How did we get the Bible? by Dr. Jason Lisle

Okay, okay,

I'm Terry cameras all and I'm here on behalf of creation fellowship CNT, where a group of friends who love to study

God's Word and believe the Bible when read properly disproves Darwinian evolution. We've been meeting on this online platform since May of 2020 since meeting online we've been blessed with almost 90 individual speakers covering creation science other theology topics and even current events.

Our goal is to equip believers to be ready to share their faith. You can find most of our past presentations by visiting tiny

URL .com forward slash CFS archives, and tonight we're happy to have back one of our frequent and most watched or favorite guests,

Dr. Jason Lyle Dr. Lyle is then creation astrophysicist who founded the biblical science

Institute. And in addition to studying science and and posting articles about it on his website he also has a lot of other topics that he covers and tonight, we're happy to have him with us to talk about how did we get the

Bible. So with that, Dr. Lyle I'd like to turn it over to you. Okay, well thank you very much.

This is a fun topic it's an interesting topic, how did we get the Bible because we have in our possession this amazing document inspired by God.

And a lot of Christians have some misconceptions about how we got it or they don't know or they haven't bothered to think about it or they have actually a wrong idea about how they got it you know it seems like a lot of people have this impression that God wrote the

Bible up in heaven and then it kind of floated into their local Christian bookstore in whatever translations your favorite that's the one

God wrote it in of course. Well, the real history of how we got the Bible is a little more complicated than that it's more interesting than that and there's a reason why

God did it the way that he did it. And so I'll have some slides here that I can share with you, hopefully.

And how did we get the Bible and why does this matter. Because critics will make claims, you've probably heard critics claim the

Bible is probably the Bible has been translated so many times it probably isn't reliable at all. Or the

Bible can't be trusted because it was written by men, or the Bible was probably written by some monk during the

Dark Ages, or there are thousands of variations so how do you know which one is really the

Bible. And if you've, if you've been doing apologetics at all if you've been evangelizing those objections will come up.

And so we need to know how to answer those. So with the first one the Bible has been translated so many times.

That's often what people say I have to wonder if that's really what they mean. Because if you have a modern

Bible, the New American Standard or something like or ESV. It's been translated once from the original

Hebrew and Greek directly into English, and so it's been translated once now it's been, you know, the other languages, the

Bible has been translated in other languages, but our modern English Bibles are not a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation.

That's just not the case. Perhaps when critics claim that the Bible has been translated so many times what they really mean is it's been copied many times but that's not translating that's copying.

And if the Bible has been copied many times and so that's something we're going to have to look into. But the translation, that's not an issue because we can go back we can go back and look at the

Hebrew and Greek today and confirm that it's been translated accurately that's not an issue. Or the claim that the

Bible cannot be trusted because it was written by men. What books aren't written by men, men and women, all books are.

So when somebody says that I'm like well what book do you read and they'll name it I'll say but it was written by men.

Well, of course, the Bible is written by men but men inspired by God and so that makes it unique in that it's

God breathed it's the only God breathed collection of books that we have in our possession.

Or the claim the Bible was probably written by some monk during the Dark Ages, I was doing a debate with somebody and he brought that up it was an informal debate.

And the guy, he had a PhD obviously wasn't in the Bible, that was an art or something and he said yeah the

Bible probably written, you know, by some monk during the Dark Ages. We have copies of the

Bible that are older than that we have complete Bibles that are older than that so that's unless the monk could time travel that's not a possibility.

Now the last one, there are thousands of variations. So how do you know which one is really the Bible, there are thousands of variations.

That is, when we look at some of these ancient copies of the Bible, there will be differences in them.

One will use this word another will use that word and so on. And that's something we're going to have to deal with.

But when we analyze the situation we're going to find that it really confirms the authenticity of the

Bible. It's often helpful when studying a book to see what the book says about itself.

Most books have, you know, a little bit of information about the author. Sometimes the author printed on the side and so on.

The Bible is no exception and has information about its author. It says that it's inspired by God or God breathed.

And therefore profitable for teaching for reproof for correction for training and righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequately equipped for every good work.

So all scriptures God breathe everything in scripture is something that God approves of or in the sense that not everything that's recorded is something that God approves of, but the truthfulness of it is endorsed by God.

And so the Bible records false statements that critics have made, but it's accurate.

It's a truthful. It's true that they made that false claim, as it were. And so the Bible really is

God's word. And it is inspired for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the

Holy Spirit spoke from God. And so the way the Bible was penned is different from the way other books are penned where human author sits down and writes from his own will.

The Bible is the will of God. It's, it's what God wanted to be written. And the interesting thing about it, of course, is that God used the personalities and life experiences and writing styles of the various authors that he used to pen scripture.

And so when you read an epistle of Paul, it's different than you when you read the epistles of Peter. There's a different style there because the human authors different.

And so that's a little perplexing to us. How could God, how could God do that? How could God use their personalities and their, you know, their experiences to write what he wants?

Well, God designed their personalities and he controlled their life experiences. So it's not really a problem for an all powerful

God to do that. So yes, it's written by men, but men inspired by God. When did

God first speak to man? God speaking to man, that's revelation, divine discourse.

God first revealed himself to man in the Garden of Eden. God spoke directly to Adam and Eve.

We know that it's recorded in Genesis 1, 2, and 3. So you need to understand that there was a time when people didn't have a written

Bible. For the first 2 ,000 years of history, people did not have a written revelation from God, but they did have revelation from God.

We've had that from the beginning. And Adam and Eve, no doubt, passed on that revelation to their children and onto their children.

And of course, you know, Noah's great great great great great grandson, or Adam's great great great grandson could have talked directly with Adam.

That's not a problem because people lived so long back then up until about the flood year. So that's not really an issue.

So critics sometimes ask, how did people know about God before the Bible was written? And the answer is, people have known about God from the very beginning because God talked with them.

So we've always had divine revelation. We've not always had the Bible. We've always had divine revelation.

It's just, it was originally spoken, passed down by word of mouth. Perhaps some of it was written, but eventually it was incorporated into Scripture.

The earliest books of the Bible, we actually think the earliest book of the Bible was probably Job. I think it's written around 2000

BC. There are a lot of good indicators for that. That would put it at about 350 years after the great flood, about 250 years after the

Tower of Babel. A number of indicators that Job was written around that time, Job's great age, he lived 140 years after the events of his testing.

And if everything else was doubled, then maybe he was 70 when he was tested. We don't really know, but it puts his age at around 200, something like that.

He's still using a barter system at that time. The way he sacrificed, Job made sacrifices to God, and he did that on behalf of his children in case that they had sinned.

Job chapter one talks about that. But he did not sacrifice in the temple. And once the temple was constructed, you were not allowed to sacrifice outside the temple.

You had to bring the sacrifices to the temple. And so that tells us that Job was written before the temple was constructed.

So that's before the time of Moses. Now, how did we get Job? Well, Moses lived in that area, the land of Midian, which is thought to be very close to where Job lived, or maybe they even overlapped.

In fact, Moses spent 40 years there, so he unquestionably would have been familiar with some of their literature, including

Job, which was originally written down perhaps by Job himself or maybe by his family.

But in any case, that account was written down and copied and passed around. And Moses got a hold of it, realized that it was not just another work of literature, but it bore the imprint of being inspired by God.

Now, the next books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, all written around 1490 to 1450

BC during the Exodus. We know they're written by Moses. Jesus confirms that in Luke 24, 44, that Moses gave us the law, the

Torah, the first five books of the Bible. And so, and of course, they claim to be written by Moses internally as well.

So, that makes sense. God normally uses eyewitnesses to record the events, and so the events of the

Exodus and so on, it makes sense that Moses would record those events. But the interesting thing about Genesis is it contains information about events that happened long before Moses was born.

And so how did Moses get that information? Now one possibility is that God just revealed it to him.

God could certainly do that, and that is a legitimate possibility. But it's also possible that Moses may have used previous written sources to compile

Genesis. And it would still be considered his book because he's more of the editor, but under the

Hebrew custom, that would make you the author. So, and that is suggested in passages like Genesis 5 -1, where it says this is the book of the generations of Adam.

There's a book of Adam, and the Hebrew word there for generations, toledoth, there are 11 of these in Genesis.

One's a repeat, 10 unique toledoths, and those could be 10 original books written by the people that saw the events happened.

And then Moses collected those and edited them under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, perhaps updating the date system and so on.

We don't know the details of it, but that is one possibility. But in any case, Jesus quotes from Genesis as authoritative, so it is

God's word, and therefore it is true. So now all the other books of the

Bible then were written by, all the other books of the Old Testament were written by the Israelites.

And so they were a tight community. They traveled together and then spread out, of course, into the land of Canaan.

So this is sort of a timeline of the writing of the Bible. For the first 2000 years of history, we don't have the

Bible. We do have revelation from God. We had that when Adam and Eve spoke with God. So there's no doubt about that, and they pass that information on to their children,

Job, around 2000 BC. Then the other books of the Old Testament up until, there's a 400 year period, 400

BC up to 1 AD, where there were no books of the Bible written. And so that's the silent years.

And then, of course, the New Testament was all written in a very short period of time after Christ's earthly ministry and as a result of Christ's earthly ministry.

So the New Testament is quite different. So that's sort of a timeline of the writing of the

Bible. Now, the Old Testament of the Bible was written in the Hebrew language, which today looks something like this.

Now, Hebrew reads right to left, opposite of English. That takes some getting used to. Of course, the

New Testament is written in Greek, and Greek is a little easier because it's left to right, and it has the same kind of alphabet sort of that we do.

Hebrew is weird, if you're not used to it. The original language had only consonants, and all the main characters that you see there are consonants.

And originally, it would have looked a little different from that. The phrase that you're seeing here is Genesis 1.

In the beginning, God created heaven and the earth. So that's what it looks like in Hebrew today. But originally, it would have looked different.

Up until around 600 BC, when the Hebrews wrote scriptures, that's what the script looked like.

It's the same language. It's Hebrew. They call it Paleo -Hebrew or Proto -Hebrew script. It's the same language.

It's just the letters look different. You can think of it as a different font. And then that font got updated to what we call the square script around 600

BC, when the Israelites were, or Judah, I guess, the Israelites, the northern tribes had been scattered.

And then the Jews had been taken captive into Babylon. And Babylon spoke

Aramaic, and that's the Aramaic alphabet. And so the Hebrews began using the Aramaic alphabet.

It just made it easier to communicate. So that's originally the way it would have looked.

That's what you saw above. And then the square script is adopted around 600

BC. Now, there's no vowels in the original written Hebrew language.

Now, obviously, there are vowels when you speak it, but they didn't record the vowels when they wrote it. And that would be a little difficult for us.

But if you think about it, if you'd heard somebody say something and you wanted to remember it, you could write down just the consonants.

And that would be sufficient to trigger your memory, and you go, okay, yeah, you could write down the consonants. And so it was probably,

Hebrew was probably developed as a way of a shorthand for remembering something that was originally spoken. But in any case, during the captivity, the

Hebrews thought that it might be logical, it might be wise to indicate, in some cases, which vowel is used.

And so they took three of their consonants and started using them as vowels. And that's what's indicated in the light blue that you see there.

So the spelling changed at that point. So in that case, the yod, which is normally pronounced like a y, a ya, in that case, it indicates that the vowel there has an e sound to it.

So it's breshith, an Elohim. And so that's why they did that.

Now, it doesn't give you complete information on the vowels, but it gives you a little bit of help. And so we would expect spelling changes.

Spelling changes occurred around the time of the Jewish captivity in Babylon. That's the way the text would have looked during Christ's earthly ministry.

It would have been using the square script. The older books of the Bible, when they were copied, would have been updated to the newer square script.

But there's still no vowels except for three consonants that are occasionally used as vowels. And if you're wondering, how do you know if it's a vowel or consonant, it's hard.

But apparently, the Jews were used to it, and so they could do that. Now, eventually, the

Jews thought it wise to add a complete system where you could tell what the vowels were for people who were not

Jews to be able to pronounce these words. And so they added little lines and dots above and below the consonants.

Because at this point, the text was considered sacred. You don't want to change the actual letters, but maybe we can add little things above it and below it.

And there's these little cantillation marks, not just vowels, but also which syllables should be emphasized and so on.

It gives you quite a bit of information on how to pronounce the words. So now you have a complete alphabet. And that's the only way

I can read Hebrew is if it has those vowel pointings. So those were added around 600, between 600 and 850

AD. So they're much more modern. And the reason I point that out is sometimes you'll see people having a dispute about a

Hebrew word, and they'll say, well, the vowel is this. So it has to mean this. The vowels aren't original.

The original text that God inspired did not have the vowel pointings. Those were added later by the Mazarites.

They were a group of Jews who were very concerned about preserving God's word and make sure that it was copied accurately.

And they were meticulous. They were very good at it. We would find little numbers where they would count the number of words or the number of letters.

And so they made sure that they weren't missing anything. They were meticulous about copying the scriptures.

And they eventually settled on one of three vocalization systems. And that's the way the text looks today, the way it does on the bottom there.

But how do we know the text has been accurately copied? That's the question that we want to ask, because that's the one where the critics will say you don't.

And so you can't know that the Bible is reliable. It might be totally different from what it was written. Well, we don't have any of the original manuscripts that were penned by the author.

Those would be called the autographs. We don't have those. We don't have the sheepskin or whatever it was that Moses wrote on.

We don't have that. Or any of the New Testament documents that were actually written by Paul, for example, with his pen.

We don't have those. But we do have many copies of those, many, many copies. And the earliest complete

Masoretic text that we have is the Leningrad Codex. And it goes back to 1008

A .D. And so we still have in our possession today copies of the

Old Testament that were preserved by the Masoretes, the Masoretic text. We still have those that date back a thousand years.

Pretty good. And so we know that the text has not changed in the last thousand years because we still have manuscripts from a thousand years ago.

And we can compare them to manuscripts today. And they're identical. So the text has not changed in the last thousand years.

But there was a lot of history that happened before that. How do we know that it didn't change in the previous thousand years or the thousand years before that?

Or in the case of Job, a thousand years before that? How do we know that? So the answer is we can examine different families of texts from different time periods.

You'll find that when texts are copied and mistakes will creep in, that bothers a lot of Christians.

But the fact is people are not perfect copying machines. And they didn't have Xerox machines until the 20th century.

So before then, you know, if you wanted to copy a book, you had to copy it. You had to manually look at it, letter for letter, word for word copy it.

And people did not do that perfectly. Could God have made sure that they did?

Yes, but he didn't do that. He allowed little spelling mistakes and things like that. And we'll look at those later.

But when those mistakes are copied, any copy that is from those would have that same mistake in it.

And so you'll find that texts come in certain families where they have certain common features, certain variants that are in common.

And by comparing those, in most cases, we know what the original text said, even though we don't have it.

And that's pretty neat. And here's the way it works. And this is sort of hypothetical. But just let's say it's a

New Testament text. Paul just wrote this document. And it goes to a church.

And the pastor there says, this is great. We need to get this to other churches. And let's say he makes three copies of it.

Now, probably they made, like, you know, a lot more than that. They might have made 10 or 20 copies. But in any case, let's say he makes three copies.

And one goes to one part of the world, one goes to another part of the world. And those texts are then copied, right?

And in one of them, a mistake is made, which we'll represent by the purple branch there.

Let's say the original text said Jesus Christ. And in that particular manuscript, they swapped it and it says

Christ Jesus. And by the way, most of the textual variants, the mistakes that have crept in, are like that.

They have no effect on the meaning. Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus, it's the same person. It's whether you put the title.

I mean, Christ isn't his last name. It's Messiah. It's his title. You can put it first. You can put it last. It makes no difference in terms of the meaning.

But when that's copied, then all the copies that stem from that, they'll have that mistake in it. And some of those will still be around today.

We have a lot of manuscripts of the New Testament. And so by comparing the different families, we could say, oh, this particular family, this one has

Christ Jesus. But this one over here and this one over there, and they're in very different parts of the world. They both have

Jesus Christ. And since they are in different families, that has to be the original.

So you can reconstruct what the original said, even though we don't have it today. All we have are the bottom row there, the documents that remain.

And if other mistakes creep in, we can identify those by their families. We can even do this if the mistake is very close to the original.

If one of the three original copies has a mistake in it and those are copied, we can still identify it.

It's because we can identify these two families that agree. And then this one's the outlier.

We know that the two that agree are the original. And that's a biblical principle. By the mouths of two or three witnesses, every matter is confirmed.

And so we have different witnesses to the scriptures. And in most cases, we can reconstruct what the original text said, even though we don't have it.

It's pretty neat. And you can do this for different families and reconstruct what the original text was.

And so in most cases, there's no doubt what the original text said. So I know it bothers people that there are differences, that there are copying mistakes.

But if you think about it, what was God supposed to do? I mean, somebody's copying it.

He's about to make a mistake. What's God going to do? Is God going to strike him dead just to make sure he doesn't make a mistake?

I mean, God could have done that, but that seems unnecessarily cruel. Or God could have taken over their writing.

They write the right thing, and then they go back to their own writing. I mean, yeah, God could do that, but he didn't.

And there's a reason. You see, if God had forced everyone to be perfect copy machines, then we'd all have the same

Bible today. There wouldn't be any variance, but we'd have no confidence that it's the original. If somebody asked, how do you know that somebody didn't change that?

We'd have no idea because there'd be no way to follow the families. The only way we know what family the text is in is by those little differences that have crept in.

And so God allowed enough variance to creep in that we could track the families and know what the original said and have confidence that we know what the original said, but not so many mistakes as to affect any doctrine, as we'll see as we go on.

So there's a reason God did it that way, and it's a good reason. So, again, the oldest complete

Old Testament Masoretic text is the Leningrad Codex, about 1008

A .D. We had an older one, the Aleppo Codex, and it was complete originally. But in 1947, a good portion of it was burned in a fire.

And so we lost that. Unfortunately, we still possess about 60 percent of it. Now, we have portions of text that go back earlier than that.

But another document that is very helpful to us is the Septuagint. The Septuagint is the

Greek translation of the Old Testament. It began with the Greek translation of the

Torah, the first five books of the Bible. There was an Egyptian pharaoh, Ptolemy II.

He wanted to read this book that the Jews had, but he couldn't read Hebrew. And the language of the day was

Greek because of the Greek empire. And so he had 72 Jewish scholars.

But according to tradition, 72 Jewish scholars translate the first five books of the

Bible into Greek. And some say 70 scholars.

It just depends. But that's where the word Septuagint comes from. It means 70. It's sometimes abbreviated

LXX. That's the Roman numeral for 70. So if you see LXX, that means Septuagint.

And it is the Greek translation of the Torah. Then the rest of the Old Testament and some books that are not biblical, some other interesting

Jewish books that are not inspired by God, are also included in the Septuagint.

But in any case, so that process for the first five books of the Bible took place in the 200s

B .C. And then the rest of the Bible in the 100s B .C. Now the neat thing about the

Septuagint is we have the complete Septuagint by mid

A .D. 300s. Pretty neat. And so that's 700 years older than the oldest

Masoretic text we have. And so you think, you know, older is better. It's been copied fewer times.

That's good. But the Septuagint is not a copy of the Bible. It is a translation of the Bible. And God never promised that any particular translation would be perfect.

And the Septuagint does have mistakes in it. And we know that. We can compare it with the

Masoretic text. And most scholars believe the Masoretic text is better for the most part, although there's some places where the

Septuagint could be better. It is older, but it's a translation. It's not the original text.

And so it gives you some help. There are fragments of the Septuagint that go back to around 150

B .C. So that's pretty neat because that means we have documents 2 ,000 years ago that document what the

Bible said. Granted, in a different language, but that tells us the content has not changed, not substantially.

We have a tiebreaker, too, at least for the first five books of the Bible. If there's a disagreement between the Masoretic text and the

Septuagint, we have, for example, the Samaritan Pentateuch. Now, the Samaritans, they were a group that had split off from the

Israelites. The Jews didn't consider them real Jews, and they didn't get along by the time of Christ's earthly ministry because they had allegedly intermingled with non -Jews and so on.

But the interesting thing about the Samaritans is they had their own copies of the Bible, and they only accepted the first five books of the

Bible as canon, as inspired by God. The rest of the Bible, they didn't think it was inspired. So they had their own copies of scripture.

And the earliest Samaritan Pentateuch that we have today goes back to around 1100.

And you say, well, that's not as good as even the Masoretic text, because it goes back 100 years earlier than that.

But the Samaritans, because they didn't mix well with the Jews, they split off around 600

B .C. And so the source material split around 600 B .C., which is earlier than the

Septuagint even. And so the point is, if the Samaritan Pentateuch, first five books of the

Bible, and the Masoretic agree, that means that neither one has changed in the last 2 ,600 years.

So that's very compelling. And there's tremendous agreement, of course. Another wonderful discovery was made in 1947.

That's the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There's a system of caves in the Qumran area near the

Dead Sea. Sometimes called the Qumran Scrolls. And a system of 11 caves. And they found documents of all kinds of ancient literature.

Not just the Bible, but it included the Old Testament of the Bible. And the Dead Sea Scrolls go back to around 250

B .C. to 100 A .D. And so that's as old as the

Septuagint. But a lot of them are in the original Hebrew. And so that's really exciting, because that allows us to see that the text has not changed substantially in the last 2 ,000 years.

The Hebrew text did not change substantially in the last 2 ,000 years. And I want you to be able to see this, because it's one thing for you to say,

Well, I heard this astrophysicist say something about, you know, the text is remarkably consistent. It sounded convincing, but I want you to be able to see it.

And so here I have Genesis 1. I'm a Genesis guy, so I wanted to look and see, has

Genesis been accurately copied? And so let's look at the Masoretic text, which we know has remained the same for the last 1 ,000 years.

So the Masoretic text on the left, and then the Dead Sea Scrolls on the right. Now, there's not just one

Dead Sea Scroll, right? There's many. And so there's at least three Dead Sea Scrolls that have portions of Genesis chapter 1, verse 1 on them.

And the scroll is indicated in the yellow text that you see there. So the 4Q2, that's one of the scrolls, and 4Q7 is another one.

They both have Genesis 1 .1 contained in them, or at least portions of it. Now, the

Dead Sea Scrolls do not have the vowel pointings. We would not expect that, because those were added, again, around 600 to 800

AD. The Dead Sea Scrolls are much older than that. But the consonants, we can compare the consonants and see if any of them have changed.

And what I did, I have software that allows me to analyze that, and it highlights changes in red.

And you say, well, there's only one red that you see there on the lower right on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and that's because there's only one change in Genesis 1 .1.

The other two scrolls are identical. They say, just like the

Masoretic text. In the beginning, God created heaven and the earth. Same. One of the scrolls, though, instead of saying, in the beginning, it says, which is to say it's the same word, it's just spelled differently.

It's a spelling difference. So the text, the words are identical. It's just, it's missing an aleph.

So, yeah, so there's tremendous agreement. Now, if you see brackets, brackets indicate sections that are uncertain because they're hard to read.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are not all in pristine condition. And the only reason some of them are in pristine condition is because it's near the

Dead Sea. It's a desert, and it's in a cave system. And so that kept it relatively dry and so on.

But there are some where they got a little water damaged, and that makes them hard to read. So they put it in brackets. We think it says this, but we're not sure.

But as far as we can tell, Genesis 1 .1 has not changed in 2 ,000 years. And that gives us confidence that in the previous time, it hasn't changed as well.

So verses 2, 3, and 4 are identical between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic text. We get our next change in verse 5, our next variant.

And in one scroll, the text in 4Q2, the text is identical, except the red there indicates a punctuation difference.

So there's a paragraph marker in the Masoretic text. So the words are the same. The words are identical, spelling's identical.

However, there's one scroll, 4Q7, which has one word different. And that's, so this is

Genesis 1 .5. And God called the light day.

And then in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in two of them, it says, and God called the light day. In one of them, it says, and God called the light, instead of yom for day, it's yomam, which is another word for day.

It's a more specific word for day. It's the word that they would use for daytime or daylight. Whereas the

Hebrew word yom can mean day or daylight, but it can also refer to the 24 -hour time period.

So it's not really a substantial change. It doesn't affect the meaning substantially. But did

God call the light day, or did he call it day in the sense of daytime? I want to know.

I want to know which of those two is original, because I'm a nerd, and I want to know the details there. Well, we have a tiebreaker.

We have the Samaritan Pentateuch, which, again, is later than the

Dead Sea Scrolls, but it branched off earlier than that. It branched off around 600 BC. And the

Samaritan Pentateuch, lo and behold, it says yom. God called the light day yom. So that is the original. The Masoretic text had it right.

And we know that by two or three witnesses. It's a biblical principle. And so you can see that there's just tremendous agreement between these texts.

And, of course, you can find other places where there are differences as well. But the text has been remarkably preserved for the last 2 ,000 years.

There's no doubt about that. We have the documents that prove that. There are two criteria that give us confidence that our current texts are reliable copies of the original autographs.

One is if you have a large number of ancient manuscripts, more is better, because then you can compare them.

You know, two or three witnesses. If you have 1 ,000 witnesses, that's even better. And then, of course, secondly, the oldest manuscripts are generally best because they've been copied fewer times.

Well, that makes sense. So between those two criteria, you can get a pretty good feel that what you have accurately represents the original.

So in terms of the oldest manuscripts, we've seen that the earliest Masoretic text, 1 ,008

A .D., but the Dead Sea Scrolls go back to the first century, maybe the first century

B .C. around their time of Christ, Christ's earthly ministry. And the Septuagint was translated around there, and we have copies, very early copies.

So we have very ancient manuscripts, and they are not identical with modern manuscripts, but they are very close.

The content's the same. You'll find spelling differences, and yes, the vowel system was added, but the content's the same.

So the Bible has been, the content of the Bible has been remarkably well -preserved for the last 2 ,000 years.

With the New Testament, the New Testament, of course, is written all within the first century, and we have complete

New Testament manuscripts by the middle of the fourth century. So there's only been 300 years for the text to have been copied before we now have it, and that's the complete

New Testament. The earliest fragments we have go back to the second century.

P52 is a small piece of papyrus that's a section of the Book of John. It's no bigger than a credit card.

It's written on front and back, and you can see it there. We flipped it over so you can see both sides. It's a section of John chapter 18, and the verses 31 through 33 and 37 through 38, and that dates back to around 125

A .D. Some estimates put it closer to 100 A .D. So that's not the actual letter that John wrote, but it could be a direct copy of it.

I mean, it's just that close to the original. Just amazing that we have this in our possession today, and you say, well, it's a very small section of John.

Yes, but it's identical to later copies of John. The words that you see there in Greek are identical to the words later that are found in later copies.

By the 300s, you have the complete New Testament, along with the Septuagint, the translation of the

Old Testament as well, in Codex Vaticanus. Again, it's 300s A .D.

in a complete bound volume. It's written in Greek, all uppercase letters and no spaces.

So even if you can read Greek, it's a little hard to read. Likewise, Codex Sinaiticus, also mid 300s

A .D., all uppercase, no spaces, very little in the way of punctuation.

So lowercase was added later and things like that. So you can get very early copies of the complete

Bible, which I think is cool. What about the number of manuscripts that we have? And just to give you a comparison with other works of the ancient world, here are the number of manuscripts.

And a manuscript, by the way, by manuscript, I don't mean the complete book. A manuscript could be a complete book.

It could be one page out of a book that they found somewhere. It's any unique discovery or P52, that little credit card, that's a manuscript.

So anything counts. If it has any kind of text on it that is known to be part of the Bible, that's a manuscript.

And likewise with these other documents. These are manuscripts from Tacitus 33, and that's around A .D.

70 when that was written. So that's pretty good. When you get to Plato, a lot of people have discussions about Plato and what he wrote.

We have 210 manuscripts of Plato, of his Tetralogies. Now that's, again, not 210 complete books.

If you want to have the complete book, it'd be more like 10. But in terms of manuscripts, 210.

It's pretty good. And people will have discussion, did Plato really write this? Well, with 210 manuscripts, you can have some confidence that he did because you can compare the different families.

Now one of the most popular works of the ancient world was the Iliad by Homer.

I've read the sequel to it, The Odyssey. And it's really fascinating. It's early kind of sci -fi fantasy.

It's wonderfully written. But in any case, 1 ,900 manuscripts. And with that number of manuscripts, scholars are confident that 95 % of what we have today in the

Iliad is exactly what Homer wrote. It's identical. And there's 5 % where there's some uncertainties because there's different variations and we're not sure which is original.

But with 1 ,900 manuscripts, you can be 95 % certain in the text and you can have some uncertainties in the remaining 5%.

Pretty good. Now how does the Bible stack with this? Let's start with the Old Testament. It's hard to get exact numbers on this, so this is an estimate.

But the Old Testament, it's off the chart. We'll have to adjust the chart here quite a bit to bring it down because there's something like 11 ,000 ancient manuscripts of the

Old Testament. Pretty good. So with that, you can really start to do some analysis of the text and figure out, reconstruct the original and figure out what the different families were and so on.

What about the New Testament? Well, the New Testament, written in Greek because that was the language of the day, and 5 ,800

Greek New Testament manuscripts that we have in our possession today. Ancient manuscripts before the printing press started being able to make copies of these things quickly.

So pretty good. But shortly after the New Testament was written in Greek, it was translated into other languages.

Latin became the language of the day. And so there are 10 ,000 ancient manuscripts of the New Testament in Latin.

And if you want to include other languages, Coptic and so on, 9 ,300. And so we'll have to reduce our scale again to add those together.

If you want to see the total number of manuscripts of the New Testament, something like 25 ,000. Now that blows away anything else in the ancient world.

And so, and I'll grant having large numbers of manuscripts like that doesn't automatically prove that the

Bible is the word of God or that it's even inspired by God, but this should convince a critic that there's something very different and very unique about the

Bible. It is unique in the ancient world. There's nothing else that comes close to it in terms of the number of manuscripts.

So pretty, pretty amazing. And with that many manuscripts, you're bound to have some differences, you're bound to have some copying mistakes that have accumulated over time.

And the nice thing we have, we have Greek manuscripts, we have Latin and we have other languages, we can compare them and compare the different families within each group.

And now the New Testament was freely transmitted, there was no oversight. If you wanted to have a copy of a book of the

New Testament, you would go to your pastor and borrow it and make your own copy, and then you'd have it.

There's nobody making sure that you do it right necessarily. And so there are a lot more variations, a lot more variants in the

New Testament than in the Old Testament. But then again, there are more copies of the New Testament than the Old Testament. There are thousands of variants.

And that bothers a lot of people because how do you know which one's the original? What's the original reading?

Well again, scholars can look at the families and in most cases, there's no doubt what the original read because if you have two very different families and they both say the same thing, that's the original.

The one that's different, that's the outlier, that's the one that where a change crept in.

And there's different kinds of copy mistakes that can be made. Words can be swapped, occasionally a line can be dropped, occasionally a line will be added.

I'll come back to that and we'll see how that happens. But there's two questions we need to ask about these variants, of which there are thousands.

How many of them are meaningful? Because a lot of the variants are like Jesus Christ versus Christ Jesus or the

Lord Jesus or something like that, where it's the same person, it has no effect on the meaning.

Because a lot of the variants have absolutely no effect on the meaning. There are some variants that involve a nuance of the

Greek language that once they're translated into English, it goes away anyway. So you wouldn't even see it in an

English translation. So how many are meaningful? Not very many. How many are viable? Viable means there is a chance that this is original.

Because there are some variants that are very recent, where a particular word pops in or is dropped, but only in the most recent documents from the last few hundred years.

That can't be original. The original would have to be very ancient. Or there are some variants that are just silly.

For example, you know how maybe your Bible has like two columns, my Bible has two columns, and you're supposed to read this column, and then you read the next column.

A lot of ancient Bibles had that as well, two or three or four columns. There is a copy where somebody didn't realize you're supposed to go this way and they went straight across from one column to the next to the next to the next and because his margins were different, the text is all scrambled.

We still have that manuscript today. Now that can't be original, it doesn't make any sense, but we know what he did because we can see the way the words have been rearranged, we can see that he went straight across instead of going down to the next column.

So that's not a viable variant. Viable means it could be original. Now if you combine how many variants are both meaningful, they affect the meaning of the passage, and viable, there's a chance that they're original.

By one estimate, it's about 0 .2%. 0 .2%.

What that means is that the Bible that you hold in your hand, 99 .8

% of it is absolutely certain in terms of the meaning. There's no doubt that that is what the original author meant to write.

There's no doubt about it. But what about that 0 .2 %? The good news is none of the 0 .2

% affects any doctrine, any Christian doctrine at all. And I want to show you this, I want to show you some of these variations because critics will bring these up and you need to be able to answer them, really.

So here's an example of one. This is in Mark 9, verse 43. Because the question that people ask then is, how do

I know if a text that I'm quoting is a variant? How do I know that I can stand on it?

It's the original word of God where there's no doubt, versus these 0 .2 % where there's some question.

Well, if you have a modern Bible, it'll have brackets around text that's uncertain. This is from the

New American Standard 77 version. You notice that verse 44, this is Jesus speaking. In verse 44, and again in 46, there's this little phrase where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.

And you'll see that it has brackets around it. Brackets indicate there's some uncertainty.

They usually indicate that some manuscripts have that and other manuscripts do not have that.

And so you got to decide which is the original and usually the oldest one is more likely to be the original reading.

But you can compare families as well. Now you'll notice there's a footnote there as well in those brackets, footnote 27.

And that gives us a little more information. And so here's what the footnote says. Verses 44 and 46, which are identical with verse 48, are not found in the best ancient manuscripts.

So they're giving you some information there. They're telling you that the ancient manuscripts, the ones that they consider to be the best, so they're putting their opinion in there too, do not contain those verses, verse 44 and verse 46.

So it's very likely that the original gospel that Mark wrote did not contain what we would now have as verse 44 and verse 46, where their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched.

Now keep in mind, there wouldn't have been verse numbers originally. Verse numbers were added in 1560, something like that.

And so they didn't exist originally, it was just the text, so you can't tell by the verse number. But how did that get added in then?

I mean, if Mark originally did not include that little phrase, where their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched, how did they get added in?

Well, take a look at verse 47 and 48. Verse 47, and if your eye causes you to stumble, cast it out, it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than having two eyes to be cast into hell.

Verse 48, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. Now the thing you'll notice about verse 48, you'll notice what it doesn't have.

It doesn't have brackets. That's because all ancient copies of Mark have that phrase in verse 48.

So is there any doubt? Did Jesus say, did Jesus say where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched?

Yes, and there's no doubt that he said that, because all the ancient copies of Mark have that in verse 48.

The only question is whether Jesus said it once or three times. And that makes no difference in terms of doctrine, because if Jesus says something once, it's true.

So it doesn't really matter too much. But if you're wondering, okay, but how did that get added in, if indeed it was added in, if the oldest copies don't have it, take a look at the last words in verse 47, to be cast into hell, where their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched.

Now look at the last few words of verse 45, to be cast into hell.

It's the same ending, you see. And so it'd be very easy for somebody who's copying the

Greek text for, you know, there's no verse numbers yet. He's in verse, what today would be verse 45.

He's writing down to be cast into hell. And he looks back over here to be cast into hell, but he's actually looking at verse 47.

He thinks he's looking at verse 45, he's looking at verse 47. And so he naturally writes where their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched.

It would be an easy mistake to make. So a lot of people have the impression that these variations that we find are people trying to alter

God's word. That's not the case. For the most part, they are very innocent copying mistakes, mistakes that would be very easy to make, especially when you're writing maybe by candlelight.

You know, for the first century, it was illegal to be a Christian. So, you know, you're writing under difficult circumstances, it'd be easy to skip a line like that and to accidentally add in a line when there's a similar ending.

We see those kinds of mistakes creep in. Another example is in Mark chapter 10, verse 7, where Jesus is speaking.

He says, for this cause, a man shall leave his father and mother, and the two shall become one flesh. And again, you'll see a footnote there.

There's no brackets this time, but you'll see footnote 28, which says some manuscripts add, and shall cleave to his wife.

Now, the translators of the New American Standard were confident enough that the original

Mark did not have that phrase there. It just, verse 7 ended, for this cause, a man shall leave his father and mother, and that's it.

They're confident enough that they didn't even put the extra phrase in the text, but they put it in the footnote so that you don't have to agree with them.

And I think that's a good call, right? I mean, if there's any doubt, leave it up to the reader. Put a footnote and let the reader do his homework.

You can give your opinion. Their opinion is that some manuscripts have added that later because the oldest manuscripts don't have it.

Sinaiticus does not have it. Vaticanus does not have it. Those are the two oldest complete books of the Bible. They do not have that extra phrase, and shall cleave to his wife.

Now, if you're wondering how that could be added in, it'd be easy to do, because Jesus is quoting from Genesis.

For this cause, a man shall leave his father and mother, and Genesis does say, and shall cleave to his wife, and join to his wife.

Furthermore, the parallel account in Matthew, Matthew chapter 19, where Jesus quotes

Genesis, he quotes the whole thing in Matthew. He says, and for this cause, a man shall leave his father and mother, and join to his wife. So did

Jesus say, and shall join to his wife, and shall cleave to his wife? Yes, he did. It's just a question of whether or not

Mark recorded Jesus saying that. So again, it has no effect on doctrine. We know Jesus said that.

We know it's true, because it's recorded in Genesis anyway. It's just that the evidence would seem to be that Mark originally did not record the entire quote.

And we know that they did that sometimes. They would truncate quotations, or they would paraphrase.

That's perfectly fine. So it doesn't affect your theology at all. One that you might think would affect your theology is in John 118, which says,

No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, he has explained him. Now, if you have an older translation of the

Bible, like the King James Version of the Geneva Bible, it'll say, No one has seen God at any time.

The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has explained him. And that's because some manuscripts, some of the manuscripts that we find do say

Son, which is a more natural, the only begotten, the next word you would expect would be

Son, only begotten Son. But interestingly, the oldest Greek manuscripts we have of John 118 say the only begotten

God. And that's pretty neat because it's talking about Jesus. Jesus is the only begotten

God. It's referring to Jesus as God. And so that's a very significant point. And again, you get people saying, well, they're trying to reduce the divinity of Jesus.

That's not the case. There are plenty of passages elsewhere in scripture that affirm the deity of Jesus.

Hebrews 1 .8, where God the Father says of the Son, but of the Son, he says, Thy throne,

O God, is forever and ever. I checked. There are no variations of that. They all refer to Jesus as God.

So this myth that people are trying to remove the divinity of Jesus in the Bible, it is a myth. It's not it's demonstrably false.

But you can see how easy for someone writing the only begotten. They're a little bit tired. Only begotten Son, because Jesus is called the only begotten

Son in other places. So it's easy to see how that mistake could creep in. One that's really interesting is in John, chapter five, verses three through four.

I was when I was a youngster in church and reading this, I also thought this was so weird. This was talking about the pool of Bethesda, where Jesus healed a lame man.

And verse three, in these there lay a multitude who were sick, blind, lame and withered. And then in a lot of translations of scripture will say, waiting for the moving the waters for an angel, the

Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and stirred up the water. Whoever then first after the stirring of the water stepped in was made well from whatever disease with which he was afflicted.

I also thought that was so strange that there was this little game that God played where, you know, you'd send an angel to stir the water and first one who jumps in gets healed.

And I don't know. I mean, I also thought that was so strange. But I've come to learn that the oldest copies of the

Gospel of John do not have that, that extra little section that you see in yellow that's in brackets there. It's not found in the earliest copies of John.

It's not found in Sinaiticus or Vaticanus, the two earliest complete New Testaments or the entire

Bible for that matter. It's not or Alexandria's, which is fifth century. It's not found in P66, which is a very early copy of the

Book of John dating back to about 150 A .D. It does not have that extra little phrase in brackets or in P75, which is a late second or early third century document.

In fact, early Greek manuscripts up until the ninth century did not have that reading.

So for the first 800 years of church history, no one had read that little blurb about waiting for the moving of the waters.

And you have to wonder how that got added in, if indeed that's been added in. And it seems to be because none of the older copies have it.

This appears to be a marginal gloss. Now, when people were copying scripture and they're doing it by hand, no

Xerox machines, no printing press yet, when they're copying it by hand, sometimes they would put helpful comments in the margins.

And we know that because we have some of these manuscripts today and they have helpful comments in the margins. And so, you know, they'll say, you know, see the parallel account in Matthew or something like that.

They'll have helpful information to give you a little bit more of an understanding of what's going on or they'll interpret the text, whatever.

They'll give you a little bit of extra information. That's a marginal note. But sometimes when people were copying scripture and they realized they made a mistake, they left out a verse or a sentence or whatever.

I mean, the verses, there weren't verse numbers back then, but they left out a sentence. What do you do?

You can either crumple that up and throw it away, which is one possibility, but more likely what they would do is they would write that verse in the margin.

Now, the next person who gets this copy of the Bible and he's reading it and it's got this little thing in the margin, he doesn't know if that's a comment or if it's the text of scripture that the previous author left out.

So what do you do? And more often than not, they'd go ahead and include it because you don't want to leave out

God's word. You don't want to add to it either. But given the two options, you can always cross it out later if you find it spurious.

So they would tend to include it. And so a marginal gloss is where somebody wrote a comment and then the next copyist thought that they were writing, that they had left out scripture.

And so it gets moved into the text. And we've seen cases of where that happens. And this seems to be a case of a marginal gloss where somebody was writing their own explanation for why all these people were lying around the pool.

Maybe there was a legend or a fable that had gone around. And so they wrote that in the margin. And the next person thinking that's scripture, you're not trying to add to scripture.

He just thinks it is scripture. And so he incorporates it into the text. And so that could very well be how that got in there.

But if you look at the NIV, the NIV just leaves that out. And again, it's not, you know, the

NIV, they're leaving out scripture. Well, no, they're trying to get close to the original as we can. And the oldest

Greek copies don't have that. There are three very significant variants that I want you to know about. Because they are the ones that the critics will point to.

Because, well, they're just, they're very common. And so the first one is what's called the Kama Johannium. And it is, if you read in 1

John 5, verse 7, if you read in the King James Version, it says there are three that bear record in heaven.

The Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one. Nice little summary of the Trinity.

Perfectly true. But John did not write it. John did not write it. All the early copies of the

New Testament do not have that little phrase. There are three that bear record in heaven. The Father, the Word, and the

Holy Ghost. These three are one. It's not there. And, in fact, there are no Greek Bibles that have that before the year 1362.

For the first thousand years of church history, no one had read in their Greek Bible, there are three that bear record in heaven.

The Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one. Nobody's seen that. In fact, it didn't get into a pure Greek Bible until the 1500s.

How did it get in there? It began appearing in the Latin Vulgate. The Vulgate is the

Latin translation of the Bible. And it began appearing around the year 800. But, again, for the first 800 years of church history, nobody had seen that little verse.

And so if you don't find that in your modern Bible, it's because they've rightly recognized that's not the original scripture that John wrote.

That's a comment that somebody wrote, probably a marginal gloss that got moved in. Because it does mention three that bear witness on earth, and that could be the explanation.

Somebody could be like, well, there are three that bear witness in heaven as well. Perfectly true statement. John didn't write it. So when I'm defending the

Trinity, I never use this verse. Because my conviction is that John didn't write that.

It's not inspired by God. It's not part of the original. And there are plenty of other verses where we do have certainty that do establish the

Trinity. And I point to those. Another one that's very controversial is the Pericope Adultery.

This is the story of the woman caught in adultery. It's the one where Jesus is writing in the sand, and they say, you know, the law says we should stone her.

What do you say? He says, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. It's a wonderful story. But the early versions of the

Gospel of John do not contain it. It's not there. Let's see if I have the numbers on this.

Yeah, it's not found in P66, which is the earliest complete book or more or less complete book of John.

P75, it's not found in Sinaiticus, it's Vaticanus. It starts appearing in the fourth to fifth century in some manuscripts.

It's a wonderful story. It may have happened, but John, we think, didn't write it. There's a good evidence that John didn't write it.

Sometimes people will take that, and it doesn't fit right there either. In context, it doesn't flow very naturally.

So some people put it at the end of John. In some manuscripts, you'll find it at the end of John. Sometimes you'll find it in Luke's Gospel in chapter 21, after what today would be verse 38.

They stick it in there. And some put it after John chapter 7, verse 36, or after John chapter 21, verse 24.

So when a text pops around like that, you're just like, we really need to get this in there. It's so good, but none of the ancient, the very ancient copies had it.

And so we think that's probably not original. By the way, there's nothing in it that would be contrary to Christian doctrine, because according to the

Mosaic law, there had to be two or three eyewitnesses of the crime, and they had to be innocent of that crime themselves.

And so Jesus was following the law perfectly there, but we don't need it. We have the same law recorded in the

Torah. And then the most controversial one is Mark chapter 16, verses 9 through 20.

That's the last 12 verses of the book of Mark. And most modern Bibles will include those verses, but they'll put them in brackets, because the earliest manuscripts end at verse 8.

As far as we can tell, the original book of Mark ended kind of on a cliffhanger, because Jesus has risen, but you don't get to see kind of the aftermath of what happened with the disciples and so on.

The earliest copies of Mark end at verse 8. Sinaiticus, Vaticanus end at verse 8. There are some ancient manuscripts that have a few of those verses in there.

There's a medium ending. There's a long ending. There's some that put the last paragraph of verse 20 right after verse 8 and conclude it that way.

There's lots of different endings of Mark, and that's why it is the most— the ending of Mark is the most controversial textual variant in the

New Testament. And why do I bring that up? Because I want you to know about them, and because these are the only three really significant variants.

None of them would really affect doctrine. But with the second—with the pre -Copan adultery and the long ending of Mark, those are both 12 verses long.

That's huge. Most variants are like one word. And if you want to see this for yourself, pick up a modern

Bible, ESV, NAS, one that uses the bracket notation, and take a look. Turn to a random page in the

New Testament and look at all the verses that don't have brackets around them. That means there's no uncertainty there.

So I just wanted you to know where the controversial ones are. And if you disagree with me, that's fine.

If you think, well, I think the original Mark did have the longer ending, you're fine to research that. We need to have some discussions about those kind of things, and they need to be done with grace because nobody's disputing the authenticity of the

Bible. It's just, which one's the Bible? That's the one we have to ask. So the vast majority of verses in the

New Testament have no variants. They're both meaningful and viable. Again, Jesus being referred to as God in Hebrews 1, 8.

There are no variants there, I checked. And we can do this with software now. It's all been compiled, and we can check.

And there's no other work of antiquity that comes close to the authenticity of the Bible. So that makes it a unique document for sure, and that's what we'd expect, given that it is the word of God, which, of course, is my conviction as a

Christian. So it's neat the way that God has preserved his word. He's not only preserved it so that we have all the major doctrines.

There's no doubt that the author penned what we have today or we have an accurate, reliable translation of what the author penned.

And that's very cool. But God did allow little variants to creep in so we could track the families and have confidence that what we have today is the same meaning as the original.

So I think I'll end there, and we'll take questions now. Okay, great.

That was a great presentation. Thank you for that. We do have some comments or questions.

Well, both. So we're going to start with a question from Ken. And I am not okay.

So his question is, how is, and I'm just going to spell this so that I don't mispronounce it, the letters

YHWH, the name for God, pronounced given the lack of vowel pointings in the original manuscripts.

Were the vowel pointings added to preserve pronunciation or to guard against pronouncing it?

Okay, so we don't know for sure how YHWH was pronounced because we don't have the vowels.

And because the Jews, by the time of Christ's earthly ministry, were in the practice of not saying the name

YHWH out loud. I mean, there's this commandment, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

And they weren't exactly sure what that meant, but they were sure that if we don't say the name of God at all, we're safe.

So it was common practice. It was common practice. Again, by the time, and I'm not sure when this began, but it's ancient, that certainly by the time of Christ's earthly ministry, they would not pronounce the name

YHWH. And when they were reading, even when they're reading the Bible, when they're reading the Bible, when they came to the word

YHWH, they would say Adonai, which means God or Lord. It's a generic word for Lord, basically.

And, or my Lord, Adonai, my Lord. And so even when they, when they quote the

Shema, you know, here, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. Shema Yisrael, YHWH Elohim, YHWH echad.

They would never say it that way. They would say it Adonai Elohim, Adonai echad.

To avoid saying the holy name of God, YHWH. So we don't know for sure how it's pronounced.

There is evidence that YHWH is probably the best guess at our pronunciation. When the

Mazarites added vowel pointings, there were a few places where they would intentionally add wrong vowel pointings.

And they had very few places where they did this, but one is with the name YHWH. They would add the vowel pointings for Adonai.

And that was their kind of secret way of saying, don't say this out loud. When you see this, say

Adonai. Okay. And so that's all we know about the name.

Yeah, he had an addendum. And maybe that's something because he specifically was asking about the 70 translating.

Yeah, the Septuagint. Okay. Yeah. I see the chat here. Does the Septuagint translating

YHWH as Lord provide any hint as to the original pronunciation of YHWH or motivation? I don't think so. Because it wouldn't help you with the pronunciation.

They're just substituting a different word. It tells you that they understood what it meant, that it's the

Lord God. But it doesn't help you with the pronunciation. And Leilani just wants to put you at ease that we're probably all nerds right now that are listening to you.

So you can be comfortable knowing that you're welcome in this crowd.

And then Ken also has a bonus question. He says, what is your favorite

Greek letter and is it in some way related to astrophysics? Yeah, we use a lot. You know,

I can't read Greek, but I know the Greek alphabet because we use it in physics and astronomy all the time.

So, you know, Alpha, Alpha and Omega, I guess the beginning and the end. Those are the first and last letters. Those would be,

I guess, if I have a favorite. I don't know that I have a favorite. I'm a nerd, but I don't know that I have a favorite Greek letter. Sorry. I think that's fair.

Fair enough. That's a good answer. Okay. Brody is asking, do we have an approximate number of families for the

Old and New Testament? A person who was a scholar on textual criticism could probably give you a number.

I can't. I can tell you that I know there are certain families of the Alexandrian family. There's the

Byzantine family. The Byzantine family is what it bloomed because it was in a part of the world that wasn't conquered by Islam, the

Muslims. And so there are a lot of copies there from the Byzantine family. But then there's a question of how you want to divide that.

You can divide it into smaller and smaller families. So I don't know what that number is. But there are certain main families, the

Alexandrian text, the Byzantine text, and so on. And then there are sort of families within those as well.

And a lot of this is being made obsolete because there's a new research project that's being doing where they're taking all these different manuscripts and they're feeding them into a computer.

And a computer can analyze and compare thousands of manuscripts simultaneously in the blink of an eye.

And it's the, what is it, the genealogically based, oh shoot,

I can't remember the name of it. But in any case, it's a project that's undergoing right now where they're taking books of the

Bible. And that may change our estimates of what families they're in.

And it may not even be necessary anymore. They'll be able to track the lineage of these different manuscripts that we have today.

Okay, next question goes back to the last one about the pronunciation. So if we say

Yahweh, then we might be saying it wrong. Is that what you're saying? Like we don't know for sure exactly how it's supposed to be pronounced?

We don't know for sure. But there are Hebrew scholars who have some degree of confidence that Yahweh is the correct pronunciation.

It seems to be related to the Hebrew word hayah, which is to be. And God says

I am that I am, right? God is the self -existent one. And so Yahweh actually has meaning. It might mean the self -existent one, the one who is and owes his existence to no one else.

So if I mean, it's not that we would be doing any harm in this in this day and age to to pronounce it that way.

I mean, is it more appropriate for us as English speakers just to say Lord? Or is there a wrong way or right?

We like if we're mispronouncing it. I'm sure that Grace is going to come in there, but let you answer.

Yeah, I mean, I don't I don't think so. I don't think God is terribly concerned about pronunciation. To be honest, the new legacy,

I think it's the legacy Bible where they've actually gone back. Because normally when you see the Lord in all uppercase letters,

L -O -R -D, that's Yahweh. That's the way most modern translations translate Yahweh.

But the new I think it's the legacy Bible where they put Jehovah. Now, I can tell you this. Jehovah is definitely the wrong pronunciation.

But Jehovah, basically Jehovah is Yahweh. It's just a wrong way of pronouncing Yahweh. But I don't think

God's offended by that. If you want to call him Jehovah. A lot of the names that we pronounce aren't the way they were pronounced originally.

Because they get adapted into Greek and then they get anglicized. You know, John instead of Johan.

And, you know, even Jesus, Yeshua would probably be the original. That's probably how it was originally pronounced.

Moses, that's the Greek pronunciation. The Hebrew, it would have been Moshe. If you look at Hebrew, it's

Moshe. So a lot of these names are pronounced differently than what we think. So that's part of the curse of Babel.

We have these different languages now. And that's part of the issue with that. We know that God knows our hearts.

Okay. So some of the people in this Zoom room are trying to stump me,

I think, by just using foreign or big words that I'm going to have to stumble through.

But we're going to do our best. So Jeff says, my understanding is that textus vaticanus is older than textus receptus.

But it is probably not correct. Textus receptus was used and recopied as used.

The common church rejected the vaticanus and so it went unused into storage. It was found long after still in good condition.

Though older, it doesn't necessarily mean it is more accurate. So he wanted to know what your response is.

Yeah, I've heard that before, but it's not true. The textus vaticanus, vaticanus is a complete, almost complete, it's actually missing sections of Genesis, but it's an almost complete

Bible that goes back to the 350s A .D. And it shows good agreement with Sinaiticus, which also is mid 300s

A .D. And the reason that they were not used is because they were buried in a part of the world,

I think it's close to Egypt, that was conquered by the Muslims. And so that's why those families were preserved very well and not copied as much because they were buried.

But the other families, the Byzantine family, it exploded because it was in a part of the world that was never conquered by the

Muslims. So you'll hear this a lot. The textus receptus, there is no manuscript that's a textus receptus.

The textus receptus is whatever manuscripts the folks who translated the

King James decided to use, which were mostly the texts that Desiderius Erasmus used.

Desiderius Erasmus was a scholar who he produced, was it the first?

He produced a new Latin translation of the

Bible, a new Latin translation. And he included with it a compilation of the

Greek as well. So it was actually, and it was, I think it was the first print. It might've been the first printed Greek. Anyway, I'm getting my facts confused, but I know that Desiderius Erasmus, he was comparing different manuscripts.

Now you need to understand today we have, right, we have 25 ,000 manuscripts of the

New Testament, 5 ,000 in Greek and then, you know, in other languages as well. And I have on my computer access to all of them.

I can compare all of them and I can see how they compare. For any given book of the Bible, Erasmus may have had five.

There was no internet. If you wanted access to a manuscript, you had to go to the library to get it.

They didn't even have interlibrary loan back then. So he did the best he could with the manuscripts that he had.

With Revelation, with the book of Revelation, he couldn't find any Greek manuscripts of Revelation.

So what did he do? He found a commentary that happened to have the Greek text and he used that as his basis for Revelation.

And for the last bit of the last chapter, the commentary, the pages were missing.

So for the last bit of the last chapter of the book of Revelation, he back -copied it into Greek. He back -translated it into Greek from the

Latin Vulgate, which is why there are mistakes in the King James, which is the last part of Revelation that no one had seen in a

Greek Bible ever. But that's where that comes from. Desiderius Erasmus, the King James translators used primarily his work, along with a little bit from Basil, a little bit from maybe

Stephanus, but primarily Erasmus. And whatever documents they used, they called that the received text, the

Textus Receptus. But it's not one document until recently. Recently, they've taken all those manuscripts that the

King James was translated from and they collected them and produced a bound volume. So you can get a

Textus Receptus now, but it's modern. There was no Textus Receptus in the ancient world. There were different texts.

The Byzantine was very common because it was from a part of the world that the Muslims did not conquer. But, no,

I would say that the Vaticanus and the Sinaiticus are very accurate. I mean, they're not perfect either.

They have little differences, but they're very close to the original. And so they're older than the much more recent texts that were used to translate, like the

King James, for example. Okay, good. That's a good explanation.

So you're going to have to help me through the next question. So our friend Dan has some questions, and he has three comments here, three separate comments.

So maybe you can help me read them and answer them yourself. I think you might understand better what he's talking about.

Okay. So, yeah. So I think he's referring to Targum have the

Mimra, which is not part of the Hebrew Torah. In fact, John used this Mimra in his opening verses. In the beginning, there was a word.

Yeah. So, yeah, there are documents outside.

There's the, oh, my brain's not working this evening. I don't know what it is.

There are commentaries that the rabbis would use, that they wrote, telling him how to interpret the

Old Testament. And then there were commentaries on the commentaries, how to interpret the commentaries.

I think that's what he's referring to. In any case, yeah, John was intentional about using some of the lingo of the day that would have been known to the rabbis at that time, the

Jewish leaders. There is a reason why he opened his gospel that way.

And, of course, it mirrors Genesis 2 in the beginning. And in the New Testament, John, in the beginning, was the word.

And it starts with God. The word was with God and the word was God. So there's a reason he did it that way. And he's not endorsing any other commentary.

People can quote things that are not scripture in the scriptures if they recognize that there's truth in them.

So I hope that answers your question. Okay. I hope so, too. So let's go ahead.

So the next one is not so much a question as it is a comment, but I think that Rob would like kind of a response.

So the Toledoth in Genesis 2 .4 is telling us that the heavens and the earth were providing us with an eyewitness account by the two eyewitnesses that were there through the creation.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. All of the

Toledoth, all the other ones, have a human attached to them, except for Genesis 2 .4,

which has the heaven and earth attached to them. That's why I tend to think the other Toledoths mentioned the person that was the eyewitness to the events.

And so he may have been the author. But with Genesis 2 .4, referring presumably to the verses that came before.

Genesis 2 .4 seems to be the transition verse between what came before it and what follows, where you have an expanded account of the events of day six.

But only God could have witnessed that along with the creation as he's creating it.

And so he calls heaven and earth as his witnesses. As God often does, he calls heaven and earth as his witnesses to those very early events that happened before humans had been created.

Okay. Jim says, can Dr. Lyle address the silly assertion that the Bible didn't come into existence until the councils of the early 4th century

A .D.? I have a hard time that some people still think that is true. Yeah, it is.

It is. It is rather silly because, of course, it's in the 4th century that you can get bound copies by the 4th century of all the books

Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are from the mid 4th century. And they're all the books of the Bible together.

So not only did people have the Bible, you could get bound copies at that point. Now, you had to be rich to get a bound copy of the entire

Bible, but you could do it. And the fact that we have some today that date back to the mid 4th century shows that they were already in existence.

And all the books, it also refutes that silly myth that, well, you know, they were still deciding what canon was.

No, it's the same 66 books that we'd have today. So, I mean, you know, they still had, they referred to those as canon.

Now, they began the practice of including some non -biblical books as well, and that's how we get the Apocrypha and things like that.

But the books that early church leaders, that early church fathers quoted from authoritatively were the 66 books that we have today.

So, yeah, so the Bible was in existence. P52, a section from the Gospel of John, goes back to 125

AD. So there's no doubt that the Gospel of John existed in the 2nd century.

Because we have that portion of it today. Now, you need to understand that very early on in the very early church, a given church did not necessarily have all the books of the

Bible. They probably had the Old Testament. They probably had the Septuagint because that's what they could read, not because it's superior, because they could read

Greek. Most early Christians couldn't read Hebrew, but Greek was the common language of the day. So they would have the

Greek translation of the Old Testament, Septuagint, but they might not have all the Gospels. They might have a Gospel of John.

Another church has a Gospel of Matthew and so on. And then those get circulated. And by the 2nd century, you get all the

Gospels together and so on. But, yeah, the books of the Bible, certainly all of them had been written by the end of the 1st century.

There's no doubt about that. And we find very early copies of just about every book of the Bible by the 2nd century.

And then by the 4th century, you have them all together. Okay, Brody says,

I recall hearing something about the difference in meanings of the different names and pronunciations of God.

Do different manuscripts use names with different meanings in the same place? And are those differences important?

The different names and pronunciations of God. Well, there are different words that are used for God.

In the Old Testament, the most common would be Elohim, which is translated

God. Yahweh, which is translated Lord, and all in capital letters in most modern

English translations. And then Adonai, which is my Lord, but the O -R -D would be lowercase.

That tells you it's Adonai. So those would be the three common ones in the Old Testament. Elohim is generic. It probably means mighty one.

And in some instances, it can even be used of people who are very mighty, who are in positions of power.

So Elohim is kind of a generic word for God or gods, false gods could be called

Elohim. I think the pagans used the term Elohim as well. They may well have, yes, they may well have.

And then Adonai, just my Lord, that could be a respectful title if you're in someone's house, you know, my

Lord. And then Yahweh. Yahweh is the unique name of God that only applies to God.

So if that's what you're asking about, those would be the three terms that are used. And we know how to pronounce

Adonai and Elohim for sure because we have the vowel pointings for those.

Yahweh is the one we don't know for sure how it's pronounced, but there's good evidence that it is something like Yahweh. We have the consonants anyway, so there's no doubt about that.

And so there are different terms that are used for God. Yahweh always means God. And then Adonai, just my

Lord, could be generic, could be the Lord. And then Elohim, God or mighty ones. And then the

New Testament, Phaos for God and Kyrios for Lord. And Kyrios, it's less specific.

It can either mean Yahweh, the Lord, or it can mean a Lord, depending on context. Okay. Next, Robin would like to know your opinion on why are people so hung up on the

King James Version only? Yeah, I'm not sure, other than I think some people, when they get the modern translations, like an

NIV, where you turn to John 5, 4 and the verse isn't there, and well, you're removing scripture.

You know, the King James doesn't do that. Well, no, the NIV is using more up -to -date information, more information than the

King James translators had at their disposal. They would have loved to have had the manuscript evidence we have today.

And they likely would have drawn the same conclusions that modern scholars have, that John 5, 4, that that particular verse is not original.

And so they probably would not have included it, had they known that at the time. Or the ending of Revelation, they didn't know.

They didn't know that Erasmus had back translated that from the Latin, which is why you get, is it

Tree of Life or Book of Life? It's swapped in the King James, because that comes from an error in the

Latin Vulgate, where the word for tree and the word for book are very similar in Latin. There's only a two -letter difference.

And so that's how that got in there. They didn't know that. They didn't know that. They would have loved to have had the information that we have today.

And they expected further progress. They expected more research to be done.

The ironic thing about the King James translators, they would not be

King James onlyists. They certainly would not, because they were very clear that they were doing their best to translate it.

They were not denying the existence of other fine translations, like the Geneva Bible and so on, from which they borrowed heavily and so on.

And they were expecting that more research would be done and that there would need to be changes made as additional information came in from additional manuscripts.

So it is a shame that we have this King James only mindset. The King James is a wonderful translation.

Don't get me wrong. I think one of the reasons people love it is the way the poetry was translated.

It's just majestic. The King James poetry is wonderful. And people really like that. But a big part of it,

I think, is it's what you grow up with. And it's not the first time this happened, because when the Latin Vulgate came out, there was a big fuss about that, because there were other

Latin translations and people liked their own. And they said, well, why do we need another Latin translation? We got this one right here.

This is the Word of God, isn't it? Why do we need a new one? And this was worded differently. Therefore, it's wrong. Well, you know, there's a resistance to change.

And then the funny thing is the Latin Vulgate became accepted to the point where they thought it was even superior to the

Greek, the original Greek text. And so when Desiderius Erasmus produced a new

Greek text and a new Latin translation, there was pushback against that. There were

Latin Vulgate onlyists at that time. So this isn't new. This has happened before.

Whenever there's a major translation that's very popular and people like it, there's resistance when there are updates to it.

But from a rational perspective, it doesn't make sense. From a rational perspective, it makes sense to include all the new data and try to get back to what the original authors wrote.

Okay. All right. So we are over time, but we have two more questions. So we're going to do these two questions, if you don't mind staying with us for two more questions.

So the next one comes from Jeff and he says, I'd like to know how many manuscripts were written in Hebrew.

Nehemiah Gordon has made a case using circumstantial evidence that many books of the

New Testament were originally written in Hebrew before being translated into Greek. Okay.

How many manuscripts were written in Hebrew. The Old Testament documents. The Old Testament was written primarily in Hebrew.

There are some exceptions sections of Daniel were written in Aramaic. But most of its Hebrew, and of course they use the same alphabet.

So, so that's not a problem. I have heard the claim that the

Gospel of Matthew, I've heard the claim that the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in Hebrew, and then translated allegedly infallibly by James into Greek.

I don't think that's true. The source of that legend goes back to a quote from papayas and early church father, who, who talked about Matthew having written some things in Hebrew for the

Jews. And a lot of people assume that he meant the gospel, but there's, we don't have any evidence of a gospel of Matthew in Hebrew the oldest copies we have of Matthew are in Greek.

And if we did if he had been written in Hebrew, it would we, it would be the only book of the

Bible, where we do not have a copy of the original, we only have a translation, and so that that's that gets a little bit problematic theologically and I and again

I don't think there's good evidence for I think it's a misunderstanding of a quote from papayas, which then later church fathers mistook and thought that he was referring to the gospel.

According to Matthew, but as far as we can tell it was actually written in Greek, and there's very good evidence that all the other books of the

New Testament were originally written in Greek, not Hebrew. Okay, so the last question and then we're going to turn off the, the live stream.

It comes from Joe and he would like to ask you what would you say is the hardest thing that you ever debated on the

Bible. Hardest thing that I ever debated on the Bible. I don't know,

I mean, it's the Word of God and so if you're asking about what doctrines are hard to accept and there's certain doctrines that are kind of hard to accept, but usually the debates that I participate in most of them.

Get, you know, kind of get on the science side rather than on the Bible. I debated Hugh Ross a number of times, and he's kind of frustrating, but that's because he's got his particular viewpoint, and he's just not going to budge from that, but he tries to take the word day y 'all men, and it, but the thing is it's not from my perspective it's not difficult from my perspective.

I mean the debates difficult because people have been strongly brainwashed into believing in billions of years.

And so it's difficult in that sense it's hard to convince someone that the Bible really means six days, but from a textual perspective if you know anything about here and I'm not fluent in Hebrew but I can read it a little bit and I can read six days.

There's no doubt about that. And I can compare it with other verses. So maybe the timescale is the hardest thing to debate, because there's such resistance against it but but in terms of the text it's easy there's no doubt that's what the

Bible teaches. Yeah, that makes that makes a lot of sense. Okay, so, um, before we turn off the recording

Can you please remind everybody how they can find you and support your ministry. So, Biblical Science Institute, and you can go to our website biblical science institute .com

if you'd like to contribute to us we got a donate feature there we could we can always use a little more funding, but the website itself is free, open access we do have a forum, if people want to know that if you want to partner with us, you can do, you can participate in the forum.

And then of course we have all kinds of resources that you can get from our web store books

DVDs, my latest book the importance of Genesis, and to the

Christian the church in the world. And that's a, that's a very powerful resource that I'd encourage everyone to get.

Definitely. Okay, and we are creation fellowship CNT and you can find links to most of our past speakers and presentations by visiting tiny

URL com forward slash CFS archives that see like a creation

F like fellowship as like same T in the word archives and stay tuned next week when we have

Dan Biddle coming from Genesis apologetics he's the producer of the new film that's coming to theaters the arc and the darkness and he's going to be giving us a little sneak peek and behind the scenes interview about that.