Reliability of the New Testament-Session 4

Let me finish this off first and we'll talk a little bit more about what you're looking at as we're passing it around.

I do think it's important. We mentioned last evening the two major textual variants, 12 verses each, the long writing of Mark.

And so Ken Gontars is calling me on my phone right now and he's sitting right there. No, no.

I don't answer those from Ken because he doesn't know how to operate that particular program.

And so he calls him all the time, but doesn't know that he's calling me all the time. So I just sort of ignore them and go, yeah, whatever.

Except it was flashing in my eyes. There really wasn't much I could do about it. So anyway, so we were looking at the two 12 verse, the

John 7, 53, 3, 8, 11, and the long writing of Mark. We talked about those last evening. But how many of you remember the

Jack Chick comic tracks? Remember those? Yeah. I got in trouble in fourth grade for passing out

Jack Chick comic tracks on the playground. And so, you know, they were, you know,

Holy Joe and This Was Your Life and all sorts of those types of things.

And a lot of you are going uh -huh, uh -huh, yeah. And so he put out entire comic books as well.

And he did a series on Roman Catholicism based on a guy by the name of Alberto Rivera, who claimed to be a former

Roman Catholic priest. And I was told that he was going to be speaking in Phoenix.

And so I wanted to go hear him. And he was speaking at a non -Trinitarian church, an apostolic oneness church, which

I found really odd. But I met with him afterwards. He was a short little guy. He was about yay big.

And he, I was carrying a Bible and he asked me what Bible it was.

I said, it's a New American Standard. And he just informed me straight up that I'm going to hell.

And the reason being, the New American Standard does not contain the

Kamiohonium, 1 John 5, 7 in the King James Version of the Bible. And so eventually

I went from getting in trouble for passing out Jack Chick tracts on the playground to Jack Chick deciding that I was the

Antichrist. So it was quite a journey in my young life to be able to get to that point because of the book

I wrote on the King James only controversy. In the King James Version of the Bible, you have, for there are three that bear record in heaven, the

Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the spirit, the water, and the blood.

And these three agree in one. Whereas in the New American Standard you have, for there are three that testify, the spirit, and the water, and the blood.

And the three are in agreement. So you can see there's a major section in red that is in the

NASB, ESV, etc., etc., etc. Once again, historically speaking, by the way,

Erasmus had never seen a Greek manuscript that contained what's called the three witnesses or the

Kamiohonium here. And so it was not in his first or second editions of his

Greek New Testament, which would mean it was not even in the one that Luther used when he was studying justification and things like that.

Anyway, he did put it into his third edition because he didn't technically say, well, prove me wrong.

But he said, I've just never seen a manuscript that contained it. And so in 1520, a manuscript was written called

Codex Monfortianus. We'll look at it in a second. We know exactly when it was written because it was written to refute

Erasmus. And so when he was informed of the manuscript, he inserted it in the

Greek of his third edition and the editions thereafter, which is why it's the King James Version of the Bible, along with a long note in his annotations saying he did not believe it was original.

But the text had it, and so that's the text that became used. And that's why it's in your King James Version of the

Bible. I'm fairly straightforward about this. There is no text more directly relevant to the integrity of the

New Testament's text. For if such a vitally important theological text can disappear in toto from the

Greek manuscript tradition, then we have absolutely no confidence whatsoever that we still possess the original readings of these ancient writings.

No Greek text of the first 1 ,300 years of its history contains the text found in the Textus Receptus.

So the point is that those few Greek words are not a part of the

Greek manuscript tradition. They come into it much, much later. In all probability, when you trace it back, it starts in the

Latin. It was probably a gloss or interpretation on what those three witnesses were.

Probably a marginal note that got incorporated in the Latin text, but it still took centuries before it migrated from the

Latin text into the Greek text. And my point on this slide is to say that if you insist on the

Communion being a part of the New Testament, then what you're saying is that an entire theologically relevant text can disappear without a trace from the

Greek manuscript tradition, only to be reinserted on the basis of what?

Basically another language, the Latin, 1 ,300 years down the road.

That means we can have no confidence that we actually have the original readings if you insist upon this.

And there are people who absolutely, positively insist upon it. They don't realize what the cost of that insistence actually is.

The text first appears in certain Latin texts in the 4th century, most probably as a gloss and explanation of the spirit, water, and blood.

While it is found in a few 10th and 11th century Greek manuscripts, it is only written in the margins of those manuscripts in a 16th or 17th century hand.

The following manuscripts are the only ones that contain the verse in the actual Greek text of a Greek manuscript.

So here they are, and you can see 14th and 15th century, it's a

Greek -Latin diagloch, the Greek taken from the Latin text, so it's coming in from the Latin. That second one we'll look at in just a moment, that's

Codex Monfortianus. Number 918 is from the 16th century.

Codex Ravianus is also in the 16th century. And we even have one all the way from the 18th century, which is highly irrelevant to anything, but there it is.

The second one is Codex Monfortianus, and notice the date, 1520. We know exactly when it was copied. We know why it was copied.

We know who copied it. What's interesting is it is found in the

Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Now if you ever get a chance to visit

Dublin, you've got to go to Trinity College. The library at Trinity College is one of the seven wonders of the man -made world.

It really is. You go in downstairs, you go through a nice little gift shop, and you come around these stairs, and you come up onto the main floor.

The first thing I remember being hit with was the smell. The smell of ancient books.

I mean, and then as far as your eye can see, these massive, massive, high bookshelves arching.

Look it up, Google it on your phone, and you'll see some of the standard pictures that are available for Trinity College Dublin, Trinity Library.

It is truly amazing, and in their archival room, that's where Codex Monfortianus is, that's where I examined it.

So this codex was presented to Erasmus as evidence that the reading appeared in a Greek text. Erasmus even,

Erasmus, this drives King James only out of their minds. Erasmus wrote a letter to his friend

Bombasius, what a name. Who names their kid Bombasius?

I mean really, seriously? Bombasius in Rome to consult the great

Vatican manuscript. Erasmus knew the Vatican manuscript existed, and he asked his friend to look at it to see if it contained 1

John 5 -7. Bombasius confirmed that Vaticanus does not contain the

Kamiohanium, which it does not, obviously. And so Erasmus resisted putting it in until he was provided with a manuscript that contained it, and then he basically did it just to get people off of his back because people were saying he wasn't really a

Trinitarian and all the rest of this kind of stuff. And that's why he inserted it. Now what's interesting is the form in Codex Monfortianus is not the form that is found in the

Textus Receptus today. That is a picture of me and my friend Doug McMasters.

Doug is the one leaning over there, which he's a big boy, so you can only see part of my hand as I'm holding the text open in the reading room, examining it there at Trinity College in Dublin.

But that was, I've forgotten what year that was now. Old people forget things. And about six months later, the whole manuscript became available online.

And so here is a digital picture of what it says. And so you've got the three witnesses in heaven, the

Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. But again, it's not in exactly the same form as it's found in Erasmus' final edition.

But that's why it's in the King James Version of the Bible, is because of a single manuscript that was specifically written in 1520.

So what is it that I said at the beginning?

What has to be our standard? What did the Apostles originally write? And there is no chance whatsoever that John wrote these words in 1

John chapter 5. And if he did, we don't know what he wrote anywhere else either.

That's the cost of all of it. And yet, there are people who absolutely insist that it must be this way.

So let me just do a quick summary here, and we'll talk about CBGM. 400 ,000 variants, 99 % inconsequential, most thoroughly documented work of antiquity, spread all over the world quickly, no controlling authority that could ever insert, take out, so on and so forth.

Any later editing would stand out clearly in comparison with the ancient manuscripts that are now available to us.

I hope those are the things that you've taken with you and have thought about.

Now let me show you something. I should have cued this up beforehand, but I didn't.

So let me, oh, I didn't mean to do that.

It makes my screen much smaller up here than it's supposed to be.

So I was looking for AirPlay. How do you use AirPlay? No internet.

Well, of course there's no. Uh -oh. I wonder if I can do internet.

Let's find out. Let's see.

I'm wondering if the AirPlay and internet are going to interfere with each other, because I would like to show you what's online for CBGM, but it's just staring at me at the moment.

So someday I'm going to come here, and all of a sudden, up's going to pop. Covenant of Grace wireless.

Unlikely. Hey, I've seen you move from an overhead projector to what we got now, so there's a chance.

You never, never know. Not in my lifetime. I don't know.

That's, yeah, I don't think it can connect up as long as I'm doing AirPlay, unfortunately.

So I won't be able to show you that. But let's go ahead and put, we'll put a cordon up there.

How does that sound? Something that looks biblical. Have some nice, pretty

Greek up there, something like that. All right. So this is a very, very difficult task.

I will confess that explaining this is, some people would say it's a fool's errand.

I don't think that it is. So why am I going to waste your time with it? Eventually, there have already been a few articles, but eventually, it's going to become a big headline issue.

Bible being changed by computer studies, and this type of stuff. And there's already been some

King James -only folks that have griped about CBGM. CBGM, coherence -based genealogical method.

Some people say it's computer -based. It's not. It's coherence -based genealogical method.

Is about 20 years old now, but no one really outside of Münster, Germany, knew almost anything about it until about 2014.

So very, very recent thing. And you would expect that it would be since you're using computers.

Everyone has always known that computers would eventually be being used in New Testament textual criticism. It just wasn't certain as to how.

The biggest problem we have with all the manuscripts we have in the New Testament, now that we pretty much know what the manuscripts are, where they are, and now that we pretty much know what they read, in other words, they have been collated, which means their readings have been examined and recorded.

And so you know what they say at this passage or that passage. Again, you must realize how very modern a thing this is.

Nobody had any idea of any of this stuff for centuries and centuries and centuries and centuries, because there just wasn't any way to have the communication.

The libraries didn't have. Remember the card index? Anyone remember those babies?

Weren't they fun? You show a picture of that to young people today, and they stare at you going, what's that?

They have no earthly idea. They never used one. They've always just looked at it from a computer standpoint.

But they didn't have card catalogs, let alone anything like that for many, many, many, many years. So we are talking about newfangled technology, and a lot of people don't like newfangled technology.

Let's just be honest. But the problem with our manuscripts is, especially in those early periods where most of the variants originated, the

Romans were running around burning everything they could get their hands on. They were destroying manuscripts right, left, and center.

And so most of the manuscripts we have, we don't have an unbroken line that you can trace back.

You've got one here, and one here, and one here. It's very spotty because of that original situation.

If we could connect all of our manuscripts together, then we could follow where readings came from and fill in a lot of the gaps.

But there's a bunch of gaps in the way. How can we ever create that kind of a genealogical tree?

Well, we can't in the sense of having those manuscripts, because they've disappeared. They've been ravages of time, war, flood, fire, so on and so forth.

So do we just throw up our hands? No. You can start to see the relationship manuscripts have to one another by if you can see how they read at pretty much every variant they contain.

Well, the problem is, for human beings, that's literally millions of pieces of data.

Because you have all the hundreds of thousands of readings in one manuscript, and then all of them in this manuscript over here, and this manuscript over here, and trying to compare them all together is beyond the human capacity to be able to do.

Maybe Rain Man would be able to pull something like that off, but most of the rest of us can't do that.

And so, as I said here this morning, last evening, what we used to do is we used to create families of manuscripts based upon about 70 percent agreement over a very small number of variants, relatively speaking, rather than the whole number of variants that you could address in a manuscript.

So we use a very small amount of it because that's just all your mind could keep track of. Then, Monday, a brilliant German textual critic started to realize that, well, you know, if we collated all these manuscripts and we fed all that into a computer, the computer would be able to make all these connections that our minds can't make.

And that began the process, and the first result of that was called the

Catholic Epistles, General Epistles, so 1st, 2nd Peter, Jude, things like that. Your Bible has already been changed by CBGM.

Did you know that? I think most of you had the ESV. How many

ESVs do we have in the audience? Okay, look at Jude 5. Remember, there's only one chapter in Jude, so look at Jude 5.

Okay, Jude 5. Now, in the 1995

NASB, it says, now I desire to remind you, though you know all things once for all, that the

Lord, after saving a people of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe. Now, over here in the

Nestialen 28th edition, instead of Lord, it has Yesus, Jesus.

And so the ESV now reads what? Jesus. So Jesus, after saving a people of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe.

Now, we've always known that there was a variant here. I have my father's

Nestialen text, I think it's the 23rd or something like that, from back in the 1950s, that he had at Moody Bible Institute.

And I've looked it up, and you know, the variants listed there, and the manuscripts that say Lord, and the manuscripts say Jesus. But all the

Greek New Testaments had taken Lord as the reading at that point.

Until the Nestialen 28th edition puts Jesus in the text, and now the

ESVs followed that, and a number of others. I know that the NASB 2020 did not follow that, and they wrote up a position paper as to why they were rejecting that.

But the ESV originally said Lord, and now it says Jesus. And the reason is

CBGM. So how did that happen? Okay, follow along with me.

What CBGM is looking at is called coherence.

There's different kinds of coherence, but coherence is consistency. And so you can do what's called, and the

Germans stink at coming up with names of things. If you know German, the German language, if you want to come up with a new word, you just take a bunch of old words and cram them all into something that's about this long.

It's true, it's true. But they just, they'll end up with words that are three paragraphs long.

And so they use these terms, and since they designed it, there's not much we can do about it. There is pre -genealogical coherence, which is just a basic measurement of how often two manuscripts agree or disagree with one another.

So what's one of the really positive things that has come out of the

CBGM project is that we can now, with computer -level accuracy, tell you how much in agreement the various manuscripts are with one another and how much in disagreement they are.

That used to be just a guess. You'd have, you know, a leading textual critical scholar would say,

I would say there's less than one and a half percent disagreement, and so on and so forth. But it was just a guess.

You didn't, you couldn't prove it. Now we're able to prove it. We have the readouts, and the vast majority of the text of the

New Testament is consistent all the way across. I mean, it's just, it's just amazing how well it has been transmitted down over time.

And so you can compare any two manuscripts, and it'll tell you how much they agree and disagree in any book of the

Bible, in any chapter of the Bible. Well, New Testament, obviously, it's only been done in the New Testament. It could be done for the

Old Testament, too. They just haven't done it because it's a massive amount of work yet. And you can now just go online, and there's the numbers.

That's just, there's where the collations are. That's the data. That's pre -genealogical coherence.

And then there's post -genealogical coherence, where you start relating manuscripts to one another in what's called a textual flow.

And what I was going to show you was what a textual flow diagram looks like. And it's this massive thing that the computer spits out, based upon how these manuscripts, how consistent they are in reading with each other, and how they're related to one another as a result.

And so, here's the theory. The more coherent manuscripts are with one another, the less likely it is that there has been scribal alteration or interruption in the text.

Because if you have two texts, and they agree 99 .8 % of the time, then that means there's no, there hasn't been a whole lot of scribal errors in the transmission of the text between these two manuscripts, right?

Otherwise, there'd be all sorts of differences. So, the higher the level of coherence, the better a witness for a particular reading that is.

So, if you have, so here, I'll illustrate it. In Jude 5, what happened was they feed in, and I'm pretty certain that they collated every manuscript we have that contains

Jude, every single one. And you feed that into the process, and you look at the manuscripts that said,

Lord, the Lord delivered a people out of Egypt. And then you look at the manuscripts that say,

Jesus. And what they discovered is the manuscripts that say,

Jesus, have a much higher coherence amongst themselves than the manuscripts that say,

Lord. So, in other words, in many instances, you would have a manuscript that says,

Lord, but its closest relative said, Jesus. The ones that say,

Jesus, their closest relative said, what? Jesus. So, there's higher coherence and consistency in the transmission of the text for that reading than there was for Lord.

And, as a result, between NA 27, that's the Allen 27th edition, and that's the

Allen 28th edition, they put Lord in the note and put

Jesus in the main text. Now, nothing's changed in the sense that all the data is still there.

You can look at it, and if you decide against that reading, you can decide against that reading.

I think it's a very strong reading. You read the beginning of Jude, and there are some strong testimonies to the deity of Christ in those verses.

And it is theologically relevant, whether it's Jesus that destroyed a people out of Egypt, because who does that tell you

Jesus is? Who did that? Yahweh did. So, this becomes an extremely important text, no question about it.

But, the point is that they scribe. What would be the more natural way to say someone destroyed the people who didn't believe when they came out of Egypt?

The Lord. So, that would be the easier thing for a scribe to do, would be to expect that it's

Kurios. And, remember, what is Kurios and Yesus? What are they? What's the term? Who said it?

Nomina Sacra. They're both Nomina Sacra. So, they would not have been written out, they would have been abbreviated.

And so, Yesus and Kurios would look a lot alike. So, what would be more natural for a scribe to do would be to put

Lord. It would not be natural for a scribe to put Jesus. And so, when you look at the

CBGM data, it says the Jesus reading has the higher coherence.

That was sufficient to cause the editors to make that the main reading and put the

Lord reading in the notes. So, that's why it's there. Okay? So, you can imagine doing that with a small book like Jude.

Can you imagine what it's like to do Revelation? That's why it's taking so much time.

And, when I went to Munster in January of 2019, they told me the Mark volume, which is, where is

Mark right now? I think it's right there. The Mark, oh, there's Mark back there. Okay, that must be Acts there. The Mark volume was done, and it still took two years before it came out, which didn't make me happy.

So, this is the work that is going on with every one of those textual variants.

So, what has been the result of that? So far, we have the general epistles, we have Acts, and we have

Mark. Well, most of you are probably wondering, given last night and looking at Shabir Ali, or this morning, what did

CBGM say about Mark 1 -1? Because, remember, I said, remember this. Shabir brought up the issue of the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the

Son of God, at Mark 1 -1. And, he said, well, the NIV says some of the earliest and best manuscripts do not contain this.

I want to point something out to you about Mark 1 -1. Let me go to New Testament manuscripts.

Well, there's Jude 5, by the way. I'm not sure why. Oh, that's why it was there. And, let's look at Mark 1 -1, and let me see if I can blow this up so you can actually see it.

All right, let's blow up Codex Sinaiticus. That sounds bad.

Let's blow up Codex Sinaiticus. No, let's not do that. We can take out

Washingtonianus. We can take out Alexandrinus. There we go. And, let's blow it up here.

Okay, and then let's… There's Vaticanus.

All right, this is what I want you to see right here. This line right there.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God. So, you have a line, and it's interesting.

The Sinaiticus does not contain… You've just got

Jesus Christ here, but Vaticanus has it. And, you have a line of what are called…

All the way through here. One, two, three, four, five, six genitives in a row.

It's called a genitive form in the Greek language, and they're all genitive forms in one long line.

And, remember, they're sort of putting a little space between the words here. There weren't any. You saw that. I put it on the screen, so you saw that.

So, a lot of people had already said, well, you've just got such a long genitive line there. It could be…

It's easy to see how something could have fallen off because it's just so repetitive for the eye.

But, what CBGM discovered is that the manuscripts that say

Son of God have a higher coherence amongst themselves than those that do not. And so, if you look at Mark 1 .1

in the volume that's going around, you will see the text reading is Son of God.

So, that's one of the variants. But, you need to understand something here.

That doesn't mean that a committee or a translation committee has to just automatically go, oh, well, that's the reading then.

No. This is another tool. This is another data point.

This is another way of saying, well, this reading has the highest coherence, and so it needs to be taken very seriously.

That doesn't mean that this determines what the original reading absolutely was.

That's not what it's claiming to do. And that's what you're going to hear from people. Eventually, someone's going to glom onto this, and they're going to start talking about how we're using computers to corrupt the

Bible, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're going to run with the idea that we're just simply feeding this all into a computer now.

Whatever comes out the other end is whatever we're going to believe. That's not how it works. And there is actually, in any of the genealogical relationships in CBGM, there is a subjective element.

Because at some point, the editors have to tell the computer, this reading came from that reading.

Now, sometimes that's really simple. Sometimes it's really obvious. But sometimes it's not.

And so there is a subjective level to it. And one of the things they're trying to do at Munster, which I appreciate, is they're trying to create interfaces that us folks can use, where we go,

I'm not going to agree with that editorial. What does it look like if we do this? And you can actually change things around for yourself.

They've been very, very good at doing that, because they're sensitive to the argument that this sounds like a mysterious black box that you're just pouring data into, and out comes the answer.

That's not how it's functioning. That's not how it's functioning. Now, what's interesting, again,

General Epistles, Mark, and Acts, very, very few changes from the

Nestialan 27th edition to the 28th edition. In other words, the vast majority,

I think there were only in Acts, I think there were only 35, I think it may have been 50 in Mark, where they changed the text reading that was already in the

Nestialan text. And in almost every single one of them, it was extremely minor.

It was stuff that you really have to read the language to know why there would be any interest in it whatsoever.

In other words, what CBGM is saying is we've been pretty much on track all along anyways. It's just verifying that.

Now, there are some really, really important textual variants that I'm looking forward to seeing what

CBGM is going to do. We mentioned the one before, John 118. There's another fascinating one, it's

Romans 5 .1. Therefore, having been justified by faith, it's either ecumen or ecomen.

It's either indicative or subjunctive. There's only one letter difference between the two. And that's going to be one that I think will have some serious interest in it as well.

I can guarantee you what's going to happen with 1 Timothy 3 .16 already. It's not going to change anything.

But all of that will be coming over the next number of years. I was told, and again, what

I was told in 2019 was pre -COVID, so all that becomes pretty much irrelevant after that.

But I was told that they had funding to finish the project through 2030. And so it will be done.

And you know what will happen as soon as it's done. They'll start the next edition. That's just how, this is how it works.

But I personally am looking forward to seeing all of that information available.

Because from an apologetic perspective, being able to pull up these screens that demonstrate the consistency of the readings of the manuscripts,

I think is a tremendous positive thing for doing Christian apologetics.

Now, most of the people involved with it want to stay as far away from that as possible. Why? For fear of looking like they're biased.

And I understand that. But what we're really seeing here is a massive increase in the amount of generally available to all of us information on what all the manuscripts read.

If you're looking at that volume and going, I can't make heads or tails of any of this, up at the top of the page you have the text reading.

And all that material down below is what the manuscripts are saying about that particular section of text.

That's a massive amount of information. No one's, Erasmus could not have dreamed of a day when people would have access to that kind of information.

Never. I mean, people literally were not dreaming of that only 60 years ago. And now we have it.

And that is a very, very, very positive thing. We should not look at it as a daunting thing.

And you might go, well, I'm never going to understand that stuff. That's fine. But the point is that believing scholars have access to information they've never, ever had before.

And that is a really, really positive thing. And so, if you hear rumors and you hear people talking about this, that, or the other thing, please keep in mind, this is probably what they're talking about.

They're probably talking about CBGM. CBGM is not just simply you throw all the data in and the computer says this is the original reading.

What the computer is telling you is that these manuscripts that have this reading have a higher level of coherence.

And you can, as a result of that, start creating a tree that shows the relationships between the manuscripts.

And hence, the more we do that, the more certain those relationships become as we have more and more of the

New Testament plugged in and analyzed. And the eventual goal is to, and of course you can't do this with all manuscripts, because most manuscripts only contain a portion of the

New Testament, but in, for example, a particular chapter, to be able to relate all the manuscripts that contain that to one another as best you can.

And that is extremely valuable, extremely helpful. It's just another major tool in the tool chest.

It doesn't mean that you stop doing textual criticism in the ways that you've done so before.

Recognizing Homo Etelyatan, and recognizing the errors that the scribes would make, and recognizing, for example, when you study the

Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you will see scribes all the time trying to make

Matthew like Mark, and Mark like Luke, and Luke like Matthew. Scribes didn't get the idea that it was actually good that they were different.

If they're all the same, why would we need three of them? I've never understood that part. But you're not getting rid of all of that stuff.

It's still there. You've just been given another tool, and that's really what it's all about.

So when you hear this stuff, you can be some of the people to go, chill out, calm down.

That's not really what's going on. This is just simply another extremely valuable, useful tool that we can utilize to, well, remember what

I said, even Bart Ehrman said, we're just tinkering with the details. Well, if you examine, the

Book of Acts is a pretty long book, and if you run all this on the Book of Acts, and you only end up with 32 differences, and honestly, none of those really change the result and meaning of the text, we've been doing a pretty good job all along before the computers came along.

But it's helping us to solidify that and to be more consistent, because the computer tries to be consistent.

It doesn't have a bias in of itself, and that always comes from the programming and the programmers.

So that is, in a thumbnail sketch, there's so much more to it than that, because there's all sorts of I'll just tell you one thing that still freaks me out about it, and it's something that I have to address in anything

I'll be writing on this in the future. CBGM requires that you look at texts, not manuscripts.

In other words, the written text takes on a life of its own, separate from the manuscript in which it appears.

And so one of the concerns that I have raised, and that the project

I was working on in South Africa has been derailed at the moment, but I hope to get it back on track, if the world allows that kind of thing to happen, was asking the question, does

CBGM dehistoricize the text? Because CBGM won't talk about manuscripts, it talks about readings, certain texts, and it disconnects the text from the manuscript, so that you end up with the text having relationships that historically are somewhat problematic.

So in other words, you'd have a text that is more primary, and yet it's 500 years later than a text that's earlier than it.

How does that work? Well, there are theories as to how that works, but there's a lot of stuff behind this stuff.

I'm just giving you the bird's eye view of sort of how it ends up coming out on the other end, and how if you have an

ESV or other modern translations, you've already been influenced by it. You need to realize that most of your modern

Bible translation committees are still active, so the ESV committee still exists.

You may have heard a couple years ago, they were going to say, they actually had made the decision, we're going to shut down, this is going to be the final

ESV version, and that's it. And like a month later, they came out and said, no, we're going to actually stay around.

And so Lachman keeps working on the NESB, and I know the Christian Standard Bible, and so most of those were translations of the

Ness Yellin 26th edition, Ness Yellin 27th edition, but what happens when Ness Yellin gets changed? What's that translation committee going to do?

Those are some of the questions that are being faced today. Those are all good things.

So let me address one other thing while the CBGM volumes keep going around. I have a lot of friends,

I have a lot of Reformed friends, who don't think this is a good thing at all, who don't think it's a good thing at all.

In other words, I have been told that I am not properly confessional because I don't use the same text that the

Framers, the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith used, which would have been the Textus Receptus. And so you have to use the

Textus Receptus to be actually confessional. And then they'll go farther than that to say, look, this is the providentially preserved text.

This is the text as God gave it to us in the 16th century. It underlies the

Westminster Confession of Faith, the London Baptist Confession of Faith, Savoy Declaration, etc.,

etc., etc. And so since this is when the great flowering of Reformed theology took place, then this is the providential text.

You should accept this. And what they're really saying is, anything that's come along after that period of time is irrelevant.

All the papyri, irrelevant. Sinaiticus, irrelevant. CBGM, irrelevant. None of that makes any difference.

This is the final text. Accept it. Believe it. Enjoy it. They will say it's so wonderful to not have to worry about when there is a textual variant, and I don't have to tell my people about it when

I'm preaching, and we've just got such wonderful unity and certainty. It sounds nice.

It is the exact argumentation that Rome was using in defense of the Latin Vulgate against the Reformers.

It's the exact argument. And they had a better argument because the Vulgate had been in use for how long? 1 ,100 years.

1 ,100 years. And the Textus Receptus has only been around for, you know, 400 years.

So it's extremely inconsistent to me, but that's where they're coming from.

And you will hear people saying, look, you start going down that line, it's going to lead to all the liberalism in the world.

Look, lower textual criticism. The textual criticism that we've been talking about here has had zippity -dippity -doo -dah to do with liberalism and the rise of liberalism.

Has nothing to do with it at all. Believing conservative inerrancy, believing

Christians. I mean, if you look at the Chicago Statement of Inerrancy, it recognizes the necessity of doing textual critical studies.

That doesn't lead of any type of necessities some kind of liberalism at all.

But I recognize, I have brothers, I consider them brothers. I'm not sure they consider me one, but I consider them brothers who will make this kind of assertion and say you need to use the

Textus Receptus. And then when you point out the Textus Receptus has problems,

Ephesians 3 .9, just one of those problems, 1 John 5 .7, etc., etc.,

you end up in a pretty vicious circle where fundamentally it's, well, because remember, always remember this, if all the

Greek New Testaments were wiped out today, all the Bibles were wiped out today, and all you had was left was the manuscripts, you would never, ever, ever be able to devise a consistent system of analyzing those manuscripts that would result in the

Textus Receptus. Never. So, whenever you defend the readings of the

TR, when my Christian friends defend the readings of Ephesians 3 .9,

they will set up a system to do so. And as soon as we move to 1

John 5 .7, or to Colossians 1 .14, or wherever it might be, they now set up a whole new set of arguments that may be completely contradictory to the arguments they just used for the preceding text.

Because they're not actually worried about the text, the text they've already got. They just have to come up with a defense for each reading of that text.

So, if you got rid of all of the Greek New Testaments and you started from scratch, and you had the manuscripts, you would never, ever, ever come up with the

TR by applying any kind of consistent mechanism of analysis of those manuscripts.

You would pretty much come up with what we've got today if you were consistent in your application of your standards and things like that.

That, to me, is the greatest evidence. The TR -only -ism, whatever they want to call it, confessional text -ism, whatever, simply cannot pass muster.

And I know some great people. Doug Wilson's a TR guy. In fact, most people don't know this, but he and I have a book on the subject.

He and I did a written debate on that. And in fact, we had done a written debate in the old credenda agenda back in the 1990s on that issue as well.

So, we've been going back and forth on that for a couple decades now. And so, we can still get along despite the fact that he's wrong about that.

You know, nobody can be right about everything. And in fact,

Doug and I are going to be debating April 22nd in Moscow, Idaho.

It'll be very interesting. It was on a subject that was going to make all of you go, really?

We'll be debating paedo -communion. Because they practice paedo -communion up there.

And the reason we're doing paedo -communion is we've already done paedo -baptism to death.

And in fact, some of you have seen the debates I've done on that. And some of you may know that one of the major debates

I did on that subject with Dr. Greg Strawbridge, but Dr. Strawbridge suddenly died this week.

He was only in his mid -50s and it was completely unexpected. Very sad.

But we've already done that. So, couldn't we shed more light on the issue by doing this subject?

Because the assertion is, from their perspective, that they're being more consistent than even the

Reformed churches have been by having paedo -baptism and paedo -communion. And I'm like, yeah,

I think that does shed more light on the subject. So, we're doing that April 22nd, Lord willing. I mean, we had planned to do that in March of 2020.

I had my plane tickets and hotel reservations and whole nine yards and something weird happened starting in March of 2020.

And so, it's been put off for a while. But I'll be driving up there in my truck, in my fifth wheel, and we'll be doing some stuff like that while we're up there.

We'll also be recording Sweater Vest Dialogues and Man Rampant and doing stuff where we're all on the same side.

I enjoyed when I debated Bill Shishko of the

Franklin Square Orthodox Presbyterian Church on paedo -baptism. That was on, I think, a Thursday night.

On Wednesday night, I preached at his church on justification. And so, some of you know

I have friendships with people that I disagree with on a number of issues. And the funny thing is, the two most famous of those people,

Doug Wilson and Michael Brown, I'm the person they've debated more often than almost anybody else.

We've actually been on the opposite side. But Mike and I also have done debates where we were on the same side.

And that bothers some people to no end. I'm not quite sure why. But if you've ever seen the debate that Michael and I did against the two homosexual pastors, in Florida.

And if you watch the section where we were sitting doing the rebuttal at the beginning, pretty much toward the, well, it's toward the middle of the debate, but they've made their presentations, we've made our presentations, and now

Mike and I are rebutting them. We are refuting their arguments. We're sitting at our tables. Watch that.

But when that debate was over, the moderator said, good evening, so on, so forth.

And we sort of just looked at each other. And we said, what happened during rebuttal?

Because we had people come up to us afterwards, did you guys memorize that? How did you do that?

We were finishing each other's sentences. It was the most flowing, consistent, two people, two different voices saying the same thing.

It was supernatural. It was amazing. I'll never forget it.

I will never forget it. And when we debated the two Unitarians, long, long ago, before we knew each other very well at all, that also was astonishing.

We were finishing each other's sentences and everything else. And yet, we've also debated each other over and over and over again. Maybe you've seen the debates we've done on Reformed Theology and Charismatic Gifts.

We did those debates on Charismatic Gifts in Spain, Malaga, Spain. How in the world did we end up there?

But I did get to run next to the Mediterranean in Spain. That was pretty nice. How did I get on that?

I don't know. Anyway, so Doug Wilson, TR -onlyism, et cetera, et cetera. So we've had a lot of people who have been saying, hey, when are we going to get to have questions?

And that would be a really good time, a really good thing to do now. I will try to remember to repeat your questions so that it can be heard by the listening audience.

But sometimes, I forget. And I apologize for doing that ahead of time. So, yes, sir?

So on the topic of CBGM, have there been any recommendations from CBGM that the

NA28 hasn't brought into it? I know the English Translation Committee's going to make a decision.

But is the NA28— NA28's owned by the same people, so no. So it's fully— It's the same group. Okay. Yeah, both

UBS and NA—the Nestle Alland text and the iBible Society text are all part of the

New Testament Institute there in Munster. And so, yeah, no. The NA28 is simply—the

Nestle Alland, whatever it's going to be, when the 29th comes out, when the 30th comes out, they're just simply meant to be the small version of that big beast going around.

So, yeah. So, no, there's been none of those. Yes, sir? I think I was half asleep, but I'm going to ask it anyway.

On Ephesians, you're talking about Laodicea, and I have an ESV, and it just says, Paul, that ended up, to the saints who are at Ephesus, and are faithful to Christ Jesus at night.

You said that wasn't necessarily a proposition to the church at Ephesus, so I don't know.

Please. I totally missed something. Right. Notice in the

Greek here, n -epheso, in Ephesus, is not found in—I know you can't see this,

I can't blow it up right now—but the phrase, to the saints who are in Ephesus, is missing in P46, the original hand of Sinaiticus, the original hand of Vaticanus, 6, 1739, and even

Marcion did not have it as well. So, that's the first part, is that the specific identification as in Ephesus is not in a number of the earliest manuscripts.

But what I was saying was, if you look at Colossians 4 .16, it says, read the epistle that is coming from Laodicea.

And when you look at a map, which is a real good thing to look at in looking at ancient history, you see that Ephesus is the chief city in the

Lycus River Valley, Colossae is upriver, as is Laodicea. So, you put that together with the fact that Ephesians, even though Paul was in Ephesus for years, has not a single personal reference in it.

There's no greeting of individuals, anything like that. Then, that's why many scholars,

I certainly would agree, would view Ephesians as meant to have been a circular letter that would be passed around the churches in the

Lycus River Valley. Certainly, the church at Ephesus would have received it as well, but it wasn't specifically addressed to them, and that is the letter coming from Laodicea.

That's what I think the evidence demonstrates. As they should, as they should.

Yes, sir. I wasn't sure if you were just stretching there and getting ready to go to bed or what, you know.

Yes. Did you have as much gray hair when

I first started coming here? Is it because I've been coming here?

That's the, yeah, that's the question. I wondered if, and this may just be speculation, both

I think of Ephesians and Colossians. There are notes to the effect that Paul would send

Tychicus, I mean some other guys, to take the letters, and I just wondered perhaps, you know, long distance, maybe they took those letters and maybe they dropped off those two letters together.

Well, they're clearly written together. Yeah, yeah. They're direct parallels with one another, yes, most definitely, and many people have laid out what the parallels between Colossians and Ephesians are, and in fact, someone, and let me point this out because it is illustrative, forgive me,

I think it was the kind lady down here, I think you were the one that asked about the bloodless

Bible. Okay, I was standing outside the

Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, and this guy came up and started passing out tracts, and he didn't really say anything to us, so he sort of kept them to himself.

So eventually, during a quiet time, I went up to him and and said, hi, you know, we're passing out tracts.

Okay, yeah, and one of the first things he says to me is, so what Bible are you using?

And I immediately knew what this meant. This guy was a King James only guy, and I said, we have a number of different translations we're using.

I actually carry the Greek text with me. Oh, so do you use the bloodless

Bible? And I knew exactly what he meant, knew exactly what he meant. So if you look at Colossians 1 .14

in the King James version of the Bible, let me see,

KJV with Strong's, oops,

I didn't mean to do that. Okay, so KJV says,

Colossians 1 .14, in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins.

New American Standard has, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. So you see, they've taken out the blood because they don't believe in blood atonement, and so it's the bloodless

Bible. All right, well, you look at the textual data, and you see that through his blood is found in manuscripts 614, 630, 1505, 2464, and that's pretty much it.

It is a minority reading, it's not the Byzantine reading, it's not the reading of the

Byzantine manuscript tradition, it's not the majority reading, and 614 is the earliest manuscript, it's from 900 years after Christ.

So where'd it come from? Well, the nice thing about the Nessean text is it has these parallels.

It comes from Ephesians 1 .7, which is the parallel to Colossians.

And so if you go over to Ephesians 1 .7, you will see, yes, yes, yes,

I know, I know, there is no book E -O -H. I really wish you'd be able to figure that out. And notice what the

New American Standard says at Ephesians 1 .7, in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace.

So if it's the bloodless Bible, why keep it in one text and not in another text? Oh, well, but you know it has to be in every text, or you're trying to take it out, blah, blah, blah, blah.

No, this is a simple situation where someone who, and Ephesians 1 was frequently used in liturgy and things like that, it may not have been a scribe purposefully trying to harmonize the two.

It may have simply been he has Ephesians 1 .7 memorized, and when he copies Colossians 1 .14,

they're both saying the same thing in the same words, and yet through his blood is in Ephesians 1 .7,

so he inserts it in there, didn't even know he did it. Or it may have been a scribe going, what idiot who wrote my manuscript forgot this?

It's supposed to say through his blood, and so he puts it in. This type of thing happens constantly between Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

When they're telling the same story, there are always scribes that try to either purposefully or inadvertently harmonize and make them say the same things.

Anyone who's done any serious study of the Synoptic Gospels in the original language knows it happens all the time, and it also happens between Ephesians and Colossians, and it did there, and that's why the guy wouldn't pass out tracts with us, not that we really wanted him to anyways, and that's where you come up with the bloodless

Bible, which is not the bloodless Bible. Now, 216?

Also, it would have to go with the textual variant. Oh, have you told...

Have you told Jerry Jenkins, is that the guy's name? Who did Left Behind?

Tim LaHaye, Tim LaHaye, and he had a co -author, wasn't it? It was Jerry Jenkins, okay. Have you told them about this, because you could start a whole new series, and they might give you a percentage of the cut or something like that, who knows, yeah.

Well, there you go. Yes. So, you've shared dating of papyrus and codex and things like that.

Is there a good resource that gives us good information on that? Well, the back of any critical edition of the

Greek New Testament has the quote -unquote official guesses as to the century, so it'll say 7th century, 6th century, whatever.

Right, right, they'll both have that, and then Philip Comfort has a bunch of really good books on the various manuscripts that'll have all sorts of dating issues and discussions of that, and he even has a textual commentary on the

New Testament that pretty much covers all the, not just major, but a lot of the minor variants and discusses those things.

You can get, for accordance, you can get right here, yeah, so you'll see here that I have the

Comfort text commentary and the Metzger text commentary with the Nessialen apparatus, the

UBS apparatus, and then the NA -28 over on this side. Of course, it doesn't show anything right there because it's in, it's down in Matthew 2, 1, how's that?

So, that's what it ends up looking like, and that's always a good place to start, is you've got Comfort's text commentary, you've got

Metzger, and there's the Greek text, there's the apparatus, and UBS down here. So, by the way, just for your, if you're actually going, you know,

I might buy a Greek New Testament, just simply to have the apparatus down there. What's the difference between the

UBS and the Nessialen? Aside from the color, the UBS is normally red, case -bound, and the

Nessialen is blue. The UBS has larger print, it's a little bit easier to read.

The Nessialen has a more ingenious citation method and takes up less space. But fundamentally, the

UBS text is for translators. It's for people that are translating the Bible into unreached languages.

And so, there's only like about 400 variants that are noted in it. What they're noting are the variants that will impact the translation of the text because it's for translators.

And so, you can see down here, it's rather small, but they go much more at the bottom into detail of what early church fathers had and stuff like that.

So, when UBS gives you data, it'll give you more data, but the

Nessialen covers like 20 ,000 variants rather than 400. So, it covers a whole lot more variants that the

UBS will just skip. It just won't even put it there because it's not a major enough variant, but it doesn't go as in -depth.

So, and if you really, really, really want to go in -depth, you buy those big books that just came by you, and you'll see that they've got lots of stuff in them.

Mr. Gister. With writing algorithms for coherence and consistency, have there been discussions about and against subjectivity and why it's conditioned to subjection?

Well, yeah, but there is a level of subjectivity. The text flow is decided by the editors as to, and again,

I wish I could bring up the internet so I could show this to you, but when you see the output of the

CBGM, you will see that the textual flow diagrams, and that's based upon the editor's decisions as to what reading gave rise to what other reading.

So, there is a level of subjectivity there, but I'll be honest with you, there are very few places where there would be almost any serious disagreement with the editors on that issue as to what reading gave rise to what.

It's not that big of a thing. It is a pretty fair system.

Once you buy the presuppositions that you can deal with the text separately from the manuscript itself, and that's really where the question is, and that's where I think more work needs to be done.

There isn't a lot of interaction going on with CBGM yet because it's not out. You don't have enough data to really be working with yet.

Once the Holy Testament's done, then you're going to see a lot of, well, hopefully the world situation will allow for a lot of interaction and discussion on it, but who knows.

Yes? On the bias question, I think one of the criticisms of CBGM was that it doesn't include any of the

Byzantine material. Oh no, it does. Oh sure. In fact, what's fascinating is that 80 to 85 percent of the changes, and there's a small number of changes, so in Acts there was like,

I think there was like 35. It was either Acts or Mark, one of them was 50, one of them was in the 30s, so it's a very small number.

85 percent of those changes are toward the Byzantine text type, and that's the other thing. CBGM has definitely established that the

Byzantine text type exists as a textual family. None of the others has CBGM discovered.

There's no Alexandrian, there's no Caesarean, there's no Western. Those terms which are found throughout the currently available literature,

CBGM is saying they don't exist. Now, will that change? Don't know yet.

Maybe when you do John, maybe when you do Paul, maybe the Alexandrian will only be in the

Pauline corpus, and we don't know. We don't know. It's just too early to know yet, but one of the big developments

CBGM does bring to us is a fundamental reorientation of that terminology we've used for decades.

If you read Metzger's textual commentary, you can hardly get through three or four of them without a reference to Alexandrian or something like that, and CBGM is saying there is no

Alexandrian, not as a recognizable text type. Yes, sir?

I'm not aware of... Well, that's two completely different things.

I was going, Isaiah 714 has nothing to do with Romans 8, so you totally lost me there.

Well, okay, Romans 8, the issue is how you render spirit.

Spirit is a neuter, and so technically it would be, the

King James says the spirit itself bears witness with our spirit, but the

New American Standard says the spirit himself, even though the pronoun there is, and they have gendered pronouns in Greek, those will have to be removed by order of Uncle Bill, Uncle Joe, whatever.

So that's just simply an editorial decision as to whether you're going to, how you're going to render that in English, if you're going to emphasize the personality of the spirit as the

NASB does, and I think that's perfectly fine. That doesn't mean that the King James translators were trying to de -emphasize the personality of the spirit.

They did not have the same concerns that we have in regards to pronouns back then, I can guarantee you that.

And then the other one that you referenced, which is what completely threw me off because it's not cited in the

New Testament in Romans. Right, and so the

Lord himself will give you a sign, behold a virgin will be a child and bear a son, and she will call his name

Emmanuel. And I would assume the issue is the term Alma right here in Hebrew, Parthenos in Greek.

And just briefly, Alma can be a young woman of marriageable age, or more specifically, a virgin.

There is a specific technical term in Hebrew for virgin, Bethula, which is not what is used here.

But the Greek Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which was the

Bible of the early church, at least 85 to 90 percent of the time when the

New Testament cites from the Old Testament, it's citing from the Greek Septuagint, not from the Hebrew. And so when

Matthew quotes this prophecy, he quotes the Greek, and you can see it right here, hey

Parthenos. Parthenos is, you've heard the Parthenon in Greece.

It is the technical medical term for a virgin. And so the

New Testament uses the interpretation of the translators of the Greek Septuagint in regards to the subject of the virgin.

And so a translation that doesn't do that is simply looking at Alma and is saying that is not the technical term for virgin.

It's a young woman of marriageable age. In Jewish culture, she would have to be a virgin to be married, or she'd be stoned.

So it did carry the idea, but it's not the technical term that Parthenos is.

And so that's why there would be some probably more liberal translations that would not render it as virgin in their

English text. So there's always a reason. There's always a reason somewhere down there.

Yes, sir. The Brooklyn Tabernacle?

The Brooklyn Tabernacle? The Metropolitan Tabernacle.

It was. You and Jeffrey would disagree with that.

Yeah. We basically double them up on that. Yeah. Yeah. Evidently, and I was not aware of this until Dr.

Masters informed me of it before I preached there. Yeah. Evidently, that was

Spurgeon's conviction. The Puritans certainly didn't buy that.

Puritans would preach for hours. And so there's certainly nothing biblical about that particular subject.

You have to get your own people prepared for stuff. But I do remember one of our deacons once, when

I was in my previous church, the sermon had gone rather short. And the deacon said, well, let's remember, as somebody said,

I don't know who it was, sermonettes make for Christianettes. And so I'm not sure if that's the case, but it is obviously the reality that in church history sermons got shorter and shorter and shorter as literacy and attention declined.

And that's what became the reason for much of the artwork in the church was, as people couldn't read, you had to teach them by pictures.

And so, yeah. But yeah, I can guarantee you that that clock will stay in that pulpit as long as Peter Masters is alive.

It'll be there, and it will be in regular use. In regular use. When it comes to practical ministry, as a preacher who's just becoming more acquainted with sexual criticism and sexual variances, what advice would you say on how would that affect his weekly expositional preaching?

Say like whenever you're noticing some say Lord, some say Christ, how much would you emphasize that, talk about that, give any interest to that?

That has to be a decision, as the old man says, that has to be a decision that you come to based upon your knowledge of your congregation.

So when I preached through Hebrews for 80, 83 sermons,

I did so in a context where my people knew who I was, and they expected me to address those issues.

And especially in Hebrews, you have to address a couple textual variances. If you don't, you're not really going to be dealing with the text.

So if you don't deal with the quotation of Jeremiah 31 in Hebrews 8, where the

Hebrew says, even though I was a husband to them, whereas the Greek Septuagint says, even though I did not care for them, and the writer of Hebrews goes to Septuagint, and it's part of his point.

Same thing in chapter 10, when he says, a body have I prepared, whereas the Hebrew says, an ear.

Again, following the Septuagint. There are certain congregations where you do not have, and the ministry needs to know this, sufficient background on the part of the majority of the people to bring these issues up.

And you have to be aware of that. I would say that would be something you'd want to be addressing over time.

They should have that, because especially when your young people go to university, their professors will point that out.

But that has to be something done over time. I was at that same church 29 and a half years.

Even when I go to Apologia, everybody at Apologia knows who I am, what I do. So they've been listening to me talking about textual criticism forever anyways.

So I have the freedom to do that, not everybody does. I taught a textual criticism class outside of Kiev, Ukraine, and for the

Evangelical Biblical Training Center. And I had an old pastor from Donetsk.

Donetsk? Donetsk? Yes, the place that you all have a really nice building at, right?

Yes, that can't access anymore. He was in my class, and he said, at the end, he said,

I really, really enjoyed it. I learned a lot, but I could never tell my people any of this.

Now, he didn't say that to me. I was through a translator, obviously. But he said, I could never tell my people any of this.

So he knew that. I'm sorry? Because it would shake their faith? Yeah, probably.

Yeah, probably because it would shake their faith. And he was saying,

I've not prepared them for this kind of information. And they're probably in a situation where they're not necessarily going to be challenged on that in that particular context anyways.

But, you know, he made the decision. I know this now, but I don't know that I could ever share it with them.

So you have to be careful. I think in the vast majority of instances, you don't want to derail a sermon by a lengthy excursus on textual critical issues.

But sometimes, it's right there. And if almost every English translation says, some manuscripts say this, and some manuscripts say that.

And especially if you have differences between translations available in your congregation, you have to be aware of those types of things as well.

And then there's the big question that no one's asked yet, but I'll go ahead and throw it out here.

Would I preach John 7, 53 through 8, 11, if I'm preaching through the Gospel of John?

Would I preach that section? Which is everybody's favorite story in the Gospel of John anyways.

You know, a woman taking an adultery, and let the hymns of sin cast the first stone, and oh, it's just wonderful.

But would I preach it? I could not. Not a scripture, because I'm convinced

John didn't write it. Now, I'm also not going to go from 7, 52 to 8, 12 without some type of commentary.

I might do that in a Sunday school lesson, or on a

Wednesday night, or in a blog article, or something. I'm not going to just leave people who want to know, not knowing why.

And it's not like I haven't addressed it enough times in my own writings to just refer people to it. But no,

I can't, because... Can you go across the board with even, like, the first John 5, 7?

Oh, well, that one's, that one's... Can you sing along with something even smaller? First John 5, 7, definitely, because as I said this evening, if that was original and it was lost, then we don't have any hope for really knowing what's in the

New Testament in the first place. But no, I wouldn't do the long writing of Mark, though there's much better evidence for long writing of Mark than there is for the pericope adultery, the woman taken in adultery.

Or 1 John 5, 7. There aren't really...

Acts 8, 37, the insertion from the Latin Vulgate about believing and being baptized.

So there's a few places like that. But if it's just a verse or something like that,

I will take the time to explain why that is in passing. But I need to be consistent with my conviction at that point.

And the response from other people would be, this has become a part of the canon by simply being repeated so many times.

So it becomes accepted by tradition rather than being something that was inspired by the

Holy Spirit of God in the first place. That concerns me greatly. I think it would have concerned...

By the way, the Reformers were living in a pre -critical time.

Calvin did make comments about whether something should or should not be translated one way or another, and whether it should be in the text, not in the text, a few things.

But they had access to so little information. And when you're in danger of dying if you go down the wrong road, you're not really in a position to be studying textual critical stuff.

They didn't have the... Couldn't even dream to stuff like this. Couldn't have dreamed of it.

In the back. Yes, yes.

Thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, there's another textual variant that I would have to address that is highly theologically relevant.

And that is, and I'm going to tell you something, I was well out of seminary with my first master's degree before I even realized this was a textual variant.

I had heard sermon after sermon after sermon after sermon on this text, and had never heard anybody mention anything about it.

But Father forgive them if they know not what they do. From the cross, one of the seven sayings is a major textual variant.

And what's fascinating about it is, even back, and I'm going to be really interested in seeing what

CBGM does with it, obviously. That's another one that I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes out when that's published.

But, and there's one in Luke 22 as well. I think it was the one about sweating drops of blood, if I recall correctly.

That's a textual variant too. But the one, Father forgive them if they know not what they do. Pre -CBGM, one of the standards you would use in analyzing a text like that, is if you have a variant that was across all the family lines.

So, in other words, the early Alexandrian manuscripts don't have it. The early western manuscripts don't have it.

The early Byzantine manuscripts don't have it. That makes for a really, really, really strong case to not include something.

And when you look at Father forgive them if they know not what they do, the earliest manuscripts of every family do not contain it, including the

Byzantine. Codex Washingtonianus, which is the prototype early Byzantine manuscript, does not have it.

And so, most definitely, I would address that, especially because I know a lot of people put incredible theological weight on that text, and they come up with an entire theology based upon what they assume that text must mean.

And that does raise one other thing that we haven't really addressed. My dad taught me years and years and years and years ago, before I really had any grasp of a lot of this stuff, that you do not, you do not make dogmatic theological conclusions based upon a hapoxlegomena.

Hapoxlegomena means a word or phrase that appears only one time in scripture.

It's unique in scripture. So if you don't have other scriptures by which you can interpret it, then you do not base a dogma upon, especially a disputed hapoxlegomena, where it might mean this, it might mean that, we're not sure.

It's primarily in the Old Testament where you have disputed hapoxlegomena. And then the other thing is you do not make a dogmatic case based upon a textual variant, especially if it is a difficult textual variant.

There are some textual variants that are not difficult, but if it is a difficult one where there is a good argument to be made either direction, then you don't use that as a primary evidence.

You can use it as a secondary evidence, but not as a primary evidence. I was taught that long, long, long ago, and I try to be consistent with that as well.

So thank you for that. Did that answer your question? Okay. Yes, sir. I didn't catch the last part.

Did Scrivener do what? This is a fascinating part of it that we didn't talk about, and I'm supposed to be done right now, right,

Ken? Ken, take a wild guess. Do you think I'm gonna be done right now?

Yeah, I didn't think so. Okay, I'll try to be brief. Real King James -only people don't like TR -only people, because they think they are just trying to one -up them.

And the King James is the locus of the providential preservation of God, not the TR. So King James -only will sometimes defend the

TR, but most of the time they're not concerned about it. The Texas Receptus that people run around with today at various Bible colleges,

Blue Casebound, published by Trinitarian Bible Society, is, as you know, the work of Scrivener in the 19th century, late 19th century.

And what's fascinating to me, I should have brought this up before, but what's fascinating to me is that what is normally identified as the

TR today is actually a Greek text based upon an

English translation. Now what do I mean? Well, if you know how

Scrivener derived his text, what he did is he looked at the five editions of Erasmus, the edition of Stephanus, editions 1550, 1551, and Theodore Beza's, especially 1598.

And so he compared them together, found where they differed from one another, and then looked at the

King James translation to see what their textual decision was. Now the King James translators met in different committees, and so you had a

Gospels committee and a Paul committee, and different committees did different portions of the Bible. That's common in most translations, but what the

King James didn't have was a final committee that smoothed everything out.

So for example, in the King James and Matthew, I forget which direction it goes, but in Matthew and Romans, the exact same

Greek phrase, ufanusais, you shall not murder. In one it's rendered, you shall not murder, and the other is rendered, you shall not kill.

Now in most modern translations, they would have caught that, and they would make it say the same thing, because it's the same

Greek phrase. But in the King James, one place it says you shall not murder, the other place says you shall not kill.

I've had atheists use that as evidence against the Bible, believe it or not. Dennis MacKenzie back in the 80s, biblical errancy, really weird.

So anyways, they had different committees, and different committees relied on different printed

Greek texts more than others. Most of them relied on the 1598 Beza, but some had Erasmus, and a lot of people loved the 1550

Stephanos, the one that I have an actual version of. And so he then took the base text,

I think he took the base text from Beza, and then when there were any differences amongst those printed editions, he went to the

King James, and whatever they chose is what he put into the Greek text. So it's a

Greek text based upon the textual decisions of an English translation. It's not there is no manuscript in the world that has ever been found that reads like the

TR. Nowhere. Or the Nessie Holland, or the Tyndale House, or whatever else, because they're all eclectic texts.

They've all been edited, and you're all making decisions just as Erasmus did, and Stephanos did, and Beza did.

They're making textual decisions. So TR -onlyism tries to get away from making textual decisions by simply enshrining somebody's previous textual decisions as the final word.

That's the problem with it. And so I just always find it somewhat humorous when

I see someone whip out that TR. This is it. It's like, well, actually that's

Scrivener's interpretation of the King James translator's decisions based upon all these different Greek manuscripts,

Greek printed editions you've never looked at. And you're just accepting it as the authority. And if that makes you feel good, okay, fine, but there you go.

Yes. Yep. What else would you have? I mean, outside of that, you'd have to be either

Beza. It could be the 1633 Elsevier Brothers edition. That could be used, but today the default is

Scrivener. Yeah. Yep. One more. Yes, sir. You get to be.

Okay. Oh, goodness.

That's not on our subject tonight. What was your question? I was wondering, you're a translator, and do you feel a kinship with the people, with the scribes, and where do you see yourself in all of this?

How did you become a missionary? This all started for me not only when

I met with Elders Reed and Reese, the two more missionaries that I met with about six weeks after I got married, and that ended up leading to Alpha Omega Ministries and everything else that's come since then.

But I would say it really happened in Fleming Classroom Building on the campus of Grand Canyon College back then.

Fleming's gone. I'm sure it's been buried by about an eight -story building. But I was in first -year

Greek, and it was in the first week or so of class, and we had our

United Bible Society's text, the red one, not this one, but the red one, and I had it open, and I'm looking down at the bottom of the page, and I said,

Dr. Baird, what are these notes down at the bottom of the page? And he said, that's where the manuscripts disagree with one another.

And that's when I knew I need to know what this is all about. Now, Dr.

Baird, who became, I became his colleague in later years as we were both teaching for Golden Gate. I had him for seven years, poor man.

He had hair when he started, and he really didn't by the time he got done. But he told me years later, he said, oh, by third year, you were so far beyond me on textual critical stuff that I just had to keep smiling, just hope he didn't find out.

Because I immediately, as soon as I saw that, knew I have to know this. I have to be able, and so I'll just tell you a story, and we'll wrap up with that.

Years and years ago, we would go up to the General Conference, the

Mormon Church. We went for like 18 years in a row, and I had just gotten to go again in October of 2019, and now the

Mormons are in hiding. They don't do in -person stuff anymore at all. It's amazing what's happened there.

But anyways, we'd go up there, and a number of times I would go on radio stations in Salt Lake City and talk about Mormonism with Mormon hosts and Mormon professors in the room with me, with Mormon callers.

Okay, I mean, why not if you got the opportunity to do it? And so I was on a radio program, and I was on for,

I was on two radio programs, two two -hour radio programs, so four hours in a row. I was younger back then. You could do things like that, and as I was leaving my spacious hotel room to go there at Motel 6,

I was, I had a book bag. You know, I looked like a Jehovah's Witness, and I had a book bag, and I was looking at what books to put in my book bag, and I had this beautiful,

I think it was, I think it got stolen from me, had this beautiful red leather -bound

Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the Hebrew Old Testament, and I almost didn't put it in because I really didn't have room for it, but I decided to go ahead and cram it in there.

I didn't really think there'd be much, well, the last half hour, so I've been on for three and a half hours, this guy calls in, what did he call himself again?

Anyway, he just uses a first name. I found out later it was one of BYU's primary professors of apologetics, and he called in, and he throws out this argument from Deuteronomy 32 that the

Mosaic Law actually tells you that there's more than one God, as Mormonism teaches, and so I, now this is before,

I've got Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia right here, now, okay, I've got it on this, I've got it on that, this was way before that, and so I grabbed that Hebrew text out, and I whipped open

Deuteronomy 32, and down there at the bottom of the page are your textual notes, and I was able to review him, because I could read the textual notes at the bottom of the page.

Now, sadly, the vast majority of our seminary graduates, that's not something that they're taught to do anymore, that's not considered to be the most important thing.

In fact, sadly, in many seminaries today, you can fulfill your Hebrew requirement by taking a

Jan term class, that's 13 days. Now, unless you are a rain man, you don't learn

Hebrew in 13 days. What you're doing then is, you're learning to use a program like this, that's all.

So, that's where we are in a lot of education in the U .S. today, but that's the point, the ability to use those things, there was a fulfillment of what

I felt that day in class, I need to know this stuff, and so that was sort of what started all of that stuff, and most people involved in textual criticism really try to stay as far away from apologetics as possible, so that they can pretend to be completely unbiased.

I think as many people as possible should know about this stuff, and you may disagree with me tonight after CBGM, but I think

I have the ability to make understandable some really difficult things for people who don't necessarily have a real background in it, and so that's what

I try to do. So, if that answers that question. I'm not technically a translator,

I was a critical consultant on the New American Standard Bible for a while, so there's something along that lines, but I've just taught

Greek and textual criticism for years, and yeah, so I just do a lot of other stuff, a lot of stuff that they wouldn't want to do.

A lot of scholars just don't want to get their hands dirty, they don't want to get out there and wrestle with tough stuff, and I do, so there you go.

All right, hopefully that has been helpful to you, encouraging to you, give you some foundation, give you some directions to be thinking, there's obviously much more to do, people ask me what book should

I read, well, you know, my King James only controversy covers a lot of that stuff, but it's somewhat dated, I'll be honest, I wrote it in 1994, we updated it in 2004, so it's not exactly completely irrelevant any longer, but the fact of the matter is, especially

CBGM stuff, there's only one book out on it right now, that's how new it is, and I'd recommend it to you,

Peter Gurry, and forget the other guy, Peter Gurry teaches at Phoenix Seminary, and he's younger than my son, which makes me really feel old, but anyways, he's written a good introduction to it, it's challenging, even on the introductory level, it is challenging stuff, but it's out there if you want to take a look at it, and we've certainly done a number of debates on these things, so while they're still on YouTube, we've mirrored all of our material on Odyssey now, we figured that'll be the last to go, once they delete everything else that we've done, but that information is available to you as well, and I know that we did this, what, five years ago,

Van, something along those lines, five, six, when was it? 2015, okay, so we covered some things there that I didn't cover this time, and I certainly covered a lot of things this time that I didn't cover that time, so, you know, they might complement each other, so hopefully that'll be useful to you, and thank you very much for your attention, you have been very, very, very good group to listen very carefully,

I didn't hear any snoring whatsoever, thank you very much for that, that's very helpful, let's close our time with a word of prayer.

Our Grace, Heavenly Father, we do thank you for the freedom that we still have to be able to discuss these things, we always thank you for that freedom, but especially now we do so with with much more appreciation in our hearts, and so we would ask that you would make us good students of your word, we do want to be able to communicate these truths to others, especially to those whose faiths are being challenged by half -truths and errors in regards to the history of how you have preserved your word for us, we do thank you for your word, we ask that you would always drive us into it, deepen our faith in you and your promises, we pray in Christ's name, amen.