The Reliability of the New Testament | James R. White

Apologia Utah

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Dr. White has been extraordinarily gracious to our congregation over the years. I was totaling it up.

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I think we've been working somewhat together for over 22 years now. When did we do that first debate?

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2001. Sounds about right. 2000. No, wait a minute. It was...

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Seeing the two old men up front, I can't remember what year they did anything. Some of us are a little older than others, but we won't talk about fitness.

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But at any rate, no, it would have been 2000, fall of 2000 is when we did the

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St. Martin Luther debate. Yes. Yes. Yes. It's been a while.

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It's been a while. So, well, James has done numerous debates. For a while, we had him doing debates.

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Not only... We'd have Mormons one night, and then we'd do a Catholic the next. He's accused me of trying to kill him before on the last visit.

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Well, you've accused me of trying to kill little old Mormon men, so... No, I just pleaded with you not to.

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Don't, not to. That's right. Please don't kill me. Yeah. Dr. Scharfs was trembling like I've never seen anyone with Parkinson's tremble.

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And it's like... That was North High School, was that what it was? No. Hunter High School.

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Hunter. Hunter High School. Yes. Hunter High School. But we have invited

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Dr. White to come and address us on the reliability of the New Testament text. He's done that presentation many, many different times, many different ways.

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I asked him if he would be up to an interview because in spite of how clearly he has expressed himself many times,

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I've found that there are lots of folks who don't seem to actually understand what he's saying. Or don't want to understand what

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I'm saying. Well, what they say is not what you say. So a couple of years ago, we had you here for the

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Lee Baker debate. And so I heard you say something there that I'd like everyone to hear.

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Do you believe that one word, one letter of what the apostles wrote in the

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New Testament has been lost to the church today? In answering that question, you can just do a simple answer and say, no,

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I do not. But that immediately goes, so where are they? So let me just briefly lay out why

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I would take a position that many people involved in doing textual critical study would find somewhat unusual, though in reality, in history,

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I think most people were definitely on the same side that I'm on. The New Testament manuscripts demonstrate something called tenacity, tenacity.

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That used to be a word we'd use. You were supposed to be tenacious. Now no one says things like that because they don't want to hurt your feelings.

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But tenacity is stick -to -itiveness. And the reality is that in the scholarly realm, what that means is when a reading appears amongst the

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New Testament manuscripts, it stays there. It's tenacious. Now you might say, well, that doesn't sound good to me.

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You mean if a scribe makes a mistake? Let me give you an example. There was one scribe. We know without a doubt exactly what happened in this situation.

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Now my conjecture that he didn't get his coffee that morning, we can't prove perfectly.

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But this manuscript, when you read it in the genealogy of Luke, everyone has the wrong father.

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And when you start looking at it closely, you can tell what this poor guy did was he had like a two - or three -column manuscript he was copying from.

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But like I said, he didn't get his coffee that morning. So instead of going down this column, and then down this column, and then down this column, he went straight across.

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And so everybody ends up with the wrong daddy in Luke's genealogy, and the poor guy didn't even notice it.

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Now if he'd been copying something like the Sermon on the Mount or something like that, it wouldn't have made any sense. He would have caught it.

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We still have that manuscript. We didn't do what the Muslims did when they burned manuscripts of the

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Quran to establish a particular text. Now you say, well, but those are mistakes.

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Right. But if the mistakes were preserved, what does that mean? The original readings were preserved as well.

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And so we have, in the manuscript tradition, everything that John or Paul or Luke ever wrote.

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But see, I'm getting a lot of stuff here, but that's because you have to give some of the background information. But what we have to do is we have to study those manuscripts to be able to identify where, for example, there have been expansions.

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So it's very easy to take manuscripts in the New Testament. When we look at the oldest ones, they'll say something like, then

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Jesus said to the man. And then one that's maybe 500 years later would say, then the

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Lord Jesus said to this man. And you can put together an entire chart where the older manuscripts will have a shorter reading.

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And then the manuscripts later on will have a slightly expanded. So he becomes

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Jesus, Jesus becomes the Lord Jesus, the Lord Jesus becomes the Lord Jesus Christ. There is an expansion of what

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I call piety involved in these later manuscripts. And so our job is to, in all of this, in all of this,

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I will defend this statement. I want to know what the apostles wrote.

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Not what a scribe 500 years or 1 ,000 years or 1 ,200 years thought the apostles should have written.

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And if that is your ultimate goal, then there is only one real direction you can go in the analysis of the manuscripts.

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If you are willing to give that up, you have to ask the question, what am

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I giving it up for? Because especially here in Utah, you know that we deal with people who claim a particular religious text as well.

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And it may not just be the Mormons, it might be the Muslims now. You've got everybody here in Utah now. And so we have to have equal scales.

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We have to stand firm in saying, I want to know what the apostles wrote, and I'm not simply going to say this text over here, that's my standard.

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Because we know lots of other groups that do the exact same thing. And if we're going to critically interact with their texts and point out the history of their texts, then we have to use the same standards with ours.

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And it's obvious here we can talk about that with Mormonism, but the same with Islam, it's the same with a lot of different groups.

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And so I want to know what was originally written. And therefore, when we look at the manuscripts that we have today, and we have far more manuscripts, far earlier manuscripts, and far higher quality manuscripts for the

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New Testament than any other work contemporaneous with the New Testament by a long shot.

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There is nothing that comes even close. And so we have a massive amount of information, millions of pages of handwritten data that we're dealing with.

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And the question that must guide our analysis of those is, what did the original authors write?

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Now, I brought with me tonight a critical edition of the Greek New Testament. And while it's not exhaustive, it has far more information in this one volume than any

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New Testament scholar had access to before, I would say, 1950, which wasn't all that long ago, but to younger people seems like a long, long time ago.

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But there is more information in this one volume than almost any scholar had access to for 95 % of the history of the

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Christian church. And so we have a tremendous amount of information we can draw from.

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We are hiding nothing. It's not like you have some priest group that you have to go to to get your information.

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Anybody can buy this. My Muslim friends buy this. I know Mormons who look at stuff like this.

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Jehovah's Witnesses and others. We don't hide anything, and we don't need to hide anything because we can openly lay out our, here's how we're going to do it.

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Here's the rules that we're going to go by. Here's why we think this is the way to do things. And we put it on the table, and you end up with a tremendous amount of consistency in an understanding of what the original text of the

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New Testament was. One last thing I'll say, because we have other questions to get to. One last thing

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I'll say is this, historically, the

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King James and the New King James are based upon what's called the Textus Receptus. The Textus Receptus is actually a number of different printed editions of the

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Greek New Testament. Historically, the 1624 edition is really the

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TR, but today, the Trinitarian Bible Society, Textus Receptus, has sort of taken the place of that one.

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And that was produced by a brilliant scholar by the name of F .H .A. Scrivener in the late 19th century.

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And that's what underlies the King James Version and the New King James Translation of the

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New Testament. If you have a New American Standard, ESV, NIV, Legacy Standard Bible, Christian Standard Bible, any of the modern translations, they are based upon this

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Greek text, which is called the Nessiean text. This text, in its main readings, because if I add a, if you, the main text is above, but then you'll see a number of notes down at the bottom, a lot of notes down at the bottom of the page.

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In the main text here, if you compare that with the TR, there is about a,

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I think it's 2 % difference in length. And that represents those expansions that we were talking about.

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All of those expansions are in the notes here. So you have it right there. It's on the page.

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You can look at it. You can make your own decision as to whether you accept that reading or not. But here's the point.

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Either in the main text or at the bottom of the page are all the original readings from the apostles.

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They're still there. And Robert Bowman, that's the name I couldn't remember earlier today. Robert Bowman used,

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I thought, a brilliant illustration. Dan Wallace agreed it was a brilliant illustration.

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He said, the situation we face is like having a 10 ,000 piece jigsaw puzzle.

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And we have 10 ,100 pieces. Now, I don't know if any of you have ever done a 10 ,000, who's done a 10 ,000 piece jigsaw puzzle?

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The one young man down front who noticed he only went like this. It's not like I asked who here has hands solo jammies or something like that.

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I wouldn't want to ask that question, actually. Now, you know that having 10 ,100 pieces would complicate that process.

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Because you have to identify the extra pieces. But which would you rather have?

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10 ,100 pieces and have to identify the extra pieces? Or 9 ,900 pieces and never be able to complete the puzzle?

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We don't have the 9 ,900. We have the 10 ,100. And so that is a, to me, is a tremendous testimony to the preservation of the text of Scripture over time.

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I believe that God has preserved the New Testament. It's the method and methodology that He used that we have to understand.

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And a lot of people want to have the Indiana Jones method of New Testament preservation.

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Man, I'm dating myself. You realize how many people don't even know who Indiana Jones is anymore? Man, that is so sad.

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If you've not seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, or this was Search for the Holy, was it? Which one was it?

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Last Crusade. Was it Last Crusade? Okay, thank you. It's always easy to identify the fans in the group.

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In one of the Indiana Jones films, they were looking for the

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Holy Grail. And they find it in this cave with a really, really, really, really old guy.

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I mean, like, he doesn't die, okay? And a lot of Christians wish that the original manuscripts in the

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New Testament were in some cave someplace with a really, really, really old guy who doesn't die, who's been watching over them and eating bugs for the past 2 ,000 years.

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And that way, we wouldn't have any questions. There wouldn't be any little notes at the bottom of the page. You've got the same notes at the bottom of the page in your

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Bible, too, and people don't like that. But here's the problem.

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Unless you have 2 ,000 years worth of video recordings, how do you know what that guy has been doing in that cave for 2 ,000 years?

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You have to trust that whoever has that one untransmitted text hasn't tampered with it.

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Now, what's the best way to make sure someone doesn't tamper with something? Have lots of copies made and spread all over the place.

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And then have some of them buried in the sands of Egypt and not dug up for 2 ,000 years.

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Because if you do bury some of them in the sands of Egypt someplace, and they're found 2 ,000 years later, and someone has been messing with the text, what are you going to see?

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You're going to see the massive changes. It's going to be obvious. Well, in the 1930s, we discovered that the—well, we knew for a long time that the

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British had been stealing the Egyptians' blind and had been stealing everything. You know, when they ruled

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Egypt, they stole all sorts of stuff and took it to London. And some of the stuff that they took were things like Egyptian funerary documents, which help us here in Utah, which

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Michael H. Chandler was running around showing people. And that type of thing. But there were all sorts of papyri, ancient papyri manuscripts.

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And lo and behold, in the 1930s, there's this guy. Can you imagine how smart this guy was? He's looking through these papyri fragments, just little fragments, in a cardboard box in a basement in London.

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And he looks at one. It's about the size of a credit card. And yet this guy—and that means you don't even have a sentence.

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You've just got fragments of words. You know how difficult that is to read? I mean, that's tough in English, let alone ancient

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Koinean Greek. He recognizes that this is from the New Testament. And upon analysis, what he had found is what we now call

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P52, which is arguably, anyway, is the earliest fragment in the New Testament we possess from around the year 125

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AD. And it's from the Gospel of John. John chapter 18, verse 31, 34, on one side, 37, 38 on the back side, which ironically is

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Jesus' conversation with Pilate, what is truth? I've just always found it just fascinating.

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Do you have any idea what that one little piece of papyrus had to survive for 2 ,000 years?

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But we find all these papyri that we now have that no other generation of Christians had ever seen or had access to.

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And they take our knowledge of the New Testament 200 years back from where it had been at that point, closer to the originals.

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And do we find massive editing? No, we don't. We don't. So, we have the ability at this very time where people like Bart Ehrman are running around, sowing seeds of distrust and doubt, we have more evidence of the antiquity and the accuracy of the preservation of the text of the

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New Testament than any generation has ever had before us, has ever had before us.

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So, I think the Lord has been taking care of things. And so, because of the tenacity of the

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New Testament text, I believe God has preserved all of His Word for us. But just like every single person who published a

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Greek New Testament that was then used by the Reformers, Martin Luther, Martin Luther had to use someone else's work.

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He didn't have access to manuscripts. He wasn't a scholar in that field. So, what did he do?

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He read Erasmus' Greek New Testament. Well, Erasmus only had about a dozen texts to put that together with, and he wasn't really all that concerned about the

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Greek. He was much more concerned about the Latin translation he was providing because he knew it could get into a lot of trouble.

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And so, we've all had to utilize the works of others.

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And in that process, we have produced translations down through the years and everything else.

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But Erasmus would have given his eye teeth to have this, but he didn't.

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And so, we are blessed. And I personally think that especially for homeschool parents, this is a topic that you need to know because our kids, when they leave our home, the first thing that is attacked is the veracity and the transmission of the text of Scripture.

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And I think this just should be something that we all know about and know about it well, for ourselves and for our grandchildren as well.

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Sorry about that. That was a half -hour redone. Okay. All righty. We'll see y 'all later. Question two.

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Let me give a little lead into this. You mentioned Bart Ehrman. He, every opportunity he gets, he says, there are more textual variants in the

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New Testament than there are words. And you've explained in other venues, he's stating fact.

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There are many more variants than there are words.

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The impression that he is giving purposefully is that therefore, we can't know what's in the

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New Testament with any certainty. You have people on the other extreme who think that in order to respond to Bart Ehrman, they have to have a text about which there is absolutely no question.

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But it's not as if there are an infinite number of possibilities of what things read.

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The choices are between, you used the example, Jesus said to the man versus the

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Lord Jesus said to the man. It's not going to turn, there's no chance of digging something up in Egypt that's going to cast doubt on whether it was something completely different.

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It's one of the two. Well, let me give you an illustration of that that'll illustrate really well.

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I remember listening years ago. I wish I had kept the audio file. It probably is someplace on my eight -terabyte hard drive, but who can find anything on that?

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I was listening to a webcast where Bart Ehrman was on with an atheist. The atheist was the host.

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And so you could just tell the atheist is just loving this. And he goes, so Dr. Ehrman, in light of all the changes, what do you think the

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New Testament was originally all about? Okay, so what's in his mind?

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His mind is that the New Testament was actually about space gods from Kolob, who knows?

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Weird, wild, wacky stuff like that. And you can tell there's this hesitation.

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And then Ehrman goes, well, it was about Jesus as the

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Son of God coming to earth and dying on a cross to provide forgiveness of sins.

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And you can just, it's like, as the balloon just goes flat, because the guy was expecting some really cool thing.

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And Ehrman is a scholar, okay? It's his conclusions that are off, not his facts.

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And he has admitted all we're doing is playing around with the text as far as what the original readings are.

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He says, we know what the New Testament was about. There are a couple of places when I asked him in our debate, if for a single place where he believed the original reading was lost, he could only give me one, and it was whether it was

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And or Enoch, somewhere in 2 Peter. That was it. No impact upon the meaning of the

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New Testament. And he would admit there's really nothing. He loves to talk about the variant in Mark 2, where Jesus, instead of in compassion, in anger, healed the leper.

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And then in Hebrews 2, where there are a few manuscripts that say, by the grace of—apart from God, rather than by the grace of God.

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That's it. Those are his big examples. He knows that what the

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New Testament teaches is firmly established. And it is interesting. I'll just mention this in passing.

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Sorry to have jumped in on this. But he knows that since he did his doctoral work back in the 70s under Metzger at Princeton, just over the past 10, 12 years now, we have developed something called

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CBGM, the coherence -based genealogical method. And to make a really complicated, very, very complicated subject, very, very simple, we can now, with computer precision, demonstrate the amount of agreement amongst the texts of the

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New Testament. And we can demonstrate that the claims that there is this wild variation are themselves wild.

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And this did not exist when Ehrman was—and Ehrman has admitted he's no longer in this field.

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He does not claim to be doing actual research work in the textual critical field any longer.

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And so he's never dealt with CBGM and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And so we can respond to even some of the things that he has said with significantly more material than he ever knew.

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So keep that kind of stuff in mind. There's—Bart, you know, go listen.

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Go watch the debate that we had. You can stand toe -to -toe with the best the other side has to offer.

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And when he did make our debate available, finally, years after we gave it to him, years after we gave it to him, he posted it with one comment.

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This wasn't my best debate, which is the greatest compliment you would ever, ever, ever get from Bart Ehrman.

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There's absolutely no other ways about it. Yeah. We actually took some of that and added a few things.

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We did the Bible versus Bart Ehrman, and I think that's really revealing. Most of his facts are correct, but he'll bend the facts to—

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Depends on his audience. Yeah. I mean, you don't get on the New York Times bestseller list running Bruce Metzger kind of stuff.

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That's right. Bruce Metzger said, we have the

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Word of God. He said, this is the Word of God. We have it. Out of all these textual variants, roughly what percent are actually even—have any effect?

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I mean, let me preface it. What's the most common textual variant? Okay. The most common textual variant is the same issue we have in English with Southerners.

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Midwesterners are not exempt. Well, this is true. But you're supposed to say, may

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I have an apple. Not, may I have an apple? And so—

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I resemble that remark. That's it. So there'll be many textual variants created in Georgia.

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But anyway, and Louisiana, and parts of Oklahoma, and so on and so forth.

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But there was something called the movable new, which in Greek functioned the exact same way.

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You don't want to pronounce two vowels in a row. No language—well, never mind that.

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Western languages don't want to do that. There are some languages that think that's a lot of fun. So the most common textual variant in the

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New Testament is whether you have a movable new, which does not impact. A apple or an apple does not change what it means.

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And so it does not impact the translation into another language. There are, by some estimates, between 400 ,000 and 500 ,000 variants in the

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New Testament. And there are 138 ,230,

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I think, words in the main text of the New Testament. But the vast majority of those are movable news, or they are issues that cannot even be translated into another language.

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So in other words, they do not carry meaning. Of the, let's say, 400 ,000 variants, there are about 1 ,500 that are meaningful.

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They actually can be translated into English and have a different meaning. And what are called viable.

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So if you find a manuscript from the—well, I could give you an example in the King James of this.

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Well, I will. Let's look at a text real quick. In Ephesians chapter 3, there is an interesting reading in verse 9.

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In Ephesians 3 .9 in the New American Standard, it says,

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And to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery, which for ages had been hidden in God, who created all things.

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Now, if you have a King James or a New King James, it doesn't say administration. It says what?

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Anybody have one? It says fellowship. Fellowship.

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Now, fellowship and administration are not the same thing. Okay, those are, one is koinonia, the other is oikonomia.

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Now, we have found the one manuscript that is from around 12 to 1300

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AD that is responsible for the

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King James having fellowship here instead of administration. And it just happens to be one of the very few manuscripts that Desiderius Erasmus had access to when he created the first printed

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Greek New Testament, printed and published Greek New Testament in 1516. And we don't have any manuscripts before that.

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We don't have any early church fathers before that. Everybody who preached this text said administration.

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All the papyri, everything said. And we have, for example, in the

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Chester Beattie Library in Dublin, Ireland, we have

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P46, which is the earliest collection of Paul's major epistles.

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It's from around the year 200. Okay, so it's the earliest we have.

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And by the way, for those interested in such things, it also contains Hebrews. Which means that somebody in the year 200 thought

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Paul wrote Hebrews. That's all it proves. But anyway, it says administration.

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So, we can trace the text 1100 years before one manuscript, and yet that one manuscript ended up being used by Erasmus.

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And that's why it's in the King James. And so, the vast majority of scholars would say that reading is not viable.

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Because not only is it not found in any of the early manuscripts or any of the early church fathers, but remember, we're not just talking about the

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Greek New Testament. Because Christians wanted their scriptures to go to everybody. So, you have early translations into Latin, Coptic, Sahitic, Boheric, and so on and so forth.

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And none of those translations have anything other than administration.

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None of them have fellowship. Which means there weren't any other manuscripts back there in those ancient days that had that reading either.

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So, fundamentally, the reading of the Textus Receptus at Ephesians 3 .9

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is not viable. It's impossible. It's an error in the TR. And so, when you cut down all the variants to what is actually meaningful and viable, there's about 1 ,500 out of…

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The percentage is less than 1 % of any of the texts. –

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Erman loves to throw numbers around, statistics. Because he can confuse people.

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He can overwhelm them. There are people who are advocates of the

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TR that will also throw around statistics. And they'll talk about, you know, 5 ,000 differences between Vaticanus and Sinaiticus just in the

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Gospels. Things like this. – But in terms of what the

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Bible teaches, there are a few passages such as Ephesians 3, 1

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John 5 .7, the Johannine Comma, things like this. Is there any doctrine that is in any way affected by these 1 ,500 variants?

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– Okay. Now, we need to be really clear about this. Really, really clear. Because I have said since 1994 that I would debate anyone on the assertion that the textual variations in the

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New Testament fundamentally change the message of the New Testament. So, I have said forever that if you apply the same method of hermeneutics and interpretation to the

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Textus Receptus and to the Nessiean 28th edition of the Greek New Testament, you will not come up with different beliefs.

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Now, the list of verses that you would put forth that would teach a particular topic might be slightly different.

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So, in 1 Timothy 3 .16, in the

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King James and New King James, it says, God was manifested in the flesh. Well, that's pretty strong.

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The modern translations say, He who was manifested in the flesh. It's the different… It literally…

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And this is one point where it's very helpful to be able to project this on the wall.

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But the difference is between has and theos, but as they were written in the ancient language.

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You need to remember something. For the first 900 years of the transmission of the text of the New Testament, it was transmitted by writing in all capital letters, no spaces between words, almost no punctuation.

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Can you imagine what that looks like? So, it's a page filled with nothing but an unbroken line of capital letters.

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And you would not even… At the end of a line, you would just break a word and start on the next line.

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That was how Greek was written at that time period. And for the first 900 years of transmission of the text of the

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New Testament, that's how it was done. And then somebody woke up one morning and said, you know, if we use capital letters and small letters and spaces between words and punctuation, this might be easier to read.

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And very quickly, that's what took over. It's called minuscule text. And you can just watch the numbers starting right at the turn of the millennium.

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All the old way of doing it disappeared. And all the manuscripts after that are written in minuscule text, which is what you study in seminary and what's in the

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Greek New Testament today. So, in 1

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Timothy 3 .16, the difference between has, omicron, sigma, and theos, theta, sigma, is just two small horizontal lines.

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And you're writing in papyri. Papyri had lines in it. It'd be very easy to understand how someone could make a mistake one way or the other.

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For in John 1 .18, in John 1 .18, in the four earliest manuscripts of the

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New Testament, the Gospel of John, John 1 .18 says, hominogenes theos, the unique God, God, the one and only has revealed

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Him, has revealed the Father. Here is an application of the word theos to Jesus.

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Later manuscripts say, hwios, Son. So, it's interesting.

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A lot of people… Did any of you ever see the interview I did with Stephen Anderson, the really neat, fun guy out in Tempe?

37:15

That was for a movie. And I think 30 seconds of it got used in the movie. But the big thing that they pushed in the movie was, for Timothy 3 .16,

37:25

and the idea that modern translators are trying to deny the deity of Christ and stuff like that.

37:33

Well, you could turn that around and say, on the basis of John 1 .18, that the

37:38

King James translators are trying to hide the deity of Christ. But both are lies. They were simply following the manuscripts and the printed text that were before them.

37:46

And so, you can do stuff like that. You can find the variants.

37:52

And it's not just with King James onlyists or T .R. onlyists or modern critical text advocates.

37:59

Jehovah's Witnesses do this a lot too. I remember… You've got to be careful with Jehovah's Witnesses. Some of those people are really well -trained.

38:09

I was driving home from teaching a systematic theology class for Golden Gate Theological Seminary years and years and years ago, and I was listening to my own radio broadcast, which was live at the time.

38:21

My friends were filling in for me. And this Jehovah's Witness called in, and I knew who it was. So, thankfully, this was right as cell phones were starting, and somehow

38:29

I got in. And he and I ended up doing a debate while I'm driving on a cell phone in the early days of cell phone coverage, which is sort of amazing.

38:41

And he hit me with a question. We were talking about John 20 .28. There's no variant of John 20 .28.

38:46

But John 20 .28, Jesus appears to Thomas. And what is

38:52

Thomas' response when he sees Jesus? He says, Hakuri asumu kai hathe asumu, my

38:58

Lord and my God. And Jehovah's Witnesses have to stand on their heads, do handstands, and to do the splits and everything else to try to find a way around John 20 .28

39:08

because it's really rather clear and obvious. And so he hits me with a question.

39:16

Hakuri asumu is in the nominative case. And the Greek language, there was a way to address someone directly, which is called the vocative.

39:26

Now, in the Koine period, the vocative was passing away. It was being replaced by the nominative. So he hit me with a question.

39:32

He said, is there any other place in the New Testament where God is addressed in the nominative that doesn't involve a textual variant?

39:46

Because I knew there was one other, but I also knew there was a minor textual variant there. It's in Revelation chapter 4.

39:52

So this Jehovah's Witness knew not only where it was, but that there was a textual variant involved.

39:58

That's how deeply these people will dive into the utilization of that type of information.

40:04

So, hey, all information can be used for good or for evil. And sometimes the cults use it.

40:10

And we need to know it on the other side. So really, when you think about it, what's interesting, there are only two multiverse variants in the

40:24

New Testament that we end up always talking about. And you need to know where they are. And they are, both of them are a block of 12 verses.

40:34

That's big. There's only two places. And you probably already know where they are. The longer ending of Mark, Mark 16, 9 -20, because there are multiple endings of Mark.

40:47

And as Dan Wallace has expressed it, his favorite story that's not in the

40:55

Bible, The Woman Taken in Adultery, John 7 .53 -8 .11. There just isn't anything else.

41:04

There are single verses. There's the Communionium, 1 John 5 .7, which is not a viable reading either.

41:11

We can talk about that more if you want me to expand on that. But generally, people like Ehrman will use

41:19

The Woman Taken in Adultery, which is called the Prick of Adultery, as a means of unsettling their young Christian students and stuff like that.

41:30

And so once you know the background of those two texts, they don't have much else to throw at you.

41:37

So an educated Christian is an insulated Christian as far as that's concerned. Now, of those two, the longer ending of Mark has much earlier manuscript evidence than The Woman Taken in Adultery does.

41:51

As far as actually having a manuscript that reads that way, the first manuscript that reads that way historically is called

41:59

Codex Vese Cantabrigiensis, Codex D. Now, Codex D, I call the living

42:05

Bible of the early church, which is not a compliment. Theodor Beza, Calvin's successor at Geneva, he was gifted this manuscript.

42:22

And upon examining it, he eventually donated to Cambridge University with a letter.

42:30

And the letter, he said, this manuscript is so unique in its readings that it is better stored than read.

42:41

So it is a highly unusual manuscript. In fact, in the book of Acts, when Peter is freed from the jail, for some reason, this manuscript decided to tell us how many steps he went down to get to the street.

42:56

He said 29 or 39. I've got to look that back up again. But it's a very, very unusual manuscript.

43:04

And it's the first one to contain that particular text. And what's fascinating is those verses are found in three different places in John, in the manuscripts of John.

43:20

And interestingly enough, in some other manuscripts, they're not found in John at all.

43:25

They're found in two different places in Luke. Now, when you have one set of verses found in five different places, that's a story that people really, really liked trying to find a place to call home.

43:40

And it's the only example of it in the New Testament at all. And so those are your…

43:47

Now, there's all the stuff that could be said about the long writing of Mark. And you can listen to a debate

43:53

I did in 2020, I believe it was, on that particular subject. I… You know what?

44:01

If you want to believe the long writing of Mark is canonical, great, fine, defend it. Here's the issue.

44:08

Just use the same arguments to defend it that you would use to defend any other text that contains a variant.

44:17

That to me is the issue. I have to be consistent in the arguments that I would use against the

44:25

Book of Mormon, against the Quran. I have to be consistent. So I have to be consistent in the arguments I use for the readings that I believe should be adopted in the text of the

44:35

New Testament. The problem is that when you look at the

44:43

Textus Receptus, because of its history, because it was not the work of just one person, because it was the work of many people, they used different standards.

44:55

And so you could never take the manuscript material that we have today and reproduce the TR using any set of standards at all.

45:03

It just can't be done. Let me give you a fascinating example that I only found out about two and a half, three years ago.

45:12

I had always wondered about this. It's well -known that Erasmus struggled to produce—now

45:22

Erasmus, just to give you an idea, Erasmus, Dutch humanist scholar. Humanist did not mean the same thing back then that it means today.

45:31

Erasmus was—reading Erasmus is sort of fun. He could sling them with the best of them.

45:40

And he risked his life. He risked his life to do the things that he did. So you've got to give him some credit.

45:48

But Erasmus was under a lot of pressure to finish producing the first printed edition of the

45:55

Greek New Testament. It was a diaglot, so it had the Greek on one page and the

46:01

Latin on the other. The dangerous thing he was doing is he was providing a fresh Latin translation.

46:07

Why was that dangerous? Because Rome had said the Vulgate was the final edition. So if you're questioning that, you could literally find yourself tied to a pole someplace and being turned into a crispy critter.

46:20

And so he was really focused on the Latin. The Greek was sort of just a habit there.

46:26

He wanted to have many more manuscripts to work with. He even moved to Basel, Switzerland, thinking that the library there would have a lot more manuscripts, but it only had about six.

46:36

And so when he got to the book of Revelation, it is very clear from Erasmus' own writings that Erasmus had very little respect for the book of Revelation.

46:47

And in fact, I think if he had his druthers, and there were other people who'd agreed with him at that time, he didn't think it was canonical. And so he gets to Revelation and he cannot find a single manuscript of Revelation in Greek anywhere.

47:05

There's a reason for that, by the way. Of all the New Testament books, the book we have the fewest manuscripts of is

47:12

Revelation. And the answer as to why that is is pretty easy. It had to struggle for inclusion in the canon.

47:20

There were a lot of people who were like, are we sure John was behind this, you know? And you might go, hmm, that bothers me.

47:28

Which would you rather have? The church going, we really need to make sure about this one? Or the church going, we don't have nearly enough books with ten -headed monsters and seven -headed sea creatures and stuff.

47:37

But we need some more of that. No, it's good that they, you know, were very intent upon examining these things.

47:47

And so finally, he had a friend, Johannes Reuchlin, from whom he borrowed a

47:57

Latin commentary on Revelation that had the Greek text inside it. Now, Reuchlin's fascinating.

48:03

Do you know what the name of that name? I mean, I know the name, but I don't know. – Reuchlin, if you ever have taken

48:10

Hebrew, you can blame Reuchlin for your ability to do so. Because he risked his life to learn

48:18

Hebrew from a Jewish rabbi. Now, the rabbi risked his life as well. This could have been a setup.

48:25

And gave us our first Hebrew grammar for Christians. So he also ended up getting into weird

48:31

Hebrew numerology too. So anyway, but we try to think of the positive things rather than the negative things.

48:38

Anyway, so he has this commentary. He has to extract the Greek text of Revelation of his commentary.

48:44

In the process, creates readings that have never been in any Greek manuscript before the 16th century.

48:53

And when he gets to the last chapter, the last few pages have fallen out of the book.

49:00

The last six verses, he doesn't have the Greek too. So his printer, John Froben, is going, come on, we need to get this done, need to get this done.

49:08

So what he does is he back translates from the Latin into Greek.

49:17

Now, he does a fairly decent job, but in the process, he creates readings that have never been seen by a

49:24

Christian in the entire history of the Christian church. And they're in the last six verses of the book of Revelation.

49:36

Now, that's sort of historically known. What I was never able to figure out is he did four more editions.

49:45

He did five. He did, he still had another 20 years. Why didn't he fix it? And then why didn't

49:51

Stephanus fix it in 1550 and Beza fix it in 1598? Why are those weird readings in the

49:58

King James Version to this day? I could never figure it out. And then

50:03

I was reading this excellent book on Erasmus and Beza and the subject of what's called conjectural emendation.

50:14

And I found the answer in a footnote. You got to read footnotes. Got to read those footnotes. Always got to read the footnotes in my books.

50:19

So I just read the footnotes of everybody else's books too. I've put some good material in those things.

50:26

Here's what happened. Erasmus' first edition comes out 1516. This is what

50:31

Luther uses when he's studying Romans and stuff like that. Very, very important. Erasmus knows his

50:37

Revelation stinks. He hasn't done a good job with it. And so when the next edition is coming out, he says to his printer, about a year after his year or two years, about two years after his initially came out, the

50:53

Align brothers published a Greek New Testament. And Erasmus was aware of this.

51:00

And so when his second edition goes to the press, he says to the printer, go get the

51:06

Align New Testament and correct my readings in Revelation by theirs.

51:14

He just did not want to do the work. There really is good evidence.

51:20

He just felt doing the book of Revelation wasn't worth it. And so he said, go get theirs, correct mine, and he never revisited it again his entire life.

51:33

And in fact, for hundreds of years, nobody else did either, which is amazing. There's only one problem.

51:40

The Align brothers had used his first edition for Revelation. That's why nothing was changed.

51:47

And that's why those readings that came from back translating from Latin into Greek are in the TR to this day, are in the

51:53

King James to this day. Because Erasmus thought he had fixed it, but he didn't.

52:02

And that's why those readings were there for that long. And you may be going, now, that wouldn't happen today.

52:10

People would catch that. That's right. You know why? Because we have the ability to communicate.

52:17

We have the ability to do journal things. We've had the ability for a couple hundred years now.

52:25

But you've got to realize, just simply to know where all the manuscripts are, let alone what they read, is a completely modern situation.

52:38

Erasmus wanted to have more manuscripts. He just didn't know where to find them. There weren't no card catalogs back then.

52:44

You couldn't go online and Google it. And in comparison, what we have today, the

52:49

Center for New Testament, Study of New Testament Manuscripts, they are digitizing manuscripts from all over the world.

52:56

You can go online today to literally look at the page itself for so many of these manuscripts now.

53:03

It's hard to communicate to folks how absolutely, unbelievably rare that is.

53:11

No one back in those days could have ever dreamed of having that kind of access, that much information.

53:18

So today, you would catch the fact that nothing got fixed in the Book of Revelation pretty quickly because there's a lot of eyes on it, and we've got communication, we've got computers, we can do all that kind of stuff.

53:30

The vast majority of even preachers and teachers that now had a printed edition of the

53:36

Greek New Testament never, ever saw a handwritten manuscript in the New Testament. This is all they had.

53:41

They had no way to compare it to anything else. And so it was hundreds of years later, once you started having universities that would publish catalogs of what manuscripts they had and stuff like that, that people could start comparing things.

53:58

And that's when the issues in Revelation were found and things like that. And you had the revision of the text and stuff like that.

54:06

So we have to keep in mind that we live in an absolutely unique age.

54:13

We really, really do. The amount of information, I mean, literally only 17 years ago,

54:24

I was wishing that I could have the textual critical data on my phone.

54:31

Because I went to London, and we went street preaching. And even back then, there were

54:37

Muslims everywhere. And when we go street preaching, the Muslims would show up. And so what they'd do is they'd shuffle the

54:42

Muslims off to talk to me while they continued preaching to the pagans. And I wanted to be able to show the textual data without lugging around heavy books and stuff like that.

54:55

And I even tried to create PDFs and this type of stuff. Now, it's all there.

55:02

It is all there right there on my phone. In Accordance Bible Software, it's all there. That's only in 15 years.

55:08

There's been 17 years. There's been that kind of a change. So we need to keep that in mind when we look back at the history of these things.

55:17

I don't have any idea what question you just asked me. I think we're up to three now. And I may not have even answered your question for that matter.

55:28

Actually, you did. Let me talk. I think a lot of folks, they hear that there's some question about the exact words that were used by the apostles.

55:41

And that throws everything into question. How do we know anything for sure? One of the variants that comes to mind is my brain just slipped to gears.

55:54

It's in Matthew. It's necessary that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom they come.

56:01

About half the manuscripts have that man. About half of them have the man. It doesn't affect the meaning.

56:11

Is there any other than the woman caught in adultery, longer ending in Mark?

56:18

People may want to appeal to 1 John 5 -7 in terms of proving the

56:23

Trinity or 1 Timothy 3. But is there any difference in the message?

56:31

You've made it clear, but I want to make it especially clear. Like I said, if you apply the same methods of interpretation to the

56:41

Nessean 28th edition that you do to the Texas Receptus, you will have absolutely positively no difference in theology at all.

56:48

It's just I have challenged people to debate that issue, and no one will do it.

56:58

They'll quote Dan Wallace, which is funny. My first name is Daniel. I'm Daniel J.

57:04

Wallace. But at any rate, not that that means anything. He's all better in Greek than I am. He's learned it three times.

57:11

I know. Isn't that fascinating? Yeah. Lyme disease? You know, I walked with him through that.

57:19

I stayed in contact with him. We had long conversations when he was recovering. That was what they thought at the time.

57:25

It may have been some type of encephalitis or something. Yeah, but the poor man had to learn

57:31

Greek three different times in his life. You'll get folks that they want certainty so bad on it's got to be the man or that man or everything's in question.

57:45

Right. Or Jesus didn't rise from the dead. Yes. All the manuscripts have Jesus rising from the dead.

57:51

But in terms of, there's no other than the woman caught in adultery.

58:01

Well, you're going to quote Dan. Oh, I'm sorry. Dan, yeah. I'm getting old. So am I. They will quote

58:07

Dan Wallace and say it's an impossible task to ever get back to the original reading.

58:15

Now, I can't speak for him. Sometimes he says things that are kind of out there. Yeah. But is that a fair description of the critical text?

58:29

Let me put it this way. Has the 29th edition come out, Nestle -Yvonne? No. Okay.

58:37

What differences are there between the 27th and 28th edition? Because they're constantly throwing it. Well, there's new editions.

58:42

We never know. We're never going to have a fixed text. Well, let me first give you the quote that I thought you were going to give from Dan Wallace is where he says, there are many people who will trade truth for certainty.

58:53

Yeah. And he's exactly right. I've met many of them.

58:59

You know, how many missionaries have I talked to who I present truth to them and no, but they're certain the

59:08

Book of Mormon is the Word of God. So they have certainty. They don't have truth. The two are not the same thing.

59:17

But in answer to your question, what is going to be the difference?

59:22

Well, the 27th edition, which was just before this, the 27th edition was the basis of the

59:31

ESV, NASB, so on and so forth in their modern versions like the 1995

59:37

NASB. The only changes to this, to the 28th edition, have come about because of what's called the

59:48

ECM. ECM is Editio Critico Mayor, or the major edition, critical edition of the

59:55

Greek New Testament. So the primary group that is worked, that does all this stuff, that does

01:00:02

Nessiolan, it does the United Bible Society text, which is what a lot of people use in Greek when they're learning and so on and so forth, is based in Münster, Germany.

01:00:12

I visited this place in 2019 to ask questions on the production of what will be the most extensive critical edition of the

01:00:26

Greek New Testament ever produced. Currently out, they have Mark, Acts, and the

01:00:34

General Epistles. And that's already, that's one, two, three, seven, that's already about 11 or 12 volumes just for those books.

01:00:45

And they're big volumes and they're expensive volumes. It's all available online, so don't feel like, oh, they're making a bunch of money.

01:00:52

No, if you want to have the nice hardbound volumes, it's going to cost you a pretty penny. The point is this will be the largest collation of Greek manuscripts ever done in history.

01:01:04

That is a good thing. Every one of the King James translators would have said, that's a fantastic thing.

01:01:14

They would have known the amount of work that goes into this. And what is driving the creation of the

01:01:24

ECM is the thing that I mentioned briefly at the beginning called CBGM, coherence -based genealogical method.

01:01:32

Some people think it's computer -based German madness because it is

01:01:38

German. But there are about, in Mark, there were about 50 places where in the 29th edition, it'll read differently than the 28th.

01:01:54

Almost none of them affect translation. They are extremely minor, extremely minor.

01:02:00

And there's really, so far, only been one reading that CBGM has introduced into the text in Nessie Olin that really catches people's attention.

01:02:13

Now, they're almost done with John. John, I think, is finally going to trigger people finding out about this.

01:02:20

But you already have—how many of you have an ESV? Okay. You already have one of the

01:02:29

CBGM readings in your ESV, and you didn't even know it. It's in Jude 5.

01:02:38

It's in the little book of Jude, the fifth verse. And pretty much all English translations up until recently said, the

01:02:48

Lord delivered a people out of Egypt. The modern

01:02:53

ESV, I think the LSV has it as well. I think the

01:03:00

TNIV has it. But these translations following the 28th edition say,

01:03:09

Jesus delivered a people out of Egypt. Now, you can't just come up with a reading and insert it in the

01:03:16

Bible, okay? I go back to my dad's Greek New Testament he used at Moody Bible Institute in the 1950s.

01:03:23

I open it up, look at the bottom of page Jude 5, and there it gives you the reading Jesus, and gives you the manuscripts that contained it and everything else.

01:03:31

So, it's not like people didn't know about this for a long, long, long, long time. But what

01:03:37

CBGM did, and without going into the details of it, what the computer analysis does, the computer can remember every single place where every single manuscript agrees with or disagrees with any other manuscript or all other manuscripts.

01:03:58

Our minds can't do that. We just can't do it. The computer can. And so, the computer is able to recognize coherence.

01:04:10

That is consistency between manuscripts. And to make a long story short, when you look at the manuscripts of Jude 5 that say,

01:04:22

Jesus, there, by CBGM analysis, their closest relatives also say

01:04:32

Jesus. So, there's consistency of transmission. But in many instances, the manuscripts that say,

01:04:41

Lord, their closest relative says Jesus. Low coherence.

01:04:49

Now, when you think about a scribe, what would be the more natural understanding of Jude 5?

01:04:56

What would be the normal way to say, the Lord delivered a people out of Egypt? If you say, Jesus delivered a people out of Egypt, there has to be a particular theological concept you have in mind to say that.

01:05:08

So, the analysis demonstrates that that's what happened with the scribes. And so, that caused the editors of the

01:05:17

Nessiolan text to put... And if you look at the 27th edition, Jesus is down there at the bottom of the page and says,

01:05:23

Lord, up here. Now, they're switched. It says, Jesus up here, and Lord's at the bottom of the page. So, it's not like they hid something or anything else.

01:05:30

It's just the decision, what's going to be in the main text? And then those translations, like the

01:05:35

ESV, read their reasoning and go, yeah, we're going to follow that. The NASV 2020 rejected it, and they do not have that reading.

01:05:45

So, there is an example. Like I said, the vast majority of the changes would be very difficult to explain outside of someone to someone who actually reads the language.

01:05:58

In other words, it really has not impacted the meaning of the text at all. –

01:06:04

I think a lot of people, they hear bits and pieces of what's supposed to be scholarship.

01:06:10

– Right. – They... John Dominic Crawson and the Jesus Seminar, they're passing around a hat or whatever, and they're putting...

01:06:20

– Marbles. – Marbles, you know, different color marbles. And they're just making conjectures about what they think

01:06:28

Jesus would actually say. Bart Ehrman loves to say, Jesus didn't think he was

01:06:34

God. Jesus didn't think he was starting a religion. Paul didn't think this, and he was just writing a letter.

01:06:42

And they're just making it up. And there are people who want to take all things scholarly and throw them into that.

01:06:56

– But somebody had to give you your Bible translation. – That's the point I want to draw out.

01:07:04

Is there any Greek manuscript that is precisely what the

01:07:09

TR reads? You've already answered it, but I want to make it clear. – I think this is really important to understand. There is no

01:07:18

Greek manuscript that is word -for -word identical to the Nestle on 28th edition, because, well, first of all, more ancient manuscripts only contain portions anyways, so you've got that.

01:07:31

And there is no Greek manuscript anywhere in the world that reads identical to the

01:07:36

TR in any single book of the 27, let alone all 27.

01:07:43

And so what you have to realize is everyone has to utilize scholarship to produce a

01:07:53

Bible translation. Desiderius Erasmus was a brilliant scholar for his day.

01:08:00

I mean, wow. But he wasn't perfect. And it's normally far better to have a group of men working on something than to have a single individual, because that single individual can sometimes have their own bend on things.

01:08:17

That's why I've always said a translation done by a committee is far better than a translation done by an individual, because you will let your prejudices into that.

01:08:27

There's no question about it. I'm translating the Epistle of Diognetus right now for a book, and I realize in rendering a couple of those texts, you know,

01:08:38

I could go this way, I could go that way, and I'm probably going that way because of who I am and what my background is and stuff like that.

01:08:44

So the Texas Receptus is based upon the scholarship primarily of Erasmus, Stephanus, Robert Estienne, Calvin Sprinter in Geneva, and Theodor Beza.

01:09:01

Now, they were all scholars of great rank, but they had very little material to be working with, and they were working primarily as individuals.

01:09:15

And so just one cool example of this, I made a big mistake once.

01:09:22

People say I never admit mistakes. I actually admit making a lot of mistakes. This is one you all can learn from.

01:09:28

I was being given a personal tour of Albert Moeller's library. Has any of you ever heard?

01:09:36

Albert Moeller's library is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. I mean, it's worth millions and millions of dollars, and many of these books are first editions.

01:09:49

And it's just astonishing what's in here. And I did the dumbest thing on the planet.

01:09:58

He's literally standing in front of me, and I said sort of out loud, I might have one book that Dr.

01:10:07

Moeller doesn't have, because I do have a pretty unique book that most of you know.

01:10:13

Well, some of you know. I have a 1550 Stephanus Greek text. It was published in 1550.

01:10:22

It was valued at $35 ,000 when it was donated to my ministry. And it could have been used by the

01:10:29

King James translators, for all I know, because they used the 1550 as one of their printed texts. And so I said that out loud.

01:10:41

He literally reached over to a shelf and pulled off a 1550

01:10:46

Stephanus. Now, how do you rescue yourself in this situation is the question.

01:10:55

So here's what I did. He opened it up, and I said, Dr. Moeller, have you ever noticed

01:11:02

Stephanus's very early primitive critical notes in the margin, and his use of his beta manuscript?

01:11:12

He goes, no. And so I pointed to it in the text. And Stephanus is the first one to start doing this, where he put marginal notes and variant readings.

01:11:22

But here's a, this is, and this is true. Beza did not know that Codex Canterburgiensis, the one

01:11:32

I said, the living Bible, the New Testament of the ancient world, it had been given to him. He didn't know who had it earlier.

01:11:39

Guess who had it earlier? Stephanus. It was his beta text.

01:11:45

But Beza didn't know that. And so Beza would look at Stephanus.

01:11:52

Oh, his beta text had this reading. Look at that. So does my manuscript. Now he thinks there's two ancient manuscripts of that reading, when it was only one, because he didn't know it was possessed by Stephanus.

01:12:06

So that impacted things. That just shows where they were at that time, and the information that they had, and the things that they were working with, and how different it is.

01:12:17

We stand on the shoulders of giants. But the point is, they had to do scholarship. And we must examine the scholarship that they did in light of the very few manuscripts they had, their inability to compare one manuscript with another manuscript, and our ability to collate manuscripts much more fully than they had the ability to do at that time.

01:12:43

But you're going to have to borrow somebody's scholarship to produce a Bible translation.

01:12:50

And the Textus Receptus, like I said, you can demonstrate any doctrine whatsoever.

01:12:58

The differences are extremely minor between these texts.

01:13:05

But the reason I think this is important is that if I'm going to point my finger at somebody else and say, show to an imam at Reformed Theological Seminary like I did in 2015,

01:13:19

I think. 2015, no, it was 2016. I'm going to put up on the screen variant readings in Surah 2 of the

01:13:28

Quran. And his response is, well, they all pretty much mean the same thing.

01:13:34

Okay. Well, then I need to be consistent in looking at my own manuscripts and in how

01:13:42

I defend my text. He's basically saying there's no reason to worry about those types of things.

01:13:47

We have the Uthmanic revision. We have our Textus Receptus, basically. Well, I can't just turn around and do the same thing.

01:13:54

We'll have nothing to talk about at that point. And so I really, really believe that in our modern day, to be able to defend the

01:14:04

New Testament the way we need to in light of the Bart Ehrmans of the world, that simply defaulting back and saying, well, you know what?

01:14:12

If this was good enough for the Reformers, it's good enough for me. Is simply suicidal, apologetically speaking.

01:14:19

We can't do it consistently. And there's no reason to do it. There simply is no reason. I understand the warm feeling that comes from going, but look at all the good

01:14:31

God did with this. The problem is, if you're

01:14:37

Reformed, you have to read Augustine and go, look at all the good that God did with Augustine, who was reading the

01:14:45

Latin that we don't use and would never use. So are we going to be consistent?

01:14:52

If you're going to say, well, God used that text for 400 years. God used the Vulgate for 1 ,100 years.

01:14:59

So what? Unless you're going to say there were no Christians from Jerome onward, which

01:15:04

I guess some people might say, but most people recognize that's not the case. Then you're going to have to admit that God has used all sorts of things down through the history of the church.

01:15:15

And you're also going to have to admit that one of the earliest conversations, starting with Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century, was a discussion about the variations in manuscripts.

01:15:25

So Christians have never thrown out the baby with the bathwater. They... Remember, the reason that you and I can be extremely focused on this is because we have printing presses.

01:15:39

We have photocopiers. These people never had them. The vast majority of Christians up until the time of the invention of the printing press had never, ever seen two manuscripts that were identical to each other.

01:15:56

And they never overthrew the faith because of that. So for us to do that really demonstrates that we just are not thinking historically in a meaningful fashion.

01:16:06

I meant to mention it to you before. Are you familiar with Gordon Fee's commentary on 1 Corinthians? Yes. Yes.

01:16:11

Chapter 14. You have...

01:16:16

That's why you don't do a translation by only one person. Yes. But basically, you have, in terms of women keeping silent in the churches, you have some transposition of the order of the verses.

01:16:29

And therefore, he does a conjectural inundation that it's not original.

01:16:35

It's in every Greek manuscript. Is there any need to do conjectural inundations on the

01:16:43

New Testament? Let's explain what that is. A conjectural inundation is when you make a change in a text on the basis of conjecture without any evidence in previous texts that what you're suggesting should be there has ever been there.

01:17:01

There was a conjectural inundation made, for example, by Theodore Beza that's in your

01:17:07

King James Version. Revelation 16 .5, in all the manuscripts that we have, said the same thing.

01:17:18

It used the term hosios, he who was and is the Holy One. They all said hosios.

01:17:26

Every Christian that we know of for 1 ,500 years that read the book of Revelation read who is and who was the

01:17:33

Holy One. And that's what Erasmus said. That's what Stephanus said. Beza looked at that phraseology because elsewhere in Revelation, who is and who was and who is to come, right?

01:17:50

And so the idea being, well, that's an established phrase. He did not have any manuscripts that said anything else.

01:17:59

But since that's an established phrase, he looked at hosios and he said, that does look a lot like esaminos, which would be and who will be, the future form, the future participial form.

01:18:09

And so he made a conjectural inundation, put esaminos, and that's what's in the

01:18:15

TR in the King James Day. Which means you're reading something that for the first 1 ,500 years of the church, nobody read.

01:18:21

That bothers me. It bothers me for a lot of reasons. You know, I think the church had the

01:18:26

Bible when they came up with the Nicene Creed. And I'm glad they did. And sometimes we just forget about them.

01:18:34

And in fact, when you argue, well, look at all that God has done in the Reformation with the Reformation text.

01:18:40

Okay, fine. But I sort of think Nicaea was important too. You know, church history didn't start with Luther.

01:18:46

And Luther didn't think the church history started with Luther. And Luther probably would have cussed at you.

01:18:55

In his... Far more readily than Calvin. Far more readily than Calvin would have. But Luther would have cussed at you for even thinking such a thing, let alone saying such a thing.

01:19:05

So, yeah, there's a lot of these types of things we have to keep in mind. But you have a

01:19:10

Bible translation because you are trusting someone's scholarship. And Desiderius Erasmus, I have a lot of respect for Erasmus, but I also will have to admit, he was a

01:19:22

Roman Catholic priest and died in fellowship with Rome. He wrote a book defending transubstantiation.

01:19:29

So, if you're going to do the, yeah, but modern translators, they're all liberals. No, we're not actually all liberals, but there are some, sure.

01:19:37

Every generation has to do its fighting. There's no question about it. But the warm, fuzzy feeling that you get by saying, oh,

01:19:45

I'm just doing what the reformers and the generations after the reformers did, they did not have the information we have.

01:19:54

It is not fair to drag the reformers in and say they made these decisions. They did not know about these other manuscripts.

01:20:00

They didn't know about the papyri. They didn't have this information. So, don't tell me that they would have decided like you decided when they didn't have this information to draw from.

01:20:10

That's not fair. That's anachronistic. That's an abuse of history, in my opinion. And I've said that very clearly to people more than once.

01:20:20

I want to try to wrap this up. To me, it's striking that with Ehrman, you get all kinds of conspiracy theories in terms of what led to changes in the text.

01:20:35

And you get the same thing from a lot of apparent conservatives that they have conspiracy theories.

01:20:45

They want to portray, sometimes they'll portray you, but especially in the past,

01:20:53

Westcott. Oh, yes. Westcott and Hort, a spiritist. Yes. And, you know,

01:21:01

Hort went liberal. But Westcott was actually defender. Yes, he was.

01:21:06

Of the Gospel of John against German criticism.

01:21:12

And his commentary on Hebrews is really good, too. Yeah. Oh, you can, hey, it's easy to pick on dead people.

01:21:19

Yes. It's very easy to pick on dead people. But you can turn it around, like I just said.

01:21:25

How about Erasmus? He wrote a book defending transubstantiation, for crying out loud. Is there any evidence that Westcott was a spiritist?

01:21:33

No, there isn't. The stuff that the King James Onlyists and Gail Riplinger and stuff throw out.

01:21:40

I gave one example in the King James Only controversy many, many years ago, where they'll quote about, whether it was

01:21:48

Hort or Westcott, I forget which one it was, going into a Marian shrine or something like that. They won't quote the next sentence where they rip on Marian devotion as being pure superstition.

01:21:57

So, it's so easy to isolate quotes and to misrepresent people that it's astonishing.

01:22:04

And there's no reason to do it. Westcott and Hort produced a

01:22:10

Greek New Testament that is not the New Testament we're using today. And modern scholars have all the freedom in the world.

01:22:16

I have all the freedom in the world. The Ness -Allen 28th edition uses a single conjectural emendation at 1

01:22:24

Peter 3 that I reject. I reject it. And I can look at whatever scholarship is out there and take the good and throw out the bones, man.

01:22:36

If we were hiding stuff, if they weren't being open and honest with us as to what's going into the

01:22:43

CBGM analysis, okay, that's a different world. But they're open and honest about it. You can go online and use the same stuff yourself that they're using.

01:22:51

So, they're being above board about it. So, the idea that, yeah, but a bad person could do what you're doing, okay.

01:23:00

Yeah, that's true. But that doesn't actually mean anything. We're all dealing with the same text. And some of us deal with it on a foundation of faith and some do not.

01:23:10

I just don't believe, I just don't believe, I believe God has preserved His Word. The question is how

01:23:15

He did it. And I don't believe He did it by enshrining a particular text at a particular time that no one in the earlier centuries of the church ever possessed.

01:23:27

I want to be connected to all the church, not just to a particular portion of the church. I tell people all the time, no one has anything to fear from truth but liars.

01:23:37

That's true. Sometimes truth is messy. Sometimes Augustine can say things that make you roll your eyes.

01:23:45

Sometimes Augustine makes me go, what on earth were you drinking that day? Yeah. And yet the church history is messy, but it's glorious.

01:23:59

God has built His church. The gates of hell have not prevailed. You know, the church didn't go away at the time of Jerome.

01:24:11

Was there growing darkness in some areas? Of course. But we don't need to hide.

01:24:18

We don't need to fear if the 30th edition switches back to Lord from Jesus and Jude, you know, delivering people out of Egypt.

01:24:33

Is that going to shake our faith? We know it's one of the two. That's right. So any closing thoughts?

01:24:40

Well, and those are the only two options at that point. So yeah, that's the point in each one of those. And there are complex variants.

01:24:46

There's one in Galatians where there's five different possibilities, and it's challenging. But again, none of it changes the message of Galatians.

01:24:53

It doesn't change Galatians from justification by grace through faith alone without the works of the law to justification by pilgrimage as Jerome.

01:25:02

I mean, that's not even a slight possibility. And so I think that we need to rein our emotions in, especially when we are approaching the subject of the foundation of our faith itself.

01:25:17

We need to be—what we believe today needs to be communicable to the next generation and the next generation.

01:25:26

And I'm just, I'm truly thankful that as I look at the attacks on the

01:25:33

Bible today, when you can produce videos and put them on YouTube and you've got the

01:25:39

Bart Ehrmans of the world running around, is right at the very same time when we have been given more information with which to refute that than ever before in history.

01:25:49

I am very thankful providentially for that. – One quick thought I meant to ask earlier.

01:25:55

Lots of folks will throw up Dean Bergen as, you know, monumental scholar, brilliant man, godly man, and he stood against all this, right?

01:26:06

– And no, he didn't stand against almost any of this. He disagreed with Westcott and Horton in their methodology.

01:26:12

But interestingly enough, there is a thing called the Dean Bergen Society. But by confession of faith,

01:26:19

Dean Bergen could never have been a member of the Dean Bergen Society, which I find fascinating. – Well, they threw out Lydas, didn't they?

01:26:24

– I think they did, yeah. But Bergen was brilliant. But Bergen, his scholarship was prior to the papyri and prior to the modern period.

01:26:35

And that means he was dealing with significantly less data than we are dealing with today. And so even with that, for example, he would have rejected the

01:26:44

Kamiohanion. He did reject the Kamiohanion. He recognized that was not an appropriate—that's 1

01:26:49

John 5, 7, there are three, the very witness, father, son, and spirit, and these three are one. That came into the

01:26:56

Greek manuscripts from the Latin. It came into the Latin manuscripts in about the 6th or 7th century. It is not—it could not possibly have been originally written by John, but there are people—I had one of Jack Chick's favorite authors,

01:27:12

Alberto Rivera, who said he was a former Roman Catholic priest. He was a little, short guy.

01:27:18

And he told me right to my face I was going to hell because I didn't have 1 John 5, 7 in my New American Standard Bible.

01:27:25

So there's that. But Burgon was truly a scholar, and hence to transport him out of what he knew then into another situation and say,

01:27:38

I know what he would have said, again, is pure anachronism, and it's really abusive history. – Did Burgon have some valid points against Westcott and Hort?

01:27:46

– Burgon had valid points in the sense that Westcott and Hort over -emphasized

01:27:53

Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. There has been a correction of that. But then there were certain readings where Burgon was correct at the time to make the criticism, but then when the

01:28:06

Pirates show up and they have the same readings and they're 200 years earlier, that would have impacted his conclusions if he had had that data.

01:28:13

But he didn't have that data. So I think it's really unfair when people throw Burgon out there and don't tell folks, yeah, this is 140 years out of date now, and there's been a lot of development since then, but hey, let's go with it anyways.

01:28:27

– Well, thank you so much. This has been a real blessing. Let's take an opportunity to thank Dr. White. –

01:28:35

Thank you, sir. – Thank you. –

01:28:42

Any questions? We need to make them short because I ran too long. –

01:28:52

What do you think has caused there to be Jesus instead of, or vice versa?

01:29:00

Do you think theologically, you know, any of the scribes or specifically

01:29:06

Jude was considering a theophany or anything like that, or why do you think that's there? – Just really, really quickly.

01:29:13

I like the reading because Jude 3, 4, and 5 contains references to the deity of Christ.

01:29:18

I think it really does. And so it makes that just all that much stronger in its reading.

01:29:24

But I think the primary reason you have a variant there is that it is a striking way of putting it.

01:29:30

And so the natural way, if you were just simply copying something, the natural way of expressing it would be the

01:29:36

Lord delivered to people out of Egypt. Because what's the, in the Greek translation of the

01:29:42

Old Testament, which is what everyone's reading, what was the Greek term for Lord?

01:29:47

Well, they didn't transliterate Yahweh. They used a different term, kurios, same term that's used in Jude 5.

01:29:54

So that was the natural way for a scribe to refer to Yahweh in the Old Testament. So that would have been much more easy for them to do if to specifically write

01:30:03

Jesus would require you to be following what the text was saying. And as CBGM has shown us, the manuscripts that say

01:30:12

Jesus that are related to each other, they all say Jesus. Um, the ones that say

01:30:17

Lord, that's where the, that's where the scribe put the easier thing. Not because they were trying to change something, but probably just simply in the transcription process.

01:30:27

Another quick question. Oh, they're all good. Oh, there's one. Thank you so much.

01:30:36

This isn't quick enough. With the Old Testament, so this is used, it's hard to argue against the

01:30:48

Old Testament. So what do they do? They're the resultants. And now we get to talk about the Old Testament.

01:30:57

What do you recommend? Are there resources, thinkers out there? How do you modify it, which is the

01:31:09

Old Testament? Because the Dead Sea Scrolls can be used for both. I don't know.

01:31:15

Um, well, the Dead Sea Scrolls can be used primarily on our side. The, you do need to be aware of something here.

01:31:23

If you have heard about the Isaiah Scroll in the Dead Sea Scrolls and how up until the discovery of the

01:31:29

Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest Hebrew manuscript we had was from around 900 years after Christ. We find the

01:31:35

Isaiah Scroll and it's, it's simply identical. No change over a thousand years.

01:31:41

What that proves is there doesn't have to be change during transmission of the text. That much is true, but be careful.

01:31:48

The Dead Sea Scrolls version of Jeremiah is one third shorter than the Masoretic text.

01:31:55

Now, the fact of the matter is Jeremiah tells us why that is. If you remember Jeremiah, remember there's a time where his book is taken from him and torn up by the, by, at the king's command.

01:32:06

So there was an earlier edition and then Jeremiah is chucked, chucked off to Egypt. So he then has to reproduce stuff down below.

01:32:14

So the book of Jeremiah actually tells us why there would be different versions of Jeremiah found in the

01:32:21

Greek Septuagint versus the Masoretic text. But hopefully you all know that about a year and a half, two years ago, one of the scrolls that we had never been able to open from Qumran because it's completely fossilized.

01:32:34

You try to move it and it just will, will turn to dust. Um, some brilliant geek, um, realized that when you x -ray, uh, that stuff, the ink had lead in it, whereas the, the material did not.

01:32:52

And so they figured out that you could x -ray this, uh, scroll and then use a computer to digitally unroll the scroll and read it.

01:33:05

And it turned out to be a copy of Leviticus that again is smack dab the

01:33:12

Masoretic text from a thousand years later. Uh, so fascinating, fascinating stuff.

01:33:19

Old Testament textual criticism is a completely different world for a number of reasons. It's much older and it's produced in a completely different context than the

01:33:30

New Testament is. The New Testament manuscripts are written by multiple authors at multiple times to multiple people and meant to be distributed and translated in other languages.

01:33:40

The Old Testament scriptures were a covenantal scripture for a covenantal people and primarily were only for those people.

01:33:49

Uh, the first major translation, well, the Targums in, in, in, uh, in Aramaic, but, uh, and then the major translation being the

01:33:57

Greek Septuagint 200 years before Christ. And so there is a, it's a completely different world as to, um, uh, traditions within the

01:34:06

Masoretic texts and things like that. And you're still looking at far, far after the times of the original writings because it's just so ancient.

01:34:15

But isn't it fascinating that within the past month they found, well, they didn't find, but they published what they had found a few years ago on Mount Ebel, um, uh, a, a, uh, tablet with curses using

01:34:34

Yahweh's name from 1200 BC. Well, that's where the blessing and cursings are in Deuteronomy 20 and 29.

01:34:42

It's astonishing. Um, there's no other work of antiquity that can even come close to that. But if you want theologically, this is, this one's actually, if the person you're talking to is a

01:34:54

Christian, well, theologically, um, that man who rose from the dead thought that the

01:34:59

Old Testament had been accurately transmitted. In other words, when you look at Matthew chapter 22, when

01:35:05

Jesus answers the Sadducees, uh, the answer he gives on the issue of the resurrection is based upon the form of the verb,

01:35:14

I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not I was the God of Abraham. So that has to have been transmitted correctly for his argument to make any sense.

01:35:26

Now, he also happened to have been the author. So that really helps. Um, you know, but that's the point is that you, you really, you have

01:35:34

Jesus's testimony at that point to go to the accuracy of something that historically we, we, you know, that was a long, long, long, long, long, long time ago.

01:35:47

Uh, and it's, and you cannot expect to find the kind of level of material because written material, unless it's chiseled in a stone someplace, as those tablets were 1200 years before Christ, you're not going to, it's not going to survive this long.

01:36:02

It's just, it can't. That's all, that's all you've got from anything in antiquity. Yeah. Well, we have refreshments in the fellowship hall and, uh,

01:36:11

Dr. White is graciously going to be with us for Sunday school, 945 Sunday. Uh, he'll be preaching for us 11 o 'clock and then he'll be back

01:36:21

Monday night at seven o 'clock back here in the chapel. So thank you for coming. On a completely different topic.