56 - Preservation and Translation, Part 1

Well, welcome to the

Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology. We are glad to have you with us.

If you are a new student here, we welcome you and we tell you that you're about like 55 lessons too late, just saying.

It's fine that you're here in these lessons, but I strongly encourage you to go back to lesson one and start from there as well.

Why would I say that? Because I don't want you listening live. No, because of the simple fact that people make an often mistaken theology by starting in the middle.

Now, actually, this isn't exactly the middle because two areas to start any systematic theology study is going to be either in the nature of God as we did or in the nature and doctrine of the

Bible as we're studying now. We are using our systematic theology book three, which is titled, that was neat,

God Speaks to the World, the Doctrine of the Bible. And so, with that in book three, we are going through the doctrine of the

Bible. This is a good place to start a systematic theology in the sense that it gives a good place where everything we're going to build upon in theology is based on the

Bible. So it's good to, most seminaries, Bible colleges will start with the

Bible because everything you're going to teach is based on that. And as you're seeing, as we've been going through this book, there's not a whole lot of references we're doing in scripture, more we're giving historical things.

And for that reason, we put this here in book three and started with the attributes of God.

We felt that it was a good place to start because all of your theology is going to be based on the attributes of God.

And so, for that reason, we started there. But either place is fine. But it is really important, though, before you get into especially doctrines of salvation and end times, which is where many people debate, it's good to start with the attributes of God.

Know who God is. Know His nature because that's going to define a lot of things for you because the reality is a lot of people have areas where they get things wrong in theology.

And a big reason why they do is because they've made the mistake in this one area of starting in the middle.

Don't do that. Okay? So, we're actually in book number three and we're in lesson number six.

Lesson number six, the preservation and translation.

Preservation and translation. And with this, if you have your syllabus that you can purchase reasonably priced from strivingforeternity .org,

you can go to the store and pick up a copy of the syllabus. And in doing so, you'll have all the notes, as we say, there's fill in the blanks and there's things that we put in the syllabus that we don't go over in class and vice versa.

So it's good to not only have the syllabus, but also pay attention in class, not just watch live and gab in the chat room.

Although I'm told that some students like to just be in the chat room when it's live class, maybe to make fun of me during the teaching and then they go watch it later on YouTube.

But, all right. So, when we talk about this, the doctrine of preservation involves two primary areas of study that relate to how we obtained our

Bible. Okay? And the first one is canonicity. That's your first blank there, by the way.

Canonicity is what we just spent really two lessons ago. We focused on it and then we kind of talked about it again when we talked about the

Apocrypha. But, canonicity is one and the second is the translation. That's your second blank there.

So, canonicity and translation are your two blanks. And this lesson that we're going to go over today is going to address how

God preserved His word through translations. I'm being a little bit careful because some people have different ideas of how

God preserved His words. We're probably going to look at that next class because I don't think we're going to get to everything here.

But, just to start with this, you have some people that believe that God preserved

His word by inspiring different translations. And so, they would argue that the

King James Version is inspired by God and authoritative because of that.

And that is how He preserved it. So, to be a little bit more precise, and I would use the phrase, a derived preservation.

Why that? Because we would argue that the preservation that we have through many translations is derived, but it's not preserved in the same sense of the original writings.

And we're going to look at this because there are many people that believe that there are certain translations that are inspired by God and therefore they're the only translations that should be in use today.

We're going to look at those, why I would not hold to that, why

I think we have different translations, why some translations are better than others. We're going to really look at that in more detail in Lesson 7.

But this lesson is going to focus on translation. And in this lesson, I hope to, and actually, we'll probably do this in two lessons, and in both lessons,

I hope to really help you understand some of the major challenges to translation issues that we have today.

So, this is going to be really important if you are engaging with people, especially on the street, in the open air, in the open, you know, just talking to people and sharing the gospel, you're going to hear these arguments that we're going to try to address and give you some background on when it comes to things like textual criticism, alright?

And we can explain what that is as well. But this lesson is going to focus on translations.

We will note that the two most significant ancient translations, we're going to talk about three families of the

Greek translations that most of our translations are from.

Then we're going to look specifically at this issue with the Texas Receptus that some argue is the earliest, where the earliest

English translations come from, and some argue is inspired, and so we're going to have to deal with that just because some of the issues that come up.

So, with that said, let us begin with the ancient translations, alright?

Let's start with that, with the ancient translations that we have. As we look at the ancient translations, we have two, the

Spituagin and the Vulgate. Let's start with the Spituagin, and sometimes maybe you've heard someone quote from the

Spituagin, you'll hear someone that'll say, well, they find a word in the

Greek New Testament and they want to see where this word is used in the Hebrew Old Testament, but obviously a

Greek word isn't going to be found in Hebrew. Sometimes you'll hear someone say, this is the same word used in the

Spituagin, and sometimes maybe you went, what is that? You trying to spit or something? Spituagin, I don't know, what's up with that?

Maybe you were curious, maybe some people refer to it and they don't give the explanation.

Well, I hope to give you the explanation. This is a translation of the

Hebrew into Greek, and that's your blanks there, Hebrew and Greek. The Spituagin, and sometimes you'll see this in some times referred to as the

LXX, LXX, and the idea here is that the

Spituagin is the translation of the

Hebrew manuscripts into Koineia Greek, common

Greek, the Greek of the people. So, in other words, there was a translation of the

Hebrew that they took so that it could be, the Bible could be understood throughout the

Greek Roman Empire, and this way not just Hebrew speakers knew it, but there were many

Hellenist Jews. What's a Hellenist Jew? A Hellenist Jew is someone who didn't grow up knowing

Hebrew. They didn't grow up in Jerusalem or in the land of Israel, but because of the dispersion, remember your history here, you have a case where Israel under Babylonian, when the

Babylonian Empire came in, they took the nation of Israel and spread them out. The Assyrians came into the northern tribes, spread them out, and you have

Jewish people that were spread out and thriving in different areas but kept their

Jewish heritage. Some of the main areas that we'll see this, and we're going to see this when we look at the family of the

Greek manuscripts, in Egypt you have a large area, okay, in Alexandria, you have in Bessinia, you have a large area of people that, where there was actually a lot of work going on in Jewish writings as well as some of what we'll see in the

Greek, and so you have areas where people, because of persecution, because of the

Assyrians in the north, Babylonians in the south, they fled. Many fled to Egypt, and so Egypt had a thriving

Jewish population for a long time, and you end up seeing that there was these pockets of Judaism that were copying the

Bible, but they didn't all speak Hebrew anymore because being moved away from Israel, they had to do business in the language of the people around them, and Greek was that language.

So, what happened was that they took the Bible and translated it into the language of the people,

Greek, and this is what we call the Spatuagint. This translation was done in about the 3rd century

BC, that's your blank there, 3rd, it was the 3rd century BC, that means this was before Christ by a couple hundred years, okay.

Why is that important? Well, we're going to get to that. Now, why is it the LXX? Well, the tradition has it this way.

Tradition teaches that there were 70 scholars that translated the

Old Testament Hebrews separately into the Greek, and then they came together and had an identical manuscript.

I kind of find that a little hard to believe, but I do believe that they could have done it separately and come really close.

And maybe there are some words that were debated, but it's the idea of the 70. The 70, some will think, was this the

Sanhedrin? If you remember when you were reading your Bible, the Sanhedrin, there were only 70 of them, and so could this have been the 70 scholars?

I don't know. But the tradition states that there were 70 men that translated the

Hebrew into Greek by themselves, doing the whole Old Testament, and then they came together and, gee, everything matched.

I don't know how much of that it really matched or how much of it was stated that it matched to make it sound more authoritative in a sense, but I'll tell you what does make it authoritative, and that's point number four in your syllabus.

This was the translation that Jesus Christ quoted from. When Jesus spoke, he spoke in Greek, as far as we could tell.

And when he quoted the Scriptures, he would have done that in the Greek, because that's what everybody understood.

That's the translation everyone would have had, except in the synagogues and in the area of Israel.

So, it's an important note. The fact that Jesus willingly quoted from a translation when teaching about the

Scriptures is proof that our translations are also authoritative, and that's your blank there, authoritative.

This is what I mean when I say we have a derived preservation. See, the manuscripts that we have today, the

Bible that we have translated into English or Spanish or any other good translation today is authoritative.

The argument that some make that we had to have something that was in the language of the people, inspired by God through all generations, well, you're going to end up having to say that, okay, at first it was all in Greek, it was in Hebrew, then they would have to say the

Spittuagin was inspired, then they'd have to say the Latin Vulgate was inspired, because for a long time in the

Middle Ages, that was the only Bible that was really used. And then some will say, well, then the

English in the King James, and we're going to look at that as well. But there's a lot of issues that we would have when we'd say, well, so the

Latin Vulgate was inspired, why don't we continue using these old ones? And I think it's a really a hard argument to make.

Now, I've noticed in recent years, many have moved away from the argument that the King James 1611 is inspired, and they just argue that it's the only one we should use, that it's the best and things like that.

We're going to look at that as well. But the Vulgate, letter B there in your syllabus, it is a translation of the entire

Bible into Latin by Jerome in about 400 AD. So, we had the

Spittuagin, but in 400 AD, one man, Jerome, brilliant guy, took the entire

Bible and translated it into Latin. And that became the translation, really, that the

Roman Catholic Church used. This translation is the basis of the translations accepted by the

Roman Catholic Church. So, even many of the English translations today that the Roman Catholic Church has used will do it off of the

Latin Vulgate and not always from the Greek and Hebrew. Some in Roman Catholicism at least seemed to argue that the

Vulgate was inspired, or at least that the Vulgate was the only version to use.

That does give weight to those who try to argue that the King James would be inspired because they would say, see, look, there seems to give weight that the

Vulgate was inspired. But I do think when you look at it historically, it's kind of a weak argument somewhat, all right?

Because they don't come straight out and say it. But the reality was there just wasn't any other translation really out there that people were heavily using.

Where the issue of translations really became hot and heavy was in our country, at least in the

United States, was really when you had other translations starting to be written. New King James, New American Standard, NIV.

As these started to be more and more translations, people started to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.

You see, in years past, you know, especially before the printing press, Bibles were hard to come by.

You know, doing a translation was hard work and people didn't pay for that.

So it was something that didn't happen very often, okay? And it was expensive.

So it wasn't something that people would do. Even after we had the printing press, you still find that it was really expensive and really hard to be looking at having a translation of the whole

Bible done because it's not something that, well, it's not really something that people are going to be doing as a full -time job.

I mean, not many people are going to be paying. Hey, you want the job of translating the Bible into whatever language?

It's got to pay, right? People got to get paid for this because it takes a long time to do it.

And that's part of the thing is this is not something that was done just kind of briefly or things like that.

This is something that it takes a long time to do this translation.

You know, a good translation is going to take a year. Now, I don't know about your job, but can you take a year off to go do something like that?

No, probably not. So, someone's going to have to pay you. So, you need to be commissioned.

And if it's from, say, the Roman Catholic Church and you're Jerome, then maybe they're going to pay you to take the time.

And actually, I don't know. It's a good question. I don't know offhand how long it took Jerome to do the translation.

That'd be a good question to find out. But I'm sure it took him many, many months working full -time at it.

Many translators take years to do translation of the whole Bible.

So, I don't think that it was something done rather quickly. So, you had to be paid for that.

All right? So, you basically have, and even when you look at people that do translation today, they're going to take not only the

Greek manuscripts that we're going to look at in a moment, but many of them will base their interpretation off of the

Greek Spituagin and the Latin Vulgate to see what word choices they have chosen. All right?

And so, that's why these are still important today. The Latin only because,

I think it's still important because many of our translations do look back to that as looking at word usage, but really with the

Spituagin because it helps us to understand the usage of the Greek at the time as compared to the

Hebrew. So, let's now take a look at the family of Greek translations.

The family of Greek translations. And here, what we want to do is see that there are three different major translations.

And two things I'm going to mention before we get started, and I don't know that we'll finish the

Greek translations this week, but one is some of the stuff that we have in the syllabus, there's been a lot of work in the area of Greek manuscripts in recent years.

And so, there's been a lot of stuff that I'm going to give you in the class more than what's in the syllabus just because things have changed.

And where there's certain Greek manuscripts that we used to have more of, now we have more of some others and we're getting better stuff from some of the other manuscripts.

And so, we're going to look at that and I'm going to give you some things to look at with that. But before we look at Greek manuscripts, this is an area that many, many people attack.

Okay? And for that reason, before we look into Greek manuscripts, we're going to have to talk about this thing called variances.

And this gets into what's called textual criticism, criticizing the text.

All right? When we examine text and we look at how it got transmitted, all right?

Some understand this, there's two different branches of higher criticism and lower criticism. But when we look at this, one of the things that I want to encourage you with is to note that this is a very detailed area of study concerning why there are variances among the best of the modern translations.

Okay? You do know that there's differences. Why did someone translate a word this way versus that way?

Why do we see some Greek manuscripts that have this word or that word? Maybe you've looked in your

Bible and you see where there's verses that seem to be missing or there's a footnote that says in some other manuscripts, this isn't here.

And you go, well, how could that be? How could it be that we have some passages that aren't there?

Some don't even have like the ending of Mark 16. Not even there.

We're going to talk about that as an example one. But the woman caught in adultery.

We see that in different manuscripts showing up in different places in the Gospels. And so, sometimes it's not there at all.

Should cause us to wonder, okay, what's happening here? These are changes, variances, something that's different between them.

And people sometimes try to latch onto this to go, see, you can't know what the

Bible actually teaches because you don't know what the Bible… you don't have the Bible. That's the way the argument goes.

And we're going to talk about this. While it is an important study, it needs to be understood that it only affects at most a tenth of the

Bible. A tenth, that's your blank there. And even now we realize that number may be even less.

But a tenth of the Bible, and it does not affect any major doctrine.

Underline that. People argue that because we have all these different variances, it must mean that we don't know what

God actually said in the original Bible. Not true. Not true.

The reality is it's because of the fact that we have so many manuscripts that we can know where these changes, these variances are, and we can realize that not one of them, not one, affects a major doctrine.

Okay, minor things. Now, if the woman caught in adultery, if that's not in the original

Bible, if it wasn't in the canon of Scripture, does that change any doctrine? No.

We still know that Jesus was merciful. And we know that Jesus was the judge.

And we know that adultery is wrong. We know all those things. We don't need that verse to prove it.

And people go, oh, wait, what about that passage with John writing about the three witnesses, then the trinity, three or one?

That's not in the original. That's a change. Okay, do we need that to prove the trinity?

No. If you take our classes in the systematic theology and go back to book number one, when we talk about the nature of God and we dealt with the topic of the trinity, you'll notice

I didn't use that passage at all. Didn't need to. Because the doctrine is taught overwhelmingly elsewhere.

Okay, and so we see not a single major doctrine is affected by these changes. Now, there is a gentleman, maybe you'll hear his name called

Bart Ehrman. Bart Ehrman is a liberal scholar. He is not a believer in Jesus Christ.

And yet he is one who they go to often because he, as a,

I guess he'd kind of be a professing atheist, he would argue very much so against knowing what the

Bible actually said. Now, here's what they do. The argument goes like this.

They argue that there's this document called Q for quellum, meaning source.

And the argument is that you'd have one writer and he'd be the one source,

Q, and that all the other gospel writers embellished upon Q.

And the idea is the telephone game. You'll often hear it explained this way. You remember that game you played as a kid where, you know, it starts with one long phrase and you whisper it to the next person who whispers to the next person to the next person to the next person.

And you get around to the end when the final person says what they heard and it was nothing like the beginning.

And people argue that's how the Bible was translated and that's what we have with the manuscripts. And what we have today is nothing like what the beginning.

That's how men like Bart Ehrman would argue. And they build it on this document called Q. If you ever hear anyone bring up the issue of Q, you go, ah, you can rest because you're about to win the debate.

I'm going to tell you how. I mean, when they bring up Q as an argument, you are about to blow them out of the water and you don't need to be very smart to do it.

You only have to ask one question. You ready for it? Someone says, well, we know there was this document called

Q. Stop. Excuse me. How do we know that? Have we discovered it?

Well, no, we know it because, yeah, right there, they just lost. There's no, zero, absolutely no, none, nada, evidence for Quellum.

Q does not exist. Not because it's missing, but because it never existed.

Now, the argument for Q is that there had to be an original source that all these gospel writers got their information from.

I agree. There was an original source. The gospel writers were eyewitnesses.

You want an example to make this clear for someone? I use this often.

You go to anything that's in the newspaper. You can use any current event. I did this with a gentleman who, when

I was preaching on the boardwalk, who was arguing for Q and the proof that there had to be a single source.

And I said, yes, eyewitness testimony. No, all the writers had to get it from a single source.

This was right after President Barack Obama, in his re -election, they had the

Democrat National Committee. So I asked him, I said, last night, did the president speak at the

National Committee, Democrat National Committee? This guy said, yes. I said, did the New York Times report it?

He said, yeah. How about the Boston Times? Yeah. LA Times? Yeah. Washington Post?

Yeah. What's the original source that they all got it from? Did they all get it from the

Associated Press and then embellish from that? The guy goes, no, they were all there in the audience.

Thank you. That's right. They were all there, and they all wrote their own account of what they saw.

There's a lot of things that are similar in those accounts, and there's a lot of things that are different. Take any major event and look at all the newspapers, and that's what you're going to see.

You're going to see a lot of people that talk about some similarities, and they're going to have some differences. And that's what we have with the gospel writings.

You have a lot of similarity, and you have a lot of differences, because they're all giving it from their perspective and their style.

But the original source was Jesus. I mean, they saw what he did.

They heard what he did. It's from firsthand testimony. The argument that you had to have

Q, and then they argue that Mark was written first, because they say Mark was the smallest, and everyone would embellish more and more.

So Luke and Matthew supposedly embellished upon Mark. And then by John, they argue that, well, now people were really believing that Jesus was now

God, because they argue that in Q, you'll sometimes hear of what's called the historical

Jesus. And they argue that in Q, Jesus was just a man, but he became embellished just a little bit by the time of Mark.

And then by the time of Luke and Matthew, it was a little bit more, and then John went out of control and really said he was

God. That's how the argument is. I actually believe that Matthew probably was written earlier than Mark.

I think Matthew is probably the first one written. And one of the reasons I argue that is because of the audience it was written to, a

Jewish audience. It was written to people who were needing to know from a

Jewish perspective, since the church in the earlier part was Jewish. So that would be an argument

I would make for Matthew being earlier. But it doesn't fit with the narrative of the liberals.

And that's why you have them arguing there had to have been this document called Q, and that they all embellished from there.

All right. It was not the telephone game. It was actually more like this.

If I had a book of the Bible, I would make maybe 10 copies of it.

And I would give it to 10 different people because I want to get this out as fast as I can. So I make 10 copies.

I give it to 10 people, one copy each of them so they can make 10 copies. And then I make my another 10 copies.

My friends, 10 friends make 10 copies. Now we have 110 copies, well 111 because we have the original.

Then all of them give it to 10 people. And you see how this reproduces. But you know what? I have a friend who has dyslexia and he just transposes a couple letters.

Well, because people want to be accurate, they're going to continue transposing that. But because you have all these copies, what you end up doing is you can say, okay, we can see that all the copies that are in this area, maybe you shipped it off to some friends.

So you sent this letter to New York, to LA, to Atlanta, all over.

But you notice that the one in Atlanta all has this same spelling mistake.

Well, you can quickly identify that that's something unique to that area because none of the others have it. So that's probably something that happened in a region.

Now, if that same spelling mistake showed up in, say, New York and Atlanta, well, then maybe that spelling mistake was something that maybe when

I was first doing it, I wrote it wrong in two in the same spot, maybe. But you start to see that geographically, you can identify where these things occurred.

You start to see some old manuscripts where things were written on the sides and then later manuscripts that are written in the text.

So you can kind of guess how this happened. Someone was making a copy, wrote notes in the side, and then later those notes worked their way into the text, maybe with brackets around it.

You know, we would put as brackets and then, you know, saying that this isn't in the original and then later they remove the brackets.

Things like that we think happened. But because we have so many manuscripts, what do

I mean by so many? Well, when we look at the New Testament, we have over 70 ,000 documented copies.

I say that because we have a whole lot more copies we just haven't gotten to yet. I mean, not, you know, Christendom and the world.

We have a lot of manuscripts and we're finding more and more. We're finding them in like mummy's tombs. They used to use them to mummify people, the scriptures.

And so those are great ones because they're very early. But the thing that you see is that we keep having more and more.

We have some that are dated within less than 30 years of the writing. Now, why is that important?

When you look at the study of textual criticism, there's three things you want to study. How early is it to the original writing?

How many copies do you have? And where do you have those copies? Because remember what

I said about the regional areas, right? So, we have like 70 ,000 copies of the New Testament, all right, some within less than 30 years of the writing.

Very close. Now, how's that compared to other things? Well, you know, the Iliad, I think we have about 600 copies at most, all right?

600 compared to 70 ,000. The writings of Julius Caesar or the record of Julius Caesar, no one challenges the history of Julius Caesar and yet we only have like 200 copies of that.

And how close is that from the original writing to the copies we have? Like 1 ,500 years.

Not 30, 1 ,500. That's a long time. The closest outside the

Bible is like 1 ,200. So, when we look at these things, we can trust that the Bible is the most accurate document we have in antiquity.

We don't have any other ancient documents that have that many copies. Why? Because it was that important for people to get it.

So, they were in a hurry when they made copies and they did make mistakes. They did put copying errors. It's not like the Old Testament.

The Old Testament, it was painstaking. They would sit there and write every letter, one letter at a time and then mark that letter so that they could tell at the end of their copying, they knew exactly how many letters and how many words.

After they got done with the word, they put a tick mark next to that word. And so, they had a way of measuring if there were any mistakes in the

Old Testament. And because of that, you don't have many variations in the Old Testament, okay?

But in the Greek, because they wanted to get the gospel out, they were making copies quickly and that's when mistakes would work their way in.

But let's look at someone like a Bart Ehrman in his book, Misquoting Jesus.

If you're going to write a book to make a case, you're going to put your best case first. You're going to make your argument based on the best evidence, the best argument that you can make.

Here was what Bart Ehrman had did in his book, Misquoting Jesus. He argued that we cannot know what the original

Bible says because we don't have it, because there are changes.

What was his example of a change? You ready? Hold on. This is going to blow your mind.

There are some manuscripts that actually teach Jesus was a carpenter.

And others that teach Jesus was the son of a carpenter. Wait, what doctrine is based on Jesus being a carpenter?

Oh, none. I mean, if that's going to be, if you're going to argue that we can't know what

God said, we can't know what the Bible's teaching based on that, there are absolutely no, none, zilch, nada, doctrines based on whether Jesus was a carpenter or not.

If that's the best argument you have, that's not a really good argument, okay?

And so I want to, because this is the argument so many make. There's been so many copies, so many, when you hear someone argue, just ask them, how many variances are there?

Do you know? See, guys like Bart Ehrman, they throw out the number 400 ,000.

Wow, that's a big number. Considering, I think the total number of like letters in the

New Testament is like 100 ,000. That means that there are four variances per letter?

Sounds like an awful lot. Yeah, the number's inflated to make it sound like a lot.

In other words, if I have the word, and keep in mind, in the ancient writings, they didn't have spacing.

So, they didn't have punctuation. So, they'd have things like, God is nowhere, or could that be

God is now here? You see, if you just have those letters, the spacing makes the difference in the wording.

How would you know what it is? Well, the context would give the answer. So, one of the things that happens is as they started adding spacing, they put spacing in different areas, okay?

Punctuation. One of the things I find very interesting is 75 % of these supposed variances are spelling and punctuation errors.

Wait a minute, if you just said that the original didn't have punctuation and spelling, or punctuation and spaces, most of those go away, don't they?

Well, yeah, 75%. If you get a spelling error, like I said, if I have my dyslexic friend make a copy and he transposes a letter, you could figure it out.

Oh, you spell love, L -V -O -E. Now, some of you think

I just spelled it correctly, but I didn't actually, it's L -O -V -E. But the thing is, is that you quickly know, oh, that's a spelling error.

I can look at the other copies and compare it to this one and realize, spelling error, just correct it, not a big deal.

And that's the thing that most of them get put into that category, 75 % of these. Now, what they would do with these variances to inflate the number is, you'd have one misspelling of a word here, maybe another misspelling of the word here, and then the original.

So that's three variances. Now, if you have a large passage, say,

Mark 16, they like to count that as several. Because, I mean, the whole passage is missing in some places, some they have just part of Mark 16, the ending of it, and there's a whole lot of different ones.

But see, we could just put that all together as one. There's one variance, one major variance in Mark 16, but they'll count like every letter or every little word, and they do a lot to inflate it.

Obviously, if I'm going to have the word love, and I spell it L -O -V -E originally, but someone spells it

L -V -O -E, or maybe L -O -V, they drop the E altogether. The liberals would argue for that as being three variances.

I would argue that's one, because it's the same word in the same spot. It's just that you have somewhere where they made a mistake somewhere along the line.

And so you have one variant, okay? It's a way you have to know the game that they're playing, so that you know how to get around this when they try to make this case.

There's not so many variances. And when we realize it, 75 % of them are word spelling or punctuation.

Those don't affect any doctrine. Those don't affect any meaning. And so we can get back to the original in those, all right?

24%, 24%, that's a lot now, because now we're up to 99%. 99 % of them are going to be in either the punctuation and spelling.

And the second category, which is 24%, is going to be in the area that where we have something that we can get back to the original.

Something that we see, such as in John, where we see the three in one,

Father, Son, Spirit, and we see that in the side of the text.

And then later manuscripts, we see it in the text. And then we see it, you know, where it's no brackets and it's just part of this, you know, the text and people have assumed that way.

We can see how that worked its way in, right? And so we can see what happened. So we can get back very easily by just saying, you know what?

That probably wasn't in the original. So we take it out. We can get back to the original that way, okay?

So in 99 % of the cases, we can get back to the original. So now, if you're looking at these variations, suddenly you're only dealing with 1 % of changes that we have to deal with.

Now with that 1%, you have a question. We can't get back to the original in the 1%, okay?

How many of those change the meaning? That's the only question because you only want to worry.

If Jesus was the son of a carpenter or he was a carpenter, does that change the meaning? Yes, it does.

Is it a big deal? No, it's not. And that's the point. It's not a big deal if Jesus was a carpenter or the son of carpenter or maybe both.

I mean, historically, if he was the son of a carpenter, he probably was a carpenter, okay?

So they would follow in the family trade. But you see the point there? It doesn't matter because it does affect the meaning, but that meaning isn't affecting doctrine.

And that's the importance of it. The reality that we have so many manuscripts is the proof, is the evidence that we can look at the manuscripts and go, yep, not affecting any doctrine.

Can we get back to the original 99 % of the time? Yes, we can. 1 % we can't, but most of those times, it's not affecting the meaning.

And in areas where it does affect the meaning, it doesn't affect any major doctrine, period. And therefore, it should encourage us, all right?

Now, I said I wouldn't get far. Next lesson, we'll look at the, basically, there are three, and that's your blank there at the end there, there are three families of manuscripts.

And we're going to pick up next class on those three. Probably going to go over some of this again, because this is under such attack that is very important to understand.

And so, we're going to talk about some of this again as we dig into the Greek translations, all right?

But when we talk about the preservation and translation, we understand that these are important things because this is where the

Bible is being attacked right now, all right? It is under attack in this area, and it's something that we have to be prepared to defend.

And yet, it's an area that truthfully, most people are not educated on. Now, the atheist bloggers, oh, they're reading

Bart Ehrman and these others, and they're studying these guys. And if you dig in, maybe next time,

I'll bring the quote from the book. There was a New York Times bestseller written by a former

Muslim who argued for Q. And he bases this entire book trying to prove a historical

Jesus different than the Jesus of the Bible. He does the whole thing based on Q. The irony of that is that you can dismantle his entire argument in the introduction to his book where he says, we don't have any historical evidence for Q.

We haven't discovered it yet. Notice the assumption. It's just like the teaching of evolution. It's assumed to be true.

The evidence will eventually prove it out, but we know it's true. That's not scientific. That's called blind religious belief, okay?

Just blind faith. You want to believe it. You don't have any evidence for it, but you want to think it's going to happen.

It's got to be that way. And that's what you have. So, if you have any questions about this lesson, we're going to continue with this next lesson.

But you can email us at academy at strivingforeternity .org, academy at strivingforeternity .org.

If you'd like to get a copy of the syllabus, you can go to our store. You can go to strivingforeternity .org

or specifically store .strivingforeternity .org. You can pick up our syllabus and $25 per book.

We ship it out to you. You get all the notes. It's a helpful resource to have. At our store, you can see all the other things we have for sale, including, depending when you're watching this, the new book that we just wrote called,

What Do They Believe? This will be really helpful when we get to our lessons that we're going to do. Before we start book number four, we're going to look into world religions and basically be teaching through this book,

What Do They Believe? A Systematic Theology of the Major Western Religions. So that's something you can get a copy of, $14 .99,

$15 to get a copy of that online. You can go to our store and get that.

Also, I will mention, if you're anywhere near like, say, 500 miles of New Jersey, come to Jersey Fire, July 10th and 11th.

We're actually going to do a pre -conference on the 9th. So it'll be the 9th, 10th, and 11th of 2015.

Tom's River, New Jersey. Dan Phillips, Carl Kirby Jr., myself, Michael Coghlan. We'll all be speaking.

You can register at jerseyfire .org. It's really going to be good to hear that there's going to possibly be a carpool from the

Ohio area. So we'll try to get you information if you're along that way and want to jump into the carpool and follow them along to Jersey.

We follow it up always with evangelizing at the Jersey Shore, the Boardwalk. Great place to witness.

But it is an evangelism event. We're going to be talking this year's topic on discipleship and a lot of things.

I can't emphasize enough Carl Kirby Jr.'s talks on video games and how they are discipling people and indoctrinating people and how the school systems and the media are doing that.

His talk is very, very important. Some of what we talked about today in this lesson is also some stuff we cover in a seminar called

The Bible Interpretation Made Easy. That's a seminar we do. We come to your church for a weekend.

You can invite us out. Come to your church and you can just contact, email speaker at strivingforeternity .org

and we will come to your church, do an eight -hour, six -session seminar.

Basically, it's our 20 lessons of Bible hermeneutics, how to interpret the

Bible, shoved into eight hours. Intense, intense lessons but really good.

We try to give a lot of information there. So, I encourage you to consider hosting one of those in your church. And so, that would be good to do.

Lastly, we always want to encourage you to encourage others. And so, this week we have a brother that we found out has some things we're not going to publicly say but he needs a lot of encouragement and prayer.

If he chooses to share with you, that's up to him. But just under a lot of attack right now, put it that way.

And really just difficult things going on with family and things like that.

And so, yeah, even though he made it somewhat public, we are not going to.

But it is someone who works for us, Mitch LeBron. We've given you there his email address and if you email him, contact him, just send him and his wife

Christina an encouraging note this week. Mitch does a lot to try.

He wants to do more than I allow him to do for Striving for Eternity.

He asked me once why I don't let him do more. And he's got a young family and that's the priority.

And I don't want him being so wrapped up in doing ministry that he ignores the family.

And so, he understood that, respected that, and that's been really good. And he does as much as he can and as time allows.

But his wife stays home and takes care of their two adorable little daughters. If you know

Hannah and Abby, they've come to Ohio Fire, they've come to Jersey Fire, just the cutest little things. And so, you know, she's home taking care of them.

She's also, this is public, right? Pregnant, if it's not public, it is now. So, they have another one on the way.

And so, just be praying for them, but be encouraging them. Just going through a difficult time.

So, if you'd encourage them this week, that'd be really, really good. And just until next class, we're going to finish up with Preservation and Translation.

We're going to look at the Families of Greek Manuscripts. We're going to look at this issue over Texas Receptus and go into that and make a case.

So, if you have friends who believe in the King James only position of the Bible, maybe you want them listening next week, next class, all right?

But until then, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.