The Canon: The Preservation of God's Spoken Word | James R. White

Manuscript Evidence for the Reliability of the New Testament

It is good to be with you. I am on what we call a road trip. I, in 2019, I flew 165 ,000 miles. I taught in Durban, South Africa, Johannesburg, Samara, Russia. Yeah, it was 28 degrees below zero in January.

That's a great time to go to Samara, Russia, by the way. I actually spent about two and a half months in London during that time traveling and then speaking there as well. I can get pretty well anywhere in London on the Tube.

It's an amazing place to be. And I consider myself to have escaped from Melbourne, Australia in December of 2019. When you consider how close that was to when things went upside down, that really was somewhat of an escape.

So I was doing a lot of traveling. And in fact, I was doing a lot of debating that year. I figured it would only take about another year or two years to get to 200 debates. And then everything changed, as we all know.

And I don't wear face diapers. And so I don't fly anymore. And so we were doing stuff online. And that's fine. But I could spend the whole evening just encouraging believers with the stories that I've been told from the people that I've been talking to here in Utah, down in southern Utah.

I spoke at Cedar City last Wednesday, I believe it was. And just getting to see people and shake hands and look at people and hear their stories. And so now I have that pretty GMC truck out there that I pull a fifth wheel around with.

And here we are. It's a little bit different than Heathrow Airport in London. But you get to meet all sorts of neat and wonderful people. And you go with where the Lord puts you and take advantage of the opportunities that you have.

I'm on my way up to Idaho. I will leave on Saturday heading up there. Going to be up in Moscow doing a bunch of stuff with Doug Wilson. We're going to be recording Man Rampant and doing a sweater vest dialogue that we've been doing for about a year and a half, two years now.

But we're also going to be debating each other on the subject of paedo-communion, which is a real interesting subject. But again, demonstrating that you can have deep friendships and yet disagreements at the same time.

And so we'll be doing that. And then I'll be heading home from there, playing tag with all of the nice big semi-tractor trailers and things like that along the way. By the way, I just today had a sign made.

And just today, I got it taped onto the back of my fifth wheel. And it says, let me see if I can remember it. Bible questions? Let's talk. CB channel 15, handle Diognetus. And so I'm really going to be interested on Saturday.

We installed a CB radio. I had a CB radio installed on my truck. Of course, I'm old enough to remember when CB radios were really cool. I was on a CB radio when I was in probably that would have been like before I was driving my freshman year in high school back in 1977, something along those lines.

Anyways, but I decided I need one of those things because those trucks, especially when you're climbing hills, sometimes get angry with me. So I'm like, what did you want me to do? And so I thought, I wonder how many people would fire up their units and talk to me.

So I'll let you know. I'll report on my little CB missionary adventures over the next couple of weeks worth of travel. But anyway, this evening, I am, as was introduced, one of the pastors at Apologia Church.

We are planning a church up in Salt Lake City. That's one of the main reasons I come up here. But I've been coming to Salt Lake City for a very, very long time. The first time I, in fact, drove up the 15 was in a 1964 Dodge Dart.

No two body panels were the same color. And it did not like driving all the way from Phoenix up here. It was running pretty rough by the time we got up here. But I've been coming up here for a very, very long time.

And in the intervening decades, I have had the opportunity of teaching Greek and Hebrew. I have been a critical consultant on the New American Standard Bible translation. I do a lot of work in what's called textual criticism, the study of the manuscripts of the New Testament, some of which are on the screen right now.

So other than being the director of Alpha Omega Ministries and a pastor at Apologia Church and a grandfather, which I'm really enjoying more than almost anything else, I am also the professor of church history and apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas, with Jeffrey Johnson, Owen Strand, and some other men there.

And so that's the background that I bring to us this evening. Obviously, in much of the work that I have done, both in regards to Mormonism as well as debating men like John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg and Bart Ehrman, it has been in the defense of the veracity of the text of Scripture.

Early Manuscripts and the Earliest Attestation of the New Testament

And so, for example, we have on the screen right now some of the fascinating little nuggets of information. For example, the one on the bottom left, the two columns, that's the end of 1 Peter and the beginning of 2 Peter in manuscript P72.

And I saw that page during the papal visit in 1993 in Denver, Colorado. And I remember the excitement that was mine to be able to read that manuscript. It's the earliest copy we have of 1 2 Peter and Jude.

So if you've ever read 1 2 Peter and Jude, then you are looking at the earliest handwritten reference to those materials. It's also, this was interesting to me during the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code craze.

Anyone remember the Dan Brown? Everywhere I went, every airline gate I went to, somebody was reading the Da Vinci Code. And then they put the movie out and all the rest of this stuff. And it was all fiction, but everybody thought that it wasn't fiction, that it was the real thing.

And if you remember the story, the idea was that the deity of Christ had been made up by Constantine and that up to the days of Constantine, Constantine's around 325 AD. Up until that period of time, everybody thought Jesus was just a regular man and that he was married and all the rest of this kind of fun stuff.

And during that same time period, I was going around giving presentations and I would show this particular page because 2 Peter 1 .1 contains what's called a Granville Sharp construction. It's a special construction in the Greek language.

And Jesus is called our God and Savior, Jesus Christ, here in P72, right at the beginning. It's on the right hand side of the page there. And the significance of that is this was written between 175 and 200.

That means 125 to 150 years before Constantine. So much for Dan Brown making millions of dollars off of lies. Right next to that is the long, tall, dark little piece of a manuscript. I saw that manuscript.

I have a picture holding it at Macquarie State University in Sydney, Australia a number of years ago. And it's probably from about 275 to 300. It's from the Book of Acts. And the only reason I show it primarily is because a friend of mine took me and we met the curator.

And he got it out. And he and I started talking papyrology and how you date papyrus. Anybody know how you dated papyrus? You just walk up to him and say, hey, you want to go out? No, no. Just see if anybody's still awake.

Most of you just had dinner or something like that. Taco time is sitting there bubbling in your stomach. And all the blood's down there. There's nothing up here. So I could get away with saying anything right now.

But no, we were talking about dating, how you date papyri and things like that. And I could just tell that I had provided a real service to this gentleman. Because it was plainly obvious that his wife had gotten tired of that subject about 35 years earlier.

And so he was really looking for somebody to have a nice conversation about papyrology with. And so we did. Over on the right-hand side is P66. And I like that particular picture. Because most of the time, what you see in pictures of manuscripts, and more and more of them are becoming available, thanks to what's called CSNTM, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts in Dallas.

Dan Wallace is the head of that. They're going around. And they are making high-quality digital photography of all these manuscripts. And that's vitally important. There was some stuff that was lost even in the Iraq War and Afghanistan.

There's probably been some stuff lost in Ukraine. War destroys manuscripts. And fires destroy manuscripts, and floods, and bugs, and everything else. And so it's vitally important that we have high-quality digital photography, super high resolution of these manuscripts.

So most of the time, all the pages are separated from one another. But here, you can see what the book looked like initially. And this is actually the beginning of the Gospel of John. And you can see, notice how the bottom right corner is damaged, as is the upper right corner.

But the left-hand side is the spine. So you can understand, most of our books, your Bible will probably have the same pattern of wear. Because if you put that on a shelf, what's the first thing that's getting hit?

It's that outside part of where the pages are. The inside part has the whole binding to help protect it. But the outside part does not. And most of your manuscripts will have, your papyri manuscripts, the ancient ones.

This is from around the year 200. And sometimes I have people look up at that and go, wow, that doesn't look like it's in really very good condition. And I look at them and say, what are you going to look like in 1 ,800 years?

It's doing a whole lot better than you will. And so that's actually John 1 .1. I use that one, too, because in the beginning, it was word was with God, word was God. And there you have that long before Constantine, as well.

I like taking shots of Dan Brown just for the fun of it. And the last one up there, over on the left-hand side, the red-colored one, may well be, most people think, it is the earliest portion of the New Testament we possess.

So in other words, in real life, it's about the size of a credit card. And imagine this with me for just a moment. You've got a guy in the early 1930s in a basement in London. And he is shuffling through little pieces of papyri that have been brought to England from Egypt.

And if you look at it, you can see all you're getting is the middle portions of words on a couple of different lines. So you don't really have any way of coming up with a context or anything like that.

So to be able to figure out what this is means you really know your stuff. You can read. Most seminary graduates would not be able to read what's on the screen right now. The reason for that is that for the first 900 years, the transmission of the text of the New Testament, it was written, as you can see, as a single line of capital letters, no spaces between words, and almost no punctuation.

Think about that. In fact, when you get to the end of the line, you just simply start the next line. You don't even worry about where you break. So the words can be broken at really interesting and unusual places.

And so that's what you have here in what's called P52, which is the manuscript on the left-hand side. And what's fascinating to me about P52, when it was discovered, it was sent to the leading papyrologists of the day.

Three of them put it at around the year 125. And one said it was about AD 95 in the first century. Now, when you date a papyrus, you go 25 years each way. So it's a 50-year date range. So P52 has been dated as early as 125, which is extremely early because of what it is a manuscript of.

It's from John chapter 18, verses 31 to 34 on this side, 37, 38 on the back side. Now, why is that significant? Well, because if you lived in the 1870s, German scholarship had convinced everyone that the Book of John was written probably around the year 175.

It had nothing to do with anyone who knew Jesus because it had such a high view of Jesus that had to be due to an evolutionary process over time of a gradually increasing view of Jesus. And so German scholarship was absolutely convinced that the Gospel of John had been written about 175 until you find a fragment of it from 50 years earlier.

That sort of ruins everybody's day and lots of books get thrown in the trash, which is good. But, and it is ironic to me anyways, that this, if you think about what John chapter 18 contains, this is Jesus' discussion with Pilate, where Pilate asks him, what is truth?

And here, the earliest fragment of the New Testament that we have comes from a book like that. Now, just with me for a moment, please realize, we have portions of the New Testament, vast majority of the New Testament, in those first 100 and 200 years.

By the way, the book that is the Gospel that is the earliest attested, most attested, is John, not Mark. And the book that has the least attestation manuscripts, which makes sense because the nature of the book is the Book of Revelation.

Book of Revelation struggled for acceptance in the canon, that makes sense, we'll talk about that a little bit more later on. And so we only have two papyri copies of the Book of Revelation. And what's really interesting, just in passing, I'll just give you this information, you can use it to amaze your friends over the weekend as you're getting together with folks in the church or whatever, you can say, hey, did you know this?

And they're gonna look at you like, wow, you are really sharp. If you'd want people to look at you and think that way, then great, you can use this. But the two earliest papyri manuscripts we have, now a papyrus doesn't necessarily contain the entirety of a book.

Obviously, P52, that's not all of John. That's all there is to it, there's nothing more. But what it does tell us in 125 is that John chapter 18 was just like John chapter 18 is in later manuscripts as well.

So it's an important witness along those lines, even though it's a very small fragment. But in the two papyri of Book of Revelation, we do have Revelation chapter 13. And what's in Revelation chapter 13?

Well, what's in Revelation chapter 13? If we were to stop any guy riding by the road out here on a Harley, okay? And we were to ask him, what's the number of the beast? He's gonna go, 666, right there, you know, right?

Everybody knows 666, right? Well, what's interesting is, that's in Revelation chapter 13. And what's interesting is in the two earliest papyri manuscripts of the Book of Revelation, it's 616, 616. Now, I don't know if any of you are old enough to remember, I remember when people were very, very strongly arguing that the beast was Henry Kissinger.

Anyone remember when the beast was Henry Kissinger? Now, the amazing thing is Henry Kissinger is still alive. He's 147, but he's still alive. It's astonishing that he's still around. But everybody has added up somebody's name to 666, right?

Every time there's a presidential election, you know, Hillary's name added up to 66 and Obama's name added, somebody, Trump, it doesn't matter who it is, they all add up to 666. So what if it's 616? And Dan Wallace at Dallas Seminary, this is his joke, so I blame him for it.

He says, he thinks the number of the beast is 666 and 616 is the number of the neighbor of the beast. Think that one through. Now, some of you are laughing because everybody else is, but you have no idea why that was funny at all.

I know you because I knew my mom. That's how my mom got through all jokes. And then two weeks later, Jim, I got that joke. Yeah, that's good, that's good, Mom, that's wonderful. So anyways, by the way, 666 and 616 are just Greek and Hebrew versions of the name Kaiser Nero, just so you know.

That's what that's about. But that may challenge your eschatology one way or the other. Anyhow, so why put these up here other than me being able to get you to tell you some stories? And I like people, you look at the bottom of the page in your Bible and it says certain manuscripts say this and certain manuscripts say that.

How many of us have ever seen any of those manuscripts? I like to be able to show folks, these are what some of those manuscripts look like. And in fact, here are some of the later manuscripts. For example, on the left-hand side there is a closeup of a section from John chapter 14 in Codex Sinaiticus.

And Codex Sinaiticus is a, when it was discovered anyways by Count von Tischendorf. How many of you know who Count von Tischendorf was? How many have ever heard the name of Count von Tischendorf? Marley, have you heard of Count von Tischendorf?

No. Okay, all right. I just want everybody to know Marley's my friend and if I get too tired to finish up, Marley's gonna come up and tell you about Frozen. So there you go. That's how we'll finish off.

So anyway, Count von Tischendorf, what a fascinating, you would think a German scholar looking, publishing a Greek translation, the Greek translation of the Old Testament and traveling the world looking for manuscripts.

He really believed that the Bible is the word of God. And he really believed that eventually they would find earlier and earlier manuscripts would help them to defend the Bible against German rationalism.

But what most people don't realize is that in all probability, it was Constantine von Tischendorf that was the model for someone that you all probably know a whole lot better than him. Remember any movies back in the 1980s about someone looking for ancient treasures?

A guy named Indiana Jones? He was modeled after Constantine von Tischendorf. Didn't know that, did you? Now, now you know. And Codex Sinaiticus was found by von Tischendorf. And it's a really funny story.

I've gotta tell you it quickly. He had found some ancient material there and it's called the Monastery of St. Catharines. To even get into the monastery, you have to go up over the wall in a basket, all right?

And they, obviously their library was incredibly ancient and just amazing. And when he first visited, he found one of the monks taking some fragments to the kitchen to be burned in helping to cook food.

And when he looked through it, he realized these were ancient fragments. And so he sort of freaked out. Well, you shouldn't freak out when you're visiting a monastery and the monks never get out. And so they sort of clammed up and like, okay, this is a weirdo.

And they wouldn't really tell him much more about it and things like that. And so he kept coming back and he kept visiting. And it was years later that he's come back. And again, he still hasn't found anything.

And it's the last night he's gonna be there. And so he had published an edition of what's called the Greek Septuagint. The Greek Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament done about 250, 200 years before Christ.

It was the Bible of the early church. And so the monk that was the steward who was taking care of him, who would take him to his room and provide him with food and the guy that got that dirty job, he gave him a copy of the Septuagint as thanks for helping to take care of him during his visit.

And the monk started looking at it and goes, oh, I have one of these. Oh yeah? Yeah, let me show it to you. So he takes him to his cell. And he reaches up into the closet and he pulls out this large volume wrapped in red cloth.

And he lays it down, he pulls the cloth back. And von Tischendorf is looking at Codex Sinaiticus, which was written around 325 AD. Now, this would be the earliest manuscript of the New Testament known.

So von Tischendorf, having learned his lesson and having matured, sort of goes, oh, yeah. Hey, that's really interesting. Mind if I take it back to my room and just sort of thumb through it a little bit, take a look at it?

Yeah, okay. So he goes in, closes the door. Now, this is my interpretation, okay? I cannot prove this historically from the historical documents, all right? But this is what von Tischendorf did. But silently, because you're in a monastery, okay?

Because that's the way you need to do it. And he did not sleep that night. And it wasn't just the Old Testament. It was the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Now, there were some parts missing.

It's 1700, it's old. It's really very old at this point in time, okay? And so the next morning, he asks if he can buy it. And they say no. And how it eventually ends up in London, where I saw it in 2005 in the British Museum, is a long and sordid tale involving czars and backroom deals and all sorts of other stuff along the lines.

But it's all online today. If you go to codexsinaticus .org, you can zoom in on the text like that and see the different handwriting styles and things like that. The one in the middle in the blue is Codex Vaticanus, which is in the Vatican Library.

It's contemporaneous with Sinaiticus. And the one on the right is Codex Alexandrinus. I've seen both Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus in the flesh. When I walked into the viewing room at the British Museum, I was stunned.

I was the only one in the room. There was nobody else there. And there's Codex Sinaiticus. There's Codex Alexandrinus. Over here, there's a Tyndale Bible, original 1611. And I forget, I think maybe a Wycliffe translation behind me.

Millions and millions of dollars worth of astonishing things. And they're just under glass and nobody else around. I thought, this is really dumb. Someone's gonna walk in here and blow everything up and we're gonna really miss this stuff.

So anyway, these are the manuscripts. You'll notice they look a whole lot nicer. And that's because this is done after the Peace of the Church, after 313 AD, Christianity becomes a religio licita, a licit religion.

And so you can have professionals do the copying without risking their lives and so on and so forth. And so you can see the quality of the manuscripts that are produced after that point in time. But anyway, so, oops.

The Unbelievable Radio Program in London, you discussed the Cease and desist, sir. I'm gonna need to use this. So we've got, this will be the only video clip I play. Well, no, there's one other. But we're gonna go old school and I'm just gonna hold the microphone over the speaker.

That's how we'll get the audio. In 2009, you can see I look a little bit different there. In 2009, I debated Bart Ehrman. Bart Ehrman is the leading English-speaking critic of the New Testament in the world today, really.

He did his PhD under Bruce Metzger at Princeton Seminary back in the 70s. And we did a debate on the reliability of the New Testament. You can watch it on YouTube. And during the cross-examination, I asked him a question based upon the fact that I had spent months and months and months listening to his presentations and listening to his classes and reading all of his books and everything else.

And he did absolutely none of that in regards to me, which is not unusual at all. But I asked him a question, and I want you to listen to the leading critic of the reliability of our Bible, well, at least of our New Testament.

Listen to what he says about the New Testament. I did not expect him to say this, but here's where it came. That's not what I wanted to do. All right, let's try this again. And hit the right button this time.

On the Unbelievable Radio program in London, you discussed the length of time that exists between the writing of Paul's letter to the Galatians and the first extant copy, that being 150 years. You described this time period as enormous.

That's a quote. Could you tell us what term you would use to describe the time period between, say, the original writings of Suetonius or Tacitus or Pliny and their first extant manuscript copies? Very enormous.

Sorry, ginormous would be a good one? Ginormous. Ginormous, okay. Ginormous doesn't cover it. The New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book in antiquity. Did you catch that?

Now, Suetonius, Pliny, these are Latin historians writing contemporaneously with the New Testament. And so, we know when they were writing, because they tell us when they're writing. But on average, any work that's contemporaneous in the New Testament, the first manuscript copies that we have, so the first physical evidence we have of that book averages between 500 and 900 years later.

Okay? Remember I told you about P52? What was it, say? 125, from John. So that's within 100 years, less than 100 years. But for all these other books, the average is between half a millennium, 500 years, and 900 years, almost a full millennium.

And so, I asked him, would you compare the two? Ginormous. And then he says, the New Testament has much earlier attestation than any other book of antiquity. And he's the leading English-speaking critic of the New Testament.

I think that's very important for us to keep in mind, because unfortunately, in the vast majority of universities and college settings, you don't hear that part. You hear all about the unreliability, the possibilities of change, but you don't hear this part.

And I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. Now, let me just do a, this is the summary screen from an hour and a half presentation I do on manuscripts and variant readings, and I explain how variant readings arise and all the rest of this stuff.

I'm gonna summarize it real quick, because we still have to talk about the canon, too. So there's a lot of stuff. All of this is just simply to whet your appetite, to get you thinking, to get you some, hopefully, much more in-depth way of thinking about these things than what's normally, commonly going on in our society today.

How many variants are there? You'll hear people from, Bart Ehrman will say, 400 ,000 to 500 ,000 variants in the New Testament. There's only 138 ,200 words in the New Testament. So if you've got 400 ,000 variants, 500 ,000 variants, that sounds like three variants for every word.

That's not what that means. They won't tell you that's not what that means. And people will repeat that, and religion reporters, oh my goodness, where do we grow religion reporters today? I mean, it's gotta be a very dark, secret lab someplace to get religion reporters, because the things that they will repeat uncritically is just astonishing.

But that's the kind of stuff that you're gonna hear. And I remember when my daughter went to Glendale Community College briefly after she graduated from high school. She had a vile, nasty, anti-Christian teacher in a philosophy of religion class or something, introduction to religion class or something.

Just a nasty, nasty guy. And she tried to endure it, and eventually, she'd been to all my debates and stuff. Someone just recently tried to insult her on Twitter. Does anybody know Sheologians? My daughter, Summer and her?

Okay, a few of you know. She's been going at it for quite some time now. And someone tried to insult her on Twitter recently. They say, oh, you know that Summer Yeager is James White's daughter. The apple didn't fall very far from the tree on that one.

And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. So she eventually, he made some dumb statement about the languages of the New Testament that she knew wasn't true. And so she challenged him on it.

His best response was to Google it, which tells you. But the point is that these kinds of professors are all over in the public educational system. And so they'll throw these numbers out, and they'll say there's 400 ,000, 500 ,000 variants.

You know what, they're right. You know what the vast majority of them are? In the English language, unless you're from Mississippi or Georgia, you are supposed to say an apple, right? They say apple down there.

But we're supposed to say an apple. You're supposed to put that N in there. Greek had the exact same thing. It's called the movable new. You're not supposed to have two vowels crammed up against each other.

And scribes really struggled with that. Well, that doesn't mean anything. It doesn't impact the meaning of the text at all. So there's a large number of them are movable news. And in fact, 99 of the scribal errors that have taken place in the transmission of the text of the New Testament, you could not explain to someone if they did not read Greek.

They don't impact the meaning of the text at all. Now, there are about, it depends on how you break it down, but there are about 1 ,500 variants that do impact the translation and could be original. So for example, if you have a manuscript, if you have a reading in a manuscript from, say, like 1 ,300 years after Christ, and it's the only manuscript that has this reading, and no other Greek manuscript contains it, and none of the translations that were made, because remember, the New Testament was translated into Latin, Sahitic, Coptic, Boheric, all these other languages in the first couple of hundred years after it was written.

And those are really important because they can tell us a lot about what manuscript they were translated from, what kind of manuscript they were translated from, and what it originally read. So if you have a manuscript that has a unique reading and there's no versional support for it, there's no earlier manuscript support for it, and it's from like the year 1300, that doesn't have any possibility of being original because it's left no history and it's left no trace of its reading in history.

There's actually an example of such a reading. That's really interesting because it was in a manuscript that a man by the name of Desiderius Erasmus used, and we may get to Erasmus later on, but Erasmus was a Dutch humanist scholar who printed and published, not printed first, but printed and published the first Greek New Testament in 1516, and that was a very important Greek New Testament because it happened to have been picked up by someone by the name of Martin Luther, and Martin Luther, in studying that Greek New Testament, it's actually Greek-Latin diaglot.

It had the Greek on one side and Erasmus' Latin translation on the other. That's when the light started breaking through, when he started recognizing, huh, punitentium agitate, do penance, but over here it's metanoiate, repent.

They don't mean the same things, huh? So Erasmus was important and his work was important, and it's his Greek New Testament that pretty much, with only a few changes, ends up being the basis of the King James Translation of the New Testament, but one of the manuscripts that he happened to obtain in Basel, Switzerland, and working on his New Testament was a manuscript that had a singular reading in Ephesians chapter three, where all of the manuscripts talk about the administration of the mystery of the ages.

His one manuscript said the fellowship, the fellowship. If you look at your King James, your New King James is at this day, it says fellowship. All manuscripts, all ancient translations, all commentaries from early church fathers don't say fellowship, but it's in the King James, because Erasmus got hold of that one.

Now we know that, it can't be the original, but there's where it took place. So 99 inconsequential, there might be about 1 ,500 that we have to deal with, and we do. It is the most thoroughly documented work of antiquity, not only the earliest attestation, it's the best attestation and the most attestation of any work of antiquity.

Very important, it spread all over the world quickly. There was no controlling authority. I don't care what YouTube says. I don't care what movies you track down on YouTube made by someone you have no earthly idea.

There are so many conspiracy theories, but the reality is the New Testament was written by multiple authors to multiple audiences at multiple times in multiple places. So there was never a time when any one group could control the text of the New Testament.

In fact, the process was the gathering together of the New Testament over time. And so if you go to the Chester Beattie Library in Ireland, in Dublin, you'll be able to see manuscript P46, and that is the earliest collection of Paul's major epistles.

Well, that took some work to do because when he wrote his epistles, he sent them to places that are a long ways away from each other. You know, Colossae is not next door to Rome. And so obviously there was a copying process going on and eventually a collection process.

And so what you get are gospel manuscripts with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And then you get Pauline collections and you get collections of like 1st, 2nd Peter, and Jude, P72, which we saw earlier.

And eventually that all comes together to form the New Testament, but that took time. And so in those early years, there was no group that could come along and say, you know, we don't like the doctrine of the resurrection.

And so we're gonna take the doctrine of resurrection out. We're gonna put something else in. Does anyone remember, I always struggle with her name. I'm sorry. She, out on a limb, Shirley MacLean, Shirley MacLean.

Okay, I don't know why I struggle with her name, but Shirley MacLean. And most of you younger people are going, okay, he's going back in danger in history again. And, but Shirley MacLean was this actress and she did this movie about her getting into the new age.

And she had a spirit guide and all the rest of this stuff. And she was, you know, in the movie, she was walking along the beach and her guru is telling her to say, I am God, I am God, I am God. And everybody in the United States is in front of the TV going, no, you're not, no, you're not, no, you're not.

And, but she would tell people that the Bible used to talk about reincarnation, but they took it out at the Council of Constantinople. Now, I just say, I like to say that and then stop and look at folks, because we all go, ha, ha, ha, because we all realize, I'm not sure what happened to the Council of Constantinople.