2021 10 07 Current Developments Greek NT BMA Seminary Jacksonville TX

I am seriously thankful to have the opportunity to talk to you about this subject. You're the first group of students that have had this opportunity to do this with.

And so that doesn't make you a guinea pig. It just means that I think this is really, really important.

If you're doing any type of New Testament studies, you need to know what's going on right now. I was sort of blindsided by this stuff myself, to be honest with you.

I don't want you to be blindsided. And I also think that pastorally, once the word starts getting out as to what is happening, the media is going to spin it in such a way as to cause great concern on the part of people.

And I just think pastors need to be individuals who will be able to give a solid answer and to alleviate some of those fears.

And so that's where you are. That's where you are in your studies. And so I think this will be helpful to you.

I want to point your attention to a few things down here. And what I'm going to do, actually, is

I actually now got somebody in the back who's going to be watching this. And if all these volumes aren't back when

I leave, there will be dire consequences as a result. That's all I can say.

Okay, this is eventually something that you want to have on your wish list for your library.

This is currently what is available, what's called the ECM, the Editio Critico Mayor.

And this is only Mark, Acts, and the small

Catholic epistles. And look how big it is already. Can you imagine what the New Testament's going to look like?

It'll probably be, you know, probably about yea long. Mark cost $280,

Acts cost $320, and I think the general epistles were like $240, something like that.

This is not the New Testament that you will carry in your car. You will not be bringing it into the pulpit with you.

Okay, but what it does represent, and I want to pass around, I'll go ahead and pass around Mark and Acts here.

How's that sound? And hope it doesn't fall over. This was supposed to have been completed.

I'll start one over here and one over there, and they'll just sort of pass in the middle of the night, and it'll get very confusing and whatever.

But here you go, sir. This series is supposed to be completed in 2030,

I'll be honest with you. When I was in Munster, Germany in 2019, asking about when

Mark was going to be made available, interviewing the lead on this project, that was before COVID.

And so something tells me there's probably going to be somewhat of a delay. He told me Mark was done at that time, and it took 18 months more before it finally came out.

So what you're looking at is the fruit of the largest collation of Greek manuscripts that's ever been done.

So think about it. Only a matter of decades ago, many of the Greek manuscripts that we possess today, we knew where they were.

They were in a central catalog. There had been a desire to microfilm them.

Anybody remember microfilm? That was a while back. But they were not generally available for actual analysis, and they had not been collated, which means taking all of their readings, normally against a particular standard, but making all of their specific readings available.

Not just the big readings, because if you're familiar with the process of New Testament textual criticism, you know that what has been going on for about 100 years now is there has been an attempt to organize the manuscripts into families.

So you've heard of the Byzantine manuscript tradition. You've heard of the Alexandrian, Western, sometimes

Caesarean. And how were they organized? Well, scholars who would work with the manuscripts and work with their readings would notice similarities in regards to what passages they may or may not contain, how they read in a certain variation, things like that.

And in general, up through about 2010, you would put them in these families based upon about a 70 % agreement.

So if any of you have, for example, Metzger's New Testament commentary, the textual commentary that comes with, sometimes it comes with the

UBS. Which New Testament do you all, do you use

UBS or Nessie Olin? UBS. UBS, okay. So you've got UBS V right now. The textual commentary from Metzger, from the committee that put that together initially, very, very popular.

You can get it in all the Bible programs and stuff like that. You could not read anything that Metzger says about almost any variant without him using

Alexandrian, Western, and Byzantine, those phrases. This is how textual criticism was done up until a

German by the name of Gerd Mink started thinking through how can we actually use computer technology to help us to understand the relationship of the manuscripts in a fuller and less subjective way.

Is there an objective way of finding the relationship between these manuscripts?

Now that's a tall order because we have about 5 ,800 fragments of the

New Testament and they come from all over the place. We don't know how they are related.

There was, as you know, a tremendous amount of persecution of the Christian church up through 313 and, in fact, between 303 and 313 the

Roman Empire tried to wipe the New Testament out and destroyed thousands and thousands of manuscripts.

And so what we have today is just a selection of the survivors. It's amazing we have as much as we have, to be honest with you.

And so how to relate them to one another, which one is copied from an ancestor of another, extremely difficult to do.

And to actually get to that point, you need to be able to track thousands of different points of data.

In other words, you'd have to have a collation of all of those manuscripts and be able to ask the computer, put it into a massive database and go, all right, now that you've got all these points of data, where are they connected?

The human mind can't do that. We just can't put 70, 80, 100 ,000 different readings in our mind and remember, oh, that manuscript said that there and that manuscript said that there, so they go together.

We can't do that, but we now have the computing capacity to be able to see those types of relationships.

And that's what CBGM is all about. Coherence -based genealogical methodology,

CBGM, is the brainchild of Geerd Mink. It is being utilized in Munster.

Your UBS 5th edition and the upcoming 6th edition, your Nessie Oland 28th edition and upcoming 29th edition are all based now on this.

They will now reflect the text readings of the ECM. And the

ECM is being created along with the application of CBGM technology to each of the readings.

And so, for example, when the General Epistles came out, there were 30 some odd differences between the

ECM and the Nessie Oland 27th edition. So the 28th edition incorporated those 30 some odd changes.

Now, to be honest with you, they were relatively very small changes.

And in fact, for most people who are not actually translating the Greek text, you wouldn't even notice that they were there.

There was one really significant one. I'd be really interested in how many of you are aware of this particular change that took place and how it's impacted the

New Testament. But one change that did take place is in the little book of Jude.

In the 5th verse of Jude, the phraseology normally has been, in most translations, the

LORD delivered a people out of Egypt. Now, that's standard phraseology, kurios,

LORD, that's, you know. But we've known for a long time. I still have my dad's old

Nessie Oland that he had when he studied Greek under Kenneth Wiest at Moody Bible Institute back in the 50s of the last century.

And I can dig that out and I can look down in the footnotes and we've known for a long, long time that there are a number of manuscripts that at Jude 5 do not say kurios, they do not say

LORD, they say Jesus. Jesus delivered a people out of Egypt.

Now think about that. If that's the reading, what are the

Christological ramifications of a text saying Jesus delivered the people of Israel out of Egypt?

Okay, that's a fairly important text. If you look at the

Nessie Oland 27th edition, then you will see the text reading is kurios and down the note you'll see all the manuscripts that say

LORD and then Jesus and so on and so forth. Well, actually you won't see all the manuscripts.

The Nessie Oland doesn't list a whole lot of manuscripts, the UBS has more, cites more in those.

The Nessie Oland 28th edition, the text reading is now Jesus and kurios is in the notes.

And the ESV has adopted that reading. And so since there is still an active translation committee for the

ESV, it's gone from LORD to Jesus. And in fact they did it before the 28th edition came out because they knew that was what was going to be in the 28th edition.

So the question is, why does the Nessie Oland 28th edition have that particular reading?

And the answer is CBGM. It is one of the 30 some odd places in the general epistles where there has been a change between the

Nessie Oland 27th and the 28th and it's reflected in the ECM. And so I'm not sure how many more books are going to have to come out before they're going to do a 29th edition

Nessie Oland. My gut feeling, I haven't asked any of my sources on this yet, but my gut feeling is probably when

John comes out. John's actually being done outside of Munster. It's being done in Birmingham, England. And I think when

John comes out, that'll probably trigger the mechanism of doing a 29th edition of the

Nessie Oland, probably 6th edition of UBS. And I have a feeling that's when this is finally going to enter into the consciousness of Christian media and you're going to start hearing the discussion of computers determining the text of the

New Testament. It's not, that's not what it is. It's a tool. It's a tool that sheds a tremendous amount of light based upon more collation evidence than we've ever had before.

That's a hugely positive thing, especially as an apologist, I can tell you that my

Muslim friends don't have anything even close to the Nessie Oland text. There is no critical edition of the

Quran. And so we are light years ahead of them in the study of our text.

So to go from this to this, and now no longer do we have to, you know it used to be you'd ask some big major scholar, well how much, what percentage of difference do you think exists in the manuscripts?

And he'd give you some sort of super educated guess, but he didn't have access to the actual numbers to give you an exact number.

We now have exact numbers. I mean we can go to a computer readout that will tell you these two manuscripts agree in 97 .77

% of their readings. And so, and it's all available to you right now online if you know how to use it.

And one of the things I'm going to do when I wrap up, the whole reason we've got the projector up is so that I can show you online what this looks like.

So what is, I do want to send these around too. If you're, if in any way, shape, or form

I get you interested and you are, you're as much into textual criticism as I am and always have been since I was a student in Bible college.

My Greek professor told me years later once we were colleagues, he said, oh man, by second year you were beyond me in text criticism,

I just didn't want to tell you that. So I've just always, as soon as I opened up the UBS text, it was a third edition corrected.

As soon as I opened that up and asked, what are these notes down at the bottom? And Dr. Baird said, well those are where the manuscripts differ.

I knew I needed to know everything I could know about that, because I was already witnessing Mormons and they were already saying things like, you know, the

Bible's been changed, stuff like that. So I needed to have that information. There aren't many books on this subject out.

It's that new. And there aren't that many people who know much about it. This is

Peter Gurry's doctoral dissertation on a critical examination of the Coherence -Based Genealogical Method in New Testament Textual Criticism.

And this is a much easier to read, a new approach to textual criticism, an introduction to the Coherence -Based Genealogical Method, Tommy Wasserman and Peter Gurry.

It makes me sad to realize that Peter Gurry is younger than my son, which makes me very old.

But these are some of the resources that would be available to you to do follow -up. I'm just giving you some basic stuff that maybe will make those books a little bit easier for you to jump into if you want to do further studies.

So what is this all about and why? Let's use Jude 5. Let's use Jude 5 and then

I'll show you one of the variants that I was really interested in.

I've been saying since I started studying CBGM that I was going to be very interested in seeing what they did with Mark 1 .1.

I have a clip of a debate that I did, my first Muslim debate in 2006 at Biola with Shabir Ali.

It's now Dr. Shabir Ali. I have a clip where he presents to everybody the textual variant at Mark 1 .1

because it says the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the

Son of God. The Son of God is a textual variant. And there's a real clear reason why it is.

It is a long string of genitives. And if you're familiar with the text of the

New Testament and how it was written for the first eight, nine hundred years of its history, it was written in what's called majuscule or unsealed text, which is all capitals, no spaces between words, and almost no punctuation.

Can you imagine if your Greek New Testament looked like that? Most people who graduate, who even do well in Greek, look at an ancient manuscript in unsealed text and go, what on earth is that?

It's very difficult to read. And so you put a series of genitives in a row, and it's easy to see how someone in copying could skip over one, and then that's a series of genitives using what's called the nomina sacra.

Let me just ask real quickly, how many would feel confident giving a definition right now of the nomina sacra? One, two, three, was there, did you have your hand up?

That's a four. Okay. The nomina sacra, we do not know why this happened.

But in the ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, Christians adopted the practice of abbreviating the nomina sacra, the sacred names,

God, Jesus, Lord, Spirit. But they didn't always use the exact same form.

Sometimes it was three letters, most of the time it was two letters. So for example, God, the genitive of God, would be a theta and an upsilon in capitals with a line over the top.

So instead of theta, epsilon, omicron, upsilon, which is what you would see in your Greek New Testament, it would just be two letters.

And so it makes it easy to identify Christian manuscripts from the ancient world, because as soon as you see a nomina sacra, you go, okay, there you go.

A Christian copied this. We don't know why, again. There are lots of theories, but they are just that, they are theories.

And so at Mark 1 -1, the question was, I was thinking, I wonder what CBGM is going to say about Mark 1 -1.

Well, if you've got the Mark volume back there somewhere, you can look at Mark 1 and you'll be able to see what the conclusion was, and they have included it as the text reading.

And so why is that? Well, let's use the Jude 5,

Jesus Lord one as our primary example here, and let me lay out just a few basics.

What CBGM is looking at is coherence. Now what is coherence?

Well, generally the term would be used in reference to how consistent things are with another standard.

How well they cohere with one another. And so there are different kinds of coherence.

One of the problems with this methodology is it was invented by Germans, and therefore they are terrible at titling anything.

If you know anything about German, any German speakers in here? Keine? Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch.

Und Sie? Jawohl! Es ist ein schönes

Sprache, ja. It's a wonderful language, but if you know anything about German, when they want to come up with a new way of describing something, all they do is take a bunch of old words and cram them into one really big long word that may take like two lines for a single word.

And it's just true. So the name CBGM is not, they weren't trying to sell this to anybody, you know.

It's just meant to be accurate. It's hard to follow. But what they're doing is they're looking at different kinds of coherence.

And they're using the computer databases to measure these kinds of coherence. So you would have, and I'm just running up here just to grab my cold bottles of water if that's okay.

So what you would have, first of all, is what's called pre -genealogical coherence.

Pre -genealogical coherence. What is that? That is, you simply take, let's say we take two really well -known manuscripts,

Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. And you can do this online right now. And you can break this down to chapters, you can break this down to books, you can do it for everything in the

ECM that's been done. But you can simply say, what is the pre -genealogical coherence?

So for all the places where Codex Sinaiticus has a text and Vaticanus has a text, for example

Vaticanus stops at Hebrews 9 .14. So you couldn't do it for Revelation because it doesn't contain

Revelation. But for everything where they both have all the same text, where there are variants, how often do they have the same reading in the variant?

Now one of the things that's fascinating about all this is what we've discovered is when you take all manuscripts of wherever they came from, no matter how different they might be on the underlying text, but let's put it this way, when there are differences, the average agreement amongst all manuscripts is over 85%.

That means where there isn't variation, they're almost identical all the way across.

The quality of the New Testament textual tradition, it's no longer a scholar going, well

I'd estimate this, the computer can tell you how absolutely spot on all these manuscripts are because all the readings have now been read in.

That was a lot of work! I don't know who they were paying to do that, but that was a lot of work to put that stuff in.

So, pre -genealogical coherence is where you're not asking a question about how these two manuscripts are related to one another, it's just simply the bulk numbers, how often do they agree with one another in the places where there are textual variants.

It's just a number, and it's a pretty simple number to derive. Once you have all their readings available on a computer, you can just simply compare the two databases, where there's differences, how often they agree.

That's pretty simple computer stuff to be done there. That's not AI level stuff.

That's pre -genealogical. Then you have what's called genealogical coherence. Genealogical coherence.

What is genealogical coherence? This is one place where there is a subjective element to the

CBGM. Now, textual criticism has always been an art form.

It has involved critics making decisions based upon how much weight they put on this witness, and how much weight they put on that witness, and whether they put weight on internal testimony or external testimony.

There's always been a great deal of subjectivism in textual critical studies. There has to be.

There is a subjective element to CBGM. It's primarily in the editors, when they look at where Sinaiticus and Vaticanus have different readings.

They look at those, and they determine, and this is the subjective part, which reading gave rise to the other.

So, they make that decision. Now, it's getting to the point where, I think eventually, you're going to be able to download a program onto your computer that will get hold of these databases, and you can change the parameters yourself.

You can disagree with the editors and say, no, I think the reading went the other direction, and then put that in, and then run the program and see what comes out the other end.

We're pretty much at that point right now, if you really want to go to that level. There aren't too many of us doing that, but if you want to go to that level, then you could.

But the point is, I've looked at a lot of these, and yeah, they're subjective, but most of the time, it's pretty obvious, yeah, obviously this reading gave rise to that reading, not the other way around.

And so, while it may be somewhat subjective, it's got to, most people would agree, yeah, okay, that obviously is the easier reading, or things like that.

And so, you can go into the databases, and it will tell you how many times for Sinaiticus, that it has the earlier reading, the

Vaticanus. Now, earlier doesn't necessarily mean earlier as in time. This is one of the real tough things.

Okay, if you want to bend your minds, if the food is, you know, I had a cinnamon bun, right, before I came over here, so my insulin has kicked in.

I'm ready to take a nap right now, but I'm standing up, so I'm okay. If you're about to take a nap, this is where you need to poke the guy next to you, do whatever you need to do to stay awake at this particular point in time, because this is where everything sort of comes together, and you start understanding what they're doing here.

Okay, when they did Jude 5, what they did is they looked at all the manuscripts that say

Lord, and they looked at their pre -genealogical coherence.

And then they looked at all the manuscripts that say Jesus, and they looked at their pre -genealogical coherence.

So in other words, just all the manuscripts say Jesus, how closely related are they to one another? And then over here, all the manuscripts say

Lord, how closely related are they? Now, how do you determine close relationship? Well, that eventually is where you have to do what's called the text flow material, and what's coming from what.

And here's the hard part, and I still struggle with this, because I learned textual criticism late 1970s, early into the 1980s, and this is not how we were taught to think.

The only way CBGM works is that you treat the text of a manuscript separately from the manuscript itself.

So in other words, if you're talking CBGM, you don't talk manuscripts, you talk a witness, and that's just the text, it's not the manuscript.

Why is that? Well, you can't put manuscripts in a computer in the first place, but the text itself might be much older than the material upon which it's written.

So we've always known, for example, that manuscripts 1739 and 1881, those are 10th century manuscripts, but we know they were copying from 2nd century exemplars.

And so the text in that situation is much, much earlier than the manuscript itself is.

And so CBGM disconnects that, and that's where I've always had a concern about CBGM, and that's one of the things that's going to have to be fleshed out more in the future, is there is a sense in which

CBGM disconnects the manuscripts and the text from history.

And so when you compare Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, the databases will tell you that 25 % of the time

Sinaiticus has the earlier reading and Vaticanus the later, and 75 % of the time it goes the other way.

And so the conclusion of that is that as far as relationships between these texts go, not manuscripts, but the text they contain,

Sinaiticus comes after Vaticanus, not before it. And so in the text flow, and hence in genealogical coherence,

Vaticanus is before or above Sinaiticus.

And so as you would see it, and as I'll show you later on, when you put these diagrams together of how these are all related, you'll see

Vaticanus above Sinaiticus, Sinaiticus being below.

And what the computer will do is it'll start relating all the manuscripts to each other in that way. And these diagrams end up being huge, very, very large, as I'll show you when

I fire up the computer, and hopefully it'll work and you can see it. So, there is a third type of coherence, it's called stematic coherence, and that's, once you get enough of these done, you can start relating these manuscripts across entire books and eventually across the entire

New Testament, and see how they relate to one another. But you need to get all the rest of CBGM done before you get what's called a global stemata, which is not just a, these are how all the, this is the family tree, it's not that.

It's the text, how did the text get transmitted through time, as best as we can see it in light of the fact it's extremely fragmentary.

It's extremely fragmentary. We don't have but a few examples where we have one manuscript that was copied from another manuscript and we know which two manuscripts were.

That's very, very rare, given, well, the ravages of time and everything else that takes place in textual criticism.

So, back to Jude 5. What they discovered was that when you look at the witnesses that say

Jesus, their closest relatives that are related to them on the basis of the analysis of the readings say

Jesus. Jesus. You might go, wow. The point is there's high coherence.

There is consistency between these related manuscripts of saying

Jesus. But when you go over the manuscripts that say Lord, very often their closest relative will say

Jesus. So there's low coherence. Now why would that be especially relevant?

Well, think about it. Which is the easier reading in your mind, to say the Lord delivered a people out of Egypt or Jesus delivered a people out of Egypt?

The Lord. I mean, that just sort of flows. That's what you'd expect. That's what a scribe would be expecting.

And so he may have been, what he's copying may have said Jesus, but he's expecting it to say

Lord, and that's what he ends up writing down. And so we hadn't been able to see in the analysis before.

And so up until up through Nesheol and 27th, you look at the manuscripts and you go, well, yeah, there are some early manuscripts that have

Jesus, but there are early manuscripts that have Lord too. And it sort of looks like the preponderance and you're breaking them up into Alexandrian and stuff like that.

And you don't have one piece of information. And that is the manuscripts that say Jesus are more consistent themselves than manuscripts that say

Lord. That's the new piece of information we've never had before. Never had it before now. And it was so striking and had so much weight to it that the editors changed the text reading.

Now you need to be really careful to explain to people. No one can change the Bible. You're changing which reading you're putting in the main text.

They haven't taken Kodios out and thrown it out in the cold someplace. They haven't erased it so you never know it was there.

It's in the footnotes now, just like it always has, just like Jesus was through all the earlier editions of the Nesheolam text.

It's just what you're putting up in the text. And not all translations, if there's,

I mean, it's not like we need any new English translations, but if you're doing translation work, you can read the footnotes like anybody else can.

And for example, the NASB 2020 that came out, that no one's really noticed, but it's there, they didn't follow the

Nesheolam. They stayed with the Lord. And in fact, they sent me about a 6 or 7 page explanation of why they rejected the

CBGM reading at Jude 5 and they stayed with the Lord. You can do that. You're a

Bible translation committee. You can do what you want. But they were open about it and they said, this is why we don't agree with the editors.

But it's still one of the readings that's presented to you. But the point is, pastorally speaking, if you're preaching

Jude, you need to know that you're going to have people sitting in your congregation and some of them are going to have

Lord and some of them are going to have Jesus. And they know that that makes a difference.

And my concern is very often whoever is standing in the pulpit is just hoping nobody comes up to ask about it.

And that makes you uncomfortable. And that's why I want to do this, is to at least give you an idea of where this is coming from.

So if you do need to dig into it, you know what some of the resources are, you're familiar with some of the vocabulary and you go, oh, this strange man from Arizona, that's what he was talking about.

Oh, yes. Okay. That's where that's coming from. And like I said, my concern is, and I hope that maybe the world will just be so insane by then.

Well, can it get any more insane? I'm not sure. But maybe they'll just skip over it. But I can just see even

Christian media grabbing hold of something like this and running with the computers are now determining the text of the

New Testament and stuff like that. When it's all it is, is we are just using it as a tool and we now have these huge collations of more manuscripts than we've ever had available to us before.

And so now we can compare these texts, not just on the few places where one human mind remembers, oh, that text reads this and that text reads that.

The computer knows everything that that text reads. And hence the comparison is objective.

It's no, this percentage of time, this is what it reads and this one reads that and you can hook them all together.

And so it's extremely important along those lines, I think, to have that understanding.

I think it should be something that we are rejoicing about. I mean, something like this looks intimidating to somebody, but for someone like myself who deals with so many false religions,

I love the fact that not only are we wide open, you don't have to present your I'm a Christian card to buy one of these, or a vaccine card for that matter.

I think you can get them, though it is Germany, so you never know. That means

Muslims can buy these, and atheists can buy these, and Mormons can buy these. We are open with all this information, which is not the case in many other places.

There are all sorts of things locked up in the archives of the Mormon Church that, if they were to be released, would have a huge impact on the historical analysis of Joseph Smith and the early

Mormon movement, but you'd probably never see those things unless there's a jailbreak or something at the

Salt Lake City headquarters. But we're wide open about these things, and it's exciting to me that we now have so much information where we can give objective data that says, you think our

New Testament manuscripts are just wildly all over the place? Here's the actual data. And you can go online and look at it yourself, and it just simply doesn't say what you say it says.

Not that too many people in the media would actually care to report any of that anyways. But I think it's something to be absolutely...

I cannot imagine what Desiderius Erasmus, the compiler of the first printed and published

Greek New Testament in 1516, I just can't imagine what he would have thought. He would have loved to have had one hundred thousandth of the information that we have available to us today in the work that he did.

But we've got it, and it's coming out. So let me show you.

So you can see that we're up here at Munster. This is, if you're interested, if you want to find this, write this one down real quick.

It's ntg .uni -munster .de,

and this is slash mark slash ph35 slash. So that's

Mark phase 3 .5, you've got Acts phase 4. They did the pastoral epistles really early.

I asked the guy who was in charge, he's since retired, but I asked, sitting in his office there in Munster in 2019, whether they would be updating the epistles software and stuff like that.

And he said, well, we want to, but we've got to get the whole thing done first. So I'm not sure when the epistles will be able to have this same type of...

There is an interface online, but it's extremely clunky and very difficult to use. So Mark and Acts are up to date, and my assumption is that they will eventually put the pastorals out in this format, and as each new book comes out, like John, will be available too.

So if you go to coherence and textual flow. Now one of the tricky things here, real quick, and I think

I was supposed to be done about now, right, doctor? So I need to hurry up. Okay, the way you find the variant you're looking for is by counting the space before the first word is 1, the first word is 2, the next space is 3, the next word is 4.

That's how they've done this so that you can look up any specific reference in the text.

That's not normally how we're thinking, we just go verse numbers. But here is, you'll notice right here,

Hwiyututheyu, so the beginning of the gospel of Christ, the

Son of God. So this is numbers 12 through 16. So here's the variant.

Here's the information available to you for free online. Here are your manuscripts that read each of the variants.

So Son of God, these are your manuscripts. Son of God without the article, these manuscripts.

Son of the Lord, 1241 went off on its own there. Son of the God, two manuscripts did that one.

Simply of God, there's a few manuscripts there. It's omitted by these. And then

ZZ means these are witnesses in the gospel of Mark, but they don't contain the beginning of Mark. And so they just don't contain the reading at all, so they're not relevant.

Okay, so you got that. That's nice. That's what you're used to having in like UBS or something like that. Then you have what only the computer can do you.

And so here is what's called your local stemma. So this is how the readings relate to one another as far as the editors are concerned.

A, Son of God gave rise to all these other readings. And you can click on each one of these and it makes differences in what comes below.

Coherence at variant passages. Your primary A readings and how they relate to each of those.

So in other words, I told you 1241 went off on its own, did something weird. Well it looks like, given its relationship to other manuscripts, that 1241 was copying from 35.

So for some reason he made a change even though 35 reads Son of God.

So you can see how they're related. And now, you ready? Here is coherence in attestations.

Now I have to literally scroll across the screen so that you can see how wide and how big the graph is.

Now you can click on any one of these witnesses, see how they're related to other witnesses. Each one of these, like see these numbers here will change when

I run something over it. So those are all variables that you yourself can change if you want to change what the editors did to see and plug it back into the computer and the computer will spit back out what that does to the relationship of these manuscripts one to another.

But you can see how large a number of manuscripts you're talking about here and how they're related to one another.

Notice 35 is a pretty important early manuscript. And you can see how many are related to it in genealogical coherence.

Then you go down here and here is general textual flow. And once again, it's humongous.

But you can see the relationship between all these manuscripts and how they relate to one other and what the general textual flow is.

Starting with the original reading in 03, which is

Vaticanus. Seems to have the, Vaticanus is the earliest manuscript in this reading from which the other readings can be traced back to as far as the textual flow is concerned.

And so you can do this with important variants like this or with variants as small as just simply the article, word order, all sorts of things like that.

And you can do this right now with the full graphical interface like this with both Axe and Mark.

And again, my gut feeling is John will probably be next. And that's when it's going to get interesting.

I want to know what CBGM says about John 118, for example. Is it monogenes theos or monogenes hwios, the only begotten son or only begotten

God? That's a big, big, important textual variant. And so I'm really looking forward to when

John comes out. I don't know when that will be. But I would not be surprised if it would be within next year.

Within next year. So final word here is, if you are doing in -depth study in New Testament, not just textual criticism, but anything being done in New Testament today, you cannot ignore this anymore.

I mean, I just stumbled into it. I was going to do PhD work in a whole new field in P45. Even my doctoral advisor had never heard of it before.

I asked Peter Gurry, wherever the Gurry books are back here, I asked Dr. Gurry about a year and a half ago,

I was telling him what I'm doing, looking at the papyri and their impact on CBGM and how

CBGM impacts the study of the papyri, especially P45. And I said, do you know anybody doing any work in that area?

He says, you're pretty much it. There's literally three, four, five dozen people in the

English speaking world, maximum, that are doing stuff with it right now.

And that's not good, simply because once somebody gets hold of it and starts throwing it out there, there could be so much misrepresentation of it, that a good, useful tool could end up being defamed in some fashion.

And so, I think it's extremely useful, but it's a tool. It's not making the final determination.

Like I said, the NASB looked at it and said, that's real interesting, we take that in consideration, but we're not changing our text reading.

And you can do the exact same thing. Now, I happen to think in Jude, by the way, if you look at Jude 4 and 5,

I think that's a good reading, and I think it fits the context. But that's something you have to examine.

That's something that you need to be doing in your study, and not necessarily in the pulpit.

The results go in the pulpit, but this kind of work primarily needs to be done in the study. But that's why

I think anybody doing New Testament work needs to at least be aware of what CBGM is, what its general outlines are, what it's looking at, how it's positive, and some of the questions.

I still struggle with the idea of being able to separate the text from the manuscript. The text always exists in the history.

It seems to be working. There are only 30 some odd changes in the pastoral epistles.

I think there were 50 in Acts, again, almost none that impacted any meaning, and I think it was in the upper 30s again in Mark, in comparison to what we already had.

So what that's telling you is, we had done a pretty good job up to this point. But they still got to do all the

Paul. Romans 5 .1, you know the variant, Romans 5 .1,

therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God, indicative, let us have peace with God, subjunctive.

Now I think there's a way to understand the subjunctive there that really doesn't change the flow at all, and I think the external reading favors the subjunctive.

But what's the CBGM going to say? And once it does say it, how is that going to be covered, how is that going to be discussed?

You folks will be one step ahead of everybody else having at least a general knowledge of what it is they're talking about, where they're going, and why they've gone there, and what they're trying to solve, the issues they're trying to address.

That's really fast. It's sort of like drinking out of a fire hose. I know a lot of these categories are not the standard categories that we're accustomed to using in New Testament textual criticism, but I hope you've at least gotten from me the fact this is something that's good, it's something that's positive, even if you end up going,

I'm not sure how we should use it necessarily in that way, the fact that we now have this level of information available to us is a positive thing, a really, really positive thing.

The very times when the New Testament is under the most severe attack outside, we've been given the most information to defend it.

And I think it's a providence thing, I think it's a God thing, I think we should be thankful for that, and hopefully that has at least whetted your appetite a little bit.

And where'd all my books go? Books? What books?

We didn't, did you pass out, is there any video evidence you passed out books? I don't know, I don't know. So I've gone past time, so do you want me to close in prayer, do you want me to take a couple of questions?

What do you want me to do? A couple of questions. Okay, a couple of quick questions. Yes, sir? So is the naming of the text families no longer proper in Alexandria?

I was going to say that, I was going to say that, thank you. The CBGM has been able to demonstrate one textual family that is consistent with itself, the

Byzantine, nothing else. There is no evidence from CBGM that the Alexandrian, Caesarean, or Western text types exist, and therefore, what

I was going to say is, you can't read Metzger without that appearing all the way through it. And right now, it looks like, now,

John hasn't been done, Paul hasn't been done, some of that can change, but let's say it stays the way it is right now, it will change everything as to how you describe the manuscripts, there's no question about it.

And what is being discovered is, like you saw 35 up there, there are certain manuscripts that their importance has been greatly elevated because we're seeing that they were like, well, you know

Genghis Khan, genealogical studies have demonstrated

Genghis Khan had like 20 ,000 offspring, I mean, he was a rather prolific man, and so there are some manuscripts that are similar, in other words, for some reason, those manuscripts had a huge impact upon the textual tradition, and CBGM's detecting that, and so that's pretty interesting as well.

But yes, Alexandrian, Caesarean was always disputable, and it was only in the

Gospels. The Western was already under severe attack, and now

CBGM, Western pretty much only existed in Acts anyways, Acts is done and CBGM said, nope, not there.

But the Alexandrian, that's the big one, I mean, that was the normal contrast between the

Alexandrian and the Byzantine. I should mention that in those changes, over 100 changes that have happened so far, again most of them not translatable, 80 % have been toward the

Byzantine, but there have been some that have gone the other direction too. So there's always a list provided when one of these comes out of all the changes.

It's normally only two sides of a single sheet of paper, but all the changes between the last Nessie -Aland edition and what's coming out here.

But yes, that is going to change everything. So I'd like to redo the

King James Omnicontroversy, but I can't, because CBGM will probably not be done until I'm too old to bother to do so.

But if it does eventually come out, I probably should, just simply to update the language. Anyone else?

Yes, ma 'am. Not yet, but there is absolutely nothing that would stop doing it outside of the massive investment in the collation of the manuscripts.

You don't have as many manuscripts. Oh, by the way, and thank you for asking this question,

CBGM is only working on the Greek text. It's not taking in consideration patristic witnesses, it's not taking in consideration the

Vulgate. But there is nothing that would keep it from doing that, other than just the massive effort of the data entry from all those sources.

And so right now, CBGM is pure Greek. I could see once this version of the

ECM is done, I mean, if the world is still free at that point in time,

I could see the update in bringing in, say, Syriac and Coptic and stuff like that, and factoring those in as possibilities as well.

Or maybe even the early Church Fathers. I mean, that's a huge, huge, huge ask, but it would be possible.

And that could be done with the Hebrew Old Testament, could be done with the Greek Septuagint. There's all sorts of things that could be done.

It's just a matter of creating those massive databases. Yes, there's exciting times, assuming that we're going to have the freedom to continue to pursue these things.

I pray that God will protect us from evil men and women who would like to take those freedoms away from us.

I especially pray for that for my grandchildren as well. But this is what we've got right now, and yes, sir, real quick.

So if, what did you say, if Vaticanus is,

I think you said like 75 % of the time it represents what it's calling an older reading?

Well, in the text flow between it and Sinaiticus, 75 % of the time they determined that the textual flow is going from Vaticanus to Sinaiticus, only 25 % the other direction.

And so what that would indicate is, I'm sorry?

Is it presenting the contention that it's the Mosaic, that you've got an older bit here, a little bit here?

No, no, it would basically, if there is a predominance in the text flow from one to the other, then the conclusion is the one from which the text is flowing is the prior, is the ancestor of the other.

And that's fed into your local stomata and your global stomata, and eventually once all of it's done, then the computer's going to say, as best as we can tell, these are how all the manuscripts are related to one another.

Not manuscripts, I'm sorry, bad, bad, bad, texts, not manuscripts. The texts that they contain, yeah.

So all that's saying is, let's say Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were copied, let's say they were both copied in 330.

Well, they still had to use a certain text to copy Vaticanus from, and a certain text to copy

Sinaiticus from, and the idea is what they copied Vaticanus from is earlier in the transmission history than what they copied

Sinaiticus from, even though they're copied in the same year. That's the idea. Yeah. Yeah.

All right? All right. Well, thank you very much for your attention, I hope that is of some interest to you and some benefit to you, and keep your eyes open for further developments, and shall

I close with a word of prayer? All right. Let's pray together. Father, we do thank You for this time together to give consideration to these developments, as we seek to be good stewards of our time and of the talents

You've given to us, and stewards of the pulpit, that we would be good shepherds of the people of God, be able to explain things to them as they come up, and that we would use these tools as well to be good handlers of Your Word.