Apologetics Conference 2016: Why I Trust the Bible (Andrew Rappaport)

Conference Welcome and Speaker Introduction

All right. Ladies and gentlemen, please bring it in. Grab a seat. All right. We're off to a good start, aren't we? Amen. All right. Our second speaker tonight is Andrew Rappaport. His ministry is called strivingforeternity .net and if you want to write that down you can check some of the resources that he has online.

Andrew is a gifted teacher. I got the chance to go through his website and watch many of his YouTube videos and he has, Andrew, how many videos? Maybe a couple hundred? Just yeah and classes that he offers.

It's almost like a seminary education right there on his website. So please make note of that. We are really honored to have this gifted apologist here with us today. So guys, let's give you a hand clap and we'll.

Andrew Rappaport’s Background and Ministry Resources

Welcome Andrew Rappaport. Good evening. Is this on? Good. Let me drop some things so that I can pick it up. All right. So some things you might have picked up on the way in. One is a bookmark promoting a book that I'll talk about in a second that I had written.

Another is what Pastor Jeff was just talking about is our Academy. We have an Academy that we offer online. It's all on YouTube for free. You can watch all the classes that are currently there. And systematic theology, how to interpret the Bible called harmoneutics, how to disciple, and then the major Western religions and a Christian defense of them are all the classes we already have covered.

So if you're interested in those. I've written a book that we have if you go out and table and you're interested in different world religions. If you spoke, if you heard from David Wood, you know he has a background on Islam.

I've studied Islam, Catholicism, Jehovah Witnesses, Mormons, Jewish, which is my background, and then Christianity. Go to systematic theology, what's their authority, what's their view of Christ, or God specifically, the Trinity, their view of Christ, his deity, man's sinfulness, salvation, and times.

And so we systematize all of the religions from their sources. The reason it's called what do they believe is because one of the things that that I'm very glad of is I had this past week when I spoke to some a whole family of Muslims and I'm able to say in everything that I've shared with you have I mischaracterized anything about Islam and they said you did not.

And then I said well that's why I don't believe in Islam because you've been mischaracterizing Christianity. So and and the one nephew actually is supposed to get he gave my I gave him my number and hopefully we're gonna get together for dinner.

I buy he talks and I get to share the gospel. So I'm willing to buy dinner to share the gospel, I'm just saying. So let me give you a little background on me. I'll do a shorter testimony than than David did, but I grew up in a Jewish household, so I was born Misfit at the age of 12.

I don't have that really radical, I used to think there was something wrong with me because I didn't have that really radical salvations testimony. For me it was a three and a half hour discussion. I basically turned to a guy that shared the gospel with me and I said dude I thought it was an emotional argument.

I said I am God's chosen people, I'm in like Flynn. I thought that was enough. And I walked away and and he had said he would have made a great open-air preacher. He said what if you walk away and your mother died, he knew my mother died when I was nine, so if your mother dies you and you walk away not listening to this message, your mother might have died just for you to listen to this message, you walk away your mother would have died in vain.

I was like let me listen. I said you give me a logical reason to believe, I'll believe. Now you have to understand son, any of you read that passage in scripture that says Jesus laughed? No you didn't, there's no verses that Jesus laughed, fool you.

Jesus wept, but you don't see, where do you see, you know, you know, does God have a sense of humor? I actually know that he does because see he took a guy who is really really proud of his intellect.

I have 168 IQ, I've passed the test for Mensa and the guy that led me to Christ never passed the sixth grade, that's humor. So God took a guy that never passed sixth grade to sit there and go through prophecies.

I took every prophecy he gave me, I put it in one or two categories, coincidence or self-fulfillment. I could prophesy, I'm gonna walk out that door, I can make that happen, but those, I rejected those, I only wanted those that were coincidence.

I took all the ones he gave me that were coincidence, I started running calculations in my head, I got beyond what is it 10 to the 48th power, 10 to the 48th power is statistical impossibility. I said it is impossible for the New Testament to not have been written by God, and so I believe New Testament, not Christ.

See being raised Jewish, I believe Jesus Christ was Hitler's God, that's how I was raised. I believe that Jesus Christ represented the Holocaust, the Inquisitions, and the Crusades. I wanted nothing to do with Jesus Christ, but I couldn't argue with math, that's my background.

And so I said okay, New Testament, I'll believe what, I said to Chuck, he said tell me what the New Testament teaches, he says that Jesus Christ died for sinners like you. I had no problem believing I was a sinner.

I almost burnt my house down twice because once wasn't enough. First time was a fire extinguisher took care of it, the second time it needed the fire department, okay. So I, you know, there wasn't a problem on the sinner part, I just didn't see I needed a Savior.

And so what ended up happening was I sat there and he's explaining Jesus Christ and he's mentioned this resurrection, I'm like dude, come on, nobody can raise themselves from the dead. I never read, any of you read Josh McDowell's Evidence Demands a Verdict, The Morning of the Carpenter?

I never read that at that point, and I had every one of the false views of the of the resurrection except for one that's still original with me. My last argument was maybe the disciples dug a hole underneath the tomb, came up, took the body, and snuck it out.

And Chuck goes, in three days? They didn't have heavy equipment back then. I was like, I could not argue around the resurrection. If Jesus Christ rose from the dead, then Jesus Christ was God. I had to deal with that.

Jesus Christ is God, I'm accountable to him. So on steps of Dairy Queen in 1984 in San Francisco, I turned from being a enemy of God to a child of God. I thought that was everyone's story, and then I start realizing that, no, most Christians hear the gospel over and over and over and over.

And that's one of the things that you're here this weekend to do, is to learn how to defend the faith, because the reality is many people will hear the gospel many times, and there are gonna be times that some of you are gonna go, oh man, I feel like I just shared the gospel and this was a waste of my time, this guy is so unreceptive.

Let me explain something to you, you guys, I'm from New Jersey, born and raised, all right, so I go into Union Square in New York, that's my regular fishing hole to go and evangelize. We've been going there, I've been going there for ten years.

We know four people who used to heckle us, yell at us, be quite mean to us. It's the only place I know where I can get guys dancing in tutus while I preach, just saying. But we, you can see anything there, but we have had four people who have given their life to Christ and have contacted me afterwards to apologize for the way they behaved.

We have a total of seven people who have contacted me that have at least apologized, because they recognized over the years that the way they treated us was bad, and just wanted to ask forgiveness. And that's the thing of going there, you think that some of these guys, you think that you're not getting through, you're not getting through.

The apologetics that you're gonna learn this weekend is to help encourage you, but also strengthen you so that when you do go out, you have a ready answer. And guess what? I can give you one way I can guarantee that you can answer any question.

You can answer any single question you ever get, because I tell people all the time, I can answer any question I'm ever asked on the street. I can, because I believe I don't know is a perfectly good answer.

And it's actually one that gets people to go, oh, you guys don't think you know everything. No, I know someone who does, but I'm not him. And so the thing is, is that if you don't have an answer, that's when you start studying.

David said he didn't have answers to Islam, he started studying. Now many people go to him and look to him for answers. So what we're gonna talk about, if you do any kind of evangelism, I was just talking to a gentleman just a couple minutes ago, and I asked him whether he's ever been asked the questions, or challenged with these questions.

And maybe I want you guys to think, have you ever been challenged with someone coming to you and saying, well, the Bible was written by men? And this guy said, the guy gentleman always said, every time I talk to someone that's not a believer.

That the Bible was edited in the 300s, or sometimes the 600s, or the 1500s. I love the 1500 one. That we don't have the original Bible. You see, the Bible has come under attack. It is one of the things, and so I have the task now of not only having to follow David Wood, which is like kind of hard, but I gotta follow David Wood and talk about textual criticism.

How many of you guys even know what that word means? Okay, some of you. So my job is to take a topic that is usually saved for seminaries, and bring it down to a level that all of us can understand. Because the reality is, is that those atheists on the street, those professing atheists, they are being equipped to argue against the Bible and its reliability.

But many Christians, they're not having the resources to know how to defend that. And this is a crucial thing, because there's going to be two presuppositions that as Christians we're going to hold to.

God exists, and He has spoken. We don't give up on either one of those two. If we're out on the street, we're going to share with someone, and they're saying, well, look, I don't want to believe the Bible, so you talk to me without that.

Really? Okay, let's talk biology, but please don't quote any science textbook. No, you don't give up the very source of truth to discuss truth. You don't do that. So what we want to do is we want to know how to defend the reliability of the Scriptures.

So that's what we're going to do at this time. Let's start with a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, we are grateful for the many people that are taking time out of their day because they want to be equipped, they want to be encouraged, they want to be edified, because we know that we have the truth, not because of anything within us, Lord, but because of who you are.

You are the great and holy God, and there's nothing, as David had said, we're wretches, and you came into this universe and became one of us to die on a cross to be a payment of sin for us. It is the great transaction, imputation, as we're going to hear talked about tomorrow.

Lord, we are grateful that we can be called your children, and we thank you that we can gather, that the fellowship this evening would be sweet, that the conference this whole weekend would be encouraging and edifying, most of all to you.

We say this in Christ's name, amen. And so I am a little bit jealous of some of you guys that are going to get to be here tomorrow to hear the speakers tomorrow. You know, both Eric and John are going to be talking.

I'm jealous because John's got a great topic on imputation, so it is a crucial, crucial topic, so I strongly encourage you to be here. I can't be because I'm leaving right from here. I have to drive out to Ohio, so I get a, my son has given me a timeline.

I got to get my car to my son by 8 o 'clock in the morning, so I, it's one of these things where I had to be in, I had to be in Ohio in the afternoon. I thought I'd stay overnight in a hotel. He has other plans, but he's helping me out and taking care of my daughter this week, so.

Why the Bible Is Attacked and Why Textual Criticism Matters

So when we look at this topic, this is a topic that many people are being challenged on, and there are many people who aren't ready to give a defense for the reliability of the Bible, specifically the New Testament.

We're going to get into why the New Testament comes under more attack in a moment, but one of the most common arguments that non-believers raise is that men wrote the Bible. Is that true? Yes. Is it completely true?

No. You know, what they're trying to do by saying, well, men wrote the Bible, is to say that it's not trustworthy. I love that statement. When people make that statement, I'm open-air preaching, you know, people are like, well, men wrote the Bible.

I say, really? So you don't believe anything written by men? No. Really? Okay. So you don't, so if a man writes something, you can't trust it? No. I usually will ask them, so do you believe in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution?

They almost always say yes, and I used to have my preaching bag, a copy of his book, and I'd pull it out, and I'd look at it, go, huh, that's funny. It was written by a man. I thought you don't believe things written by men.

Really, the issue is, is it trustworthy? That's the real thing. See, the reason it could be trusted is because it was written by an author who cannot lie. That's not circular logic. Atheists will always say we have circular logic.

We do not have circular logic. Circular logic would be that we believe the Bible because the Bible says it can be believed, and that's the argument they try to give us, but that's not what we say. I believe the Bible's accurate because its author cannot lie.

Therefore, by definition, it must be accurate, and so it's in the nature of God that I'm going to root the reliability of the Scriptures, and so the issue that we're going to have is that people think it's not trustworthy, and what they're dealing with is the fact that, and we must be honest, and maybe this is going to surprise some people.

I hope not, but when we look at the Bible that we have today in the Greek and the Hebrew, we have copies of the Bible that do have changes in them. They're called textual variances. Let me read from Daniel Wallace.

He says, he defines a variant this way, quote, a textual variant is simply any difference from a standard text, printed text, or a popular manuscript, etc., that involves spelling, word order, omissions, additions, subtraction, or total rewrite of the text, unquote, and see what you have is we have a Bible, we have Greek manuscripts that have had changes in them over time, and so the argument that many people say is because there's changes, we can't know what the original Bible said.

What did the original text say? We believe that in its original writings that the Bible was without flaw, without error. It was completely accurate in its original writings, but we don't know if we have those original writings anymore, and so we don't think we do.

There's some things we would expect to see if we thought, you know, the original, but the reality is people will say, well, there's 400 ,000 variances in the Bible, in just the Greek Bible, the Greek New Testament.

That seems like an awful lot, especially considering there's only 138 ,000 words in the Greek New Testament. Anyone see a problem there? There's about three times as many variances as there are words.

Now, let me give you some ways that some people define a variant and how we come to them. Now, some people have tried to say that a variant, a textual variant, the way they come to this number is some will argue that it's every time that you have a manuscript where there's some word that's misspelled, and if it's misspelled the multiple times in every manuscript that for each manuscript it counts as an additional variant.

Well, that's not actually true. It's a quote that comes from Lightwood, and it's not the way that we count it. The way we count it is actually there's 400 ,000 variant readings. In other words, you may have in some places where it says, Jesus Christ is Lord.

That's one reading. Another, it says, Christ Jesus is Lord. It's a second reading, and the other might say, Lord Jesus Christ. That's a third reading. Now, what you see there is that there's three different ways of reading that.

That's not spelling errors. That's not just the fact that in one case it's spelled one way and in another case it's spelled another way. So, the point here is to say that there are, and we have to be honest with this, that there are different ways that these were written down and copied.

Now, the thing is is that when we go through and actually look, and I've done this work, but if you look at all of the Greek manuscripts and you look at the different textual tools that we have today, you can actually count how many either phrases or words have a textual issue, and we come up with about 50, well, 6 ,577 is the number.

So, about 6 ,500. So, when we look at what, we're going to have two ways of looking at textual variances, and what, if we want to make it sound like you can't possibly in any way get back to the original meaning, you're going to use this definition that gives you 400 ,000 because it's a larger number, and what are you going to do?

You're going to have to count every different reading, but you see, in the phrase that I gave you, you're dealing with one text that has three different readings, and we want to get back to the original reading if we can, so we're going to count that once, not three times.

Gives you a very different number. Now, from 400 ,000, we get to 6 ,500, 6 ,600 if you want to round up. So, very different numbers. We're going to come back to why that becomes important in a bit, but I want you to keep that number in your head because here's what ends up happening.

What you end up seeing is that many of the scholars will try to argue that we cannot get back to the original meaning of the scriptures. Very interesting, since David Wood quoted from Bart Ehrman, I guess I should too, right?

So, Bart Ehrman, how many folks do not know who Bart Ehrman is, just out of curiosity? Okay, Bart, okay, well then let me give you some background on him. Bart Ehrman is someone who grew up in a Christian home, went to seminary, he kept going to more and more liberal seminaries, and somewhere along there he says he lost his faith.

I would look to 1st John chapter 2 verse 19 and say he never had faith to lose. He went out from among us because he was never of us. Now, Bart Ehrman has done some great work in this area, but the reality is one thing he tries to do is say that we have lost the meaning and we can't possibly get back to the original meaning of the Bible.

In his book, Misquoting Jesus, he lays out an argument for this. Now, one of the things I learned with Bart Ehrman, anytime he gives support for his claims, he's usually pretty right on. It's the times he doesn't.

See, what he does is he gives support for some that's true and then supplants it with some that's not true, and for most people they can't see that because they haven't done the study, and when you do the study you realize what he's doing, but for most laymen, especially the atheists that are reading his book, they don't see that.

They don't understand what's happening, and so here's an argument. Now, if you're gonna write a New York Times bestseller, don't you think you're gonna put your best argument first? I mean, wouldn't you?

Alright, so here's his best argument. He has a chapter where he says we cannot get back to the original meaning of the Bible. We can't know what it said. We can't understand the meaning, and here's his proof.

There are some manuscripts, you know, where some people just teach that Jesus Christ was a carpenter, and others teach he was just a son, he was a son of a carpenter. I mean, doesn't that just shock you?

I mean, you know, all those Bible doctrines we have built on the fact that Jesus was a carpenter, right? Oh, wait, no, none. I mean, there's not a single doctrine that's based on Jesus being a carpenter or the son of a carpenter.

In fact, both could be true, couldn't they? Especially in a day and age where Jesus was, where most people took the trade of their father. It wouldn't be unusual for both to be true, but even if only one of them was true, does that change the meaning of the Bible in any way of real significance to doctrines that we hold to?

No. So my argument would be, Bart Ehrman, if that's the best you got, you got nothing. Like, we're afraid of this? I had a gentleman who talked about Q. Any of you familiar, anyone, any of you heard of Q, the document Q?

A couple of you, all right. There's another New York Times bestseller book written by a guy who came out of Islam, and he claims he wanted to be a Christian, and he came to America and take the religion of America, which was Christianity.

Now he rejects that. He wrote a book called Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus and Nazareth. There's Reza al-Azhar, and what he argues is, he basically tries to argue the same argument that Bart Ehrman argues.

He's trying to say, hey, we can't get back to the original Bible, and that's why he gave up on the Bible. He gave up on the Bible because we can't know what it actually said. And so he bases everything in his book on this document called Q.

Q stands for Quellum. It's Greek, sorry, it's German for source. This is the idea that they have. The liberal scholars believe that there was this document called Q, and Q was the first gospel. Q was then used by Mark to write a later gospel, and then the other gospel writers, Luke and Matthew, used Mark, and they may use a little bit of Q, and from that they built their documents, and they kind of wrote a little bit more of making Jesus less of, you know, less of a man and more of a God, and by the time he got to John, he just totally forgets Q, and he writes that Jesus is God.

And this is the progression they try to argue, is how these things happen. I actually believe Matthew is the first gospel written, which would make more sense since that's the gospel written to Jewish people, and that was an issue earlier in Christian life and not later in Christian life.

So here's the thing, though. You write a New York Times bestseller book, and I'm amazed that people don't pick up that in the introduction of the book, the introduction, the author undermines his entire book, because this whole book is based on this document called Q.

Let me quote from him. Aslan says this, quote, although we no longer have any physical copies of this document, we can infer its context by compiling those verses in Matthew and Luke that share in common and do not appear in Mark, unquote.

Now, if you're gonna write a book based on something you have no historical evidence. Where's the historical evidence that Q ever existed? It only appears in the text of liberal scholars, in their textbooks.

It's kind of like the the transitional forms of evolution. They only exist in textbooks. They don't exist in real fossil record, right? So what do we have? We have someone that's building a whole argument on a book that doesn't exist, but we can infer it.

That's called begging the question. It's a logical fallacy. You're starting with your conclusion. I had a gentleman once, I was at this, you guys go to the Jersey Shore, right? All right. So when they were doing that TV show, I used to do some open-air preaching down there.

It was a lot of fun. I loved it when they'd come video me. I would never give them permission to use any of the footage, but they would give me a crowd for like an hour and a half because there's big cameras there, and we had all the crew from Jersey Shore sitting there, and they needed the gospel.

Trust me. But I was there once, and this guy was arguing for Q, and he said, well look, there had to be an original document. This is the argument these guys make. There had to be one document that everyone else got their information from.

I said, really? Why? Why couldn't it be firsthand eyewitnesses? He said, no, it has to be an original document. I said, really? I said, let me ask you a question. This was a couple years back. This was right after Obama was running for his re-election.

He was speaking at the Democrat National Committee. That was like the Thursday night, and this is now Friday night, and I said, you know, Obama spoke last night. Did the New York Times report it? He said, yeah.

I said, did the Washington Post report it? He said, yeah. I said, what about the Boston Times? They reported, yeah. I said, what about the AP? They reported, yeah. I said, what was the original document they all got that from?

He went, well, they were all there. They were all there? I thought you said eyewitnesses don't count. What do you mean they were all there? You mean they could all sit there and observe the same thing?

Did they all write exactly the same account? No, they didn't. They all took a little bit of a different angle on the accounts, didn't they? You mean just like we have in the Gospels? In fact, that's a better argument for the Gospels.

If we only had one account, that would be a problem. The fact that we have four different accounts of the same events is what strengthens the argument that these were eyewitness accounts. In fact, there is a cold-case detective who had been an atheist, a professing atheist, and he came out to try to debunk Christianity and the Christians he worked with.

And he wrote a book called Cold Case Christianity. And he basically argues, he took 20 years experience as a detective to argue, okay, there's certain things you'd expect in an eyewitness testimony. He deals with eyewitness testimony for 20 years ago, 30 years ago, people who've been dead for a long time.

And he ends up arguing that when he looked at the New Testament, well guess what? That is good, solid, first-hand eyewitness accounts. There are certain things he laid out had to be there. So J. Warner Wallace laid out a case.

It's a good book to get on this. It really deals with it in a good way. But the thing that you end up seeing is the reality is there is no physical evidence for this document called Q. Now, I don't know about you, but I keep hearing in the news and on atheist blogs, yes, I get on atheist blogs.

It's always good to get on atheist blogs. I get to find out who's got a hit on me. We actually have had, I've had on atheist blogs, they put my address, a picture of my house, they put a picture of my family, they put my preaching schedule when I was out of town and say, hey, let's go rape his wife and daughter and kill and rob the house.

I responded on the atheist blog. I hope you don't mind, but my house is actually regularly patrolled by the police. So just saying, we got lots of cameras. But, you know, when you look at this, we end up seeing on the atheist blogs that they make these arguments.

And what you see is that it's based on nothing. Now, they keep telling us that we believe in fairy tales. Have you ever heard that? We believe in a sky daddy, an invisible sky daddy. Really? I'm not the one that's basing my argument on nothing.

That's what I would call fairy tale. Saying that we can't trust the Bible because of a document that never existed. That's a fairy tale. Actually, I kind of believe frogs becoming men, princes is a fairy tale.

Just saying. It's just, add millions of years and we call it science, you know. We supposedly believe in a magic god, right? A magical being. I believe nothing, having a magical bang and exploding into everything is, that's magic.

Someone creating something, we see that a lot. Just nothing and then boom, everything. Yeah, I don't think we're the ones that have magic on our side, sorry. But when we talk about these things, let's categorize these variances because I want you to see something.

We're going to see how this is going to work. There we go. So, what we see here in this pie chart, okay, you see the blue. 75 of most of these variances that we deal with are spelling errors. This is the largest number.

Now, I find it always interesting when Barterman and others say that the largest majority of them, of the textual variances that we find are spelling errors and punctuation. You know why I find that so interesting?

Do you know that there was no punctuation in the Greek until 800 AD? Where did you, like, just to, now, there was also no spacing in some of the manuscripts. Now, that can make a difference. So, here's what I want you to do.

You're all taking notes, I know. So, on your paper, you can write these letters down. I should put it up here one day on the slide, but G-O-D-I-S-N-O-W-H-E-R-E. Now, what did I spell? Yeah, some people are having trouble.

Is God, God is now here or God is nowhere? You put a space in the wrong place and it makes a big difference, doesn't it? Could that explain some variances that we have? How are we going to know which one of those two I mean?

You're going to look at the rest of the context of what I'm saying, right? Yeah, we're going to say, well, if I'm an atheist and I'm saying this, I'm probably saying God is nowhere. But if I'm writing to defend Christ and if I'm talking about God and I'm talking about His omnipresence, I may be saying God is now here, right?

The context is going to explain that. But that one space, when they start adding spaces, and some people put spaces in the wrong places, that fits in the 75%. Now, the issue with that is when you start comparing to the different manuscripts, what we can do is see where those spelling errors are, where those spacing errors are, because we have many manuscripts to compare to.

As you compare to the other manuscripts, you can take a look at them and say, okay, this spelling mistake, okay, this guy had early onset of dyslexia. Okay, he just mixed up a couple letters. Sometimes what people would do is because they were copying, they'd skip whole lines.

And so you have those sort of things. We can explain those sort of things. But those don't affect the meaning, and we can easily get back to the original meaning of the text. That's 75 of these variances don't affect the meaning of the text, and we can get back to the original.

Okay? So the second largest one there is this not meaningful 19%. 19 of these variances are ones in which there's no, the meaning of the text hasn't changed, but we can't get back to its original. So it'd be a thing like Jesus is a carpenter, or Jesus is the son of a carpenter.

The meaning is actually changed, and we can't get back to the original a big deal. Okay? And that's going to be one that people are going to argue for. Now the question is when we get to some, we're going to not be able to get back to the original meaning, or sorry, the original, what it originally said, but the meaning hasn't changed any.

There's going to be things where we can say, okay, could have said this, could have said that. For example, in the Hebrew you have in Kings and Chronicles, you have a case where in one case it talks about so many, I think it's like 12 ,000 chariots and 8 ,000 horsemen, and in the other text those numbers are reversed.

Which one's right? Don't know, but the meaning of the text hasn't changed any. So if we want to get back, our goal is to get to the meaning of the text, right? So that 19 put that in the category with the 75 and this whole pie, so far we could toss.

Okay, so what about that 5 These are ones that are meaningful, but not viable. In other words, the meaning of the text actually changes, but viable means that we can get, can we get back to the original?

By comparing it to other manuscripts, can we get back to the original? And the answer is, with that 5%, yes we can. So in other words, here, spelling errors, punctuation, things like that, not a big deal.

The ones that are not meaningful, we don't really, we're not so concerned about because it's not changing the meaning of the text. Here, well the meaning of the text changed, but guess what, we can get back to what it originally said.

That leaves us with, ready, a whopping 1%. 1 of these textural variances are ones where we can't get back to the original meaning and the meaning has changed. So these are the ones we are concerned about, right?

Where we can't figure out what did it originally say, we can't get back to the original and the meaning actually changed, so this could be a problem. This is where Bart Ehrman uses his one because here you have more than, that he's a carpenter or the son of a carpenter, which was it in the original, we don't know.

Is the meaning changed? Yes it is, but you see the dilemma that he has is there's no doctrine built on that. When we look at this and we look at these textural variances and we look at this 1%, there is not a single Christian doctrine that's in that 1%.

Not one. People say, whoa, in 1st John you have that part that talks about the trinity, the three in one, so that wasn't in the original. Big deal. When I have Jehovah Witnesses come to my door, oh wait, they never come to my door.

They avoid my door. When I go to them, I could tell you ways to get off there, to get your house avoided. I actually have my whole block avoided. My neighborhood, I moved to Jackson and when I moved in, we had the Jehovah Witnesses.

I didn't know one of my neighbors, his sister's a Jehovah Witness. And so what would happen is 10 o 'clock every Saturday morning for five years before I moved in, Jehovah Witnesses would come down our street and they would knock on every door.

I didn't know that, I just moved in. So I move in, they came to my door and I was like, oh, Jehovah Witnesses. I know you guys are probably like, I pretend like I'm not home. I love when they, I pull my New World Translation off the shelf and I get all ready and my wife is like, oh no.

So I sit there and I sat and talked with them for a couple of hours. So next week, you know what they did? They went to my one neighbor's house, they skipped right past my house. I felt rejected. You know what I did?