Reliability of the New Testament Text

In misquoting Jesus, which was a New York Times bestseller. In the one, he's very conservative. He recognizes that the 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 New Testament means that we must be agnostic about all ancient documents, in totem, and in fact, much more so, because no other work of antiquity comes even close to having the testimony of the 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, or here. If he actually boiled down the number of texts he's talking to, it would be a very, very, very small number of texts that would in no way impact the actual teaching of the New Testament.

But he doesn't bring that out when he's talking to people like he was in that media.

Clip right there.

Why the New Testament Manuscript Tradition Is So Large

And so, 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.

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 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 Bible.

It was a text of New American Standard, but the 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. So I think it's very important that when we're preparing our sermons, you check these things out.

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.

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. And 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.

They emphasize that all we have are copies of copies of copies of copies from hundreds of years after the originals. Whenever you hear anybody saying that, they're quoting Barnard because he's the one who's sort of pushing this now.

Dr. Shaw on Thursday evening said exactly that because he's reading and misquoting 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.

That is the assertion that is being made. Now, here is Bart Ehrman's more scholarly book that came out in late 1994. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. It is his assertion that there are a number of textual variants in the New Testament that the 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. Now, 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 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, I don't know how many new manuscripts in the New Testament that had never been cataloged 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 AD, that's a new manuscript variant, okay? So how many manuscript variants do you think are found in the currently cataloged New Testament manuscript tradition?

Anybody? 100 ,000?

We're at 30 ,000, what was this? 10?

200 ,000?

200 ,000? Well, we've got a range here, don't we? All right, probably best guess would be right around 400 ,000. Now, that's what Bart Ehrman's gonna tell you. And that's what the Muslims are gonna tell you.

That's what the atheists are gonna tell you. There's a 400 ,000 variants. In fact, think about what 400, there are only 138 ,162 words in the New Testament.

That's nearly three variants per word.

And I've listened to Muslims just hammer on this.

Just imagine that there's three different variants.

For every single word in the New Testament. So we have no idea what it originally said.

And oh, that sounds terrible.

And most 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 here going, wow, that's a lot of variants.

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 or walk up and slap them in the face, but they with confidence will tell young people, you have no idea what the New Testament said.

My daughter had a anti-Christian bigot her first semester in college, and she tangled with him. And he didn't know what he was getting into. My daughter is me in a female body. She has attended my debates since she was knee high to a grasshopper.

I have pictures of her listening very intently to the Muslims quizzing me at the Hamza Abdel Malik debate in New York in 1999. She was at the debate with Barry Lynn on homosexuality, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So he was waxing on about something, and she's like, excuse me, but don't you realize the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the New Testament was written in Greek, and you're confusing the Old Covenant with the New Covenant.

And he went after her in public in that class. Your parents have lied to you. You Google the Gospels and tell me who wrote them. There is scholarship for you. But anyway, so she learned firsthand. That's the kind of stuff they're throwing out there.

They accept this kind of stuff as surface level as it is. 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. These are facts, but let's, what they don't tell you, let's look at the reality here.

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 variations, and Ehrman would confirm that. He would confirm that what we're talking about, we talk about 400 ,000 variants, is one manuscript from the 10th century spells John with two Ns instead of one.

Up variant.

Add that one in, and it's pretty easy to start adding up variants for another reason. Hence, 1 of 400 ,000 equals 4 ,000 meaningful textual variants out of 138 ,162 words is 2 .9 or one meaningful variant every three pages.

But that's not even it yet. That's quite a different picture, of course.

The Muslims are going, three variants per every word,.

And it's actually about one meaningful variant every three pages. 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.

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 New Testament, how much confidence do we have that what we have is actually what was originally written? That's the point. And that's what people don't understand, is that the more manuscripts you have, the more variants are gonna be piling up, of necessity, because they are written documents.

Now, if I had the whole weekend on this, I would do what most people do who teach in this subject, is 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 it would go, and we'd send it around the room.

First, we'd do the telephone game, then 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 written form, and we'd pass it around, and sometimes I'd have it branch off and split, and stuff like that, and we could see how handwritten copying introduces textual variation.

Well, the New Testament, for the first 15, 1600 years, because the printing press, while 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.

The first printed and published edition of the Greek New Testament comes out in 1516. So, for a millennium and a half, approximately, the New Testament is transmitted in a handwritten form, as any ancient document is.

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 corruptedness of the text. Anyone who actually knows the field knows that.

There are 5 ,700 plus cataloged manuscripts of the New Testament, the average of which is 200 pages long, 5 ,700 plus in the Greek language. Averaging 200 pages each, that means that's approximately 1 .2 million pages of handwritten text.

4 ,000 meaningful variants in 1 .2 million pages of handwritten text, now you're starting to get the idea of the real sense of the numbers. 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.

It's clearly meant just for impact. It's meant to communicate something in that context. But it's not meant, to be honest, with the actual text itself. 4 ,000 meaningful variants over 1 .2 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.

One might say it is downright miraculous. Now, what I did is I popped up BibleWorks, and by the way, Version 8 is out, for those of you who use it. I popped up BibleWorks and I have set my system to compare the most Byzantine-printed Greek text with the Nesteol and UBS text.

And it will put in color where there's a variation between the two. Now, unfortunately, it also picks up where there is a difference in capitalization, which is really totally irrelevant. 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. 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 P here,.

There's another N here.

But given the form of Christ there, it wouldn't actually normally impact translation. There you see sort of the type of textual variation you have there. Revelation's very interesting. Revelation's textual history is totally unique, unlike any other book in the New Testament, which makes sense, given it's the fact that it had to fight for inclusion in the 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 I could actually handle. So, I'm glad there was a discussion about it, because people go, oh, well, there was disputes.

I'm like, I'm glad there were.

If there weren't, that means there was just.

A bunch of gullible people sitting around going, oh, you think that's a spirit?

Okay, I will, too.

You know, I want to go, why do you think that's a bad thing? People automatically assume that it is. There just shouldn't have been unanimity. Everybody just had an epiphany, you know. It's the golden tablet syndrome.

You know, you want to have these golden tablets floating down from heaven, and it's all nice and simple. But is that how God ever did anything? Is that how God worked with Israel? You know, I mean, God's hands dirty for dealing with some rather stiff-necked people.

But anyways, so there's Revelation 1, and then here's a gospel, Mark 1. That's a really interesting textual variant, Son of God at Mark 1, 1, that is an important one to study. Isaiah the prophet, that's an important one, contextually, because of the citation there.

But you see a number of them are smaller prepositions and things like that. That one's probably a capitalization one. You know where you'll find just incredible whole tracts with almost no meaningful textual variation at all?

I found this very interesting. Book of Hebrews. Hebrews textual history is amazingly consistent.

Along these lines.

You'll notice there, I only see three. One of them is an article, and there's not much there at all. It's very, very interesting to compare those to each other. Remember, this is handwritten text. 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.

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, you might not actually read for yourself. That would be really interesting.

Now, these variations, what is their nature? The vast majority, I mean, I think that Ehrman's thesis, while interesting, has a lot of holes in it in finding in a number of textual variants theological significance when it could be explained as simple scribal error.

He wants to read all those things as if a scribe was having a problem. What kind of scribal errors? Even the 4 ,000 number needs to be understood. Even when the variant does impact the reading, in the large majority of instances, the careful student of the text can see which reading is original.

Many of these errors involve common scribal errors, mistakes that we continue to make this very day when copying from one text to another. Here is an important example of the history of the 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, B .C., before computer, and I still remember that large green IBM Selectric that I had, and some of you who, with me, have white in the beard here are going, oh, yes, and the tremendous frustration you experience when you had to put a footnote at the bottom of the page, 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 because there ain't nothing you can do. The young people are going, how the hell did you survive that? Bam, what persecution you had. Oh, it was bad, it was, that was terrible stuff.

I remember my first WordStar, that glowing green screen and dot commands. 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, and if you're copying out of a text, the human mind does certain things.

You make certain errors, and it still happens today. I can be sitting there, and unless I'm gonna take that book over to my scanner, but even then, the 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, I skip phrases, and I skip lines, and my eyes, if I get distracted, and I'm sitting in an air-conditioned office with fluorescent lights.

I don't know how these folks, before LASIK, were sitting there with pen and quill, you know, by sunlight or candlelight, and the fact 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. You have your Bibles, which I hopefully, hopefully you do, depending on which translations are available. First 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. The King James and the New King James are based upon what's called the Texas Receptus, and so they're gonna read pretty much the same, and then the NASV, NIB, ESV, and all the rest are gonna be based upon the NA27UBS text platform.

There are no current translations that I'm aware of, anyways, the majority text. I keep hearing rumors about some coming out, but I haven't seen them yet. The King James base in the TR says, behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God, therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.

There's the King James rendering of First John 3 .1. Now compare First John 3 .1 in the New American Standard. See how great a love the 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. 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, 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, I didn't get your point, and I said, and I looked at what they're wearing, a tie in their shirt, and go, I can see why.

So.

And such we are. So, now, if I were, like many King James-only preachers, I could start preaching on texts like this, and there's a whole bunch of texts like this that I could present to you, 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, Colin?

Yes.

And secondly,.

Those Anglicans didn't believe in adoption, the adoption of us as the sons of God, the children of God, 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 King James-only folks do with all the variants going the other direction.

But why is there a difference between these two texts? Why does the Numerical Standard have the assertion, and such we are, but the King James does not? Well, it is a simple, easily identifiable textual variant.

And it's not that the King James translators didn't understand what textual variants were, prescribable errors, the fact of the matter is, the King James translators weren't doing much in the way of studying the text on that level at all.

They're primarily utilizing, they used the five conditions of Erasmus, starting at 1560, he did five editions, then Stephanus does the 1550 Stephanus text, and then Theodor Beza, they used his 1598 text, the successor of Calvin at Geneva, he did a text in 1598 that was the primary text that they used, they did compare some of the others.

But they're only using printed text, they are generally not going to the manuscripts at all, and doing any textual study on that level. They used the 1525 Bomberg text, if you're interested, for the Old Testament.

And so, they're just following those printed Greek texts, and those printed Greek texts contain a textual variant. And let's take a look at what it is. Here I am, this is, I'll skip down here, this is a glowing example right here of homoiteleuton, similar endings, think how many times you've been copying a word, ending with such combinations as ing, tion, es, and when looking back at what you are copying, have mistakenly started with a different word that had the same ending.

It might be on the next line, it might be just a few words down, but you just wrote tion, your eye goes back, finds tion, you continue there, but it's the wrong tion. And so, you have inadvertently, and especially if it doesn't immediately turn the text into gibberish, you might not even notice it, you have inadvertently deleted something from what you're copying, it's a common scribal error based upon similar endings.

And as we'll see later, the text they're copying, called uncial text, has no spaces between words. So you'll see why it's an even greater issue in that context. So, ancient writers made the same error, here is the relevant portion of the Greek as would have appeared in uncial text, all capital text, in the early days of the New Testament.

So, there it is, very clear, let's move on from there. Oh, not quite, not used to reading scribal uncial text. Now see the problem, let's put you some color to point it out, this again won't help those of you who are color blind.

But there you see the text, and here we have claythoman, we are called, chi esmen, dia tuta, for this reason. And so, that we might be called, the tecna, then the theu here is what's called the nominus sacra, it's a God, Christ, Lord, these were all abbreviated in the uncial text of the New Testament, and so that's the form of God.

And then we might be called, there's mu epsilon nu, and we are esmen, mu epsilon nu. So there's, this is the section right here that is missing in the textus receptus. Clear example of homo italiaton, an early scribe skipping from one mu epsilon nu to the other mu epsilon nu.

A scribe, upon copying, called claythoman, returned his eyes to the exemplar and saw the following esmen resulting in the error. 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 King James that just base themselves upon this kind of allegation that actually has no substance when you actually look into the original text.

So, the majority of the 5 ,700 Greek manuscripts date from after 1 ,000 AD, and they comprise what's called the majority text. You'll see a very fancy German fractur M used for the majority text. The earlier manuscripts are called papyri text, written in uncial or maguscule text.

That uncial text is all capital forms, no spacing, no punctuation. Makes it very interesting to read. I've been having to spend more and more time with that, and 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.

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 I've read every papyri manuscript in the papyri, not just a transcription of it, actually, papyri text.

I think that'd be very useful for what I do. Let's look at some of these manuscripts, give you some introduction here. You saw this one at the beginning. This is the text that is universally recognized.

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 P52, it comes from around AD 125.

Now, I've always thought that P52, and by the way, it's about the size of a credit card. 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.

I've always thought that P52 is God's way of demonstrating humor, and the reason 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 German critical thought, came to the conclusion that it was the sure and certain discovery of theology and history and scholarship that the Gospel of John was written long after the time of Jesus.

Well into the second century, there are those who said the Gospel of John was written in the third century after the time of Christ, because clearly, its Christology is so high that now that we, 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 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. Well, I just think it's just wonderfully humorous that here, the one that everybody agrees on comes in AD 125, is from John chapter 18.

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. 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.

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. You can see here, this actually is a very good scan, Petru Epistole Be, so that's the beginning of 2 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. 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 gerrymatitics at Denver Seminary and at a local 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 thousands, hundreds of thousands of youth that had gathered for World Youth Day.

But when I found out that a page in P72 was gonna be on display, then my partner, Rich Pierce, and I managed to get in, and I'll never forget, it's one of the first things they were showing, it's in this hermetically-sealed glass case, and I'm just sitting there, and I'm going, oh, this is cool.

Look, here's the Nominus Sacra for Jesus Christ. 2 Peter 1 has a Gramble Shark construction in it,.

And so here's a Gramble Shark construction, and I'm sitting here reading this stuff,.

And pretty soon, the security guards are starting to take notice of this, because most folks, you know, they sort of walk up, and they look at that, and they just. 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?

And he goes, yeah, he's reading it. Look at this, Ralph, this man's reading it. So this crowd starts gathering around, and the security guards, and this number, so everyone's following Rich and grabbing, and have to go off and look at a diamond's yard.

For a while, you know.

I don't know, I don't know what I'm doing.

I don't know what I'm doing.

I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing.

That was great, that was exciting, and I get excited about things like this. I guess we have someone studying papyrology back here mention this as well, and I get excited about stuff like this, because think about it.

First of all, this is 1 ,800 years ago. Someone comes into a church. Now, this guy's not a professional scribe. Sorry, I had better handwriting in first grade. Not a professional scribe. Written on papyrus, not written on vellum.

Why?

Well, because Christianity's illegal right now. This is probably someone risking their life to have this. 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, 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?

I've never heard that before.

Well, these are Peter's epistles. It's actually the earliest manuscript we have of 1st, 2nd Peter in Jude.

And I've never heard that before. Our church would love to have that. 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. That's why I get excited about it, yeah. I will confess, I will confess something else to you when I show you another manuscript here that I've seen that I actually can get misty-eyed at times.

But anyways, here's P72 from AD 200. There's the description of it. Petro Epistole Dei, the 2nd Peter. It's really neat to be able to see that. Here is one of the most important ancient manuscripts we have, P75, Luke and John.

There's the beginning of the Gospel of John. Tremendously accurate. This person was a, at least had been trained as a scribe. Their hand is much better. You can see it's much more regular. And very few textual variations.

Very, very clean text. Very similar to manuscript B, Codex Vaticanus, which you'll see here a little bit later on.

Very, very important.

Then the very important as well, P66. You'll notice you can see in this, instead of the, you can see here the form of the Codex. You can see that the, some people theorize that Christians actually invented this way.

These are not scrolls. There have only been a handful of New Testament manuscripts that are written on scrolls. And most of the time, those are written on the back of pre-existing scrolls. Remember, Christians are primarily slaves and it's illegal to read.

It's a persecuted, it's a time of persecution. They're not rich people. And 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.

Generally, one side will be fairly smooth. The back side has all the veins. Writing on that is a pain. But the Christians don't have a lot of money. So, you know, it's the common way of doing things. This guy was happy because you can see the lines are going up in P66.

But we see here that the collection of the Gospels over time, the Gospels are being, even though they're not written together, they're already being collected into one book. And P66, very important witness to the Gospels.

And likewise, another codex, P46. This is Paul's epistles. Now, those of you who've studied this, you don't get the answer to this. But how many of you think that in this early period of time, Hebrews is included in this, or is it excluded from this?

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.

Who think it's excluded? Yeah, I get it.

It's included. It is included in this early collection. So many in the early church viewed Paul as, and you can see here, it's a little bit hard to see in that, but there you have two of the Philippians.

There's the beginning of Philippians right there. From P46 from around AD 200. Now, after the peace of the church in AD 313, Christians could have professional scribes copy the scriptures. 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 Hebrew term aleph, Vaticanus, which is B, and Codex Alexandrinus, A.

Sinaiticus and Vaticanus may well have been among the Bibles copied with imperial monies at the time of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. Constantine gave money. Since the Roman Empire had been destroying.

The Christian scriptures,.

Then he gave money to the churches to copy their scriptures. 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.

Here is a picture of Codex Sinaiticus from around AD 325. If you want to see how regular that is, here is a full screen.

Look at that.

That is Codex Sinaiticus. This is in the British Library. In 2005, I believe it was, when I went to England before I got super sick, the day I was getting sick, I went to the British Library and it amazed me because I was able to simply walk right in, no one challenged you in, and walk right up to this glass case, and here, sitting in front of me, is Codex Sinaiticus, and sitting right next to it is Codex Alexandrinus, and behind me is a 1611 King James Bible, and next to it, the Tyndale, and all that's between me and them is glass.

It worried me. No, no, no, you all are not thinking right here. Remember, London is becoming Londonistan. Okay, one explosive device, and those treasures are gone. Thankfully, as you may know, Codex Sinaiticus is now online, and by July of this year, all of it will be online in the most amazing, high-definition pictures, and it's not just pictures from straight up.

What's really cool is they use raking light, so light from the side, so you can actually see the texture of the text as well.

It's just good.

Codex Sinaiticus .net. It's exciting, but I will confess that as I stood there, looking at Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus next to it,.

I wept.

It was just so incredible. I knew what Tischendorf felt like. Tischendorf, Constantine von Tischendorf in the middle of the 19th century, out of a desire to defend the word of God and a desire to promote the word of God, was searching for ancient manuscripts of the Bible, and he went to St. Catherine's Monastery on Sinai, and I think, I'm just 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 is the first time he visited, and 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, and so he stopped the monk, and he pulls out, and he recognizes, see, these are blue septuagint, and they're ancient.