Scripture, Apologetics and Islam Part 2

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Scripture, Apologetics and Islam Part 3

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You can always tell if the hosts of a conference like you or not as to whether you are slotted in right after lunch or not, because especially with all the carbs in the pizza.
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And see, the thing is, Pastor Mike is a chemist, and so he knows the biochemical processes that are taking place right now.
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And you know I was a bio major, so I had to write out the Krebs cycle, electron chain transport, glycolysis, the whole nine yards.
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And so I know what's going on in the gurgling cells of your digestive system right now.
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And in about 15 minutes, I'm going to start sounding like this. It's Charlie Brown, and it's all over with at that point.
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And so that's when I have to start doing handstands and flips across, and Jessica come up and do some cool karate moves, and that'll wake you up.
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And actually, he's going to be asleep by then, too, so it won't really make any difference. So we'll do our best to work through the material that we have.
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Now, if you recall, when we were last together, I introduced to you a very important concept, and that is the difference between a freely transmitted text and a controlled text.
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A freely transmitted text is one whose transmission is not controlled by an external authority such as a government.
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It is widely copied without constraint. And so a freely transmitted text would be a book that is written, and it is distributed, and maybe it becomes very popular, and so many people are allowed to copy it, and hence it has a broad and wide transmission stream.
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A controlled text is one that is copied under the guidance of an external authority, whether it be a governmental authority, whether it be a church, a religious group.
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But somehow, the text is controlled. So the idea would be you have specific copies, and they are sent to specific areas, and anyone who has another kind of copy or something that varies from that, they're to destroy their versions.
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You're only to use this one, and if there are any copies made, it has to be done under the control of this overarching authority.
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This is a controlled text. Now a freely transmitted text will have more textual variance, but will have greater confidence as to originality.
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A controlled text will have more uniformity, but much less confidence as to originality.
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Why? Well, it's quite simple. When you have a freely transmitted text, then you have it coming to us now in the modern day from multiple different sources.
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There are multiple different streams. When you have a controlled text, you always have the question, well, when it was under the control of one particular organization, how do
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I know that they did not alter it from its original form? Since we don't have a manuscript tradition to derive from, since we don't have other streams from which to take examples to be able to see, oh, yes, over here, the
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Gospel of John says the same thing in P45, it says in P66 and P75 and Sinaiticus and Vaticanus and so on and so forth.
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We have all these different snapshots of the early state of the text, but you don't have that with a controlled text, especially if the controlled text involves redaction or editing.
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In other words, if there is a period of time where the controlling authority had full control over the text, then how do you know what came before that?
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How do you know that if they only come to control it, say, 50 years after the original, how do you know that they haven't altered that text if nothing else from the original has survived?
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These are some of the issues that we have to think about. A freely transmitted text can promise to present the original readings in its manuscript tradition.
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A controlled text cannot promise the original text past the last redaction or revision, especially if previous versions are destroyed.
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And so if you are successful 50, 100 years after the writing of the original to gather up all the copies to control that and to make edits and changes and then destroy everything that came before them, then you can only trace the history of that text back to the point of editing.
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You can't take it back to the original and say it no longer. You can't really say we know what it originally said. Now all you can say is, well, up to this point we don't know what it said, but now we knew what it said after that.
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That's the difference between a freely transmitted text. Now what do we have in the New Testament? Well, what's important to recognize is that we have multiple authors writing to multiple audiences at multiple times.
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Now by the way, I did design this particular graphic and made the little manuscripts move around and stuff like that.
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So if you're just completely overawed and you feel the need to go, ooh, it's okay.
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I will overlook that, though I realize we are in Australia and most of you will be asleep in a few moments anyway, so it's not really going to matter.
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But when you think about the history of the New Testament, we have multiple authors.
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They're writing in multiple places. The Apostle Paul, for example, writes from prison, but he also writes from other cities when he is free.
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And he's writing to different places. And so we don't know where the
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Gospels were written. There are theories about that frequently. Mark is associated with Rome and sometimes
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Caesarea and so on and so forth. We have theories, but we don't have anything written in the
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Gospel that says Luke wrote this while sojourning in such and such a place. So you have multiple authors and they're not writing at the same time.
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Paul's epistles predate most of the Gospels, at least in most theories, most theoretical reconstructions.
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Paul's writings, like Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, some of the earliest writings of the
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New Testament, we don't really know where James fits in there, might be very early on. But multiple authors writing to multiple audiences at multiple times, which means there is never a time when the
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New Testament text is under the control of any one centralized organization.
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There wasn't a centralized organization anyways. Even the apostles went to different places.
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There wasn't some, you know, apostolic council that they attended every two years to approve new scriptures or anything like that at all.
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All the videos you see on YouTube about, you know, black hooded monks and running around with various manuscripts and stuff like that is just all fanciful.
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It never really took place, anything like that. So what happened over time is you have these manuscripts being copied in many different places and eventually what happens is you begin to get collections.
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And so, for example, we have, I'll show you a little bit later on, P46, the earliest collection of Paul's writings and the gospel manuscripts coming together, things like that, as these are collected together.
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And again, these take place in many different places. And if I tried to put all the different lines of transmission up on the screen, it would very, very quickly become too jumbled to even be of any use.
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But the point is to recognize what I call multifocality. Multifocality is vitally important to realize the transmission of the text of the
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New Testament did not follow a single line of transmission. The New Testament originated in multiple places, written by multiple authors with books being sent to multiple locations.
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This means the text was never under the control of a single individual. There was no pope back then, for example, to control anything to begin with.
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Or any group. At no time in its history, at a time of authorship, or at any point during its time of transmission, were the
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New Testament documents under the control of an individual or a group. Hence, there could not be any editing out of doctrines, any editing in of doctrines, which would require, for a doctrinal type of insertion, would require changes to multiple books at the same time.
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There was never a time when that could have happened. It's just not possible, given the history of the transmission of the text in the
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New Testament. As a result, we can look forward to finding even earlier manuscripts of New Testament documents.
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Some of you have heard about the Green Project. There was way too early release of speculations that we had found first century fragments of Mark and things like that.
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Maybe we have. The tremendous delay in the release of this information seems to indicate to me that maybe there's been some second thinking going on.
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Maybe some other data that has come to light that needs to be evaluated. I don't know.
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There was early leaking of news about the finding of fragments of Mark in an
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Egyptian funerary mask and things like that. If that turns out, that would be really fantastic, but right now it's just simply that.
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It's a theory. It hasn't been released, so we really can't tell. We can look forward to finding earlier manuscripts of New Testament, as the free transmission of the text has provided us with a solid basis for asserting that we continue to possess the original readings of the authors themselves.
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In other words, we may have textual variants, but the original readings continue to exist in the manuscript tradition.
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They haven't passed away. Even when we have a variant at any point in the text of the
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New Testament, we can be confident that one of those variants, one of the possibilities presented to us is the original, that there has never been the time period when any type of extensive editing or changing of the text could have taken place.
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The transmission of the New Testament textual tradition is characterized by an extremely impressive degree of what is called tenacity.
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Once a reading occurs, it will persist with obstinacy. So in other words, because that's the case, readings don't disappear, and that means the original readings are still in our possession to this day.
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I can say with confidence that we possess all the original words that the apostles wrote to any of the churches, in the
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Gospels, whatever else it might be. Someone put it rather well, actually. They likened the situation that we face with the
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New Testament manuscripts to having a 1 ,000, let's make it a 10 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle.
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Now, I've never done a 10 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle, and people used to do that a lot. I'm not sure if people bother with that anymore, with computers and all that kind of silly stuff that people do.
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But you know the heartache of someone having a 10 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle and getting to the end and discovering that the cat ate three pieces, and then the cat's never found again.
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But you wanted to hang it on the wall, have it treated in such a way it would hold together, and hang it on the wall because it's so beautiful, and all the rest of that stuff, and you can't because there's these holes in it.
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Well, is that the situation that we're in with the New Testament? Do we have a 10 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle with only 9 ,900 pieces left?
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No. The reality is, what we have is a 10 ,000 -piece jigsaw puzzle with about 10 ,100 pieces.
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Because the tendency of scribes was to expand, not to contract. And so the issue is identifying the extra words, the additional material, rather than anything else.
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The originals are still there. Now, it can make it a little bit difficult because you're sort of, well, these both sort of look like they might fit there, you know, and you've got that type of thing going on.
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But all the original pieces are there. It's much better to have to work through 10 ,100 pieces than it is to only have 9 ,900.
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That would be a problem because then we'd be missing something. But that is not how the New Testament was transmitted to us.
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Here's a quote from Kurt Ahland, the late scholar of New Testament textual criticism.
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It is precisely the overwhelming mass of the New Testament textual tradition, assuming the, and this is a
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Greek phrase that means the healthy teaching of New Testament textual criticism, which provides an assurance of certainty in establishing the original text.
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We can be certain that among the New Testament manuscripts, there is still a group of witnesses which preserves the original form of the text despite the pervasive authority of ecclesiastical tradition and the prestige of the later text.
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Now, if you know anything about church history, you know that in the West especially, the
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Latin Vulgate became the official translation of the established church for a very, very long period of time.
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And in fact, during the height of the period of the Inquisition, to even desire to learn
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Greek could get you in great trouble because why would you want to know the language of the heretics?
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The heretics were the Greek Orthodox. And so there was a period of time, well, the
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Roman church even put out an allegedly infallible version of the Latin Vulgate. It was so much the final authority.
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But despite all of that, the reality is that the original form of the text continues to exist in the
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New Testament textual tradition. Now one of the things, I'm going to have to be very fast, I love doing this part, but I'm going to have to be really quick because I still have a lot of stuff to cover.
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But I love showing Christians some of the manuscripts. I already showed you P45. I showed you some of the material there.
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When you're looking at that page in your Bible and it says, some early manuscripts say this and some early manuscripts say that, that just seems so,
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I don't know, esoteric. It's like, well, somewhere, some scholar someplace has a manuscript and what does that really mean to me?
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But from my perspective, the fact that God has preserved these little scraps of papyri over the course of 1800 years and more in the instance of some, is just an amazing thing.
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I know it makes me weird and most of you know that I'm weird anyways, but I've just always found this stuff to be completely fascinating.
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What you see on the screen right now is P52, which is not a World War II fighter jet, it is a fighter plane, it was a prop plane obviously.
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But this is about the size of a credit card. It is a fragment written on both sides.
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We're not sure why, but there have been almost no New Testament scrolls ever discovered.
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Christians adopted the Codex form and used the Codex form. Why they did, no one fully knows, but they did.
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It was just almost every single manuscript is in the book form that we use today, even though scrolls were quite popular in that day.
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This is just a little fragment, you can see it's from the top of a page. What I love about this one,
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I'll tell you the story very, very quickly, is if you went to seminary in Germany in the 1870s, you would have been told that the cutting edge of scholarship had proven that the
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Gospel of John was written around 170 AD. Had nothing to do with anybody who knew
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Jesus, in fact, it was generations removed from the days of Jesus. And if you wanted to be accepted in scholarship, then you just needed to go with this perspective.
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And you may ask, well, how did they come to that conclusion? Well, it was an application of evolutionary thought to theology and to the study of the
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New Testament. The idea was the Christology in John is so high and so evolved that it must have taken quite some time for that to happen.
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And so it had been moved all the way back toward the end of the second century, around 170, 175
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AD. And so in the 1930s, early 1930s, this little fragment was found.
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I know that we have, I know Brother David's here, and Brother David's one of the first people to drag me down here to Australia, so if you don't like having me here, you can blame him.
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But he's not actually from around here, he's from that little island up in the other part of the world, you know, where the
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Queen lives, there you go, where the Queen lives. And by the way, I love the meme, I've actually posted it myself,
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Make America Britain Again. Let me tell you something, if I had the choice,
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I'd vote for her any day. I'm going to tell you,
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I never thought I'd hear myself saying that, but David finally won, he's rejoicing back there.
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But anyway, up there in that little island up there, where they, you know, for a while, the sun never set upon the
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British Empire, that's no longer the case anymore. But for a while it didn't, and while they had control of Egypt, they basically stole a bunch of stuff, and they needed something for their museums, and so they just dragged it all back to England, and so someone was leafing through all these little papyri fragments in a cardboard box in a basement of a university and came across this, and obviously was a well -trained individual, because it's really tough to read this, not only the
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Greek, but when you're reading a fragment of sentences, it's very difficult to get a context and things like that, but he started reading it and realized what it was from and what it represented.
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And I'll use a font here to sort of let you see how the text would have flowed around the text here.
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This is from, now back up a little bit, the papyri was, the papyrus was sent to the four leading papyrologists of the day, and three of the four dated it to about 125
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AD. Now when you date a papyrus, you walk up to it and say, hey, would you like to go out and, no, sorry.
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David knows I know a little bit of papyrological humor, because he took me to see another papyrus,
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I'm not sure if I have the picture of it in here, that's at Macquarie State University. And the fellow there, it wasn't the curator, but I'm not sure what.
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A professor there, yeah. I've told the story many, many times. He really seemed to really enjoy getting to talk papyrology with somebody, because I have a feeling his wife had gotten bored with that about 35 years earlier.
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About 35 years ago, that was the last time, you know. And so, yes, the papyrologist, what a life we live when you study ancient pieces of paper.
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But what you do is you date these things based upon the form of the letters in comparison to other papyri and stuff like that.
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And three of the four dated it to 125, and normally it's 25 years each, either direction.
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So it'd be 100 to 150 was the range, 125 being in the middle. The fourth put it in the first century.
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So about 100 as early as into the 90s, and then from there. Why is that significant?
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Well, P52 contains John chapter 18, verses 31 through 34 on one side, and 37 to 38 on the back side.
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And so here you have a copy of the Gospel of John that is written approximately 50 years before German orthodoxy in the 1870s said it was even written.
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And so it's wonderful that the theories of the cutting edge of scholarship were shredded by the discovery of actual material evidence that demonstrated that their theories were nothing but really badly formed theories.
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And so this is probably the earliest fragment we possess, from about 125. And interestingly enough, it's from John.
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And today, scholars will tell you, well, John's ahistorical, and John's this, and John's that. But it's interesting, amongst the papyri, the book that is best attested is the
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Gospel of John. And the one that is least attested is Mark, which they say is the earliest.
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So it's interesting to note that. Very quickly, this is P72. And this one is actually readable.
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I wonder what, did someone, someone may have grabbed my laser, hmm, someone may have really liked that,
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I don't know. It's difficult to see right now, but it's actually quite readable. You can see on the right -hand side, it says
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Petru Epistolae Bae, so that's 2 Peter. This is the end of 1 Peter, the beginning of 2
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Peter. This is the earliest manuscript we have of 1 -2 Peter in Jude.
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I saw this in 1993 during the Papal Treasures exhibit in Denver, Colorado.
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They had it on display. Here, if you'd like to have evidence that Dan Brown and the
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Da Vinci Code was a joke, this says 2 Peter 1 -1 is found here. This is an early, the earliest manuscript of that, and there's what's called a
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Granville Sharp construction, our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. Both God and Savior are in reference to the same person,
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Jesus Christ. So the Da Vinci Code theory that the deity of Christ was made up at the Council of Nicaea.
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This was written long before the Council of Nicaea. It is thereby disproven. But here you have a very, very readable manuscript.
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It's not, you know, it doesn't look like it's done by an overly professional scribe or anything like that.
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But you have the collection of 1 -2 Peter and Jude. I like to theorize that maybe someone was traveling and they visited a
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Christian church. Someone comes out and starts reading this, but I've never read that book before. We don't have that in our church. Could I make a copy of that?
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And they make a copy of it and take it back to their church. That's how so many of these manuscripts were distributed over time.
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And there's the Granville Sharp construction. Sorry about that. It's sort of cool to make it blow up like that personally. I think it's sort of wild.
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Anyway, here is manuscript P75. Many of these are available online now and starting to appear in some of the higher end
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Bible programs like Accordance, Logos, Bible Works, stuff like that. P75 is a
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Gospels manuscript that's the end of Luke, the beginning of John. A very accurate manuscript. The scribe was very, very dutiful in making an accurate copy.
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And here's P66. I like this one because it shows you what the book looked like and what papyrus looks like today.
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Normally you only see a page, but you'll notice where the damage is. I mean, think about it. Where do your books get damaged, especially if you carry them?
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They get damaged on the outside edges, especially toward the bottom. And then at the top. Well, if you look at papyrus, that's exactly what happens to it.
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This is also John 1 .1. Here's another example of the error of the Da Vinci Code. And the word was
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God right there in John 1 .1, long before Constantine ever came along. But it gives you a good sense of what a
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Gospel manuscript would have looked like, even though, again, this is a solid 1 ,800 years of age.
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And then here is one that I saw. I saw this very page, in fact, in the
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Chester Beattie Library in Dublin, Ireland. And you can tell what this is about because that says,
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Pras Philippasius, to the Philippians. And so this is the earliest collection we have of Paul's writings, and a very, very important manuscript.
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And very, very quickly, I always ask this question. I just cannot resist doing so. There's one book of the
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New Testament that is anonymous. It's the book of Hebrews. Unless you have a King James Version, which says the epistle of Paul to the
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Hebrews. So then it's all decided. And if you are
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British, you have to believe that because the king said so. So there you go. But since this is the earliest collection we have of Paul's writings, do you think it did or did not contain the book of Hebrews?
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Because it's around the year 200. So how many of you think that P46 contains the book of Hebrews?
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How many of you think it does not contain the book of Hebrews? And how many of you just sat there and went, you ain't making me speak?
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I'm not saying a word. I'm not. How am
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I supposed to know? Why are you asking me a question like this? It's to keep you awake. That's why.
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It does contain Hebrews right after Romans. So take that for what it means. What it means is someone in the year 200 thought that Paul wrote
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Hebrews. That's pretty much the extent of that. I think that Paul preached
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Hebrews, but I think Luke wrote Hebrews. Is there a back door here?
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I'm a little scared. No, I think that's my best theory. It's simple.
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If you've ever read, if you're very familiar with Paul's style, his vocabulary, his Greek, Hebrews is not written by Paul.
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It is extremely classical. It is a completely different syntax, completely different vocabulary. But the thought and the argumentation is
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Paul. There's no question about it. But if you were to say, what else in the
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New Testament has the same kind of syntax, style and vocabulary as Hebrews? It's called Luke and Acts.
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So I think Paul preached Hebrews to a Hebrew congregation and then
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Luke wrote it in Greek and distributed it for other congregations from there. So hey, my theory is as good as yours.
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So there you go. Now in a debate at Trinity College Dublin, Muslim apologist
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Adnan Rashid said, Can we trust the gospel records? I believe that we don't even have what Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and Paul even wrote, let alone what
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God might have revealed to them. He also said there are more variant readings in the
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New Testament than there are words. We do not have two similar manuscripts of the New Testament in their contents.
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It is impossible to know today what Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and Paul might have written. Now these statements represent skepticism beyond that even of unbelieving scholars like Bart Ehrman.
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The picture of the New Testament presented here is never presented by anyone who has done first -hand study of the New Testament documents, never, it just simply isn't.
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Let me give you an example. A number of years ago, I asked my computer, very kindly, and that's why it cooperated with me, to compare the two most dissimilar printed
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Greek New Testaments. So in other words, a Byzantine text with an Alexandrian text, and to mark where the differences in those two most dissimilar texts were using green.
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And here's just one example. Now I could find places there would be more green. But interestingly enough, the book that has the least amount of textual variation is the book of Hebrews.
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And here in chapter 6, verses 8 through 20, there are only three places where the most
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Byzantine manuscript and the most Alexandrian manuscript differ from one another. And they really, in no way, shape or form, even begin to impact the meaning of the text at all.
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That means everything else was absolutely identical, even though these come from very different lines of transmission.
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So the radical skepticism would point you to the fact that, for example, if you only have 138 ,000 words and you have 400 ,000 variants, that that's the reality that you're facing.
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But they don't tell you the whole story. And what they don't tell you is what
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I've already mentioned to you, the 99 % that do not impact the meaning, et cetera, et cetera.
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Now let me just...I need to speed a few things up here real quick so that we can move on to our other material.
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Now, let me just summarize so that you have a good understanding of where we're going to make our transition.
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Free transmission versus controlled transmission. Do you think you've got a good handle on that? Free transmission, understand where we're going with that.
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One is a book that is a work of literature, including epistles, the
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New Testament as a whole, that is transmitted freely. There is no controlling authority. There is no government or religion that has control over it as to what its content is, who's going to copy it, who's going to possess it.
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That is not how the New Testament was transmitted. Multi -focality, the authors of the
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New Testament were not colluding with one another. You did not have them using their iPhones to go, okay, so Peter, are you ready to go with 2
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Peter? Because I'm ready to go with this book, and then you put it out, and then I'll... That simply could not happen.
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That was not a possibility. It was not something that was necessary. So you have multiple audiences writing multiple letters, multiple transmission, et cetera, et cetera.
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Very, very important. And then the tenacity. That is, once a reading appears in the New Testament documents, it stays there, even if it's a silly reading.
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I mean, I should have told you this before, but one of the classic examples is there was a medieval scribe who just had a bad day one day before he went in to do his copying.
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If he was an Australian scribe, he obviously couldn't get hold of his coffee or his tea, one of the two, and you all become non -functional at that point, just sort of comatose.
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No, it's done. And so he went in, and he was not paying attention, and he was copying from a manuscript that was written in two columns.
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But he was so out of it that day that he copied straight across. And it was in the genealogy of Jesus.
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So imagine what that ends up looking like. God has a father named
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Phares, and somebody else is the originator of the entire human race. I mean, it's just, it is nonsensical.
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It makes absolutely no sense. But we still have the manuscript. It's still there. We still possess it.
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It's good that people didn't get into the let's burn everything except our particular version type thing, because if you don't, if you're misunderstanding what the original was, you might be burning some of the original readings in the process.
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The tenacity of the text of New Testament gives us tremendous confidence that the original readings are still in our possession.
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So with that in mind, we move over to my comparison.
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Sometimes it helps. And how many in the audience have read the
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Koran? That's actually a fairly large percentage.
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That's one of the largest percentages that I have seen in any group that I have ever met, which is either very encouraging or very frightening, one of the two.
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Because I'm not so certain that you understood what I actually said. What was that American word he used?
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I'm not sure. I'm going to put my hand up anyways, everybody else is. In fact, maybe you thought
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I just asked, it's just the vibe of the thing. Thank you.
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Thank you. I have to thank Brother David for educating, giving me the cultural education to understand the vibe of the thing.
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Isn't it sad though that, I know that scene, isn't it sad though that's how many, that's how a lot of preachers interpret the
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Bible too. The basics of their teaching, it's just the vibe of the thing, you know, it's sad.
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Some of you are going, what are you talking about? Never mind, don't worry about it. Large portion of the
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Muslim people have never read the Bible. There is actually, there's actually reason in the history of Islam to not read the
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Bible. There is a story recounted of, if I recall, it was Uthman ibn Affan who was reading from the
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Old Testament when Muhammad came in and when he asked him what he was reading from and he told him he was reading from the prophets of the
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Old Testament, the Torah actually, if I recall correctly. His face changed color, in other words he became angry and basically said, what
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I have given to you, is it not enough for you? And so, there is in the traditions, given that especially today the vast majority of Muslims believe the
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Bible to have been corrupted, to no longer accurately represent what was originally sent down because the
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Quran specifically states that the Torah and the Injil were Natsal, they were sent down, that they contain light and guidance and in fact were commanded in Surah Tawmaidah, Surah 5, those who, the
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Allah and Injil, the people of the Gospel are commanded to judge by what is contained in the
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Gospel. So obviously we have to possess it if we are to judge by it. And so there are very high things said of the
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Christian scriptures, the Jewish scriptures. There's even a text that parallels the challenge of the
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Quran, one of the challenges the Quran gives is to produce any book like it.
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Interestingly most Muslims do not know there is a text in the Quran that also makes that challenge on the basis of the
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Torah, produce something like the Torah, which is quite interesting. But it's very clear to me and I think it's clear to most honest readers of the
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Quran that the writer of the Quran knew much more about the
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Old Testament than the New, but still did not have direct access in any written form to either one and had significantly less understanding of the contents of the
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New Testament than he had of the Old. Clearly Muhammad had had more exposure to Jews than he did to Christians as far as their traditions, their stories, things like that.
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That is very, very clear. Now by comparing the transmission of the
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New Testament with the Quran, I can not only help you to understand some basic fundamental elements of Islamic theology, but I can also help to illustrate some of the key issues that exist between the
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Quran and the New Testament and hopefully in the process accurately enlighten you on both.
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But I want to offer this with a caveat first of all. Comparing the
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New Testament with the Quran is comparing apples and oranges and unfortunately many of my
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Muslim friends do this rather regularly. The Bible as a whole, the
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Quran is only 14 % the length of the Bible as a whole. It's only 57 % the length of the
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New Testament. It's a much smaller work. And it is a much younger work. It had to exist in manuscript form, handwritten manuscript form for a much briefer period of time prior to the invention of printing.
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Now printing, like I said, is not perfect, but it does serve to freeze the text of any work in a particular form.
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And so it only had to go through a certain number of centuries whereas the New Testament had to go through a much longer period of time.
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What are some of the other differences? Well, the standard Islamic understanding of the
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Quran, and of course I want to differentiate here, when I generally say standard
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Islamic understanding, I'm talking about Orthodox Sunni Islam. I'm not talking about Shi 'ism.
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Shi 'ism has its own views on things in many ways. They're the same, especially in talking about things where there's differences with Christians, but there are also some differences as well.
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For example, Orthodox Sunni Islam believes that the Quran is uncreated.
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It is eternal and uncreated. Allah is eternal and uncreated. And the
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Quran is not a created thing. But Shi 'ism does not affirm that, at least not in the same way that Sunni Islam does.
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So there are differences. And there was even a period of development of that. There were certain caliphs that did not believe that, and that's just part of Islamic history.
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But you also have, from their perspective, only one author. And this is very key to understand, from the
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Islamic perspective, what Muhammad did or did not understand is absolutely irrelevant to the text of the
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Quran. Because, well let me ask this question, this will give me an even better understanding of the theological connections with Islam here.
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If I say Laylat al -Qadr, how many of you know what that is? Wow, I am impressed, very good.
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Night of Power, the Night of Power. Laylat al -Qadr is the night upon which the
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Quran was sent down from heaven to the angel Jibril, and it takes place, well, it takes place in the last week of the month of Ramadan.
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On an odd -numbered night, but we don't know which one. It could be the 21st, 23rd, 25th, 27th, and if the lunar month extends long enough, 29th.
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But Laylat al -Qadr is a special evening where, in Islamic tradition, prayers that are said that night have far more efficacy, thousands of times more efficacy than they do on any other night of the year.
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And so if you know your Muslim friends, or if we have any Muslim friends visiting with us today, and you are most welcome, and I hope you find this to be interesting, and most especially if you are a
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Muslim here today, I hope when you hear me representing your faith, you hear me attempting to be as accurate as I possibly can while still being communicative and allowing people to understand what it is
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I'm saying. I consider that an act of respect for you, and I hope if you come back tomorrow evening, when
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Abdullah and I have our dialogue, that you'll hear the exact same thing coming from both sides. That's what I love about the debate that we did in 2011 with Abdullah, and what
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I'm really hoping, and I hope you'll pray with me, will happen tomorrow evening, is that when Abdullah and I debated last time, there were no cheap debating tricks, there was no trying to trip somebody up, it was pure dialogue, total respect, and that's exactly what we need.
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That's what this world needs, to be perfectly honest with you, is that kind of conversation.
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But anyway, Laylat al -Qadr is the night where the
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Quran is sent down, and prayers done that evening are extremely efficacious.
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It was revealed, according to the Hadith, it was revealed to Muhammad which night it was, and he was about to come out and tell the people which night it was, and when he came out, he found the people arguing with one another, and he became so upset that he forgot.
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And so, they know that it's an odd -numbered night in the last week, and so if you know your
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Muslim friends, you know that during the month of Ramadan, and of course Ramadan moves forward in our calendar year, about 10 days each year, because the
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Muslims use a lunar calendar, and we use a solar calendar, and the lunar year is shorter than the solar year. So it moves forward, and that last week, there will be numerous overnight, night -long prayer services and special things to do to stay up all night during that particular period of time, so as to, hey, if you do it the 21st, 23rd, 25th, 27th, you've got them all covered.
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You prayed on Laylat al -Qadr one of those nights, even if you don't know which one exactly is.
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But the idea is that the Qur 'an is sent down to Jibril, and then when it is given to Muhammad, it is sort of piecemealed out between 610 and 632.
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So over the course of 22 years, as need was, that which had been sent down to Jibril is revealed to Gabriel, and he simply,
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Muhammad is nothing more than the ancient equivalent of an MP3 recorder, or an OCR device, or whatever else you want to call it.
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His understanding, his knowledge does not matter. This is the very word of God. It has eternally existed in the
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Arabic language, evidently, and therefore, there is nothing of man in it.
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So there's no, you can't ask the question, when Muhammad met with the
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Christians from Najran, and most people feel that in like in Surah 3, there's a reflection of this encounter that they had, did his understanding of what
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Christians believed about God increase? Well you can ask the question, but it's irrelevant to what's found in the
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Qur 'an. Because the Qur 'an does not represent Muhammad's understanding of anything. It is absolutely separate from him.
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He is a passive device through which these things are passed on. Now obviously,
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I have some issues with that. I think there are some texts in the Qur 'an that are very problematic from that perspective.
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I think the entire issue of Zaynab bin Jash, in what
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I think it's Surah 34 off the top of my head, is extremely problematic from that perspective.
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Very hard for me to believe that that was written in eternity past, and does not represent something that was going on in Muhammad's life.
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But they view the Qur 'an in a very different way than we do, and their doctrine of inspiration is very different.
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We talk about the Bible as the word of God, but we do not talk about the Bible as dictated.
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We believe, as Peter said, that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. And so I can tell the difference between what
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Paul wrote and what John wrote, because there's different vocabulary, there's different syntax, obviously
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I already mentioned to you the difference between Luke and Paul, so on and so forth. We believe God's big enough to choose the instruments by which he brought his word into existence, so that while they are expressing in their words and in their experience the result of that expression under the guidance of the
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Holy Spirit is exactly what God intends us to have, and that it's in very fact their experiences which give such a deep color.
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I love that when we read the Psalter, the whole range of human experience is presented to us there.
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I'm awful glad that's the case, because I've experienced that whole range of human experience, and I'm glad to be able to see that God has worked with people going through all of that through all of their lives.
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And so we do have a fundamentally different understanding of what inspiration means and how it works out, but it also results in a very different way of approaching the text of the
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Quran and the interpretation of the Quran. But one thing that needs to be understood, the Muslim believes that while we, the
45:59
Muslim today, down through history there were two streams of Muslim thought. There were those who believed in the corruption of the interpretation, and those who believed in the corruption of the wording.
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And so those sort of existed side by side until,
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I believe it was 1864, when an Indian Muslim published a book called
46:29
The Vindication of the Truth, Itzar -ul -Haq. And that book became so popular, it has had so much impact, that today 99 .9
46:40
% of the world's Muslims believe that the Bible has been rather radically corrupted.
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Now they are very fuzzy on the details, but that has become by far the predominant perspective.
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And so in two minutes, let me give you something to hang on to before our last time together that will help you to see how we're going to tie all these things together.
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There are three major barriers that stand between the
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Gospel and any Muslim person. Three major barriers, and you need to know what all of them are.
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The first one is called shirk. Shirk is an Arabic word which means association.
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Shirk is the denial of the central affirmation of Islamic theology, which is called tawhid. Tawhid is the oneness of Allah, that Allah is one, there is only one
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God worthy of worship. Tawhid, therefore, is the formal principle of the
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Islamic faith. It's the center. So if you deny the center, you're committing literally an unpardonable sin.
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If you die as a mushrik, plural mushrikun, those who have engaged in shirk, there is no hope for you.
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There is no forgiveness for you. Muhammad was not even allowed to pray for his parents, who died as mushrikun.
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He was allowed to pray for one mushrik, his uncle Abu Talib, and as a result, Abu Talib has the garden spot of hell.
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But he's still in hell. And if you're all wondering, I love how quiet it gets when I tell the story of Abu Talib.
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Because everyone's sitting there going, so what's the garden spot of hell look like exactly?
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He's wearing sandals that are so hot his brains boil. That's the good place.
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So shirk is extremely serious. And what you need to understand, the vast majority, there are some westernized
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Muslims that have done enough study that they've sort of backed off in some of this, but the vast majority of Muslims in the world believe that you and I are mushrikun, because of every song we've sung so far today.
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The worship of Jesus is shirk from their perspective. That is associating a mere man with the worship of God.
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Now obviously, we don't believe Jesus was merely a man. We believe he's eternally been God and worthy of our worship, but the author of the
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Quran didn't know that, and that's where the problem comes in, is the Quran's misunderstanding of our own beliefs, but that's another issue.
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So what you need to understand is the Muslim thinks you are inviting them to commit the most grievous sin that they can commit, and that is to commit shirk.
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That's barrier number one. Barrier number two, Surah 4, 157. Surah 4, 157 is the denial of the crucifixion of Jesus.
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There are only 40 Arabic words in the Quran that deny that Jesus died on a cross. If they weren't there, there are numerous other texts,
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Surah 355, Surah 1933, that naturally would speak of Jesus' death. But because of that one ayah, and there's no commentary in the hadith about what that ayah means, ayah means verse, and so it's extremely, and there's all sorts of different interpretations over what it means.
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For example, there's a phrase in it that says, so it was made to appear to them, and many
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Muslims think that someone was made to look like Jesus, and he was the one that was put on the cross, because Jesus wasn't crucified. Many of them believe it was
50:07
Judas. I had one Muslim send me a long email once proving it was Simon the Cyrenean that was crucified, and he proved it by using bold, blue, and red ink, and that really proves everything in the internet.
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And so, if you don't have the crucifixion of Christ, and you don't have the resurrection, you don't have redemption, you don't have the gospel, so barrier number one, shirk.
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Barrier number two, denial of the crucifixion, and if you debate either one of those two, you know what it's all gonna come back to?
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Barrier number three, the belief that the Bible has been corrupted, because every debate that I've done, every single debate
50:43
I've done that centered on the deity of Christ, the concept of shirk, you know what it ended up ending on?
50:49
Whether we could trust what the New Testament actually taught. And if you discuss the issue of the crucifixion, what does that end up boiling down to?
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Whether you can trust what the New Testament actually taught on that particular subject. And so, those are the three barriers, shirk, crucifixion, and then a fundamental rejection of the accuracy of the transmission of the text of the
51:09
New Testament itself. And so, you can see why it's important for us to compare what we have in the
51:14
New Testament with what we're gonna be looking at in the Koran, because it's directly relevant to the barriers that exist between us in seeking to proclaim the gospel to the
51:24
Muslim people. Alright? Okay. 2 .15
51:30
to 3 .15, I actually have a few more minutes. You gave me more than an hour. Oh!
51:35
See, I was thinking I had to be done by 3 to get to make sure that we're right on time.
51:42
Hmm. I'm sitting here thinking I think it would probably be best for me to give
51:48
Jeff the extra time so we actually finish on time, because something tells me,
51:55
I know I can get done in an hour, but I'm not so certain about other people, whether they can do that or not.
52:04
Did you hear about what happened in Brisbane? An hour and 38 minutes, they are still talking about that, and will be for years to come.
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And so, yeah, I'm not so sure. What do you think, Jeff? Jeff, your face is an unusual color for you.
52:24
A little warm over there in the corner? Okay. Let me just read you a few quotations here.
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I'll try to get done by about 10 after, so I'll give them a few extra, you know, it's all going to come out in the wash at the end, as they say.
52:41
Let me give you an idea of what Muslims, most Muslims believe. Now, there are Muslims who are aware that this is not the case, but they are in the minority.
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They are in the minority. Muslims and non -Muslims both agree that no change has ever occurred in the text of the
52:54
Qur 'an. The above prophecy of the eternal preservation and purity of the Qur 'an came true not only for the text of the Qur 'an, but also for the most minute details of its punctuation marks as well.
53:04
Now, I just stopped for a moment and say, there were no punctuation marks in the original, but anyway. It is a miracle of the
53:11
Qur 'an that no change has occurred in a single word, a single letter of the alphabet, a single punctuation mark, or a single diacritical mark in the text of the
53:22
Qur 'an during the last 14 centuries. That's the claim made in 130 Evident Miracles in the
53:28
Qur 'an by Mazzar Qazi. Now, I wish that that was an unusual claim.
53:34
I wish that that was just simply the kind of stuff that you find on the internet that's just sort of way out there, you know, sort of like our own
53:41
Bible code stuff that happened a number of years ago and some of the weird stuff you see like that.
53:48
Unfortunately, that is not the case. This is a very, very majority view, and so much so that I didn't bring it with me this time, but normally when
54:03
I speak on this subject, I bring an Arabic Qur 'an with me, pass it around the room so people can see what it looks like, see that it doesn't have any critical notes in it.
54:13
Now, there is a new translation of the Qur 'an that just came out called the Study Qur 'an, and what's really strange is for being a modern translation, they used
54:22
King James English. These and thous. Why? I have no earthly idea, but it's done by a very wide variety of Islamic scholars, and it's the first version of the
54:35
Qur 'an that looks like the ESV Study Bible. Wow, it got quiet in here when
54:41
I said that. If you've seen the ESV Study Bible, generally there's more notes on a page than there is text on a page.
54:48
And in most sections of the Qur 'an, there are more notes than there is text, and that's the first time that I've ever seen anything like that before.
54:56
And so it's very helpful in its chronological material, a lot of its background material. It makes a number of admissions that many
55:04
Muslims are a little bit uncomfortable with, actually. But if you're looking for a
55:09
Qur 'an that would help you want to read, like again, it's only 57 % the length of the
55:14
New Testament. That would be one that you might want to take a look at and utilize, because it gives a lot of background material there.
55:23
But those folks do not make this kind of claim. The authors of that text recognize the existence in the tradition, in the manuscript tradition of the
55:36
Qur 'an, of textual variation. And I have debated, for example,
55:41
Yusuf Ismail in South Africa, and he likewise admits that there are minor textual variations that don't impact the meaning at all.
55:52
But they are there, that there are differences between manuscripts. But many of the
56:00
Muslims with whom you'll speak are utterly unaware that there are any variations whatsoever.
56:06
They truly believe that the Arabic Qur 'an that they hold in their hand is identical to what was spoken by Muhammad.
56:15
And they don't know the history of the text. They don't know that there was a major revision of the text under the caliph
56:23
Uthman. And they've never thought through what that might mean as well. Because what it means is the
56:29
Qur 'an is a controlled transmission text, not a free transmission text.
56:36
And that raises all sorts of questions. At this point, there is truly no question the scholarly sources,
56:43
Islamic and non, both attest the same story. Here, for example, is a single chart out of the
56:50
Topkapi manuscript. The Topkapi, this is a Turkish printing of the
56:56
Topkapi manuscript of the Qur 'an that came out in 2007. And this is just one of a few pages where you have variations between the major mushaf, the manuscripts of the
57:09
Qur 'an at various places, what's read in the Uthmanic and then what's read in each of these mushafs.
57:15
There is not yet, they're working on one. Western scholars primarily are working on a critical edition of the
57:25
Qur 'an. But Qur 'anic studies, textually speaking, are in their infancy in comparison to both the
57:32
New Testament and the Old Testament. Whereas we have critical editions in the UBS, there just simply isn't anything like that.
57:40
And even that Arabic text does not have any place where at the bottom you've got in small Arabic some manuscripts say this or some manuscripts say that.
57:48
Doesn't exist. And so pervasive is that, at least in the
57:53
Western world, and I think it would probably be the same down here. It's not the same in Pakistan and India, they have slightly different readings there.
58:00
But the Arabic text that I have is printed with a blue background.
58:06
And so consistent is that, can you imagine how this would work for us?
58:12
I was listening to one particular Muslim scholar once, and he is one who has memorized the entire
58:20
Qur 'an in Arabic. And normally he can just quote it like that. But you know, all of us have one of those days where, you know, you forget your wife's name, you know, and you just, it just, the brain freezes and things just don't work.
58:37
And he just couldn't bring this one text up, and this is what he ended up saying. He said, it's in, and then he mentioned the surah, it was a fairly short surah, so it was like surah 129 or something like that.
58:49
It's in surah such and so, right hand side at the top of the page. Right hand side at the top of the page.
58:58
Now think about what that means. Because he was right, it is at the right hand side at the top of the page, because they're all using the exact same
59:08
Qur 'an. So it was a meaningful reference. You could have found it. We can't do that.
59:14
We can't say right hand side top of the page, because we have 47 different translations and 47 different printings of every other translation that we have, and that's the consistency of that one printed
59:26
Arabic text. Now the funny thing is, and I'll close with this, well it's not funny, but the thing to keep in mind is this, that particular printing came into existence less than 100 years ago, and it wasn't the result of a bunch of scholars getting together and doing in -depth textual analysis of the best manuscripts of the
59:50
Qur 'an. It came from Cairo, Egypt, and it was produced because the school system wanted to have a consistent printing of the
01:00:01
Qur 'an, and so they made one Qur 'an, and that has now become the standard around the world.
01:00:07
There was no textual study. There's no way to go back and say, well how'd you deal with this variant, how'd you deal with that variant, did you deal with any of the
01:00:15
Su 'ana manuscripts, none of that at all. It has simply become the traditional, this is the text, and it came from I think it was
01:00:24
July 10th, 1924, Cairo, Egypt as I recall, and it was just simply so that the school system could have a consistent
01:00:31
Qur 'an, and yet the vast majority of the Muslims to whom you speak think that what they're holding right there, well, it's exactly what
01:00:40
Muhammad said. Now, is it a stable text? Am I saying there's a bunch of textual variation in the
01:00:47
Qur 'an? No, because it's a controlled text. The question I'm going to raise is, since it did undergo, even in the
01:00:56
Islamic sources it is said that there was a major revision under Uthman, how do you trace it before Uthman?
01:01:04
That becomes the question, that becomes the question, okay? All right, I'm going to wrap up all of one minute early here, at least according to my computer here, and we'll get prepared for Brother Jeff, let's pray together.
01:01:18
Father, once again, we thank you for this day, we thank you for the fellowship we've already had, we thank you that you have given us this freedom, we ask that you would help us to remember, that you would help us to concentrate, even in this afternoon's session
01:01:31
Lord, that the time that we've spent to come, and the time of preparation, and the time of travel,