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 me all the time but doesn't know that he's calling me all the time.

So I just sort of ignore them and go, you know, 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 through 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 yea big. And 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 Kamiohanium, 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 King James Version that is not in the NASB, ESV, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 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 in 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 diglot, 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 from the 16th century. 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. 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. 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, and this drives King James onlyists 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 Comma Iohannium, 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, 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 they 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. 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. Unlikely. Hey, I've seen you move from an overhead projector to what we've got now. So there's a chance.

You never, never know. Not in your lifetime. 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. I'm not sure. Have some nice, pretty Greek up there or something like that. All right. So this is, 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, 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 years. So we are talking about newfangled technology, and a lot of people don't like newfangled technology, let's just be honest.

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 a 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 or last evening, what we used to do is we used to create families of manuscripts based upon about 70 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 used 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 Nesiallon 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 Nesiallon 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 the variants listed there, and the manuscripts that say Lord, and the manuscripts that say Jesus, but all the Greek New Testaments had taken Lord as the reading at that point, until the Nesiallon 28th edition puts Jesus in the text, and now the ESV's 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. Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch.

Ich habe eine kleine Wortschatz, ich habe keine Leute zu Hause mitzusprechen. But 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 that 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 a leading textual critical scholar would say, I would say there's less than one half percent disagreement, and so on and so forth. But it was just a guess. 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 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. 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 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, Lord delivered a people out of Egypt. 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's 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 the 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? Gnomena Sacra.

They're both Gnomena 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'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, 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. Another fascinating one is 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 of 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 that, 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 of 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 and 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 Yellen 26th edition, Ness Yellen 27th edition, but what happens when Ness Yellen 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, that I don't have to tell my people about it when I'm preaching.

And it's just, 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.