Reliability of the New Testament Text

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My presentation from Durham, NC, 11/22/08.

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In misquoting Jesus, which was a New York Times bestseller, in the one he's very conservative, he recognizes that the
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New Testament manuscript tradition is by far the largest, richest manuscript tradition of any ancient work of antiquity at all, and therefore to be agnostic about the readings of the
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New Testament means that we must be agnostic about all ancient documents and Toto, and in fact much more so, because no other work of antiquity comes even close to having the testimony that the
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New Testament does. But then when he writes popular books, where you make lots of money, all of a sudden things change and, well, you know, we don't even know what it reads here, here, here.
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If he actually boiled down the number of texts he's talking to, it'd be a very, very, very small number of texts that would in no way impact the actual teaching of the
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New Testament, but he doesn't bring that out when he's talking to people like he was, and that's a media clip right there.
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But we need to realize, unfortunately, the vast majority of our parishioners don't have any background there, because let's face it, this is the one subject that most of us feel uncomfortable about.
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We don't know how to present this within the context of sermons. I think it is important to recognize that when we are preaching, there is such a wide variety of translations sitting in front of us, that I know one of the reasons
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I wrote the King James Only Controversy is a volunteer called me one day, and she said, my pastor preached an entire sermon yesterday on a text that was not in my
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Bible yet. It was a text of New American Standard, but the
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NIV didn't have it, and she didn't notice that it's in that four -point font down at the bottom of the page that to people over 40 looks like smudge.
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I think it's very important that when we're preparing our sermons, you check these things out.
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You don't want to preach on something that half of your parishioners are going to be sitting there going, you just think you're not doing well that morning, because you've got all these confused looks.
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The reality is, they don't even know what you're talking about, because your text isn't even in their Bible. That can be very disturbing to people.
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So, a lot of our folks are subject to this kind of spin, because it's just not an area that we talk about nearly as much as we should.
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They emphasize that all we have are copies of copies of copies of copies from hundreds of years after the originals.
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Whenever you hear anybody saying that, they're quoting Barnard, because he's the one who's sort of pushing this now.
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Dr. Shaw, on Thursday evening, said exactly that, because he's reading, and misquoting
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Jesus was sitting on his desk, the very same book was sitting on his desk. Copies of copies of copies from hundreds of years later.
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That is the assertion that is being made. Now, here is
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Bart Ehrman's more scholarly book that came out in late 1994, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
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It is his assertion that there are a number of textual variants in the New Testament that the
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Orthodox introduced as a part of defending the Orthodox perspective, and that is really where he got his name and came into prominence after he graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary.
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Now, for those of you who were at the debate, you can't answer this, but if you were not at the debate, approximately how many textual variants would you think there are in the
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New Testament? Now, remember, a textual variant, if Dan Wallace, because his group for New Testament manuscripts is going around, and just this last summer they found,
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I don't know how many new manuscripts in the New Testament that had never been catalogued before, and in each one of them as they're found, if there is a single variant reading in one of those manuscripts, well there's that, even if it's from 1100
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A .D., that's a new manuscript variant, okay? So how many manuscript variants do you think are found in the currently cataloged
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New Testament manuscript tradition? Anybody? 30 ,000?
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What was this? 10? 200 ,000? 200 ,000? Well, we've got a range here, don't we?
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All right, probably best guess would be right around 400 ,000.
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Now that's what Bart Ehrman's going to tell you, and that's what the Muslims are going to tell you, that's what the atheists are going to tell you, 400 ,000 variants, in fact, think about it, there are only 138 ,162 words in the
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New Testament, that's nearly three variants per word, and I've listened to Muslims just hammer on this, and just imagine that there's three different variants for every single word in the
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New Testament, so we have no idea what it originally said, and, oh, that sounds terrible, and most
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Christians are sitting there going, what? We have no idea, and they just pound away on that, and it's only our ignorance that's making us sit there going, wow, that's a lot of variants,
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I didn't know about that. And so we are confidently told, no one can have any confidence, that the text they read today accurately reflects what was originally written, and that's what our young people are told by ignorant history of religion professors at community colleges, like my daughter had, who couldn't read a word of Greek, but walked up and slapped them in the face, but they with confidence will tell young people, you have no idea what the
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New Testament said. My daughter had an anti -Christian bigot her first semester in college, and she tangled with him, and he didn't know what he was getting into.
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My daughter is me in a female body. She has attended my debates, since she was knee -high to a grasshopper,
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I have pictures of her listening very intently to the Muslims quizzing me at the Hamza Abdel -Malik debate in New York in 1999.
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She was at the debate with Barry Lynn on homosexuality, etc., etc., etc., so he was waxing on about something, and she's like, excuse me, but don't you realize the
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Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the New Testament was written in Greek, and you're confusing the Old Covenant with the
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New Covenant, and he went after her in public, in that class, your parents have lied to you, you
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Google the Gospels and tell me who wrote them. There's scholarship for you. But anyway, so she learned first -hand, and that's the kind of stuff they're throwing out there, they accept this kind of stuff as surface -level as it is.
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Now those are facts, but a fact outside of a context is very frequently a weapon of deception, and that's exactly what these are.
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These are facts, but let's, what they don't tell you, let's look at the reality here.
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First of all, 99 % of all variants do not impact the meaning of the text, variations in spelling and word order make up the vast bulk of the variations, and Ehrman would confirm that.
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He would confirm that what we're talking about, we talk about 400 ,000 variants, is one manuscript from the 10th century, spells
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John with two N's instead of one. Oh, variant! Add that one in, and it's pretty easy to start adding up variants for another reason.
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Hence, 1 % of 400 ,000 equals 4 ,000 meaningful textual variants out of 138 ,162 words, is 2 .9%,
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or one meaningful variant every three pages. But that's not even it yet.
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That's quite a different picture, of course. The Muslims are going, three variants for every word, and it's actually about one meaningful variant every three pages.
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That's a little bit of a different story. What they also don't tell you is the more manuscripts you have for a particular work, the more textual variants you will have.
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If we only had one manuscript of the New Testament, how many textual variants would we have? Zero! But if we only had one manuscript of the
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New Testament, how much confidence do we have that what we have is actually what was originally written? That's the point.
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And that's what people don't understand, is that the more manuscripts you have, the more variants are going to be piling up, of necessity, because they are written documents.
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Now, if I had the whole weekend on this, I would do what most people do who teach on this subject.
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I would write something down, I'd write a paragraph down, and I'd hand it to this gentleman, and I'd ask him to copy it off and hand it to this gentleman, and then we'd send it around the room.
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First, we'd do the telephone game, we'd do it orally, and we'd see what comes out at the back end of the room. But then we'd do it in a written form, and we'd pass it around, and sometimes
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I'd have it branch off and split and stuff like that, and we could see how handwritten copying introduces textual variation.
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Well, the New Testament, for the first 1 ,500, 1 ,600 years, because the printing press, well, it is invented in the middle of the 15th century, does not become the predominant mechanism, because it took a while for that to catch on, and printing presses to be made, and so on and so forth.
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The first printed and published edition of the Greek New Testament comes out in 1516. So, for a millennium and a half, approximately, the
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New Testament is transmitted in a handwritten form, as any ancient document is.
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And so, given that, the actual numbers concerning the text of the New Testament are amazing as to the purity of the text, not the correctedness of the text.
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Anyone who actually knows the field knows that. There are 5 ,700 plus cataloged manuscripts of the
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New Testament, the average of which is 200 pages long. 5 ,700 plus in the
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Greek language. Averaging 200 pages each, that means that's approximately 1 .2
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million pages of handwritten text. 4 ,000 meaningful variants in 1 .2
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million pages of handwritten text. Now you're starting to get the idea of the real sense of the numbers.
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You know, when they just throw out that 400 ,000, they don't tell you what the nature of them are, how many of them are actually meaningful.
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It's clearly meant just for impact. It's meant to communicate something in that context.
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But it's not meant, to be honest, with the actual text itself. 4 ,000 meaningful variants over 1 .2
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million pages of hand -copied text spanning approximately 1 ,500 years is an amazingly small percentage of the text, reflecting an amazingly accurate history of transmission.
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One might say it is downright miraculous. Now, what
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I did is I popped up BibleWorks, and by the way, Version 8 is out now, for those of you who use it.
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I popped up BibleWorks, and I have set my system to compare the most
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Byzantine -printed Greek text with the
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Nestial and UBS text. And it will put in color where there's a variation between the two.
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Now, unfortunately, it also picks up where there is a difference in capitalization, which is really totally irrelevant.
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So it's actually not as many as these. But here's Ephesians 1 through 14, and there you have the two extremes of the manuscript tradition and the variations that exist between the two.
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You'll notice, like, an auto, in him, or something like that. I don't know what the variant there is. Sometimes it's a preposition, a
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P here, there's another N here. But given the form of Christ there, it wouldn't actually normally impact translation.
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There you see sort of the type of textual variation you have there. Revelation is very interesting.
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Revelation's textual history is totally unique, unlike any other book in the New Testament, which makes sense, given the fact that it had to fight for inclusion in the
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New Testament. And by the way, I'm awful glad that it did. Let's face it, I don't know how many more books with multi -headed monsters in it
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I could actually handle. So, I'm glad there was a discussion about it.
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Because people go, oh, well there was disputes. And I'm like, I'm glad there were.
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If there weren't, that means there was just a bunch of gullible people sitting around going, oh, you think that's as far?
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Okay, I will do. I want to go, why do you think that's a bad thing?
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People automatically assume that it is. There just shouldn't have been unanimity. Everybody should have just had an epiphany.
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It's the golden tablet syndrome. You want to have these golden tablets float down from heaven and it's all nice and simple.
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But is that how God ever did anything? Is that how God worked with Israel? I mean, God's hands dirty dealing with some rather stiff -necked people.
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But anyways, so there's Revelation 1. And then here's a gospel, Mark 1.
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That's a really interesting textual variant. Son of God at Mark 1 .1.
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That is an important one to study. Isaiah the prophet, that's an important one contextually because of the citation there.
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But you see a number of them are smaller prepositions and things like that. That one's probably a capitalization one.
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You know where you'll find just incredible whole tracks with almost no meaningful textual variation at all?
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I found this very interesting. Book of Hebrews. Hebrews textual history is amazingly consistent along these lines.
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You'll notice there, I only see three. One of them is an article and there's not much there at all.
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It's very, very interesting to compare those to each other. Now remember, this is handwritten text.
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I don't think in this room we could do that well with a paragraph by the time we got to the end of the room.
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I really don't think we could, no matter how hard we tried. Especially if I wrote it in Greek and you had to try to copy something you don't know.
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You might not actually read for yourself. That would be really interesting. Now, these variations, what is their nature?
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The vast majority, I mean, I think that Ehrman's thesis, while interesting, has a lot of holes in it.
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In finding, in a number of textual variants, theological significance when it could be explained as simple scribal error.
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And he wants to read all those things as if a scribe was having a problem. What kind of scribal errors?
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Even the 4000 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.
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Many of these errors involve common scribal errors. Mistakes that we continue to make this very day when copying from one text to another.
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Here is an important example from the history of the New Testament. Now, before I show it to you, I'm old enough to have been writing papers in high school and the beginning of college.
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B .C., before computer. And I still remember that large, green
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IBM Selectric that I had. Some of you who, with me, have white in the beard here are going, oh, yes.
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And the tremendous frustration you experience when you had to put a footnote at the bottom of the page.
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You forget. You get to the bottom of the page. And you know what you have to do? Tear it out and start all over again.
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Because there ain't nothing you can do. And young people are going, how the hell did you survive that? Bam! What persecution you had!
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I thought it was bad. That was terrible stuff. I remember my first word star, that glowing green screen and dot commands.
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I was like, yes! Technology is wonderful! But anyway. But the fact of the matter is, you'd be sitting there and you'd be typing along.
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And if you're copying out of a text, the human mind does certain things. You make certain errors.
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And it still happens today. I can be sitting there, and unless I'm going to take that book over to my scanner, but even then, the
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OCR software can sometimes come up with some wild interpretations of what it's seeing there. But if I'm copying out of a book,
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I skip phrases and I skip lines in my eyes if I get distracted. And I'm sitting in an air -conditioned office with fluorescent lights.
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I don't know how these folks, before LASIK, were sitting there with pen and quill, you know, by sunlight or candlelight.
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And the fact that they did what they did is actually an amazing thing, when you actually think about it. Let's look at a common ascribable error here.
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If you have your Bibles, which hopefully you do, depending on which translations are available.
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1 John 3 .1 in the King James Version and in the New King James Version. Please realize, I think it's very important that we recognize the textual background of the translations we're using.
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The King James and the New King James are based upon what's called the Textus Receptus. And so they're going to read pretty much the same.
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And then the NASV, NIB, ESV, and all the rest are going to be based upon the
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NA27UBS text platform. There are no current translations that I'm aware of, anyway.
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It's the majority text. I keep hearing rumors about some coming out, but I haven't seen them yet. The King James, based on the
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TR, says, Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.
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Therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. There's the King James Rendered of 1 John 3 .1.
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Now compare 1 John 3 .1 and the New American Standard. See how great a love the
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Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called the children of God. And such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know him.
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I realize I'm talking to a group of men, so I need to inform a few of you. A small percentage that the phrase,
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And such we are, is in a different color than the rest of the text. I have had people come up to me and say,
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I didn't get your point. And I look at what they're wearing to tie in their shirt and go, I can see why. And such we are.
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Now, If I were like many King James only preachers,
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I could start preaching on texts like this. And there's a whole bunch of texts like this that I could present to you.
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Was, if I wanted to reverse this, I could say, those Anglicans, First of all, they're from England, can you trust anyone from England, right
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Colin? Yes. And secondly, They, they, those
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Anglicans didn't believe in adoption. The adoption of us is the sons of God, the children of God.
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And so they've cut it out, and they've deleted it, and they've removed it. And you can use all these buzzwords and stuff like that, which is what
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King James only folks do with all the variants going the other direction. But why is there a difference between these two texts?
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Why does the Numeric Standard have the assertion, And such we are, but the King James does not?
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Well, it is a simple, easily identifiable textual variant. And it's not that the
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King James translators didn't understand what textual variants were, or ascribable errors. The fact of the matter is, the
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King James translators weren't doing much in the way of studying the text on that level at all. They're primarily utilizing,
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They used the five editions of Erasmus, starting in 1560. He did five editions. Then Stephanos does the 1550
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Stephanos text. And then Theodor Beza, they used his 1598 text, the successor of Calvin at Geneva.
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He did a text in 1598 that was the primary text that they used. They did compare some of the others.
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But they're only using printed text. They're generally not going to the manuscripts at all and doing any textual study on that level.
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They used the 1525 Bomberg text, if you're interested, for the Old Testament. And so, they're just following those printed
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Greek texts. And those printed Greek texts contain a textual variant. And let's take a look at what it is.
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Here I am. This is, I'll skip down here. This is a glowing example right here of homo teleton.
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Similar endings. Think how many times you've been copying a word ending with such combinations as ing, tion, es.
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And when looking back at what you are copying, have mistakenly started with a different word that had the same ending.
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It might be on the next line. It might be just a few words down. But you just wrote tion, your eye goes back, it finds tion, you continue there, but it's the wrong tion.
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And so, you have inadvertently, and especially if it doesn't immediately turn the text into gibberish, you might not even notice it.
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You have inadvertently deleted something from what you're copying. It's a common scribal error based upon similar endings.
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And as we'll see later, the text they're copying, called unsealed text, has no spaces between words.
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So you'll see why it's an even greater issue in that context. So, ancient writers made the same error.
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Here is the relevant portion of the Greek as it would have appeared in unsealed text, all capital text, in the early days of the
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New Testament. So, there it is, very clear, let's move on from there. Oh, not quite?
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Not used to reading scribal unsealed text? Let's see the problem, let's use some color to point it out.
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This, again, won't help those of you who are colorblind. But there you see the text, and here we have kleithomen, we are called, kei esmen, dia tuta, for this reason.
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And so, that we might be called, the tecna, then the theu here is what's called the nomina sacra, it's a
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God, Christ, Lord, these were all abbreviated in the unsealed text of the
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New Testament. And so, that's the form of God. And then, that we might be called, there's mu epsilon nu, and we are esmen mu epsilon nu.
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So, there's, this is the section right here that is missing in the text's receptus.
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Clear example of homo eteluton, an early scribe, skipping from one mu epsilon nu to the other mu epsilon nu.
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A scribe, upon copying, called kleithomen, returned his eyes to the exemplar and saw the following esmen resulting in the error.
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It wasn't that the King James translators were trying to get rid of adoption and all the rest of this stuff, and yet, there are entire books published in defense of the
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King James that just base themselves upon this kind of allegation that actually has no substance when you actually look into the original text.
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So, the majority of the 5700 Greek manuscripts date from after 1000
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AD, and they comprise what's called the majority text. You'll see a very fancy German fractur M used for the majority text.
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The earlier manuscripts are called papyri text, written in uncial or majuscule text.
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That uncial text is all capital forms, no spacing, no punctuation. Makes it very interesting to read.
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I've been having to spend more and more time with that. In fact, when I get back, thanks be to the Lord, a two -volume set of all the known papyri manuscripts of New Testament will be sitting on my desk.
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I'm very excited to get that because one of my projects is I want to read all of them. So, in a debate, I can say
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I've read every papyri manuscript in the papyri, not just the transcription, but actually the papyri text.
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I think that would be very useful for what I do. Let's look at some of these manuscripts, give you some introduction here.
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You saw this one at the beginning. This is the text that is universally recognized.
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No one questions that this is the earliest text. There are those who believe there are earlier texts than this, but at least there is general agreement that here, manuscript
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P52, it comes from around A .D. 125. Now, I've always thought that P52, and by the way, it's about the size of a credit card.
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You're looking at the entire manuscript. Now, there's a backside to it, but you're looking at the whole thing. So, obviously, many of those early papyri manuscripts are extremely fragmented, and hence may not be overly helpful in establishing the text outside of the establishment of the existence of the text at that very, very early period of time.
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I've always thought that P52 is God's way of demonstrating humor, and the reason
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I say that is that if you know something about the history of theology, you know that in the late 1700s and the 1800s, especially
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German critical thought came to the conclusion that it was the sure and certain discovery of theology and history and scholarship that the
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Gospel of John was written long after the time of Jesus. Well into the second century, there are those who said the
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Gospel of John was written in the third century after the time of Christ because clearly its
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Christology is so high that now that we understand, especially once Darwin comes along, we understand evolution and development of things, that there must have been a long period of time, because we know
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Jesus wasn't anything like what John says he was, and so to have such a high view of Jesus required that there be much development and evolution over time and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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Well I just think it's just wonderfully humorous that here the one that everybody agrees on comes from AD 125 is from John chapter 18.
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Praise the Lord. Which of course sort of blows the second and third century stuff about John out of the water when you actually have a manuscript fragment of it that comes from AD 125.
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So that's just always made me chuckle just a little bit every time I look at it because it reminds us that what modern scholarship might say is absolutely assured, well, it's nice to have facts rather than just modern scholarship.
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Here's P72 from around AD 200, and these are conservative dates. There are actually a number who would push them earlier than these, but I'm using fairly conservative dates here.
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You can see here, this actually is a very good scan, Petru Epistole Be, so that's the beginning of 2
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Peter and that's the end of 1 Peter right here. I saw this sheet with my own two eyes in 1993 in Denver, Colorado.
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Why was it in Denver, Colorado? Because that's where the Pope was, and the papal treasure exhibit was there in Denver during World Youth Day, and I was up there to debate geromatics at Denver Seminary and at a local
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Presbyterian church on the papacy over two nights, about seven and a half hours of debate, and we were also there to pass out tracts to the hundreds of thousands of youth that had gathered for World Youth Day.
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But when I found out that a page of P72 was going to be on display, then my partner,
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Rich Pierce, and I managed to get in. And I'll never forget, it's one of the first things they were showing.
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It's in this hermetically sealed glass case, and I'm just sitting there, and I'm going, oh, this is cool.
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Look, here's the Nominus Sacra for Jesus Christ. 2 Peter 1 has a Gramble -Sharpe instruction in it, so here's the
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Gramble -Sharpe instruction, and I'm sitting here reading this stuff, and pretty soon, the security guards are starting to take notice of this.
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Most folks, you know, they sort of walk up, and they look at that, and they... And they just...
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But I'm standing over there, and I'm translating this thing, you know, and the people would walk up, and they'd sort of look down at that, and they'd look up at it, and they'd look at me, and they'd look at Rich, and they'd go, is he reading that?
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And he goes, yeah, he's reading it. Look at this, Ralph, this man's reading it. I saw this crowd starts gathering around, and the security guards, and this number, and everyone's, oh,
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Richard Grabney would have to go off and look at a diamond tiara for a while, you know. That was great.
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That was exciting. And I get excited about things like this. I guess we have someone studying papyrology back here mention this as well.
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And I get excited about stuff like this because think about it. First of all, this is 1 ,800 years ago.
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Someone comes into a church. Now, this guy's not a professional scribe. Sorry, I had better handwriting in first grade.
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Not a professional scribe. Written on papyrus, not written on vellum. Why? Well, because Christianity's illegal right now.
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This is probably someone risking their life to have this. Okay?
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And they go into a church. Christians have this weird thing about getting together for worship, and so they go into this church while they're traveling, maybe a business, maybe it's a soldier,
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I don't know. But he sought out other Christians, and all of a sudden they're reading from this book, and he's like, wait a minute, what is that?
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I've never heard that before. Well, these are Peter's epistles. This is actually the earliest manuscript we have of 1
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Peter and Jude. And I've never heard that before. Our church would love to have that.
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Can I copy that? And so here is someone who loved the Word of God 1 ,800 years ago, risking their life to write this up.
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That's why I get excited about it. I will confess. I will confess something else to you when
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I show you another manuscript here that I've seen that I actually can get misty -eyed at times.
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But anyways, here's P72 from AD 200. There's the description of it. It's Petro Epistole Dei, the second
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Peter. It's really neat to be able to see that. Here is one of the most important ancient manuscripts we have,
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P75, Luke and John. There's the beginning of the Gospel of John. Tremendously accurate.
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This person was a, at least had been trained as a scribe.
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Their hand is much better. You can see it's much more regular. Very few textual variations.
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Very, very clean text. Very similar to manuscript B, Codex Vaticanus, which you'll see here a little bit later on.
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Very, very important. Then the very important as well, P66.
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You'll notice you can see in this, you can see here the form of the codex.
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You can see that some people theorize that Christians actually invented this way. These are not scrolls.
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There have only been a handful of New Testament manuscripts that are written on scrolls. Most of the time those are written on the back of pre -existing scrolls.
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Remember, Christians are primarily slaves and it's illegal to be. It's a time of persecution.
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They're not rich people. Writing on the back of papyri is a pain because you're taking leaves, you're laying them 90 degrees from each other, you're trying to create a smooth surface.
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Generally one side will be fairly smooth. The back side has all the veins. Writing on that is a pain.
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But the Christians don't have a lot of money. So, you know, it's the common way of doing things.
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This guy was happy because you can see the lines are going up in P66. we see here the collection of the
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Gospels over time. The Gospels are being, even though they're not written together, they're already being recollected into one book.
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And P66, very important witness to the Gospels. And likewise, another codex,
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P46. This is Paul's epistles. Now those of you who've studied this, you don't get the answer to this.
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But how many of you think that in this early period of time Hebrews is included in this or is it excluded from this?
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How many of you think it's included? How many of you think it's excluded? How many of you are a bunch of chickens?
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It's included. It is included in this early collection. So many in the early church viewed
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Paul as, and you can see here, it's a little bit hard to see in that, but there you have two of the
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Philippians. There's the beginning of Philippians right there. From P46 around AD 200.
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Now, after the peace of the church in AD 313, Christians could have professional scribes copy the scriptures.
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At this time, the great vellum or leather manuscripts began to appear, including the three greatest of these, Sinaiticus, which is always symbolized by the
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Hebrew term aleph, Vaticanus, which is B, and Codex Alexandrinus, A. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus may well have been among the
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Bibles copied with imperial monies at the time of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. Constantine gave money since the
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Roman Empire had been destroying the Christian scriptures. Then he gave money to the churches to copy their scriptures.
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He, of course, did not tell them what to copy, unlike what Dan Brown would like us to think, but they may well have been those done at that time because they are clearly very professionally made.
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Here is a picture of Codex Sinaiticus from around AD 325.
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If you want to see how regular that is, here is a full screen. Look at that. That is
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Codex Sinaiticus. This is in the British Library.
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In 2005, I believe it was, when I went to England before I got super sick, the day
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I was getting sick, I went to the British Library and it amazed me because I was able to simply walk right in.
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No one challenged me and I walked right up to this glass case. Here, sitting in front of me, is
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Codex Sinaiticus. Sitting right next to it is Codex Alexandrianus. Behind me is a 1611
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King James Bible and next to it, the Tyndale. All that is between me and them is glass.
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It worried me. You all are not thinking right here.
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Remember, London is becoming Londonistan. One explosive device and those treasures are gone.
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Thankfully, as you may know, Codex Sinaiticus is now online. By July of this year, all of it will be online in the most amazing high definition pictures.
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It is not just pictures from straight up. What is really cool is they use raking light, so light from the side so you can actually see the texture of the text as well.
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Codex Sinaiticus .net It is exciting. I will confess that as I stood there, looking at Sinaiticus and Alexandrianus next to it,
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I wept. It was just so incredible. I knew what Tischendorf felt like.
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Tischendorf, Constantine von Tischendorf in the middle of the 19th century, out of a desire to defend the
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Word of God, a desire to promote the Word of God, was searching for ancient manuscripts of the
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Bible. He went to St. Catherine's Monastery in Mount Sinai. I am doing this off the top of my head after 16 days on the road, so please, if I get a date wrong, don't shoot me, but I believe it was 1844 was the first time he visited.
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A monk was walking past him in the hallway and he happened to look into what he was carrying and he saw what looked like scraps of ancient manuscripts.
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He stopped the monk and he pulls out and he recognizes, these are Septuagint and they're ancient.
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He says, what are you doing with these? I'm taking them to the kitchen to stoke the fires. He goes nuts.
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It makes sense. Think about having an ancient library made of papyri. What's going to happen as you use books?
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Pages fall out and stuff ends up on the floor. You can't leave it down there. It becomes the perfect place for, boom, fire.
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So you have to clean it up. So they're just doing what they always do. Pages fall out, scraps, you don't know which book they went to, you pick them up and you go use them to start your fires for your food.
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At least you're doing something useful with them. Well, Tischendorf's reaction freaks the monks. It's not like they're used to having a lot of visitors anyway.
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And when the funny visitor from Europe starts freaking out about your garbage, you're really like,
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I can't hear that talking to you anymore. Do you have any more of this? Crazy European, go away.
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And so he didn't find anything more on that trip, but that is the origin of the lie about Sinaiticus.
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You will hear a lot of people say, well Sinaiticus was found in a garbage can. No, Sinaiticus was not found in a garbage can in any way, shape, or form.
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What happened is Tischendorf came back a couple of times and the last time he visited a number of years later, he still hadn't found a whole lot, but the steward who had been helping him and seeing him around and so on and so forth had been very nice to him.
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And so Tischendorf had published an edition of the Greek Septuagint and so he had a copy with him and so he, as a gift, gave a copy to his steward.
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And so this monk is looking at it and says, oh, I have one of these. Let me show you. So he takes him to his cell and out of what we would call a closet, he takes a book wrapped in red cloth.
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Now, monks do not wrap garbage in red cloth, okay? And he unwraps this thing and Count von
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Tischendorf finds himself staring at Codex Vaticanus, which was written around the time of the
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Council of Nicaea. So at this time, it's over 1 ,500 years old and it is the only manuscript known to man at this time that contains both the
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Old and New Testaments in the Greek language. Now, von Tischendorf has learned his lesson.
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Oh, well that's interesting. Mind if I sort of take a look at that? Oh, sure.
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So he takes it to his room and it's like, he does not sleep the whole night.
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He is just enraptured. Of course, the next morning he offers to buy it and they refuse. The story of how it ends up in England is one of intrigue in many ways, but that is the story of the discovery of Codex Sinaiticus.
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Some of the ties that you'll see me wear in videos and stuff are from Codex Sinaiticus. I take the text and turn them into ties.
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I am a total freak. So, anyway. Around the same time, we have
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Codex Vaticanus, which is not nearly as accessible to us, though right now, I can tell you someone that if you have $5 ,999 will sell you an entire facsimile of Codex Vaticanus.
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And if I had $5 ,999, I'd buy it, but I don't, so there you have Codex Vaticanus, which is unfortunately locked up in the
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Vatican Library in Rome and is not nearly as accessible to us as things like Sinaiticus, unfortunately.
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And then we have Codex Alexandrinus, a smaller text. Like I said, it was right next to Sinaiticus in London when
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I visited, from around 8350 or 400, around in that time period. Again, very easily read, much more...
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I have a beautiful tie the same color as Codex Alexandrinus. It's actually got John 1426 in it, because the
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Muslims say, the non -Muslims say, that that's been corrupted. So I had this tie made that has the exact word paraclete in it, so I can show a
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Muslim, Why hadn't you ever thought of that?
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So, aside from the 5700 plus Greek text, we have early translations into Latin, Coptic, Sahitic, etc.,
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that are important witnesses to the early text of the New Testament. They obviously can tell us if certain texts were there or were not there.
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They're not as helpful as to certain readings, because sometimes the target language won't even be able to actually render the
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Greek to be able to help us, but they are important. Combining these with the Greek text yields over 20 ,000 early witnesses to the text of the
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New Testament. We have more than 124 Greek manuscript witnesses within the first 200 years after the writing of the
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New Testament, far more than any other work of antiquity. I'm sure you've heard it illustrated and said before, but the fact of the matter is that for most of the ancient works of antiquity, our first manuscript evidence of them comes from at least 900 years after their writing.
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So that if anyone is going to be skeptical as to the original text of the New Testament, saying, we just can't know what it said, then if they're going to be consistent, but have to say that we can't know what any book written before Gutenberg actually said.
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As long as there's textual variation in it, especially those ancient works that have to be extremely when you have one or two manuscripts dating a millennium after the original in comparison to what we have, 124
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Greek manuscript witnesses within the first 300 years after the writing of the New Testament. And by the way, the
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Koran is 600 years after this. The Koran has a much shorter time period to go before printing is invented than the
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New Testament did. And of course, the Koran has state sponsorship protecting it, rather than the entire mighty
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Roman Empire trying to destroy it the first 250 years of its existence. That's a major difference.
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In fact, we have 12 manuscripts from the 2nd century, i .e. within 100 years of the writing of the New Testament. These manuscripts contain portions of all four
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Gospels, nine books of Paul, Acts, Hebrews, and Revelation, comprising the majority of the books of the New Testament we possess today.
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Again, no work of antiquity even comes close to this early attestation.
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Now, when you listen to Bart Ehrman, it sounds like the transmission of the text of the New Testament is like in the phone game we played as kids, where one person listens for something in the ear and the person next in line and so forth around the circle until the last person repeats what he has heard and it is inevitably changed in often humorous ways from what was originally said.
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But is this an accurate way of thinking of how the New Testament is transmitted over time? That is certainly what Ehrman is trying to get into people's minds.
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Copies of copies of copies from hundreds of years later. And that sounds like a single line of transmission.
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That is not how the New Testament text came to us in any way, shape, or form. Here is the illustration
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I used in the debate. For those of you who weren't there, I actually stole these slides and stuck them into my presentation.
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But instead, if you have John writing down Ephesus, his text might end up over to Jerusalem or Damascus or something like that.
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Paul might write from Rome to Corinth. And so we have these handwritten manuscripts that are being carried to their target audience.
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We know, for example, that Paul wanted letters to be read in multiple churches. So, for example, probably in Ephesians, when it talks about the, in Colossians, when it talks about the letter coming from Laodicea, that is probably
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Ephesians. Ever wondered why Ephesians, where Paul is ministering for three years, there's nothing personal in it.
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There's no greetings of individuals or anything like that. It looks like it was a circular letter, meant to be circulated around the cities of the
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Lycus River Valley. So then, they are copied, and copies are then sent to other places, maybe with travelers, maybe with people who you know, like soldiers, business people, whatever else it might be.
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So these begin to move around the entire area. And then you have them coming together in similar places.
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And when they come together in similar places, then a codex begins to be created. Say, Paul's letters are gathered together, the
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Gospels are gathered together, as a single whole. And so then you have codices, entire books then, that are sent out from place to place, copied, then the
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Gospels might become combined with Paul, for example, in one place. And these here, creating this, what
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I call, multifocality, the fact you have multiple writers at multiple times writing to multiple audiences.
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It's very important to recognize the nature of how the New Testament comes to exist in that way.
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It's vitally important to realize the transmission of the text of the New Testament did not follow the phone game single line. Not only are written documents much less liable to corruption than what is whispered in the ear, but the phone game involves a single line of transmission.
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The New Testament originated in multiple places, written by multiple authors, with books being sent to multiple locations.
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This multifocality leads us to the final considerations that demonstrate the bankruptcy of the modern attacks on the
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New Testament. This is what we need to somehow get communicated to our people and to ourselves, for that matter, so we can communicate this focus.
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To make specific changes in a text like the New Testament, which originally circulated as a group of texts, independent from one another, not as a single body, would require a centralized controlling body that could make wholesale changes in these widely dispersed texts.
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That's exactly what you had in the Da Vinci Code. That's exactly the theory that you had in the Da Vinci Code. Somehow, Constantine could do at the time of the
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Council of Nicaea what we cannot do in our modern day. Da Vinci Code said that Constantine gathered up all the
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New Testament manuscripts and made wholesale changes, destroyed the stuff that disagreed, and came out with the four
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Gospels and presented Jesus as a God over against the earlier Gnostic manuscripts that had the opposite, which
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Gnosticism only makes you chuckle. I think Dan Brown chuckles every day when he spends his millions of dollars that he made off of really stupid people.
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Constantine managed to do what we can't do today. We have a brother here that has just returned from Afghanistan.
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I know my brother here would like to have caught a certain fellow by the name of Osama Bin Laden. We've got satellites up there taking pictures, and we're doing everything we can.
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We can't find a big tall guy in a hat. How in the world could Constantine find manuscripts buried in the desert sands of Egypt and gather them all together and make wholesale changes in 325
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AD? He didn't even have one satellite. The very idea is so outrageously absurd.
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That's even why Ehrman wrote a book identifying the Da Vinci Code as silliness. Even the radicals on the left go, wow, that really does need to be in fiction.
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That's where it needs to be. Man, I wish I could write a piece of fiction that would make me that many millions of dollars, but amazing stuff.
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You don't have this kind of centralized structure, even if the Christian faith in one tried to do that.
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The Christian faith is under persecution. There is no centralized structure. There is no papacy existing at this time that would have that kind of power, and yet even the movie that came out two
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Easter's ago, On the Taupia Tomb, they've got sections where they've got these black -hooded monks burning books and doing stuff like this.
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It's just no historical basis whatsoever. The fact of the matter is no such central agent ever existed, or could have existed.
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Christianity was a persecuted religion made up mainly of the lower classes. There was no central authority to ever gather up all the texts and make wholesale changes.
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Such was impossible in the earliest days of transmission, and given that we have such ancient texts now, obviously it could not have happened at a later point without giving clear evidence.
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In other words, because we found these papyri that go so far, so close to the original, if someone later on had made wholesale changes, had done what
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Shirley MacLaine said, how the Council of Constantinople took reincarnation out of the
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New Testament. Well, we had manuscripts that exist before the Council of Constantinople. If they had made wholesale changes, then as we found these early and early manuscripts, they'd stand out like a sore thumb.
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That's not actually what ends up happening. We can prove beyond all doubt this kind of corruption did not happen.
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Since papyri have been found that date back to the 2nd century, that only within the past 100 years had any later centralized organization sought all of the text, those later texts would show stark differences as older and older manuscripts are found, but just the opposite has been the case as we have found earlier and earlier manuscripts.
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So all allegations of purposeful corruption, such as those made by Muslims, fall upon the mere consideration of the historical context and the data itself.
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The rapid, widespread distribution of New Testament manuscripts in the first two centuries precludes any purposeful centralized corruption.
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It also gives rise to the need to study the relatively small number of textual variants because the people making the copies were humans.
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They weren't professional scribes. They were just people who loved the Word of God.
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They wanted to see the Word of God distributed and so they made errors. Well, we can recognize what those errors are.
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We have this rich manuscript tradition and that's why we need to deal with the textual variants. This leads to another important point.
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When scribes copied their text, they were very conservative, often incorporating marginal notes into the text since they could not be sure if the note was original or not.
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In other words, remember the IBM Selectric story I told you? Well, what if you're typing along and you just don't want to go back and retype this whole thing?
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And, of course, back then, especially writing on vellum, you know, most people didn't have an extra cow back home.
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Man, messed up, go kill a cow. And, you know, start all over again. And so what they would do when you did skip a line or something like that was they would write it in a smaller hand in the margin.
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Well, if you're copying that manuscript 50 years later and the person who did the original copy is now dead, or you don't even know who did the original copy, you come along, well is that meant to be a part of the text?
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Or is that someone making a note explaining something in the text? The tendency of the scribes was include it in the text, don't lose anything.
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And so much of the textual study is what has been added along those lines. And why is that important?
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Why is that a good thing? Because that means the original is still there too. See, if the tendency was to get rid of things then we'd be worried we'd lost something.
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But the tendency was to include anything that was found in it. And so the issue becomes what's been added, not what's been lost.
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That's the important part. So, this means they even preserve mistakes or silly readings.
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This may sound bad at first, but consider what it really means. The New Testament text is tenacious. That means readings are preserved in the text.
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All readings, including the original readings, are still a part of the manuscript tradition. That is why the leading textual critic can persevere in even the most difficult variants.
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One of the readings is the original reading. Now, I'm going to have to move a little bit too fast in the last six or seven minutes, but I have a variant here
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I wanted to go over with you because it's an important one. And if I go a minute or two over, hopefully no one will throw food or anything else at me in the process.
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Because I'll probably eat it if you do. So, a key theological example. And this one hopefully is helpful to you.
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Look at 1 Timothy 3 verse 16. So, before I throw this on the screen,
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I want you to take a look at it in your own text. Let's compare, once again, the
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King James Version and the New American Standard. By the way, just a quick poll.
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How many have King James or New King James? How many have
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NASV and IVDSV? How many of you are reading the Aramaic? Right.
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Alright, King James Version. And without controversy, greatest in the mystery of godliness, God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the
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Gentiles, believed on the world, received up into glory. Here is the
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New American Standard. By common confession, greatest in the mystery of goddess, he who was revealed in the flesh was vindicated in the spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed in the world, taken up in glory.
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Now, if you're a King James only advocate, this is the one you preach on. Those godless liberals, they don't believe in the deity of Christ, they've taken
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God out, they've just put in the word he. This clearly demonstrates that we need to go out in the churchyard, and if you have anything but the
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King James Bible, the one God gave us, then we're going to burn your Bible because it's a satanic counterfeit.
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And if you think I'm making that up, you do not know what King James only -ism is about. Trust me,
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I wrote the King James only controversy, that's the longest reputation of the subject in print right now, and hence
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I am the high priest of the Alexandrian cult. the letters
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I could give you would, uh, why do you think I'm bald? Singed it right off I better know that one.
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In fact, D .A. Carson had written a book on the subject before I did, and once mine came out, he took his out of print because he was glad for me to be in the interview.
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Let him have it, that's okay. So, by the way, the second edition of that's coming out next month, if you have the first edition, you might want to get it.
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32 pages long now. But, here, God was manifesting the flesh, he was manifesting - look, that looks like a major barrier.
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And we've got to realize, our people sitting there, if they're looking at their notes, you know, on the margin, down at the bottom of the
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NASV, or the ESV, that can be troubling. Because that looks like a major barrier. God and he don't look anything alike to me.
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And I want to know whether this text is teaching the deity of Christ or not, right? It's an important question. So, let's take a look at the variant.
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This is one of the key texts, used by King James only advocates, we know that. They don't look a lot alike, in English anyway.
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This variant is very evenly matched as far as the external evidence is concerned, but let's look at the actual variant itself.
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Let's look at what it would have looked like in the unsealed text. There's the unsealed text. And this is the reading of God, and this is the reading of he who.
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And, don't worry, I'll use color to help you out here. Don't worry, we'll get to it in a moment, just let me read along here.
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Here's the difference. There's the difference between the two. There's the nomena sacra for theos, and there's the word hos.
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So let me show you what the real difference between those two readings is. There's the difference.
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The difference between this, and that. Actually, it's two lines. The line in beta, right there, and the line over the nomena sacra.
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Now, what were you writing on? Papyri. What's papyri made of?
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Leaves. What do leaves have in them? They have lines. Even if you're writing on leather, take a look at the front of your
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Bible, except for, of course, Stan's Uber Bible, which I, working for the
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Lachman Foundation, of course, have my own, and I've said many times that if you're very quiet at night, you can hear the
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Bible move. Oh, man, it's so smooth. It's great.
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But if you have any... Man, it's been a long trip. But if you have any other leather
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Bible here, other than Stan's, you will notice what does it have on its front cover? Lines.
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Now, if you're reading someone's handwriting that you can't go to them and ask them, or if your eyesight isn't the best, if you're over 45 and you can't find your spectacles that day, or whatever else it might be, is there really some type of satanic conspiracy that is needed when you can see these two words and how absolutely similar they are, especially when they're in a long line of stuff?
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Go back. Go back, I said. No, not that far back. Go back.
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In a long line of stuff that looks like this? Seriously, man, I went way too far back, didn't
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I? The unsealed text can sometimes be very, very difficult to read. And so when you take a look at it, and we'll get there eventually, that's what you do when you go too far back.
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There. When you look at something like that, especially if it's at the end of a day or something like that, I don't find any reason to be accusing all the translators of NASB of being
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Satan -inspired heretics, when you actually go back and look at what the original would have involved their copying.
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But unfortunately, it's very rare when you get folks to actually take a look at it at that level. In summary, we're coming up on time here.
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400 ,000 variants, yes. 99 % of them are inconsequential to the meaning of the text. It is the most thoroughly documented work of antiquity.
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It spread all over the world quickly. There was no controlling authority. There was no Christian Uthman to change the text.
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All the New Agers who think that it used to talk about reincarnation got taken out. No. Any later editing would stand out clearly in comparison with the ancient manuscripts that we possess today.
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And so that is a summary of why it is that we need to be aware of these facts.
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We need to be ready to give an answer because the fact of the matter is that people like Bart Ehrman are presenting their perspectives.
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And that's the stuff that is showing up in classrooms. And that means our students are coming back into our churches.
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And who's the first person they're going to be asking about these things? You. So may
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I strongly suggest that your library, maybe you're putting out a list for people in your church who would like to help their pastor at this time of year, maybe give them some gifts.
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There are some excellent resources you might want to be putting in your library to help you on these issues.
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So hopefully this has been useful to you. I look forward to having a word with you. And dear
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Heavenly Father, we do thank you for the Word of God. With the psalmist we confess that it is precious to us, more precious than gold.
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And we thank you that you have preserved it. You have preserved it in a way that we can trust the transmission of that text.
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You haven't preserved it in the way that some people would like it to have been preserved, but you have done so in such a miraculous way, working with your people, safeguarding your text.
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We thank you that you've given us that Word, and by your Spirit you drive us into it, you cause us to love it and desire to be obedient to it.
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May we be amongst those who give an answer, the hope that's within us, demonstrating that we can trust that you have indeed spoken.