Scripture, Apologetics and Islam Part 1

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Well, it is an honor to be with you. I'm not going to do any of the Australian accents, anything like that.
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This is my third time here, so I'm a veteran now. Except I will mention that I was on a train yesterday.
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We rode out. I rode a bike out with Brother Stephen, who's hiding around here someplace, to Wollongong.
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It was a little bit of a trek. And we took the train back. And while we were riding back, some of the gentlemen started talking around us.
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And I kept looking over at Stephen. And he was sort of smiling at me, because I hadn't a clue what they were saying.
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It was just, I studied a number of languages.
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That was not one of them. And in most civilized languages, there are consonants and vowels.
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And this was just a, I don't know. I don't know.
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But it is interesting. And thankfully, most of the time, someone takes some mercy upon me and translates for me.
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And I appreciate that. But here I thought we all spoke English. What a silly thing.
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We have a lot to cover. And we've already gotten a very good start. And I appreciate that. Jeff and I talked.
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And I realized that there was going to be a lot of overlap, depending upon how we approached our subjects.
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And so I know what you have on the handout, or whatever it is you've been given, or up on the walls, has me doing scripture and apologetics, engaging atheism, and engaging
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Islam. Now, for only an hour's period of time with each one of those, and given how often
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I knew, in his presentations, Jeff would be talking about issues relevant to atheism.
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We talked it through. And I'm going to change things around a little bit. We are going to do scripture and apologetics.
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We are going to do engaging Islam. But we're going to do it all as one presentation, and do it in three parts, basically.
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So it'll be somewhat of an unusual approach, but hopefully one that will be memorable, and one that you will be able to find benefit in.
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Now, I'm going to start off in a way that will probably scare some of you, and make you think that you're not going to get anything out of anything
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I have to say. And you'll just be thankful when Jeff gets back up, so you'll be able to understand something that's being said.
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But hang with me for a little while. There are some very odd people. I have noticed a number of you here, who
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I recognize listen to a program called The Dividing Line once in a while. And if you do that, then you're actually accustomed to some of these things.
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If not, then just be patient, and I will make application.
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You do not have to read ancient Greek to be able to benefit from what I'm going to be saying.
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But it is good to take a look at some of these things. On the screen behind me, it's a little bit difficult to see with the sun coming through these windows right over here.
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But you see a portion of a page of an ancient biblical manuscript.
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This is P45, I'm going to be showing you some other manuscripts later on. But this is a page from P45.
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I've begun an unusual sermon series at my home church. This is in fact the text that we began with.
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P45 is a Gospels and Acts manuscript from somewhere between 180 and 220
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AD. And it contains today fragments of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts.
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As you can see, this is a fairly decently preserved page. I mean, obviously there's a good bit missing there.
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But in comparison to some of the pages, this is one of the better pages.
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It was originally about 220 pages long. We don't have anywhere near that available to us today.
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That's easily understood. It's made out of papyrus, and papyrus is a rather brittle substance, and it's about 1 ,800 years old.
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And as I've said many times to audiences, let's see how you look 1 ,800 years from now. Given that this particular text is from the
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Gospel of John. This is John chapter 10. What we're doing in the sermon series is, I've never heard of a sermon series like this before.
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Maybe it's just because they were all major flops, and that's why I never heard of them before. But what
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I'm doing is, if the current, if P45 contains a chapter in, say, here's
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John chapter 10, then we're gonna preach through John chapter 10, John chapter 11, we're gonna preach the section of Acts that is available,
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Matthew, Mark, Luke. If it contains any portion of a chapter, then we're gonna preach through that particular chapter using what in God's providence remains of this ancient manuscript.
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Now, why would I be showing you an ancient manuscript? Especially, this is the
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Good Shepherd passage from John chapter 10. In fact, I'll blow a little section up here.
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This is, and I forgot to grab my laser. Oh, wait a minute. I'm really surprised they allowed me into the country with this.
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This is probably illegal, and I'll probably get kicked out or something if I can find it in here anywhere. Yes, he hid behind, ah, there we go.
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Aha. Are you allowed to have these? I hope so. I'm seeing no heads going, oh, yeah.
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Everybody else is going, what's a laser? I don't know. But you can actually see concerning the sheep right here.
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You know, that's the section talking about the hireling runs away because he doesn't really have any concerns concerning the sheep.
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But this is the section, for example, I know the Father, the Father knows me.
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You have the entire beautiful section here in John chapter 10 concerning Jesus laying down his life for the sheep, that he has this authority, and that he has a special relationship with the
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Father, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. This is a theme that is woven throughout the text of the
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Gospel of John that starts right at the beginning. At the very beginning, what is the emphasis of John 1 .1?
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In the beginning was the word, word was with God, and the word was as to his nature deity, and then at the end of the prologue, verse 18, no one is seeing
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God at any time. The monogamist theos, the unique God who is in the bosom or at the very heart of the
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Father, he has revealed him, he has explained him, he has exegeted him. And so through the
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Gospel of John, you have this emphasis upon the reality that we can have true knowledge of who the
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Father is because the Son is the perfect representation of the
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Father. He doesn't just do a good job at sort of approximating in telling us about the
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Father, because he is the incarnate logos, because he is the word made flesh, then he is an absolutely reliable representation of the
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Father in the similar words to the book of Hebrews in chapter one, where it says that he is the express image of his being, of his person, and so the fact that Jesus is a reliable revelation of who the
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Father is is central to the Gospel of John and to the message of the
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New Testament. Now, what would this have to do with Scripture in apologetics? Well, it's fairly simple.
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You just heard Brother Jeff talking about the fact that we are to recognize that God has spoken and that God's speaking admits of no higher epistemological authority.
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If we keep running off to external sources to prove the validity of what
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Scripture says, those external sources have to have a greater reliability or greater authority than Scripture itself, and so those become our ultimate authorities, but we recognize that when we make that kind of claim, when
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Jesus makes the amazing claim that Jeff referred to in the
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Sermon on the Mount, in the sand and the rock, and my words will abide forever, and that he is the standard of all these things, we recognize on one level that we're dealing with ultimate authorities here, and that these ultimate authorities are being placed against human authorities that can never stack up against these things because God is not speaking to those things.
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They're just man's opinions or a consensus of certain scholars at a certain given time in history or whatever else it might be, and so Jeff is focusing upon the necessary reality of the fact that when we engage in how we know things, when we engage in dealing with worldviews, there needs to be a certain word from God.
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All those things are vitally important, and when we hear Jesus saying those things, when we hear Jesus making those amazing statements, they are based upon the overall biblical teaching about who
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Jesus Christ truly is. Now, there are many, obviously, today who present a much lower
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Jesus, a Jesus who is nothing more than Gandhi or Buddha or Muhammad, just a religious teacher.
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He wasn't truly God in human flesh, and if you don't believe that God has spoken, if you do not have a consistent word from God that is unchanging from generation to generation, there really isn't any reason to believe in Christianity.
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I mean, let's be honest with ourselves. The only reason to be a Trinitarian is because you believe God has spoken, the scriptures are true, and you're trying to believe everything that the scripture teaches.
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Once you abandon that foundation, there's no reason to be a Trinitarian. There's no reason to believe in the providence of God and the sovereignty of God and salvation or in the meaning of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and atonement and the idea the
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Son has entered into the presence of the Father and He's seated at the right hand of the Father in our place, and all those things are based upon believing that we have a revelation from God.
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Once you abandon that, well, what happens historically when denominations abandon these things?
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It's not very long before all the theology falls apart as well, and you have
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Wiccan priestesses leading the prayers in some service someplace. And you might say, that's never happened.
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Oh yeah, it happens, sadly, all the time. And so who Jesus is is vital, and here we have in the words of an ancient scribe a testimony concerning Jesus, and once again, think about what
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Jesus says. He speaks of the relationship He has with the Father. The Father knows me, and I know the
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Father. This is an intimate relationship that is spoken of here, and He talks about how the Father loves
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Him because He gives His life and He takes up His life again in behalf of the sheep.
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You have this tremendous message of who Jesus is, and here it's being written down.
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Basically, within 100 years of when John wrote his gospel, and this was a period of time where we don't know what the context of this particular scribe was.
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There was intermittent persecution from the time of Nero onward till about at most 30 to 50 years after the writing of this manuscript, and then around 250, you have consistent empire -wide persecution all the way through until the peace of the church in AD 313, and it's a very severe persecution, and there is destruction of many copies of the
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Christian scriptures during that time period, and obviously, this would be a manuscript that survived that period of persecution where Roman soldiers were seeking to destroy the
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New Testament, and it racked the church. The persecution racked the church because there would be people who would either give up the scriptures or give up other books to the
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Roman authorities, and then when the persecution would cease, there was tremendous controversy as to whether they'd ever be allowed back into the church because they had given up these things.
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They were considered traitors by many people, and so this was a difficult time period, and we don't know, did this scribe risk his life to make this copy, or was this a relatively peaceful period of time in where he was?
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We just simply don't have that kind of information to be able to answer those kinds of questions, but what we do know is within a century after the writing of the
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Gospel of John, and even a little bit longer, given that we would date
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Matthew, Mark, and Luke earlier than that, probably looking at Luke in the early 60s,
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Acts in the early 60s, this is a very, very early manuscript, and here you have someone who wants to possess these things, and he's communicating these things to us in this manuscript, and so yes, we find the deity of Christ, we find the necessary theological ramifications, but I think we all know where the attacks are focused today.
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Yes, they are very much focused upon the things that Jeff is gonna be talking about in epistemology and the understanding of those things, but there is a more basic and fundamental attack.
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Many of you would be able to reason with people, given your starting place in the revelation of God in Scripture, and be able to say, well, wait a minute, if Jesus rises from the dead, if Jesus is the creator of all things, then his words have to have ultimate authority, and they have to be normative for us, and all these things, and all of that is very true, but you and I both know that there is a much more basic challenge being launched against our faith today.
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It was a challenge that was literally not a part of the thinking of my grandparents, or my great -grandparents' generation.
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They never had to consider these things, they never had to think about these things, and really, it has been the advent of the internet that has created such a wide dissemination of this form of attack upon the
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Christian faith, and unfortunately, the vast majority of believing
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Christians find themselves extremely unprepared to deal with this fundamental attack against their faith, and to what do
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I refer? Well, this is one of the earliest manuscripts we have of the
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New Testament. What if the New Testament had been changed before this was written?
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How do you know? Jeff quoted many passages of scripture, but how does he, and how do you know?
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Not only the question of, well, how do you know that God has spoken, how do you know that that's what God says, rather than what's found in the
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Quran, or what's found in the Book of Mormon, or the Bhagavad Gita, or whatever else, the Upanishads, whatever, how do you know that's another area of discussion?
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But today, the fundamental element of skepticism and disbelief that is being communicated in most of our universities, and being taught to most of our young people, is a hyper -skepticism as to whether we can even know that this is, in fact, what
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John wrote. We can talk about the inspiration of the Holy Spirit all we want. We can talk about the apostles being the eyewitnesses of the events of Jesus' life all we want, but what if the scriptures were changed even after the apostles originally wrote them?
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How do you know that what you have in your Bible is what Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul actually wrote down to begin with?
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This is the attack that is being launched, that is very obviously represented by people like Bart Ehrman, and it's my experience that many of the other atheists who are most commonly speaking out there are extremely ignorant in this area.
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They recognize they would have to learn biblical languages and they have to learn stuff about the transmission of handwritten texts and things like that, and so they don't even go there.
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They just simply repeat what they think Bart Ehrman has said, it's amazing. I think
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Ehrman does this purposefully in some ways, but it's amazing how often atheists will actually go far beyond anything
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Ehrman would ever actually affirm himself, because they just want to grab hold of the most skeptical position possible and then very glibly say to you, well, scholars have proven, and of course, every single one of you who has attempted to open your mouth in defense of the
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Christian faith have run into the scholars have proven argument. Very rarely are those scholars named, very rarely are their actual words repeated, but the mindset in so many of those to whom we would be speaking today is that scholars have demonstrated not only fundamental errors in the
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Bible, but they have demonstrated fundamentally that we can never really know what the
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Bible originally said. We only have copies of copies of copies of copies, and therefore, we can't really know.
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Now, there is a presuppositional argument behind that that most people are not even aware of, and that is what they're actually positively asserting is there have been changes, and the original message of the
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Bible was different than what it is today, because if it was the same message, then the argument would pretty much be irrelevant, and that's where they somewhat depart from a skeptic such as Bart Ehrman, because Bart Ehrman would be one of the first people to say, well,
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I even heard him say this. He was on an atheist webcast, and if you haven't heard of Bart Ehrman, he is an apostate.
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He was Bruce Metzger's last doctoral student at Princeton, and he has left the faith.
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He calls himself a happy agnostic. Having met him, I'm not really sure about the happy part, but he is an agnostic, and he is really the leading
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English -speaking critic of the New Testament today, and Bart Ehrman was on an atheist webcast, and the atheist was just, oh, he was giddy.
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He was just so excited to have somebody on to blast away at those Christians and prove that the
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Bible's been corrupted and all the rest of these things, and so he was so giddy, he evidently really wasn't listening to what
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Dr. Ehrman was actually saying, because he said, well, you know, if there's been all these changes, then
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Dr. Ehrman, maybe you could speculate for us. What do you think the New Testament was originally about?
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Before all the changes, what do you think it was actually talking about? And there's this sort of uncomfortable pause as Ehrman is thinking, and he's like, well, it was about Jesus and his disciples and dying on the cross of Calvary and stuff like that, and you could just, it was like the pin in the balloon.
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Psssh, because you could just hear the atheist like, oh, really?
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He wanted to hear something about space aliens or the Illuminati or, you know, that would have fit, you know, write a book, make money, do something like that, but Ehrman recognizes that the areas where there is any real question are extremely tiny, even from his own perspective, and to prove that there was once a completely different message, like the
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New Agers, you know, that Jesus was a New Age guru and he was teaching reincarnation and all that kind of stuff, he recognizes that's simply impossible, that if the
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New Testament had had any other form that it has today, that it would have left evidence in history of that differing message, but it has not, and he recognizes what that means.
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And so what I want to try to do in the first half here is to try to ground you and to immunize you, in essence, to hyperskepticism.
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You know how immunization works. We're gonna get a shot, in essence, of the truth about how we got the
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New Testament. Would say, well, it's simply not, is this cutting out on us there?
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Every once in a while, it's just sort of, I all of a sudden feel like I'm all alone up here. I can move the pack or something if it's in a wrong spot, but to immunize you against that hyperskepticism, to give you some type of a grounding.
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Now, by the way, if any of you are homeschooling parents or something like that, or you're just trying to educate your children and things like that, this is something you've gotta be able to communicate to them, whatever your situation is.
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This would be something that is a regular part of the education within the church, but the fact of the matter is, a lot of our ministers are uncomfortable with this particular area.
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A lot of our schools are far more focused upon leadership training classes than they are making sure that we can communicate with clarity how it is we got the
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New Testament. And even if you had something like the Australian Standard Version, which
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I have not seen, even if you use the ESV, and I'm really, like I said, those guys on the train, if that was
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English, I don't speak it, okay? So, if you use the ESV or something like that, you've noticed those little notes at the bottom of the page.
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You've seen those little, some manuscripts say this, some manuscripts say that, some of the earliest manuscripts do not contain this text, so on and so forth.
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We can't, in our day, we can no longer allow that to be the farthest we have gone in thinking about this subject.
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We just can't do it any longer. If we're going to engage in apologetics, if we're going to engage in defense of faith, then we have to understand these things.
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We have to have a fundamental basic understanding of how we got the text that we have today.
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Now, of course, few today understand the history of ancient documents. If you were fortunate as I was to be raised in the church, maybe the
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Bible has always had thumb indexing and gold on the edges of the pages and a nice calfskin cover or something like that.
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That's not how the Bible came to us and sometimes it can be extremely uncomfortable to some people to be reminded of the historical process by which the scriptures came into our possession.
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For me, I think it's tremendously exciting to realize that God has always been working with his people.
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I think it's tremendously exciting to realize that he has been involved in this messy thing called human history and that the word of God was spoken into that context.
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I think it's a wonderful thing to think about the scribe of P45 and to think of someone long ago writing these words down.
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And I possess the same words today. And it makes me wonder what he thought of the teaching of Jesus about being the good shepherd and laying down his life for his sheep and then going on to tell the
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Jews, you're not of my sheep and what all that stuff means. And then going on to say, I am the father, we are one.
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And everything takes place there in John chapter 10. I sort of wonder what he was thinking as he wrote those words down.
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But I also wonder how many of our own people, if they had to handwrite their own copy of the scriptures, would have much of the
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New Testament at all. We can't get folks to show up on time for church. Can you imagine trying to get them to write out the
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New Testament? It'd be a pretty tough trick to do. These were people who loved the scriptures and they wanted to have the scriptures and possess the scriptures.
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And it took a little bit more than just going down to a local bookshop and that or just tapping on an app on your phone to get the scriptures.
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We have a great blessing today. The process of transmission in antiquity is vastly different than today, vastly different.
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And one of the problems is hyper skepticism is based upon the ignorance that people have of how anything was transmitted in the ancient world in comparison today.
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So many of us are so accustomed to the technological wonders that we have today.
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I remember the first time I saw a digital scanner. Wow, that was, and the first time
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I ever used OCR. Oh man, that was absolutely incredible.
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Do you realize how completely outside the experience of the vast majority of the human family that has ever lived anything like that would be?
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And in fact, photocopying has existed my entire life. It was invented in 1949.
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Some of you are going, oh, you're actually younger than that. Wow, I didn't think so. You look much older than that, so thanks.
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It was invented in 1949. Some of you who are as old as I am realize that it may have been invented in 1949, but it was not perfected in 1949.
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Maybe some of you took some tests in high school that had been photocopied on a photocopier that really wasn't in the greatest condition in the world, and so there was still a possibility of error in copying even once a photocopier came into existence.
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But for the vast majority of human history to communicate the written word was almost magical.
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The number of people in a given society that would even be literate, I think a lot of the modern estimations of how many people in societies were literate are rather low, and we're seeing evidence of that as we're starting to see more and more.
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For example, just recently they discovered a number of ancient receipts, almost like grocery receipts, in the
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Middle East that really seemed to indicate that a larger portion of the society was literate than we had guessed, and certainly amongst the
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Jews. There would be a reason for literacy because the Jews have always been a people of the book.
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The reading of scripture would be an important thing. But still, the availability of written material to us today is so far beyond anything that existed in the past.
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Yes, there were libraries in the past, and they were filled with handwritten books, but in comparison to what we have today, the ease with which we are able to reproduce things, we live in a very, very, very unusual time.
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Hand copying was the only way to produce documents for distribution until relatively recent times, and even with the invention of printing, you've gotta realize, you had to typeset the printing, and hence there was the very same level of the possibility of error in the individual placing of letters into a block to create the opportunity of printing, as it was invented in the
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West anyways. It had already existed in the East before that. You could make numerous errors in the typesetting of a book as well, and so when we use modernistic standards to attempt to judge what has taken place in the past, we're demonstrating we really don't understand history, and we really don't understand the situation that people lived in before.
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Every document produced prior to printing, and even after printing, has been, quote, corrupted, end quote, in its transmission.
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Well, what do I mean by corrupted? Normally, when that terminology is used today, corruption means that something is no longer useful.
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I've been doing electronic stuff from back when computers were very, very slow, and very, very expensive, and once we even started doing transmission of files over electronic medium, you had to have these methodologies of, you know, the checksum methodology to make sure the file was not corrupted, and if it was corrupted, it would be useless.
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Even if it was a small amount of corruption, if it was an archive file or something like that, the data would be lost, and you'd have to try sending it again.
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Well, when we hear that term corrupted, and we think of the New Testament or any other book of antiquity being corrupted, it communicates to our minds the idea of corruption without the possibility of understanding what the original was.
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That's not what we're saying. But the reality is, any type of handwritten document, any type of thing where mankind is involved in doing something that requires the consistent application of constant attention, that's gonna result in error, because there's some of you who
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I just stopped speaking, tuned back into what I was saying because your attention was gone. You had been distracted by something.
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Some of you are parents. You've got little children. You're taking care of them. Some of you are Facebooking something. Someone just got a text message somewhere probably, and it's very easy for our attention to be distracted.
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Well, it's not just electronic things that do that. That is simply the reality of the human mind.
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So corruption means any variation or alteration of the text, no matter how minor. If you skip the word and, if you misspell the word
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John, if any type of alteration between either what you're copying because in the ancient days, generally the way of transmission was you would have a scribe who was copying from an exemplar, an example, an original in front of him.
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Could be copying from multiple ones. What if you had two or three copies of the Gospel of John? Now the person might be comparing those two or three copies, and what if there's a variation between them?
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Then he has to be making textual decisions of himself, but when you are copying something that is written down, your eye has to go from what you're writing to what you're copying back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
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And that can create, especially over many hours, opportunities of messing things up.
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We especially would probably be much worse at that than ancient man was. Because we have the attention span of a, oh, something, oh, oh, oh, what's that over there?
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Oh, I better check Facebook. I haven't checked Facebook in 37 seconds. Who knows, someone may have liked something
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I said. I don't know. We have this very, very short attention span. And ancient man was actually, ancient man in previous generations was actually better at these types of things than we are.
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But you would copy by sight, or the other way was in a scriptorium where you would have a person standing up front who is reading the text, and then you would have multiple scribes who are writing down what he is dictating to them.
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And so there you wouldn't have issues of sight errors, but you'd then have issues of what?
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Hearing errors. What if the scribe's reading it too quickly?
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The reader's reading it too quickly, the scribe's moving too slowly? What if you have an
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American scribe and an Aussie reader? That would result in hyper -skepticism, and a good reason for hyper -skepticism, because we would have no earthly idea what the original really originally was.
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Over and over again, the word was clear, C -L -E -A -R, and the
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Aussie read it as clea, and the poor American is trying to figure out what a clea is.
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What is a clea? I don't know. Basically, the letter R would disappear from the transcription, because it disappears from the language.
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Anyway, so there are different ways in which this transmission would take place, and hence you have different kinds of corruption that has come in.
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Now, we have over 5 ,700 cataloged Greek manuscripts of the
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New Testament comprising ancient papyri containing only a few lines of text to complete manuscripts from the 15th century and even after that.
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And so, some are very small. Some are just but fragments. Obviously, the closer you get to the modern period, the more full those manuscripts become until, obviously, you start getting entire copies of the
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New Testament. Many of the early papyri collections were only of the Gospels or of Paul or something along those lines.
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They weren't meant to be an entire New Testament. The last number I saw was 5 ,717, but the number changes over time with the, not only with the discovery of new manuscripts, but also with discovery of the fact that sometimes we'll have a part of a manuscript in one library, and we find out through comparison that we have a portion of the same manuscript in another library that had been cataloged as two different manuscripts.
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So, the number can go up and down. But we have about 5 ,700 of these, and including ancient translations such as Latin, Coptic, Sahitic, Boheric, et cetera, et cetera, there are more than 24 ,000 manuscripts of the
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New Testament known to us today. Now, no ancient work comes close to the
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New Testament with reference to the number of witnesses and the number of early witnesses. No ancient work. By the way, the
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Quran is not a work of antiquity. It is a medieval work. Generally, the medieval period starts anywhere from 500 onward.
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It's about 632 by even Islamic understanding as to its origination.
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And so, it's more of a medieval work than it is an ancient work. But there were obviously a number of works of literature written around the time of the
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New Testament, both by Greek and Latin authors. You have the
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Greek historians, you have the Latin historians like Suetonius and Pliny and Tacitus and people like that.
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And so, there were works that were written at that period of time. No work of antiquity comes even close to the
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New Testament, not only in the number of witnesses that we have and the antiquity of those witnesses, but in the quality of those witnesses.
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And so, if the local university professor, who is expressing great skepticism because he read a
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Bart Ehrman book, expressing great skepticism about the text of New Testament were to be consistent, then he would likewise have to express tremendous skepticism about basically the antiquity of everything in the ancient world.
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He'd have to wonder about Suetonius and Tacitus and Pliny and the Greek historians and everything else because in comparison to what we have for the
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New Testament, we have far less documentation that was written much farther. The first copies we have come many, many more centuries after the originals.
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And so, there should be great skepticism expressed in that way. It almost never is. There are very few who are consistent on this particular issue.
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Now, the more manuscript witnesses one has, the more variance one will have. This is where people start getting a little bit confused.
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And when you hear the skeptics saying, well, there are so many hundreds of thousands of variants in the
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New Testament manuscripts, that can sound very foreboding to the believer who has not thought through how it is you got the
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New Testament that is in your hand this day. If you only have one witness, you will have no textual variance, right?
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How could you have a textual variant? Because a textual variance where there is a difference between two manuscripts, and if you only have one manuscript, that's all you got.
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And so, if you only have one manuscript, there's a lot of folks that wish that was the way it was. That there was the one special preserved manuscript kept up on the mountaintop.
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And if you really wanted to know what it meant, you had to climb up to the mountaintop, and there would be the bearded monk that is protecting it, and it's got the candles around it, and Indiana Jones has been there many times, or whatever.
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And that way, there would be no footnotes at the bottom of your page. And there would be no questions about textual variance.
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And there wouldn't be any argumentation at all, would there? But how much confidence would you really have that we possessed exactly what was given by God through the apostles of the
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Lord Jesus Christ? Because you see, you weren't there the whole time on that mountaintop.
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You don't know what's been going on there. And if you only have one copy, whoever made that copy had better have gotten it right, because you've got no way to check them.
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If they skipped something, it's gone. There's no way to ever find out. And if they edited something, and they're the only ones up on the mountaintop, again, no way to find out.
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And so, for people who would say, I just wish it was so much easier than this.
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Well, you know what? You look at the history of Israel, you look at the history of the early church, God's always been dealing with us messy humans.
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I'm not sure why you think that things should be less messy than this situation we find ourselves in.
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I wish 1 Corinthians didn't have to deal with some of the stuff 1 Corinthians deals with, but it does, because God deals with us.
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And that's how he's given us his word. So, if you only have one witness, you'll have no textual variance, but you will likewise have little bases upon which to believe you have the original text.
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The more witnesses you have, the confidence you have that you possess, the more witnesses you have, the greater the confidence you have that you possess the original text.
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So, if I have a manuscript of John from Caesarea, from Africa, from Italy, from France, from, well,
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Gaul back then, from all over the Mediterranean region, if I recognize that what has happened is that the
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New Testament exploded across the known world, it was freely copied, and hence you have a wide variety of sources and a wide number of manuscripts, and they all say the same thing, not down to every single spelling of a word or the textual variance that we have, but they're very clearly all copies of the exact same thing, then
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I can have tremendous confidence because if what I had, instead of what we have in P45 or P66 or P75, which are all gospel manuscripts from around the same time period, if what we have is we have
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P45, which has the story of the good shepherd, and then in P66, we have something called the
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Gospel of John but there's nothing about a good shepherd, but there is in the place something about a good king, and then
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P75 has a story actually about an eagle. Now you'd have a problem.
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If in about the same place in the same book, you have very, very different narratives and very, very different stories, so you have all these different streams of transmission with all these differences between them and there's a fundamental difference, you wouldn't know what the original said.
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Now you've got a problem because obviously there has been tremendous amount of editing and changing and maybe even multiple originals and there would be tremendous doubt as to what exists, but anyone who knows the manuscripts knows that that's not what we have.
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If you take, when scholars examine the manuscripts of the
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New Testament, we are able to identify what are called families because basically if you have, if you put together a set of variants and when one manuscript agrees about 75 % of the time with other manuscripts in these particular variants, then they are grouped together as a family or a subfamily, something along those lines.
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70 to 75 % agreement, not on the text because there's 98 % agreement always on the text, but in these variants, then you put them together.
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And on the two ends of the spectrum, you'll have what's called the Alexandrian text and on the other side, the
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Byzantine text. Most scholars, not all, we can get into the details, but most scholars believe the
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Alexandrian text is the earliest and the Byzantine text is a later text because it's a longer text, it's a little bit bigger.
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The tendency is in the Byzantine manuscripts, if the Alexandrian says
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Jesus, the Byzantine will frequently say the Lord Jesus. And if this says the Lord Jesus, then the
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Byzantine will say the Lord Jesus Christ. There's an expansion of piety that is found in the
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Byzantine manuscripts. But if you take those two, if you take the most
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Alexandrian text and the most Byzantine text of the Gospel of John, guess what? They say the same thing.
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If you apply the same hermeneutics, the same method of interpretation to the most
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Byzantine manuscript and the most Alexandrian manuscript, you are going to have the exact same
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Christian faith as a result. They're not different stories. You don't have in the
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Alexandrian manuscripts reincarnation, in the Byzantine manuscripts, you have Orthodox Christianity.
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That just simply isn't the case. And so the reality is this hyper -skepticism is only something that works on people who don't have any knowledge of what the
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New Testament manuscripts actually say. What that means is there was one
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Gospel of John. Now there are liberal Christian scholars that write entire commentaries about the hypothetical redactions of the
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Gospel of John before it was finally published. As if somehow you can dig into the mind of John and say, well, you know, it looks like he inserted chapters 14 and 15 in after he'd already written 13 and 16.
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This is a good way to get published, but it's also a claim to have knowledge that no one could possibly have today.
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It's all theoretical, and then someone comes along and sets up another theory, and then they get published, and so on and so forth, that's sort of how it works.
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But the reality is that when you look at the manuscripts that we have today, they do not tell us of multiple versions of Mark, or Luke, or John, and multiple stories of Jesus, or Jesus and a brother named so -and -so, or anything like this whatsoever, which we hear about every
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Easter and every Christmas from some crackpot someplace who comes up with some new wild -eyed theory just to sell a few e -books at a certain time of the year.
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Instead, we have so many manuscripts from so many different places that we have tremendous confidence that we possess the original text.
45:41
Now, taking the most liberal estimate, we have about 400 ,000 variants in the manuscript tradition of the
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New Testament. That sounds like a very huge number, and still you start thinking about what it actually means.
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There's about 138 ,000, a little bit over 138 ,000 words in the current standard
46:03
Greek New Testament called the Nessioland 28th edition. So 138 ,000 words, it sounds like what you're saying is you have three options for every word because there's 400 ,000 variants.
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That's not the case. What that is saying, once you start understanding what's being communicated, is that over, when you look at the length of the
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New Testament, the New Testament averages, the later manuscripts that contain the entirety of the
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New Testament average about 350 pages in length. And so when you start examining those variants, you discover that 99 % of these variations cannot be translated out of Greek.
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That is, they do not impact the meaning of the text, the movable new, for example. Those of you who have studied
46:52
Greek know that, well, and it's the same case in English, at least in most parts of the world, where you're supposed to put an
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N between two vowels. So you're not supposed to say a apple.
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You're supposed to say an apple. You're supposed to insert that in there for pronunciation's sake.
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When you're not worrying about consonants and vowels, you don't need to worry about things like that at all. So you just skip over it anyways. But the same thing is true in the
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Greek language. And it gave scribes no end of difficulty. And so there are literally thousands of variants in the
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New Testament that are related to the movable new. Now, it has absolutely no impact upon meaning at all.
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And so you can't even, you have to explain it to somebody in another language to even go there.
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So it does not have any impact upon the meaning at all. Of the remaining variants, the vast majority are simple errors of sight or hearing, depending on how the manuscript was produced.
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And so, for example, in 1 John, there's a number of variants, 1 John chapter one, when it says these things will be written so that our joy may be full or your joy may be full.
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Well, it's pretty obvious that in the ancient world, they didn't pronounce Greek the way that, well, there's modern pronunciation of Greek, which is a little bit more like the ancient world, but I was taught what's called the
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Erasmian pronunciation of Greek, where, going back to Erasmus, you actually differentiate between each of the vowels so that you can really understand what someone is saying, that things are differentiated.
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And so I would say something like haimin versus humin, which would be the difference between us and you in a certain form, or humon, haimon, so on and so forth.
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But it's pretty obvious that in the ancient world, those two are much closer together in pronunciation. And hence, you get textual variants between the two, primarily because of those manuscripts that were produced in a scriptorium where someone was reading and didn't stop and say, which one of those, which form specifically are you indicating to us?
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Particularly common was something called homoiteleuton, similar endings. And I know young people today don't do this, but some of you, did any of you ever write a high school or college paper on a typewriter?
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Wow, there's two of us, that's great, that's wonderful. Okay, now there's four of us. How many of you don't know what a typewriter is?
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That's the frightening question I have to ask. So whiteout, correction tape, any of this?
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Oh man, I'll tell you, I'm really dating myself here. But it used to be, before that thing called cut and paste, that you actually had to copy out of books when you were writing papers.
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Can you imagine having a stack of books that you want a quote from, and you have to find, no one ever designed a really workable way to hold a book open properly, by the way.
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We came up with many ingenious variations, but you'd prop your book open, and you'd actually have to sit there, and you would have to either, using a thing we called a pen and paper, either write out the quote, or if you were at, and I had an
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IBM Selectric, which I was advanced, I mean, that was pretty cool, you would sit there, and you would have to copy out of the book, which means your eye would have to go to the book, and then to what you're doing, to the book, and to what you're doing.
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And when you did it that way, there were these things called the endings of words,
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T -I -O -N, I -N -G, E -S, or mm, in Australian, and so, which all sound the same.
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And what would happen is, you would be, let's say you were typing the word education, or for you folks, where you have all these extra letters, color,
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O -U -R, you know you don't need the U, honestly, folks, honor, color, we got rid of them, it's shorter this way, we use less ink, less energy, the
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Hawaiian arts, just keep that in mind. Anyways, so you might be writing the word education, so you look back at your typewriter, education, your eye goes back, you find
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T -I -O -N, and you continue on. But here was, at times, the gut -wrenching reality, that there was a word that ended with T -I -O -N in the next line, and your eye caught that one, and inadvertently, you skipped an entire line of what you were quoting, because of Homo Etelyuton, similar endings, and you know what you got to do when that happened?
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You take the piece of paper out, you crumple it up, you throw it in the trash, you put a new one in, and start all over, that means you young folks, look at us old folks that did this, this is why you need to respect us.
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We laid the foundation of civilization with hard work for you, so that you could use cut and paste, so you've got it easy because of our suffering, so that's why you need to respect us, so keep that in mind.
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We were fighting off the dinosaurs at the same time. So anyway, this happened a number of times,
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I could give you examples, if we had more time, I could give you some glowing examples of Homo Etelyuton. The point is that when we see that happen in the manuscripts, we can go, oh, okay, let's say we have, for example,
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I normally use 1 John 3 ,1, there's an example of Homo Etelyuton in 1 John 3 ,1 in the manuscripts of the
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New Testament, and I go, you know, if we only had one manuscript of 1 John, then we would never know that this phrase had been inadvertently skipped by a later scribe.
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But since we have many manuscripts of 1 John, once we compare them, we look at it and go, oh, see, this word ends in the same ending, this word ends in the same ending, the manuscripts that are missing the intermediate part are the result of Homo Etelyuton.
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We are able to analyze the manuscripts in this way and see where the textual variants were.
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These kinds of scribal errors are common, expected in any widely transmitted document. As long as one has a robust manuscript tradition representing various geographical areas and containing early witnesses, these kinds of variations are rather easily detected.
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And we don't hide these things. It used to be I would have to hold up a critical edition of the
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Greek New Testament, like the Nessie Island 28th or the new UBS Fifth, something like that, and say, see, here, we published these, these are made available, don't even have to do that anymore.
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I can pull out my iPhone and I have an amazingly complete set of critical texts of both the
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Old and New Testament sitting there on my iPad, my iPhone, whatever else it might be, whatever device you have, as long as it is not a
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Samsung Galaxy Note 7. That creates severe textual variation when it explodes.
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I feel sorry for Samsung. Every flight I've gotten on, on this trip so far, before I got on, was the announcement, we do not allow any
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Samsung Galaxy Note 7s on this flight. It's just sort of like, oh man, the guy who got those batteries signed that contract,
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I doubt he's actually around anymore. I think he's wearing what we call cement overshoes and is at the bottom of a river somewhere because bad, bad, bad stuff.
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So anyway, anybody who wants to know about the history of the
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New Testament, wants to know what the New Testament manuscripts read, it's widely available, you don't even have to purchase these things, they're available online.
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You can go to various websites and you will find rather complete textual material available for both the
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Old and New Testament online today. We hide none of this, it is all available, and here's the problem, the enemies of the faith know it's available, and unfortunately they know that you and I generally ignore it.
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And so they realize how effective it is to throw out variations and variants, and one of the most effective ones is when they throw out facts about stories that most of the people in our congregations actually like.
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So for example, you know what Bart Ehrman loves to do? He loves to talk about the woman taken in adultery.
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The woman taken in adultery, specifically, the story is called the Pericope Adultery, it's found in most of your
56:10
Bibles in John 7, 53 through 8, 11. But hopefully most of you have noticed when reading through that, that in some of your translations it's in brackets, that there's maybe a dividing line, hey, a dividing line, there's a dividing line, some way of indicating that that particular story is questioned by scholars.
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And there'll be a footnote that'll say something, you know, give you some level of information.
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But a lot of us just don't bother to look at those things. And for a lot of folks, it's a sentimental favorite.
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Dan Wallace, a textual critic out of Dallas, says it's his favorite story that's not actually in the
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Bible. And the New English translation, I think, is actually going to finally remove it, and Toto, it'll be in a footnote, well, that'd be a pretty big footnote, it'll probably be in an appendix toward the end or something like that, but I think in the next printing they're actually gonna do that.
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But for a lot of folks, that's really bothersome. I don't wanna hear that, that makes me question everything.
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Always keep something in mind, folks. What you and I want to know is what
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God gave us that is theanustos, God breathed, that's the
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Greek term, God breathed. We want to know what God gave us in Scripture, not what a scribe 400 or 500 or 1 ,000 years later thought
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God should have given us in Scripture. I wanna know what Matthew wrote,
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I wanna know what John wrote. And when John was writing his gospel, did he write the story of the woman taken in adultery?
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The evidence is very strongly against that. Not only does it first appear in a manuscript of the
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New Testament in the 5th century, it first appears in a very unreliable manuscript from the 5th century called
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Codex Bese Cantabrigensis, which basically was the living Bible of the ancient church.
58:27
And so it is a manuscript that has a lot of unusual characteristics to it.
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The scribe, for example, when Peter was released from prison, for some reason, that's the one manuscript in the world that tells us he descended 39 steps to the street.
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Who knew? I'm sure Peter was counting on the way down. One, two, three, four, five, six, angel.
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I don't know where it came from and I don't know why the person thought that was relevant, but there it is. Not only that, but what's interesting is in some manuscripts, the story of the woman taken in adultery is found elsewhere in John.
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And in some manuscripts, it's found in two different places in Luke. Now, when you have one story that's sort of bopping around, looking for a place to land, that's clear indication that it was a story that the early church really liked because it's a great story, but it wasn't originally a part of the
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Gospel of John because there's no explanation as to why it would be someplace else if it had always been where it is in the
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Gospel of John. No other text of scripture has ever done that. And so, what we want to know is what was originally given, not what a scribe at a later point in time thought should have been given.
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So, we'll finish off our first hour on this with the critical issue.
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And I'll introduce it to you so you can think about it and then think about it even over morning tea or whatever it is we call it after Jeff speaks again.
01:00:01
But all these considerations relate primarily to a freely transmitted text, not to a controlled, edited, or redacted text.
01:00:12
Now, what do I mean by this? The greatest evidence of the mechanism by which
01:00:20
God has preserved the New Testament, the greatest evidence of this, is the means by which he did it is the free transmission of the text.
01:00:33
In other words, once the apostles, when Paul writes the letter to the church at Ephesus, it's immediately copied and then it is distributed.
01:00:45
Copies go to other churches. When he writes to the Romans, when he writes to the Colossians, et cetera, et cetera, there is an explosion of copies of these manuscripts and it is freely transmitted to the widest possible audience rather than someone saying, okay, here is
01:01:03
Paul's epistle to the Romans. Now, we're gonna deliver it to the Romans, but then we need to keep a lid on this.
01:01:12
We need to make sure that we keep real tight control on it.
01:01:17
We don't want anybody copying this. We only have a small group of approved copiers.
01:01:26
That's not how they did it. That's not how they did it. And they didn't gather them all together. There was never a centralized structure that could have gathered all this together and okay, we're gonna control this.
01:01:36
We're gonna have control over the text of the New Testament. That never happened.
01:01:43
And so I'd like you to think before our next time together, what would it mean if there had been a controlled transmission of the text of the
01:01:52
New Testament? What if there had been a sufficiently centralized church structure that could control the contents and the transmission of the text of the
01:02:03
New Testament? What would be the result of that? And are there other major religious texts that have a controlled transmission?
01:02:17
That's how we're gonna make the transition in the next hour into discussing, hint, hint, hint,
01:02:23
Islam. Because there you have a text that was controlled in its transmission.
01:02:31
And comparing that methodology of transmission has helped a lot of people understand, wow,
01:02:39
God's been pretty good to us. Yes, he has in how he has preserved his word.
01:02:45
Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for the freedom that we have to gather here this day. We thank you that you have granted traveling mercies to all those who have come even from a long distance.
01:02:55
We do pray that you will bless our fellowship together. You will encourage our hearts together with one another.
01:03:02
But you will also help us to remember. Help us to be prepared. We want to be servants of yours.
01:03:10
We want to be those who are able to speak to the world around us in a way that is honoring and glorifying to the truth and is used by you to draw your people into yourself.
01:03:21
We thank you for this day. We ask that you would bless it as we continue to seek to honor and glorify you.