Freely Giving the Greek New Testament - Dr. Alan Bunning

Selling Jesus

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

Every so often we want to highlight work that's being freely given by people who share our conviction that ministry should be supported but not sold.

00:09

In this video we want to introduce you to Alan Bunning from the Center for New Testament Restoration, CNTR.

00:17

Bunning founded it in 2013 to provide free and open resources of the

00:22

Greek New Testament, giving the general public a direct view into the original manuscript evidence so that they can examine all the important textual issues for themselves.

00:34

For centuries, the underpinnings of the Greek New Testament had been obfuscated from the average

00:40

Christian because of incomplete data, restricted access, biased scholarship, financial barriers and educational obstacles.

00:48

The CNTR removes these obstacles and enables areas of research that had never before been possible.

00:55

Now if you want to learn more about it, we'll link a couple things in the description. Now Alan kindly took some time to share with us, and I think you'll find his discussion of copyright law and ancient manuscripts particularly enlightening.

01:08

Let's talk a little bit about original texts. So clearly the Bible, the

01:14

Word of God written by Matthew, Mark, and Luke and Paul and the various authors, they never intended anybody to like somehow get control of that, copyright it, control it, and charge money for it.

01:28

And there was no such thing as copyright laws back then, but if there was, this would not be in their mind.

01:34

And if there was, of course the copyrights have run out hundreds of years ago. So it's really not an issue that any of these original texts could be copyrighted some way.

01:44

And yet we do have people that are literally copywriting and buying and selling the

01:50

Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. One thing to be aware of though is that due to a court case, at least in the

01:59

United States, it's very clear that the original texts of the

02:04

Old and New Testament cannot be copyrighted. We consider those texts to be reconstructions. In other words, they're looking at a lot of different manuscripts and picking pieces together to put those texts together.

02:16

But then the resulting product cannot be copyrighted at least in the United States. And this comes from a

02:22

Supreme Court case, the Feist decision from the Supreme Court in 1991. And basically in that decision, they basically ruled the reconstruction of a public domain work is still a public domain work.

02:36

And it doesn't matter how hard you had to work or how many scraps of paper or what you had to do to do that, because it might be quite labor intensive.

02:45

But what you are doing is reconstructing a public domain work, not a copyrightable work, but a public domain work.

02:52

And so the case actually centered around a phone book. So there was a company that made phone books for a community.

03:00

Another company came in, copied the data that they had, and made their own phone book and sold it in the same market.

03:07

So the original company sued them saying, you can't do that. Well, it went to the Supreme Court. And basically what they're looking at is a reconstruction of a phone book based on public domain facts.

03:20

So you can't copyright facts. That's not a thing that's copyrightable. If you're seven years old, you can't copyright that you're seven years old.

03:29

You just are. And that's the same thing with other facts. So in this case, with the

03:36

Old and New Testament, we have public domain text that you can work really, really hard to reconstruct.

03:42

And at the end, what have you done? You have reconstructed a public domain text. It also doesn't matter, as mentioned in the court case, that there might be errors.

03:52

So the original phone book could have had an error in it. And yet the second company is still allowed to copy their errors because they're presenting them as facts.

04:01

When we think about the New Testament, you can ask somebody, well, what is it that you have reconstructed?

04:06

Well, we've reconstructed the Greek New Testament. Oh, you have reconstructed a public domain work.

04:13

That's what it is. Now, if you were reconstructing something else, maybe you could copyright it.

04:18

But what you're doing is reconstructing a public domain work. So, you know, in the phone book analogy, let's say that the original phone book was now in tatters and, you know, there's some in one dumpster and you find a page somewhere else and maybe you got a big percentage of it somewhere else.

04:35

And so somebody has to work really hard to get all those little pieces together and look and, you know, find, you know, maybe some of the printing is faded.

04:44

So you have to look real hard to discern what phone numbers are actually in there. But after doing all that and all that painstaking labor, what have you created?

04:54

A public domain work that was already public domain facts. Your hard labor doesn't change the fact that what you're reconstructing is a public domain work.

05:04

So let me read this quote from that court case. Copyright is not a tool by which a compilation author may keep others from using facts or data he or she has collected.

05:15

So it's a very telling ruling by our Supreme Court. I should add the caveat that I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV.

05:23

This is a very landmark ruling and it applies to the United States. Now, in other jurisdictions and other countries, this may not be true.

05:32

You'll have to check, you know, with the laws of the land. I also should point out that some features in the

05:40

Greek New Testament or Hebrew Old Testament are copyrightable. So, for example, the

05:46

Apostle Paul, there was no such thing as punctuation, accents, capitalization. None of those things existed.

05:52

Or apparatuses, sometimes they'll put an apparatus at the bottom. Paul didn't write that.

05:58

Somebody else did. So these other features that get added to the public domain text are copyrightable.

06:05

But I will point out that one of the other things to consider is, again, what they call a creative spark.

06:11

If we look at the Greek New Testament, for example, we have the Nestle -Alan text, we have

06:16

Tyndale House, we have Society of Biblical Literature text, the Center for New Testament Restoration. We have our own couple texts and they're all about one percent different.

06:26

Let's compare the Nestle -Alan 28 edition to Westcott and Hort from 1881.

06:33

So over 200 years. How different are these reconstructions of a public domain text? How different are they?

06:39

Well, about a 0 .7 percent. Less than one percent.

06:45

That's not significantly different. Let me read you a quote from the Copyright Office. To be copyrightable, a derivative work must be different enough from the original to be regarded as a new work or must contain a substantial amount of new material.

07:01

The new material must be original and copyrightable in itself. So when we're talking about this 0 .7

07:08

percent difference in this case, what we're talking about in that 0 .7 percent are public domain words taken from other public domain

07:16

Greek New Testaments, from public domain manuscripts. It's all public domain. None of it is original, as we saw in the quote, and it is also not substantial.

07:28

It is not a substantial amount of material and it is not original material. It's just different public domain material that have been included in the public domain reconstruction.

07:38

So it's a hard leg to stand on there. You know, some might try to argue like, well, we put a lot of effort into, you know, reconstruct these works and we had to strain over looking at these letters.

07:49

And then there's some gaps. So, you know, they might supply words. OK, but is that a creative spark or are you simply just looking at other public domain documents and sticking public domain works in your reconstruction of a public domain work?

08:04

So since they can't really have a leg to stand on in terms of copyright of these manuscripts, what some museums and libraries have done is attempt to restrict them.

08:13

So physically, you know, a manuscript may reside somewhere in some library, some museum.

08:19

They may or may not be a Christian organization. So, you know, we don't expect secular entities again to be a ministry.

08:27

They're buying and selling artifacts. They have emission prices. People come in and see them. And so we understand that.

08:33

But if it's for a Christian, if it's with a Christian organization, again, I think that would be problematic.

08:38

But what they can do then is say, all right, well, we can't really enforce a copyright over something that's 2000 years old.

08:45

But what we can do is not let you see it. It's ours. If you want to see it or write a paper about it or maybe we'll let you take a picture of it.

08:52

But you're going to sign a contract with us to abide by our rules. And we'll tell you, you know, under what circumstances somebody can look at this picture or somebody can publish it.

09:02

And so it's still restricted. Literally the word of God, copies of the word of God are being restricted by these rules.

09:08

However, once it is seen, once it is published, somebody can take, again, the transcription of those letters.

09:16

And that is a public domain work. Those are public domain facts. So they can control it up until that point.

09:22

But once it becomes visible to the general public, at least in the United States, they can't control it. Now, some of them have tried to assert copyright over the pictures of the manuscripts.

09:33

You know, they may have the manuscript, which is a public domain entity. They're not gonna let anybody see it, but they might let somebody take a copyrighted picture of it and then they can control that, who sees that picture and who uses that picture by copyright.

09:47

At least that's what they had been doing. But in 1999, there was another federal court case in the

09:53

United States. This issue came up, what somebody was doing was taking pictures of Rembrandt and the federal court kind of looked at it like this.

10:02

Well, you know, so I walk up to Rembrandt, take a picture of it. You walk up to Rembrandt, take a picture of it.

10:08

Another guy takes a picture of Rembrandt. Are you asserting that at each of those three different pictures are each separately controlled, individually controlled, copyrightable elements?

10:18

And the court looked at that and said, well, gee, let's say you have, you know, like the Gettysburg Address or something and you go to a copy machine and you make 100 copies of it.

10:27

Are you asserting that each one of those 100 copies is an individually copyrighted work that can be controlled each individually because each one's a separate picture?

10:38

And the court said, well, that's nonsense. No, you can't do that. Taking pictures of two -dimensional objects.

10:43

And so that was one of the key things. It's a two -dimensional object. It's no different than photocopying it.

10:49

It's a public domain work to start from. You taking a simple picture of it is not changing the status of the information as being public domain.

10:59

And so, you know, that that made waves, of course, with museums and libraries. But some of them saw that and have opened up their collections to that.

11:09

The court also went on to talk, just like the Feist case. It doesn't matter how high quality, like I have a super high quality camera.

11:16

So I took a super high quality picture of this. So I should be able to copyright because it's super high quality. And it doesn't matter the amount of resolution or a degree or care that went into taking a picture of a two -dimensional object does not change that copyrightable status.

11:32

It's a public domain work. And you're just making a copy, essentially a digital copy of a public domain work.

11:38

It's not unique or creative. Now, with a three -dimensional object, it's different. So a three -dimensional object, you have different angles.

11:45

You have different lighting. And somebody can be creative. There can be a creative spark. So the ruling was narrow and that it only applied to two -dimensional objects.

11:55

So the manuscripts we're talking about are two -dimensional, right? There's text. It's like copying the Gettysburg Address and making a facsimile of it.

12:02

Doesn't matter. So let me read you a quote from that court case. A photograph, which is no more than a copy of the work of another as exact as science, as technology permits, lacks originality.

12:15

That is not to say such a feat is trivial, simply not original. Again, it's very clear.

12:20

And I would point out that although this court case has been upheld by several other rulings now, it is essentially the law of the land in the

12:28

United States. Overseas is different. But overseas, we have noticed that this trend is also happening, that some museums and libraries have followed this pattern, that they are now opening up their photograph collections.

12:40

This is good news. But one thing some organizations have figured out to do is to put watermarks in their pictures or add other annotations, maybe indexes, other marks they can put on there, which would then make that photograph copyrightable.

12:55

In order for you to use it as a public domain picture, you would have to remove all of any kind of other extra artifact that the organization put in.

13:05

So again, we have Christian organizations, quote Christian organizations, adding watermarks and stuff to still can try to control pictures of ancient public domain works that they have.

13:15

So again, it comes down to the heart. Do you want to be a business or are you a ministry serving the body of Christ?

13:22

So the question then comes up, what about other works that aren't the biblical text?

13:28

Somebody might make a lexicon or a Bible commentary, you know, an interlinear. Paul didn't write that.

13:34

Luke didn't write that. John didn't write that. Somebody modern did that and that they worked hard and they can't copyright that.

13:40

That is their own copyrightable work. Again, it still comes back to the heartfelt issue of are you a business looking to make money off the body of Christ or are you a ministry trying to serve the body of Christ?

13:53

I would also point out that translations of the biblical text are also copyrightable.

13:59

Obviously, you know, NIV, ESV, New American Standard, all these different Bible translations, they are all different.

14:05

There is creativity or a creative spark in a translation that they can use to copyright that.

14:12

And so they do. So again, are you a business trying to make money off the body of Christ or are you a ministry trying to serve the body of Christ?

14:22

When I was about 30 years old, I took a Greek class. You know, one of the first things I was presented with is

14:28

I had to buy a very expensive lexicon. It was over $200. And then I had to buy the

14:35

Greek text itself. And that was like another 50 bucks. And so I had to spend quite a bit of money. And it's like,

14:40

OK, this stuff is we've had this text for a long time. Shouldn't this just be free stuff on the Internet?

14:45

What is this? You know, we want people, we want other people to engage with the biblical languages and to understand.

14:53

It's hard enough already. These resources should just be sitting there for anybody's fingers to use.

14:59

So after I learned Greek, you know, I began thinking about the issue of textual criticism.

15:06

And, you know, we have all these Greek manuscripts and which one's right. And how would you know?

15:12

So that kind of started me on the journey of looking in to try to find out what resources do we have available and how can

15:21

I make them available? I started with the Westcott and Hort Greek New Testament. And I said, well, here, that should be free.

15:28

That's 200 years old. And I went and I found it on the Internet and I downloaded one.

15:33

Hey, this is great. And then I went to another website and said, well, they have one, too. Let me download it off there. And then

15:39

I compared the two and they were different. So then I went and found some more. I found, I think, six different copies of Westcott and Hort on the

15:46

Internet. And they were all different, every single one of them. And so I compared them and found out where they were different.

15:52

There were thousands of differences. I finally went to the library, Taylor University, and checked out a copy of Westcott and Hort and painstakingly went through every single reading and found out which one was correct.

16:05

And it turns out that none of the six copies of Westcott and Hort that I downloaded off the

16:10

Internet were correct. I think one was close, like maybe only 50 errors and some had hundreds of errors.

16:16

I took all these different copies of Westcott and Hort and made one accurate copy and which, again, you can receive off my website.

16:25

That's one Greek text. We also have, you know, the Stephanas text and we had the Pierpont text.

16:31

We have all these different texts. And so I did the same thing with all of them. In every case, there were errors in all of them and not a single one of them was correct, including works off of the author's own website had inadvertent mistakes that the author didn't know about.

16:49

When I finally got a bunch of Greek texts together, then I put them in a coalition so that everybody could see them.

16:55

And then I realized, well, gee, all those Greek New Testaments are over a thousand years after the fact, in most cases not working with original documents.

17:04

How would you know that any of them are correct and what are they based on? So I set off the journey to actually go back to the earliest manuscript evidence we have and make transcriptions and release them.

17:15

So we're not done there. We are actually working on releasing an interlinear and analytical lexicon and a regular lexicon.

17:26

And we have many different works that we are looking as a free gift to the body of Christ to release open source.

17:32

So you have to realize during this time, I was full time working full time as a college professor.

17:40

This is what I did as a hobby. So nights and weekends. And it took over 10 years for me to just get most of the transcriptions up to 400

17:49

A .D. Just working on it part time as I could, putting the website together and all the other accomplishments, parsing those texts, all the other things we've done.

18:00

That was all done as a part time job, just as a labor of love for the body of Christ. I just wanted to get materials that have been locked up and hidden from the general public for thousands of years, evident that everybody could see it now.

18:13

Everybody knows what we're working on. Everybody can see the basis for what these Greek texts are made on. And so it truly was a ministry, a labor of love.

18:24

After I did those transcriptions, I thought that was a pretty good stopping point. I'd worked pretty hard for a long period of time, a lot of drudgery.

18:32

You know, my family all helped out doing little things. I give them little tasks where I show them the differences and they would circle.

18:38

My kids would circle this text is different here and they would circle it. And I was about ready to quit. And I was asking the

18:45

Lord, hey, can I move on? And I just felt like the word he spoke to me was, if you keep doing this, there will be a blessing.

18:55

And I told the family, hey, I just feel like the Lord's saying if I keep doing this, it'll be a blessing. So should I push on?

19:00

And they said, yeah, you should push on. And so many years happened after that. I saw no blessing and started rethinking that word.

19:08

Well, he never said I would be blessed and maybe it's blessing somebody else. But he never said I was going to be blessed.

19:14

But, you know, now, many years later, looking back, you know, I've retired from my job. I'm receiving some funding.

19:21

It's clearly a blessing. And so I'm really glad that it continued on. And so, you know, somebody else who's struggling, you know, trying to make resources available to the church.

19:32

Hang in there. It is blessing. It probably will bless you, but it's certainly blessing us.

19:37

There is a trend. The idea that everything is locked up and going to be controlled for profit is dissolving before our eyes.

19:47

And more and more resources are being released. I would just say that the spirit of Christ and wanting the word of God to go out freely and without restraint.

19:56

That is the goal. We want people to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and anything we can possibly do to make that happen by opening resources, additional resources.

20:06

Besides just the biblical text, anything we can do to facilitate that. That's a free gift from God.

20:13

Paul also said we are not like many who peddle the word of God. He draws a strong distinction in terms of what they're doing.

20:21

They're not trying to make money. They're not trying to build an empire. What they're trying to do is see that people are led to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.

20:29

And if he had to work and make tents or do what he had to do to do that, that's what has to happen.

20:35

I think it resonates with most anybody I've talked to that the word of God needs to be free. It should be free.

20:41

Again, a workman is worthy of wages. There's people that are working and we should be supporting them. But the word of God needs to be free.

20:49

Thanks for watching. And if you're interested in more content like this, check out sellingjesus .org or read the