Scripture, Apologetics and Islam Part 1

Well, it is an honor to be with you. I'm not going to do any of the Australian accents, anything like that. This is my third time here. So I'm a veteran now. Except I will mention that I was on a train yesterday.

We rode out. I rode a bike out with Brother Stephen, who's hiding around here someplace, to Wollongong. 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.

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. It was just, I'm a veteran, I'm a veteran, mate. I've studied a number of languages.

That was not one of them. And in most civilized languages, there are consonants and vowels. And this was just a, I don't know, I don't know. But it is interesting. And thankfully, most of the time, someone takes some mercy upon me and translates for me.

And I appreciate that. But here I thought we all spoke English. What a silly thing. We have a lot to cover. And we've already gotten a very good start. And I appreciate that. Jeff and I talked. And I realized that there was going to be a lot of overlap, depending upon how we approached our subjects.

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 Islam. Now, for only an hour's period of time with each one of those, and given how often I knew, in his presentations, Jeff would be talking about issues relevant to atheism, we talked it through.

And I'm going to change things around a little bit. We are going to do scripture and apologetics. 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.

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 a benefit in. 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 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. But hang with me for a little while. There are some very odd people. I have noticed a number of you here, who 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. If not, then just be patient, and I will make application. You do not have to read ancient Greek to be able to benefit from what I'm going to be saying, 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. But you see a portion of a page of an ancient biblical manuscript. This is P45, I'm going to be showing you some other manuscripts later on.

But this is a page from P45. I've begun an unusual sermon series at my home church. This is in fact the text that we began with. P45 is a Gospels and Acts manuscript from somewhere between 180 and 220 AD.

And it contains today fragments of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts. As you can see, this is a fairly decently preserved page. I mean, obviously there's a good bit missing there. But in comparison to some of the pages, this is one of the better pages.

It was originally about 220 pages long. We don't have anywhere near that available to us today. 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.

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 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.

Maybe it's just because they were all major flops, and that's why I never heard of them before. But what I'm doing is, if the current, if P45 contains a chapter in, say, here's 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, 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.

Now, why would I be showing you an ancient manuscript? Especially, this is the Good Shepherd passage from John chapter 10. In fact, I'll blow a little section up here. 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. 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. Ha-ha. Are you allowed to have these? I hope so. I'm seeing no heads going, oh, yeah. Everybody else is going, what's a laser? I don't know. But you can actually see concerning the sheep right here.

You know, that's the section talking about the hireling runs away because he doesn't really have any concerns concerning the sheep. But this is the section, for example, I know the Father, the Father knows me.

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 Father, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.

This is a theme that is woven throughout the text of the Gospel of John that starts right at the beginning. At the very beginning, what is the emphasis of John 1, 1? 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 has seen God at any time.

The monogamist, theos, the unique God who is in the bosom or at the very heart of the Father, he has revealed him, he has explained him, he has exegeted him. And so through the Gospel of John, you have this emphasis upon the reality that we can have true knowledge of who the Father is because the Son is the perfect representation of the Father.

He doesn't just do a good job at sort of approximating in telling us about the Father. Because he is the incarnate logos, because he is the word made flesh, then he is an absolutely reliable representation of the 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 Father is, is central to the Gospel of John and to the message of the New Testament. Now, what would this have to do with scripture in apologetics?

Well, it's fairly simple. 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. If we keep running off to external sources to prove the validity of what 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 Jesus makes the amazing claim that Jeff referred to in the Sermon on the Mount, and 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.

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.

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 Jesus Christ truly is.

Now there are many, obviously, today who present a much lower Jesus, a Jesus who is nothing more than Gandhi or Buddha or Muhammad, just a religious teacher. 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.

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.

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 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. Once you abandon that, well, what happens historically when denominations abandon these things? It's not very long before all the theology falls apart as well.

And you have Wiccan priestesses leading the prayers in some service someplace. And you might say, that's never happened. 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 Jesus says. He speaks of the relationship he has with the Father. The Father knows me and I know the Father. This is an intimate relationship that is spoken of here. And he talks about how the Father loves him because he gives his life and he takes up his life again in behalf of the sheep.

You have this tremendous message of who Jesus is. And here it's being written down. 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.

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 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 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 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.

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?

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 Gospel of John, and even a little bit longer, given that we would date Matthew, Mark, and Luke earlier than that, probably looking at Luke in the early 60s, 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.

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. 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.

It was a challenge that was literally not a part of the thinking of my grandparents, or my great-grandparents' generation. 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 Christian faith. And unfortunately, the vast majority of believing Christians find themselves extremely unprepared to deal with this fundamental attack against their faith.

And to what do I refer? Well, this is one of the earliest manuscripts we have of the New Testament. What if the New Testament had been changed before this was written? How do you know? Jeff quoted many passages of scripture.

But how does he, and how do you know? 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 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 that is? That's another area of discussion. 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 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?

How do you know that what you have in your Bible is what Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul actually wrote down to begin with? 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. 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. They just simply repeat what they think Bart Ehrman has said. It's amazing. I think Ehrman does this purposefully in some ways, but it's amazing how often atheists will actually go far beyond anything 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 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 Bible, but they have demonstrated fundamentally that we can never really know what the Bible originally said.

We only have copies of copies of copies of copies, and therefore we can't really know. 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 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, 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. He was Bruce Metzger's last doctoral student at Princeton. And he has left the faith. 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 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. He was just so excited to have somebody on to blast away at those Christians and prove that the 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 Dr. Ehrman was actually saying, because he said, well, you know, if there's been all these changes, then Dr. Ehrman, maybe you could speculate for us.

What do you think the New Testament was originally about? Before all the changes, what do you think it was actually talking about? And there's this sort of an 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. Psssh, because you could just hear the atheist like, oh, really?

He wanted to hear something about space aliens, or the Illuminati, or, you know, that would have fit, 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 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 New Testament had had any other form than 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. 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.

You know how immunization works. We're gonna get a shot, in essence, of the truth about how we got the New Testament to say, well, it's simply not, is this cutting out on us there? 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. 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, 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.

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 New Testament. And even if you had something like the Australian Standard Version, which 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 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. 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.

We can't, in our day, we can no longer allow that to be the farthest we have gone in thinking about this subject. 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.

We have to have a fundamental basic understanding of how we got the text that we have today. 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 Bible has always had thumb indexing and gold on the edges of the pages and a nice calfskin cover or something like that.

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. For me, I think it's tremendously exciting to realize that God has always been working with his people.

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. 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.

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 Jews, you're not of my sheep, and what all that stuff means.

And then going on to say, I and the Father, we are one. And everything takes place there in John 10. I sort of wonder what he was thinking as he wrote those words down. 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 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 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.

And it took a little bit more than just going down to the local bookshop, and you or that are just tapping on an app on your phone to get the scriptures. We have a great blessing today. The process of transmission in antiquity is vastly different than today.

Vastly different. 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. So many of us are so accustomed to the technological wonders that we have today.

I remember the first time I saw a digital scanner. Wow, that was, and the first time I ever used OCR. Oh man, that was absolutely incredible. 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?

And in fact, photocopying has existed my entire life. It was invented in 1949. 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.

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. 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. But for the vast majority of human history to communicate the written word was almost magical. 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 each society were literate are rather low, and we're seeing evidence of that as we're starting to see more and more.

For example, just recently they discovered a number of ancient receipts, almost like grocery receipts in the Middle East that really seemed to indicate that a larger portion of the society was literate than we had guessed, and certainly amongst the Jews.

There would be a reason for literacy because the Jews have always been a people of the book. 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.

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.

Hand copying was the only way to produce documents for distribution to relatively recent times, and even with the invention of printing, you've got to 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 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.

Every document produced prior to printing, and even after printing, has been, quote, corrupted, end quote, in its transmission. Well, what do I mean by corrupted? Normally, when that terminology is used today, corruption means that something is no longer useful.

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 the checksum methodology to make sure the file was not corrupted, and if it was corrupted, it would be useless.

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. 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.

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 I just stopped speaking, tuned back into what I was saying because your attention was gone.

You had been distracted by something. 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.

Well, it's not just electronic things that do that. That is simply the reality of the human mind. 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 John, 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, 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? 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. And that can create, especially over many hours, opportunities of messing things up.

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, what's that over there? Oh, I better check Facebook. I haven't checked Facebook in 37 seconds.

Who knows, someone may have liked something I said. I don't know. We have this very, very short attention span. And ancient man was actually, ancient man, a man in previous generations was actually better at these types of things than we are.

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.

And so there you wouldn't have issues of sight errors, but you'd then have issues of what? Hearing errors. What if the scribe's reading it too quickly? The reader's reading it too quickly, the scribe's moving too slowly.

What if you have an 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.

Over and over again, the word was clear, C-L-E-A-R, and the Aussie read it as clear. E-C-L-E-A, and the poor American is trying to figure out what E-C-L-E-A is. What is E-C-L-E-A? I don't know.

Basically, the letter R would disappear from the transcription because it disappears from the language. 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.

Now, we have over 5 ,700 cataloged Greek manuscripts of New Testament comprising ancient papyri containing only a few lines of text to complete manuscripts from the 15th century and even after that, 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 New Testament. Many of the early papyri collections were only of the Gospels or of Paul or something along those lines.

They weren't meant to be an entire New Testament. The last number I saw was 5 ,717, but the number changes over time 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, 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 New Testament known to us today.

Now, no ancient work comes close to the New Testament with reference to the number of witnesses and the number of early witnesses, no ancient work. By the way, the Quran is not a work of antiquity. It is a medieval work.

Generally, the medieval period starts anywhere from 500 onward. It's about 632 by even Islamic understanding as to its origination, 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 New Testament, both by Greek and Latin authors.

You have the Greek historians. You have the Latin historians like Suetonius and Pliny and Tacitus and people like that, and so there were works that were written at that period of time. No work of antiquity comes even close to the 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, and so if the local university professor who is expressing great skepticism because he read a 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.

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 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, 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.

Now, the more manuscript witnesses one has, the more variants one will have. This is where people start getting a little bit confused, and when you hear the skeptic saying, well, there are so many hundreds of thousands of variants in the New Testament manuscripts, that can sound very foreboding to the believer who has not thought through how it is you got the New Testament that is in your hand this day.

If you only have one witness, you will have no textual variants, right? How could you have a textual variant? Because it's a textual variance where there is a difference between two manuscripts, and if you only have one manuscript, that's all you got, 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, 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, and that way, there would be no footnotes at the bottom of your page, and there would be no questions about textual variants, 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 Lord Jesus Christ? Because you see, you weren't there the whole time on that mountaintop.

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. 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. And so, for people who would say, I just wish it was so much easier than this.

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. I'm not sure why you think that things should be less messy than this situation we find ourselves in.

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, and that's how he's given us his word. So, if you only have one witness, you'll have no textual variants, but you will likewise have little basis upon which to believe you have the original text.

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. So, if I have a manuscript of John from Caesarea, from Africa, from Italy, from France, from, well, Gaul back then, from all over the Mediterranean region, if I recognize that what has happened is that the 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 variants that we have, but they're very clearly all copies of the exact same thing, then 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 P45, which has the story of the good shepherd, and then in P66, we have something called the Gospel of John, but there's nothing about a good shepherd, but there is, in the place, something about a good king, and then P75 has a story, actually, about an eagle.