The History and Reliability of the Bible 2

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So let's pray together, our father and our God, we thank you for this opportunity to again be in your house to be about the business of looking into your word.
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And Lord, being as it is, the subject of this conference, the word of God and the belief in the reliability and history of the text of Scripture, we pray, oh, Lord, that you would keep us focused on it.
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Remind us, Lord, not just to study about the Bible, but to actually study what the Bible says and to have faith that you have through your apostles and through your prophets down the ages have seen fit to bring about a word that we can trust has come directly from you.
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And Lord, as we examine the more difficult aspects of scholarship, the more difficult aspects of history and reliability in regard to textual criticism, we pray, oh, Lord, that you would.
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Keep me as the instructor, keep me from error, fill me with your Holy Spirit, give me the strength to teach and preach correctly.
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I pray that you would open the hearts of the congregation to hear and understand what is taught.
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We ask all this, Lord, in Jesus name and for his sake.
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Amen.
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Most of the time when we hear the word criticism or critical, we tend to think of that in a very negative way.
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Nobody likes to be criticized.
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No one likes it when someone is critical against them.
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So when you hear or see that tonight we're talking about textual critical issues that can automatically put you on the defense because you think about what does this mean? We're going to be criticizing the Bible.
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Well, there are two forms of criticism that we need to understand before even launching into this.
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And that is what we would call textual criticism, which is what we're going to be looking into.
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And then there's what is called higher criticism of the Bible.
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Textual criticism simply is this.
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In looking at the vast amount of manuscripts that we have of the New Testament, that's going to be the primary focus of the New Testament.
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Being that we have a vast amount of handwritten manuscripts, within those manuscripts, there are variations, places where things are spelled differently, things where different words are used.
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And we have many of those.
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And because of that, scholarship is required.
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Well, scholarship is not the best.
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It is required to study, to seek, to find what the original said, since we no longer have any copies of the original.
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And that's the study of what is called textual criticism or the criticizing of the manuscript tradition, bringing it down to what it actually said when it was originally written.
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There is another form of criticism, which is called the higher criticism of the Bible, and that is much more liberal in its approach.
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And those people attempt to not just do textual criticism, even though that is part of what they do, more so their attempt is to criticize what the Bible says.
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And they spend time repudiating miracles and repudiating the fact that Jesus was God in the flesh and repudiating the resurrection.
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And as such, you end up with a very liberal form of quote unquote Christianity.
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And that's the difference.
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So when you think about when you hear someone talk about textual criticism, know that there are really two forms.
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And we're not engaging in the higher criticism where we're going to be saying, well, this if the Bible says there was a burning bush, we have to consider that burning bushes can't be or something like that.
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And that's the way liberals would approach it.
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They approach it from a very naturalistic, materialistic point of view.
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Our study, on the other hand, is simply to say there are a vast amount of manuscripts and we want to find out, well, how do we determine what the original text actually said? Most churches of the evangelical variety have a statement of faith that includes a statement of biblical inerrancy.
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This simply means that they state in their statement of faith somewhere that they believe that the Bible is true.
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Usually the statement looks something like this.
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And click through, please.
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This is just an example of one.
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This is not the one we use at our church, but I use this as an example because I think it's worded in a very specific way.
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And I think it's worded in a way that would probably be best example.
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It says, we teach that the Bible is the word of God, supernaturally inspired, without error in the original manuscripts and preserved by God in its verbal plenary inspiration.
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And it is a divinely authoritative standard for every age and every life.
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Now, the key part that I want to focus on in this statement of faith is just this part here, without error in the original manuscripts.
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Almost every statement of faith that I've ever seen, including the one in our own church, uses some form of the statement, the original manuscript.
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Sometimes they're called the autographs.
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That's another way of saying original manuscripts.
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But almost every statement of faith in evangelical churches will have something in accord with that statement.
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That it will say it's the original manuscripts that we are saying actually came from God.
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But what many people are failing to see in our modern world is that this is not really where Satan is attacking.
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In fact, I've heard people say, well, it's fine if you want to believe God inspired Paul or God inspired the writing of the book of Romans.
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Or it's fine if you want to believe that God inspired the writing of the book of 1 Corinthians.
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The problem is we don't know what it actually originally said, because all we have are copies.
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That's their argument.
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That's the attack that's being used.
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So it becomes not an attack against inspiration.
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It becomes an attack against what we would call transmission, how the text went from the apostle Paul to where it is today in our hands.
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That's that's where the attack is, is they say, well, in fact, I heard it doesn't matter if God gave it to Paul or whatever, because we don't know what originally said.
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This is the argument that is often being used recently.
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I say recently now, it's been a few years, but I had the privilege of sitting in on a debate between two scholars on this subject.
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And I brought pictures, not that they really needed it, but just wanted to show you this is Dr.
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Bart Ehrman.
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Dr.
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Bart Ehrman is, in every sense, a distinguished scholar on the subject of historical languages and the biblical text.
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This is Dr.
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James White.
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And these two men debated on the subject of whether or not the history and reliability of the scripture was to be trusted.
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This was a three hour, very intense debate in which both men at times showed obvious signs of frustration.
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Dr.
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White was standing for scripture.
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He was standing for the belief that the Bible is the word of God and that it can be trusted.
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Dr.
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Ehrman was saying that it couldn't be trusted and they were really frustrated with each other throughout the debate because it seemed as if Dr.
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White was frustrated because it didn't seem as if Dr.
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Ehrman was understanding his arguments.
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And Dr.
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Ehrman seemed frustrated that any Christian could actually believe the views that Dr.
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White was espousing.
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So there was this sort of just a back and forth that really didn't have a lot of progress except for to to have one or the other say a few things that I thought were were important.
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But really, when the dust settled and the smoke was clear, there was a clear picture that many Christians really don't know the history of the Bible.
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And a lot of what Dr.
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Ehrman was saying in the debate, I think, would have been massively harmful to people's faith in the Bible if Dr.
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White had not been there to propose the counter understanding.
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If it had just been Dr.
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Bart Ehrman standing up, giving a three hour presentation of only his position and he did not have the the counter statements of Dr.
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White, I think it could have been very detrimental to people's faith.
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And the sad thing is, it is men like Ehrman who have been given the stages of the world to stand on and proclaim their version.
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Dr.
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White is he's known among Reformed Christians, but he's not really known even even outside of Reformed theology.
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A lot of a lot of people don't know who he is, even though he's a very brilliant man.
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He makes very strong arguments for the history and reliability of the Bible.
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A lot of people don't know who he is.
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But Bart Ehrman has been on The Daily Show.
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He's been on the History Channel.
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He's been on everything you can imagine, you know, all types of television shows.
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And the thing is, he's also Ehrman is the head of religious studies at North Carolina University, University, North Carolina.
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He's he's the head of their religious department.
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So here he is not believing in the text of the Bible, not believing in its history and reliability.
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And he has the podium and the ear of thousands, if not millions.
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And very few are standing against what he's saying, because very few, quite frankly, would even know where to start.
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Very few would even know how to how to understand or even interact with his objections.
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And this means that our children are now growing up in a society where men like Ehrman have this great voice in the community and men like Dr.
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White do not.
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And I can tell you that he has sent home many young people who went to to their college experience, believing he has sent many of them home as atheists.
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And we could obviously make the argument about, you know, perseverance of the saints and their faith being really genuine or whatnot.
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But the truth of the matter is many children go away to college, at least having some understanding and belief in what mom and dad told them about the Bible and about Jesus Christ.
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Only to come home being totally derailed.
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And it's men like Bart Ehrman who make it their business to to do that very thing.
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So because of this, I've made it my goal in this lesson tonight to tell as many people as I can in an attempt to prepare them for the disputes that they and likely their children will face regarding this issue.
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And it is an important issue.
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In fact, it is foundational.
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If the Bible we have is unreliable, then our faith has no foundation.
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And where do we go from there? Yet, I hope to show by the end of this message that not only is the Bible reliable, but that it is truly supernaturally preserved.
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And we're going to see how that actually came about.
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Now, before we begin, as well as we as we begin, I want to actually dispel some myths.
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Now, this first one might really be somewhat difficult for certain people.
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But this first myth, I think, needs to be immediately dealt with.
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And that is myth number one.
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God has preserved his word in English through a perfect translation called the King James Bible.
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That is believed by many people that is believed to be the truth.
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And as I said Wednesday night, I'm going to deal with what we call King James only ism.
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People who say that's the only English Bible.
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And in fact, there are some who say that it's the only Bible that anyone should use and and that the world should have to learn English because this is the Bible.
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I've heard that argument made.
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They've said that because English is the standard language for business and it's the standard, they even use the argument that because air traffic controllers all have to speak English because that's they have to have a universal language.
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And English has become a universal language that because of that.
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Now, that's why the Bible in English and the King James Version is the Bible that everyone should be using.
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And it really is.
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I think it's a it's a horrible argument.
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We're going to talk about that more on Wednesday night.
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But the key is just asking this question.
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This this is a way to get around the issue.
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The issue is we have a ton of Greek manuscripts, not any one of them read exactly the same as any of the rest.
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So we have to deal with textual criticism.
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We have to deal with that issue.
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So they say, well, we don't have an issue anymore.
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We've got the perfect Bible.
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We made it, it's done.
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And that's the problem is they produce this new doctrine that in 1611, God in his mercy reached down from the from the throne of heaven.
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And he gave us a new, totally perfect, totally inspired, without error text that from then on would be the total perfect text.
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And would no longer have to be studied in light of textual criticism.
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The problem is.
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There are issues about the King James, which.
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A lot of people don't even realize.
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I want to show you something.
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If you have a King James Bible, which I don't know how many of you brought one tonight, but if you have a King James Bible and you went to 1 John 5 7, some of you may not be able to see this, I didn't realize the text was this small.
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In the King James Bible, it says in 1 John 5 7, for there are three that testify or excuse me, there are three that bear record in heaven, the father, the word and the Holy Ghost.
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And these three are one.
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But if you have a New American Standard Bible, it will say, for there are three that testify.
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It adds a colon and then it begins in verse eight.
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Now.
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If you notice, I marked in red the passage that the words that are missing.
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I've heard people say, well, the NIV and the NAS, these are just updated language of the King James Bible.
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That's not true.
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The New American Standard Bible, the English Standard Bible, the New International Version are based on an entirely different family of manuscripts.
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Let me say that again.
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They are based on an entirely different family of manuscripts.
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Then the King James Bible.
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And that is why there are places and this is one of the few, there are only a few, but this is one of the major ones where there are words, there are entire sentences that have made it into the King James that are not a part of other translations.
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And the question becomes, well, should it be there? Should that statement be in there? I mean, obviously.
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This is a true statement because all it's saying is that there are three that bear record in heaven.
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We believe that we believe that it's the father, the son and the Holy Ghost.
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We believe that obviously this is a true statement.
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These three are one.
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That is a very true statement.
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We believe in the doctrine of the Trinity that God is one in essence and three in person.
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This is this is all very true.
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But whether or not it be true, the question still remains, should it be in the text? Well, I'm going to deal with this more tomorrow because I'm actually going to look at this very deeply.
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But I just want to give you the sort of the Cliff Notes version tonight, if I could, because I have a lot more to get to.
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The text that underlies the King James version comes from an edition of the Greek New Testament that was put together by a man by the name of Desiderius Erasmus.
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This text, after a few other editions, became known as the Textus Receptus or what is commonly called the Received Text.
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When compiling the manuscripts for this text, Erasmus could not find any Greek sources that included this sentence.
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I say that again.
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When he was compiling the manuscripts and he was doing the work of textual criticism, he could not find any manuscripts, any Greek manuscripts that included this sentence.
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So in his first edition, he produced a manuscript that did not include that.
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In fact, he did not include it in his second edition, yet the text still existed, but it didn't exist in the Greek manuscripts.
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Where did it exist? In the Latin.
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Now, when did the Latin come about? Well, the Latin was one of the first translations of the Bible into another language.
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The New Testament was written in Greek, but the New Testament was almost immediately within the first century translated into Latin.
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Latin was the language of learning.
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It was very erudite.
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And by the fourth century, Jerome had translated the Vulgate and that became the Bible for a thousand years.
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Up until the time of the Reformation, almost, the Latin was the Bible.
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So here comes Erasmus and Erasmus is trying to produce a Greek, going back to the original language, because Latin is obviously not the original language.
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And he's looking for Greek manuscripts and he's not finding anything that would support this reading.
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But yet there was the influence of the hierarchy.
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And they were saying, no, this text is in the Latin, it's in the Bible because.
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The Latin was the Bible, it's been the Bible for a thousand years.
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Who are you, Erasmus, to question? And Erasmus, I want to say from here and I'll tell you what I must say, from here on, this is a story that is argued by some.
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But according to traditional history, Erasmus said, if you can produce one Greek testament, one Greek, that's all, one in the Greek.
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That has this reading, I will include it in my third edition.
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And according to the way the story goes, one was produced and he had to do it because he had promised that he would.
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But the issue is.
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That one dates at the same time.
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As when he was writing, so it was it was likely produced for that reason, it dates to the same time as Erasmus.
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The history of it is that there is no preceding Greek text from the time of Erasmus that had this reading in it.
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Ultimately, I think we have to say this, if we're honest and tomorrow I'm going to make a better case for this, but if we're honest, we have to say that this reading is not original.
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That's why the New American Standard Bible, the NIV, the ESV, none of them include it, because from a scholarship level, there's no doubt.
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This is called the Comma Johannium, if you want to look it up, I encourage you to might not be able to spell that, but the Comma Johannium.
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It's or John's comma, it's just a sentence that we believe was included in the text of the Latin translation that was not a part of the original.
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And people ask the question, well, wait a minute now.
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How did the whole sentence get added into the scripture? Well, let's very quickly, let's just talk about how that could happen.
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How many of you write in your Bibles? OK, you didn't invent that, that's something that has actually gone on for a long time.
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In fact, in ancient manuscripts, they were actually the side of the pages were used and they would put notes.
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Well, let's just say, for instance, you were reading 1 John 5, 7, and it says there are three that testify and it goes on to say there are three that testify.
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And on earth, it is the the the word, the spirit and the blood.
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And these three, you know, testify.
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It goes on to talk about three.
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If you saw that in your Bible, you might make a note off to decide that said what? Well, hey, there's three that testify on earth.
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There's also three that testify in heaven, the father, the the word and the spirit.
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You know, you might add that in a textual note.
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Well, guess what? If the next guy who comes along, who's looking at your manuscript is going to make a copy of what you wrote, guess what he might include? In the text, it's very easy to understand how that could happen and how over time that gets introduced into the text.
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Oh, that's a dangerous thing.
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That means there are other things that could be introduced into the text.
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Yeah, that's what this whole subject is about.
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How do we recognize the history of things like this? Because this hasn't gone unnoticed.
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The issue that's been around for a thousand years, the discussion of this has been around since the time of Erasmus.
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It's not gone unnoticed, but we need to deal with it.
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I mean, how would you how would you like it if you were holding a NASB and you went into a church and everybody's reading from the King James Version? They tell you to turn the first time five, seven and they start reading.
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And you say, wait a minute, a whole whole sentence that I don't have.
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You want to know why? As I said, it's been a little longer with that than I wanted to, because tomorrow I'm going to deal with what I call the big three.
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There are three textual variations that I think are very important and they all have interesting names.
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There's the Kamiohaniam, the Pericope Adulterae and the longer ending of Mark.
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Mark's not so fancy, but there's three parts of the New Testament text which are major textual variations that have to be dealt with.
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But anyhow, that's you can click through now.
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I think the argument that the King James Bible is the perfect translation falls apart under scrutiny.
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Myth number two.
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Myth number two is that scribes never made mistakes.
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I find this myth often I find people make that argument a lot of times they'll say, well, hey, man, the Bible was translated and they'll tell the story like this.
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I talked about this in Sunday school this morning.
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So if you were here, you're going to hear it again.
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They'll say, well, when the Bible was being copied, one copy to the next, they would take extreme precaution to make sure that all of the words were exactly right and that they would count the letters and that they had a mathematical paradigm that they would use that allowed them to know what middle letters should be.
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If they put up if they put two strings on the paper, they could see the whatever the middle letter was.
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They had this perfect way of maintaining the text.
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And I call that a myth because because even though that story is true as far as it goes for certain manuscripts, because there were scriptoriums and there were scriptoriums that had very specific rules set up for how things were to go.
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And if they found a mistake, they would destroy a copy.
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You can imagine being at the end of it.
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And right there, they're going to destroy a whole copy.
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You know, that did happen, but that rarely happened in the Christian scriptures that happened more in the Jewish scriptures.
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The Jews had professional scribes who were scribes by trade.
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The early church did not have that.
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The early church, the New Testament, was copied by hand by church members, and it was dispersed through the church by church members.
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We didn't have professional scribes until after the time of Constantine, when the church began to be part of the state run organization that was allowed to flourish.
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Before Constantine, Christians were burned.
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Christians were fed to lions.
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Christians were persecuted.
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Along comes Constantine.
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Christianity becomes the religion of the of the of the nation, and it's legally allowed.
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So now the Bible begins to be manuscripts begin to be produced in scriptorium.
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So after the time of Erasmus, we see less of some of the problems, some of the variations that were in the earlier manuscripts.
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But let me just quickly show you something.
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If you want to pull up the screen, even though the Bible, by the way, this is what a scriptorium looks like.
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Forgot I had this picture.
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This is what a scriptorium looks like.
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If you look at this picture here, you'll notice there are desks that are set up.
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And one of the there will be one of two ways which a copy would be translated or copy would be copied.
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They would either bring the original or the the the exemplar, the one that they're working from.
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And they would literally copy one to the next.
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Or they would have somebody stand at the front and read it as everyone copied what he was reading.
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You can imagine how easy it would be to make a mistake with that.
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And I've heard people say, well, scribes never made mistakes.
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Yes, they did.
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In fact, the next picture will demonstrate this.
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This is a copy of Codex Sinaiticus.
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Now you can get Codex Sinaiticus on your computer.
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It's available.
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You can get I forget the website address.
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I think it's Sinaiticus.org or something.
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But you can actually go and they have really clear pictures of it.
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But you'll see right there, right there, right there.
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What is that? That's where they made a mistake and they did the same thing you do.
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They put a line through it and they added a word or they added a text, they added a little bit because they didn't have enough room.
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This is a picture of it is what it looks like.
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They did make mistakes, it happens.
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All right.
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So the idea that scribes never made mistakes is not true.
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There were no Christian scriptorians in the early church and Christians were under severe persecution.
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The first Christian scriptorians came years later and early Christians copied by hand, sometimes on the run.
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And because of this, early manuscripts are peppered with things like spelling errors, misspelled words, grammatical errors.
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Even things that are too difficult to read, some people just have bad handwriting.
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There's one text I talked about this morning in Sunday school class.
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There's one text that was a scrape that we found.
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It's literally where somebody had written the Bible portion of the Bible on this piece of vellum.
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And later they needed the paper for something else.
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So they scraped off the ink and they wrote something else on it.
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And now through technology and the use of light, they can actually shine a light on it and show what was written on it before.
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And they can tell what copy, actually, that's actually a manuscript.
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They call that a biblical manuscript because they can read what was on it before.
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But you can't do it with the naked eye because they literally they scraped the ink away.
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As I told my class this morning, Christians were most likely the ones who invented writing on two sides of the paper because we were poor.
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And papyrus plants, when they were laid one on top of the other like this and they were flattened down, one side was very smooth, one side was very rough.
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And affluent people did not write on both sides because the other side was rough.
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It wasn't made for writing on.
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It was there was one side that was made for writing on.
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But earliest, the earliest manuscript that we have, I believe it's called P52, Papyri Fragment 52.
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It's only about the size of a credit card.
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And it's this little maybe postcard sized little scrap.
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But it's from the Gospel of John.
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It dates somewhere between 100 and 120.
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And that little manuscript is written on both sides.
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And it's one of the earliest forms that we find of people writing on both sides of the paper, because, again, Christians are having to write what they can, when they can, how they can, so that they can get that gospel out to as many people as possible and get that get that out to as many as they can.
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So myth number three, we said we said scribes never make mistakes.
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That's a myth.
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Myth number three, this one is very popular.
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If ever a Christian, if ever a question about a manuscript comes up, all we need to do is consult the original documents.
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Well, that would be wonderful, but we don't have them.
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We don't have them.
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The original manuscripts no longer exist.
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I mean, it would be wonderful.
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However, we just don't have them.
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And barring some miraculous Dead Sea Scroll like find, and I don't know if you know much about the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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I talked about this in Sunday School this morning, too, but the Dead Sea Scrolls up until the time of 1948, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, up until that time, our earliest Old Testament manuscript was dated at one thousand around there.
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Around one thousand.
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That's that's fifteen hundred years after it was written.
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That was our earliest Old Testament manuscript.
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When the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, bam, it jumps back a thousand years because Dead Sea Scrolls were written before Christ.
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So, I mean, tomorrow they could unearth a massive tomb of New Testament documents, and it would be wonderful if they did.
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We and they could all be closer to the original than we've ever had.
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That would be great.
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You're going to ask me another question.
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Was that going to make any changes to the New Testament? Here's what happened when they unearthed the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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It didn't make any changes.
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It just verified that what they had was what they were supposed to have the whole time.
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The Dead Sea Scrolls was a great find in the sense of faith because it encouraged what we had is what we should have had.
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So I don't mind if they find a great big stock of Old Testament or New Testament documents tomorrow.
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I think it'd be wonderful to find such a thing.
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But again, reminding ourselves always that every time a new manuscript is added to the mix, there comes the opportunity for variation.
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There comes the opportunity for misspellings and changes and little things like that that we have to recognize.
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So myth number three, if there was ever a question about a manuscript coming up, all we have to do is consult the original documents.
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That's a myth.
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We can't.
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We don't have them anymore.
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And as I said this morning in my sermon, could you imagine if we did? Could you imagine what people would do if they had an original copy of the Gospel of Mark, if they really had what Mark wrote? They would worship that faster than a fried, like I said, a fried picture of Mary's face on a piece of bread.
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You see them.
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They do that.
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See Mary's picture on a piece of toast.
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And I think that's something worthy of worship.
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You can imagine if they had the original copy of Mark.
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All right.
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So the myths are clear.
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The King James is not the perfect translation.
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King James is not the perfect English translation.
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The scribes did make errors and we no longer have the original autographs.
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We don't have them anymore.
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So and you can click through the question becomes, then why do we believe what we have is accurate? If all those things are true, why do we believe what we have is accurate? Well, I want to give you eight reasons, eight propositions tonight as to why the Bible in the form that we have it today can be trusted.
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Here's all that all up until this point has been somewhat maybe discouraging.
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Here's eight things that maybe will help re-encourage you.
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Number one, I think it's the most obvious one.
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The scriptures are without errors in their original manuscripts.
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This is what all of our statement of faith say, and this is what we believe.
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The Bible claims itself to be the word of God.
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It says in the New Testament, Paul wrote, all scripture is found in sauce.
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It's breathed out by God.
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Thus, the claim is that the scripture is the very word of God.
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And if God is perfect and if God is all powerful and if God is truth, then we can be confident that what he breathes out is perfectly true.
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Thus, we know that when Paul and Mark and Matthew and Isaiah and Moses put their pen to the paper or to the vellum or to the papyri, that that person wrote what God had inspired to be written and it was without error.
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That, again, is a statement of faith.
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That's why it's called a statement of faith.
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We believe that.
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But if we believe what was originally written is from God as a theological deduction, that if God is perfect, what he says is right and can be trusted, then that's the firm foundation upon which we begin our step.
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So that's number one.
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Number two, we no longer have the original manuscripts.
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What we do have is a text that represents the result of a critical study of a vast manuscript tradition.
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Now, I first did this in 2008.
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I haven't updated my slide, so I don't know if this is as of November 2008, there were 5,752 Greek manuscripts, 5,752 Greek manuscripts.
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Now, these manuscripts can be broken up into three different types.
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First, what we call unsealed manuscripts on papyrus.
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These date back to the early 2nd century.
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When's the 2nd century? That's the 100s.
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When did Jesus live? In the before 100s, prior to 100s, up till around 30 to 33 A.D.
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Jerusalem fell in 70 A.D.
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We believe the scripture, the New Testament scripture, is written sometime between the death of Christ and the fall of Jerusalem.
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So we're looking at a 40 year period approximately.
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We have manuscripts, even though there might only be fragments of manuscripts, that go all the way back to the earliest part of the 2nd century, which would put them within one or two generations of the original.
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P52 is believed by some to be an actual copy of the original because of its such early date.
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So we have manuscripts that date all the way back to the 2nd century.
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We have unsealed manuscripts on vellum and part or parchment that date back to the 4th all the way to the 9th centuries.
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And then we have many school manuscripts which date from the 9th to the 15th centuries.
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So even though we don't have the originals, we have mountains of copies, each one attesting to the tenacity of the text.
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That's important because, again, even though we don't have the originals anymore, what we have is we have a text that represents a result of a vast manuscript tradition.
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Now, moving to the third point, variants do exist in these manuscripts.
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Yet because of the vast amount of copies, these variants are easily recognizable.
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Variants fall into two different types of categories, if you will.
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There are unintentional variations and then there are intentional variations.
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What would be an example of an unintentional variation? Well, misspelling of a word, changing the order of words.
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Let me ask you a question.
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If I said the Lord Jesus Christ or if I said Jesus Christ, the Lord, do those sentences both say effectively the same thing? Would it be easy, though, to get those words out of order if I'm copying one to the next? Absolutely.
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And that's that's we see that type of variant more than any other.
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There's another variant that I think is interesting to see it.
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It's called homily Italian and that basically just means similar endings.
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It'll be where in a text you'll have at the end of a row, two words that are the same and they both at the end of a row.
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And a person will finish this sentence and then he'll his eye will look down and look back up and see the end of this.
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And he'll begin on this sentence and leave out an entire sentence.
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That's called homily Italian, similar endings cause us to do that.
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You've done that.
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You read a book, you get to the end of the line and you jump to the next line without thinking.
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Well, that happens to scribes.
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And guess what? It's easy to recognize.
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You've got one one line of manuscripts that are missing an entire sentence or another line of manuscripts that are not.
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And you can see where the sentence didn't make sense without that section.
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So we understand that that happens.
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That's an unintentional error.
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There are also intentional errors that scribes that are attempting to make changes where they felt changes were necessary.
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One of the most interesting changes that I think is easy to recognize as a scribal amendation is the Lord's Prayer.
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How do you know Lord's Prayer? Everybody, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
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Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.
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We know the Lord's Prayer, right? That's how it reads in Matthew.
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If you have a King James version, the way it reads in Luke is exactly the same as it reads in Matthew.
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But if you have the New American Standard, NIV, or any of those, the reading of the Lord's Prayer in Luke is much different.
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Not much different.
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It just isn't as long.
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And people say, well, why is that? I believe Matthew gives us a more full version.
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And I think Luke sort of collapses it, sort of paraphrases it for us.
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But the reason why it's the same in the King James, one to the other, is because the King James is based on a manuscript tradition where the one was taken to the other and it was added to by a scribe at some point in time.
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And he made them the same so that, well, we got to have an agreeance on what's the Lord's Prayer.
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So there was this intentional thing that happened.
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So we see unintentional variation and we see intentional variation.
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As I will talk about tomorrow night, I think the longer ending of Mark is an intentional variation.
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The longer ending of Mark is something that, to me, seems like an intentional variation.
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And as I said, we'll deal with that tomorrow.
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Number four, the overwhelming majority of these variations are either not viable or meaningless.
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This is something that I think Bart Ehrman would argue with me about.
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But I think it's easy to recognize what I'm trying to say here.
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What I mean when I say they're not viable or meaningless? Well, a viable variant means that it actually is a possible reading.
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A viable variant means that it is actually a possible reading.
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Many variants are not found in an earlier copy of the text.
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Thus, they're not likely viable, not really viable options.
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The issue with 1 John 5-7 we talked about earlier.
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It's not a viable option.
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If it didn't exist for 1600 years, if it didn't exist until the time of Desiderius Erasmus and and then it existed, but yet it was in the original.
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That means we don't know anything about what the original said.
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If something like that could have been lost and then added back in later and it just kind of jumped around like a verbal jumping jack, that doesn't fly at all.
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So we would say that it's not a viable reading.
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There are other ones that would be considered not viable.
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Mark 1-41, this is an interesting one.
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Most of you know the story.
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Mark 1, a man comes to Jesus to be healed and it says, moved with pity.
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He stretched out his hand and touched him and said, I will be clean.
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OK.
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Moved with pity.
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He stretched out his hand.
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He said, I will be clean.
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Remember the man said, if you will make me clean.
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He says, I will be clean.
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All right.
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So we know the story.
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We know this history.
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This is a story.
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The argument is, what word should be used which is translated moved with pity? Because in the Greek, this is what it would have looked like.
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Remember, unsealed text is all capital letters, no spaces, no punctuation.
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That's how the original looked.
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Very, very different than what our language looks like.
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This is splats in the face is how you would say it.
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That's a little thing there to remind us how to say it means move with compassion.
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There is one manuscript.
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That is an older manuscript.
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That uses this word, Augustus, Augustus, that means moved with anger.
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Now, let me ask you a question, which one of these? Have we chosen to use? Obviously, we've chosen to move with pity, move with compassion.
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That's what we've chosen to use.
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Splats the nace, kind of hard to say, as the rendering for that.
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Would it change the meaning if we put that? Yeah, absolutely.
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If Jesus was moved with anger and not moved with pity, then, yeah, that's it.
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That's an entirely different meaning that that text would then come.
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So this is a meaningful variant, but it's not a viable variant.
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This is the the reason why it's not a viable variant is because that particular reading splats Augustus, rather, comes from one Greek manuscript.
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This manuscript is alone responsible for many variant readings, causing some to conjecture that the person making the copy intentionally included his own commentary.
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In fact, that particular manuscript is a manuscript that has the Greek and the Latin together.
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And it is responsible.
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It's one of those things where you wish didn't exist because it's responsible for so many variations.
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And again, it is believed that the person who copied it intentionally made changes.
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So we see something that none of the other manuscripts corroborate.
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You have one manuscript out of 5,752.
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You have one.
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That's not a viable argument.
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That's not a viable variation, especially in a manuscript that has so many variations anyway.
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So that's what we would call not a viable one.
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Now, the next one would be a meaningful variant.
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A viable variant is one that could actually be the reading.
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A meaningful variant means that it actually changes the meaning of the text because the overwhelming issues considered consists of word order, spelling, etc.
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The vast majority of variants are meaningless.
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And I don't say that because that's my my opinion.
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I say that because that is what everybody recognizes.
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Even even Ehrman said that he is arguing against the text.
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And when pressed on it, Dr.
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White said, but are these variants meaningful? The vast majority of them.
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And the answer, absolutely not.
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As we said, the Mark 141, it could be a meaningful variant.
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Hit the thing.
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Oh, go back.
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I'm sorry.
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It could be a meaningful variant, but it's not a meaningful variant or it's not a viable variant.
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The obvious question one has when seeing that there are variances is this.
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How significant are the textual variations in the grand scheme? Well, here they are.
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When all the variants of all the manuscripts are accounted for, the number of variants in the New Testament text is somewhere around 200,000.
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Some people say around 400,000.
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Some people, some people conflate.
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But how sure can we be that our biblical text then has not been corrupted? There are 200,000 variations.
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The answer is that the vast majority of these variants are very minor and affect in only a few cases the actual meaning of the text.
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None of the variants have an impact on any major doctrine of scripture.
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In fact, none of them really can be used to make any argument at all in regard to doctrine.
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Westcott and Hort said this.
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They said these excellent textual critics believe that or rather I'm reading something about them.
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These excellent textual critics believe that only one 60th of the variants in the New Testament rise above the level of trivialities or could be called substantial variations.
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Even before the recent manuscript findings, this would amount to a text that is 98 percent pure.
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And then Ezra Abbott said, according to his estimates, it was more like 99 percent pure.
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And then A.T.
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Robertson believed that a thousand part of the entire text was of any real concern.
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That would make the New Testament 99 percent pure and free from any real concern for the textual critic.
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Sir Frederick Kenyon said this.
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He said the Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds it in his hand.
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The true word of God handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries.
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So major textual critics on both sides have agreed that the argument that these variations are going to change what the Bible says is not true.
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That argument is made, but that argument is not actually the case.
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Number five, no one variant changes or distorts any doctrine as no doctrine is based upon any text, any single text rather.
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Consider the great doctrines of the faith.
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Number one, the doctrine of the Trinity.
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Could somebody use first John five, seven from the King James Bible to make an argument for the Trinity? Absolutely.
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But yet that is not where the major parts of the doctrine of the Trinity come from.
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The major parts of the doctrine of the Trinity come from the teaching that Jesus is himself called God in the flesh.
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He is himself called Emmanuel, God with us.
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He has said it said that in the beginning was the word.
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The word was with God and the word was God.
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The deity of Christ, which is the foundation of the doctrine of the Trinity, is seen obviously in John one, one through three, Hebrews one, one through four, Philippians two, five to eleven, et cetera, et cetera.
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It just goes on and on.
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So whether or not first John five, seven says what the King James says is irrelevant to the point of whether or not the doctrine of the Trinity is true.
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And that goes for all other Christian doctrines.
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It's not based on any one reading.
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Now, this part, this number six, this is the part I think is fun.
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The New Testament is the single best documented work of antiquity.
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I mentioned this this morning in the sermon, but I really wanted to look at this tonight because I wanted to show you this picture.
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I always thought these were kind of cool.
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If you look at this.
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This is the number of copies that we have, manuscript copies.
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This is a chart.
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You have the Bible.
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This is the New Testament.
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Then you have Homer's writings, Pliny's writings, Tacitus's writings.
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It's not even close.
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And this is in thousands here.
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Almost six thousand manuscripts for the Bible.
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You go down to Homer's writings, I'm going to give you I'll give you the exact number here.
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Let's see.
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Where is it? Well, I thought I had Homer on here.
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I don't.
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I have I have Pliny, Pliny the Younger's Natural History.
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How many manuscripts do you think we have of that? If you're looking at this, you know, it's kind of hard to judge.
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Seven.
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Seven.
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Fifty seven hundred fifty two manuscripts of the New Testament.
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We have seven from the writings of Pliny.
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What about from Tacitus? Twenty.
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And here it is.
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Homer's Iliad, the most renowned book of ancient Greece, is the second best preserved literary work of antiquity.
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Second best.
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What's the best? New Testament.
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Second best.
48:38
Six hundred and forty three copies.
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Six hundred and forty three.
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In those copies, there are seven hundred and sixty four disputed lines of text as compared to 40 lines and all the New Testament manuscripts.
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So even the closest second.
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Is not close at all.
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Now, jump to the next thing real quick.
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This is how many years separate the time it was written from the time of our first manuscript copy.
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Again, going back to the New Testament from the time it was actually written to our first evidence, our first copy.
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From the Bible, we're looking at a period of well, let's see if you figure P52 is somewhere between one hundred and one twenty.
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If it was written anywhere between 40 and 70, some people want to argue for a late date for John.
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Let's say we take it all the way to 90.
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Let's say John was written after the time of the the the Jerusalem's destruction after that time.
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If that's the case and John was written after that, even though I don't accept that, I think John was written earlier than that.
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But let's say that that actually happened, that John wrote after that.
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Let's say he wrote somewhere between 80 and 90.
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If he wrote somewhere between 80 and 90, the Gospel of John, that would put it within 20 to 30 years.
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Of this copy that we have this this this piece of evidence that we have of a manuscript now.
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Going back up here, looking at the difference, the earliest manuscript copy of Pliny from the time it was written to the time that we have the earliest copy, 750 years, not even close.
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Tacitus over or up to a thousand years from the time it was written to the time that we have the earliest copy, Homer, is around 500 years.
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So it's not even close.
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The tenacity of the history of the text, this is the type of stuff that makes.
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It's like if they had this kind of evidence for any of these other writings, they would drool over it, they would say, this is wonderful.
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Yet when they say, well, it's the Bible, it's not enough.
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Even though the Bible has this this tenacious history, it's just not enough.
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They'll they'll say, well, it's not enough for us to believe that we actually know what originally said.
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And it's horrible.
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But that's often their argument that they make.
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Number seven, the New Testament.
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Is the most open religious document readily acknowledging the textual critical issues and its own footnotes.
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Liberals have accused Christianity of trying to hide.
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They say, you guys don't tell your people about these textual variations, they said we've tried to hide them, that's not true.
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In fact, if you look at the next picture, I just want to show you something.
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I think it's real important.
51:35
If you have a Bible, a New American Standard or English New International Version, any of these, you'll see at the bottom it has these little notes.
51:44
You come to a little number and you look down the number and they'll say a few late manuscripts add this statement over here.
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It'll say late manuscripts, you know, add this or take away that.
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And it actually says that in the text.
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The problem is we don't usually read past the bottom line.
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The problem is we don't usually look past that.
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But it's not as if anybody's trying to hide anything.
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It's not as if we don't recognize that these issues exist and seek to try to learn what they have to teach us.
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Bart Ehrman says it was these variants that caused him to leave his faith.
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And I ask why, because the great men of the past, the great men of faith of the past were all aware of these things, yet they never departed from the faith.
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And learned Christians today know these things and our faith is still intact.
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The key is, folks, nothing I'm saying is even at all a secret.
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These things are well documented.
52:38
You can go to any book, you can go to the writings of F.F.
52:41
Bruce, you know, the writings of James White, you know, the writings of many authors.
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And you can find everything that I've said tonight written down.
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It's not a secret.
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These are issues that just most people don't want to deal with.
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Number eight, and finally, God's providential preservation of the New Testament differs from his providential preservation of the Old Testament.
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But both have been miraculously preserved.
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The Old Testament was kept pure because of the Jewish scriptorians and the keeping of the documents within the Hebrew community, the New Testament was preserved in a different way.
53:16
It was preserved by the massive amount of manuscripts that went out.
53:20
It has been conjectured that early on, someone made wholesale changes to the New Testament.
53:24
In fact, I don't know how many of you have ever read the Da Vinci Code or how many of you have ever looked into the writings of Dan Brown and his arguments from the Da Vinci Code, but that's his argument in the book.
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He says that the early church took the Bible and changed it.
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Yet, how would you answer such a question? Well, the answer is very simple.
53:46
There was never a time in history after the writing of the New Testament where all of the manuscripts could have been gathered up and a wholesale change made.
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There's just too many copies.
53:57
It would it would literally it would be like trying to change something that had already gone out to so many people that you would have to go to all those people and you'd have to bring it back in and you'd have to change it.
54:08
You'd have to kill them or do something to get rid of them.
54:12
There was just too much that had already happened.
54:16
There is no history of any revisions in the New Testament or change within the textual tradition within these 5000 manuscripts, none that cannot be easily recognized.
54:29
We recognize the Kamiohanion, which I showed you earlier.
54:31
We recognize almost where it came from, almost where it happened and when it happened.
54:38
There are scribal errors, we can see these, we recognize these, but no one could have come along and introduced entire section or change whole portions because the amount of texts that were out there preserved it from this error.
54:54
And, you know, it's interesting, that's not so with the Koran.
54:57
And I'm not here tonight to say, well, the Bible is good and the Koran is bad.
55:01
Obviously, as a Christian, I don't believe the Koran, but there was a time in history wherein the Koran went through what was called the Uthmanic revision.
55:15
The Uthmanic revision does represent the oldest manuscript of the Koran, and all the copies that came before that were kept close at hand.
55:23
And when he made his revision, Uthman saw to it that the copies that predated his writing, his revision, were no longer made available.
55:31
In fact, it's conjectured that he destroyed them.
55:35
And this is why you won't find textual variations marked at the bottom of the Koran.
55:40
Because it was revised, it was taken into account, it was given an opportunity where there would be no debate.
55:50
But the Koran does have variants, even though these are not open to the scrutiny of the public, like with the Bible, we open it up, we say scrutinize the scripture, look at it, look at what we have.
56:02
The Koran does not do that.
56:04
The Bible is open, we put it on display, we put the facts on display, we put the fact that the scribes made mistakes on display, and we know that despite these mistakes, we can know that we have the original reading.
56:20
Now, I want to end with a question, thinking about a question.
56:26
What about the places where there are two options for a reading? Which one do we take? I think that's the most difficult question that we have to ask.
56:38
As has been said, none of these are used to refute or disprove any doctrine of scripture, but yet we still have to say we believe that the Bible is the word of God.
56:46
What do we do when we come to a place where there are two readings, where there's the option of two viable readings? What we must realize when we see our Bible giving us an optional reading, because that happens, you'll be reading the New American Standard Bible and it'll say some manuscripts read this.
57:08
What do you do? Do you take the one that's in the text or do you take the ones at the bottom of the text? What we must realize when we see our Bible giving us an optional reading is that we have the original and we have a scribal error.
57:21
We have a scribal error somewhere in the text.
57:24
And at times we may debate as to which reading is the original, but never could we say that we don't have it.
57:30
It's there.
57:31
We just might not know which one it is.
57:34
You might say, well, that doesn't bring me a whole lot of comfort.
57:36
Well, maybe it doesn't, but it's the truth.
57:40
Dr.
57:40
White describes it like this, and I think it's an easy way to describe it.
57:43
It's as it's almost as if we have a thousand piece puzzle and we have a thousand and five pieces.
57:49
We haven't lost anything.
57:52
But there are times wherein there are things that we have to look at, there's two readings and we have to say, well, which one is the right one? And sometimes that takes a massive amount of study.
58:03
Sometimes that takes time to look into to come to a conclusion, and sometimes you may not come to a conclusion.
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But you can be confident that the original is there.
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God has preserved the original in this vast manuscript tradition.
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We can be confident that when we look at the text of scripture, even though there may be these variations, there has been no detraction from the central message of Christianity, and that is this, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, that we are all sinners in need of a savior, that he died, was buried, was resurrected, and in his resurrection, he proclaimed salvation through him.
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That message is not at all even debated that that's what the Bible teaches.
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Are there times where it should say Jesus Christ and not Christ Jesus? We know we can talk about that.
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Are there times when there are things like orgas face and splotches in the face that we could discuss? Yes.
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But the central message of Christianity stands.
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We can be confident in the word of God because it is the word of God.
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That's right.
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Father, thank you for this opportunity to deal with this very difficult issue.
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Lord, I know that much of what I've said tonight has probably been difficult to hear, difficult to understand, difficult to interpret in the light of the truth that we can trust your word.
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But Lord, help us to always remember, Lord, that.
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Though we live in a time of fax machines and copy machines and inkjet printers now that for hundreds of years, for centuries, your word was copied by hand.
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By men whose job it was to sit and write the scripture, to make copies and in those fallible men, you maintained your infallible word.
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And Lord, now that we can look and see these variations and see these things that we need to study further.
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Help us, Lord, not lose faith.
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But help us to be ever committed still that you have maintained your word in such a way that is amazing.
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You have seen to it that the word of God has so much attestation, has so much tenacity that it has been able to bore its way through the muck and the mire of history.
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A long, extensive history.
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Of scribes and writings and copies.
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Lord, I pray that as we go through the rest of this week, we look at variations in the text and we look at things that are serious in regard to our faith, that our faith would be strengthened by this time of study.
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We love you, Lord.
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We praise you.
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We give you all all glory in Jesus name.
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Amen.