Abdullah of the UK on Textual Claims, Part 4

Now here again, we are really left wondering exactly what is being said. The oldest being the

Magdalene Fragment, which is about 150 years after Jesus and contains only one line of no significance.

Now what does that mean? My assumption would be that the Magdalene Fragment is a reference to 7Q5, the fifth fragment of the 7th

Qumran cave. And you are looking at it, it is obviously a very small fragment.

This is why I have not made reference to it before, is because it has not convinced all of New Testament scholarship that it actually is from the

New Testament. Some pretty strong arguments have been made that we have fragments from New Testament writings in that cave from Qumran.

And it sounds like this particular presentation, at least it sounds like Abdullah accepts that this is actually from the

New Testament. Well if it is, it is not from 150 years, it would be 20 to 70 years after the time of Christ.

It would be contemporaneous with the lives of the apostles themselves. It is one of the reasons that a lot of people are hesitant to see it as necessarily a

New Testament fragment. But the fact of the matter is, even the statement here demonstrates a misunderstanding of why it would be significant in the first place.

When it says, contains only one line of no significance, the significance would not be what is found in 7Q5, it would simply be the dating of 7Q5 and the existence of it.

It would not matter what you were quoting. You could be quoting any portion of any New Testament manuscript, any

New Testament book, it would not make any difference. It is the fact that it is being quoted in that context at that date that is relevant, not what is being quoted at all.

So at each point, just this one slide shows, to me anyway, and again this is not meant to be a personal attack, this is just an observation from someone who is somewhat familiar with these subjects, a real misunderstanding of why this would be significant, what the dating is, how you determine these things, all these things coming together.

Now once again, I'm left a little bit befuddled as to what's really being said here.

Axsoronkas contained a wide variety of papyri materials, not just Christian materials.

And so, to even suggest, well, most of the stuff wasn't in the Bible, yeah, so, it almost sounds like they think this is a single papyri, or made up of lots of papyri, it's really hard to follow this kind of assertion and to really try to understand seriously what is being asserted.

But I can only say that this kind of presentation really hurts credibility because it really doesn't show a balanced understanding of the material that's being examined.

But even, let's ask a question about what you call the Textus Receptus. Let's look at this

Textus Receptus. The Textus Receptus was basically the first production of the

Greek New Testament done by Desiderius Erasmus during the 16th, 17th century.

But the case was that although this was done on manuscripts older than the ones available to those who produced the

KJV, let's look at it. It itself has corrupted texts.

The last 12 verses of Mark, the woman taking adultery, the Johannine comma which mentions the

Trinity. It's in the Textus Receptus. Again, just basic historical problems here.

Generally, the five editions that Erasmus produced during his life, and by the way, these were all in the beginning of the 16th century.

Erasmus dies, what, 1535 off the top of my head, somewhere around there. And so, had nothing to do with the 17th century at all, but his five editions, plus those of Stephanus, 1551, 1555, and then

Beza, 1598, generally those together are called the Textus Receptus.

There's actually many different versions. There isn't any one TR. The one that most people who favor the

TR, this one here put out by the Trinitarian Bible Society, isn't actually a

Greek text. Let me explain that. This text actually was created by Scrivener when he looked at the textual choices that were made by the

King James translators. Because realize, the five editions of Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza, there's differences even between these published texts, which by the way,

Erasmus was the first, not the first printed, it was the first published. Cardinal Jimenez's Completentium Polyglot was already existent at the time of the initial publication of Erasmus' first edition.

The reason he got out faster, even though the Completentium Polyglot had already been printed, was because Jimenez was waiting for approval in Rome and Erasmus took a rather interesting way out.

He decided to forego getting papal approval and so he dedicated the volume, which is called the

Novum Instrumentum at the time, to Pope Leo X, who was the Pope at the time.

And that's how he got around it. But there were differences between each one of these printed editions and so what

Scrivener did is he went to the King James and as best he could, sometimes it would be difficult to say, determined what textual choice the

King James translators had made in their English translation and created this edition based upon that.

There is no Greek manuscript in the world that reads exactly like this. This isn't exactly like any one of Erasmus'.

This is exactly like Stefano Cervesa. And so the

TR is more of a family of printed texts. The very term TR came from an advertisement, as I recall, in 1633, the

Latin, of course, being the received text. It was just a common printed text at the time. And again, it became common because it was the most easily obtainable, just the very same reason why the current edition of the

Quran is the most common one, because it's been printed most often.

It wasn't a process of textual criticism. Now Erasmus did engage in textual criticism in producing his text, but he made errors and he admitted that.

He himself said that the first edition was precipitated rather than edited.

And he never did fix the many problems in the Book of Revelation. In fact, he only had one manuscript and had to translate from the

Latin into Greek for the last few verses, the last chapter, because the last page of the one manuscript he had borrowed from his friend

Johannes Reuchlin had fallen off. And so there are all sorts of issues to be kept in mind in regards to what is, quote unquote, called the

TR. But it was not the first. The Competention Polyglot was before that. And it did contain the standard

Byzantine or Ecclesiastical text. But then Abdullah went on to the issue of the

Comma Iohannium. Let's take a look at that. So this book itself was following corrupted verses.

And not only this, but the verse concerning the issue of the Iohannium Comma, the one which we talked about, the

Trinity, the people were upset that Erasmus did not include it in his Bible, that he was forced.

They forced him to put it in. So even then he had to write a text that he knew was false and put it in his

Bible, which is basically the epitome of the history of the Christian Bible, how

Christians came in and because they loved their doctrines, they wanted to force it into the text. Now, that I can't let go past.

That is just completely unfair. I'm sorry, but Abdullah, if you're an honest man, you're going to have to retract that.

That's just, there is absolutely no scholarly basis for saying that what happened with the

Comma Iohannium and Erasmus's irascibility and his insertion of the comma into the third edition and the lengthy footnote that he attached to that discussing why he felt he had been deceived and why he felt it was a spurious text.

How that can become the epitome of the entire rest of the text, how the comma, which is not found in the

Greek manuscript tradition of the first 1 ,200, 1 ,400 years, minimally at the very best, how that becomes the epitome for the entire textual tradition.

I'm sorry, that is so wrong that you simply have to retract that.

That is, no person who is serious could possibly say that kind of a thing.

And so in the next video, I'm going to talk about the Comma Iohannium, and I'll demonstrate that. And I will invite you,

Abdullah, to admit that it looked to me like you were getting a little bit into your topic.

And that happens to all of us. And I would invite you to say, you know what, you're right, that is not a fair statement and withdraw it.