The Reliability of the New Testament | James R. White

Dr. White has been extraordinarily gracious to our congregation over the years. I was totaling it up. I think we've been working somewhat together for over 22 years now.

When did we do that first debate? 2001. Sounds about right. 2000. No, wait a minute. It was... 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. But at any rate, no, it would have been. 2000, fall of 2000 is when we did the St. Martin Luther debate. Yes. Yes. Yes. It's been a while.

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

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

That's right. Please don't kill me. Yeah. Dr. Scharf's was trembling like I've never seen anyone with Parkinson's tremble.

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

Hunter High School. But we have invited 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. I asked him if he would be up to an interview, because in spite of how clearly he has expressed himself many times, I 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 I'm saying. Well, what they say is not what you say. So a couple of years ago, we had you here for the Lee Baker debate. And so I heard you say something there that I'd like everyone to hear.

Do you believe that one word, one letter of what the apostles wrote in the New Testament has been lost to the Church today?

The Tenacity of the New Testament Manuscripts

In answering that question, you can just do a simple answer and say, no, I do not. But that immediately goes, so where are they? So let me just briefly lay out why I would take a position that many people involved in doing textual critical study would find somewhat unusual, though in reality, in history, I think most people were definitely on the same side that I'm on.

The New Testament manuscripts demonstrate something called tenacity. Tenacity, 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.

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

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

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

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

Now, if he had 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. We still have that manuscript. We didn't do what the Muslims did when they burned manuscripts of the Qur 'an to establish a particular text.

Now, you say, well, but those are mistakes. Right. But if the mistakes were preserved, what does that mean? The original readings were preserved as well. And so we have, in the manuscript tradition, everything that John or Paul or Luke ever wrote.

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.

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

And you can put together an entire chart where the older manuscripts will have a shorter reading. And then the manuscripts later on will have a slightly expanded. So, he becomes Jesus, Jesus becomes the Lord Jesus, the Lord Jesus becomes the Lord Jesus Christ.

There is an expansion of what I call piety involved in these later manuscripts. And so our job is to, in all of this, in all of this, I will defend this statement. I want to know what the apostles wrote.

Not what a scribe 500 years or 1 ,000 years or 1 ,200 years thought the apostles should have written. And if that is your ultimate goal, then there is only one real direction you can go in the analysis of the manuscripts.

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

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. 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. 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.

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

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

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 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.

There is more information in this one volume than almost any scholar had access to for 95 of the history of the Christian church. And so, we have a tremendous amount of information we can draw from.

We are hiding nothing. It's not like you have some priest group that you have to go to to get your information. Anybody can buy this. My Muslim friends buy this. I know Mormons who look at stuff like this, Jehovah's Witnesses and others.

We don't hide anything. We don't need to hide anything because we can openly lay out our, here's how we're going to do it. 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 New Testament was. One last thing I'll say, because we have other questions to get to.

One last thing I'll say is this. Historically, the 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 Greek New Testament.

Historically, the 1624 edition is really the TR. But today, the Trinitarian Bible Society, Textus Receptus, has sort of taken the place of that one. And that was produced by a brilliant scholar by the name of FHA Scribner in the late 19th.

And that's what underlies the King James version and the New King James translation of the New Testament. If you have a New American Standard, ESV, NIV, Legacy Standard Bible, Christian Standard Bible, any of the modern translations, they're based upon this Greek text, which is called the Nessie-Aland text.

This text, in its main readings, because if I add a…. 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. In the main text here, if you compare that with the TR, there is about a….

I think it's 2 difference in length. And that represents those expansions that we were talking about. All of those expansions are in the notes here. So you have it right there. It's on the page. 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. Either in the main text or at the bottom of the page are all the original readings from the apostles.

They're still there. And Robert Bowman, that's the name I couldn't remember earlier today. Robert Bowman used, I thought, a brilliant illustration. Dan Wallace agreed that it was a brilliant illustration.

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

The one young man down front who noticed he only went like this. It's not like I asked who here has Han Solo jammies or something like that. I wouldn't want to ask that question, actually. Now, you know that having 10 ,100 pieces would complicate that process, because you have to identify the extra pieces.

But which would you rather have, 10 ,100 pieces and have to identify the extra pieces, or 9 ,900 pieces and never be able to complete the puzzle? 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.

I believe that God has preserved the New Testament. It's the method and methodology that He used that we have to understand. And a lot of people want to have the Indiana Jones method of New Testament preservation.

Man, I'm dating myself. You realize how many people don't even know who Indiana Jones is anymore? Man, that is so sad. If you've not seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, or this was Search for the Holy, which one was it?

Last Crusade. Was it Last Crusade? Okay, thank you. It's always easy to identify the fans in the group. In one of the Indiana Jones films, they were looking for the Holy Grail, and they find it in this cave with a really, really, really, really old guy.

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

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 Bible too, and people don't like that.

But here's the problem. Unless you have 2 ,000 years worth of video recordings, how do you know what that guy's been doing in that cave for 2 ,000 years? You have to trust that whoever has that one untransmitted text hasn't tampered with it.

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

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? Well, you 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 British had stealing the Egyptians' blind, and had been stealing everything. You know, when they ruled 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 Michael H. Chandler was running around showing people, and that type of thing. But there were all sorts of papyri, ancient papyri manuscripts.

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.

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. 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 Koinean Greek.

He recognizes that this is from the New Testament. And upon analysis, what he had found is what we now call P52, which is arguably, anyway, is the earliest fragment of the New Testament we possess from around the year 125 AD.

And it's from the Gospel of John. John 18, verse 31, 34 on one side, 37, 38 on the back side, which ironically is Jesus' conversation with Pilate, what is truth? I've just always found it just fascinating that—do you have any idea what that one little piece of papyrus had to survive for 2 ,000 years?

But we find all these papyri that we now have that no other generation of Christians had ever seen or had access to. And they take our knowledge of the New Testament 200 years back from where it had been at that point, closer to the originals.

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

So, I think the Lord has been taking care of things. And so, because of the tenacity of the New Testament text, I believe God has preserved all of His Word for us. But just like every single person who published a Greek New Testament that was then used by the Reformers, Martin Luther.

Martin Luther had to use someone else's work. He didn't have access to manuscripts. He wasn't a scholar in that field. So, what did he do? 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 Greek.

He was much more concerned about the Latin translation he was providing, because he knew it could get into a lot of trouble. And so, we've all had to utilize the works of others. And in that process, we have produced translations down through the years and everything else.

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

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. Sorry about that. That was a half-hour redone. Okay. All righty.

We'll see you all later. Question two.

Bart Ehrman, Textual Variants, and the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method

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

There are many more variants than there are words. The impression that he is giving purposefully is that therefore, we can't know what's in 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.

But it's not as if there are an infinite number of possibilities of what things read. The choices are between, you used the example, Jesus said to the man versus the 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.

It's one of the two.

Well, let me give you an illustration of that that'll illustrate really well. 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?

I was listening to a webcast where Bart Ehrman was on with an atheist. The atheist was the host. 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 New Testament was originally all about?

Okay, so what's in his mind? His mind is that the New Testament was actually about space gods from Kolob. Who knows? Weird, wild, wacky stuff like that. And you can tell there's this hesitation. And then Ehrman goes, well, it was about Jesus as the Son of God coming to earth and dying on a cross to provide forgiveness of sins.

And you can just, it's like, as the balloon just goes flat, because the guy was expecting some really cool thing. And Ehrman is a scholar, okay? It's his conclusions that are off, not his facts. And he has admitted all we're doing is playing around with the text as far as what the original readings are.

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 and or enoch somewhere in 2 Peter. That was it. No impact upon the meaning of the 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.

And then in Hebrews chapter 2, where there are a few manuscripts that say, by the grace of, apart from God, rather than by the grace of God. That's it. Those are his big examples. He knows that what the New Testament teaches is firmly established.

And it is interesting. I'll just mention this in passing. 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 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 New Testament. And we can demonstrate that the claims that there's this wild variation are themselves wild.

And this did not exist when Ehrman was…. And Ehrman has admitted he's no longer in this field. He does not claim to be doing actual research work in the textual critical field any longer. 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. So keep that kind of stuff in mind. There's…. Bart, you know, go listen, go watch the debate that we had.

You can stand toe-to-toe with the best the other side has to offer. 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.

This wasn't my best debate, which is the greatest compliment you would ever, ever, ever get from Bart Ehrman. There's absolutely no other ways about it.

Yeah, we actually took some of that and added a few things. 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…. Depends on his audience.

Yeah. I mean, you don't get on the New York Times bestseller list. That's right. Running Bruce Metzger kind of stuff. That's right. Bruce Metzger said, we have the 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? 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. Midwesterners are not exempt. Well, this is true. But you're supposed to say, may I have an apple? Not, may I have an apple?

And so…. I resemble that remark. That's it. So, there will be many textual variants created in Georgia. But anyway, and Louisiana, and parts of Oklahoma, and so on and so forth. But there was something called the movable new, which in Greek functioned the exact same way.

You don't want to pronounce two vowels in a row. No language. Well, never mind that. 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 New Testament is whether you have a movable new, which does not impact.

A apple or an apple does not change what it means. 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 New Testament.

And there are 138 ,230, I think, words in the main text of the Nessie Olympic. But the vast majority of those are movable news, or they are issues that cannot even be translated into another language.

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. They actually can be translated into English and have a different meaning.

And what are called viable. So, if you find a manuscript from the, well, I could give you an example in the King James of this. Well, I will. Let's look at a text real quick. In Philippians chapter 3, Ephesians chapter 3, there is an interesting reading in verse 9.

In Ephesians 3 .9 in the New American Standard, it says, And to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery, which for ages had been hidden in God who created all things. Now, if you have a King James or a New King James, it doesn't say administration.

It says what? Anybody have one? It says fellowship. Fellowship. Now, fellowship and administration are not the same thing. Okay. One is koinonia, the other is oikonomia. Now, we have found the one manuscript that is from around 12 to 1300 AD that is responsible for the 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 Greek New Testament, printed and published Greek New Testament in 1516.

And we don't have any manuscripts before that. We don't have any early church fathers before that. Everybody who preached this text said administration. All the papyri, everything said. And we have, for example, in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland, we have P46, which is the earliest collection of Paul's major epistles.

It's from around the year 200. Okay. So, it's the earliest we have. And by the way, for those interested in such things, it also contains Hebrews, which means that somebody in the year 200 thought Paul wrote Hebrews.

That's all it proves. But anyway, it says administration. So, we can trace the text 1100 years before one manuscript. And yet that one manuscript ended up being used by Erasmus. And that's why it's in the King James.

And so, the vast majority of scholars would say that reading is not viable. 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 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. And none of those translations have anything other than administration.

None of them have fellowship. Which means there weren't any other manuscripts back there in those ancient days that had that reading either. So, fundamentally, the reading of the Textus Receptus at Ephesians 3 .9 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...the percentage is less than 1 of any of the texts.

Ehrman loves to throw numbers around, statistics. Because he can confuse people. He can overwhelm them. There are people who are advocates of the TR that will also throw around statistics. And they'll talk about, you know, 5 ,000 differences between Vaticanus and Sinaiticus just in the Gospels, things like this.

But in terms of what the Bible teaches, there are a few passages such as Ephesians 3, 1 John 5 .7, the Johannine Comma, things like this. Is there any doctrine that is in any way affected by these 1 ,500 variants?

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 New Testament fundamentally changed the message of the New Testament.

So, I have said forever that if you apply the same method of hermeneutics and interpretation to the Textus Receptus and to the Nessiean 28th edition of the Greek New Testament, you will not come up with different beliefs.

Now, the list of verses that you would put forth that would teach a particular topic might be slightly different. So, in 1 Timothy 3 .16, in the King James and New King James, it says, God was manifested in the flesh.

Well, that's pretty strong. The modern translations say, He who was manifested in the flesh. It's the different…. It literally…. And this is one point where it's very helpful to be able to project this on the wall.

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

Can you imagine what that looks like? So, it's a page filled with nothing but an unbroken line of capital letters. And you would not even…. At the end of a line, you would just break a word and start on the next line.

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

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. 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 Greek New Testament today.

So, in 1 Timothy 3 .16, the difference between hos, omicron, sigma, and theos, theta, sigma, is just two small horizontal lines. And you're writing a papyri. Papyri had lines in it. It'd be very easy to understand how someone could make a mistake one way or the other.

In John 1 .18, in John 1 .18, in the four earliest manuscripts of the New Testament of the Gospel of John, John 1 .18 says, hominogenes theos, the unique God, God, the one and only, has revealed Him, has revealed the Father.

Here is an application of the word theos to Jesus. Later manuscripts say, hwios, Son. So, it's interesting. 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?

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

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

And so, you can do stuff like that. You can find the variants. And it's not just with King James onlyists or T .R. onlyists or modern critical text advocates. Jehovah's Witnesses do this a lot too. I remember...you got to be careful with Jehovah's Witnesses.

Some of those people are really well-trained. 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.

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 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.

And he hit me with a question. We were talking about John 20 .28. There's no variant of John 20 .28. But John 20 .28, Jesus appears to Thomas. And what is Thomas' response when he sees Jesus? He says, Hakuri asumu kai hathe asumu, my 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 because it's really rather clear and obvious. And so he hits me with a question.

Hakuri asumu is in the nominative case. And the Greek language, there was a way to address someone directly, which is called the vocative. Now, in the Koine period, the vocative was passing away. It was being replaced by the nominative.

So he hit me with a question. 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? Because I knew there was one other, but I also knew there was a minor textual variant there.

It's in Revelation chapter 4. So this Jehovah's Witness knew not only where it was, but that there was a textual variant involved. That's how deeply these people will dive into the utilization of that type of information.

So, hey, all information can be used for good or for evil. And sometimes the cults use it. 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 New Testament that we end up always talking about.

And you need to know where they are. And both of them are a block of 12 verses. 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.

And as Dan Wallace has expressed it, his favorite story that's not in the Bible, The Woman Taken in Adultery, John 7 .53 -8 .11. There just isn't anything else. There are single verses. There's the Communion in 1 John 5 .7, which is not a viable reading either.

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

And so once you know the background of those two texts, they don't have much else to throw at you. So an educated Christian is an insulated Christian as far as that's concerned. Now, of those two, the long writing of Mark has much earlier manuscript evidence than The Woman Taken in Adultery does.

As far as actually having a manuscript that reads that way, the first manuscript that reads that way historically is called Codex Bese Cantabrigiensis, Codex D. Now, Codex D, I call the living Bible of the early church, which is not a compliment.

Theodore Bese, Calvin's successor at Geneva, he was gifted this manuscript. And upon examining it, he eventually donated to Cambridge University with a letter. And the letter, he said, this manuscript is so unique in its readings that it is better stored than read.

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.

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