testament, we have fragments, for example, the Gospel of John, P52, a little credit card fragment from John 18, verses 31 -34 and 37 -38, is from around 125. So, four times earlier than any other work of antiquity that would be contemporaneous with the New Testament.

That's what we're dealing with. Now, what is a controlled transmission? A controlled transmission is Sahih al-Bukhari, volume 6, pages 509 and 510, which I will allow Abdullah to narrate for you because he did it earlier when he gave the presentation just a few days ago.

Specifically, a controlled transmission is when there is an external authority or power that is involved in revision or control of an official text and has the power to actually enforce that. And so, fundamentally, when you have Uthman specifically creating an official version of the text and then sending that official version to the major Islamic cities and saying, this is the Qur 'an that you are to use and anything else is to be destroyed.

And you have people like Ubaid Ibn Ka 'b and Ibn Masud who are going, well, Ka 'b not so much, but especially Ibn Masud going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Muhammad said, I was one of the people you come to for the Qur 'an and I'm not giving mine up.

And so, there's dispute. But when you have the governmental authority saying, this is the version you are to use, destroy anything else, that is not a free transmission of the text, that is a controlled transmission of the text.

Now, for most folks, you'd rather have the controlled one. Now, I don't know about you, I do not want the United States government approved version of the Bible. That concerns me greatly. It really, really does.

But what if it's a religious government? What if it's the successor of Muhammad? Then why not? That would be a good thing to have. And a lot of people don't like the fact that in the margins of your Bible, it's in little teeny tiny print, but it says right over there, some manuscripts say this and some manuscripts say that.

And if you're a Christian, you've got to admit, there were times you looked at it and said, I don't know if I like that. You should be very thankful that that is in the margin of your Bible. You should be very thankful you have that kind of information available to you.

Because the controlled transmission of a text can only give you confidence back to the last revision of that particular text. So, let me give an illustration. Some of you may remember the movies with Indiana Jones years ago.

I'm dating myself here. Some of you will watch some of the oldies channels. And you remember the search for the Holy Grail. And the Holy Grail is in this, remember the cave with the dude that had been sitting around in there for 700 years as a really boring job and didn't even have cable.

And I'm not sure how you live for 700 years and a Nazi can shoot you and you die immediately. But anyway, the believability was sort of rough. But a lot of people would like that, let's just have one version of the New Testament and it's kept in one place and if we need to know, we go ask the guy who lives for 700 years and protects it.

That way we'd have no notes, we'd have no concerns whatsoever. Except for one thing. How do you know what he's been doing in there for 700 years? You've got no way to check. Maybe he decided he could do a better job than the original writers did.

You have no way of knowing because unless you have a free transmission of the text and hence can compare many, many manuscripts, if you only got one, you have to trust that whoever produced that one got it exactly right.

And so what if Uthman was successful? What if he produces the final edition and he sends it out and says everything else needs to be destroyed and everything else was destroyed? It wasn't. That's one of the issues we need to discuss.

On a papyri, a manuscript finds things like that. But what if he was successful? How far back then could you go in the transmission of a controlled text only back to the last successful revision? I remember I debated Adnan Rashid on this subject in London a number of years ago and he said, hey, as long as we can get back to Uthman, that's perfectly fine with me.

So there you go. As long as that's your ultimate authority, there you go. But you're admitting we can't go back to the original, we can only go back to the last revision in a controlled transmission of a text.

Now when you have controlled transmission, you're going to have much less in the way of textual variation. There are textual variants in manuscripts of the Quran. That is not even a questionable thing.

I'm sure that's not going to be disputed today. That's been admitted by many of my opponents, easily documented. But you're not going to have nearly as many because you don't have nearly as many copies being made.

So what's the situation we face today? One of the things that we need to understand is that issue of the free transmission versus controlled transmission. And then, it's a little bit unfair, but we have critical editions of the Greek New Testament today.

I have one over there I can talk to you about a little bit later on. We have the Nessian, the 28th edition. We're working on what's called the ECM, the Edicio Critico Mayor. It's supposed to be done by 2030.

It's going to be huge, probably about 40 volumes long in regards to the manuscript evidence of the New Testament. It's going to be awesome to have all that information available to us. But we have many critical editions available to us with the manuscripts listed and so on and so forth.

There is not yet a critical edition of the Quran. They're working on it. There is a project undergoing. But as far as having an even close to complete catalog of all the manuscripts, their contents, collations of the manuscripts, the availability of information, the critical study of the Quran is in its infancy in comparison to the New Testament.

And that means the conclusions that we come to in this type of a dialogue and discussion have to be that they can't be final. I'm not going to be one of those people that says, and as a result, this is what you must believe.

No, there is more information to come. But the reality is that one side has significantly more data from which to draw than the other side does as to the history of their text, which is a little bit interesting given the fact that the Quran is 600 years younger and hence was written much closer to the time period of the modern time as well.

Those are issues we'll have to be getting into. Hopefully that wasn't too much information too fast, but it's a good foundation to get us started. We've got a lot more time to talk about it. Thank you very much for your attention.

I needed to ring that bell. Thank you, James. I'd like to now begin a 20-minute presentation as Abdullah brings this one to us now.

Manuscript Variants, Textual Criticism, and the Reliability Problem

Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to thank the organisers for providing this opportunity and also seeing James White in real life. I've only seen him on the computer so far, and I look forward to reading his book.

I echo a lot of the sentiments that he expressed in terms of dialogue between either faith and the nature of respect and reflection, not necessarily to answer questions, but perhaps to get us to think a little bit more deeper about our own beliefs and our own foundations for both sides.

I'll begin my presentation. You might actually get an opportunity to ring this bell on me because I've got quite a few things to run through, but let's go into it. Have you ever thought about how religious scriptures, how the religious scriptures that we have today have been passed on throughout history?

And thanks to innovations like the printing press in the world that we live in, which allows for the mass distribution of information, we don't have to really worry about the loss of our religious texts because of the printing.

We only have to account for a small portion of our history of most of our religious texts because of that, which span thousands of years. The vast majority of religious texts today have been passed down to us through scribal traditions, whereby manuscripts are copied word for word, hand by hand, using materials such as ink and leather.

And so the question here is, is this method of preserving information reliable? So have a think about communications in the modern world, such as email, text messages. Have you ever sent an email or a text message that contains spelling or grammar mistakes?

And even with the benefit of modern computers, phones, even with professional media outlets and spelling and grammar, spell check and whatnot. Now imagine if you have a copy of an entire book with hundreds of pages by hand, and it's been copied by hand and only with paper and ink, without relying on any modern technology.

Now, naturally, I think it's reasonable to agree, and I think we both agree, that it would be probably filled with some mistakes. And so this is exactly what we find when we compare manuscript copies of religious texts from the past.

They're filled with many spelling mistakes, missing words, sentences. There have even been scribes that have made intentional changes to suit a particular agenda. And I'm not going into conspiracy theories, although some of them are interesting.

It was easy to do this without most people realizing because literacy rates in the ancient past was really, really low. And there were very few scribes. Now extend this copying process over hundreds of years, and even a thousand years.

Now you can imagine how this text will change over a long period of time. Accidental or intentional changes will eventually gradually creep in. Now imagine if you had this task of evaluating all these written copies with all their differences.

You would have to compare each of them to the original, word by word, line by line. Now this would be an extremely time-consuming task, but if you had enough time or enough people helping you, eventually you could work out which copies were the most accurate compared to the original.

Now imagine if you had to perform this task of evaluating all these variations, but this time you didn't possess the original to compare it against. It would almost be impossible to determine the accuracy.

This brings us to another major problem with relying with manuscripts only and the preservation of information. Over time they can be lost, they can be damaged, and so we don't always know or have access to the original or even the early copies of the originals.

And so therefore, we lose the ability to determine which of the copies we possess is the most accurate. Now that we have a background of the transmission of ancient texts, we can have a better appreciation of the transmission of the New Testament.

The earliest physical manuscript, which was mentioned by Dr. White, is the New Testament manuscript known as P52, dated by the earliest part of the second century, nearly 100 years after Jesus. It was from the Gospel of John, and it's about the size of a credit card.

That's all we have. The front contains the first seven lines from the Gospel of John, and the back contains the seven lines from verses 37 and 38, both in Greek. Now, the earliest copy of the New Testament is Codice Sinaiticus, and that was dated in the fourth century.

Now, trace this timeline. That's 300 years after Jesus. And so just about how many New Testament manuscripts are there, and how different are they from one another? The original language of the New Testament is in Greek, and this is the language that most ancient manuscripts are in.

There's almost 6 ,000. We had a number of 25 ,000 in total of New Testament manuscripts, but no two pages are identical. This is according to the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, and I quote, there is no one sentence in the New Testament in which the manuscript tradition is wholly uniform.

And so the famous Alexandrian scholar Origen was aware of the scale of the variance of the New Testament as early as the third century. And he says, the differences among the manuscripts of the Gospels have become great, either through the negligence of some of the copyists or through the perverse audacity of others.

They either neglect to check over what they have transcribed or, in the process of checking, they lengthen or shorten as they please. The third century. And then the Codice Sinaiticus, one of the oldest surviving manuscripts of the New Testament, has a fascinating scribal comment in the margin which provides great insight into the variance from this point of view, from the copyist.

And it says, some of the New Testament presents a bewildering number of variant readings across the manuscripts. For example, Colossians 2 .2, with 15 variations. So this raises an interesting question.

Which version of the New Testament is inspired as the Word of God? And since there are so many variants in existence, how do we choose? And so faced with a massive number of variant readings, how do Christian scholars go about determining what may be the Word of God and may be the Word of man?

So let's take an example here. Luke 10 .1, yeah? And I'll provide the example from the NIV, the RSV as well. So in the NIV, it says, that verse, after the Lord appointed 72 others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go.

That's in the NIV. In the RSV, it's like, quote, after the Lord appointed 70 others and sent them on ahead of him, two by two into every town and place where he himself was to come. So as you can see, the editors have two, there's two different versions of the Bible and two different readings.

On one hand it says 70, on the other hand it says 72. But in the original New Testament, so which one is in the original New Testament, 70 or 72? So Bruce Metzger, a Christian expert in the Greek biblical manuscripts and is widely recognized as one of the most influential 20th century New Testament scholars, this is what he had to say about the evaluation of this textual problem in the wake of Luke 10 .1.

He says, and I quote, the external evidence is almost evenly divided. The factors bringing the evaluation of its internal evidence, whether involving transcriptional or intrinsic probabilities, are singular, elusive.

It is likely that in most of the early manuscripts, the numeral was written in letters of the alphabet. It was easy, therefore, for either number to be accidentally altered. So evenly balanced, there's two probabilities.

Now, more or less, as you can see, the criteria here, and this is just one example that has been developed by textual scholars, depend wholly on probabilities. Often the textual critics must weigh each set of probabilities against each other.

The range and complexity of the textual data are so great that no mechanically divided set of rules can be applied with mathematical precision. So each one of those variant readings need to be considered in itself and not judged according to a basic rule of thumb.

And so Bruce Metzger concludes by saying the following about the evaluation of the readings. He says, by way of conclusion, let it be emphasized again that there is no single manuscript and no one group of manuscripts that a textual critic may follow mechanically.

All known witnesses of the New Testament are, to a greater or lesser extent, mixed texts. And he goes on for a larger quote, and if anyone is interested, I can go into this. And so answering the question whether the Bible is the Word of God, we have the difficult task of identifying which version may be the Word of God.

And so as we've seen, ultimately it's fallible editors that decide what goes into the New Testament, not Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Now we can appreciate why there may be different versions of the Bible in the existence of today.

And scholars of the Bible, those who are experts in sifting through the huge number of variants that exist in the manuscript tradition, can't agree on which copies are the most accurate. This is because they have the tough task of estimating which copies are closest to the original without possessing the original to compare.

I'll say that again. Their task is to come as close as they can to the original because they do not have the original to compare it. So with each version of the Bible that exists, there's a patchwork of different copies combined together, and this represents what a particular scholar or a group of scholars estimate as the closest match to the original.

Therefore, with the text of the New Testament, we've relied on the manual copying of preservation. And so with this, we rely on estimates, and we can't say with 100 that what we have today is, however, the accurate representation of the original.

Now, you might say, hey, so what are the theological consequences of the New Testament variances? Yeah, spelling errors, sentences, passages, you know, does it matter at all? Now, I wanted to press on about three different examples.

Actually, four. Make that four if I've got time. Now, I'll run through them, and hopefully maybe in the dialogue that we have in the next segment, I can go into them deeper, otherwise I won't get an opportunity to go through the Quran.

The first one is 1 John 5 -7, yeah? For there three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one. This is an often quoted passage to demonstrate the Trinity, although the Trinity is larger than just a sequence of persons, co-equality is core to it.

So, anyway, we can discuss that a bit later, I'm sure. Dr. White's got many debates on the Trinity. Now, this verse supposedly mentions the Trinity. Now, it used to be present in all Bibles. It remains in some versions, but in the King James Version today, there's an interesting quote.

However, the editors of the modern versions of the Bible, such as the RSV and the NIV, have removed this particular quote. Now, compare 1 John 5 -7 in these different versions of the Bible. Notice that in verse 7, if you've got the RSV or NIV, pull it out and have a look.

I don't have a projector on me here, but there's a slide on this. So, notice how verse 7 in the RSV is different to verse 7 in the KJV. The RSV does not contain the mention of the threeness. Also, notice that the verse 7 in the NIV is different from not only the KJV, but also the RSV.

The NIV does not contain mention of the threeness. Now, here is the NIV quote regarding that verse. In the late manuscripts of the Vulgate testify in heaven the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one.

And there are three that testify on earth. And then there's a bracket, not found in the original Greek manuscripts before the 6th century. So, if you're an auditor, you could only go up to the 6th century.

You've got six centuries to account for, which you can't determine without any level of accuracy. And this is a quote that people use for the Trinity, very, very core. And so, without this verse, there's no mention of God's threeness in the Bible.

So, one has to wonder if the Trinity is even a genuine doctrine of the Bible in this case. Why is there only one explicit mention of God's threeness and only in later editions? It seems that it has to be inserted into the Bible in order to lend support for this particular doctrine.

So, that's the first example. The second example is the story of the adulterous woman. Now, to refresh your memories, as the quote goes, let any of you who is without sin be the first to throw the stone at her.

How often have you heard this in sermons? Now, this section of the Gospel of John, verses 7, 53, and 11, is a famous story of the adulterous woman who is about to be stoned because of her charge of adultery.

Now, in these verses, Jesus was questioned about her punishment and added the famous words, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Now, this whole story is another later edition in the earliest New Testaments, and it's not found until the 5th century.