Scripture, Apologetics and Islam Part 2

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, and see the thing is, Pastor Mike is a chemist and so he knows the biochemical processes that are taking place right now 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 and so I know what's going on in the gurgling cells of your digestive system right now and in about 15 minutes I'm going to start sounding like this and it's Charlie Brown and it's all over with at that point and so that's when I have to start doing handstands and flips across and Jessica come up do some cool karate moves and that'll wake you up and actually he's gonna 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.

Free Transmission and Controlled Transmission

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. A freely transmitted text is one whose transmission is not controlled by an external authority such as a government.

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.

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, 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 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.

This is a controlled text. Now a freely transmitted text will have more textual variance but will have greater confidence as to originality. A controlled text will have more uniformity but much less confidence as to originality.

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. 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 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 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.

We have all these different snapshots of the early state of the text but you don't have that with controlled texts especially if the controlled text involves redaction or editing. 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?

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? 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. A controlled text cannot promise the original text past the last redaction or revision especially if previous versions are destroyed.

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.

You can't take it back to the originals any 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.

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.

Now by the way I did design this particular graphic and made the little manuscripts move around and stuff like that so if you're just completely overawed and you feel the need to go oh it's okay 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 but when you think about the history of the New Testament we have multiple authors.

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 and he's writing to different places and so we don't know where the Gospels were written.

There are theories about that frequently Mark is associated with Rome and sometimes Caesarea and so on and so forth. We have theories but we don't have anything written in the 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. Paul's epistles predate most of the Gospels at least in most theories most theoretical reconstructions. Paul's writings like Galatians, First Thessalonians, some of the earliest writings of the 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 New Testament text is under the control of any one centralized organization.

There wasn't a centralized organization anyways. Even the Apostles went to different places. There wasn't some you know apostolic council that they attended every two years to approve new scriptures or anything like that at all.

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. 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. 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 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.

But the point is to recognize what I call multi-focality. Multi-focality is vitally important to realize the transmission of the text of the 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. 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 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 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. There was never a time when that could have happened it's just it's just not possible given the history of the text of the transmission of the history of the transmission of the text of the New Testament.

As a result we can look forward to finding even earlier manuscripts of New Testament documents. Some of you have heard about the Green Project. There have been there was way too early release of speculations that we had found first century fragments of Mark and things like that and 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 maybe some other data that has come to light that needs to be evaluated.

I don't know but there was early leaking of news about the finding of fragments of Mark and an Egyptian funerary mask and things like that and if that turns out that would be really fantastic but right now it's just simply that it's a theory we haven't we don't it hasn't been released for we really can't tell so 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.

So in other words we may have textual variants but the original readings continue to exist in the manuscript tradition they haven't passed away. Even when we have a variant at any point in the text of 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.

The transmission of the New Testament textual tradition is characterized by an extremely impressive degree of what is called tenacity. 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.

I can say with confidence that we possess all the original words that the apostles wrote to any of the churches in the gospels whatever else it might be. Someone put it rather well. Actually they likened the situation that we face with the New Testament manuscripts to having a 1 ,000 let's make it a 10 ,000 piece jigsaw puzzle 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. 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.

But you know you wanted to you know hang it on the wall. You know have it have it to treat it 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. 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. No the reality is what we have is a 10 ,000 piece jigsaw puzzle with about 10 ,100 pieces because the tendency of scribes was to expand not to contract and so the issue is identifying the the extra words the the additional material rather than anything else.

The originals are still there now it can make it a little bit difficult because you 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 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. That would be a problem because then we'd be missing something. But that is not how the New Testament was transmitted to us.

Here's a quote from Kurt Ahland the late scholar of New Testament textual criticism is precisely the overwhelming mass of the New Testament textual tradition assuming the and this is a a Greek phrase that means the the healthy teaching of New Testament textual criticism which provides an assurance of certainty in establishing the original text.

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 prestige of the later text.

Now if you know anything about church history you know that in the west especially the latin vulgate became the official translation of the established church for a very very long period of time. In fact during the height of the period of the inquisition to even desire to learn greek could get you in great trouble because why would you want to know the language of the heretics.

The heretics were the greek orthodox. And so there was a period of time well the roman church even put out an allegedly infallible version of the latin vulgate. It was so much the the final authority.

But despite all of that the reality is that the the original form the text continues to exist in the New Testament textual tradition. Now one of the things i'm gonna have to be very fast is i love doing i love doing this part but i'm gonna have to be really quick because i still have a lot of stuff to cover.

Um and uh but i i love showing christians some of the manuscripts i already showed you uh p45 i showed you some of the material there when you're looking at that page in your bible and it says some early manuscripts say this and some early manuscripts that that just seems so i don't know esoteric it's like well somewhere some scholar someplace has a manuscript and you know what does that really mean to me.

But from my perspective the the fact that god has preserved these little scraps of papyri over the course of 1800 years uh and more in the in the instance of some is just an amazing thing. Um 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.

What you see on the screen right now is p52 which is not a world war ii fighter jet. It is a fighter fighter jet. Yeah fighter plane. It was a prop plane. Obviously um but this is uh about the size of a credit card uh it is a fragment written on both sides.

We're not sure why but there have been almost no new testament uh scrolls ever discovered. Christians adopted the codex form and used the codex form. Um why they did no one fully knows. But they did uh it was just almost every single manuscript is is in the book form that we use today even though scrolls were quite popular in in that day.

Uh this is just a little fragment you can see it's from the top of a page. What i love about this one 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 the cutting edge of scholarship had proven that the gospel of john was written around 170 a .d had nothing to do with anybody who knew jesus.

In fact it was it was generations removed from the days of jesus. And if you wanted to be accepted in in scholarship then then you just need to go with this perspective. And you may ask well how did they come to that conclusion.

Well it was an application of evolutionary thought uh to theology uh and to the study of the new testament. The idea was the christology in john is so high uh and so evolved that it must have taken quite some time for that to happen.

And so uh it had been moved all the way back toward the end of the second century around 170 175 a .d. And so in the 1930s early 1930s uh this little fragment was found. Um i know that we have i i know brother brother david's here and uh brother david's one of the first people that dragged me down here to australia.

So if you don't like having me here you can blame him. Um but uh he's not actually from around here. He's from that that little island up in the other part of the world you know um where the where the queen lives there you go where the queen lives.

And by the way i love the meme i've actually posted it myself. Make america britain again. Let me tell you something. If i had the choice i'd vote for her any day. I'm gonna tell you i never thought i'd hear myself saying that.

But david finally won you. He's he's he's rejoicing back there. But uh anyway um up there in that little island up there uh where they you know for a while the sun never set upon the british empire. That's no longer the case anymore uh but uh 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 university and came across this and obviously was a well-trained individual because it's really tough to read this not only the 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. And i i'll use a font here to sort of let you see what how the text would have flowed around. Uh the uh the the text here um this is from now.

Well let me 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 a .d. Now when you when you date a papyrus um you walk up to and say hey would you like to go out.

No. Um you sorry david knows i know a little bit of papyrological uh humor because he took me to see another papyrus. I'm not sure if i have the picture of it in here. Uh that's at mccorry state university.

And the the the fellow there the it wasn't the curator but uh i'm not sure what a professor there. Yeah um i've told the story many many times. He 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 about 35 years ago.

That was last time you know. And uh so uh yes the papyrologist what a life we live. Uh when you study ancient pieces of paper. But um uh what you do is you date these things based upon the form of the letters in comparison to other papyri and stuff like that.

And and uh three of the four dated to 125 and normally it's 25 years each either direction. So it'd be 100 to 150 was the range 125 being in the middle. The fourth put it in the first century so about 100 as early as as into the 90s and then and then from there.

Why is that significant. Well p52 contains john chapter 18 verses 31 through 34 on one side and 37 to 38 on the back side. And so here you have a a copy of the gospel of john that is written approximately 50 years before german orthodoxy in the 1870s said it was even written.

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.

And so this is probably the earliest fragment we possess from about 125 and interestingly enough it's from john. And today scholars will tell you. Well john's a historical and john's this and john's that.

But it's interesting amongst the papyri the book that is best attested is the gospel of john. And the one that is least attested is mark which they say is the earliest. So it's it's interesting to note that very quickly this is p72 and this one is actually readable.

I'm i wonder what did someone's someone may have grabbed my my laser. Hmm someone may have really liked that. 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 petru epistole bay.

So that's second peter. This is the end of first peter the beginning of second peter. What's. Uh this is the earliest manuscript we have of first second peter in jude. I saw this in 1993 during the papal treasures exhibit in denver colorado.

They had it on display here. If you'd like to have evidence that dan brown and the da vinci code was a joke in this sense. Second peter 1 -1 is found here. This is in early the earliest manuscript of that.

And there's what's called a granville sharp construction. Our great god and savior jesus christ. Both god and savior are in reference to the same person jesus christ. So the da vinci code theory that the deity of christ was made up at the council of nicaea.

This was written long before the council of nicaea is thereby disproven. Uh but uh here you have a very very readable manuscript. It's it's not you know it doesn't look like it's done by a an overly professional scribe or anything like that.

Uh but you have uh the collection of first second peter and and jude. I like to theorize that maybe someone was traveling and they visited a a christian church. Someone comes out 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. 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. And there's the granville sharp construction.

Sorry about that. Uh sort of cool to make it blow up like that. Personally i think it's sort of wild. Anyway. Here is a manuscript p75. Um many of these are available online now and starting to appear in some of the uh higher end bible programs like accordance lagos bible works stuff like that.

Uh p75 is a gospel's manuscript. That's the end of the beginning of john. A very accurate manuscript. The the scribe was very very dutiful in making an accurate copy. And here's p66. I like this one because it shows you what the book looked like and what papyrus looks like today.

Normally you only see a page but you'll notice where the damage is. When you think about where do your books get damaged. Especially if you carry them. 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. This is also john 1 -1. Here's another example of the error of the da vinci code. And the word was god right there in john 1 -1 long before constantine ever came along.

But it gives you a good sense of what a gospel manuscript would have looked like even though again this is a solid 1800 years of age. And then here is one that i saw. I saw this very page in fact in the chester beattie library in dublin ireland.

And you can tell what this is about. Because that says pros philippaceous to the philippians. And so this is the earliest collection we have of paul's writings and very very important manuscript. And very very quickly i always ask this question.

I just cannot resist doing so there is one book of the 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 hebrews. So then it's all decided.

And and if you are british you have to believe that because the king said so. So there you go. But um uh 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.

Because it's around the year 200. So uh how many of you think that p46 contains the book of hebrews. 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 yeah. I'm not. I'm not saying a word. I'm not i i how am i supposed to know. Why are you asking me a question like this. It's to keep you awake. That's why 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 hebrews. That's pretty much the extent of that. I think that paul preached hebrews. But i think luke wrote hebrews.

Is there a back door here. I'm a little scared. No i think it's i i that's. That's my best theory. It's it's. It's simple. If you've ever read if you're very familiar with paul's style his vocabulary his greek hebrews is not written by paul.

It is extremely classical. It is a completely different syntax completely different vocabulary. But the thought and the argumentation is paul. There's no question about it. But if you were to say what what else in the new testament has the same kind of syntax style and vocabulary as hebrews.

It's called luke and acts. So i think paul preached hebrews to a a hebrew congregation and then luke wrote it in greek and distributed it for other congregations from there. So hey my theory is as good as yours.

Uh so there you go. Now in a debate at trinity college dublin uh muslim apologist 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 god might have revealed to them.

He also said there are more variant readings the new testament than there are words. We do not have two similar manuscripts of the new testament in their contents. 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 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. Um let me give you an example. A number of years ago i asked my computer uh very kindly and that's why i cooperated with me to compare uh the two most dissimilar printed greek new testament 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 and here's just one example.

Now i could i could find places there would be more green but interestingly enough the book that is that has the the least amount of textual variation is the book of hebrews. And here in chapter 6 verses 8 through 20 there are only three places where the most 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 of the text at all.

That means everything else was absolutely identical uh even though these come from very different lines of transmission. So uh the radical skepticism uh would point you to the fact that for example if you only have 138 000 words and you have 400 000 variants that that that's the that's the reality that you're facing.

But they don't tell you the story. Uh and what they don't tell you is what i've already mentioned to you the 99 that do not impact the the meaning etc etc. Now let me let me just i need to speed a few things up here real quick so that you can we can move uh on to our other material.

Summary of New Testament Transmission

Now let me just summarize so that you you have a good understanding of where we're going to make our transition. Um free transmission versus controlled transmission. Do you think you've got a good handle on that free transmission.

You understand where we're going with that one is a book that is a work of literature including epistles the new testament as a whole that is transmitted freely. There is no controlling authority there is 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. That is not how the new testament was transmitted. Multifocality. Uh there the the authors of the 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 second peter because i'm ready to go with this book. And then you put it out and then up there that simply could not happen. That was not a possibility. It was not something that was necessary.

So you have multiple audiences writing multiple letters multiple transmission etc etc 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.

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. I 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. No it's it's done 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.

But he was so out of it that day that he copied straight across. And it was in the genealogy of jesus. So imagine what that ends up looking like. Um uh the the god has a father named ferrez. And somebody else is the originator of the entire human race.

I mean it's just it. It is nonsensical. It makes absolutely no sense. But we still have the manuscript. It's still. It's still there. We still possess it. Um it. 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 uh some of the original readings. In the process the tenacity of the text of new testament gives us tremendous confidence that the original readings are still in our possession.

So with that in mind we move over to my comparison. Sometimes it helps. And how many how many in the audience have read the quran. Okay that's actually a fairly large percentage. 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 because i'm not so certain that you understood what i actually said. What was that american word he used. I'm not sure i'm gonna put my hand up.

Anyways everybody else is okay. In fact maybe you thought i just asked it's just the vibe of the thing. Thank you. Thank you. I have to i have to thank brother david uh for educating giving me the cultural education uh to understand the vibe of the thing.

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 bible too the basics of their teaching. It's just the vibe of the thing. You know it's sad.

Some of you are going. What are you talking about. Never mind. Don't worry about it. Large portion of the muslim people have never read the there is actually uh there's actually reason in the history of islam um to not read the bible.

There is a story recounted of if i recall it was uthman ibn affan uh who was reading from the old testament when uh muhammad came in and when he asked him what he was reading for uh from and he told him he was reading from the prophets of the old testament uh the torah.

Actually if i recall correctly his face changed color. In other words he became angry uh and basically said what i have given to you is it not enough for you. And so there there is in the traditions given that especially today the vast majority of muslims believe the bible to have been corrupted to no longer accurately represent what was originally sent down because the quran specifically states that the torah and the angel were nuts all they were sent down uh that they contain light and guidance.

And in fact we're commanded in surah five uh those who the angel the people of the gospel are commanded to judge by what is contained in the 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 christian scriptures the jewish scriptures. There's even a text that parallels the the challenge of the quran. One of the challenges the quran gives is to produce any book like it.

Interestingly most muslims do not know there is a text in the quran that also makes that challenge on the basis of the torah produce something like the torah which is quite interesting but it's very it's very clear to me and i think it's clear to most uh honest readers of the quran that the writer of the quran knew much more about the 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 new testament than he had of the old.

Clearly muhammad had had more uh exposure to jews than he did to christians as far as their traditions their stories things like that. That is is very very clear now by comparing the transmission of the 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 uh that exist between the quran and the new testament and hopefully in the process uh accurately enlighten you on both.

But i want to i want to offer this with a caveat. First of all comparing the new testament with the quran is comparing apples and oranges and unfortunately many of my muslim friends do this rather regularly uh the bible as a whole the quran is only 14 percent the length of the bible as a whole it's only 57 percent the length of the new testament.

It's a much smaller work and it is a much younger work um it had to exist in manuscript form handwritten manuscript form for a much briefer period of time prior to the invention of printing. Now printing like i said is not perfect but it does serve to freeze the text of any work in a particular form.

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. What are some of the other differences. Well the standard islamic understanding of the quran.

And of course i want to differentiate here when i when i generally say standard islamic understanding i'm talking about orthodox sunni islam. I'm not talking about shiism. Shiism 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. For example orthodox sunni islam believes that the quran is uncreated it is eternal and uncreated.

Allah is eternal and uncreated and the quran is not a created thing. But shiism does not affirm that at least not in the same way as sunni islam does. So there are differences and there was even a period of development of that there were there were certain caliphs that did not believe that and that's just part of islamic history.

But you also have from their perspective only one author and from and this is very key to understand from the islamic perspective what muhammad did or did not understand is absolutely irrelevant to the text of the quran.

Because uh well let me ask let me ask this question this will give me an even better understanding of the theological uh connections with islam here if i say laylat al-qadr how many of you know what that is.

I am impressed. Very good night of power. The night of power. Um laylat al-qadr is the night upon which the quran was sent down from heaven to the angel jabril. And it takes place. Well it takes place in the last week of the month of ramadan on an odd numbered night but we don't know which one it could be the 21st 23rd 25th 27th and if they're the lunar month extends long enough 29th.